The Journey So Far - A Special Issue
From the first post till today
I began writing this post in the middle of December 2023. Initially, I thought I would create a post like this after reaching the milestone of 1000 subscribers (that is, free subscribers). It seems like a random milestone when you think about it long enough. I don’t know how many of you actively read the stories I put out, but I know for a fact that someone of you have really enjoyed the content I have been putting out for the last two years. This post is a thank you to them, and an expression of my gratitude to each and every comment, message and upvote (like) that I have received while working on this publication.
This is a special issue of Concupiscence. This is a gratitude post, a post with reflection and with behind-the-scenes of writing, publishing and publicizing desi sex stories.
This will be a meandering post, more of a chronicle of the growth of After a Good Date since its inception, the changes in the ways I write stories, and what I have learned from hustling in sex blogging over the last two years, while holding down a full-time job.
Content Warning: This post is meant for adult audiences only. It has explicit images, and other sexually explicit content. If you are reading this post as an email, be sure to scroll through it with appropriate privacy.
How did It All Begin?
Why start a Desi Sex Blog?
There’s a lot to unpack here. Across different posts, I use different words to describe After a Good Date. Sometimes, I refer to it as a blog; other times, as a newsletter. And sometimes, I call it a publication. In my mind, this is a blog that is published in a newsletter format, under the publication name of After a Good Date.
Blogging was not cool in 2022. It stopped being cool a decade ago. A blog, which is short for web log, is meant to be a series of posts, published on the web, which would be a log of something. There are food blogs with recipes, there are travel blogs with exotic pictures and places to visit. Then, there were sex blogs. Sex blogs provide accounts of people’s sex lives.
Do not quote me on this, but there are a million sex blogs. Some which are still active, some which stopped after the first post. Some are written by women, often because they lack someone to talk to about their fantasies and desires. Some are written by men, aiming to flesh out a fantasy, to live in a sexified world, imagining a world where every woman is theirs and every situation is sexual. Whatever merit a sex blog has, it is meant to gratify someone — at least the writer of the blog.
I was among the fortunate 0.1% in India who had access to the internet at home in 2004. The internet of that time didn’t have the algorithm-fueled garden of Facebook and Instagram. It was unstructured, and finding interesting things to read or do on the internet often meant literally stumbling upon them. I’d use the website StumbleUpon (which was dissolved in 2018), to find things to read. I would mess around on Tumblr to find “hot” pictures and posts to read, which I shouldn’t have been reading at that age.
Most fascinating thing about the internet to me, was the keyboard — the ability to type practically infinite amount of text, and send it to the world. The only thing that was missing — what should I write about?
I messed around with blogging, opening three different blogs on blogger.com (it was called blogerspot.com then) to write about Football, Science and Movie reviews. It was 2008, Spain was beginning its football domination, I was 16, with a lot of time during the summer vacations, along with access to torrent sites and a BSNL broadband connection to download whichever movie I wanted to for the first time. I mixed all these things, and thought I would have enough to write about.
I didn’t.
Then, adulthood happened. I went to college, graduated from college, moved to Bombay and started working. Life was moving really fast in those years, and before I knew it, it was 2020. During the COVID lockdown, I had a lot of free time. I would go upstairs whenever Nisha would call me, I would go upstairs whenever Nisha called me, I would fill her up with my cum, and then linger around her house, waiting to be hard again. But, it got boring after a while, seeing only the same faces, using the same bed for sex, and with the singular objective of impregnating her with my seed.
So, I got back to my other hobby — reading. I wanted to re-read the Harry Potter series. I had to let go of my paperback collection of the entire series when I moved to the city. So, I finally decided to put my Kindle to use. I took up a Kindle Unlimited subscription, because it seemed reasonable to be able to read the entire series for free for just INR 169 a month. I burned through Harry Potter in about 2 weeks.
