In the end, it's more her story than mine so I don't want to push too much outside of what she wants.

Before her summer job, she was writing more than 50% of the content, sometimes 75%, and since that job and later college, if I kept writing, I would write 90% of the content!

Still, almost 95,000 words means that if things keep up, we will soon get to 100,000 words!

Two episodes were published this week, and we want to publish more. We left the camper in, despite my hesitation. My daughter had ideas she didn't share yet.

Oh, she found other naturists on campus! That's cool...

Still, we are having fun when we are writing, and my daughter reminded me that we are almost at the first "jump point".

In short, so far, in the story, every day was detailed in depth, with new things occurring every day.

But that's not how life goes! There are days when almost nothing occurs, and sometimes weeks when it's just more of the same.

Lucy is on her last weekend before Halloween at the resort in Chapter 38, and Mindy is about to spend more time with her new love interest than with Julie. So, Julie will see a sort of routine settle in until that Halloween, and then, a boring winter with a few events.

This was always planned. Julie starts at 12 and a half, and there are beats of the story planned when she is 15. Some days have 3 episodes or more, so we can't write 3000 episodes or so before those elements occur.

This is where I failed in many stories, and my daughter made it clear that we would time jump.

It's coming.

Don't worry, the project isn't abandoned and we still plan new episodes which I plan to try to write.

Still, with us driving her to her workplace and back, and an expected contract for my job (Yeah, I still write my software) took my time.

But I will continue the story and soon, my daughter will be more adapted to her summer job and she will resume writing too.

I will try to put the next episode later today. I should have kept it going, we have a good buffer.

Lucy and her boyfriend Clark are now in the story, and in a good part of it. They are older teenagers who befriend Mindy and Julie, and who are really cool. Well, they are supposed to be, anyway.

Julie's parent have more and more a personality of their own, same for Mindy's parents, but plot points on them are for later.

Edith is in the story, and is rather important. With Mindy and Julie, she completed a trio of girls who hang out and are friends. Edith, accepts the 2 girls' naturism and even goes topless despite self-image problems to Mindy's house, but never goes fully nude. My daughter insisted on it.

Soon, in a few chapter, we will meet Bobby, a love interest for Mindy. Sure, it's an immature one, just an interest for each other, but it will sort of isolate Mindy a little, and push Edith and Julie closer.

At this moment, things are moving slowly, with often several chapters on the same day, but soon, it will get colder, and weeks will fly by, with Mindy more preoccupied by Billy, and Edith and Julie just hanging up, playing video games.

We need time to fly, because the starting point of the story is Julie at age 12, but but events occur much later, when 13, 14 and 15. We can't write 1000 episodes to cover 1000 days!

But that's for later. Right now, it's day by day, or almost...

I decided to take a look at the site code, which is in PHP and I understood nothing...

At first.

Slowly, I began seeing how it worked, and what it did, and I managed to figure out how to show scheduled episodes and put a mark saying when it would appear.

I think the cache is only cleared once per day, so maybe it won't show up this afternoon?

If it works, we will schedule more chapters so that you know when the will drop and get a sort of preview.

Chapter 19 is completed, and it's a pivotal one that introduces the main conflict in the story.

Because the story isn't just about naturism. It's about a girl, trying to find her place in the world, and something big happens in chapter 13, 14 and 19 (It's the same thing, over 3 episodes).

It will shape future episodes.

My daughter thinks we would mark the end of a chapter soon, but I am not confident we want to do that.

Still, at 19 chapters, it's two more than eden's creek (which got 17), and which was my longest story in number of chapters.

At 46,000 words so far, it's 75% of the length of Catherine Reynolds (which gets massive episodes), and How Kristen spent her summer vacation (by Nemo).

Mark and Kenny, with 13 chapters, only has 10,000 words, including an episode of only 330 words!

I sometimes feels like we are wasting time on trivial details, but my daughter insists that this is important in a novel. We get to learn more about the character via their interactions.

I'll be honest, I told my daughter, I feel chapter 18 breaks the believability of the story.

In short, they get access to buy for cheap a trailer to camp in, which allows them, the next summer, to camp at the resort.

I feel it's like a deux ex machina. It just falls on them, but she says we can't play on their financial fears AND have them rent cabins all the time.

Fine. But I am thinking it over before it gets published.

And when I say together, I mean together.

Previously, we would each write on our side. Her part, my part, and then stich then together.

But not yesterday. We sat in my office, each with out laptop and pitched ideas back and forth.

For example, we wrote a pinball scene (chapter 9) to introduce 2 important characters that will help Julie mature and grow up. They are teenagers who visit (but do not stay at) the resort on weekends with their parents.

