Story notes and commentaries.

[BlackRonin]

I've always enjoyed author notes in anthologies and such, for much the same reason I've always enjoyed director's commentaries on DVDs; I like getting insight into where a story came from and how it came together. I've long wanted to write some commentary material on my own stories, but it seemed like a self-indulgent exercise with little demand in the first place, so I never bothered.

But then I wrote an annotated version of my recent story "Phantom" as bart of the tenth "Calling all Writers" challenge on the forum. The theme of this particularly contest was simply to put forth the best story possible, and I thought that some background on the story and its the sources I drew on for it might be a good way to present an argument for its merits and help it stand in the large field of entries. I wasn't sure if anyone would bother to read the annotations, but it was a fun exercise, so I did it anyway.

To my surprise, a few readers really did seem to enjoy hearing the commentary, and I discovered that it was a great tool to help me examine the story after the fact to see what worked well in it and what didn't. So with that in mind, I'm going back and writing up commentaries on every story I've posted on the site. I still don't know if anyone else wants to bother with this degree of detail, but what the hell.

I guess I should start from the beginning and work my way up to the present so that the list will stay in chronological order as I add new material for new stories in the future, but I'd actually rather begin with more recent work before I forget the details. Although since I think I've already said about as much on "Phantom" as can be said, we'll be skipping that one here.

***

"Two Wishes"

-There are a lot of sex stories about magical wish fulfillment, but the inspiration for "Two Wishes" was actually a children's short story, "The Fourth Wish". In that tale, a benign djinn's friendship with a human makes the creature consider what it would wish for after a lifetime of only ever considering other people's wishes. The story is pretty dull (I thought so as a kid too), but it did get me thinking about what a wish-granting creature's own desires might be.

But then I thought, if it has all this power, it must already have everything it wants...unless it was cursed to never really know its own desires! Instead it could only study the wants of other people, hoping for some kind of insight into itself. The concept was so appalling that I just had to write it.

-In addition to "The Fourth Wish", a few other stories contributed to this one: Although the djinn cab driver in Neil Gaiman's "American Gods" has no wish-granting powers, I still drew drew inspiration from that book's earthy, "everyday people" depictions of supernatural entities.

Darius' dry, withdrawn demeanor was based on, of all of things, the devil in Josef Rother and Tony Greis' "The Murderer's Mother" (the line about no longer trying to figure out why people do things is taken almost verbatim from that comic). T

he element of the enchanted husband who falls for his wife because of magic, and the ambiguity over that arrangement, is Demetrius' predicament in "A Midsummer Night's Dream".

-The story is set in Orleans, France, and an actual coffee shop near Pasteur Parc. Why Orleans? My senior year of high school I fell pathetically in love with a French girl and a few years after graduation went to visit her there in her hometown. By then she'd gotten engaged, and these days she and her husband have two incredibly beautiful children.

I still envy the both of them quite a bit, so I decided to give Luc the "ideal" life that I had once wanted (and sometimes want still). I guess in light of all that I perhaps should have made him an American living abroad, but I didn't want to start conflating the character too much with myself.

-Like "Blooded" much earlier, "Two Wishes" reflects my curiosity over how people deal with temptation. In most sex stories people give in to temptation and usually end up having a riotously good time, but I can't help but speculate about what happens to those characters after, when they have to deal with the long-term ramifications of keeping a secret. I wondered if there was any "perfect" way to escape the negative implications of both temptation and regret? The gimmick of getting two wishes (just enough to do something and then undo it) grew out of this. Hopefully the mystery around that singular number keeps people reading to the end.

-I can't help but notice that I seem to have a habit of putting male characters through FFFM scenes under unusual circumstances, having done so previously in "Ramadan", "Midsummer's Eve", and "The King in Yellow". Not really sure why that is, although I guess the appeal doesn't require all that much explanation...

"The Mummy"

-Usually a story comes to me and whatever elements are a part of it just happen to be whatever fits that idea, but occasionally I'll go out of my way to write a particular concept. In this case, I just plain wanted to write a mummy story. I had spent a few weeks watching and rewatching Universal horror films from the 30s and 40s, including "The Mummy" with Boris Karloff and its more obscure sort-of remake "The Mummy's Hand", and I became fascinated with the early horror movie conventions about ancient evil.

Most of these films are about something from the dark ages or ancient history, be it a monster or magical secret or even just a superstition, trying to invade our modern setting, like Dracula trying to buy up real estate in London. Ancient Egyptian's ideas about birth, death, and rebirth can't help but seem downright morbid these days, and felt like a nice, sinister contrast with the modern age.

-Other sources: Tua'tha somewhat mirrors the villainous Egyptian princess in Bram Stoker's "Jewel of Seven Stars" and its Hammer Films adaptation "Blood from the Mummy's Tomb". The Anne Rice book "Ramses the Damned" is actually pretty bad, but I liked her idea that the awakened mummy would be ravenous for physical indulgence after being deprived of earthly pleasures for so long, so I credit that book as a source as well. Several HP Lovecraft stories center on ancient beings trying to be reborn in new bodies, including "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" and "The Thing on the Doorstep".

-I settled on the museum setting pretty fast but shortly ran into problems. How, I wondered, does a museum procure ancient human remains? How are they shipped and handled? How are they displayed? I had never seen a real mummy, so I decided to take a research trip down to San Jose's Rosicrucian museum.

I liked the building's moody atmosphere so much that I set the story there, and the anecdote of the Usermontu mummy's mysterious arrival at the museum (more or less accurately related in the story) was so weird that I couldn't not use it. You can see the real Usermontu here. The tomb replica (which is actually a little creepy to be in) is also a real part of the museum and another thing that was just too good not to use. "Tua'tha" is the name of a Ptolemaic Egyptian woman whose sarcophagus is on display in one of the galleries.

-I'm always sensitive about how women are depicted in my stories. Initially I didn't like Anne's characterization, as it's too much like the cliche "naughty librarian" character of so many stories (repressed but just waiting for someone to say/do the right thing, etc). I ran with it because I wanted her to contrast as much as possible with Tua'tha's sociopathic self-indulgence. I would call the results mixed.

-I consider this one of my weakest stories, and in truth I didn't so much finish it as give up on it. It went through a lot of iterations, and in the original ending Anne actually does agree to trade places with the mummy. But that ending didn't work, because Anne seemed weak for going along with Tua'tha's plan so soon after being victimized. But since I had decided to base the story on a real artifact in a real museum, I had to come up with a satisfactory ending that did not mean destroying the mummy.

I went back and forth on how to end this so many times that I soon grew sick of the whole thing, and the more time I spent on the plot the less I was able to devote to character, atmosphere, and theme. I guess it's not a terrible story...but it's certainly not a very good one either.

"Man nor Beast":

-I feel like I write about werewolves a lot. I enjoy the Freudian overtones of the myth, the idea that deep down inside everyone is afraid of reverting back to an animalistic state. Werewolf stories seem like a way to try to reconcile ourselves with our own ids. As such, every werewolf story I write draws its primary inspiration from two Angela Carter stories, "The Company of Wolves" and "The Tiger's Bride", both of which I'd recommend to any writer of erotic fiction as they tread very heavily on the contest between male and female sexuality and people overcoming their inherent conflicts with their own sexual urges.

"Man nor Beast" is probably my best use of these themes, and is one of my favorites of my own stories, despite my being legitimately depressed while writing it and EVERY time I read it. The formatting error that flooded the whole thing with italics drives me fucking nuts.

-Other inspirations include Alan Moore's "Swamp Thing" story "Cursed", which provided me with the idea for the werewolf transformation being triggered by emotions, the 1935 Universal movie "Werewolf of London", in which the werewolf, like Andrea, lives in perpetual fear that his beastly alter ego will instinctively track down the woman he loves, and, above all, John Landis' modern classic "An American Werewolf in London". This story's ending and transformation scene are cribbed almost directly from the Landis film.

-I like to screw around with gender expectations as much as possible, and one of the easiest but most effective ways to do this is to just "flip" the genders of any initial character concepts. If I write a grizzled old cop into a story, I always at least consider the idea of turning the character into a woman rather than the typical male detective. When writing "Man nor Beast", I found I was bored with the idea of a lonely, insular man with a crush on a stripper, so halfway through my first draft "Andre" became "Andrea", and all of a sudden the dynamic was that much more interesting.

I liked the idea that the werewolf is an expression of her repressed desires and conflicted feelings about her sexuality; when she doesn't get what she wants, another side of her comes out and tries to take it. Her desire to "possess" the object of her affection takes on horrifying implications when viewed through the lense of the monster's instincts. As such, another unlikely source of inspiration became Mark Millar's depiction of the Hulk in his first "Ultimates" series. The, um, "colorful" language that Miller put into the classic monster superhero's mouth annoyed some fans, but if you ask me it was downright brilliant.

-Unless otherwise noted, all of my stories are set in San Francisco, but this was the first time I tried to use the specific character of the city (like its famously temperamental weather) in a story.

The strip club Andrea frequents is the Gold Club (a place where I did some rather extensive, um, "research" for a few weeks...), set just on the border between the city's upscale Financial District and the oddball SoMa neighborhood. SoMa was a skid row of drug use and seedy sexy clubs and leather bars a few decades ago, but since then has been gentrified into an extension of the downtown area. It seemed like a good metaphor Andrea's superego, a neighborhood that has been "tamed" and shaped into something else.

Andrea's apartment is in the Mission, a neighborhood in the process of gentrification, transitioning from the city's Latino cultural hub into a haven for hipsters, young artists, and invading yuppies. A neighborhood in flux felt like the ideal place for the character to hold up.

The finale takes place in the Tenderloin, a slum that has defied all attempts to reform it for decades now, remaining a haven of poverty, drug abuse, and exploitative prostitution, the ideal place for the character's nadir. The club she wanders into is the infamous Mitchell Brothers Theater, once a counter-culture hotspot frequented by the likes of Hunter S. Thompson and the place where the lapdance was invented but which now serves just as a particularly dingy, depressing brothel. The venue is directly across the street from the offices I was working in at the time, and I walked under their "Where the Wild Girls Are" marquis five days a week.

-Leila's stage name means "night beauty" (or something to that effect), which is admittedly a little strange given that she works the day shift. Originally the character's name was different but, by a staggering coincidence, I met and made good friends with a woman who dances under the character's original moniker, forcing me to change it. I still prefer the old name, but what are you gonna do? I was a bit disappointed that the character comes off as shallow, as I've become sensitive about how I depict sex workers and erotic entertainers in my stories lately. Can't win 'em all, I guess.

[BlackRonin]

"Festival"

-I love writing, but I'll be the first to tell you that it's incredibly hard. In fact, it's a pain in the ass. Only every now and then do I work on a story that I consider fun to write, but "Festival" was one of those stories. This is my grand tribute to HP Lovecraft, and I worked hard to emulate his trademark, overly verbose style, even using such classic Lovecraftisms as "cyclopean" and "squamous." I was rather worried that some people might not be familiar with Lovecraft and would just assume I was being a blowhard for my own sake, but in general folks seem to like the wordplay.

-Obviously the story is a take on Lovecraft's own "The Festival", probably the scariest fucking Christmas story ever written. In that tale, as in many Lovecraft yarns, the narrator is horrified by his family's inhuman secret, but I decided to explore what it might be like if the character was torn between his revulsion and his desire to have a real family. Other sources include Lovecraft's "The Whisperer in Darkness", the best realization of his moody, monster-haunted New England setting, Neil Gaiman's affectionate satire of Lovecraft's writing style in "Shoggoth's Old Peculiar", and Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita" for its completley perverse but at times still strangely touching romantic overtures.

-Incest is by far the most popular theme on this and most sex story sites, but it's never one that interested me much. Still, I decided, as an experiment, to try and figure out what sort of circumstances such relationships might theoretically be considered acceptable under. All I could think of was certain ancient society's in which members of the same royal family were encouraged to interbreed (an idea that I'm exploring in a story in progess) or circumstances such as we see in this story where, for one reason or another, the population is too small to avoid it.

-I spend a lot of time trying to find thematically appropriate character names. Celia's name means "path for the blind" in Latin. Whether this reflects positively or negatively on her and the other character's seems up for debate. Charles' name, on the other hand, is just a nod to "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward", one of Lovecraft's best stories.

[BlackRonin]

"Bela Lugosi's Dead"

-Another one I had fun with. Sometime last year I became interested in late 70s and 80s post-punk, darkwave, and gothic rock music, and started hanging out a bit in goth clubs. This story is both my tribute to the musical genre and my frank opinion of certain people who seem intent on ruining everyone else's fun. It is, admittedly, maybe too pointed of a "take that" of those elements, but a guy needs to let off steam somewhere...

-The title, of course, comes from the song that started it all. The story was born, almost in its entirety, on Halloween night, when the DJ spun that song and the entire club split down the middle between those who were amused and those who were, well, not. By way of explanation if you don't know the song, "Bela Lugosi's Dead" by the Bauhaus pretty much started the entire goth scene all by itself. I've been told that in the 80s it was so widely played and so iconic that people soon grew sick of it, and even suggesting that it be played was tantamount to provoking a riot. I have no idea if this was true (I would have been three years old at the time this was all going on), but it's a persistent story.

