Support me on Patreon for first looks at all my stories!
Hey, folks. Just a little update on what I have been up to lately, and that would be writing. Lots of writing! First, I am finishing my nearly 60,000 word gender swap novel, Carrolwood. The final chapter will appear on my Patreon October 12th.
I also have completed and lined up two new works. The next in line will be a 20,000+ word novella called Girls’ Weekend. In this story, a guy talks his female friends into letting him come to Miami Beach with them for a girls’ weekend. What he doesn’t know is that they plan to keep it an all girls’ weekend!
Then, my patrons will enjoy a super fun 10,000 word short story in which an arrogant and entitled male slowly transforms into a dorky nerd girl. It’s a really fun little story I think people will really love.
In the meantime, this being Halloween Month, I am also posting fun Halloween themed GIFs and short videos along with some gender swap spooky short stories! It’s a busy and fun time! Hope everyone is well!
Today, I’m gonna share on where I get my ideas. I’ve written hundreds of gender swap short stories, novels, novellas and now scripts over the years. While they share a common element– someone gets gender swapped– they also are all different and unique in their own ways. Mostly, that does not result from a kind of logical process, but from an imaginative experience.
One of the greatest idea generating activities in my life involves walking. Aside from getting story ideas, I just like to walk. It’s healthy, and for me it’s a form of meditation. When I walk regularly, I just feel better physically, mentally and spiritually.
And, I get ideas. In the case of my current novel, Carrolwood, for example, the voice of the narrator came to me as I walked around my neighborhood after dinner one sweaty summer night. I sort of met this character, and I thought the voice was funny, and I began to think about what kind of story I could tell with that voice. The characters and setting all then just kind of emerged from my subconscious.
Another time I was walking around the beach down at Asbury Park, NJ, where the evil, 19th century clown Tillie still serves as town mascot, and I just started to think about what if Tillie were an evil spirit haunting the town? As I walked around, I took pictures of different locations, and the story ended up being built around that walk.
In addition to getting ideas for stories, I sometimes walk to inspiration while in the middle of a story. Sometimes when I am writing I get in a jam and can’t figure out what the character would or should do, I take a long walk, and the answer a lot of times just comes to me. Sometimes I see the scene in my head, and at those times I am very much inclined to believe in the idea of a muse that is feeding me ideas. It really does feel to me sometimes like I am seeing the story happen and just writing it down rather than “coming up with it.”
There are other ways ideas come to me. Sometimes I create a cover and then write a story to match. I have been inspired sometimes by other authors. For example, I once decided to write a TG story in the style of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Likewise, Forever Mine started out as “forced femme version of YOU (the book and Netflix series). There must be others I can’t think of right now– Oh, yeah– It Girl! What? Just started out as “TG Anime.”
But, I would say, without walking, I think I would write a lot less. There’s just something about walking along a shady, tree-lined path that allows my mind to open itself up and accept the gifts of inspiration!
What is it to be a male? A female? How closely does anyone really adhere to the stereotypes? No nation explores these ideas with as much creativity and vigor as Korea, and My Runway, now available on Netflix, does a wonderful job exploring these questions while also having a lot of fun.
In the series, a guy and a girl swap bodies. Been done before, right? But the choices here make it more interesting from the start. The male, Jae Boem, is the world’s top male model, and very much a spoiled princess. Arrogant, haughty, and superior, he swans around like the the world is beneath him, disrespects others and is perfectly confident in his beauty.
The female, Na Jin Wook, is a high-school student with bad grades who dreams of being a model and refuses to listen when people tell her she is too short. Spunky and full of pep, she believes that she can succeed through hard work despite her unfavorable genetics.
They swap bodies and suddenly Jae Boem finds himself the cute but imperfect girl, physically over-powered by another high-school girl and dragged into a mundane life. Meanwhile, Na Jin Wook finds herself sharing a house with a bunch of super hot guys, including a male model she has been crushing on from afar.
Of course, there are romantic complications and lots of drama. The types are all mixed up, too, with guys who obsess over designer fashion and hair, aggressive girls and a lot of mixing and matching of gender types that reflect reality more than most shows.
I don’t want to say much more because it is all fun and a lot of that fun comes from surprise, but if you are interested in gender identity and what makes us who we are, check out this fun and super-well-acted and written series!
With story by Gail Simone and Art by Cat Staggs, Crosswind features the kind of body swap that gets me all tingly and excited; a macho hit man trades bodies with a mousy housewife. I love these kinds of switches because not only do the main characters exchange bodies, but they are forced into lives with distinctly different gender roles.
Even better, the force that switched them orders them to fully immerse themselves in their new lives. The hit man, for example, finds himself ordered to cook, clean and a be a perfect hostess when his husband’s boss comes over for dinner the night of his swap. He is told unless he embraces his role, he will be stuck as a woman and a housewife forever.
Now, for those of us who love body-swaps and forced- femme stories, it couldn’t get much better. How will this tough guy deal with being a housewife, step-mom and hostess?
Well,this is where the story lost me because he just does it. We see him go shopping for groceries, cook and clean, deal with his bratty step son and then cut to him wearing a sexy dress as he plays housewife. There is no conflict whatsoever. He just does it all as comfortably as if he’d been dressing as a woman and playing the supportive little wife his whole life, and he handles other situations with ease as well– for example, being sexually harassed by a couple teenagers, who he just beats up as if he were still a man– although it is a little funny as he does it with a frying pan.
The hitman finds it so easy to be a woman that he even says at one point that it’s kind of fun and not hard at all.
The woman, meanwhile, rapidly gets over her “icky, blood and murder” reactions, quickly dropping into the male role and seeming to have little problem with her sudden life change.
Now, I read only the first three issues so far, and it is very possible that the story lines may develop more and involve more awkward struggles– but right now it is a story that does very little to really explore the radical life changes these characters have experienced.
The art is gorgeous, and the story moves very fast. I still find myself intrigued, but it feels a little too easy for the main characters so far as they each seem largely unphased by their new sex and role in life.
T.G. Kadee 