Any vagaries in your collection?

[yowser]

A bit ago the TLS did a piece on vagaries, the odd one out in an author’s corpus. Most of us have our favorite themes, characters, or settings that are comfortable and allow us to spin out our tales. But do you have an exception lurking in the weeds somewhere?

Here’s what DJ Taylor said:

What is the writer's vagary? It is the solitary book in a well-known novelist's oeuvre that deviates from a well-trodden path, the uncharacteristic or in some cases over-characteristic book, the exception that proves the rule, the occasion on which the talent in question takes it into their head to venture out on a limb. The master of drawing-room comedies who decides to write a three-act tragedy; the historical novelist who produces a book set in a psychiatric hospital in which all the characters are represented by letters of the Greek alphabet – it is in this questionable and hitherto untilled soil that the writer's vagary takes root and burgeons.

Do you have one story that stands out from the others? What helped create it? Did you suddenly lurch into new territory? Deliberately attempt something new? Any nudges or external factors? Most importantly, did you learn anything?

Please share.

 

[BiscuitHammer]

My odd story out at this point is The Great Khan. It's a historical and war drama. It's incredibly grisly and violent, with few touches of my signature humour and next to no romance whatsoever.

Lots of battles, blood, gore, murder, rage, and rape, tho.

Hey, it's 11th century Mongolia. I really enjoy writing it (and I need to get back to it), but it's my story unlike any others I publish.

 

[lovecraft68]

Most like its "That's What Friend's Are For" which is a first time romance that could unfortunately be described as sweet-at least as sweet as a story featuring graphic sex can be

Its not my only romance, I have two others, but both are in mature and both had some conflict and at times depressing content.

This one had conflict, but the characters didn't have any type of trauma or dark experiences, it was a straight up mostly light hearted coming of age story.

Ironically, this story is far and away my most successful, like 24k votes 4470 favs successful

Maybe I should try making that type of story the norm.

 

[Voboy]

I did an incest story once, partly out of curiosity and partly because I have a character for whom that kind of encounter would be a natural progression. But I didn't enjoy writing it very much, and I'm not planning on a repeat.

I did do one other incest story, involving pegging, but I only wrote it to exorcise a scene I couldn't get out of my head. It's not going to be published. It's a bit graphic for Lit, frankly.

So... yeah. Incest stories are vagaries for me.

https://literotica.com/s/natalie-fills-in

 

[oggbashan]

Several:

Breathless Stargazing

Getting Nude with Chairman Mao

Donna

The Wost Chain Story Ever Ch. 01

and pastiches of other authors.

 

[SimonDoom]

I have several odd-ball stories, but if I had to pick one I guess I'd pick "BTB, Incorporated," which was my first foray into the jungle of Loving Wives. It's a combo Mickey Spillane spoof/cheating wife/cuckold story. It drew some spectacularly vulgar comments, most of which Laurel deleted, without any prompting by me. The most memorable comment I can recall receiving was "Here, eat my condom."

Link to the story: https://literotica.com/s/btb-incorporated

 

[NC_Coastal]

I was writing on Fet a few years ago and entered a fairy tale contest. The result was a recreated "true" story of Snow White.
Last year, out of boredom, I wrote a Beauty and the Beast story that I assumed would be rejected. It was published in like two days and ended up being something of a hit.
You just never know.

 

[windar]

I would honestly say that all my stories are vagaries....they really run the gamut-historical epics, crime, post-apocalyptic sagas, political and social satire, humor. All have varying degrees of strong content.

Probably the one most out of character would be the only story I wrote specifically for Literotica- "Dear Steve: I Just Fucked Your Wife". Stories about cheating wives are something in which I really have very little interest, and I did it only because people promised I would get some really horrible comments. The comments were actually pretty mundane and quite a few were even positive. Very disappointing...

The only thing which would be more of a vagary for me would be a mother/son incest story and that is NOT going to happen. Nope. Not for a million bucks (well OK, maybe for that much..)

 

[JGittes]

Several:

Breathless Stargazing

Getting Nude with Chairman Mao

Donna

The Wost Chain Story Ever Ch. 01

and pastiches of other authors.

Unfortunately, I haven't read your story, but the reality of Getting Nude with Chairman Mao wouldn't have passed the underage ban here.

 

[MrPixel]

I have no outliers, per se. I tend to write around a core centered around a swinging husband and wife, sometimes drawn from long-ago personal experience. I don't "feel" other topics, so don't write about them. SF, I/T, Gay and Horror are totally lost on me, for instance.

The one piece I wrote strictly as an exercise was an intentional attempt to poke the LW bear to see for myself the vitriol associated with that category, so I guess it can count as being outside my comfort zone.

 

[windar]

Unfortunately, I haven't read your story, but the reality of Getting Nude with Chairman Mao wouldn't have passed the underage ban here.

Maybe it was group sex with The Gang of Four...talk about a Great Leap Forward...

 

[Voboy]

Oh! Shit! I completely forgot about another one: a werewolf story I wrote from the viewpoint of a dog.

That one was weird.

https://literotica.com/s/unnatural-selection

 

[gordo12]

I have a few, but the outlier one was Fido. The entire story was written from the viewpoint of the dog. I was scared to publish it, I thought it was so far out there, but prereaders said hell ya. It turned out they were right.