-The boiling oil joke I stole directly from "Writhe and Shine". Just too good not to rip off.

-Ruby is pretty much the girl I always meet a goth club. Lucretia is the girl that people think you meet at a goth club, but never do. I avoided giving any of the character's a "goth name", since I haven't ever met anyone who does that, but I threw in "Lucretia" just so I could give a nod to my new favorite band.

-Although it's not as pronounced as in "Man nor Beast", this was my first attempt to really use San Francisco as a setting in a practical sense. Andrew starts his night at the DNA Lounge. The nameless other club is "located" in an industrial lot a few blocks away.

-I went nuts trying to find a prominent goth rocker who was dead to front the band in this story. For rock stars, those are a healthy bunch of guys. A site reader suggested Pete Steele of Type O Negative, but I think Joy Division's Ian Curtis probably fits Andrew's tastes better. This bit with the dead celebrity band is pretty worn out, I admit, but it was my homage to a particularly good, particularly strange Stephen King story called "You Know They Got a Hell of a Band."

-Lucretia's disintegrating face comes from a "Tales from the Crypt" episode called "Til Death" that scared the shit out of me as a kid. It's nice that everything awful that happened to me as a child can be put to good use now.

[BlackRonin]

"Ramadan"

-Other than horror stories and theater, my other big passion is fairy tales and folklore. I love old stories that have been told again and again, and "The 1001 Nights", also called "Arabian Nights", features some of the oldest of the bunch. A lot of people primarily know the neutered, kid-friendly versions of these tales common nowadays and might be shocked at the medieval depictions of overt eroticism, primitive sexism and racism, and imperialistic attitudes in the older texts. Folk tales will get away with pretty much anything if you let them.

-I used Jack Zipes' translation of "Nights" as a reference. But actually, my primary inspiration was not "Nights" at all but Neil Gaiman's "Sandman" story "Ramadan", easily his best work. This "Ramadan" plays on pretty much the same theme as that one, namely that fiction can be more substantial than facts. I tried to reference as many real "Nights" stories as a could, but the most important was "The Sleeper and the Waker", from which I took the story of the Caliph and Abu al-Hassan.

-Haroun al-Rashid, of course, was a real person and the real ruler of the Muslim empire, but he's probably more famous now for the fairy tale version of himself in "Nights". The Caliph disguising himself and going out into the city as night is a common convention in a lot of "Nights" tales. The story is set right around 800 CE, right in the midst of the Muslim renaissance.

-Arram was originally Syrian, and in fact his name even means "Syrian", but I decided that just wasn't far enough away from Baghdad, so I him a Sicilian of Syrian descent. I have no idea what, if anything, the relationship between those two regions was at the time, but hopefully neither does anyone reading this.

-I was actually worried that the references to Islam might attract anti-Muslim trolls, but I seem to have dodged that bullet. I intentionally only invoked the name of Allah once, and the phrase "Only Allah knows all," is taken straight from Gaiman's "Ramadan". One commenter took umbrage with the Muslim's drinking wine, generally frowned on in that belief system, but the fact is the "Nights" is full of Muslims doing things they really shouldn't, including a great deal of drinking and fucking. This was their primary appeal at the time they were recorded, actually.

-I have no idea who the Caliph really is.

[BlackRonin]

"New Arrivals"

-If you're ever stuck with writer's block, my advice is to read a lot or watch a lot in the meantime. Virtually every other book, movie, or tv show I come across gives me some idea for a story. "New Arrivals" was inspired by an episode of the 90s-era "Outer Limits" called "First Anniversary", in which a couple of guys start to suspect that their wives are not what they seem. In keeping with my usual line of thinking, I flipped the genders.

-Other sources: The David Cronenberg movie "The Brood" as well as his version of "The Fly" for their depictions of pregnancy anxiety as body horror. I had various Greek myths in mind too, those stories where the gods seduce women in mortal form and father half-human children, sometimes to ruinous effect on the women. More grotesque spins on that theme include HP Lovecraft's "The Dunwich Horror" and its inspiration, Arthur Machen's "The Great God Pan".

-This was a touchy story to work on for a few reasons. For one thing, it's a story about pregnancy anxiety, the fears about what will happen to your body, and your life, after and during this momentous change. But of course, as a man, I really can only speculate about those kinds of fears, so I did feel a bit presumptuous. This was also my first stab at taking on race issues, presenting the rather troubling idea that we can't always walk away from our prejudices even when we want to.

-I've been accused of writing a misogynistic story here, one in which the wicked, deceitful woman is punished for her ways, but that's not how I saw it. Rather, I looked at it as a story about what happens when people think they understand each other without realizing their perceptions are being altered by their prejudices. Gloria is plainly not the most sympathetic heroine I've ever come up with, but I don't think of her as a bad person; she's in a terrible situation that's impossible for her to even fully perceive, much less understand, and her self-destructive behavior is her only outlet. For that matter, Michael isn't a bad "person" either, any more than, say, a praying mantis that eats its mate is a bad person. It's just his nature.

-I try not to worry too much about what stories are popular and what stories aren't, but I guess it's still human nature to speculate. "New Arrivals", like "Bela Lugosi's Dead", seems tailored to have the narrowest possible appeal: a protagonist who is difficult to like, a consistently depressive tone, a completely ghastly ending, and the relegation of genre elements to the last few pages. Like I said before, can't win 'em all.

-I spend a lot of time on titles, and usually a work in progress is saddled with an oddball working title just designed to remind me what it is when I see the file. This one was started off as "What to Expect When You're Expecting", which I honestly still think is a little funny.

-Although it's a small thing, the tapping on the tank in the garage scene ranks pretty high on the list of "Things I've written that scare the shit out of myself."

[BlackRonin]

"Matty Groves"

-Now here's an oddity, a story that has no genre elements at all. When I was a kid we bought one of the first commercial CD players on the market, and of course there was not much music available in the format at the time, so I heard the same two dozen or so albums over and over. One of those was British folk rock group Fairport Convention's "Liege and Lief", largely a collection of traditional folk ballads set to contemporary scores. Of the songs on the album, "Matty Groves" left the deepest impression on me at that young age.

-Being a folk song, there are a lot of variations of "Matty Groves" (also called "Little Muskgrave"). I specifically wrote to the lyrics of the version most common today, and in fact the story was pretty much just an experiment to see if I could plant song lyrics directly into narration and dialogue. I'm not that happy with the results, actually, but ah well.

-For almost my entire life I thought the character's name was "Lord Donald", but if you listen very closely it's actually "Darnell", or sometimes "Arland". I'm not the only one who has made this mistake, though, as sometimes you'll heard recorded versions where people actually say "Donald". In the song his wife has no given name, so I decided on "Alexandria" which, due to being the feminine version of "Alexander", literally translates to "Defender of men." Yeah, I'm a smartass.

-Matty Groves is frequently referred to as "little Matty Groves" in the lyrics. Exactly what that means is open to interpretation, but I suppose it indicates that he's young and of slight build. The song is a bit confusing in that the lord's wife recognizes him on sight but he has to guess her identity, so I decided that Matty must have something of a reputation as a lady's man. I always felt sorry for the character, as it seems he's being used as a pawn in someone else's marital spat.

-The song indicates that Matty "hurt Lord Darnell sore" but was no more specific than that. I decided on the emasculating thigh wound (this close to castration) based purely on enmity for the bad guy.

-The hellfire and brimstone preacher is my addition to the story; in the original it's just "a servant" who rats out the couple. I had in mind Reverend Paris from "The Crucible", a part I played in high school.

-Two other songs from that album are big influences on me, "Tam Lin" and "Crazy Man Michael". I meant to write stories based on them too, but since "Matty Groves" is just an average story I may or may not go through with it.

[curiousgirl]

This was fascinating reading, BR, especially on the stories I've already read. It also tells me which one I want to read next (Two Wishes, I think).

Thanks for taking the time to write it.

[BlackRonin]

Glad you're liking them, thanks for reading.

"The Company of Wolves"

-Although I'm in the habit of writing big, ambitious stories, in truth it's usually the shorter, briefer ones that I like better when all is said and done. Quick and dirty has a lot to say for itself. If I had to show a new reader just one story I've turned out over the last two years, I would probably go with "The Company of Wolves" (or possibly "Grave Robber").

-Again we're in werewolf territory, so again I have to invoke Angela Carter. Although I stole her title for this (I think I've mentioned already how much I love a good title), in truth this story is the inverse of hers. Carter's "The Company of Wolves" is about how sex-positive feminism balances out the excesses of unchecked male sexuality (it sounds less pompous when you actually read it...which you should), rather than, in this case, bringing a man out of his shell. But that's all right; I don't need to writer Carter's story again, she already did that.

-I'm not sure how many sex stories bring up erectile dysfunction within the first 500 words. If this was the first, I want some kind of medal.

-Normally I publish a story first on XNXX, then on similar sites a few weeks or months later. Usually I give the text one last polish revision before posting it elsewhere, but XNXX was actually the last place I featured "The Company of Wolves", and this version is much an improvement over the somewhat clunky early incarnation on Literotica and such.

[BlackRonin]

"Grave Robber"

-I said before that I don't think too hard about what makes stories popular or unpopular, so if you asked me why "Grave Robber" is far and away the best-received story I've featured on any site, I couldn't begin to give you an answer. It took almost an entire day for it to garner a single negative vote when I posted it. This was a lucky break, as I was at the time feeling rather down about my writing and having serious doubts over whether I could cut it. Those up votes are tiny, petty things really, but it's amazing what a big impact they can have at just the right time.

-"In the Mausoleum" is one of HP Lovecraft's least widely read or regarded stories, but I got a kick out of it and would probably never have written "Grave Robber" had I not read it first. The business about storing the bodies until the spring thaw came straight out of the Lovecraft story. The initial idea to do a Victorian zombie story came from the "Doctor Who" episode "The Unquiet Dead". The scene with Clarence and the dead villagers has its roots in countless EC Comics horror stories of the 50s from the likes of "Vault of Horrors" and "Tales from the Crypt". April's benign but still frightening resurrection smacks of a particularly unsettling Ray Bradbury story called "The Emissary". The Tim Burton movie "Corpse Bride" was actually not a source of inspiration, but I acknowledge that it's impossible not to think of it when reading this.

-Story tags are tricky sometimes. They can attract readers, but they can also scare them off. I debated whether or not to call this a necrophilia story. I mean, technically it is, but I doubt this is what people have in mind when they click a link promising such a text. On the other hand, I did mark "Bela Lugosi's Dead" as necro, despite it having even less of a claim to that content than this one does. I honestly never thought I'd get to a point in my life when I spent this much time debating the nuances of fucking a dead woman.

-In general, I prefer my female characters over my male ones, but Clarence goes down as my favorite supporting character of all time, and he was riotously fun to write.

-Originally this was meant as a particularly eerie ghost story; Wallace opened the tomb and found a family of pale, ethereal women supposedly living in there, but they always vanished whenever he brought Clarence or anyone else in. Falling in love with one of them, he returns again and again, eventually choosing their underworld over his normal life. So what happened to all that? Couldn't say, except maybe that it just seemed a bit too much like everything else I had written lately. I like the plot we have now better in any case.

-Also high up on the list of "Things I've Written that Scare the Shit out of Myself" is April's hand coming out of the darkness to turn the lamp down. We had a lot of those old oil lamps in the house I grew up in and we broke them out during power outages (frequent during rural mountain snowy seasons). I remember how absolutely EVERYTHING was creepy in the light of those lamps, so I like to reference them whenever I can.

[BlackRonin]

"Three Vampire Night"

-I don't do many vampire stories. It's not that I dislike vampires, it's just that it seems like every other erotic horror story is just vampires and more vampires and I want to stand out. As you can see, even the vampire stories I do aren't much for the subgenre, the first being a deconstruction and this one being a flat out parody. It probably doesn't reflect that well on me, but fuck it, I thought it was funny.

-Some interpreted this story as an attack on "Twilight" and its fans, but really I was trying to lampoon the entire literary history of vampires, starting with the creeping, night-stalking corpses of folklore, moving on to the aristocratic fiends and Byronic anti-heroes of the 19th century, and yes, the brooding but benign hearthrobs of modern pop culture. I don't necessarily consider any of these bad types of characters or single out one as superior or inferior to the others, I just enjoyed the spread.

-Lenore was originally to be called Carmilla, after one of the earliest literary vampires, but I had just used that name in "The Red Masquerade", "Varlock" is reminiscent of Count Orlock from Murnau's "Nosferatu", still my favorite vampire movie of all time. "Daniel", of course, is just as inoffensive a name as I could come up with. His character is actually based on the protagonist of a failed novel I started years ago about the pragmatic obstacles of being a vampire. The first chapter was all about how terrible blood tastes and how hard the character worked to find something he could mix it with, eventually deciding on the blood and Kool-Aid concoction featured here. I was glad to bring it back.

-There was pretty much no way to write a real, substantive sex scene into this and make it funny. Which is odd, given that the pattern I was working off of was the classic British sex comedy, complete with people falling through doors and into the midst of one another's trysts.

[wantsomefun]

There are others on this site that have shared snippets of the inspiration or thought process behind a story.

