How it started / How it's going

[ElectricBlue]

I really need to pass a blood alcohol test before posting here. Still haven’t lived down the “I don’t get cuck” thread.

Em

Go to LW and ask nicely. It would appear they have lots of them there. You could probably get one in pink.

 

[MrPixel]

I really need to pass a blood alcohol test before posting here. Still haven’t lived down the “I don’t get cuck” thread.

I'm sure we could arrange to have a breathalizer attached to your keyboard.

 

[AG31]

Glad I found this thread. I'm always interested to share what, so far, seems to be a unique story. Has anyone heard anything like it? Actually, I'm just going to cut and paste from the afterword to my first book, Twelve Maxbridge Street.

How I got started
I'm a 76 (now 79) year old happily married heterosexual woman with two grown children and four incredible grandchildren. My fantasy life has always centered around masochism, but I had never taken the male point of view with the exception of a short period in elementary school when I was on a Robin Hood kick. I've never attempted, nor felt the desire to act out my fantasies with other real human beings.

At my age my fantasies had gotten less frequent, understandably. But in the week before Christmas of 2020 and into the first week of 2021 my consciousness, day and night was suddenly flooded with the story you've just read. I would experience strong erotic spasms like John Faranger does. This was a dramatic first for me in regards to the intensity, the constancy and the duration of the fantasy. I refined the details until I began to entertain the idea of writing it down. I took a lot of pleasure in the pure writing aspect of it. And I still do. I tweak it from time to time and am preparing to issue a new revision as soon as I get this Afterward tidied up. So if you are inclined to re-read it, please download a new copy.

It took some time to get over the hump of writing and publishing it with absolutely no chance of being discovered, even if I suddenly died. But I did get over the hump. Learning that I could publish an ebook very easily and "sell" it for free was a big deal. (I can't afford to receive 1099s, no matter how small.)

Where I am now
Over the last 3 years I've published 11 stories. They're all records of fantasies, which have diminished in intensity and gotten farther apart. But almost all focus on the same theme of male surrender. For the 11th time I'll say that I don't anticipate writing any more stories. I began one a week or so ago, but realized that too much of it was plain old creative writing, not a recording of a fantasy, and it didn't "work." So I discarded it.

 

[Trionyx]

I'm sure we could arrange to have a breathalizer attached to your keyboard.

She claims she doesn’t use a keyboard…does most of her work on her phone. Come to think of it, that would be a great app. Breathalyzer on your smart phone to make sure you’re safe to drive. If your level is too high, it disables your ignition.

 

[Euphony]

none of my ideas would be original.

That I'd steal too heavily from too many famous, well established stories.

Beyond the truism "it's all been done before" (which is reasonably true enough but not infallible) I' use a visualization to help me when I'm getting those unsettling vibes.

Think of how undependable witness statements are.

They all experienced the exact same event yet there is often a spectrum in how they describe what happened.

Couple loud thuds in apartment 2B. Police called to investigate for foul play.

Woman in 1A is sure she heard domestic violence (she ought to know, once being a victim herself)

Man in 3C pretty sure he just heard people moving furniture around (he recently moved in so knows the sounds)

Guy in 2D pretty sure there were no noises at all (but he recently lost his job and spends a lot of time in his own head)

That's the thing. We can have very differing experiences of a common (or even shared) event b/c we bring our own backstories and/or current emotional state of affairs with us.

Those are tools we play with to make our (or character's) experiences unique and something readers won't feel is trope or derivative. Use whatever you can to influence how you characters might see/experience thing differently than the usual trope.

Readers also bring their own experiences and backstories and have a natural urge to apply them.

Throw a few ambiguous crumbs around for them to latch onto and everybody wins.

 

[EroticCupcake]

I had an idea of a girl who sells her self to do nude sushi modeling, and it goes wrong. The idea "made sense" as a stupid sexual fantasy, but it had no emotional stakes.

So I wrote some backstory. How would she get in the room? Then more backstory. I published an introduction to see if I could do this. First comments were encouraging. I started publishing more of the backstory as I wrote it. 18 months and 40k words later I got to the original idea.

By the time FMC was in the room, the story was about FMC's relationship with her roommate (sexual love) and her badass sister (platonic love) and why/how she pushes them away when they were trying to help (spoiler: they do eventually.) The audience seemed to like the mean-spirited sushi story, but by the time I got to it, it was one of my least favorite chapters.

I'm an anti-pantser, in that I want to plan everything in advance, but I realized for this genre, I'm better off having a general direction and finding characters I like, then see where they take me.

 

[MillieDynamite]

Writing started for me as therapy. It was pretty dreadful and, I'm sure, difficult to read. Eventually, my work improved, and while it was still therapy, it was readable. Some of my writing is still a type of therapy. Case in point, my crime and punishment story, Vengence Is Mine, was therapeutic to write. I have to admit, I enjoyed killing off the bastards that raped me, I mean her.

How's it going? Pretty good.

 

[AG31]

I'm an anti-pantser, in that I want to plan everything in advance, but I realized for this genre, I'm better off having a general direction and finding characters I like, then see where they take me.

Sorry, but what's an anti-pantser? Urban dictionary says it's someone who'd prefer boxers or shorts.

 

[lovecraft68]

Beyond the truism "it's all been done before" (which is reasonably true enough but not infallible) I' use a visualization to help me when I'm getting those unsettling vibes.

Think of how undependable witness statements are.

They all experienced the exact same event yet there is often a spectrum in how they describe what happened.

Couple loud thuds in apartment 2B. Police called to investigate for foul play.

Woman in 1A is sure she heard domestic violence (she ought to know, once being a victim herself)

Man in 3C pretty sure he just heard people moving furniture around (he recently moved in so knows the sounds)

Guy in 2D pretty sure there were no noises at all (but he recently lost his job and spends a lot of time in his own head)

That's the thing. We can have very differing experiences of a common (or even shared) event b/c we bring our own backstories and/or current emotional state of affairs with us.

Those are tools we play with to make our (or character's) experiences unique and something readers won't feel is trope or derivative. Use whatever you can to influence how you characters might see/experience thing differently than the usual trope.

Readers also bring their own experiences and backstories and have a natural urge to apply them.

Throw a few ambiguous crumbs around for them to latch onto and everybody wins.

Do you actually write stories here under another name?
If you do, is there a reason you don't share that name and a link?

 

[Bamagan]

Sorry, but what's an anti-pantser? Urban dictionary says it's someone who'd prefer boxers or shorts.

In context, I interpreted it to mean that they don't like to 'fly by the seat of their pants' when it comes to storytelling, preferring a more strategic approach, with every engagement pre-planned.