Hrm. Well, there’s knowing that you have a fetish and there’s knowing how to define that fetish; I knew I liked ‘zombie girls’ more or less since puberty. As for the fetish genre of mind control, it really only became an overarching genre encompassing all the things that pushed my buttons – vampires, parasites, Robert Palmer videos – with the growth of the WWW.

I remember encountering the Mindnumbing archive – Brian C. Ladd, right? Gosh, it was so long ago – and the perhaps hundred stories there, but until Simon bar Sinister stepped up with the EMCSA and trilby started posting his stories there, mind control was just one of several subjects that I liked. It was only around the turn of the millennium that I realized that mind control was really the erotic kernel at the heart of my many disparate sex fantasies.

Well, first off, I am bisexual. And not in a ‘experimenting in college’ sort of way; if I am seeing a man then after a while I begin to hunger for women, and if I am seeing a woman then after a while I start fantasizing about men. It’s tough on relationships, let me tell you. That said, when I write it’s almost always about the transformation of a woman. And that’s because, as a woman, I really only associate with the inside of a woman’s head.

Frustratingly I cannot remember who said this, but when asked if a certain character in one of a particular well-known author’s novels was, in fact, that author, he replied “they’re all me.”

Which is why my stories are the way they are. I’m not a sub, nor am I attracted to the idea of being mind controlled. Hell, with my imagination, hypnosis actually scares me. But when I write about women being mind controlled, I can be them – I can understand them. I understand who they were before and who they are after and that’s what gets to me.

I don’t understand men. You say you’re so simple, but you’re not. So when a man is being mind controlled, it doesn’t push my buttons because I cannot get into his head in the same way.

Mostly by leading me to write F/F stories. 🙂

How does my writing influence my sexuality? Not a lot, really. I have experimented with bondage and D/S, but while fun they weren’t more fun than straight up vanilla knockin’ boots. Mostly I use writing to get myself all revved up, and then I go indulge in some good old fashioned 1-1 sex with my partner. No watches, no collars. Don’t need ’em.

Hrm. I dunno, what do you like?

Mostly I like transformation, of a good believable character into something much less than she used to be. Even stories that are kind of hokey or poorly written can do it for me if they hit the right notes. I like fantastical elements. I read almost anything with demons, vampires, robots, mind control slugs, no matter how poor. And if it’s well-written, I like it a lot.

I like degradation, a lot, dog-on-woman sort of stuff, but I do NOT like anyone sneering at it. If there’s anyone around to see what the character goes through, that person had better already be or be on their way to being degraded themselves.

Which leaves me cold on a lot of the more common Mf stories, or even the Fd stories, because they’re about one party getting what they want and the other party licking their boot. Not for me. I want everyone licking boots and whoever is left holding the chain is an entity wholly uninterested in mocking them for it.

I also like happy endings. Certain of my correspondents tease me about it, but I don’t like it when characters die, or wind up despondent. I like the victims to be happy about their fate, gross and/or degraded as that fate may seem going in. If you read my stories, there are only a very few where the protagonists don’t wind up being happy in the end.

There are Tabico stories on the EMCSA solely because of trilby else. ‘Watering Hole‘ was so *good*, so *pure*, that I just had to give something back, no matter how second-rate. (It was, too – ‘New Tunez‘? GodWhatWasIThinking…) And then I grew from there.

I’ve had lots of influences. trilby, pretty much constantly, Iago, Sara H… It may sound arrogant but I try not to trace influences on my work. I’m a good writer, and I know it. I write what I like, the way I like, which is the way I know how and the way that appeals to me. That said, other authors – and, frequently, the outside world, or my dreams – inspire me to write something specific. ‘Rouge‘ for instance was directly caused by trilby’s ‘Hive‘ – after reading it (again and again) I just *had* to write a “women in a hive” story. It wasn’t that I was trying to emulate ‘Hive’, it’s that I was inspired by it to create something of my own.

I mentioned the outside world – I also draw some inspiration from art. I collect erotic art books; Hajime Sorayama, Shirow Masamune, Stephen Grey… and those images will percolate around and amass erotic stories around themselves like a pearl around grit. Most of them stay locked up in my head for lack of impetus to write them down, but sometimes they make it out. ‘Adaptation‘ is at least in part from some Chris Achilleous illustrations, one in particular of a giant wasp carrying a nude woman away.