What you've done here is fascinating and, as curiousgirl intimates, serves well to help someone navigate their way through your collection.

Thank you for sharing this. Most of us don't have the time and talent to do what you do in the first place, let alone create an appendix to each of our stories.

[BlackRonin]

This is more self-centeredness than talent at work, but I'm glad you like it regardless.

[wantsomefun]

Of course it's self-centered. So what?

Are you enjoying it? Does it really surprise you that much to learn that someone else thinks it's a good idea?

Seeing what you're doing here made me question whether I could put together some notes of my own on most of my scribblings.

No. I can't. Even though I write stuff that has something resembling a plot or at least a sequence of events, I can't honestly say what part of my brain or what desire or fascination makes me write one thing or another.

If you can, go for it.

To me, this is interesting reading.

[BlackRonin]

Glad you like it. I would guess you probably have more to say about your own stories than you think, since you obviously put a lot of work into them.

"The Red Masquerade"

-If you've been reading these notes, you'll surely notice that HP Lovecraft's name comes up a lot. So it's pretty much inevitable that sooner or later we'll come to Lovecraft's own principle idol and inspiration, Edgar Allan Poe. Ever since I read "Masque of the Red Death" in grade school I thought that a party themed after the decorum of the story was a great idea...although granted, anyone who had actually read it might be reluctant to attend. Still, it's gratifying getting to put a very old idea to use.

-Other sources: Ray Bradbury wrote his own story about a Poe-themed party with ill intentions for the guests in "Usher II". The "Twilight Zone" episode "Masks" was principle among many stories about masks that reveal their wearer's natures. Neil Gaiman's "Harlequin Valentine" was another standout in that field. The Red Death's costume and demeanor (particularly his infatuation with Miranda) are actually modeled on the masquerade ball scene in "The Phantom of the Opera" rather than the Poe story. Finally, I listened to "Hotel California" over and over again while writing this in hopes of capturing the song's surreal essence of wild abandon and underlying menace.

-This is by far my most referential story ever. On top of the Poe stuff, various characters of the Commedia dell'arte (traditional Italian comic theater) appear in their full regalia. Miranda is named for the heroine in "The Tempest", and Carmilla borrows her name from one of the oldest vampire stories in English. Dido's name, costume, and characterization are all straight from "The Aeneid". The Fool's lines are all cribbed directly from both "King Lear" and "Twelfth Night".

-This was a hell of a project, and had to be completely rewritten from scratch several times. I dug the concept and the setting, but finding the proper sequence of events was a pain. The first version was written entirely from Richard's point of view, and the guests all showed up of their own volition, believing it to be the annual party hosted by a friend of theirs. I got about a third of the way through before realizing that the build-up was too bloated and that Richard just couldn't carry the story on his own, so I threw the whole thing out and started from scratch.

-At one point there was another beach scene at the beginning, bookending the story. San Francisco's ocean beach is particularly surreal when the fog comes in, and my coworkers and I had considered shooting an eerie, Ingmar Bergman-style movie out there with various costumed figures wandering through the fog and the tide. We ended up shooting something else that weekend instead, but I liked the imagery so much I tried to appropriate it for this. Although moody and atmospheric, this opening really bogged down the pace, so I threw it all out (noticing a pattern here?) and started en media res instead.

-The few non-English lines scattered throughout are meant to suggest that the guests have been plucked from all over the world. I don't actually speak any of the languages in question but I worked pretty hard to make sure that the lines were accurate. I don't remember what any of them mean anymore, except that the Japanese guy is asking where the bathroom is.

-Can we qualify this as another werewolf story on account or Richard's costume? Halfway, maybe. Believe it or not, there was at least on draft where Richard actually does start eating the body of the dead "soldier" in the bedroom. I edited it out because it took up a lot of time but didn't move the story forward at all, and also because it was too extreme for that early in the narrative; the guest's behavior is supposed to get more and more outlandish as the night goes on. I could easily imagine Richard eating someone at the end of the night, but by then more important things are happening.

-Originally, Miranda stops the clock and saves everyone simply by destroying the works, causing it to collapse and kill her. I decided that being crushed under a grandfather clock was too undignified a way for one of my favorite heroines to go, though, so I changed it at the last second. It was nice being able to write something redemptive for a change. Some suggest that Miranda is too "perfect" of a character. I disagree, but even if she was, fuck it, I have to write about a decent person sometime.

-I sometimes get asked for sequels, and in general I avoid them because, well, they demand that the reader read one whole other story first, which can be a bit much to expect of someone. I really did plan a sequel to this thought called "Red New Year", but between "Ramadan" and "Festival" I just couldn't get it done by the end of December. Maybe in time for 2013.

-My favorite title, other than "Man nor Beast".

[Rutger5]

BR:

Since others are commenting I'll throw in my two cents. Like I said at the time I love Grave Robber and it would make a great movie in the style of Corpse Bride.

The influence of old EC comic books was obvious and brought back memories of two figures in the cemetery with lanterns and shovels for sure.

It is easily my fave of yours (which is saying something) probably because of the sweetness and romance inherent in the tale. My brain is unqualified to say if its your best in any technical sense but in an emotional way it strikes a chord with me. Plus a happy ending (of a sort) is unusual for a BR story. Thanks for posting stories here.
r5

[thatcuriousone]

I must say, I'm absolutely fascinated by your commentary. I remember when you posted Phantom with commentary and at first, I was pretty hesitant to read it since I wasn't sure what to expect. To my surprise, I really enjoyed understanding where you pulled your inspiration from and all your hard work at making sure it was accurate. Now that I've begun reading these, I think I need to visit more of your works.

[BlackRonin]

Thanks for reading. It's been a good exercise for me looking back on old work. And yes, scaring up some attention for older stories doesn't hurt either.

"Midsummer's Eve, First Kiss."

-I grew up in a tiny rural town in the Sierra Nevada mountains. There's not much to do when you're a teenager living in a town of five thousand (yes, count them, five thousand) people, so bonfire parties in the woods were a frequent weekend diversion. I actually didn't attend these much, as I wasn't the sociable type, not to mention they were frequently being broken up by sheriff's deputies and forest rangers and I didn't envy anyone having to sprint, half-drunk, through the forest in the black of night to avoid a citation. Be that as it may, I was still at enough of them to think that it would make a good setting for a story.

-The primary inspiration for this one was "First Kiss" by Patrick Bone, yet another kid's story (am I going to get put on some kind of special watch list if I keep turning grade school literature into porn?). "First Kiss" is actually not that well-written (surprising from Bone), but I liked the earthiness of it, the haplessness of the young hero, and the glancing (but entirely chaste) intimations of burgeoning preteen sexuality. Plus, ya know, it had werewolves. Originally this story was just to be called "First Kiss" as well, but curiousscouser posted her story of the same name while I was in the midst of writing it.

-Other sources: The Midsummer's Eve setting was my attempt to capture the spirit of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and its potent formula of love, magic, sex, and danger in the wilderness. A vignette with Anna Paquin in Mike Dougherty's horror anthology movie "Trick R Treat" cemented the bonfire party trappings. I considered various myths and folk tales about hapless men stumbling into supernatural gatherings, including the story of Actaeon, who came on the goddess Diana bathing in the river while hunting (this seeming stroke of luck turned out poorly for him in the end, hence the deer in this story), and Robert Burns' long poem "Tam o' Shanter", about a local drunk who spies a witch's sabbath on his way home from the pub.

-Tiresome though age debates on this site are, I was a little conflicted over whether Miles should be 18 or 16. Clearly he's a late bloomer in any case, but was 18 just too much? I suppose some may call me squeamish or even immature for insisting that he be of legal age in the story, but I'm just not that comfortable describing graphic sex with anyone younger than that, at least as much for personal reasons as for legal ones (I wouldn't fuck a 16 year old even if it was legal; what in God's name would we have in common?). Other sites often set 18 as a hard limit anyway, so it was a practical consideration after all else.

-I got a few complaints about the animal cruelty. I acknowledge that it's dicey, but I think the context is appropriate, although granted the full context is not apparent until the end. Either way, I thought it was important to emphasize that the girls aren't just teasing Miles, he's actually in very real, very physical danger at the gathering. If the girls ever actually were human, that was so long ago now that they've forgotten, so their characterization had to be decidedly amoral.

-I have actually fallen through manzanita bushes in a fashion not dissimilar to in this story. I'll be honest, I couldn't have fucked anyone if my life depended on it after landing.

-This is another story where I plotted a sequel that I will most likely never write, titled "Midsummer's Eve: Five Years Later". In this story, Miles (now in college) spent a few years attending the Midsummer gathering with the others but eventually walked out on the circle because of his increasing discomfort with the whole thing. They take this rather personally and make various, half-sincere efforts to harm him in reprisal. The relationship between the characters is actually kind of sweet and hilarious. So why not write it? Again, I consider myself lucky if people read even one of my stories, so asking them to go back and read a whole other one first only seems like it will discourage new readership.

[BlackRonin]

"Til Death"

-Continuing my string of unlikely sources of inspiration (or maybe starting, since we're going backwards here), this story grew out of, of all things, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2". I was shocked and rather annoyed that in that film (and book), something as seemingly important as a magical object that lets you speak with the dead is simply discarded and serves little function in the story's resolution. Naturally, I started thinking about how far people would really go to get/keep that power, and a story was born.

-Other sources: This is my other ode to Poe and his various bereaved, brooding characters such as in "Ligeia" and "The Raven". But Poe's characters are usually afraid of visitations from beyond the grave, so for the protagonist's ruthless ambition I considered several Nathaniel Hawthorne stories about people seeking forbidden power, such as "Ethan Brand" and "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment". Although the characterizations are considerably different, the relationship between the ambitious aristocrat and the seemingly humble but powerful magical character was rooted in "Macbeth". Oddly enough, "Jane Eyre" was often in my mind while writing this as well, and I initially thought of Porphyria as a female version of Mr. Rochester, although you can see that she very quickly got out of hand. There was a touch of EC Horror in here too, as usual.

-The very first concept was of a rich and powerful man trying to be reunited with his dead wife. Why the gender flip? Well, first just out of habit I suppose, but at the time I was working on another story, "The Mermaid", built around the same idea, and I didn't want to repeat myself. Of course, in the end it turned out not to matter, as "The Mermaid" fell by the wayside, but I still hope to finish it some day. So many stories to deal with...

-Another story where I spent a lot of time on character names. Hester is named, rather arbitrarily, after "The Scarlet Letter", and "John Grey" was simply a name that I felt communicated blandness and a lack of remarkableness (um, no offense to any John Greys out there...), but naming the lead character was harder. Originally she was simply "Lady Grey", but I felt like I was writing a Harlequin novel every time I typed that. She then became simply "Jessica", but I thought the character deserved something a little more exotic. At first "Porphyria" was just a reference to Robert Browning's poem "Porphyria's Lover", but when I learned that the word actually refers to a hereditary neurological disease I decided that it was the perfect expression of the character's unhealthy mindset and played into the tone of Victorian decadence.

-Porphyria is my favorite of my own protagonists (we can't call her a hero, although perhaps she's an anti-hero). To a degree, the story is an exploration of one of the most pressing issues in my life, namely, why do strong, smart, independent women tend to fall for such schmucks? At first I wanted her to be a true, Byronic anti-hero, the sort of character who is not overtly villainous but is still distinctly dangerous and frightening. Then she went and killed a guy and that was so much for that then. Still, the trappings are there, I think.

-I'm not sure whether Lord Grey was always kind of a clod or whether that's just what happens to you when you come back from the dead. I suppose he has his charms, though.

-Usually the ending of a story comes to me along with its concept, or sometimes I'll think of a particularly shocking or dramatically satisfying ending first and then have to arrange a story around it ("writing for the ending" is not really a great practice, but sometimes it works for me; "New Arrivals" and "Ghost Writer" are two examples where I feel it worked out well), but this time I agonized for days over what the hell to do with the conclusion. Where this ending came from I have no idea, but when it finally struck me I actually had to sit down for a second. It's very bad form to praise your own writing, but if I'm proud of anything I've written, it's the last page of this story.

[BlackRonin]

"Night Chat"

-We go a little out of order here so that I can address both chapters of "The Tribunal" together. "Night Chat" was one of the few direct efforts I've made to write something scary. I mean, in theory, all of my horror stories should be scary (though that is, of course, subjective), but this time I actually sat down and said, "What's the scariest thing I can come up with?" That's probably not the best way to go about these things, but what the hey, you've gotta try everything once.

-If you're reading this, then probably you're the sort who has spent a lot of time on electronic communication, and probably with nominal strangers. To be honest, even from the early days of the internet (well, early for the general public, which is to say mid 90s or so) I've found chat rooms, instant messaging, and yes, even message boards, a little creepy. Here you are interacting with this person, possibly even telling them things you would never share with your closest friends and loved ones, but you probably have very little idea who they even are. What if they're not who they say? What if they're even dangerous? You might not have any idea. I think everyone has probably had at least one experience where a seemingly normal person on the internet says something that makes you go, "Wait, what the fuck?", and this story grew out of that particular, sinking sensation.

-This is also, of course, a 21st century take on the old urban myth about the threatening calls to the babysitter. You know, "Those calls are coming from inside the house!", etc.

