Last year around this time I posted a journal acting as a look back on the stories I'd written and shared online, the first ones I'd done under the name "Viscosisaurus". I figured it would be an interesting way to recap the year and allow me to share some thoughts on the stories I'd posted and how I perceived their reception. By this I mean SoFurry exclusively because I do not post my work anywhere else other than this very website. I'd like to do that again for this year.

The kicker however is that SoFurry went offline over the summer... and is still offline as of this post (estimated relaunch is mid-January 2026). SoFurry actually had a beta version of a complete site revamp already in the works (sofurrybeta.com), but when they had to migrate the site it wasn't ready yet. I bring that up because SoFurry was the only metric I had available to me to measure how "well" a story was received. Without that information a lot of this will just be a shot in the dark. But really, it's not a numbers game for me anyways; I mostly just like the actual feedback/response to the things I share.

In the Valley of the Drums

Up to this point everything I've shared has been one-off stories that are open and shut by the end of the tale. In the Valley of the Drums is unique because it's the first story that was spread out across multiple parts (three, in this case). Earlier this year I received some gift art of Viscosisaurus lunging toward the viewer in a setting that looked like a chemical factory. I mentioned in the liner notes of the first chapter of Drums that I have this uncanny "gift" of being able to visualize entire stories just from looking at things that catch my interest. The gift commission had that effect on me and I cultivated this entire story over the course of a couple of days on that initial idea.

The monster in Drums is technically not Viscosisaurus but he's a very close analogue since the character in the art that inspired it was meant to be me. He also doesn't have a name and is only ever addressed as a monster or creature in the context of the story, and on this website's Rolodex he's listed as "The Entity". I feel like out of what I'd posted thus far that Drums was my best work; its third chapter went up shortly before SoFurry went down for maintenance meaning it's one of the only ones that I was able to see how "well" it did. I do not know if the new SoFurry will have the readership charts that the original did, but chapters two and three of Drums both reached the #2 spot for the days they were released. In the chronology of everything I've posted thus far, this makes them the most well-received stories I've shared.

Saving Grace

At the end of 2024's year in review I mentioned I had an idea for a story with "light transformation" elements that the protagonist slowly starts to accept. This is that story. It's actually another pretty old work as the earliest I can date it to puts it in the early to late 2000's and it's based on something I co-authored with someone who, like me, departed from the furry community some time ago. I doubled back and retooled the story using the parts I'd written, though in the notes I expressed some reservations about this one because it's "another horse story" and I acknowledged that I might be unintentionally cornering myself with a certain kind of content that doesn't necessarily reflect the scope of what I want to do. I guess the best way I can explain it is that a pretty generous swath of my older work is off limits because I'm adamant about not wanting to just re-post things that were completed and shared in my previous time with the fandom. I feel sticking my old pen name on something would come with expectations or something that I'd feel obligated to live up to, I can't really explain it. I mostly just came back to share things "no strings attached". Because of this, I feel like the only stuff I can properly revisit are things that were not publicly shared to start with.

That aside, going by the readership numbers from SoFurry this one actually turned out to be a slow burn. It did not make much of a dent on the pages that tracked popular uploads but it received a steady flow of readers. Despite there being five other stories posted before this one (all of 2024's submissions and the first chapter of Drums), Saving Grace wound up being my first submission as Viscosisaurus to reach 1,000 total views.

Her Name was Moiwahine

This is the first story to go up exclusively on this website instead of SoFurry as this one was completed after it went down for server migration. This story was originally written in the period spanning when I'd left the fandom but before I returned as Viscosisaurus and it served as something of a personal test to come up with an idea for a human X orca story that didn't rely on the "trainer at the marine park gets lucky with Shamu" trope. Even though at the end of the day this is just pornography I wanted to do something that I felt was unique, so I put together this base idea of being able to "communicate" with another being by way of very low level telepathy. The two characters in the story do not speak the same language, even in their thoughts, so instead they have to rely purely on how they interpret the emotional state they feel from one another.

I'm probably inadvertently building this up into something more than it honestly is, but I do think it was an interesting idea and I wanted to polish up the story I'd finished years prior and share it more widely. This is another story idea that was mentioned briefly in 2024's year end journal. I've yet to see how well it's received on SoFurry (this and the other stories posted during the migration will trickle onto the site when it relaunches), but I do believe out of the queued ones yet to go up this stands the best chance of being the stand out submission.

