Winnings: an Exegesis

[TheWritingGroup]

Part 1 of 2

I wasn't planning to write one of these for "Winnings", but @Joe_Doe_Stories requested it. I'm a sucker for anyone interested in my writing.

This is quite long. You don't have to read all this if you want to comment on the story—just hit Reply!

"Winnings" is a sequel to "Wager". In "Wager", I did a few things to make my story not just another increment in Joe's 34th Amendment (34A) universe. For one, Maureen Helfer isn't beautiful. She's middle-aged, short, fat, and has an unpretty face (snub nose, little eyes, thin lips). She's also not very fit—not unhealthy, but sedentary and soft (even for a fat person). And she has bad vision.

The other thing is … Don, her husband, is helplessly in love with her, anyway. So many 34A stories center on betrayal. Don would quite literally cut off his own hand with a nail clipper before he harmed Maureen. But … he has become impotent. And, keeping up with the theme of imperfect characters, he handles it terribly. He just freaks out and can't even talk about it, refuses medical care (which would have helped). They're both frustrated and horny as the story opens. Maureen manipulates Don into betting she won't get slave graded (which isn't hard, he enjoys bets with her and has for decades), and manipulates him into attending and watching (also not hard, he's turned on by the idea but so nervous after years of gradually worsening impotence that he can't acknowledge it). (Yes, the "hard" pun in the previous sentence was intentional.)

As I wrote in the Forum analysis of "Wager", Maureen's plan works. She's very smart, and despite pretending to fight back, Don is 100% on her side, and he's also smart and capable.

The bet was that if she got graded, they'd vacation in the South Pacific. In "Winnings" they do.

I tried to make this work stand-alone, and at least one reader thought that I did.

Don is the viewpoint character this time. I like to change things up, and I thought we should see Maureen from outside. It's the same reasons I had Luis as viewpoint for "Maria in the Tack Shop Again" after Maria starred in the first part.

The whole first 8 paragraphs or so establishes the relationship at the core of the story: it's loving and trusting, and because of the trust, they can play silly fake-adversarial games. Oh, and Maureen is ugly, just in case you didn't read "Wager".

I hope the "You're a slave now, congratulations," thing at the beginning surprised folks.

Saint Bernadette is a fictional South Pacific island. It's a not-well-disguised Tahiti. As with my US-based stories taking place mostly in two fictional US States, I don't feel like involving any real foreign countries in a 34A story. Also, it's convenient that the island is fake, because that means I don't have to get real history and customs and language perfect. I looked through the list of Catholic saints for one that didn't already have a place named after her, and sounded sort of silly to the modern ear, then selected a French one because this is an ex-French colony and now a semi-protectorate relationship of France. France really has several island possessions that are variously anything from integral parts of the Fifth Republic to basically still colonies. St. B. is in between, France manages defense and foreign policy and it is otherwise self-ruled. By treaty, St. B. citizens are EU citizens, and establishing residence in France can entitle them to French citizen status. Not much of this background gets into the story, but I like knowing this stuff.

The St. B. flag is pretty much the real-world flag of French Polynesia.

I hope the reader is surprised at Maureen's (and Don's) reaction to sudden slavery. Reen set it up, she's not surprised. Don habitually takes his lead from Maureen, if she's happy about it, he will go with it.

Yes, the irony of that is very deliberate.

I made a point of having the couple worry about their daughters, or just think about them, pretty regularly. Parents do that, even on what is essentially their second honeymoon. The kids never make it on stage and almost certainly never will, but I like how they turned out.

The transitional lounge was something I invented while writing, well after I finished the plot outline. It isn't there for plot/story reasons, it's there because otherwise the setup makes no sense to me, and I'm a science fiction fan—illogical settings annoy me!

The "no phone for you, slave" thing becomes a big plot point in the novel Pranked: Barbie (fully written, about to be submitted) and a bigger one in Owned (about 50% done with first draft). Here it's just a throwaway line.

Don first notices that Maureen is getting fitter here.

It's really as they leave the transitional lounge that Don takes over and takes charge. Normally, he's laid-back and lets Maureen run things, partly because he sincerely believes she is smarter and more capable than he is. In this situation (and on a subconscious level already aware that she set all this up), he jumps in and shows exactly how in-charge he can be. Reen never thought about walking to their hotel.

Don spends a good bit of the story stimulating Maureen sexually, as he does here with the sunscreen, but also the shower head thing in their room, on the beach, after her cage adventure, on the boat ….

I was proud of calling the neighborhood around the airport "The Atoll". Maybe it's my science background. Everyone who studies biology knows about Darwin and atolls.

We meet Anapa here. She becomes important at the end.