-This story was actually meant to tie into a book I was writing at the time and may, hopefully, if the gods are kind, finish someday. "Rose" (not her real name, of course) is a character from that book, and her "INGNR" chat handle was a reference to the book's title, "The Engineer". In fact, this is something of a diluted scene from that book; in one chapter, a man who is both blind and deaf and can be communicated with only by tracing letters onto the palm of his hand one at a time (an idea I got from the mediocre art film "Another Earth") is talking with someone who he thinks is his nurse but who, gradually, reveals that she has other plans for him. The agony of being helpless and discovering that you're in danger only one letter at a time scared the shit out of me. See, compared to that, Ben here got off pretty light.

[BlackRonin]

"The Tribunal"

-One of these things is not like the other ones.

It couldn't escape my notice that there are fewer gay-themed stories on this and every sex story site. Which makes sense, given that there are fewer gay readers and fewer gay folks in general. Even so, it seemed like a weird double standard was prevalent throughout the material offered; male characters were exclusively heterosexual, but women were depicted as bisexual more often than not in most stories. A man's potential attraction to another man was simply not part of the equation, and the overtones of the "Love that dare not speak its name" didn't sit right with me. But in truth, I didn't set out to write a gay story, it just kind of happened. I started "The Tribunal" and about a third of the way through it occurred to me that the character might be gay, and that if he were it would make the story much stronger, and it just sort of came about organically. In truth, it wasn't any harder to write, but it's not my best work one way or the other, so maybe it tripped me up more than I thought it would.

-The primary inspiration was William Burrough's "Naked Lunch", particularly David Cronengerg's characterstically bizarre film adaptation of it and its continuous autopsy of Burrough's feelings of persecution over his sexuality. Kafka's "The Trial" gave me the initial idea for the interrogation setting, though, and of course, as always with any kind of dystopian narrative, Orwell's "1984" contributed. Koshen Takami's "Battle Royale" put me in mind of various tools that authoritarian governments use to intimidate their populace and suppress dissent (I have not yet read "The Hunger Games", but I'm sure there's much the same there).

Despite the story's openly socialist sympathies, I looked a lot at anti-Communist writings from former insiders, including Orwell's "Animal Farm" and Richard Wright's "American Hunger" for examples of how an autocratic states cannibalize themselves trying to fight "the enemy within." Finally, I tried to emulate the motifs of mid 20th century sci fi writers like Robert Heinlein and Ray Bradbury because of their quaint, unintentionally retro stories about futures where people have flying cars, rocket trips to Saturn, and casual nuclear war, but everyone still smokes, wears a fedora, and stores data on spools of tape.

-Originally I envisioned a standard Orwellian "Big Government" state like in "1984", but, taking a page from Max Barry's "Jennifer Government" (a favorite of mine), I changed it to a future in which private enterprise has consumed everything, even the military and judicial systems. This was partly just for a change of pace, partly just to please my liberal sensibilities, and partly because it just seems more likely these days. Barry's book does not go down as a source of inspiration, though, because in the end I had to edit out most of the relevant material, including the background element of an ongoing cold war with the European Union, because at the end of the day the story had to be principally about the character. If I want to write a treatise on economics, I'll do it some other time.

-I'll be the first to admit that the Augur doesn't really make sense the way its depicted, but it seemed more interesting than normal flashbacks. Thanks to the events of "The Tribunal 2", though, we may consider that the images the Augur displays are in fact fabrications, built to match memories that are equally as counterfeit. Sometimes a happy accident is all it takes to turn a mistake into another shade of nuance, I guess.

-Clark is named after the talking cockroach/typewriter (you read that right) in the film version of "Naked Lunch", and of course Bill is William Burroughs himself.

-Dialogue is by far my favorite thing to write, but too much dialogue too fast can overwhelm the reader, so now and then small physical details and gestures help slow down the pacing and ground the story. You'll notice how often I have half lines describing a speaker sighing, frowning, leaning forward, touching their hair or face, or making a hand gesture. But the Tribunal was hard to write because it doesn't have normal expressions and affectations, but a great deal of dialogue was put into its "mouth". I had to develop little tics specific to it, like the sound its metal fingers make or the whine of its camera eyes.

[BlackRonin]

"The Tribunal 2"

-I've said several times that I don't like to write sequels, so what happened here? Well, for starters, it's not an ironclad rule no matter what, but in this case it's really just a coincidence. I had two different ideas for two stories with very similar trappings (an interrogation) and I didn't want to seem like I was repeating myself, so I tied them together. You don't really need to read one to understand the other anyway, since they're really only sequels in theme and setting elements.

-This story grew out of the '95 anime film "Ghost in the Shell" and a particularly memorable, horrifying subplot with a minor character who works as a garbage collector. It's a bulldozer of a scene and it rattled me as a teen, so I guess it's only natural that I would eventually write something similar. On top of everything that contributed to the first "Tribunal", there are a number of movies and books that deal with the troubling implications of memory, most notably Chris Nolan's "Memento". The story of a soldier desperate to get back to his wife, and the particularly unsettling obstacle in his path, came from Ambrose Bierce's "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge".

-Kazuhiro is named for the actor who voiced the garbage collector in "Ghost in the Shell". Kazuo's alter ego "Qi" is named for David's assumed identity in "Strangers in Paradise"...which is strange, since I fucking hated that comic, but it seemed thematically appropriate, particularly given the Chinese/Japanese confusion in both cases. June's first name is a play on "May" from Chaucer's "The Merchant's Tale", another story about a husband who doesn't know everything about his wife, and her maiden name, Amory, came out of Fitzgerald's "This Side of Paradise", primarily just because I liked how it suggested "amore."

-The protagonist's almost accidental ethnicity presented me with another tags conundrum; should I use the Asian tag, or not? From a technical point of view, yes, since the story does indeed have a prominent Asian character, but let's face it, the reason that tag exists is because a great many men fetishize Asian women, and when someone clicks on an "Asian"-tagged story that's probably what they're expecting. In truth, I used the tag almost hoping that someone would make that mistake, as I've never been big on ethnicity fetishes in the first place.

I played a bit with making much of his interracial marriage (was such a thing even allowed in this society?) and the suppression of his heritage by his military superiors (the bridal kimono, for example, would be contraband, the kind of thing he could be fired for even owning), but as with the first story, background elements had to give way to character material.

-I consider the first "Tribunal" a weak story because it was too personal. We've all, at some time or another, felt persecuted in our lives, and felt the anger of being victims of forces outside of our control. But I think I put too much of that feeling into the story, and it became heavy-handed. This one, on the other hand, is about how people fool themselves, and how we'll default to a perception of things most pleasing and convenient to us regardless of the facts of the matter. I don't know what it means that I wrote a better story railing against myself than against society, but there you have it.

-The line about June taking her hair down one pin at a time came from Li Young Lee's poem "Early in the Morning":

"My mother combs,
pulls her hair back
tight, rolls it
around two fingers, pins it
in a bun to the back of her head.
For half a hundred years she has done this.
My father likes to see it like this.
He says it is kempt.

But I know
it is because of the way
my mother's hair falls
when he pulls the pins out.
Easily, like the curtains
when they untie them in the evening."

-I wanted the Company to be represented only by machines in these stories, the Tribunal and the Augur, etc. The only people should be low-level workers like Bill or grunts like Kazuhiro. But the conclusion of this story meant incorporating dialogue that just wouldn't work coming from a robot. The solution, of course, was to present Porter, someone who seems like a real person but is just another electronic disguise for the still-faceless powers that be. There is a "Tribunal 3" that's been kicking around my brain for a while that would take a closer look at Porter, the upper echelons of power, and the nature of the fascist mindset, but it's jockeying with a lot of other material and who knows if it'll ever see the light of day.

[BlackRonin]

"The Watcher."

-This is my most direct foray into the sub-genre of dark fantasy rather than just normal horror. What's the difference? Pretension, mostly, but in general the differentiation is that dark fantasy is supposed to be about character's emotional conflicts, and the supernatural elements are usually metaphors or allegories for them and often lack clear resolutions. This is a story about regret, and I suppose it's an opposite pair to "The Tribunal 2", in that the character (or characters?) in this story can't amend her recollections, even when she wants to.

-John Keel's "The Mothman Prophecies" is perhaps one of the strangest books ever written, a supposedly nonfiction account of a spate of UFO sightings and supernatural encounters that Keel investigated over the course of a year. One brief but frightening case describes a young girl who repeatedly awakes in the night to find a strange man looming over her bed, a man supposedly nine feet tall with a noseless face and outlandish attire. This kind of "phantom intruder" is a common nighttime hallucination, and suffice to say you can creep the fuck out yourself when reading case studies...which indeed I did, giving rise to this story. At the time I was also reading a lot of online horror lit of the "creepypasta" variety, including "Candle Cove" and the various "Slender Man" memes, as well as the short films of Drew Daywalt, particularly "Bedfellows". This story's final line is an attempt to induce the distinct, "live wire" sort of fear that the best of that lot specialize in.

-Some have complained about the brevity of the sexual content in this story. While I'll grant that that's a major problem with almost everything I write, this is the one instance where I fight the criticism because, come on, the entire freaking story is only a thousand words long!

-The presence of an unseen observer is a common theme in my writing, but for some reason this and the "King in Yellow" stories are the only examples that I've actually posted. My still unfinished story "Doppelganger" explores a woman's delusion (??) that a second person lives in her house, always just barely staying out of her sight, while "The Passenger", also unfinished, charts a woman's paranoid belief that someone unseen has concealed himself in her car during a late night road trip. I think we never really grow out of certain primal childhood fears about lurking strangers and the dark corners of supposedly safe places. That line about the invisible man kissing Alice in her sleep...brrrr...

[BlackRonin]

"Eliot Walker and the Beautiful Angels."

-And here is my biggest regret since starting to write here. This could very well be a good story, in fact, it might have been a great story, but I just didn't put enough work into it. I was eager to finish it and move on to other things, and this was a demanding concept. In the end, I really gave it short shrift. It's never been featured anywhere else because whipping it into shape would mean making so many extensive changes that it would almost not be the same story by the time I was finished.

-William Gibson fans will see his fingerprints all over this, and it leans particularly heavily on "Mona Lisa Overdrive", the best example of his brand of cynical cyberpunk, where technology principally serves as a vehicle for economic exploitation, organized crime, and social alienation. Tad Williams' "Otherland" books, while really not that good overall, were very handy for helping conceive of how non-traditional computer interfaces might come about in the future. Both Gibson and Williams are rather good at lacing their cyberpunk with the suggestion of the supernatural. Phillip K Dick's "A Scanner Darkly" was a good model for the kind of low-level social dystopia characterized less by powerful governing forces as much by general malaise and degeneracy with the general population.

-When I first made up my mind to write a cyperpunk story, I conceived of a rather straightforward computer heist plot, in which wealthy businessmen are fleeced for their fortunes by a virtual brothel. It was an all right story, but there really wasn't much dramatic tension to it, and the characters were so unlikable (on purpose) that it was hard to imagine anyone caring. It was a nice lesson in what cyberpunk is, but not much of a story, so I saved the "VR whorehouse" setting and tried to tell a story with a bigger scope and more sympathetic hero. It was, at least, an improvement over that initial effort.

-Gibson's recurring theme about people gradually surrendering their humanity to technology piece by piece is the basis for this story. This provided me with a rare opportunity to really ingrain the sexual content with thematic elements; visions of electronic women brandishing sex toys and latex orifices certainly reinforce the dominance of the artificial over the organic, wouldn't you say? Sadly, I did not make the most of this, nor even half of the most.

-People are forever asking, what in the hell is going on at the end? The scattered chaos of the narration after Walk is "possessed" (which include the molecular makeup of the human body, the wavelengths of the visible spectrum of light, and descriptions of the respiratory and circulatory systems) are supposed to represent the Angels trying to perceive reality the same way they would the code of a computer program. It was a neat idea, but it just doesn't work on the page; another missed opportunity for this story.

-Enough about what I don't like in this story, here's what I do ilke about it: Walk himself. He's a lot like the guys I grew up with (or more specifically, like they became after they grew up), an unassuming type who likes to work with his hands and say what's on his mind. He was fun to write. His name is something of a pun, as a physical verb emphasizes his strong ties to the tangible, real world. The Angels, of course, are creatures entirely of cyberspace, and Mafuane is the middle ground, in transition from one to the other.

[BlackRonin]

"Special Delivery"

-I never remember this story. I don't even really remember writing it, except that the whole thing was conceived and written in just two hours. It always slips my mind when I think about my work. I suppose this, too, is a dark fantasy story, like "The Watcher" and "The King in Yellow", but it's hard for me to say what it represents because...I seriously barely remember writing this at all?

[BlackRonin]

"The King in Yellow"

-I live in perpetual fear of being embarassed if someone I know stumbles on these stories. That may sound like an irrational fear, but the truth is, it would be perilously easy for anyone who was paying attention to figure it out. For example, not long ago I became rather vocally obsessed with Robert W Chambers' "The King in Yellow"...to a degree that was impossible to ignore. Other than Frank Herbert, Ayn Rand, and L Ron Hubbard, Chambers is the writer closest to having a literal cult following.