On a hot May afternoon in 2020, when I had stumbled upon the first Indian sex story on Kindle. I don’t remember which keywords I used for the search, but I stumbled upon a Kindle Book Let them Watch by Vidhya Sood. It was just 76 pages long, which was free to read with my Kindle Unlimited subscription. I was looking for a leisurely fap, having already emptied my balls twice inside Nisha (from A Workplace Donation and Whispers of the Past) that day.
I do not remember the plot, or which sexual scene from the story made me cum. But, I read more and more of these types of books. Partly because I sought these out, and partly because Amazon kept recommending them to me on my Kindle. It wasn’t the first time I was actively reading sexual content, but that period, with the heady mix of Nisha, and the shared isolation of COVID19, added certain colors to the experience.
When the craze for Fifty Shades of Grey was at its peak and Love me like you do was on everyone’s VLC playlist, I tried to read the book. I had watched the film, which I would describe as feebly sexual. The book was worse for me. Anastasia Steele didn’t feel relatable. Christian Grey was too rich for my taste. Since then, I've avoided novels that feature cover pictures of men with their shirts open or wearing just a tie.
There’s a difference between a fully fledged 300+ page novel about a sexual dynamic and a smut. I have been reading smuts since the time I discovered a low-bandwidth website, with hundreds of thousands of words. These stories didn't have pictures, making them easier on the 2 GB monthly broadband limits of that time, and also allowing me to read discreetly. Even after all these years, Literotica is live and kicking, and is not in the radar of IT admins. You could easily browse to it, even if you are on office WiFi (be careful while doing this though. I don’t want you to get fired for workplace indency).
But Literotica, is primarily written by Americans and for Americans. I grew up watching Hollywood movies, and US TV Shows and of course, American porn. I’m sure it’s true for the Gen Z too. But, these stories quickly started losing their shine to me, after I started having sex regularly. My women didn’t have pink pussies. They weren’t brunettes, and it’s rare, even in the kinds of circles I frequent in Bombay, to find women with breast implants. We do not have a state like Alabama, where fucking your own brother is alright.
Reading smut on Literotica became a chore, a frustrating substitute for porn, especially now that I had 200 mbps unlimited internet and could easily afford a Pornhub premium subscription.
But the stories that were recommended to me on Kindle, were different. Yes, there was sex. And yes, a lot of the sex and sexual situations described in those books were more laughable than sexy. But at least the women in these stories wore sarees. The writers talked about their exposed waist, and a body type which was close to what I saw around me, close to the women with whom I lay naked.
The lockdown receded, and slowly my schedule returned to the usual, with the exception of a hybrid work model. Without the commute from Andheri to Worli, I suddenly had more time than I knew what to do with. I spent that time messaging women, planning a date, sometimes cooking for a date. But even after all that, I still had time, and all that mental energy, which I’d otherwise spend agonizing over a Creta that cut into my lane.
Something else happened in COVID — I got interested in news. There’s this stereotype that the young professionals of India, especially those in Bombay and Bangalore are ignominiously unaware of political, society, and culture. I didn’t know about this stereotype until I met Sneh. She was a lawyer, and we had dated for an incredible one and half years. Most of that time was spent naked in bed, or going to a place in Bombay, which only she knew about, having always lived in the city.
The rest of the time with Sneh, was a debate. I was grossly ill-equipped to debate her. With my education solely derived from American political satire and reading New York Times when I was preparing for my GRE and TOEFL, I was no match to Sneh who was raised by card-carrying socialists, who casually quoted an article from The Economist over dinner. During the few dinners I had with her parents, I found myself uncharacteristically lost for words at the table.
After me and Sneh broke up in 2019, I went through a phase of reading op-eds, even subscribed to physical copies of The Indian Express. I started listening to podcasts which talked at length about socio-political issues. I became a regular listener of NL Hafta, and eventually a paid subscriber of Newslaundry. One of the younger journalists from Newslaundry, started a ‘Substack newsletter’.
In the announcement he referred to it as his “Substack”, where he would condense weekly news into one single email. Most of the content I looked up online, were either personal websites, or Medium articles. Finding Substack, was incredible! The reading interface was clean, the writers were quirky, and wrote about weird things. Yes, the best stacks were behind the paywalls, but it was the new ones which caught my eye — their discipline, their attention to detail.