We wanted to find something of interest to both teenagers and tweens, so that Julie could shine and help get closer to the teens.

Video games were out, so we kept thinking, and my daughter recalled when she did a high score by accident at an adult friend of ours. He has a pinball machine and my kids were like iron around a magnet around it.

My child and I spent what, 90 minutes pitching ideas and writing some sentences, and then improving, adding stuff, and researching how pinballs work.

I don't think any pinball works like in the description, but who cares!

Same with the bicycle ride where we pitched ideas back and forth.

I think it makes them a lot more interesting than if only her or me wrote them.

It combines my experience as a adult with her curiosity and fresh mind.

And more important, we are slowing down the story.

Each time we are about to finish a segment (not a chapter, just a short sequence) we ask ourselves, what's missing?

In the second half of chapter 9, the four character go talk in the pool, and my daughter said: they need to fight in the water, splashing each other.

I replied, "only kids do that no?"

But Lucy and Carter are in love, so they do it to tease each other too, replied my kid, who went to a few broken hearts and missed opportunities of her own, but also two good (but short) relationships.

I think the story will benefit from it. Why not?

We'll see. I certainly like this story better than many of the bad ones I wrote over a decade ago.

Just as I am helping her make more interesting characters, she is helping me making a more interesting narrative.

Chapter 3 should be coming soon, perhaps tomorrow. We want to revise it with the new technique.

The site was very ugly for hours, especially on mobile, but by the time I ended, it was acceptable.

I think I did the good job, and I am proud of myself.

I am also proud of my daughter, who wrote almost 3000 words of her story while I was coding.

This morning, I fixed a few details, added some dialog and well, improved it before she woke up, and she read the edits while eating breakfast.

She approved my changes.

She will write more tonight (if she has time) and I will edit.

But let me tell you one thing. She makes fewer typos that I do!

In fact, she thinks I might have some level of dyslexia, which is ironic for a software developer, but perhaps it doesn't affect my coding.

My wife laughs at this, as apparently, she's been telling me that my typing sucks.

I mean, she's been telling me that the $ sign goes in front of the amounts for what, two decades now? And I still can't get it right.

For my life to far, we are soon going to surpass 10,000 words, which are 75% from my daughter, and perhaps 25% from me.

The idea to have current day Julie insert herself into the story, that's from me. Same thing for stuff like "I forgot since". But the sunburn, the anger from Julie, that's hers. How it's articulated, well, she put it and I improved.

She is happy for my help, it's a much better story.

I'll get back to my clients, but I wanted to tell you.

How it is bigger? It is now 1200 pixels wide instead of 775 pixels.

It was that narrow because it was made back when monitors were huge CRTs with low resolutions, and was never updated.

It should be responsive, it should be updated to a new CMS. But these are outside my knowledge. So, I put it wider.

If you visited today, there were a lot of moments when it was ugly as hell, but that's ok. I was debugging.

It's also bigger because the font size is bigger! I needed small fonts to fit the narrow width, so I put the site wider, and the font bigger. No need to zoom in to read anymore!

Now, on mobile, it no longer works well, but I am reading on responsiveness for mobiles. I might be able to do it.

The site is better

How? Well, the image the top was optimized to be about 80% smaller, so that it loads better.

Since launch, a change occurred and now, we have a SSL certificate. Who knew? I launched in SSL by accident, and the site was all broken. But I fixed it and it now worked in SSL! So you can read the archives without being spied upon.

There is also a new Blog page in the Blog and News page, and the broken bare pit page was hidden. I am sad it's not longer online, but what can I do? It's old. This site is old, I am old.

But what's better is that now, I have a ally, my daughter who is interested in writing for the site. She grew up with a father writing stories, and she wants to write.

Not everything she writes will end up here, since she also writes non-naturist stories, but we co-wrote a sequel to the pool stand-alone, and I am helping her write "My life so far".

We are now a happy naturist family, and let me tell you what, the pandemic was hard!

Our kids had just begun to enjoy social nudity when bam, everything was shut down. Well, not everything, but we didn't want to take any chances.

As such, we mainly stayed home for the two years, enjoying only family nudity.

With the pandemic slowing down, we began talking about a naturist vacation, when my daughter told me she was writing a naturist story of her own.

She recalls when I read her some of the stories on this site, and decided to try herself. I read a few pages, and I like it. She agreed to publish it on the site, once she will know more where it's going.

This is where I am coming in. She makes a lot of time jumps, so much that it's hard to follow the story. It's fine! She is 19, not 40 and it's her first time writing a serial. I sat with her this weekend, and we edited her story, with me adding a few parts to smooth the time jumps, and proposing to cut some details.

