Hi all!
Just checking in with the briefest of notes to let you all know I’ve just posted a new photo story to the Gallery!
A very short and sweet job this time. Fun black-and-white photo and a spicy bit of prose to go with it. A very fun (and unexpected) diversion for me this evening and I hope you as well!
See you next time!
So, this post has been something I’ve been working up to. Firstly, I want to thank everyone who commented and encouraged me to chime in with some news and, especially, those who reached out via email to check in on me or just to wish me well. That was exceptionally thoughtful of you and I deeply appreciate all of the interest.
So, for those who have asked, I’m doing well. I realize its been over six months since my last post but stuff got busy and then stuff got a tad pandemic and then… well you get the idea. The bottom line is that I just haven’t felt all that creative these past few months. So, I checked in on the site every now and then but being here was a reminder of what I wasn’t doing (creating) and it became a depressing kind of thing for me.
But, lately, I’ve been chatting with friends and stuff and ideas have started to simmer in my mind once again. In fact, just last night, I wrote an outline for a project that I’ve had in the back of my mind for years. A follow up to Decisive Results. I’ve had a video clip forever and a day that I always knew would be golden for a similar kind of story but I just never had a flash of inspiration as to what that story would be… until about a week ago.
Suddenly, the floodgates opened and I began to see where I could take things. So, last night I took all the ideas I’d been playing with and jotted down some notes. Its the earliest of early stages, but I’m excited by the prospect of revisiting those characters and that world again.
So that’s it, I just wanted to check in and let you, dear reader, know what’s been going on. I hope you and yours are safe and healthy.
All the best.
-Callidus
Welcome back true believers!
This is a day I’ve really been looking forward to. After 20 episodes of the The Black Room podcast, today, Madam Kistulot and I get to devote an entire episode to one of our favorite artists and her brilliant art.
Possibly the most talented 3D artist in the erotic mind control scene, Uzobono has distinguished herself not just with her mastery of Poser but also with her keen sense of visual storytelling. Her 3D comics feature a depth of narrative and sophistication of aesthetic that remains in a class of its own.
In The Black Room #21, we spend over an hour listening to this master-of-her-medium talk about her influences, her background and her incomparable work. Madam Kistulot and I are very pleased to bring you our interview with 3D artist and writer extraordinaire: Uzobono!
Welcome back true believers!
I’m preparing another post to update you on Pleasure Professionals (short version: its coming along nicely), but right now I have a brand new animation to share! Today’s addition to the gallery is called Positive Protocol and I do hope you go enjoy it before you read on for my director’s commentary!
This little gem comes to us by way of bdsmlr. I loved the source image the instant I stumbled across it. The sensuous quality of the photo, the lighting and the profound suitability for twisting into one of my manipulations put this picture somewhere in the top-ten-photo-finds of my manipping career. I live to come across jewels like this one.
The manipulation was very straightforward all things considered. Just a touch of photoshop to get the seated woman facing the screen, instead of the camera. And, again, to get her cuffed to her chair rather than simply holding on. Then, it was down to creating some content to fill this enormous window that would soon become an insidious mind control screen.
When I sat down to write the story, the only idea I had going in was that the caption would start and end with the same line of dialog and that it would, somehow, be very ironic as a result. A few paragraphs in, I had the idea that this very complimentary approach The Director was taking with her subject was just another level of mind fuck. One that she’d repeat with the woman in the chamber down the hall in the closing line. It was a fun idea and it, like the image, really come together quite quickly. At least by my current standards 😉
I think, there’s an undercurrent of gaslighting and love bombing that runs through a lot of erotic mind control fiction and I was certainly zeroing in on those vibes. There’s a very creepy quality to someone showing that sort of affection and encouragement within the context of this traumatic ordeal they’re subjecting someone to. I don’t think I’ve explored that area very much in my work so it was a nice departure in that regard.
And, that’s it. I do hope you enjoyed and, as always, your comments, questions and suggestions are welcome!
See you next time.
Greetings all,
It’s another week of reading and writing. LOTS of writing, but we’ll get to that in a minute.
First up, there’s new stuff you should be reading if you haven’t already. connie k posted the first part of a new story with the update two weekends ago. The synopsis for The Spiral Girl goes a little something like this:
An unscrupulous hypnotist recounts his fateful meeting with a new subject, and how his plans spiral out of control.