By end of 2020, I wanted to be like those writers, to have a space of my own to express myself. This was suspiciously close to a blog, but the structure of Substack had an advantage — a sense of urgency.
Why have a Desi Sex Blog as a newsletter?
Newsletter is an unsexy word. Whenever I’d hear the word, I’d think of promotional emails, weekly round-ups of news, or my college newsletter (which never took my writing, because the editor-in-chief of my college newsletter was in a relationship with Manisha — she and I had taken each other's virginity in the second year of college).
But a newsletter had a natural sense of urgency. You have to be fresh with your posts. You have to be somewhat regular with your posts. Yes, even on Blogger.com blogs, there is a way to subscribe. But, with newsletters, the entire reason you have a website is for the archive of posts which were originally emails. In a newsletter, you do not have readers; you have subscribers. Yes, there is readership traffic, but at the end of the day, there’s a goalpost — to reach a certain number of subscribers.
I did not want my first Substack to be a failed project. I was wrong. It failed miserably. I managed to post only one post, which was a pretty long read, about a niche topic. I explored every tool available on this platform. I designed an icon for that failed newsletter, I designed a welcome page, tweaked around with the web background and accent colors.
But when the time came to write my second post, I blanked. I didn’t find anything interesting to write about. I kept coming back to the dreaded post editor, messing around with each feature, but never actually typing words. Something else was going on in my life — my newfound love for Reddit and the gone wild Indian communities on Reddit.
Reddit is a dangerous place. There are no social consequences of being obscene or obnoxious on Reddit. Women who bare it all on Reddit are truly brave Amazons. When I was not obsessed with ogling women who looked a lot like my favorite exes, I would be busy commenting on Reddit posts, giving my two cents on the sex life in Bombay, and now and then indulging in unsolicited DMs to these gone wild Indian women.
It all changed when Bhakti DM-ed me on Reddit, in late 2021. For two days, I wasn’t sure if she was really a woman or just a lonely man looking for any sort of release. She had read one of my posts in r/MumbaiGW (the MumbaiGW now, does not have the posts from that time). It was an old post, and I didn’t know how she stumbled upon it.
Her needs were specific — she wanted to know what it actually meant to be dominated in bed. At that time, my Reddit name was Dominance (I know, it’s super cringe). I never advertised myself as someone who is a dom. I don’t identify myself as one. But, from what she had read (I had written at length about Prerna (from A Proper One Night Stand) and Arunika (from A One Trip Stand) in that MumbaiGW post), she assumed that I was one.
We talked, and eventually decided to exchange WhatsApp numbers. It felt odd giving out my number on a Reddit DM. On WhatsApp, our conversation was endless, and as is often the case with such connections, it led to sexting.
She shared pictures of herself. She was short and big, with the largest breasts I had ever seen on a woman not featured in porn. At the end of our sexting session, I expressed my desire to meet her.
Our meeting was a unique experience. While I was no stranger to meeting women for the first time outside hotel before checking in, encountering someone from Reddit in real life was thrilling. You might expect me to delve into a detailed account of our sexual encounter – how I dominated her, the intensity of our actions, the resulting mess of smudged kajal and a runny nose. But I'll spare those details.
I had an epiphany after I had finished cumming on her massive breasts, after she was napping naked beside me — I hooked up with her because she found me through what I had wrote on Reddit. And I hadn’t even written it with the express intent of “impressing” the opposite sex or bragging about how “good” I fuck (if you are reading this, please never do that. People who brag about it, are the ones who finish within 5 thrusts).
Returning home, I started with a blank sheet of paper. It was on that paper I first wrote After a Good Date. It wasn't until mid-January that I finally formulated a plan.
I had a platform which I liked — Substack. Its newsletter format felt urgent and goal-oriented. More importantly, I had proof that my words could manifest into real-world outcomes. And that's how the concept of a sex blog as a newsletter came to be.
