Behind the Scenes

Written at the tender age of seventeen or eighteen, this was the first "kinky" story I completed. This was back when most online people either chatted on BBS’s or on CompuServe and AOL was just getting on its feet. I wrote it on an Amiga 1200 with the extremely basic MEmacs text editor (it could indent and that’s about it). Since then it has been transferred through half a dozen formats as I upgraded computers, and needed to be repaired for incompatibility each time. It may still have error artifacts in places.

At the time I wrote this story I had recently discovered mannequinization fetish literature and wanted to make my own contribution to the genre. It also reflects the fascination I had at that age with the "forbidden" lingerie stores, though this store has everything, even wedding dresses. I prefer to keep my stories more or less in the realm of possibility, but that obviously can’t apply to subjects like mannequinization... can’t be done without a sci-fi or magic plot device. I ran with a sort of alchemical explanation. In lots of those sorts of statue/mannequin stories, the victim dies as a result - or at least goes into suspended animation - but that fate seemed sad to me then and still does now. It’s much better if a person is able to experience it. Living statues are always better, in my opinion.

I think my youth and inexperience at writing shows through pretty darn clearly. The plot is okay as these sorts of stories go, but the dialogue and grammar leave a lot to be desired. I once considered revamping it, George Lucas fashion, to improve it here and there, but apart from a grammatical pass I gave it some years ago I prefer to leave old stories alone. They are what they are, like a snapshot in time.

This is a fun little story, though it definitely spawned a great deal of frustration before it was finished. I think I started it sometime in the late 90s, but I never got past the first fifteen pages or so. I put it on the back burner for a long time. When I returned to it years later I found that it was written rather poorly, so I started over from scratch. Well, I was about a third of the way through when the word processor crashed and corrupted the file (MS Works, which I was using at the time, doesn’t make back-ups). Lost the whole thing. That’s discouraging, to say the least. So, I had to start it a third time, and I suppose the third time’s the charm.

It’s one of those stories where I pick a fetish or two and take it to an extreme in the hands of an obsessive captor. I wouldn’t say I have a huge fur fetish, myself, but I like the thought of it, particularly when used in bondage or in unconventional outfits. I had to adopt a sci-fi element in the form of mysterious pharmaceuticals in order to achieve the desired results. Can’t really stuff someone's every orifice full of fur and expect them to live, otherwise. Again, it has the victim character, Terra, finding some kind of happiness at the end. I feel unsatisfied otherwise. I get to like my characters and I don’t like the thought of them being miserable for the rest of their lives.

It also has the recurring theme of dropping an average girl into a totally insane situation and seeing how she reacts. I do enjoy that, though I don’t always know what’s going to happen at the outset. Usually when starting a new story I know the beginning, a few scenes in the middle, and sometimes an ending. The rest I discover as I go along. When I started Terra in Furs, all I really saw clearly was that scene where Terra’s all bundled up and strapped down in a fur cocoon in the alcove. I wasn’t sure how she’d get there or what was going to happen to her along the way.

I’d say Terra in Furs was the first story in a more mature phase of writing. By that I mean that my prior stories were basically fetish vehicles. Starting with Terra in Furs – though the theme is of course heavily fetishistic – the stories started to become a little more story-like, and more psychologically exploratory... getting inside the characters’ heads a little more .

This one’s the longest story I’d written to date. And it’s strange that it should be the longest, considering most of it occurs in one or two rooms with primarily just the two characters. It’s hard to keep a story in such a setting interesting for so long, but I did my best, for better or worse. I hadn’t intended it to be so long when I started it. But, for me, a story isn’t finished until it’s finished. I’ve heard more than once that people simply weren’t interested in reading it because it was so long. They weren’t looking for novel length sex stories, or didn’t like reading stories that long on a computer screen.

Of course, it was never meant to be a masturbation fodder style story. It’s really more of a psychological exploration, occurring from the point of view from the victim. How would someone react when placed in such a seemingly inescapable situation? How long would it take for them to break down and stop fighting? The main character goes through a lot of changes in the course of the story. I tried to describe the mental changes subtly, though, since the character herself wasn’t aware of them at the time. Just slight alterations in language and rationalization and such, until eventually she’s internalized her captor’s point of view.

I enjoyed going through the holidays and seasons from Katherine’s perspective. I like it when the mundane and commonplace is mixed with utter bizarreness. Crazy stuff goes on behind the facade of suburban homes, believe it.

