It's come to my attention that I have a large number of readers in recent years who aren't aware of my earlier stories. I thought I'd rectify this with links to some of my tumblr classics. These lists were made in 2017, one by me and another through the popular will of my readers, so they don't include the stories which were made after 2017 and before I created my wix blog in 2020. Most of those stories do exist on my tumblr archive, which can be accessed even through those links below though, though they lack the clean layout and guiding hand of a best-of-list.
The stories in the lists below were very formative in what my work is now. Some of these stories consistently get brought up by long-term readers (like Coming to America and Cheeks), while others that I think are also of top quality have sort of faded from working memory (Little Red Corvette, The Christmas Special 1 and 2, Between a Rock and a Hard Place, and God Works in Mysterious Ways).
Some of these stories, like Little Red Corvette and Coming to America, are as fully designed and realized as anything I write now, while most of the others are sort of like raw materials for elements which would be seen more fleshed out and subtle in later stories. That's not to say that these stories aren't great. They're often helped by their simplicity. What they lack in character and description, they gain in universality and bite. They're sort of like the primordial elements, or archetypes within the cosmology of bluvelvet and Momism, just waiting to be fashioned in more specific form. Cheeks might be the most brazen example of this, with its basic structure of rising above, providing the mom with a moment to soar, only to make her humiliating fall back to the dusty ground all that much more satisfying.
The thing to take away, the thing which I'm now noticing viewing these stories in bulk and from some distance, is that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Also, the birth of this fetish, and its rise into the mainstream, was likely inevitable. While my prose, pacing, character development, and dialogue has improved drastically since these early attempts at solidifying this fetish, most of the desired effect, the clear attempts at normalization, the joy for chaos and corruption, and the need to mythologize a new form of hero, are all still there, even back then. The only thing which has maybe changed on a substantive level is that my voice as a writer isn't nearly as dark as it was back these days, likely because my success and improvement as a writer, thanks to this very fetish itself, lead to a rise in my self-esteem, and an optimism in terms of what this fetish was accomplishing, and the mark I could see it would eventually leave on the world.
Though, there is no dawn without a period of sunlessness. Without further adieu, welcome to a beautiful night:
(My personal best of list, even of just the stories written up until 2017, would be drastically different today. Out of everything I've written back then, Coming to America sticks out clearly to me as the best. I also think it's the one that means the most to a lot of people, and for good reason.)
The color of ass was my favorite