-So what's the secret of the book's appeal? In truth, it's hard to say. It's just a collection of short stories from an otherwise unremembered author. "The King in Yellow" is both the title of the collection and the fictional play that serves as a device uniting the first four stories in it. The rest of the work is, frankly, unimpressive, and it's safe to say that if not for those four stories no one would remember Chambers at all anymore.

I suppose that the reason behind it all is the incredibly dense, potent nature of the language used. We never do learn what the play is about, only getting stray fragments here and there; there is no indication of what "the Yellow Sign" or "the Pallid Mask" really are, except that to the characters who have read it they are things of terrifying importance. Even just the words "The King in Yellow" sound...well, what does that even mean, really? Such a singular turn of phrase feels like it must mean something, but damned if anyone knows what.

-In Chambers' stories, a terrible fate awaits anyone who reads the forbidden play, either madness, death, or more often than not both. He treated each incident as isolated, but I tried to imagine a kind of pandemic outbreak, snowballing out of control as the story went on. Robert Heinlein's "The Puppet Masters" was a good model for the ballooning of a threat as the text goes on. The classic cold war paranoia film "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" helped me get a feel for the insecurity and isolation a character might feel as the noose tightens around them. The Danny Boyle movie "28 Days Later" and its images of abandoned cities and mobs of madmen was my model for this particular apocalyptic vision. Finally, TS Eliot's epic modernist poem "The Waste Land", Samuel Taylor Coleridge's famously haunting "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", and Oscar Wilde's lurid "Salome" helped put me in the mood of the disturbed, dysfunctional atmosphere I wanted to establish.

-Chambers' stories are usually about decadent artists and libertine types, with the suggestion that the play's power over them is somehow an extension of their corrupt lifestyles. The decision to set this story on a college campus came of my idea that rich, privileged Ivy League kids who spend their nights hopping between various parties and various beds would be a modern equivalent of Chambers' 19th century bon vivants.

-The scene with "The Big Bad Wolf" was originally quite different; the narrator leaves his room in a desperate quest for help but encounters an insane specter who looks remarkably like his now-dead professor. The evident ghost chases him and he takes refuge in his room again, vowing never to leave. I edited it in favor of the present exchange because it just never seemed to carry off, and really it was too big of a story beat right before the string of big reveals at the climax. By the way, if you ever wanted to imagine my own personal hell, it would be being trapped in one room with a book I couldn't read.

-I realized too late that it seems a little strange for the supposedly bereaved narrator to be hanging out at a frat party in his grief. Versions posted elsewhere make it clear that he attends only to please an acquaintance and for fear of being found out if people notice that his behavior has altered. In a way though, this is very like a Chambers character, drowning his fear and anxiety in excess and self-indulgence. One of my regrets with this story is not emphasizing enough how, the longer he goes without reading the rest of the play, the harder it becomes, grappling onto anything that will serve as a distraction.

-The statues of the Fates probably seem like ham-fisted symbolism, but they're actually a reference to two Chambers stories, "The Mask" and "The Repairer of Reputations".

-So, have you found the Yellow Sign?

[BlackRonin]

"The King in Yellow: Opening Night"

-Now, this...was a mistake.

Don't get me wrong, I rather like this "story", but as mentioned, the appeal of "The King in Yellow" in all its forms is that you don't ever know what it's really about. So to attempt to write the text of the play itself...well, it spoils the whole thing, doesn't it? Granted, I tried to save face with the "disclaimer" at the end, but even so, I'd doubtless have been better off not bothering. So why did I do it? Well, honestly, I just plain liked this story, and when it came to me it was hard not to actually write it. I'm not alone in this seeming compulsion, as a lot of fans over the century have taken the time to record their own versions of the "real" play.

-I referred to modern playwright Thom Ryng's version of "The King in Yellow" as well as James Blish's "More Light" and Lin Carter's "Tatters of the King", which all present their own conception of the play, but my most prominent influence was Oscar Wilde. I tried to emulate the lurid tone of his "Salome" and "Florentine Tragedy" while assuming the trappings and witty dialogue of "Lady Windermere's Fan" and "A Woman of No Importance". Whereas Ryng, Blish, and Carter envisioned a play of Lovecraftian cosmic horrors and dark fairy tale overtures, I tried to write something comparably more grounded. The Servant character is distinctly the valet from Angela Carter's "The Tiger's Bride", and the bit about the heart in a chalice comes out of "The Decameron". The stage direction "Enter the Guardsman" is a meaningless reference to the musical of that title. I amuse myself in the smallest ways.

-The framing device of the couple in the empty theater is probably the most successful part of this. The names of the actors in the program, of course, are the same as those of the dead characters from my first "King in Yellow" story ("Alexander Scott" being the nameless narrator), and most of them borrow their names from various Chambers stories. The "George Caplan" listed as translator is a pen name I sometimes use, a joke on Hitchcock's "North by Northwest".

-To "find the Yellow Sign" is apparently a terrible omen in Chambers' work, but what it is and what it even means to "find it" varies from story to story. As usual, his characters speak of these things as though their nature is universally understood and doesn't require explanation (which is just maddening). Every fan writer is left to interpret the concept as they will, but whatever it is, it is always a bad thing when it happens, evidently a fate worse than death. I figured that losing your free will had to be about as bad as it can get.

-"The Phantom of Truth" gets a lot of mention in the Chambers book. This phrase is particularly illustrative of what I mean by the ambiguous symbolism of his language; the suggestion that the truth, or what we perceive as the truth, might be just a phantom with no value or real power and presence, was a terrifying one at the turn of the century, as science and philosophy were taking an increasingly iconoclastic approach to the world. As you can probably tell, I had a lot of fun with the wordplay inherent in naming a character "the Truth." The image of the Truth lurking around the stage, unseen by most characters, creeps the shit out of me, and I borrowed it from a particularly strange, unsettling production of "Othello" that I read about.

-Believe it or not, I have two other "King in Yellow" stories in mind, generally meant to restore the mystique that was ruined a bit by this one.

-Have you found it yet?

[BlackRonin]

"Chroma"

-About a year ago I attended the San Francisco ballet for the first time, and among the pieces performed was Wayne McGregor's "Chroma". In this production, the stage dressing is blank white, with a single gap along the back wall allowing the dancers to enter and exit. The dancer's wardrobe is the same color as the background, leaving their faces and their shadows as the only things that stand out against the blinding color scheme. The dramatic, violent choreography gives the impression of people struggling, vainly, to make an impression on the blank non-space that they inhabit, taking increasingly greater risks as they tumble helplessly through a void with nothing to hold them in place. I was so startled by the performance that, naturally, I felt I had to write about it, and this is what tumbled out.

-The idea of fictional characters struggling with their fictitiousness is surprisingly common these days, but I was specifically thinking of Tom Stoppard's play "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead". Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot" also seems to present characters who are trapped by the confines of their story. The gimmick with the clicking keys I took out of a episode of "Night Gallery" called "Midnight Never Ends". At this time I was still in the middle of reading Mark Danielewski's "House of Leaves" and tried to emulate that book's unusual layout and use of blank space.

-All my life I've heard writers talk about how their characters feel like real people. In truth, this concept disturbs the hell out of me. I mean, just look what some people put their characters through. And if your characters are like real people, what does happen to them when the story ends? I shudder to think.

-Jackson Pollack used to say that the subject of his paintings was the making of the painting itself. I try very hard not to get a headache when I think about that, but the same general effect is true of this story, which more or less narrated itself as it went along, as with the part where the characters reference the deleted dialogue.

-The bit where Charlotte "breaks character" actually made me a little uncomfortable, and at the time I wished I hadn't thought of it. Not sure what effect it has on readers.

-Appears as "White Space" on other sites.

[BlackRonin]

"Still Life"

-Another story that pretty much saved me from giving up. I had started writing in earnest a few months earlier but was not particularly happy with my output; I'd finished a long, elaborate multi-part story only to almost immediately begin regretting having started it, and my most recent story garnered little attention. I felt frustrated at my inability to express myself and wasn't sure I would really find an audience. But I figured I would give it one last shot: I knew that the forum members hosted semi-regular writing challenges and I figured if I put in an entry, at least it would get me some exposure. Since the only thing I'd written so far that I considered any good was "Ghost Writer", I tried to conceive of something in that vein. It's lucky I didn't give in to self-pity and quit, because I'm proud of a lot of what I wrote after "Still Life"...and for that matter, "Still Life" is not a half bad story either.

-I had already written about writing in "Ghost Writer", so now I wanted to write something about a visual artist (the arts are a big thing with me; I would go on to write about theater in "The King in Yellow", music in "Phantom", and sculpture in an upcoming story under the working title "Grotesque"). The initial inspiration for "Still Life", though, was the movie "Black Swan"; I wanted to capture that film's depiction of obsession and terrifying detachment from reality. Although the story relates to no particular episode, I also had the Rod Serling series "Night Gallery" in mind for its surreal and macabre visual qualities. The painting that inspired the "haunted eBay painting" was a visual reference for me.

-Christine pretty much became archetypal for my heroines. Originally she was even more screwed up, pretty much reduced to an insane shut-in by the time the story started, but I thought it would be hard for anyone to relate to her if she was already completely fucked in the head. Another important decision was that, originally, she was repressed and sexless in the style of women in 19th century ghost stories, but after the first draft I figured hell with that, let's make her an outgoing, sex-positive woman, like most of the women I know; there's no reason why the character's problems have to be rooted in sex, or a lack of it, there can be more going on here.

-Originally, David was conceived as a woman, a sassy best friend type not dissimilar to the one briefly used in "Ghost Writer". I'd like to say I changed it because I realized how trite the characterization was, but actually it's just because I was getting increasingly uncomfortable with the frequency of violence against women in my stories and once I figured out that this character would meet an untimely end I flipped the gender. This was a happy accident, as once I did the story became about a woman's strange contest between three wholly distinct male figures. Komos saw significant changes in characterization as well, starting off as an overtly sinister figure but ending up as a kind of tentative, overly impassioned teenager type. You can say that David represents what Christine wants in a man mentally, Komos emotionally, and Troy physically. I'd like to take credit for that spread, but in truth I had no idea until reading the story again now.

-I use dreams, visions, and other altered mental states a lot in my stories, to the point where I now wonder if I'm going to that well too frequently. Not only are dreams just a good way to bring in unusual imagery, but they're particularly convenient in a sex story because, hey, sometimes it's hard to justify characters stopping and fucking each other silly right in the middle of whatever is going on in the plot, but it's always a good time for a wet dream.

-I guess this is as good a time as any to consider, why write erotic horror in the first place? The Freudian in me wants to say that we're exploring the natural tension that unites sex, fear, and violence; sex is the ultimate survival instinct, fear is the greatest motivator, and violence the most direct catalyst for conflict and change. They make a very potent combination. And really, horror stories are just fun. I like that I can look down this list, or the list of a writer with similar sensibilities, and present such a myriad of different, intriguing concepts: "This is a werewolf story, this is a story about a haunted costume party, this is a story about a camping trip where one of the campers is a monster but no one can figure out who," (I haven't finished that last one yet, but you get the idea) etc. Not that any good writer of any genre can't do the same, really, but I think these ideas, being out of the ordinary, are naturally fired with an extra bit of intrigue.

-In addition to titles, I also really love writing the little tagline introductions. Sounds strange, but they're a great tool for creating tension right off the bat. This is one my favorites, although other favorites include "Ghost Writer" ("Some stories want to be told."), "The Mummy" ("What will wake the dead?") and "The Watcher" ("It's hard to be alone together."). I really regret not going with my second choice on "Man nor Beast": "Loneliness can make you into a monster."

[BlackRonin]

"Blooded"

-When I began writing in earnest (I've written all my life, but only in the last two years have I put regular, dedicated work into it on a daily basis), I decided right away that there would be no vampire stories. Not that I don't like vampires, it was just too being done too much. Naturally, this conviction did not last particularly long, but when I went back on it I decided that I would at least do something out of the ordinary. I resolved to write a deconstruction of erotic vampire stories, following three rules: One, to never overtly use the "V word"; Two, to make no direct mention of fangs, mystical powers, or other common vampire tropes; and Three, to make the vampires as unsexy and non-glamorous as possible. To that degree, at least, I suppose "Blooded" is a success.

-This story also marks a turning point for me, one where I stepped away from writing in an overtly exploitative style and strove for something a bit more subtle. I think exploitation works fine for some people, just not for me, and my earlier stories are something of a mess for trying to employ a style that's not very well-suited to my sensibilities or my material. Would have been nice if I figured this out sooner, but then, I suppose that's true of everything in life.

-As mentioned, I wanted the vampires in "Blooded" to be as unappealing as I could make them, really just one scant step above heroin addicts...except that heroin doesn't turn you into an emotionless, calculating sociopath. It's a story about addiction, and it's also a story about temptation. In most sex stories, giving in to temptation is depicted as a good thing, or at the very least an enjoyable thing, but I wondered, what happens if you give in and it's not good, it's not fun or satisfying, if it just makes things worse? How do you live with yourself then, having essentially gotten the worst of both worlds for your trouble? Looking at it now, this is a pretty ambitious story...and a little full of itself too. Still, I try not to be too hard on it, as it's a measurable step forward from previous writings.

