Join Jody on a mind-bending adventure that begins when the weirdly realistic dreams he has had since his childhood start coming into the real world! Follow along as Jody figures out what is actually real and as he explores his confused sexuality.

Rated R for sexual content and language.

This is a long and complex story which I started writing 18 years ago. I encourage anyone who gets lost to ask questions in the comments and I will try to answer them without spoiling unposted parts of the story. Unlike my prior epic-length stories which are anthologies of loosely related stories, Jody is a single story of 128,000 words, to be posted serially in 31 parts. Author’s notes below, story begins in next part.

Author’s notes about this story and its writing process:

When I started writing down my stories, Jody was the first one to go beyond about 20,000 words. In the original version of Jody’s story, his ability was so flexible that almost any idea I could think of could fit into the story. It became a dumping ground for every idea I had, every new weird dream, and every old dream that came back to me. In this way, from 2008 to 2011, I wrote dozens of subplots, over a hundred chapters of greatly varying length, and over a hundred characters of numerous species and abilities. There were also lots of bits that were mere outlines of what should have been whole chapters, and through 2014 I filled in some of those, bringing it to 103,000 words before I abandoned the story. That was the first time I went back to re-read the entire story that I had written and realized what a mess it was. I had written so many concepts into it I could never finish them all in a satisfactory way. I moved on to writing other stories, having learned from my mistakes with this one.

In 2022, after I started posting stories here, I re-read a bunch of my stories to identify which were suitable for posting. Among them, I re-read the entire Jody’s Story at this time and decided it was hopeless. I swore the story would never see the light of day.

That changed in August 2024 when I had some ideas on how to fix the story. However, I realized it wasn’t going to be possible to simply adapt what I had. The new ideas limited the scope of Jody’s ability and those of his major characters. They encouraged me to focus on the part of the premise that I thought was actually most interesting, and only a handful of major characters, a handful of minor ones, and only a few alien species.

Limiting part of the main premise and eliminating so much other content was only possible by rewriting the entire story, using the original story merely as a guideline. The relevant characters received much fuller characterization. But characters, species, and concepts not pertinent to the story line got skipped over, and if I found I needed them later I went back and wrote them in.

After writing down enough of the new idea to establish it, I held off further work on Jody until I finished Ethertravelers. I took breaks to polish the other shorter stories I posted since that story and a couple you have not seen yet, and to start some new ones that are less far along. Apart from those, most of my writing in 2025 was dedicated toward fixing this story. The parts I did keep were expanded and made into a coherent whole, eliminating contradictions and tying up loose ends. Also, a lot of text was added to help readers keep track of things as the story progresses. As a result of these modifications, the new version is actually longer, at about 128,000 words, but they are different and better words. I spent a few more months editing and re-editing the results of a full test-read by one of my most avid readers, but it’s finally done.

In the original story, and in the first draft of the rewrite until it was about two-thirds written, chapters were daily entries in Jody’s life. They were of greatly varying length and almost all shorter than the length I am targeting for my weekly posts. I combined them into the chapters you will see, 31 in all, which are reasonably even in length, while breaking at sensible places. Date markers appear in bold inline in the text throughout most of the story. I even modified my prep software (which turns stories into tagged text ready to post on BigCloset) to make it auto-split at h1 tags (which hold my chapter titles) to make the posting more manageable because of this.

Some of the cut bits might surface elsewhere later. For that matter, some of the cut bits and even some of the retained ones have already surfaced elsewhere. If you notice commonalities between this story and some of my other works, you should understand that the original version of this story came first and was the one that inspired all the others.