The promise of where the first part leaves off is really tasty. I’m so eager to see where connie takes us in part two. Which, happily enough, connie has informed me will be going up to The Archive this weekend! It will be listed as a separate story called The Spiral Boy, similar to her Four Women / Five Women story.
Be on the lookout for it this Saturday evening!
If you’re a patron of Uzobono’s then you’ve already heard the news: good and bad. The bad news is that CORE 14 isn’t going to make it into our hands until late October instead of late September as Uzo had originally hoped.
The good news, is that Uzo has released a mini comic this weekend to tide us over! Its available to her patrons as well visitors to her Deviant Art page. Its not related to the CORE/Division canon but… well I won’t spoil it. Its loads of fun particularly if you’re a gamer who’s familiar with a certain big-budget sci-fi series from a few years back.
Its terrific fun and a great consolation prize for the unfortunate news that our next taste of CORE is still about six weeks away.
*sigh*
What about the writing? Well, there’s loads of it happening. LOADS.
How much is that exactly? Well, I’m not exaggerating in the least when I tell you that I’ve had a little trouble with some repetitive stress pain in my right thumb. Before you perverts go making jokes, let me explain!
As I’ve mentioned prior, my free time is in short supply right now. Between my full time gig and sideline freelance stuff I’m clocking 60+ hours a week minimum these days. So, I’ve been writing whenever and wherever I can spare the time.
Since that’s not always in front of a computer, I’ve been writing on my phone. I’ve got the mobile version of Scrivener (a fantastic research-organization-writing tool btw) which cloud-syncs to my laptop. So, I’ve been writing away on that during my stints of free time.
Which worked out great until I sat outside to enjoy the weather on a Friday night a couple weeks ago and wrote nearly four thousand words in one sitting. The next day, my right thumb felt like it was being held on with tape.
So, I repeated the process this past weekend except I used voice-dictation to do the writing and saved my recovering thumb for corrections only. The pain is gone now, thankfully, and the lesson has been learned.
And the good news is I also put another 3,500 words into Pleasure Professionals!
At this point, I’ve got a solid first draft of Act I that’s clocking in at around seven thousand words. I knew the story was going to be big, but even I’m surprised. This one is really living in my imagination now. Every time I sit down to work on it, the floodgates seems to open and I mostly just try to keep up.
I’m already laying down a few ideas for Act II and I’m hoping to make some big headway there later this week after my freelance work (hopefully) cools off a bit.
That’s it for now. I know its been a few weeks since I had anything new to show you but, believe me when I tell you big things are in the works.
See you next time!
Welcome back true believers!
It’s a hectic time for me. Vanilla freelance work is keeping me very busy right now. However, while I haven’t had unlimited amounts of time to dedicate to smut, I have gotten really diligent about making the most of the odd hour I can set aside here and there.
And mostly I’ve been using that to read and write.
On the reading front, I’ve been enjoying this amazing new story, that has just wrapped up this past weekend, called Kat and Mouse. The author is SoVeryFascinated and this story is his fourth on the archive. It is a successor to an earlier story called The Glass Wall, which features the same lead characters, Kat and Marisa.
I’ll tell you here what I’ve told everyone privately to sell them on reading this tale: if you’d like to know what Alfred Hitchcock would’ve done with the erotic mind control genre, this is the story for you. The suspense, the tension and the growing sense of anxiety as this tale unfolds is spectacular.
If you follow this blog, there’s a decent chance you know me and my tastes in EMC fiction. I haven’t loved anything on The Archive like I love Kat & Mouse in a while. SoVeryFascinated has already joined connie k, GigglingGoblin and a short list of other active authors whose work is an instant must read.
If you like what I like, you’ll like this story. Please let me know if you check it out, I’d love to hear your thoughts! And, please let SoVeryFascinated know as well! I’d love to see more work from him and I’m sure some encouragement from happy readers couldn’t hurt.
Moving over to writing, I’ve circled back around to the project currently known as Pleasure Professionals. I say “currently” because it will almost certainly not bear that title in its final form.
The past two weeks have been both productive and frustrating with respect to this project. As I’ve talked about previously, I’ve started and restarted this story multiple times, and each pass has been wildly different from the others.