-Oh, and we kill a hooker in this story. Again...

At this stage I was already getting VERY uncomfortable with the level of violence against women in my stories, and after "Ghost Writer" I really did not want to resort to depicting violence against sex workers as an easy dramatic device again (I've become increasingly sensitive about that kind of thing because, well, I'm friends with some of those people, and they deal with a lot of risks that I'd rather not make light of). Sadly, there was just no way that any other woman was going to come on to this character, given the state he was in. I felt like I was straining the bounds of credulity as it was.

-I considered and discarded two other wholly different plots before settling on this one, the first being a monstrously stupid story about a girl whose vampire boyfriend sells her out; it was a mean-spirited story that doesn't reflect well on me, and I'm incredibly relieved that I never finished writing it. The second was an appeal to both traditional vampire folklore and the Highgate Cemetery vampire scare of the late 60s, a story about a late night cemetery orgy that wakes up something best left interred. I'm...not really sure why I didn't write that one, it's actually kind of a neat idea. Maybe I'll put it back on the list.

-I rather like the idea that a vampire operates primarily on sense of smell, and that other vampires don't smell like anything, leaving them as kind of big blank spots in the world to one another. It's unsettling. I'll probably use it again.

[ELaken-Palmer]

This was great information. I really liked "The King In Yellow" best.

[BlackRonin]

I liked that one too.

"Ghost Writer"

-Horror writers in the habit of making characters who are also writers have long been a pet peeve of mine (Stephen King does this a LOT). But when it came down to it, I found that I had something I really wanted to say about writing too, so it seems there's no rule I won't walk back on for the sake of a story. I suppose that's as it should be. In this case, I'd been writing in earnest for a little while and was feeling a bit uncomfortable with my own material, but I was also concerned over a particular sort of reader reaction.

This site features a fair number of "snuff" stories, most of them quite graphic, and posting such a story invariably provokes at least a few comments to the effect of, "Why would you write this, what kind of sick person would write this?" That bothered me because, honestly, I don't think writers of snuff stories are sick people at all (well, maybe some of them are, but not because of those stories). I think they most likely write what they do for the same reason everyone does: Because that's the story that came to them. While it's true that what we write does reflect who we are, it's not usually in the broad, simple ways that people seem to want to interpret. Strange and frightening art can come from the most innocuous of people, and often they're just as at a loss over it as anyone else, and it's dangerous to try to cast aspersions on people based on the content of their work

-The story was written under the working title "Stranger than Fiction", and although the content is wildly different I did indeed look to that movie for an example of an unusual relationship between a writer and her book. I've never had much problem with writer's block myself (yeah, I know, you hate me, sorry), so I used Neil Gaiman's "Sandman" story "Calliope" and the David Duchovny movie "Kalifornia" as reference for how desperate a person can get when they owe writing they can't produce. A long Ray Bradbury essay titled "Drunk and in Charge of a Bicycle" presented an intriguing profile on stories that seem to write themselves (presented as a good thing in that context). Finally, I looked to three of the most noteworthy horror stories of all time, Edgar Allan Poe's "Fall of the House of Usher", Charlotte Perkins Gillman's "The Yellow Wallpaper", and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's "Green Tea", all stories which, in the words of one editor, "refuse to distinguish the paranormal and the psychologically aberrant."

-This story was just hell to write. It went through an ungodly number of revisions, partly because it was just the most ambitious story I'd attempted to date but also largely because it took me a long time to figure out what, exactly, I wanted to say. In the end it came down to a contrast between exploitative and non-exploitative writing, but this was tricky because I didn't want to seem like I was trying to elevate one kind of writing over another. Rather, I was just making the point that everyone has got to do their own thing, if for no other reason than that doing everyone else's thing just won't work for you. For example, originally Joan's book was to be a rather florid romance novel (to contrast as much as possible with the sleazy splatterpunk horror story that it would turn into), but then I worried that it would look like I was saying something derogatory about romance novels. It took a lot of work to get close to anything that felt like a decent balance.

-I wanted to draw a firm line not just between the book Joan thinks she's writing and the book she turns out, but also between my writing style and "hers." As such, the scenes with Joan are written in an understated way, while the contents of her book are written with almost vulgar directness. This had the accidental (but fortunate) effect of jarring me out of the style I had previously written in, as I realized that the "quieter" frame story scenes were much stronger than the more graphic story-within-a-story stuff that resembled my previous efforts. Over the next few months I gradually transitioned away from exploitation and closer to what I'm doing today, which worked out much better in the long run...although, as I hope "Ghost Writer" points out, it's not a question of the objective merits of any style of story but rather just what works best for each individual person. Incidentally, I'm considering trying to find a collaborator for an upcoming story featuring a character's written work. I figure the best way to make certain passages sound like they were written by someone else is if they really were.

-So what the hell is really going on in this story? Well, I think that's better left up in the air. I like stories that straddle the line between supernaturalism and psychological trauma, but I think a lot of horror writers (particularly writers of horror movies) tend to use "It was all in his/her head!" as a cop-out and blow the whole thing for the sake of a tired "twist" ending. I think it's more effective, and scarier, if you're left feeling that it could go one way or the other. As one critic said of "The Yellow Wallpaper": "It may be a ghost story. Worse yet, it may not." Even just reading those two sentences gives me a little chill.

-Another note on just how exacting I am with character names: originally it was "Joan Peters", but "Peters" sounded like exactly what it was, namely a dull placeholder because I couldn't think of anything else. This bothered me for weeks and weeks. I'm not exaggerating when I say that I might not have ever posted the story if I couldn't think of a name I liked. By chance I stumbled on the name of a minor character in William Gibson's "Mona Lisa Overdrive" and decided it had just the right quality that I wanted. "Lanier" (prounounced "Lan-yare") felt just obscure enough to be real and had a phonetic quality that made it easy to remember. Suffice to say, I was elated.

[Pornvillage]

oh very nice

[loverboyx8x]

Very nice !

[BlackRonin]

Thank you, I appreciate you taking the time to look these over. I keep meaning to finish these, but I've been working on something new that's consumed a lot of my time. And there's just never enough time for everything...

[BlackRonin]

Okay, no sense putting these off any longer:

"The Last Full Moon"

-Of everything I've posted on the site, this is almost certainly my weakest effort overall. It was one of my first efforts at a sex story, and I hadn't really settled on a voice or a tone or even thought that hard about my material. I always feel a little bad when I low-rate this story, since it's still popular with readers and it seems as if I'm criticizing their taste when I try to distance myself from this, but there you have it.

-This was my first attempt to write something in the vein of Angela Carter, and so, not coincidentally, was also my first werewolf story. I think I had "The Tiger's Bride" in mind. Already a bit uncomfortable with the depiction of women in my other posted story, I wanted to write something a little more female-centric, while at the same time avoiding the common elements of supernatural romance stories aimed at that readership. I suppose in that sense, at least, the story is a success...but it's still not very good.

-Before settling on contemporary San Francisco as the place for most of my stories, I entertained the concept of a fictional, turn-of-the-century New England village as a common setting, something in the vein of Nathanial Hawthorne. This story was, in fact, supposed to inaugurate the setting. But the second village story, "Goblin Market", was never finished, and eventually I lost interest in the period. You can see how elements like the mysterious stone icons and the antagonism between the village inhabitants and the (possibly not entirely human) forest dwellers are set up here for future plotlines.

-One thing I do like about this story, at least in concept, is the ambiguous nature of the werewolf during the sex scene; man or beast? This, like so much else I've done, is an homage/rip-off of Carter's "The Company of Wolves", and it's a motif I'm trying again in the upcoming story "Red", hopefully to better effect.

-Curiously, this story was stolen word for word and posted on another site by an apparent admirer. She claimed later that she "hadn't meant" to make it seem as if she were taking credit for it when she posted it. I wondered if maybe she had a bridge to sell me, but decided the matter wasn't worth pursuing once the story was removed. Honestly, you put something out there for all the world to see without any copyright, you're pretty much asking for it. The thief, I noticed, at least had the wherewithal to correct the typographical error in the opening line...which I found just maddening, for some reason.

[BlackRonin]

"It Came From Outer Space!" (Parts 1-4)

-And then there's...this.

It's one thing that there are some stories of mine that I just plain don't like, but this is the only one that embarrasses me. Truth is, I wrote these notes in reverse chronological order just so I could put off talking about it. This story, in fact, is the primary reason I don't want my real name attached to any of this material. But for all that, it's still my largest project and one of my most popular postings, and I must admit that if not for this story, I probably would never have written any of the rest of these. So I have a mixed relationship with it, to say the least.

It's written in a wildly different style from the rest of my work, and was intended as a schlocky, tongue-in-cheek parody of certain tropes in both horror and pornography. The tone shifts noticeably in part three as I began to realize that my original concept just wasn't working out, and that chapter is actually a big moment for me as a writer. Much as I'd prefer to disown it.

-Believe it or not, this story's origins lie in, of all things, my communication's law class. While studying legal cases dealing with obscenity statutes, we came across a lawsuit over the sale of a pornographic Japanese comic called "Demon Beast Invasion". Among the cited points in the prosecutor's argument against the book's, ahem, artistic merits was a scene of tentacle rape. A few of my bemused classmates had never heard of such an idea, and one woman (who actually seemed to find it rather funny) asked, apparently at a loss, "What's that all about?"

It was a good question; exactly what does inspire people to write, and read, that singular subgenre of porn? The "Demon Beast Invasion" case got me thinking about the idea (boy, I bet that's a sentence you didn't think you'd be reading when you got up this morning). Surely those tropes must appeal to something in the human psyche? It is, after all, not an entirely obscure branch of storytelling, even if its audience seems narrow.

After pondering the matter for, um, longer than is probably normal, I set on a theory: Tentacle porn is actually an expression of our desire for fertility imagery. No, really, think about it, what do you see over and over in comics, anime, and text stories that employ this theme: huge phallic shapes, hyperbolic amounts of fluids, forced impregnation that usually involves uteruses, breasts, and other reproductive organs of inhuman magnitude, and the repeating leitmotif of breeding, usually in huge numbers. It all smacks of the imagery used in ancient fertility and virility art, basically the oldest trick in the book when it comes to both art and religion.

The idea amused and fascinated me. But I didn't have anyone to discuss it with because, and I'm sure this will surprise you, you can't just approach any given person on your college campus and try to engage them in a discussion about the psychological symbolism of tentacle porn. Not even in San Francisco. So I decided to write about it instead. The story was just supposed to be an exercise in these ideas, a way to bounce them out there to like-minded people and see if anyone agreed. Somewhere along the way, it turned into something else entirely. Best not to think about how, and why, that actually happened...

-As mentioned, chapter three of this was something of a turning point for me. The closing scene of that installment, with Stacy running through the house, was the first thing I wrote that felt genuinely scary to me. The opening scene of chapter four, with busybody Mrs. Goodman, is actually pretty good too. And I am still interested in the fertility themes; they came up again in "New Arrivals". Sometimes I wonder if I shouldn't revisit this in some capacity and try to fix it up so that the material I like in it can come out of the closet. But most of the time I just try to keep that closet door shut.

-Chapter four originally had a rather ghastly downer ending in which the alien actually won. To be honest, I still feel this is the stronger ending, and in fact it's always a challenge for me to write a "happy" ending that doesn't feel like a cop-out, which this one, to me, does. So why did I go with the ending I did? Well, frankly, it only took me until about halfway through chapter two to become very uncomfortable with the seeming misogynist bent that was emerging in my writing; I was working on "Ghost Writer" at the same time, and it could not escape my notice that women kept getting raped, murdered, and, um, consumed, in my work.

Not that there's anything wrong with that implicitly (there are only a few stories I've ever written where someone doesn't meet a bad end), but something about the serialized victimization and the way the violence erased the female character's individuality seemed...ill-minded, for lack of a better term. So I changed the ending to try to mitigate the perceived misogyny. How well did it work? Eh, about as well as most of the rest of the story, to be honest. But I at least like that by this stage I was putting enough thought into what I was writing to even consider the matter.

-True story, I've since met several attractive, intelligent women who have openly confessed to loving tentacle porn. Takes all types, I guess.

And now we're going to have a little change of format, as from this point on the notes will address everything post "Two Wishes" in chronological order. No refunds for whiplash complaints.

[BlackRonin]

"Grandfather Death and Virgin Mary"

-There are certain themes and conventions that, even when you're writing porn and even when you're posting on a venue where almost anything goes, are going to be considered edgier than others: rape, snuff, bestiality, necrophilia, cannibalism etc. (incest, oddly, is considering rather conventional). Any or all of these are liable to draw harsh criticism just as a matter of kind, but even these pale in comparison to the controversy you'll court by writing about pederasty. Personally, I look at controversy as a challenge; I like to try to take on "edgy" or fringe material and see if I can do unconventional things with it. So it was really only a matter of time before I broached the most sensitive topic of all.

But I didn't want to do it directly, not only because there are, very recently, rules about such things, but just because the direct approach didn't appeal to me. I wondered, how can I write a story about child molestation that's not actually about child molestation? Then I remembered how 19th century Penny Dreadful writers would sometimes use vampires as a way to skirt censorship and moral watchdogs of the age by disguising sexual content through the vampire's feeding. If it was good enough for Joseph Le Fanu, it's good enough for me.

