Critters System

heya!

.... yeah, we've been pretty quiet on here since early january. oops. we blame restabilizing ourselves after last year taking longer than expected, plus plain taking our time with writing and not finishing anything big recently. we're doing well, if anything! got a busy week ahead of ourselves (getting started with a possible job support program tomorrow, going to nfc the rest of the week), so there's gonna be little writing productivity from us for the next week or so, but otherwise we're doing pretty well, both creatively and as a system. luna's still a little mad a book she bought because it seemed interesting was not what it advertised itself as and was generally a letdown, but otherwise things are good :3

and when we say our creativity's doing well? we mean it! actually crafting the art we want to is still a struggle, but what we're making is stuff we enjoy! after that last big short story, we're finally feeling the drive to take our time and let our stories cook a little, give them some more drafting and rereading stuff rather than dropping our 3 am scribbles right onto the internet. more time consuming, yeah, but we feel what we're doing is working out better than what we did before. it hasn't fixed our main problem (extremely inconsistent ability to sit down and write), but we're hoping that might ease up as spring arrives and we get to stabilize a little mentally. after a longer drawing break, we're even doing some of that again! picked up a budget drawing tablet a little while ago, and after not using one for about 8 years, we're barely even rusty at it! what we're doing with it is rough, yes, but it's no worse than when we regularly used one and we're happy with that, the problem is literally just that we need practice and figuring out what settings work for us!

so, just to give an idea what's actively in the works right now:

three in-progress short stories: we're mid writing these, between a few hundred and a couple thousand words each so far. two of them in particular are stories that take stuff we've been struggling a little with (biid/bottom dysphoria and species dysphoria, respectively), and just turning the vibes happy. hopefully they end up as good as we feel they could be.

one short story (rough sketch): we have a mostly detailed outline written down for this one, but haven't actually started writing it yet. also looking forwards to working on this one, as it takes the struggle of "hey wait, all of us in this plural system want different things out of life and we're struggling with reconciling our wants" and plays it for slight comedy. with a touch of the old accidentally-realizing-you're-plural kinda egg story. plus a lot of horniness.

one short story (loose idea): of course we already have another thing we want to work on too. haven't written/plotted anything down yet, but imagine a lot of therian and post-tf energy. figuring out what in the world your body does now. finding companionship and solidarity in others also forced to ask the same questions. this one might be a couple months out still, if we decide to go through with it, but we like the ideas we're throwing around here.

long-form writing?: okay, we'll be honest; this one's still a bit of an "haha what if". we do have an idea that we could do a novel-length story around, we could probably come up with more if we wanted, but the problem here is the abovementioned lack of consistency in writing. we're thinking of prioritizing writing more in march, try to get things running with some consistency and finishing the other works in progress, so we'll write down what we're thinking and see if we wanna try getting something big running.

there's also one final thing we're thinking about: how to best preserve our old cohost writings and stories.

we did a fair bit on there! some of it rougher than others, and less than we probably would've liked to write, but there's a lot of small stories to gather from there! plus, the multipart story aster wrote that ended up becoming our largest work from there is still good, if in need of a decent redrafting. we kinda want to do something special with all this.

so what we're thinking is this: an anthology collection of the smaller things, and an updated and remastered version of the second person beast story. depending on how we feel about the finished work? we might put both on itch.io for sale (with the anthology as a nyp, and the story as possibly a low price purchase for the story remaster).

we won't lie, the idea of offering our writing for money still feels weird! not just because it was originally released in a very free format (and should mostly still be available for free online too, within the archives), but also because we're not yet used to thinking of our creative work as something we can monetize lol. this too is probably gonna take some time, if we do it! even with a lot of good ideas, some of our late night writing can be... very rough around the edges. we'd have to edit and remaster a lot of things (just of the top of our head, there's at least 15-some things we feel like adding to this hypothetical anthology), and there's at least one or two ideas we had and posted on there that would need basically a new story written for them... but we want to do this? all those stories feel so small when we think of them individually, but there is enough there that with a little extra love, they can be released in this way.

as for the longer story: yeah, we could also include it in the anthology... but with a little love, it can stand on its own very well. we won't deny that we're kinda romanticizing the entire idea of formally publishing these works, but it's a tempting thought! give this tale of finding species euphoria and company, give it a nicer shine (one it deserves), and make it available, albeit possibly at a slight cost? depending on the price, there's a good shot a lot of any theoretical earnings will be put towards commissioning furry art, which probably would be another selling point loao

we don't know. if any of y'all have any thoughts about all this, feel free to share them. we're just rambling a little here, maybe dreaming a little too. we're small creatures in a large world! we can have funny thinking moments if we want to!