The First Post
Technically, my first post was What’s the Newsletter about? It wasn’t even my idea. It’s what Substack recommends as the first post, sort of an announcement post, to pique the readers’ interests.
Two years on, I stand by every word I had written there. I started this blog, because I wanted to improve desi sex stories.
I did not want the go-to place for desi sex stories to be the first link which pops up when you google “Indian sex stories”. I did not want a place, which had more ads than content, with more pop-ups than orgasms. And, I did not want every Indian story to be about sloppy sex with a Bhabhi or an aunty or a college girlfriend, with a plot that can basically be summarized as tripping over and falling duck-first into a pussy. I wanted desi sex stories to be deliberately paced, to have the characters talk in a realistic diction, and to have dialogues which were either in हिंदी (Hindi), or in English, and not in some bastard form (“aise dialogues nhi chahiye!”).
I will concede, that After a Good Date will probably never be at the top of a Google search. I do not SEO aggressively. I do not have random websites posting and reposting my stories. And, a vast majority of readers, looking for Indian sex stories, will probably never land on this page. I am certainly not claiming that the stories and content that you have read on After a Good Date are the absolute best Indian sex stories. I have no awards or badges to boast of.
But, I wanted the satisfaction of doing something about the sorry state of desi sex stories, instead of just whining.
So, after laboring over the sequence of stories, designing a publication icon, writing the first draft of the About page, and painstakingly anonymizing characters and places, I posted my first story on Friday, 11th February 2022.
It was a repost of what I had already written and posted on Literotica — A Workplace Donation. It’s about Nisha and me, and her proposition of having my child, instead of her husband’s.
I chose it as my first story, despite being previously written, because the reality of fathering a secret child is still the most significant thing in my life. Yes, I have never held her, and yes, she should never know who I am to her, but our secret remains undeniable. I wanted to start this web log with the truest reality I know.
The second post was the hardest. In fact, the reason I waited for a month to post A Workplace Donation, was that I wanted a draft of A School Lust Done Right. It’s about Sushri, and a decade-long wait to hook up with her. I was deliberately writing about sex after close to 2 years (I had originally written A Workplace Donation during the COVID lockdown, when I was still fucking Nisha. It was more of a diary entry, than a stroll down the memory lane).
While writing A School Lust Done Right, I realized the challenge of maintaining pace and creating multidimensional characters. I'm sure I did a shoddy job capturing Sushri's essence. Yes, it was lustful, and yes, it was all about sex when we checked in. But I wanted every sentence to convey how she looked and felt through my eyes.
I couldn’t sincerely write about her true feelings, as Sushri and I were never in a proper relationship. I don't know what drove her decisions, what led her to agree to a check-in with me after years apart.
But it was during the writing about Sushri that I developed a loose format for my Escapade stories (I didn’t have a name for such stories then; when published, it encompassed the entirety of After a Good Date) — I’d start with a history, then the seduction, and finally, the hookup.
We are halfway through this post (I think), and I’m yet to tell you the real upshot of writing a sex blog as a newsletter: the serialized nature of the stories.
The biggest problem with blogs, websites, apps or services is retention of users (readers, in my case). You can write amazing content, and you might even make a reader cum twice. But, there’s no guarantee that they will even remember what to Google to find you again. The internet is a universe in itself, full of shiny galaxies like Instagram and YouTube, with their bright stars of influencers and celebrities. For a lone planet like After a Good Date, making a lasting impression for readers to return, was an uphill task.
Writing a story in parts created an incentive for readers to subscribe. Yes, subscribing to After a Good Date is free, but I was still asking them to enter their email address to subscribe to a sex blog! I was a nobody, offering content that could be consumed in half an hour. Why would anyone trust me with their email, the inbox they frequently check? (I’ve been around the internet long enough to know we all have email addresses we give away without intending to check back).
I began by writing A Note on Privacy of Subscribers. Next, I structured A School Lust Done Right to ensure the first part contained enough sexual content to entice the reader to crave the next installment. The idea was to use their emails as a tether to this website, creating a connection that went beyond a one-time visit.