-My primary model and inspiration was "Lolita", specifically the early chapters, and even more specifically the narrator's painfully self-aware analogy of himself as being like a spider at the center of its web. That mix of diseased zeal and shame-filled self-deprecation was the tone I wanted to hit. For more direct characterization I looked at the artsy 2000 horror flick "Shadow of the Vampire" with Willem Dafoe's bravara performance as an aging, seemingly senile bloodsucker. The convention of the vampire haunted by the sadistic ghost of his dead love interest I lifted from Pat Mill's Franco-British comic series "Requiem Chevalier Vampire". Though the plots are unrelated, I took my cue from HP Lovecraft's "The Shunned House" trying to nail the atmosphere of decay in the old Gothic mansion (I even worked the title into the text). For the dialogue, I studied Alfred Hitchcock's awkwardly shot but brilliantly written "Rope" for many examples of conversations where all the involved parties disastrously misinterpret one another as a matter of kind.

-There's a lot going on in this story thematically; on one hand it's just a straightforward allegory about parental abuse. Not the direct, open kind, but the sort of insidious, stomach-turning manipulation that's possible when a very young child trusts you completely. It's also a story about being a parent and learning to look at your child as an independent entity, and how parents can be threatened by the sudden reality of their child's sexual agency and hobbled by the Virgin/Whore complex. Most of all, it's just a story about lies and how malleable the truth really can be.

***SPOILERS AHEAD***

-With all that going on, you'd think I'd like "Grandfather Death", but I consider this a failed story in the same vein (if you'll pardon the pun) as "The Mummy". In both cases, the story was hobbled in writing by my not being quite sure how to end it. In the original conclusion, Friedrich simply kills Mary after she (in his mind) betrays him. At that point the story was being written under the working title "The Last Beat of Your Heart" and was really a very different piece of work. But I realized, just as I thought I was getting close to a final draft, that this ending seems to reinforce the Virgin/Whore paradigm that I really wanted to undermine; it seemed like Mary and her boyfriend were primarily motivated by greed, and that she became untrustworthy as soon as she became independent.

So then I added some lines making it clear that her primary motivation was (justifiable) fear; but now the ending was just too ghastly. I considered the idea that she would have to live, but how to pull that off without seeming like a cop-out? And how in the hell was I even going to kill off the vampire? Around and around these questions went with no real answer. Realizing that I had written myself into a corner, I picked the least unattractive option available to me and resigned myself to it. Another missed opportunity; but live and learn, I guess...

-This story was supposed to be part of a larger arrangement of stories modeled on popular fairy tales (my upcoming "Red" is the other story that grew out of this idea). If you'll notice, "Grandfather Death" is actually "Hansel & Gretel": two lost children are in the hands of a monster, one being "fattened up" for consumption and the other being put to work. The details are different, but I tried to stick to the basic structure as best I could. Given this, Friedrich's demise probably should have involved some form of immolation...but I didn't think about it at the time.

-The significance of Mary's name is eye-rollingly obvious, but I had a hell of a time figuring out what to name the vampire. I'd have loved to name him after a character in "Lolita", but the narrator of that book is given the intentionally absurd moniker of "Humbert", which obviously isn't going to do. Nor could I name him after Nabakov himself, because there's simply no way you can call your vampire "Vlad" and be taken seriously. "Friedrich" was a placeholder name that somehow stuck (I think I had my distaste for Nietzsche in mind when I picked it). This is troubling given that the character is supposed to be Turkish, but I justified it by guessing it probably wasn't his original name anyway.

[BlackRonin]

"Wendigo"

-Like I said with "The Mummy", sometimes I just pick an idea or a theme and decide I want to write a story about that, rather than an idea coming to me on its own. Usually this does not work very well, but "Wendigo" is a rare exception. I think maybe the difference is that I sat on this one for a while; I decided I wanted to write a wendigo story, but I didn't try to do it right away. Rather, I just kind of referred back to the idea every few weeks and hoped that a plot or some characters suited to the theme might emerge. Finally one day I just started thinking about rural settings I might use and sat down to write a few paragraphs about some people making a trip, and before I knew it I was on a roll.

-There are a fair number of wendigo in horror literature and media, but few were quite suited to the kind of story I wanted to tell. The creature in Algernon Blackwood's "The Wendigo", for example, bears no resemblance to the folkloric monster at all. I still used that story as a reference for the bleak mercilessness of nature, though, and the bit about the wind repeating names I lifted from Blackwood. For the physical description of the monster I referenced the Ithaqua from August Derleth's "The Thing that Walked on the Wind". The love triangle and family grudge angle of the story was probably inspired by similar material in the wendigo-themed episode of the now defunct horror anthology series "Fear Itself", "Skin and Bones". Finally, to inform the theme of taboo, I kept several Clive Barker stories in mind, most notably "The Hellbound Heart".

-One thing that makes "Wendigo" a stronger (in my opinion) story than similar concept-inspired ones is that I took the time to think about why I wanted to write about this particular idea. Wendigo myths are about taboo, about reminding people that there are certain lines they should never cross, no matter what, so I started thinking about what modern cultural taboos are. I didn't want to explore a specific culture though, preferring instead to think in general terms: going behind someone's back, betraying a friend, hurting a family member, lying to the person you love.

The confused love story that forms the root of the conflict seemed like a particularly interesting exploration of what's forbidden; technically, there's no firm reason that the characters shouldn't be together, but a lot of taboos are not about firm and sensible reasons but just about stigma. Of course, I kept the cannibalism theme too, it being central to the myth.

-Almost all of my stories have an urban setting. I don't particularly enjoy the Great Outdoors. That said, the house in this story, and the deserted, forested area it sits in, is modeled after the house I grew up in. When we moved up there, we were almost the only people for miles in any direction. The thing about the monsters and the snow-covered trees is a real childhood recollection, and I hoped that I could use this story to communicate the combination of giddy thrill and brittle terror that comes of being alone in the wilderness, all the sounds in the world seemingly switched off by the falling snow. It really did snow on my birthday one year, the 28th of April, and old-timers would often tell me about freak summer snowstorms that happened now and then.

-There was a problem with the character of Karina all along; she just didn't have that much personality as written, and since I knew she was going to die first there was very little time to do anything with her. If I may make an embarrassing confession, the only reason she's in the story at all is because originally she was supposed to be psychic, and it was her presence that attracted the ghost/creature. I excised that on the grounds that I fucking hate psychic characters in horror stories (it's just lazy). I considered writing her out altogether, but then what shocking thing could happen to tip the character's off that they're in danger? Believe it or not, I briefly considered changing Karina to the family dog who gets mauled. The only reason I didn't was because I needed the tent around for the second sex scene.

-Among other abandoned character concepts was that I imagined Eric might be bisexual and possibly have had a brief relationship with Paul, which would mean that, between Eric, Karina, and the narrator, Paul seemed to be singling out people he's had romantic or sexual relationships with (which seemed very like him). But since Eric is something of a passive character and prone to indecision, I didn't want to accidentally portray him as a "confused" or weak-minded bisexual stereotype.

-Even though I didn't draw much from Algernon Blackwood's "The Wendigo", I still quoted from it. This is mostly because I was still kicking myself for forgetting to quote another Blackwood story at the start of "Grandfather Death", which should have included this selection from Blackwood's "The Empty House":

"There is nothing more desolate in all the abodes of men than an unfurnished house dimly lit, silent, and forsaken, and yet tenanted by the memories of evil and violent histories."

-I realized halfway through that my main character had no name; one simply hadn't come up for her. I decided that I liked it that way and wanted to keep it, but this also meant that, until the sex scenes, the reader couldn't even be sure that the narrator was a woman. This was a lot harder to fix than you might think, but the solution, when it finally came to me, was simple: change the line "when I was young" to "when I was a little girl". Sometimes there's no way around exposition, but you can at least bury it as deep as you can and in as many small, unobtrusive pieces and then it's not so bad. I hope.

-Some indecision on my part about what the monster should look like; wendigo in media are often either werewolf-like or something like a sasquatch, but that didn't fit the folklore. Folkloric wendigo, on the other hand, look mostly like the corpses of starved men, which is certainly scary but did not feel intimidating enough; I wanted something that had size and physical presence. In the end, I left it ambiguous except for a few critical details, mostly derived from the ancient creature in "The Thing that Walked on the Wind".

[BlackRonin]

"Grand Guignol"

-This might be the first instance of anything I wrote being inspired by a story that I completely despised. In general, I don't like Harlan Ellison; I find his particular brand of misanthropy cheap and lazy, and his constant deluges of anger feel like stunts. But I was particularly pissed off by the way he tried to capitalize on the much publicized real-life murder of Kitty Genovese, particularly in his bafflingly successful short story, "The Whimper of Whipped Dogs".

To hear Ellison tell it, Genovese's neighbors pulled their chairs up to the windows to watch her be raped and stabbed, or turned their radios up higher so that they wouldn't have to listen to her screams. This is all complete bullshit, of course, but Ellison is never one to let a little thing like the facts get in the way of his hourly excuse to be angry. Although Ellison was not the first to recount the now-infamous myth of "Kitty Genovese" syndrome, he sure as fuck never got tired of harping on it. So I decided that if Ellison could write a story about bullshit then I could just as easily write a story about what really happened; of course, my story won't get the same kind of play his does, since he is famous and successful and I am not, but apparently life isn't fair. Who knew?

-Other than Ellison's nega-inspiration, I also took point from Ray Bradbury's "The October Game". Bradbury's horror stories don't get as much play as his sci-fi tales and contemporary narratives, but he was a master of the horrifying, gut-punch ending that leaves you shocked and disturbed as much by what you don't know as what you did. Weird as it may sound, the stage musical "Little Shop of Horrors" and its film adaptation was a great study in how people respond to violence differently in different entertainment mediums; everyone loves the play's downer ending but audiences almost rioted when it was applied to the film, so that it had to be changed. Finally, the oddball classic exploitation movie "The Last House on the Left" was a handy study in the gritty, sleazy atmosphere of ritualized stage violence.

-Make no mistake, I had an agenda with this one. I wanted to take to task the prevalent cultural myths about the inciting incident. I also wanted to explore that idea of the no-man's land between perception and reality, both in the moment and after the fact. As such, in my first draft I didn't pull any punches and actually used Genovese's real name. However, as I detailed the violence of the "rape" and "murder" scene at the finale, I began to become uncomfortable using the name of the real victim. So to give the devil his due, I borrowed Ellison's thin pseudonym "Leona Ciarelli" from "The Whimper of Whipped Dogs". I even worked in a reference to that title, just to amuse myself. Don't say I never did anything for you, Harlan.

-As I did a little research, I was shocked to find out that Genovese was a lesbian. Not that the fact itself is shocking, mind you, but I couldn't believe that with all of the press around the incident I'd never before heard that. I immediately changed the straight couples in the story to lesbian ones in light of this reveal. This added a whole, weird, gender-queer quality to the interactions, which I liked. At the time I was writing an article about domestic abuse in same-sex relationships, which I then applied to two couples in the story.

-At first I figured I could make the violence in the story as graphic as I wanted, since there was a "safety barrier" in place; the violence is false even within the false universe of the story. But as I wrote it, I found that this didn't really matter, as blood is blood no matter how you dress it up. This, of course, is a big part of the theme of the story in the first place; all violence, and indeed, all acts in a work of fiction are equally as fake, but people can still be provoked by them anyway. How many steps removed from reality do you have to make something before the audience will relax its guard? Or is there really nothing you can do to soften the blow? I'm still not sure.

-The theme of ritualized violence on stage was one I tried in several different stories, none of which ever took off before this one. The title "The Silent Scream" is the one element that carried over in every incarnation though. It was almost the title of the story too, as was "Theater of Pain". I think "Grand Guignol" is a good title, but probably a mistake anyway, since it's non-indicative if you don't know what it means and probably doesn't stand out on the page very much. Ah well.

[BlackRonin]

About time I updated this. There's already a fully annotated version of "Roses are Red" for anyone who is interested in that story. I don't have anything else to add now except that I still really, really love that title. Instead we'll skip right ahead to "The Changeling Baby."

-I don't spend a lot of time sweating the content that I write, but at this point I realized that I had just written four particularly graphic stories in a row. All the cannibalism and rape murders started to feel like a bit much even for me, so I intentionally picked a story idea that was a little "softer," something bittersweet and thoughtful. This is not a particularly popular tale and to be honest the prose is quite awkward and ungainly, so I can see why. But I'm still a little proud of it despite its inadequacy.

-"The Changeling Baby" is my meditation on a folkloric concept that long fascinated me, the theme of the "hidden people," the belief in various cultures of invisible but still real and tangible non-human creatures living side-by-side with humanity. Traditional fairies, Icelandic elves, Middle Eastern genies, and of course, trolls all fell under this broad category. What if the "invisible peoples" were still, in fact, with us? What would their lives be like in the modern age? For inspiration I looked to Neil Gaiman's "American Gods" to see how magical creatures might eke out workaday lives. I considered Gregory Maguire's "Wicked" and the children's short story "Windwood Rose" for meditations on how being born with a magical gift might actually be a terrible thing. And I tried to emulate the tone of several of Mike Mignola's best "Hellboy" comics, including "The Corpse" (which has a changeling child) and "Baba Yaga," for Mignola's special knack of writing things that "feel" like real folktales.