I’ve recently come to realize what the fundamental problem has been in this process. In my initial story concept, I’d imagined a secretly submissive business executive who hired a professional pleasure service to find her a discreet dominatrix, who then goes on to mind control the business exec.
Seems straightforward enough. But maybe that was the issue? As I sat down to plot things out I just couldn’t find the drama. If the business exec is already submissive and already submitting to the domme who later brainwashes her… has the character really been changed all that much by the mind control?
Perhaps a better author than I am could have a field day with it but as I wrote draft after draft I had to stop and admit that my concept was not working. I gave myself permission to abandon my original idea and go wherever I needed to with the story.
I spoke with some author friends and did a bit of brainstorming. I wrote a new outline that had the drama I’d been missing. I wrote a treatment and started to get excited. Then, I made the mistake of digging through my pics folder and realized I had no photo assets, whatsoever, to support this new version.
Back to the drawing board.
I stared at a blank page (phone screen) for three days straight (in between massive amounts of the freelance work I mentioned at the top) trying to have an idea that would work for the photos I’d already collected and satisfy the drama quota I’d set for myself.
And then, I had an idea. Just a little spark of inspiration about the relationship between the two main characters. But that character dynamic immediately suggested a plot point. And that idea would require a certain kind of set up early in the story to pay off later. Suddenly, the flood gates opened and the ideas began pouring through.
I took an hour long break from freelance stuff and wrote a nearly three thousand word outline containing every idea I’d had in this brainstorming session. The next day, during another hour long break, I rewrote the outline. This time with an eye on structure and pacing.
Then I wrote it one more time, as a sort of question and answer exercise to map out the various plot points I would set up and pay off. Along the way, the characters have solidified in my imagination and the themes have risen out of the ideas on the page.
Last night I sat down and wrote a thousand words or so. It’s a first draft and it definitely needs refinement but I’m very pleased with it. I finally feel like I’m on a path that will lead to this project getting finished.
As for the photo work, I don’t quite know how I’m going to pull it off. But, I feel confident enough in my abilities that I can create what needs to be seen. It might not be as straightforward as I’d prefer but if I’m challenging myself with the writing, why not challenge myself with the manip work as well?
The one thing I’m not going to do is give up on this one. In fact, now I’ve really got a fire beneath me to see it finished. I think I’ll go work on it now!
See you next time.
Welcome back friends! Last time I know I teased something about having a new manip in the works. I believe I said something about having a seed of an idea and that I was gonna take another crack at writing it. Well I did that. And then I did a LOT more of it. I woke a sleeping giant trying to write this latest piece. It became one of THOSE projects. Those projects that aren’t done until they decide to be.
Anyway, it decided that its done! Read on for my (lengthy) director’s commentary but first, please go check out The Good Doctor, I do hope you like it!
So, right off the bat lets talk names. Last time, I mentioned that the seed of inspiration I was going to take into my third pass at writing was that the manip called to mind golden age Hollywood cinema. There’s a number of memorable hypnosis scenes from that classic, black & white era and, appropriately, a number of memorable hypnotists to go with them.
All of the names that appear in the manip were derived from three wonderful actors and the characters they portrayed:
The names aren’t the only thing that these formative films contributed. I was also trying to bring in a period sensibility to the characters and dialog. In my mind’s eye the “acting” is very obvious and the dialog just a bit conspicuous… as was the norm in that era.
I don’t know if that comes across as intended but that’s what I was going for. Thinking about these films and the characters in them ended up being a very big part of the inspiration for the writing. Though, it was certainly an odyssey getting there.
These past couple of weeks, working on this manip has been an interesting journey. I’d really hoped to have had three new updates in three weeks. That would’ve felt like a nice achievement. So, I picked out an image that I’d come across and manipulated months ago. I figured the “hard” work was already done, all I needed to do was write a little caption to go with it.
So, monumentally naive of me.
Hi all! As we’re rolling into the weekend, I thought I’d update you on stuff and things.
Its been a very busy week for me in freelance land. I’ve got deadlines for three different clients all hitting today and keeping on top of things has been, to put it mildly, a challenge. Fortunately, barring anything catastrophic, I seem to be finished on-time with all my outstanding projects!