Shades of Purple

This one's a rather deep cut as it was plucked from my Fanfiction.net era which is something from 20+ years ago. It's a fanfic based in the world of Spyro the Dragon and at the time this was written the only games in the series were the original trilogy on the PlayStation. However, for this rewrite I folded in a little bit of the expanded lore from the other games that have released in the years following to make Roune, the original character I'd made for the story, stand out better as a "rare" type of dragon. The gist is Roune is a female hermaphrodite which in "the world of dragons" is a very rare occurrence and her unique condition resulted in a string of difficult relationships. Naturally, Spyro is the one who is able to look past that and they fall in love, blah blah blah. The revised version of this story changes Roune to also be a purple dragon because the later Spyro games established that purple dragons (who can wield every elemental power) are extremely rare; this compounded with the already established "herms are also rare" lore in the fanfic paints her as a truly one of a kind dragon. (The name of the story was also changed to key in on the purple thing.)

This is the first fanfic I've shared as Viscosisaurus, so it's "notable" for that I suppose. However, fanfiction is generally not something I focus on except for in uncommon cases. I just felt that similar to Her Name was Moiwahine this story had a unique idea behind it - enhanced by the addition of the purple trait that didn't exist in the canon upon original publication - and because of that it was worth pursuing a second time. Since I have no barometer for how previous fanfics have done I really don't know what to expect with this one, but if it goes well with readers I might try to carve out a place for fanfics among my projects. We'll see.

It's For People, Too!

2025's last story, and it's based on a dumb inside joke my friends and I have had for at least 15 or more years. The short of it is that there's a brand of shampoo (that I'm abstaining from naming on this website to avoid potentially poisoning search engine results) initially formulated for washing the hair (mane, tail, etc) of show horses, however the people who tend to those horses collectively tried it on their own hair and told the company that their shampoo works great on human hair too. Because of this the bottles were redesigned to include this blurb and it's sold in both the animal and normal sections of hair care products. "It's for people too", in other words.

But what if when you used the horse shampoo it just turned you into a horse instead? You know, because it was meant for horses, not people. That's really it. So my clique and I would joke about it here and there and the gag persisted all this time. I'm certain we're not the only ones who've thought of it and if you look hard enough you'll probably find a story very similar to this one out there somewhere but I wanted to give my friends a wink and nod by turning our inside joke into a humorous short story about a guy who buys his girlfriend the wrong shampoo. This story has the interesting humor angle going for it, so it too is kind of a wildcard when it comes to finding out which of these backlogged stories will best the others when they eventually go up on SoFurry

Viscosisaurus: The Artist

An unexpected turn of events happened this year, I started doing digital art. I inherited a tablet from a friend who was downsizing his workstation and around the beginning of March or so I decided to set it all up and figure out how it worked. I actually do not have any of the programs commonly associated with digital art like Photoshop, GIMP, or CorelDraw. What I do have, however, is Flash. Yes, Flash; the thing that was end-of-life'd in 2020 that once upon a time people made cartoons on NewGrounds with. I had a lifetime license to the program dating back to when I'd initially purchased it decades ago when I did web development work semi-professionally and it's always just sort of been an "everything" program for basic image editing and art. It's not ideal, but it works and it's the only program I really have any meaningful experience with.

I'm no stranger to creating art, though usually I would sketch on paper with assorted media. Digital art was a new frontier for me but as it turns out by having surrounded myself with artists for the better part of almost 30 years I kind of learned through osmosis a lot of the best practices and standards for creating digital art. I already knew about tricks like separating lines and colors to layers and how to generate custom color palettes on the fly to maintain consistency with the eyedropper tool. Honestly, I kind of impressed myself with how quickly I adapted to the medium. I think the fact that the tablet itself has a screen on it helps tremendously because the one time I tried to use a tablet a long time ago I couldn't wrap my head around the disconnect of scratching a pen around on a touchpad while looking elsewhere at the computer screen; the tablet I have is very akin to just drawing on paper... without the paper. My old man brain understands that much better.

It's fun to be able to bring characters to life, even if my reliance on the archaic and cumbersome Flash program means that finished drawings take multiple tens of hours to make. Personally, I feel like the end result adds a certain kind of old school charm that you don't really see anymore. My finished drawings all have that very distinct "default Flash paintbrush shape" look to them with very vibrant cel-style shading since gradients are rather limited. It's definitely a look that I appreciate because it looks like it was drawn 20 years ago, yet the signature on the art says it was made this year.