-The painting referenced in the storybook is by John Bauer, whose illustrations were also a big inspiration. The indefinite "name" Troll Mother was taken from the Bauer caption. Other fun with names: Nissa's name means "test" in Hebrew but can mean "elf" or "fairy" in Scandinavian cultures; both definitions work well here. The only reason I gave the baby a name, Foster, was because it's also a name associated with fairy lore. William's name I chose just because I thought the character "felt" like a William, but it turns out that the name's etymology of being a combination of words for "wish/desire" and "shield/protection" suited the story. Lucky break.

-It used to be I never wrote about characters younger than 18 because I just wasn't comfortable writing graphic sex scenes about anyone still in high school. That's not a judgment on other people's work, just my own personal boundary. I admit that it probably hurt stories like "Midsummer's Eve." It seemed important that "The Changeling Baby" be a true coming of age story though, so here I finally broke down and penned a 16 year old protagonist. It felt right for this story. Of course, on other sites I usually have to age the character back up to 18 to meet their guidelines, which really cocks the whole thing up. Oh well.

-The hollow people are a combination of two folkloric concepts, fetches and hulder. A fetch is just a magical piece of wood made to look (and act) like a real person, but a hulder is a type of Scandinavian folk creature sometimes confused with a troll. Hulders were hollow on the inside and could only ever face you from one direction lest you notice they had no back. This seemed like a straightforward image when I plotted the relevant scene, but when it came time to write it proved damn near impossible to describe. I still can't "fix" the language so that I like it.

-As the story drew to a close I faced a dilemma: Changelings were a persistent part of both fairy and troll lore, but the stories never really made sense. Why would the fairies leave their own baby behind? Why not just steal the human baby and be done with it? In the first draft it was vaguely waved off as a "tradition," but that just wasn't good enough. I was a little proud of drumming up a solution to what I consider a centuries-old folkloric inconsistency. Though I'm probably the only one who cares.

-I liked the Golden Gate Park setting so much in "Roses are Red" that I decided to recycle it here. For a while I actually made myself a little spooked about the place and didn't go back for some time after writing these. Heh. William and Nissa live on 10th St, near the Judah St intersection; I made sure there was a real apartment building there, just for consistency's sake.

[BlackRonin]

"The Ballad of Tam Lin":

-This story sat on the shelf for almost a year. I set out to write stories based on three folk songs, all from Fairport Convention's legendary "Liege & Lief" album, which my mother's infatuation with proved a huge influence on my creative development when I was a kid. But after "Matty Groves" turned out mediocre and I had to can "Crazy Man Michael" (upon learning that it was the only original song on the album and thus the lyrics were copyrighted), I lost faith in "Tam Lin" and moved on to other things. While browsing through old story ideas for something in a lighthearted vein I rediscovered the discarded first draft. It had been long enough since I wrote it that I didn't remember most of the jokes and...well, as I've mentioned several times already here, it's very bad form to praise your own writing, but I was pleased to discover that the story really was quite funny after all. It became an instant favorite of mine, I still enjoy reading it. Again, it's in very poor taste for me to say so. But here we are.

-Other influences, besides the eponymous folk song, were Terry Gilliam's "Discworld" novels, the script of "The Princess Bride" and to a lesser extent "Monty Python...Holy Grail" and the stage musical version "Spamalot." The Fairy Queen was modeled after the character of the Moon in the (unbelievably disturbing) children's ghost story "Drawing the Mooon." In fact, originally she was quite a bit scarier, but I didn't want to spoil the story's tone too much, so I reeled her in a bit. I tried to write Janet and Tam Lin's combative banter in the vein of Kate and Petruchio in "The Taming of the Shrew," (notice I said "tried" rather than "succeeded in"; even I'm not that much of an egomaniac), particularly the film version with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.

-Fun with names: Tam Lin and Janet were named for me already. Sir Guyon is the Knight of Temperance in Edmund Spenser's "The Fairy Queen," so he was a clear choice to be Tam Lin's nemesis (how short of a straw do you have to draw to wind up with the temperance gig at knight school anyway?). The unseen Sir Topaz is named after the callow, idiot knight in "The Canterbury Tales." Lady Astrid's name is completely anachronistic and I really wish I'd called her something else, but no one else seems to mind.

-Speaking of anachronisms, I got a rather snotty (but entirely factually correct) comment on one site criticizing me for not using proper Scots dialect and terminology in this story. You would never hear the word "creek" in the Borders region that gave us this ballad, for example. I can honestly say this never crossed my mind, but it probably should have.

-As I said, this song was a huge influence on me growing up; it's the best track on "Liege & Lief" and I must have heard it a hundred times before the age of eight. I didn't quite get all of the lyrics though: I used to think that the reference to Tam Lin taking women's "maiden head" literally meant he cut their heads off...which really makes it a radically different story.

-The characterization of Tam Lin is pretty consistent with the old ballad (well, more or less), but I turned Janet from an earnest young heroine into a clever con artist on par with the male "hero." This was not something I planned, it just developed organically and I ran with it.

-"Tam Lin" is my pen name on most sites, by the by, or some variation on it.

-Finally, although I always change and re-edit stories when submitting them to new sites, I rarely make substantial changes to the structure or plot. This story is the only exception, as I came to realize that it really did need one more sex scene and that Tam Lin and Janet's first meeting doesn't last nearly long enough. So I wrote a whole extra bit between them that readers on this site never got to see. But since I think it turned out to have some reasonably funny lines that I'd hate to see go to waste, here it is as "bonus feature":

Tam Lin cleared his throat. "I believe there are some additional steps that need to be taken. As a formality." He began rubbing her shoulders. She nodded. "I was afraid of that," Janet said.

She stood up and took off her green cloak, laying it on the grass. Then she laid down on it, face-up, propping her hands behind her head and gesturing to Tam Lin. "Well, come on then, take me," she said, in tones usually reserved for ordering someone to clean the stables. Tam Lin, breaking all known precedent, hesitated. On one hand, here was a beautiful woman who had given him an unambiguous go-ahead. On the other hand, her body language suggested less a woman and more a fallen tree. And while he had absolutely no experience in the matter, he was reasonably certain that true love was supposed to seem a bit more...well, true.

Maybe she's just nervous, he told himself. Janet examined the stitching of her cloak with a critical eye while she waited. Perhaps a kiss would loosen her up? Tam Lin lay beside her, running his fingers through her hair, touching her cheek, leaning in and pressing his lips to her soft, red, trembling—

"Excuse me?" Janet said.

Tam Lin sat up. "Hmm?"

"Don't tell me you need directions, Tam Lin?" Janet said. "Your business is down there, not up here."

"Um, well, it's just, it's customary to usually—"

"I don't stand on custom, Tam Lin, and I don't lie under it either. It's a very long ride back to the castle so if we could just get a move on with the particulars?"

Tam Lin frowned. "Look, are you sure you're in love with me?"

"Does that sound like something I'd be unsure of?"

"Increasingly, yes."

"Oh fine," said Janet, sitting up and sighing. "Tam Lin, you're the most spectacular man I've ever met. Tam Lin, you're Adonis, I can't live without you. Tam Lin, you've stoked an unquenchable fire in my loins and I can't bear another minute without your touch. Take me, oh take me now my brave champion of etc." She sounded like she was reciting arithmetic. "Convinced?"

Not really, thought Tam Lin, but the hell with it. He unfastened his breeches. Janet lay back again and pulled up her riding skirts, which she'd had the forethought to wear with a minimum of undergarments. Tam Lin had to coax her legs apart a little bit and the passage was awkward because she would not wrap them around him. Finally he got himself well-situated and then...and then...

Janet sighed again. "Problem?"

"...this has never happened to me before."

"You cannot be serious."

"Well, all right, once, but that was with a wood nymph and she was very—"

"No, I mean, you cannot seriously be having this problem now?"

Tam Lin was still talking: "Because you see it was autumn and in autumn a wood nymph gets to be—"

"Tam Lin!" Janet snapped her fingers in front of his face. "Let's not worry about all the women you've failed to satisfy over the years or we'll be here until next week. Just concentrate on the woman you're failing to satisfy now."

Now it was Tam Lin's turn to be cross. "Well you're not exactly helping, you know."

"What else do you need me to do?" Janet looked around. "I'm here, I'm lying in the glen, I'm facing up; to hear most of the stories this is all the cooperation you should need. I don't even necessarily have to be awake for the next part, as I understand it."

"Generally there's a little more to—" He stopped. He was looking at her bosom. Janet looked too; she thought she might have a bug on her or something. "Look, just unlace your bodice," Tam Lin said after a moment.

"Why?"

"Because you have breasts that would give a dead man an erection and bring the Pope down off his throne. And anyway, it's—"

"Customary?"

Tam Lin pinched the bridge of his nose.

"Oh fine," said Janet, busy with the laces. Tam Lin watched as her body was revealed one inch of retreating fabric at a time. His eyes went wide. Then wider. Then wider. When Janet finished she leaned back, propping herself up on her hands and said, "Satisfied?"

"Not yet, but just give me a minute," Tam Lin said, busy with his codpiece.

"Oh, well that's just what a lady wants to hear at a time like this."

"Look, don't go developing standards now or we'll never get through this."

"That's the most sensible thing you've said all day." Janet shook her shoulders, making her breasts jiggle. "Well, come on then." Tam Lin's hands roamed over her, taking a double handful and squeezing. Janet jumped. "Hey, those are attached!"

"And what a fetching frame they're attached to," Tam Lin said.

"That kind of talk will get nothing out of me," said Janet. "Just hurry up and—ooh!" She jumped again as he kissed one pert nipple. His tongue flickered over it. Janet shivered. "Ahem. Um. As I was saying, that's not going to—"

"Lie back please."

"Yes, of course." Janet laid back. "As I was saying, don't go thinking that just because of your dozens and dozens and dozens—"

"And dozens."

"Yes, and dozens of other women were easy to—"

"Legs open, please."

"Of course. What was I saying?"

"Dozens and dozens of women."

"Right. You can't go thinking that just because—OH!"

Janet gasped and all the muscles in her body went rigid...then relaxed all at once.

"Oh..." she said. "Oh...my..."

"Don't go taking my name in vain yet, we've just started."

"Tam Lin?"

"Hmm?"

"Stop talking." She put her hand over his mouth. "Just...do what you do best."

[snowleopard3200]

Black Ronin, a question I have been meaning to ask the forum authors for a time; does producing an annotated version of a story actually help people to understand the story better by giving insights into the authors motives, desires, etc?

I have considered doing it for one of my stories, yet as they tend to follow the usual line of absolute insanity I wonder if it would be worth the time.

[BlackRonin]

Does it help the readers? I don't know; you'd have to ask them.

I'd say write one if you really feel you have a lot to say about your work. Maybe people will be into it, maybe they won't, but like anything you write, you won't know until it's done (and maybe not even then). I like writing these notes because they help me get perspective on my work, which can be handy when approaching new stories. If you have something to say, there's really no reason not to say it.

[hornee.bignthick]

nice ones... love it

[hornee.bignthick]

want more of that

[BlackRonin]

"Boogeyman"

-After the success (in my mind if nowhere else) of "The Ballad of Tam Lin" I started looking through my files for other discarded stories. I'd written this one for Halloween 2011 but wasn't happy with it once it was done. It was an okay story, but it didn't really "say" anything; it was zero calorie horror with no subtext and nothing particularly original to say. Although looking back at what I wrote that month instead I'm not really sure why I thought it was so much better.

Anyway, reading it again after all that time helped me get a little perspective on it and just as I realized that "Tam Lin" was actually quite funny after all, I also thought that "Boogeyman" was one of the few really scary stories I'd ever written. Fear is even more subjective than humor, so that's always going to be up in the air, of course, but it made an impression on me if no one else, and I decided that that was worthwhile enough on its own. But I'm not unhappy that I sat on it for so long; the edit I gave it last year was surely better than the version I would have posted the year before.

-I notice that a lot of modern horror writers like to get work around childhood fears, and the old "bump in the night" routine crops up quite a lot. It's rarely well-executed though, mostly because attempts to stretch the concept into a feature-length film or a full-length novel just run out of gas. For example, Stephen King (who I am usually not a fan of) wrote an excellent and disturbing story called, you guessed it, "Boogeyman" when he was relatively young. Later many of the same concepts popped up in his encyclopedia-length novel "IT" but they just weren't as effective there. Maybe childhood fears are like childhood itself; effective because of their brevity.

-Like I said, there's not much to this story really except that I thought the ending was scary. In truth, I've never really been happy with the prose in the last few paragraphs; it's just not quite right and it never has been. Even so, I watched hours and hours of three to five minute-long short horror films while editing this, since those almost always end on a stunning reveal and that was exactly the formula I wanted. Standouts from that (long and sleepless...) evening included, "Mama" (now a feature length film that, true to form, is not nearly as scary or effective as the short version), "The Old Chair" and "The Ten Steps."