That approach shaped the structure for A School Lust Done Right, A One Trip Stand, and A Proper One Night Stand. This trio of stories marked the end of my original content list for After a Good Date. With each part, I aimed to not just captivate but also to build a loyal readership, bound by anticipation and the promise of more intriguing content.
After a Good Date is a reader-supported publication. I do not take any ads, and there is no paid-tier here. This journey has been possible, only through the generosity of readers like you. Every rupee from you, goes back into making the reading experience here better.
You can support the work here by subscribing to my Patreon page and through buying the ebooks for the stories which you have liked on my Gumroad store or from Amazon.
The First Six Months
I want to start this section by sharing a graph with you. The numbers are humble (the total number of subscribers is 958, two short of a 960, and 42 short of the conventional milestone of 1000) and the graph is simple. In my day job, I have plotted and presented far more fancy and complicated graphs than this. But this — this is the one I am most proud of.
Every point on this graph is made up of readers, who appreciated After a Good Date enough to click that subscribe button. I agree, it’s free to do, and I don’t get any revenue from how many free subscribers I have had, but these upticks in the graph were all organic, and I can point to specific posts which led to acceleration and deceleration in the subscriber growth. Every push on this graph was because I put together a decent story, and every halt (and sometimes fall) is because I got sloppy with my writing schedule.
I promise, this is the last graph I'll show in this post. Reaching each increment of 100 subscribers is a milestone for me. It took 184 days, or roughly six months, from my first post to reach the first 100 subscribers. Six long months.
After I finished writing A School Lust Done Right, I turned my attention to telling people about it. I went to the place where it all started — Reddit.
Most Reddit communities will allow revenge posts and obnoxious misogynist posts, but they will not allow a story. I understand that managing a subreddit full of horny entitled men can be a headache. However, this doesn't excuse the hostility that my well-constructed, full-sentence posts faced in these subreddits.
This was true in the first six months, and it is true even now. I have been banned from many subreddits for posting links to my stories. I would post just links only on subreddits which didn’t allow text posts. For subreddits which allowed text posts, I will give the context, a summary, and will spend a good 15 minutes to tailor it as per the sensibilities of the subreddit I am posting to. But, the results were mostly the same. At best, the post was immediately removed. At worst, the post was removed after a mod noticed it, and I’d be banned forever or for some time from posting on that subreddit.
I have never been allowed to post on r/BangaloreGW, despite me telling the mods that my posts present a wild side of India. That I am doing something which nobody else on Reddit was doing, at least, none on their subreddits. First they wanted me to be a verified male. When I said that I didn’t want to post pictures of myself, but my desi sex stories, their response was — “If we allow you to do such posts, we will have to allow everybody”. I understand spam, but, I am sure there are ways to get around this simple problem on a subreddit.
The behavior of mods of r/PuneGW and r/IndiaTalksSex, was weird, to say the least. I was banned from r/PuneGW, when I posted a Wild Indica post. They never replied to why I was banned for posting an interview of one of their most frequent and most upvoted members (the piece was about u/arora_chef). Getting banned for posting links to text-heavy posts was not new to me. But, I had posted Wild Indica pieces on that subreddit before. And, in a DM, u/arora_chef even claimed that the founder mod of r/PuneGW was a huge fan of hers, and keeps wanting to fuck her (take this with a fat grain of salt — u/arora_chef has been ousted as a fraud since then). It was weird to be banned for a post celebrating u/arora_chef, and never been told why exactly I was banned.
True hostile behavior was from r/IndiaTalksSex. The following was an interaction with r/IndiaTalksSex, after they disabled discussion for a post, where I asked the members about their favorite Indian erotica.
Previously, I was banned for 30 days from the subreddit for posting link to “A One Trip Stand” as a comment to a post by another user. The post was asking the members about their sexual experiences. At that time, the entire One Trip Stand free to read.
