A Peek Beneath the Duct Tape: If Wishes Were Horses

First, a couple of notes:

1. I figured out how to flush my DNS cache, but that still didn't resolve my problem getting into the EMCSA; so I have to assume a lot of other people are in the same fix. Fortunately for them, they can read the story here. As for those of you who can access the EMCSA, I e-mailed it to Simon this morning, so it will show up either in this weekend's update or in next weekend's update. Not that I think you'll want to wait. ;-)

2. To avoid spoilers, please don't read the rest of this blog entry until you've read the story itself.

Okay, still with me? Well then, first of all, I can assure you that at least 95% of the text in Captain Benbow's hypnosis program really does come from one of my personal Virtual Hypnotist sessions. Just don't expect to be able to cut and paste that text into a session of your own and get the same results I do. For one thing, reactions to hypnosis are highly subjective; and for another, my real VH session includes a lot of the tweaking I discuss here, in order to achieve the semblance of a real human voice. If you want the same effects in a session of your own, you'll have to figure out how to do it yourself. ;-) I'm not being mean, just not giving out such a huge freebie without strings attached. And I really don't think there's any way at all to make the speech synthesizer chuckle, no matter what you do. ;-)

As for the plot of "If Wishes Were Horses," I just used my VH session as the foundation and tried to build something on top of it that could stand on its own. You'll have to let me know if I succeeded. Clearly, the greatest heat in the story comes from the VH text (and maybe Captain Benbow's reactions, which you can imagine are my own, even though they're often not ;-P), but I hope the story as a whole is satisfying to you. As for me, I love the idea that even though the captain is so concerned about her privacy and so protective of her fetish, the Queen's control takes her completely beyond her fears. I was proud of myself for coming up with the story's big reveal, that her crew was watching her helplessly the whole time and she neither knew nor cared.

There's a part of me - the closet exhibitionist part - that wants to reach that stage, but I'm not there yet and probably never will be. In fact, I don't want to be. I have a lot of MC dreams where I'm wandering around in a trance and real-life friends and family members appear, trying to snap me out of it. Even dreaming, I feel hugely embarrassed to have them see me like that. Most of my friends and all but one of my family members have no knowledge of my fetish, and I want to keep it that way.

Now, on to flexmatter. First, let me apologize for the obviousness of the plot device; but if Mcguffins are good enough for Sir Alfred Hitchcock (who actually coined the term), they're good enough for me. Besides, scientists really are experimenting with ways to make matter do things it shouldn't be capable of, like become invisible. Who knows what we'll be able to achieve in a few hundred years? Anyway, I'm not the first to come up with matter molding via technology or brain implants that permit telepathy; as far as I know, that was Peter F. Hamilton in his Night's Dawn series. But the term flexmatter is my own; it came to me in a dream.

Lastly, here are some Easter eggs. I certainly hope you got the references to the Trojan Horse. If not, the first paragraph of this Wikipedia article will help; and you'll also want to look up Odysseus' Latin name and the etymology of Philippa. But those are just the more obvious eggs. The one I wouldn't expect anyone else to get is my captain's name. A long time ago (in blog terms, anyway), I wrote about using an old Men at Work song from their Business as Usual album as the basis for my bedtime session. The song was "Down by the Sea," and I chose it because it's so soporific that it would put practically anyone to sleep. Well, it just so happens that in the session's current form, my trigger first appears right after the line "saluting Captain Benbow." And, if you read carefully, you'll note that Lieutenant Olorode actually does salute Captain Benbow...well, at least, part of him does. ;-)

And that's that, except to note once more that the image at the top of this post comes from Kassandra Vizerskaya. The title, loosely translated, is "Helen and Her Horse."