To be honest, like I told her, it's not great, but not any lesser than mine! Seriously, she won't win awards, but it's good writing.

She even makes less typos than I do!

To help her, we reread a few of the stories, and her favorite was the "Can naturist save the pool one" (she also likes the growing up in the bathtub and the secret beach, but I don't).

So, as an exercise in writing, we co-wrote a sequel, put online this morning.

I still want to continue some of my stories, but right now, I am mostly there to help my child.

We hope to put the first chapter this week, or the week after, but not in 3 years. Sorry for the long delays, but well, pandemic...

Just for the record, her brother is NOT interested in writing, and while my wife really enjoys Catherine Reynolds, she leaves the writing to me and our daughter.

BTW, I had announced a new serial back in 2019, and several episodes were outlined, and 3 partially written. I will probably return to them once my daughter is done with her story.

What is that? It's a "I go here, then I do this, and then I do that".

In my mind, I had been a better writer!

But the worst of all, is the fact that I am massively reusing tropes.

Both in Bliss and Catherine Reynolds, the main female character is a devout naturist woman who was introduced to naturism by her late husband. Come on!

Most of my characters are teenagers, and almost all stories feature a romantic angle where one of the characters is a naturist and the other isn't (or is less into naturism than their new partner).

Perhaps I was blind to it. Perhaps I wasn't taking the time to see it. Perhaps I was caught in my own personal problems.

Let me explain. I didn't grow up a naturist. I discovered naturism not in one step, but in 4. That apparently, is rather odd...

The first beat was when my family rented a boat on a vacation when I was 9 and we traveled up a river and crosses a nude beach. Everyone on the beach was nude, including kids my age, and I distinctly remember that everyone seemed happy. Why do I remember that? No idea, but my parents divorced about a year later so I suspect that we were all unhappy. I have zero idea where that beach is and any attempts to ask my parents got stonewalled.

The second beat was when one of my friends and I found 2 naturist magazines in his basement that were hidden by his older brother. We were 11. My friend thought these were porn magazines but I remembered clearly the nude beach. It's only years later that I met his brother as a naturist event, so that explains the magazines, but I digress. I read some of the articles and realized that the nude beach wasn't just a freak thing like my mother claimed but an actual lifestyle.

For years, it stayed in my mind, until, when I was 15, we were a bunch of friends around a fire, on a summer evening, when one of the older "kids" in the gang I didn't know (he was 19), explained that his girlfriend and he were nudists. Not naturists mind you... nudists. Well, not really. They went to a nude beach, and we got the clear impression from them talking that it was more of a sex thing than a naturist thing. Today, I don't know how truthful it was, but I got to ask a few questions and it deepened my understanding of naturism. In the first beat, I saw naturists. In the second, I read about, and now, I had a couple I could...[Continue reading on the site]

Since then, I repaid my debt for the purchase, and the mortgage on our house.

Business is good. I branched out and now I am able to touch other markets.

I hired a few translators and my software is available in over 15 languages.

There were rough times... Months without any revenues, but I took those times to improve my software.

The thing is, my software has a tiny piece of code that no one else has.

Imagine, again with the cash register example, that the code to open the cash register was secret and only I knew it, so no one could make a replacement, not even open source.

Except that in my case, it's not such a simple operation.

It's a complex algorithm that I took years, at my previous company, to build and that so far, no one seems to have taken the time to recreate.

I do have competitors, and they have their own version of the algorithm, don't get me wrong!

Except it doesn't work as fast or as precisely.

Ok, so this algorithm isn't from me. It's from an engineer that I used to work with. He used to own the patent for our industry. Personally... That's like owning the patent on cash registers!

We hired him and he built this beautiful algorithm. My job was to not only code it, but to bury it so deep it couldn't be reversed engineered.

That was my contribution. Making it obscure and unbreakable.

So far, it's working because, well, people don't realize that this is my secret.

Imagine a cash register that tallies the till and that mine were 100% accurate because I hid a camera inside the cash register and inventory the cash coming in and out.

People are trying to copy my code but never notice the camera.

That's what my code does. It does something funny, inexplicable and that's how it works.

It's my one moment of shining.

Everything I have been doing is just adding sugar on top to charge more money, but I could make a small driver that just does the algorithm and then outputs the data.

But what would I do for a living then?

I know, it's a long time but each time I sit down to write new stories, I am greeted with a blank page which paralyzes me completely.

It's not the first time, it occurred often in the past and each time, I managed to get my mojo back. I hope this time it will be sooner rather than later.

In the mean time, my website is getting older and older (it was first made in 2006!) and as time goes by, new software gets out and I have less and less capabilities to get it up: I am a software developer and not an web developer.