After a while, I realized that there was no point in hanging around in a subreddit where the most popular discussions were on “tips for first time sex” (with recycled comments), or about dead bedrooms or about a ED. Quite depressing.
u/FeistyDetective and u/arora_chef
I owe a lot of my journey to these two. u/arora_chef has recently been ousted as a fraud, who had managed to be verified on popular subreddits like r/BangaloreGW etc, but would post images from social media, pretending to be hers. She has deleted the Reddit account, and the Telegram account through which I used to chat with her. I say “her”, because, we had exchanged voice notes which were too contextual to be downloaded off the internet.
Either they are very skilled with a voice modulator (to send a morphed audio of them within minutes) or they simply wanted to post more content than they could create. You can still find the pictures she posted, on the subreddit r/arora_chef, which is more like a gravestone to her, than a tribute. But, I am going to ignore all that for now, since this is a post on reflection, and I don’t want to write through the 20/20 clarity of the hindsight.
The best thing I did to keep myself motivated to write here was think of Wild Indica. This series, was supposed to consist interview pieces, written in a cohesive narrative format, based on what I asked the Redditors. I started messaging some creators, seeking to cover them in After a Good Date. They didn’t need any publicity, their hot bodies and dirty deeds were enough to get the up-votes and views. However, I wanted to write about a side of them that doesn’t come out in their short post captions and comments.
Wild Indica was supposed to showcase some of the wildest Indians on Reddit. It seemed like a far fetched idea, and in retrospect, it was a slog that was necessary for me to keep writing. The hardest part in all this was to find Redditors who were seemingly genuine, who posted frequently, and were willing to talk to a nobody.
I had found u/arora_chef through one of her posts r/BangaloreGW. She was the first Redditor I had messaged with the pitch. I had no sample interview to show to her at that time. She was supposed to be the first Redditor I’d interview. She had plenty of content by then, and every picture that she had posted on her profile, were red hot with upvotes and teeming with comments.
Before I could finish interviewing her, I had gotten in touch with a couple’s account. The husband loved seeing his wife be an object of desire to other men. They did it spice up their sex lives. So, they became the first Reddit account, which I covered in Wild Indica.
When I finished writing about u/arora_chef, I was surprised by how well the piece had turned out to be. It was sexy, it was raw. I considered it my best piece, until I wrote about u/vanilla4banana recently.
Before I posted her interview, I finished writing my most popular Escapade story till date — A One Trip Stand. It was about Arunika, and a trip to McLeodganj, which was all about sex and not the scenic beauty there. I posted A One Trip Stand, a day before I posted Wild Flower (the interview post on u/arora_chef).
And Wild Flower blew up. And along with the interview, One Trip Stand got popular too. A School Lust Done Right started doing well, piggybacking on the success of these two works.
There was something else which helped me immensely at that time. In fact, it was so important, that I don’t know whether I’d be writing this post today, or putting together books of desi sex stories.
It was a message from u/FeistyDetective. He is the founder mod of r/DownBlouseIndia. We got in touch, and it was the first of two subreddits who appreciated sex stories enough, to give me a “Verified Erotica Writer” tag. u/FeistyDetective, was kind and appreciative of the work that I was doing. He had specifically said that he wanted to give me a platform for the kind of work I was doing.
A lot of my traffic, came from r/DownBlouseIndia. I do not have specific numbers, because Substack tends to club together everything that comes from reddit.com. But, most story posts which I made on r/DownBlouseIndia got a lot of upvotes (especially for a textual post, with no real images of naked women). It also gave me a legitimacy while approaching Redditors for interview. I wouldn’t have landed an interview with u/spicelevel99, if it weren’t for this. I have thanked Feisty in DMs and Comments, but a story about After a Good Date, cannot be complete without thanking him. Thank you!
And of course, Wild Indica wouldn’t have been possible without u/arora_chef’s presense at that time. I don’t think u/arora_chef will ever read this post, but, I want to say thank you to her too. And without u/arora_chef’s interview and the continuous stream of subscribers that it kept on bringing, I would not have written Untying the Knots, or A Proper One Night Stand.