Which means, I now have a little time to turn my attention to smut. Work continues on Pleasure Professionals. I’ve not written on it since last weekend but I’ve read my current draft a couple of times since and the next segment is beginning to come into focus. That’s the good news. The bad news is that I’ve had to backtrack a bit and re-write two chapters.
Things just weren’t coming together like I’d hoped. While I like the scenes as they were written, they ultimately were slowing everything else in the narrative down too much. So, I trashed them and had a think about how to tackle them again, this time keeping in mind the overall pacing of the story.
So, I’ve lost a bit of ground there but I’m just gonna have to accept that I’m going to stumble over these problems as I get more and more experience writing longer bits of fiction. Its just part of the learning process.
In other areas, I’ve been a bit more productive. As you may have noticed, I’ve posted two updates to the Gallery in the past two weeks. Now, that might not seem like much to you but its been literally years since I’ve had two updates that close together. Will there be a third this weekend (I hear you asking yourself)?
Maybe. Possibly. We’ll see (I reply).
As it turns out, I have a little animation that’s been finished for some time. The characters call to mind classic black & white films of the late 30s to early 50s. I have taken two stabs at writing it so far but neither effort yielded anything worthwhile. I’ve been thinking about the apparent setting and trying to figure out what the story is going to be.
I’ve toyed with the idea of making it a period piece. If I do that, it might be neat to adapt some of the style and sensibility of the mind control scenes of that era (Dracula’s Daughter, especially, is on my mind). So far, that’s all the ideas I’ve had for it. I’m going to take a third swing at it this weekend and see what happens.
So, no promises it will be ready by next week but I do have another morsel of mind control fun in the works. Hopefully, the next time we see each other here, I’ll have it ready to show you.
Have a great weekend everyone!
Twice in as many weeks! Have you ever seen the like?
So, yes, I’m back with another little goody for you all. My Director’s Commentary will follow but first, I do hope you enjoy Rescue!
I recently stumbled across this *lovely* source image on bdsmlr and I just HAD to put a little erotic mind control spin on it. I think one of the first stories I read that turned me on to the mind control possibilities of sodden panties was a JL themed story by Jo over on the Garden. It was certainly on my mind when I set to work crafting the animation and some words to go with it.
I did three drafts of this story and each one is markedly different. The first was, if I’m honest, just sort of going through the motions and not too great.
The second veered in a markedly different direction. I’d already written an anecdote referencing Invasion Of The Bee Girls (which is lovely btw, go check it out if you haven’t seen it). But I just kept coming back to this idea of Melissa hallucinating that there was this swarm of little bee women with strap-on stingers luring her into their hive with their sticky-sweet nectar, then injecting her with addictive girl-venom…
I really dug some of the imagery but it felt too convoluted and too disconnected from the source photo to really work. Whereas the Bee Girls anecdote was more about demonstrating the character’s predisposition towards sexualizing fearful & taboo subject matter. Anyway I’ve got it filed away for a rainy day. If I ever come across some source image that is really begging for mind control bee girls… I’m all set.
So, draft three is what ended up getting posted and I do hope you enjoyed that little bit of prose and, hopefully, you found this little bit of prose informative as well!
Thank you for reading and, as always, your comments questions, and suggestions are welcome!
Remember, last time, when I said I really wanted to get out some short little bits of manip fun in between these big releases I’ve been teasing? Turns out I wasn’t kidding. Its as much a surprise to me as anyone.
As I’ve mentioned before, I have a huge collection of smexy photos and GIFs I’ve turned up while browsing bdsmlr and, back when they weren’t lame, tumblr. For a while now, I’ve had a vague idea about collecting a bunch of them into a loose series of tales. Today, I’m releasing the first one!
I’ve always loved fiction that utilizes a voyeuristic device in its narrative. Reading emails back and forth between characters, chat logs, and the like, I find it adds a really neat quality to a story. I didn’t really plan that for this manip but as I started typing that’s just where my fingers steered me.
As much as I love doing big, involved projects with a lot of image work or a lot of writing its wonderful to take a break from that sometimes. I didn’t realize how much I missed just doing some animation work then writing a story to go with it: all in a single sitting.
Lots of fun to create. Lots of fun (I hope) to consume.
Here’s Just Joking!