Callidus

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.