If you have found After a Good Date, after Wild Indica was shut down, you can still get the full archive on my Patreon. The interview with u/arora_chef is free to read (because, well, let’s face it — that interview didn’t age well). I highly recommend reading my interviews with u/spicelevel99 and with u/vanilla4banana, both of whom are active on Reddit.
Changes in the Ways I Write About Sex
If you have reached this far in the post, it’s likely that you have read some of my Concupiscence issues. This entire section is dedicated to posts about my writing process, and the choice of character arcs, and also a round up of what has happened on After a Good Date since the previous issue. I will not repeat what I have already said before.
In this little walled garden of After a Good Date I am the Eros and I am the Aphrodite.
In this post, I want to specifically talk about Reeti to Rita and the transition into a more cohesive format of posting at After a Good Date.
I took my first planned break from publishing in November 2022. It was during this time that I thought about Reeti to Rita, and worked on a character arc before writing the first paragraph. Reeti was Manan’s (from Untying the Knots) sister. This was the first brick in kinky little world of After a Good Date. Since then, my fictional characters from various stories have crossed paths.
Manan is Dhruv’s (from The Truth) colleague and Dhruv fucks Ishita (also from Untying the Knots) the first time he stepped out of marriage. Along with Meera, Dhruv and Aahana sign-up for the shibari workshop in A Knot for Two (this is an unfinished story, which I will revive in early 2024). Vikram, the male protagonist of A Knot for Two had once hired Roli (from About a Common Whore, another unfinished story, which I will revive in early 2024) in the past, when he was learning the art of tying women in the delicate and sensuous styles of shibari.
Ramesh, who is Roli’s pimp (for a lack of a better word) has made appearances in two other story arcs. Ramesh is the regular supplier of drugs and other vices to Rajeev and Shikha (from An Arranged Marriage) and is also the one who abducts Lavanya in The Abduction. Reeti’s husband Yogesh, crosses paths with Tia (from Tia’s Bloom) and in a future story, Tia’s brother, Tanmay. will cross paths with Vikram.
And, finally, Usha from the ongoing story series The Other Men, will eventually meet Sneha (from Sneha at the Mall). Sneha will be a prominent character in the later chapters of The Other Men.
In future, I will write a separate post, illustrating the connections, and maybe even iron out any narrative mistakes in how the characters from different stories are related, and the timelines of these different stories.
My biggest change in writing since early 2022, has been my increased focus on fiction. Dominoes of Desire and Shorts will see a lot of entries in 2024. I love writing fiction, because it gives me the freedom to control the face. It’s more forgiving, because I can write like an omniscient God, making my characters do the kinky things I want them to do. I can explain outrageous coincidences and can dictate the fates of characters the way I see fit. In this little walled garden of After a Good Date I am the Eros and I am the Aphrodite.
The Revenue Model
I am never changing the revenue model at After a Good Date. I want high-effort desi sex stories to be accessible without a paywall, which is why more than 70% of my stories is free to read.
I received my first ever donation on my Buy me a coffee page (which has now been taken down) was on 16th September 2022. It was the first time I made money from writing. They had texted me on Reddit, appreciating my work, and asking about a specific story. They ended the chat, by saying, “Have a Happy Weekend.” And right after that, I received an email which notified me of a $30 donation.
After I came back from my break in November 2022, I decided that I will publish my stories as books on Amazon. I had written Reeti to Rita with explicit intent of putting it together as a book. When I came back in early December 2022, I posted the first two parts of Reeti to Rita and declared that the rest of the story will be available only in the ebook.
That decision didn’t work out. I wanted to keep writing and publishing desi sex stories, for everyone to read. Yes, revenue is a physical validation of good work, but that was not the reason why I had started After a Good Date. I started it because I wanted to make desi sex stories sexy, and go beyond the “wham bam thank you ma'am” narrative.
I resumed publishing chapters of Reeti to Rita. The feedback, the comments, the messages and the likes encouraged me to keep going. Reeti to Rita remains to be one of my longest stories (technically, a novella). I kept the last two chapters of the story exclusive to the book.