We also see something that matters by the end: Don is very good at ingratiating himself, befriending Ronald the desk clerk, by showing honest interest in the local culture. Notice also Ronald's line, "… Hawaii being annexed to your country." Don did—Ronald is a Polynesian nationalist who doesn't recognize (or at least refuses to acknowledge) the US annexation of Hawaii. I like deep background. The chat with Ronald about 'ahima'a is funny to me (at least) because he and Ronald are going to the same feast.

And this sends him to Teo's and involves him with Arabella and June.

Another physical weakness for Maureen, she has food allergies.

The pee in front of Don thing was from "Wager", as modulated by Joe Doe's 34A custom that slaves normally can't use regular bathroom facilities. The presence of a slave grate, cage, and chest full of slave paraphernalia are meant to imply that St. B's tourism is very much meant to attract folks who'd like to play with real slavery in a relatively safe setting.

Originally the beach outside the hotel was going to explicitly be a nude one, or at least topless (like real French beaches). Then I realized I would have Don send a picture from there to their minor children, which might run afoul of Literotica's rules about child characters. In my mind, it's topless beach, but the story never mentions it.

I always thought I'd be a plotter, the type of writer who makes a detailed outline and then just fills in the blanks to make a story. It didn't come out that way. Natalie is an example of something that just happened in writing. I never planned anything about Maureen's old college friend and roommate, she just appeared as I typed. Turns out I'm more of a pantser.

Chow mein sandwiches are something I would like to try someday, if I ever go to the South Pacific. They sound very weird to my America-trained taste. Hinano is a real Tahitian beer. I told you I wasn't disguising Tahiti very well.

Continued in Part 2.

 

[TheWritingGroup]

Part 2 of 2

This was fun for me:

I whispered, "Can you see everyone on the beach staring at you, Natalie? Seeing your slave heat, seeing you out of control? Look around you while you obey me!" I got that from reading World Turned Upside Down, where the proud billionairess Arabella is enslaved by her manipulative nephew, Royce. I was quoting dialogue from that book. I spoke quietly, in case someone else on the beach was a Joe Doe fan.

I actually got permission to use Joe as an off-screen cameo in my world. In the Annieverse, Joe Doe is a best-selling writer of romantic adventure stories. Some of them are real "as told to" stories, some are just fiction. I'd compare fictional Joe Doe to our world's Alex Haley, only he doesn't lie as much.

The German-speaking lovers show up here, and return later. They're partly just there because of how travel is. You run into some fellow tourist and have a cool conversation. Then you don't see them again, or randomly run into them on a ferry.

This is where we find out what Maureen's job is. I made her a bank VP because:

1. It's a job a Joe Doe heroine could have. Ranch owners, billionaires, high-paid consultants ….
2. My logical brain was wondering how the Helfers could afford a two-week trip to almost-Tahiti.

Dinner at Teo's was 100% discovery-written. I just knew going in that Don would do something that kept him away from the hotel for a few hours, for Maureen's offscreen adventure in a kennel.

June and Arabella are my favorite spontaneous characters. I typed them into existence with no plan at all. In another forum post, I commented that my character Liz is not a "natural slave" and would never accept that status. Ricki/Arabella kind of is. She's not in the near-parody realm of some characters who like enslavement, but she's very comfortable taking direction from Justine/June and loves playing the brat, provoking her Mistress. They are very happy.

I'm proud of implying that Justine and Ricki liked World Turned Upside Down just as much as Don, thus the temporary slave name. Joe is really popular!

And we find out that Don's a Physician Assistant. I like PAs real life, that's the only reason he has that job. I always meant him to be medical. You don't see many PAs or Nurse Practitioners in fiction, so I thought I'd let him represent.

Don, given a nap and some time to think, is aware that Maureen, the very smart person who planned this trip, would know about local slavery law. I established back in "Wager" that they will carry on pretending with each other until the whole scenario plays out. It's fun for them. It's in character for him to not mention it in front her until after the trip.

I deliberately didn't chronicle Maureen's kennel time or show her telling Don about it (although she did). I think it works, just implying what happened.

Don shops for the supplies he wants for tomorrow's public assfucking. He's actually doing this to please her, just as much as the glass-bottom boat tour. And himself, of course, but they both tend to focus on the other one, as you see in this story.

The island of Oraasi is real-ish. There's a real island, Bissago, off the coast of Guinea-Bissau. Oraasi is their word for man, and became a synonym of "slave" because of their legendary matriarchal culture. Seemed appropriate.

I did a bit of foreshadowing. I have Don say this to the reader: "… I will happily spend an hour giving her head and ask for nothing but her smile in return." Then later that same day, he actually uses her slavery to make her hold still while he spends at least an hour pleasuring her.

