Welcome to Pele's Playground! Here you'll find easy links to our worlds and the stories in them. Some worlds have a large number of stories waiting to be released; others have only one or two.
Some of these stories are complete; others are essentially complete, but need editing (a very time-consuming task). We've recently changed how we do our writing, dropping the time needed to prepare a rough draft from an hour for 1,500 words to an hour for approximately 12,000 words; expect to see a lot of the newer stuff before the older stuff makes it out. Luckily, however, none of our stories are in any particular chronological order, and none depend on the others to any great degree.
Note that most of these links won't work yet; only stories for which we have released at least one chapter have more than a nominal webpage.
Also, we have forums! Go here to discuss the stories!

Jason and Kylie, Naked in School Chapter 23 (5744 words) is up!
So, it's, ah, been a while since I put up a news post. Sorry about that. Things are going pretty well, even if the last month or so has been a giant plant bukkake session here in Dallas. I'm pretty sure there was a time when takin two Claritin a day let me breath.
You'll note there have been a couple of new stories put up — _For Amy_ is the biggest reason I didn't get a news post up a couple of months ago. It ate my brain, and I figured I'd put up the news post when I got it done — it was only going to be maybe 6-8000 words, after all, so it couldn't take that long....
Erm. Right. Thirty thousand words later....
It's up, and it and "Once and Eternal" are both complete, and I'm rather happy with it. I've got another story prowling around the edges of my brain that's... different, at least for me, and once the next chapters of Jason and Kyle, Sonuachara, and Whore of Slytherin are up I'll probably start working on it, unless I decide to try to finish Whore first. Even if I do, I'll probably try to get a chapter or two of the new story down so that I don't forget any of the initial details.
Vel will be doing much better once we find someplace that carries non-synthetic thyroid — apparently, she doesn't respond very well to the synthetic version, and our pharmacy switched to that a few months ago. So, apparently, has everyone else in the area.
At some point in the next few months, I'll be upgrading the software the site runs on. I've had a greatly improved (at least in terms of bugs && usability from my perspective) version of the software for close to a year now, but I decided I wanted to switch it back to Rails once Rails 3 came out, as Merb is... perhaps not dead, but it's doing a pretty good imitation of a Norwegian Blue at the moment.
For more frequent updates, the forums are a better bet — I'm trying to make sure to post my daily writing amounts there, just to keep myself honest, and if nothing else someone usually pokes me if it's been too long.
Finally, there's one important thing that I haven't emphasized enough. The beta-readers for the stories do a tremendous job, and the stories wouldn't be nearly as good without them. They invariably zero in on any paragraphs that I think are iffy, and find many, many other things that I miss. If you like the stories, they're a big part of why, and they really need to get credit for that.
Once and Eternal Chapter 1 (3283 words) is up!
Jason and Kylie, Naked in School Chapter 21 (2934 words) is up!
Sonuachara Chapter 14 (1942 words) is up!
Jason and Kylie, Naked in School Chapter 20 (2602 words) is up!
YIKES!
Sorry it's been so long without an update here, folks — I hadn't realized how long it had been until it was pointed out to me, and then before I could get somethnig up here I was distracted by Vel coming down with salmonella food poisoning (which is unbelievably nasty).
Count on, at the minimum, a Jason and Kylie update in the next couple of weeks (depending on how long it takes me to get it up and then fix anything the betas find), followed by either another Jason and Kylie update or a Sonuachara update shortly thereafter.
I can't speak for Vel — it greatly depends on when she finishes recovering from the food poisoning. It looks like she's over the worst of it (she didn't have a particularly severe case, apparently, which is frightening), but it could be lulling us into a false sense of security.
Yikes! Sorry there hasn't been a news posting since Oct — I thought I'd put one up just a couple of weeks ago, apologizing for just that fact.
Vel is working on another Prudence update, which requires her to re-read the existing story so that she can make sure there aren't any continuity errors. As she does so, she's making some changes to the earlier chapters, as they're hurting her to read. I've got a chapter of Whore of Slytherin up for beta (and I need to go through the comments) and I hope to get a chapter of Jason and Kylie and Sonuachara both up for beta this coming week, but job-hunting may interfere.
Health-wise, Vel's doing better, and we may have discovered the root cause of one of her health issues, which is good and bad. Good, because there's a medicine specifically for that, but bad because her doctor hasn't been impressed by it and the alternative is to avoid yellow food coloring — and you wouldn't believe how many things have Yellow Dye #5 in them.
For everyone wondering where we are, we're not dead. We've just had a bit of an emergency that's resulted in us pulling our son out of school and homeschooling him, and the last couple of weeks have been more than a little stressful and swamped.
On top of that, we've had computer issues — Vel's laptop is dead (but luckily still under warranty), my laptop is dead (The power supply yet again), and her motherboard in her desktop has died (also under warranty). Needless to say, this has caused some difficulties....
On the up side, I did manage to get 1700 words of outline done on Whore of Slytherin, and I hope to get some JaJNiS done this week — I'd hoped to get it done this weekend, but no joy. :(
And I want to make a point of thanking our betas on this one — it was a monster of a chapter, and we had over fifty comments within a couple of days of putting it up for them to look at; it's a much better chapter as a result.
| Cumulative donations | Update schedule |
|---|---|
| $0 | Prudence update and either Sonuachara or Jason and Kylie, Naked in School update |
| $100 | Weekly updates |
| $200 | Two updates per week |
| $300 | Three updates per week |
| $400 | Four updates per week |
| $500 | Five updates per week |
| $600 | Six updates per week |
| $700 | Seven updates per week |
Let me start with this: The donation drive is not meant to be any sort of demand or extortion. Everything we put out as a result of donations _will_ be put out no matter what; all the donations affect is when things come out, and the schedule above is a minimum. We'll try for monthly updates of all the stories we've started, no matter what we get in donations, but the only ones we guarantee are Prudence (for Vel) and either Jason & Kylie, or Sonuachara (for me; one or the other will be updated every month).
I'm not going to try to convince people to donate; in fact, I'm going to do just the opposite. If you don't think the work is high enough quality that it deserves it, or if you don't care when things come out, DON'T DONATE.
Donate if you like the stories that much. Donate if you can't wait to find out what comes next, and you don't want to wait a month between updates. Those are the reasons to update.
Even -- no, especially -- if you don't donate, we still want your feedback. We want to know how we could improve the stories. Not that I'm saying we're going to change what we write based on popular opinion; if we were going to do that, Aaron would never have become part of the Prudence family, because we did that knowing we'd probably lose a lot of readers (though, to be fair, that hasn't happened nearly as much as we'd expected). But we do listen to what people have to say; if several people say that a certain scene didn't work for them, we're going to look at why that was and try to do it right the next time.
It all comes down to this: we want you to donate what you think the work is worth. If that's nothing, then that's what we want you to donate.
If people don't want Prudence to be at the head of the queue, tell us. Right now, we're alternating between having multiple Prudence updates on even-numbered months, and updates for all the stories on odd-numbered months, but that can change.
Also, note -- money in excess of a breakpoint (IE, the $50 in $350) will be applied to the next month's donations, giving it a head start.