I started my Gumroad store, because, well, that’s a service which walks the talk. It was incredibly easy to setup a shop for my digital goods (my ebooks and in future, my erotica art) on Gumroad. However, making people buy from a service which is not very popular in India, was difficult. Amazon is still my most preferred place to put up my books, because, at least in Amazon I don’t have to convince buyers of a secure payment.
Publishing on Amazon India, is quirky. Some books go through, most don’t. It’s ironic that the first story I wrote to be a book — Reeti to Rita, could not be published on Amazon India for months. I finally changed its name to The Bridal Red.
I am never changing the revenue model at After a Good Date. I want high-effort desi sex stories to be accessible without a paywall, which is why more than 70% of my stories is free to read. I keep the rest 30% exclusive to the book, to meet the costs at running this publication. I would not expect you to buy my book, unless you have liked it enough to read enough of it.
Since this is a post about milestones and my journey so far, I think this is as good a place as any, to talk about the costs I incur in running this gig.
My biggest monetary expense is in generating the erotica images. If you Google right now, you will find free AI text-to-image generators online. But they have severe limitations. The biggest one is the time it takes to generate an image. It is fine for personal use. But, if you are like me, and you want to generate 20 images, before finally satisfied with the vibe you are looking for, you need to have a faster generation speed. Then, these free ones do not have flexibility in terms of the models that they use, and the LoRAs and poses. These are important to me, because without it, the images will be out of context of the story.
I generate art after I have written the story. My story dictates the art, not the other way around. For that I need specific models (which are thankfully free) and LoRAs. I need the freedom to do anything with these models, which requires heavy computational resources.
So, in January 2023, I built a PC, with the explicit intent of running diffusion models. I use it for other things too, but, it feels disrespectful to watch porn or a Netflix show on a PC with a 24 GB RTX 3090. The revenue from my Patreon and ebook sales, do not breakeven against the EMI of that PC.
Join my Patreon today (Tier S and above) to unlock more such art!
The Time Ahead
I do not intend to stop here any time soon. We all start a new year with the hopes that it will be better than the last one. Because of the things happening in my personal life, 2024 will be a struggle. But, After a Good Date is my lone beacon of hope and happiness. I plan to do the following in the 2024:
At least, a Dozen New Stories: That subscriber graph I had shown earlier is not monotonic. I have lost 12% of the total subscribers I have gained, because of too many emails in a week. I will stick to at the maximum of three posts a week, and at least a new chapter of an ongoing story or a Shorts in a week. My stories usually have four chapters, so, that’s a full story a month. This is a humble goal, and I intend to over deliver by a lot.
Putting together my first erotic novel: At first, I’d thought that, I’d publish an anthology of my stories as a book. Technically, most of the story series, would qualify as a short story, especially the stories in the last six months of 2023. In 2024, I intend to publish a novel, with lots of sex, with an ensemble of kinky Indian characters, living through life, pushing the boundaries of desire, and reclaiming pleasure that was always theirs to find. A standard novel is around 100k words. That would be a lot, considering that my longest story ever was 40k words. But, I want to put together a book, which I am truly proud of, and it will have firm footing in this kinky little universe of After a Good Date.
More Art Series: I did some art packs in the early part of 2023, but have since then, shied away from putting together thematic art packs. I want to return with Art Packs, with a generous size, and with art which is decent enough to be a poster on a wall. There’s a learning curve to it, but that’s why it is on the list for 2024.
Thank you, for being here all this time
Writing this post was nostalgic. I had to leave out a few parts with the fear of this post being too long to be finished by anyone. I wanted to talk about the difficulty and dangers in writing a story like About a Common Whore which was about prostitution and The Pathologist which was about reluctant workplace sex. I will do it soon, but maybe in a separate issue.
I hope, next year, this time, I have a better story to tell, more to celebrate, and more importantly, I hope that I make more readers happy. I don’t want to suddenly stop posting one day, but if I do, and you are reading this after years, know that this journey has been incredible, and it wouldn’t have been possible without the feedback and encouragement from my readers.