I hope I conveyed Arabella's mixed feelings about public performance—she's both frightened and excited by it. This is partly to be a contrast to Maureen, who is very excited by it (to her own surprise). Don is hardly even aware of the audience, he's so focused on the girls.

The "regular tourism" piece shows that even for characters in an erotic story, most days aren't adventurous and remarkable. Sometimes you just go swimming, have lunch, and then take a bus tour. The golf mention is just for me. My outline has a long section of Don playing golf with a bunch of weird characters and their slaves. In the end, none of those characters mattered, the whole thing ended up just being a distraction, and the plot is already really thin, so I didn't actually write it.

I like the Karl and Lorenz pantomime show. I'm eager to hear whether my description was adequate.

The racial mix of the performers (white and Asian) is because the locals don't generally want the tourists to think they're slaves. They encounter lots of racism. The club has to hire from other countries. As with Karl and Lorenz (and Mona), it's also a way for unrich people to afford a South Seas vacation, or to live there. Sex work (like naked dancing) pays.

Most of the dancers (including Karl and Lorenz) will "date" a tourist for the right price. Prostitution is illegal in France and its territories, but St. B. has a weird not-quite-either status and winks at non-forced sex work. Don is not oblivious to the racism. He just doesn't like discussing it, it's horrid to him.

Karl and Lorenz were wearing blue jeans and "Rote Pilze" t-shirts. Red … I didn't know what "pilze" translated to.

This is a joke/Easter Egg. The Red Mushrooms are a weird neopunk band popular in Europe, but with a US following. It's a reference to the head of an erect penis, of course. We'll see someone wearing a Red Mushrooms t-shirt in Pranked. I think it'll be my Red Apple cigarettes.

I dropped in the "buying presents" sequence to have a bit of falling action before 'ahima'a, and as a near-final bit of scene-setting. I also wanted to contrast the proud, loving parents with the sex tourists one more time. Another Easter egg. It's not a coincidence that the kids, Emily, Flora, and Genie, are named in alphabetical order. If you have the right kind of brain, you'll notice that Don and his sisters are Donald, Emily, Fiona. He's keeping a tradition with that practice. The younger Emily is annoyed at her parents for what she thinks is a joke with their names, but she hasn't noticed yet about her dad and aunts.

Here's a secret: Don's sister Emily is mentioned in Pranked.

Here's another. The club Josephine is named after the great dancer Josephine Baker.

That was a perfect day, but I can't say much about why. It was just a day with my soulmate, doing stuff to please each other. Only that.

I just quoted that to say that I'm proud of it.

I hope this works on a subconscious level: the "promenade" from the airport to the hotel and the drive from the hotel to Apatoerau ("North" in Tahitian) Beach, are the only times I give distances in miles. One starts the story, as they leave the airport. The other ends it, they go back to the airport.

Anapa was wearing a white t-shirt and pink shorts. Her hair was loose now, not tied back, and a beautiful pink hibiscus hung over her left ear. The t-shirt was tight enough to highlight her big bosom. The smile emphasized her pretty face.

Don tends to notice the appearance of mostly people he's going to fuck. You guys can tell me if that's a good stylistic thing or not.

Why does Don have to explain local slavery law to the partygoers? He doesn't. He misunderstands their specific curiosity about these two people as being confusion about the law (or the writer only realized just now that they should already know).

Of course, I can't say that the USA is totally immune to false enslavement. In fact, I'm sure we have more of it than you do."

This is another joke mostly for myself. Of course, there are more cases in the USA than on St. B. This is the only story that takes place on that made-up island, and there are no false enslavements! There are plenty of stories of false enslavement just in Texas. Look at Joe Doe's stuff!

Another one is that Urua hates missionaries, but then Anapa wants to fuck in the missionary position. (It makes sense in context, a Polynesian/French speaker wouldn't think of it by that name.)

I have a tendency to repeat bits of business from the beginning at the end of a story. Don comments both at the airport when they arrive and at 'ahima'a about how confident his own voice sounds to him.

In the ocean, she transformed into my giggly, playful girlfriend for a while. After the shower, she briefly turned back into the family logistics expert, making sure nothing was missed, nothing was left behind, and that we'd have an easy time getting through border controls and US Customs. It's fun being married to so many women.

A theme in all my fiction is that normal adult humans act differently depending on the situation. I think this is the first time one of the characters remarks on it, though.

At this time, I have no plans for the Helfers to star in more stories. One of them will cameo in a future tale, though. Now, I'm getting interested in exactly what's up with Natalie ….

What do you folks think?