I’ve been told that the ending and epilogue drags on too long, but I just wasn’t satisfied with an abrupt ending. I’d spent a very long time inside the heads of these characters and I wanted to lay out their future a little bit, to make sure they’d be content. And I like to think that readers, if they’ve gotten into the story and enjoy the characters as well, appreciate that. In 2011 I went through and fixed some grammar and typos, and rearranged the epilogue a little to hopefully make it a bit smoother. The changes aren’t really all that noticeable, though, unless you compared the versions side by side. Just little things.

I spent a couple days Googling poisons before finding notexin, the myotoxin Evelyn used to weaken her companion. I’m not sure it would work exactly as described in the story, especially when ingested, but, hey, this isn’t a scientific journal. And I’m not sure if they’ve ever made an automated enema machine. If not, they should!

Beauty in Repose seems to get the strongest visceral reaction of any of my stories. I suspect it probably has something to do with the whole "buried alive" thing. Yes? Maybe? Could be. And I suppose it gets rather emotionally intense. Unlike most of my stories, this one doesn’t exactly end more or less happily. But it couldn’t have ended any other way. It wasn’t a story that was meant to be happy.

The idea of live burial, entombment, mummification, and all that sort of thing has always captured my imagination. Being sealed up, sealed off, sealed away. I’d been wanting to do a story with that theme for a long time. Truth is, it’s one of those subjects that get written about a lot in certain circles, and I dislike writing stories that have already been written – with minor changes – a thousand times. But when you get down to it, most tales have already been retold a million times over, so in the end you just have to write whatever makes you happy. Absolute originality isn’t as important as telling a decent story that captures the imagination.

And capture the imagination this story apparently did. I think there may be four or five fan-made sequels floating around out there... some written with permission, others not so much. Other people writing sequels to your stories is a weird thing. Sure, it’s flattering, but it’s also unsettling. As a writer you get rather familiar and attached to your characters, and when someone else has them do things that you know they wouldn’t do, you get all indignant – thinking, “She would never act like that!” Of the various sequels, only one person got the personalities right.

Another problem is that people seemed to have wanted to correct my story by enacting revenge and providing a happier ending – rescuing the girl and putting the woman in her place. Makes me feel that the story as it is written must be flawed. If I had thought the story needed to end totally differently, I would have written it that way.

Anyhow, in this story both the characters are victims in their own way. The woman has been hurt too many times and that, along with loneliness, has driven her around the bend. She can’t even see honest love anymore when it’s offered to her. Ironically, she went ahead and buried a girl who might have been able to give her what she needed. At least, on the plus side, the girl doesn’t die, and the woman does truly love her... just in a rather inappropriate way.

Decades ago I had a daydream of various kidnapped slaves being forced to take on roles that were randomly assigned to them by pure chance in the form of tiles drawn from a bag or fishbowl. The resulting role might be something relatively innocuous – even fun – or it might be entirely dreadful... and it would all be decided by fate. It'd be an entirely arbitrary way of going about it, but that's what makes it amusing.

Around the start of the year, I had a little idea about making the idea into a page as a sort of a game. It started out as a plan to make an html script that would simply spit out a combination of variables. Of course, I was and remain clueless about scripting languages. Always have been, just can’t get my head around it. It tastes too mathy for me. But my future wife was able to help out, and her help throughout all of this project has been invaluable.

Although the results were entertaining, I felt there was more that needed to be said. I then wanted to add a short little blurb, or description, of the resulting role from the point of view of the Headmistress of the place. The project snowballed and I found myself faced with the prospect of writing a description for each of the possible 1000 or so combinations. Daunting? A tad. But it was my own idea and my determination for completing ridiculous projects I set myself to knows few bounds. So, about six months after it was just an inkling, the role generator was complete.

I really tried not to censor myself much while writing these blurbs... some of them are unsettling, or disturbing, or downright gross. But it’s mostly meant to be a comedy, you see, and not to be taken seriously. It was mainly a mental exercise in creativity by finding workable combinations for all the possibilities.

Of course, not every single blurb is entirely unique. That would be madness. And also unnecessary. So there was quite a bit of copying and pasting involved. After all, I wouldn’t want to rewrite the same paragraph describing a Chambermaid’s duties over and over forty times. But each blurb is personalized, even if some are only differentiated from the others by a change of uniform.

I must say, it was quite a relief to have this one completed, although now and then I have added a new set of roles or styles.

About the Stories

shh ... secrets