One of my good fans is a French-Canadian naturist web developer who helped me a lot in the past, notably when my domain name expired in April of 2013 (he is the one who first emailed me about it).

He recently set up a naturist blog of his own and asked me if he could translate to French the Catherine Reynolds stories (and perhaps more) and post them on his blog. 

He also once again offered to help me with my own site should I need help.

I am hoping this will inspire me to write new Catherine Reynolds chapters: I can't believe the last one was published over 4 years ago already!

In all cases, his site is https://jeuxnaturistes.wordpress.com/ so if you can read French, I suggest to check it over the next few days for Catherine Reynolds in French!

I make money on maintenance contracts for my old software, but also for custom modules. Once again, the hardware my software works with isn't cash registers, but it's a good analogy, so I'll keep it.

Since I managed to secure the rights to be a reseller for them, I mail a monthly check to the company that now has the rights to my software for the sales of licenses of my software. Let's call them ACME.

That is the extent of my relationship with them: they don't care about my software, they just want the money I mail them every month. They just had rules and limitations I had to respect, such as ensuring that my customers could migrate to their software but without allowing the opposite migration.

Since I am the only guy selling it and since I have limited contact, the checks I have been mailing them has been smaller and smaller.

You see, a client only needs to buy the base software once for each of his devices and he is licensed for life.

When I release new versions, they need to pay me a maintenance fee for the new version, but otherwise, the only time money will go to ACME is when they increase of the number of devices they have or when I sell to a new client.

With the recession, there are no new clients and existing clients do not increase their number of machines, causing months without any revenues for ACME from me.

Fortunately for me, that doesn't mean they can stop paying their maintenance fees or that they stop needing custom modules.

Last December, ACME flew me to their head quarters. This was the first time I met them in person and I was rather nervous.

They explained that they were running a deficit for 2012 and that my software was no longer bringing the revenues they expected and that they wanted to sell it to someone else, possibly me.

We spend 2 excruciating days negotiating a price and a payment plan, but after I remortgaged my house and borrowed money left and right, I was finally the owner of my own software, which I had begun writing over 15 years ago and which is now installed in machines around the world.

The good news is that now, I control 100% of the software, not just the code, but also how to name it, how to price it, and I get 100% of the revenues.

The bad news...[Continue reading on the site]

The reality is even more sinister: our web hosting company closed without warning anyone.

We've been paying our hosting and registration fees via a monthly automated Paypal subscription.

Our hosting company closed but they kept taking the payments from their customers, and automatically make payments to their suppliers, which is why our hosting remained active months after they closed their business.

They stopped however, renewing the domain names of their customers, including us and their phone number is disconnected. Their own domain name is expired!

Sadly, our Google ranking got a beating, but perhaps we can rise again in the future.

Carefully penning a gripping and interesting story is a lot harder. Doing so with beautiful prose and turning your story into literature is even more complex.

I wish I was a professional author with easy prose and perfect vocabulary, but I am at best an amateur writer who sometimes revise a piece of work enough times to make it elevate above the fold.

Let me give you examples of what I mean, in successive steps, to show how a story can get better.

Imagine this is a paragraph of a story, on the level I often found when searching for online stories:

The other day, i went to my best friend jude's house and could hear her in her pool, so i went to the back and saw that she was naked! OMG! She seemed surprised but told me that now her familie were nudists now and i decided to strip naked too since it seemed exciting. It was fantastic and now we swim naked in her pool.

In that first example, there are a few mistakes (notably, the i is not capitalized) and the sentences are telegraphed. The story sounds forced and childish.

Let's try to make it better:

Jude had been my best friend since kindergarten. We used to tell each other everything, but recently she became more distant. I decided to confront her at her house and could hear noise coming from the back yard. I quickly discovered Jude swimming in her pool, completely nude!

I was shocked but soon, she wrapped a towel around her naked body and joined me on their park bench. "My family spent our vacation in a naturist resort in Florida this year. That's why I am not wearing a bathing suit".

Jude and I talked and eventually I decided to give it a try. Guess what? Swimming in the water in the nude is really something special. I am not sure if I would be ready for more, but it sure opened my eyes.

Better, isn't it?

It would be possible to refine it even better, such as :

Jude had been my best friend since kindergarten. We used to tell each other everything, but recently she became more evasive, refusing notably to tell me what she did on her vacation. I decided to confront her at her house and could hear noise coming from the back yard. I decided to let myself in, and quickly discovered Jude swimming in her pool, completely nude!

I was shocked and appalled, but soon, she wrapped a towel around her fully tanned...[Continue reading