Uh. Fitness is the story that can most reliably get me off. Lord May I like for a number of reasons, its departure from my usual themes, the cool cyberpunkiness of it. I really like the Middle Urth setting I swiped from Iago, and enjoy all three of my stories set there. I enjoy Summit for the characters in it.

I like all my stories, really, some more than others, but they all have different things about them that I like. Cool concepts, engaging characters or setting, luscious description – they vary in how much of each. Also, sometimes I am in a Winter Flesh sort of mood, say, and at other times vampires leave me cold. So the list would vary by day or even hour.

Plus I have a terrible memory so if you mention a story I always think “oh yeah, that one, I liked that one for X”.

Yeah, that’s a good one, and I’m proud to call it mine. I wrote it, along with an unfinished piece called ‘Fake Ones’, during the first Tabico Tuesday Tidbits effort. For a few months I tried to goad myself into writing more by posting something, anything, every Tuesday on the forum we were using at the time. Sub Routine came from that effort, and a nebulous idea about a mind controlling computer program that the protagonist kept exposing herself to knowingly, although always with the thought that it was a bad idea and she wouldn’t really go all the way, though of course in the [end] she does and does so more-or-less knowing that slavery was what she wanted all along.

In fact, the original concept is still bouncing around in my head, because Sub Routine is a (very good) departure from the original story vision. It’s a good example of how a story sort of tells itself, one step at a time, and the author is in a certain sense just channeling it.

Originally Lord May was a concept piece; I had a dream wherein a woman was imprinted/painted with lines like circuitry and they turned her into an obedient robot.

Lord May was what happened when I sat down to write that idea. As I’ve protested to numerous people, I like men, and this seemed like a good story to tell from a male point of view; after all, writing from a robot’s point of view can be hot but would not have conveyed the visuals I wanted to convey.

Well, that’s it in a nutshell, really. Making up names is a non-trivial portion of initializing a story, at least for me, and although fun is sometimes a fair bit of work. Balphagor was a creation, so I thought, of my own pure brain – it *sounds* like a demon’s name, and just the right sort of demon, too.

Then, weeks later, I’m in a bookstore perusing a book on demons and ta-da, there is an entry on ‘Belphagor’ – and he’s an incubus sort of demon, to boot. It was really quite startling.

I still have no idea if it’s simple coincidence or if I had seen and then forgotten the name.

On the one hand, it’s fantastic. Iago is a great correspondent and he idolizes my work as much as I idolize his, so there’s a lot of mutual stroking going on.

On the other hand, we both suck at actually sitting down and writing things, and when he’s on I may be off and vice versa. So our dreams always outstrip our actual output, and that’s frustrating for both of us.

Oh, how did it start. Well, I had this great idea for a story set in a fantasy universe, and I wrote it; Iago had just come out with Where the Shadows Lie and it was super hot, and I realized that it hadn’t just inspired me to write a similarly themed story, but a story set in the very same universe.

So I wrote to him and asked if I could place my story in his Middle Urth, and sent the unfinished story so he could see what I was talking about. Well, he wrote back saying “oh my yes” and not only that, he’d like to add bits, and he finished the parts I hadn’t and put in whole new sectors that were smoking hot.

So In Darkness Bound became a team effort, and is still one of my favorite stories. Speaking of stories that can reliably get me off, that scene where Nerial spreads her legs for the Defiler’s iron… yow.

Of course, he wrote that part. 😉

Thrall is a wonderful person who we must unfortunately share far too much with Real Life. Were I a billionaire, she’d be in my stable of “your job is to write for me” employees. I can remember when she burst upon the scene with that Faerie story of hers, and came out with a succession of really hot mc stories with an interesting new voice behind them. Solitaire is probably one of the very best stories on the archive, and I envy envy envy how she could pack so much hotness into such a short space.

Anyhow, she had a mental image of a person with an open mouth covered in spiderwebs (it’s a lot hotter when she describes it), and was interested in a collaboration, so we came up with Arachnae. Similarly, she wanted to write a story about a slave who, in the course of a rescue, adamantly does not want to be rescued and turns the tables on her putative saviors – hence Salvation.

Working with Thrall was, like working with Iago, fun and easy and something I’d do again in a moment. In both cases we plotted out and then divided up sections to write, but then I subsequently felt free to edit the other person’s work as though it were my own and vice versa, secure in the knowledge that his/her edits would only improve my work.

I keep trying to entice trilby into a collaboration, but events have conspired against me so far.

Hell, I can’t remember. I had this student copy of photoshop, see, and a supply of pornography that would blow your eyes clean out of their sockets. And back in the day I created a fair number of graphics for web pages, so the idea of whiting out a pornstress’ eyes didn’t intimidate me.

As for the quality, it’s just because I’m a perfectionist. I’ve spent hours getting a pair of white reflections just right.

Both. I squirrel away pornography that seems to have MC potential, generally on account of the model’s expression. Then, on those rare days when I think to myself “the kid’s in bed, I’m feeling creative, I’m also feeling horny, but I don’t want to write” I’ll poke through the folder and do some ‘shopping.

On the other hand, I am a comic book reader, so I have a predilection for stories that take more than one panel. So when I have made the decision to produce some ‘manips, I often lean towards images that make a coherent sequence.

Why, I am working on one of those right now, as a matter of fact.

Pure trial and error. The World Wide Web came along, I’m Gen-X, I wanted a home page that looked cool. So I took my own photographs and started in on them with Photoshop to turn them into web graphics.

Never took a graphics class in my life; trial, error, and google are my friends.

Heh. More of the same, I suspect. I have a number of unfinished stories which I would like to complete. More than you know, honestly, at the time I’m writing this I have a nice ponygirl story that’s on part two, a sci-fi story that’s on part three, a cave monsters story that’s pushing finished, there’s ‘Riders’ part two with ten thousand words written, I have to wrap up the second part of ‘Synthetic’, there’s ‘To Bring Them All’ whose next part is half done, a sequel to ‘Winter Flesh’ that’s a couple of thousand words in, the completion of ‘Induction’…

There are probably a hundred thousand words of unfinished stories on my hard drive. And that’s just the smut. Basically, I write slower than I think, so I accumulate stories that never quite reach their climax outside of my head. I think we are all fortunate there’s as much out there of my work as there is. 🙂

One thing I would like to do is to write some short stories. Really short. I’m thinking here of ‘Solitaire’, so hot, so perfectly compact.

But we’ll see.