Getting Out of Quicksand By Starting a Timer

A frequent problem with Eric Filler books is sometimes the stories can end up a lot longer than I intend.  I might think a story is going to last just 30 pages or so and then after a couple of weeks I realize that I'm probably not even halfway through the story yet!

This often happens because there's a certain timeline to a gender swap story.

1. The Setup:  introducing the character and means of the gender swap
2. The Swap:  The actual transformation
3. The Adjustment:  The character's transition into a woman
4. The End:  How does it end?  Do they remain a woman? (Usually.)  Do they find true love?  Are they going to be tormented forever?  (More often than some people would like.)

The thing about that is it can stretch for pretty much however long you want it to.  Each part can be stretched out or compacted.  I mean you can have pages of setup introducing the character or you can have virtually none at all.  For instance a longer story like The Comeback had a few scenes before the transformations.  A lot of people do it pretty much right away.  Just like some people can stretch the actual transformation out for pages or others do it in just a paragraph or two.

The longest bit though tends to be the adjustment part.  Because if your character is a guy and he turns into a woman there's a lot of stuff that he'll have to learn differently from the way he walks to how he uses the toilet to how he dresses and of course things like makeup and periods.  So you can go on and on if you want.

Sometimes, though, if I really want to keep a story under control and not go over my time budget (say more than a week or possibly two) then what I have to do is set a ticking clock.  For One Day as a Bimbo the clock was obviously one day.  Then One Week as a Whore was longer at a week.  The final One Year as a Virgin was the longest yet because it had to last a whole year.

The Gender Swapped for Her Pleasure Trilogy I set the timer for just one night.  The nasty witch would trap someone in her secluded mansion and turn him into a girl to play with for one night and the next morning send him home.  Except in the third one where the guy in question helped her to change her ways.  Who says I don't have happy endings?

A couple of months ago I was getting bogged down in a few longer ones that had kind of spun out of control and run way overbudget in terms of time.  After I finished those I decided I needed to do a few where I set the timer.

So I whipped up One Night in Bangkok that is, gee who'd think it?, about a guy's one night in Bangkok as a "ladyboy" whore.  And then I wrote 24 Hour Woman, which again is pretty obviously about a guy who becomes a woman for 24 hours.  And just for fun I wrote 5 sequels that each only took a few days to write.

The idea is that the shorter your timeframe, the less chance you have to go off track.  This really helps with short stories.  The biggest problem some people have with short stories is trying to cover too much ground.  Where You Belong covered about 35 years; I couldn't have made that into a short story, though God knows some people have tried.  Conversely, unless you're James Joyce it can be really difficult to stretch one day into a novel.  The point being sometimes you want to be careful not to bite off more than you can chew.  When you find yourself getting mired in a story that seems to go on and on, maybe you just need to set a timer.  The ticking clock helps you probably more than your characters.