Over and over, it's been called Hilarious!

 

[TxRad]

About as far away from my norm would be, hermaphrodite.

Something I had to try and make believable not knowing much about the subject and not having much in the way of information available anywhere.

Oh yeah, and there was, So Smart.

I had to try and make people feel sorry for a computer.

 

[oggbashan]

Unfortunately, I haven't read your story, but the reality of Getting Nude with Chairman Mao wouldn't have passed the underage ban here.

It was an adult couple reading Chairman Mao for sexual ideas...

 

[oggbashan]

Oh! Shit! I completely forgot about another one: a werewolf story I wrote from the viewpoint of a dog.

That one was weird.

And I forgot White Scut - the coupling of a rabbit and a vixen...

 

[Bramblethorn]

I try to do something different with almost every story I write here, though of course there will also be points of similarity. "The Floggings Will Continue..." or "Red Callum, Sweet Cate" might be the most distinct.

Most of what I write here is reasonably gentle female-narrated F-F content with a contemporary setting, often in Australia. Usually my characters at least try to be respectful to one another.

RCSC: setting ambiguous but maybe 18th-century English town? Het, body horror. I was in a bad mood when I wrote this one. Also it's in verse.

TFWC: male narrator, fair bit of M-F, and a lot nastier than my usual due to a somewhat sociopathic force of nature.

 

[NotWise]

I don't usually post to a thread to say "no," but that's what I'm doing.

None of my stories stand far apart from the rest. Regardless of the category: they're all written in some variation of my authorial voice, they're all (but one) erotic, they nearly all end with HFN or (sometimes) HEA. If I have success with one variation, then I usually follow it up with a similar story, so nothing is unique.

My stories have more common features than differences.

 

[JuanSeiszFitzHall]

Because the OP’s pitch ended with “Please share,” I’ll make an effort. It gives me an excuse to plug a story.

Most of what I post on Lit can be categorized as either ‘love-is-love propaganda,’ ‘sex for the rest of us,’ or both. I’m not sure either applies to this one:

https://literotica.com/s/afterlife-or-little-death

It’s too short for me to say anything about it, apart from that it’s really loopy.

 

[Rustyoznail]

The only story that's a bit out of the ordinary is Festival of the lost.

I had an idea to write a story based on the video game "Destiny" and only using the dialogue one minor character speaks in that game. It was a fun little challenge.

 

[YDB95]

I guess After the Opera and After the Party at Christmas are an anomaly in such that I'm not big into BDSM (and evidently my readers agree that I'm not, since neither one scored very well), but they do both have various hallmarks of my style that still mark them as unmistakably my work.

Both, by the way, are based on a wonderful part-time job I had at a library in grad school and the women I worked with there. So they were a real labor of love, and probably the reason why I went ahead and wrote a sequel when the first one didn't do very well.

 

[TadOverdon]

Not really. I've written one short sex story - about 5,000 words - and thought it would be the first of many. But nothing else like that has come to me. All the other stories are book-length.

 

[gunhilltrain]

I have one story in Non-erotic, http://https://classic.literotica.com/s/the-bridge-at-newark-bay. It is about a New Jersey train wreck in 1958 in which part of a train went through an open drawbridge and plunged into Newark Bay.

https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/tragic-train-accident-new-jersey-1958-article-1.2360153

It is told from the point of view of one of the passengers. He is loosely based on the man in this one sentence in the news article. "At least one passenger, F.H. Douglas, of Rumson, N.J., senior partner in a New York stock specialist firm, was recovered alive from the bay, but died on arrival at Bayonne General Hospital." I changed his name of course and made up the other details about him.

The story got a better reception than I had expected.

 

[yowser]

Interesting examples. Part of my query was an attempt to discover different approaches to written creativity. Authors here have talked about how ideas, or images, or scenarios pop into their heads, and then the process of putting them together into a story.

The vagaries might be different.

In my own case, my interests are fairly broad (lots of categories, although when I skim the ‘fetish’ section here I think maybe not so much). My one outlier came when reading some Hindu mythology, which involved ancient demons, Rakshasas, and somehow they inserted themselves, virus-like, into my brain and a story emerged. I am highly unlikely to publish in ‘non-human’ again, but the story allowed me to explore arenas previously untouched.

Rough sex. Without mediation of human doubts, hesitations, mental contortions, all new territory.

Writing it all out, making a story out of the initial images, was a challenge, and nudged me into a different style. It is not always easy, or possible, to identify a launch-point, here it was clear.

 

[Wifetheif]

I wrote a historical fiction erotica story that grew out of one of my nonfiction works. It was nice finding another place to use all that research. It was set in Shanghai in 1913 when control of the city was basically a few spheres of influence and the respective government, mostly British had tacit agreements under the table to let local warlords and gang leaders run the rest of the city. So long as things stayed quiet, the Brits, the Americans, and the French did nothing. Some of the best whorehouses in the world were in Shanghai in 1913 with every sort of woman imaginable -- including lots of western women who could make more in China and have better clients than they could in Paris. Then came the war and the Japanese invasion ... and Mao!