Jeff Burton

Not you, me! Oh God there it is. One of the dark secrets that should have stayed in therapy.

See how look what you did. We are turning innocent Ben’s thread into a den of filth this is why I can’t leave you alone for 5 minutes.

You just like being punished, which is funny because that topic just came up in a PM reply I just sent to somebody. I drink this pretty horrible coffee because apparently I like being punished too. There’s probably a story in there somewhere.

Then you want to get spanked. You like it so much you go out of your way to make people want to do it. Im on to you.

I swear to God, I can’t leave you alone for five minutes.

I think me and Topher should just leave it to the professionals. 😉

This is a great collaboration, you both did this so seamlessly, I wouldn’t have been able to tell if you hadn’t said something. As for the story itself, it is cute, and I liked the way you were able to weave the pieces of the backstory in to just give glimpses into what happened before.

You sir can remain silent! 😂

Actually no Skyler's kiss wasn't the most I've done lol, I did do something in one of my stories that was rather graphic and it gave me so much anxiety I promised I would never do it again. Except I'm probably going to break that promise and figure out a way to write smut that doesn't make me cringe.

It's a tool, like a hammer or a wrench. It's not supposed to do the work for you but help you do it better, faster. At least that's my view on it. lmfao. That's literally how I see my sex scenes too. Even my characters are like "Bro, we don't want to be a part of this, people don't need to read our business. Fade to black you pervert."

I use AI for planning and formatting my thoughts into the notes I end up using later. Usually it’s just a conversation, because sometimes the only way to get an idea out of my head is to talk about it. New stuff usually takes a few days and several different conversations because I take the time to think about stuff more, to me it’s like a step process, because I’m the one that fine tunes the plot, I’m the one that has to work out the arcs into something I’m willing to type, for me it’s a useful tool in that way. Ive tested many different AI models and my conclusion is it isn’t there yet at least for what I’m trying to accomplish with my words. Details tend to get lost, it forgets what it’s actually doing and the work you end up with is a general mess that would take too long to complete. But it’s been a while since I’ve tried it. The other thing I use it for is to critique passages, I’ve been working to refine “the author voice” I’ve been trying to fine tune, it generally offers suggestions, and sometimes surprises me by telling me to try it again with a different motivation behind it because it says I can do better, like wtf? I get that a lot of people don’t want to use it at all but when you’ve got a mind like mine that often cascades into a confusing waterfall of ideas, I can tell it my raw thoughts and it helps me build it into a character sheet or a chapter map for an arc, it helps do the things I’m not good at on the back end because I just wanna write, not format notes. So I guess in short I just use it as a planning tool, and it helps me work crap out when I get stuck on something, and that’s about all I really need out of it.

That’s pretty damn solid. I enjoy cooking, I’m not a professional at it by any means, but I do get enjoyment out of it. I worked at a supermarket deli once when I was younger, the kind of place that didn’t care really if the food was actually good, just that it got out. Which of course made sales tank. The one item that we sold, that I hated doing was the fried fish. The first reason I hated it is because the way they prepared it wasn’t correct in my view. If you did it by the book it came out of the fryer with incomplete breading and just looked bad, and if your going to charge that they did for it the least you could do was make it edible. So one day I had time, I cleaned the filets and let them dry, since I had no control over ingredients all I did was change how they were breaded. Yeah it look a little longer, but anything was an improvement. I may have also decreased the cook temp by five degrees and increased the time in the basket by 15 or 20 seconds, but what came out where way better visually, the breading was even, the filets had a crispier snap while remaining flakey on the inside, and sales for that item actually improved. I ended up doing the same thing to the fried chicken just minor changes and sales went up a little too. I like cooking but I learned that you can’t cut corners and get the same quality, I also learned that some managers don’t care about quality and would rather make a sale of any kind even if it made repeat business impossible. Id rather the tickets pile up on the printer and do it right, because saving a few seconds here and there at the cost of quality is stupid and affects repeat business. Im glad your problem solved itself @Jason Rimbaud and made everyone happier in the end.

While I’m proud of this story, and glad that I wrote it, I warn people about it because the first couple of chapters are dark as hell. i was going through something in my head that wasn’t good when i wrote this and despite the fact i sanitized the writing as much as i could it’s still an emotional gut punch. That feeling of being sucked into a vortex of despair, was intentional on my part because that’s what I was feeling at the time and I had to let that bleed into the writing, but I only limited it to 2 chapters. The rest of the story is the aftermath, and trying to rebuild. And yeah most of my style across my stories have that tight focused feel to it, I try not to waste time with getting side tracked lol.

Don’t tempt me.

Hahahahaha. its been a weird couple of weeks. I’m used to dry spells and it’s been raining men and my brain can’t comprehend it. I was at the laundromat yesterday and ended up in two deep conversations because apparently I’m approachable, it’s just weird and my antisocial self isn’t reconciling it.

@BendtedWreath is practically jail bait at this point 😂

lmao right there with you

I’m 44. So your still a youngen’ and 45 is coming way too fast

lmfao not a fan of water sports. I’m not a water park.

I have no idea what I’m doing but… It seems like every Friday the last month I’ve collected a new phone number. So for those that read my work I now have a Ryan with a heart emoji in my contacts. Like. What. The. Hell. 😂 I must be giving out that innocent dork energy because this has to stop lmao.

I seriously need to write a smut story because it’s something I haven’t done but when I think about it I get so embarrassed. I feel the heat in my cheeks. No not those cheeks you pervs. But I know the real reason is if I write this it’s going to release hidden desires and people are going to read it and go “wtf bro, do you need to talk to someone!?” 😂

I’m the same age my dad was when he died and I don’t feel anymore mature or qualified as an adult than he was. I don’t adult very well lol But Thirdly is correct.

I do this too.

Yeah it took me some time to figure it out but after Encrypted I’m not posting anything new until it’s past 85% complete. I’m also redoing the chapter lengths on Faultline, reducing my 7k word average to about 4k. Thats mainly for my sanity.

The in progress stuff that’s already posted I know where I’m going I just need to sit down and do it so that part comes faster, especially in IGANS and TLKA, those stories are in motion already all I have to do is just type lol. As I mentioned before Avalons plot is already nailed all the way to the end I’ve even got a completed chapter map so there’s no question what’s next in that story I just gotta do the tedious job of getting it out of my head, so those don’t really need inspiration, just motivation. The new stuff requires inspiration because I’ve only got encrypted nailed down on the first Act which is probably 10 chapters, so at some point I’m going to need to decide on the plot direction for Act 2 because I’ve got 3 ways all of it can go, and that’s on 3 separate plot lines so someone good at math can do the probability calculations on how many actual iterations of choice I actually have. 😂 I also need to nail down how long this book actually is so far it’s looking like 25 to 30 chapters and that’s terrifying in its own right. The last one is super new it’s something that started shaking in my head like 4 days ago, which is what started to wake my motivation and inspiration up at the same time. It wants attention. Also none of this includes the other 4 stories people don’t even know about sitting on my google drive that have at least 3 to 6 chapters waiting on me to get back to, and my 2026 anthology entry due in October. i absolutely can not concentrate on a single task. If I try I shut down and just stop doing anything. So we are either going to have alot of stories in 2026 or a locked up author who needs some adderall to get his butt in gear.