so, yeah! we're writing when we can, possibly gonna work on the three larger projects we mentioned above, and things are going well for now!

hi everyone! yeah, i got permission to do a post here. technically beryl bullied me into writing this, but that's details. gonna keep this short, hopefully; the others just got ready to put on some nail polish for the new year~

so, happy new year to all of you! at the time of writing, it's about an hour left here, and the banging has already started. unfortunately, it's not the fun kind of banging, so we're not quite vibing with it. we're also feeling a bunch of things about the past year, and anticipating the coming one. i'm gonna get us to do something more fleshed out with our goals and such later, both here and... well.

somehow, we ended up the kind of system where everyone has very separate interests. this is a problem in some ways, slightly less so in others, and something we're looking to tackle better going forwards, but in my case i ended up the computer toucher. with how things were between me and r2 a good while there, that's both meanings of that phrase c: specifically, i've developed a rapidly growing interest in html stuff as we've started setting up our personal site (cough cough critterssystem.neocities.org/ ), and now i'm debating if maybe, once we've fleshed the other parts out a little... what about adding a longer form blog there too?

it would be good to have our personally written stuff all in one place that's also relatively ours, considering the closest we've had to that kind of setup, aside from here, was cohost (rip). the arc of "eh we don't need a website" to "maybe having somewhere neutral to drop stuff is good" to "aaaaa this is fun" was a ride. however, what i (and the others) are thinking is to use that as something parallel to here.

this is, as of now, our official "write way too long posts" spot on the internet. the website league's competing, but that still feels way more daily drive/small scale compared to here. it means less posts here, yes, but longer ones when we do write. and if we combine writing for here with writing for a blog page on our own website...

look: i just really want to do websitey stuff when possible, and the others are positive to it, so we'll probably be cross-posting a bit once we get that set up. hoping to get it done in the near future; we have more words we wanna write on the new year, and i think i just successfully
convinced everyone that doing it like this will be great~

so yeah! might mean slightly more stable activity here, will mean some crossposting between here and our own site when that comes up, and an even cleaner place to store our own work as time goes on too!

anyway, gonna end it here for now. we were hoping to finish a story by the end of the year, but we've just barely been able to write the last couple weeks. technically started what might hopefully become a novel, though! and gonna go do some body-attached art now.

happy new year, all you wonderful creatures!

🦨 Hello, everyone! It's Beryl again, as you could probably tell by the funky fresh totally not already used for a year icon I've got going on. The emote is mostly for nostalgia and ease right now. Just to make it perfectly clear you're talking to the Critter with the prettiest tail~

Anyway, I just wanted to talk a little about some small stuff. Probably things subject to change, but things regardless. First, a re-statement of what we mentioned in our previous entries here: We'll prioritize this platform as one for our written works, in particular the less furry ones that don't fully fit on the furry art sites we're on. Of course, there's a couple of fairly furry works that'll probably end up here too (Including one I'll mention again later!), so there'll be fun in store for this page.

And then there's what's next as well. We originally planned for this week to be a quieter one, a bit of time to rest after the emotional rush and flurry of action that was the last weeks of Cohost. Restabilize ourselves after almost two months of emotional roller coasters. Then we started on a short story yesterday evening. (It was supposed to be a TF Tuesday thing, but now it's just a TF thing) And then we got multiple art ideas, and started thinking of art projects some of us wanted to do. And then we (Or, in this case, I) thought about one of the short stories we wrote back on Cohost, a brief view into a world where people randomly started turning into anthros and the societal effects of that, and I wanted to write more in that setting, explore the ramifications and the many ways our relationships with ourselves and the society around us would change. Something that could do with at least one more short story. Or maybe two. Or maybe more, a proper long-term project.

And then we had a dream this morning, the kind that is basically the dreaming mind dropping the start of a story on your head. The premise, basically, was "The first several seasons of Digimon meets Qoheleth [The first book of the Post-Self series], with a smattering of therian vibes". Mysterious creatures showing up, widespread cases of people becoming hypersensitive to electricity and radio waves to the point of collapsing into a coma, and one trans girl who is being tempted by the voice of someone familiar (Who she was certain had a different gender when she last spoke to them) to step into one of the many screens nearby. I don't know if we'll do anything with this dream, but suddenly having another dream-powered story idea dropped in our lap sure was an experience.

We're gonna try to ease ourselves into things. There's still stuff we need to worry about IRL, we have many other projects we want to work on both on- and offline, and we're still figuring out a creative routine that works for us. Plus we have to do the entire "Port over stuff we had on Cohost to its new homes" thing. At least I can safely say that we've got a decent and healthy variety of things we want to spend our time doing~