I've been drawing a mixture of fanart of characters I like, characters my friends like, and characters that belong to my friends. I completed 10 drawings this year. Of those, 5 are fanart of game/cartoon characters, 2 are characters that belong to friends, and 3 are characters from my stories. A few of them also have variants as well, though those are "easy" to do once the base picture is done. There are certain characters and themes I'm noticeably better at than others; I feel like I picked up on latex and vinyl pretty quickly but slime is something I still need work on. I've also been somewhat reliant on referencing other pictures and artwork (especially for characters belonging to friends) and my skill has a lot of variance there as well.

Out of all the drawings I finished this year I think my personal favorite has to either be Fifi or Cassie, though after finishing these pieces I started getting a little self-conscious because these are characters from media aimed at kids. Obviously anyone who knows either of these characters is almost certainly old enough to view this website several times over, but I guess my apprehension is just over contributing to the kind of shit that's rotting the internet. Even though both pieces are "tasteful" pin-up style art (which is what I feel most comfortable doing and is the kind of early era furry art that I liked the most) I guess I'm just trying to be cognizant of the fact that these drawings might escape the confines of this website and reach places and situations that I disagree with. Within the confines of this website I'm someone in the back half of his life drawing fanart of characters people crushed on three decades ago, but the other side of that coin is someone who isn't supposed to be here doing the "im 12 and what is this" routine. I don't know, it's an issue that I'll just have to sort out on my own time.

Goals for 2026

Looking ahead to next year, I'd like to first double back to this section from last year's journal to see which of the ideas I shared that I actually completed. The "Pokemon breeder" fanfic that I mentioned is something that I've actually worked on, two and a half chapters out of about four or five total by my estimate, though everything I have is a "first draft" that I haven't finished or posted because I've been hesitant to start uploading stories in progress while SoFurry is offline as catching up with queued chapters would be tricky to do as dumping all of them at once undercuts the entire purpose of making chapters in the first place. The "ovipositor" story similar to The Stacks is still a work-in-progress and is about 50% of the way done, but still incomplete. The "light transformation" story turned out to be Saving Grace and was completed. The "toxic waste dump" idea was the entirety of In the Valey of the Drums and was also completed. The fifth one mentioned as a human X orca story was Her Name was Moiwahine and, like the others, was also finished.

So two out of the five story ideas I shared last year weren't finished this year. In their place however I posted Shades of Purple and It's for People Too, and the two missing stories did get some amount of work done on them. SoFurry being taken offline for migration was an unexpected twist and that definitely had an impact on the amount of work I finished and shared. Similarly, me getting and setting up that drawing tablet also significantly changed my workflow as I never really accounted for also doing proper furry art in any meaningful capacity, yet here I am.

For 2026, I'd like to finish the two stories mentioned last year that didn't get done this year of course. I also have another three chapter story that has been hinted about on this website (art of the protagonist is on the Artwork page and the story's characters are in the Rolodex) that wasn't part of 2024's year in review. I'd like to share it when SoFurry is back online. I have another transformation story I'd like to finish involving a dolphin character that has NSFW elements but no actual sex scenes in it, it's more of an exploratory work. There is also this work-in-progress called Greyscale adapted from a failed multi-chapter story I was never able to get off the ground in the 2010's; I am working on an extended first chapter that includes more world building than what's probably necessary just in case the series doesn't continue, I'd like the first chapter to at least be able to stand on its own if it turns out I don't pursue it.

I also have a couple of stories I'd like to write that are "novelizations" of works done by friends of mine over the years. I don't want to name-drop anyone here and put them on the spot but throughout 2026 I'd like to reconnect with some folks about taking their artwork or animations and elaborating them into entire stories. Same goes with digital art, I don't really have any plans for who or what to draw next and I mostly just keep that open to requests from close personal friends (their characters, or fanart of existing characters we both like).

I ended last year's recap by mentioning that I lurked a couple of Discord servers and that I was "available" in there if you pinged me, however as this year has gone on I've withdrawn from online communities. It's a poor experience overall and it's not really something that I see any value in engaging with as I feel like I genuinely do not "fit in" anywhere. I am very much from a far different generation of person than today's furry fandom and I don't really have the patience to deal with how wound up everyone seems to be these days. I'm still in the SoFurry Discord, and that's it, but I don't really actively participate in it. But if you're in there yourself and would like to get a hold of me I guess you still can @ me and I'll get back to you. I'm mostly just looking forward to SoFurry itself being back online so I can resume posting my writing.

See you in 2026!