Good news!

Sara H's stories are back up on the EMCSA. For those of you too new to the world of mind control erotica to know who she is, Sara H was among the very top tier of F/f writers on the EMCSA when I first found the place about a decade ago. She continued to churn out stories for several years afterwards, then pulled all her work from the web and disappeared under what I, at least, consider to be tragic circumstances.

But now Sara is back - appearing first on the MC Garden, and then on the EMCSA. I look forward to seeing what sorts of new fantasies that brilliant mind of hers will produce down the road, but for now, I'm just happy to have her old work back.

Check her out for yourself. She's worth it.

On a related note, the reappearance of Sara H's stories has given me a great excuse to update my Reader's Picks page again, which meant not only taking out the references to the Wayback Machine, but also adding in another story that I just haven't been able to get out of my head since Jukebox posted it several weeks ago. He's been a great writer for years, but his relationship with Lady Ru'etha has really set his imagination on fire.

I've just sent Simon my updated Reader's Picks, but I figure it's probably too late for him to fit them in with this week's update, so I've decided to just go ahead and copy in my new recommendation here:

Soft and Wet
Jukebox has now officially reached the stage (along with trilby else and Tabico) where he's churning out so many great stories so quickly that I hesitate to add any more of them to my Reader's Picks page for fear of playing favorites. But after several weeks of being unable to get this little treasure out of my mind, I finally gave in and made it an official Pick. "Soft and Wet" is one of the best depictions of the bliss of total enthrallment that I've found on the EMCSA. It doesn't matter if you're a fan of red, purple, green, cyan, or yellow stories; you'll love this one no matter what.

A couple of things I find interesting

First is the picture at left, which I found on My Fetish Diary Blog a few days ago. Could this image be any more directly up my alley? On closer inspection, you can even see a glint of silver in the model's eyes.

Second, sad news from the entertainment world: Ellen Page's lesbian werewolf flick is now officially kaput. Not that it ever stood much chance of being made in the first place, but wow, wouldn't that have been cool? I was especially intrigued by the concept because, shortly before I came out to myself as a lesbian and for some time afterwards, I had several dreams about being a werewolf, myself. I know a good bit about dream analysis, and I interpreted those dreams of mine to be about my potentially dangerous secret self, the part I had to hide from the world, the primal part of me. As a matter of fact, a big step in the process of accepting my homosexuality involved some dreamwork on "embracing the beast" from another dream.

Also - and here I go, teasing you again - those older stories that I mentioned in my interview with Callidus, the ones I wrote under another name and which are still online, involved a) a heroine struggling to hide her true nature from an unaccepting world and b) another character who was a werewolf. All except the final story were written back when I thought I was straight; but that last one, in which the heroine and the werewolf hook up permanently, was written after my discovery.

Make of all that what you will.

Anyway, I'm curious to know if any of my other gay or bisexual readers have had their own werewolf dreams or fantasies. I don't know if this is a recurring theme for sexual minorities or just something my own subconscious has latched onto as a handy metaphor. Comments, anyone?

I can feel your breath on the back of my neck

Over the last month, I've noticed several new blog visitors from my home state, including a couple recently from my own back yard.

No, of course I'm not going to tell you who you are...but I do hope you come back so I can tease you some more. ;-P

Story update

First, the collaboration train has just taken on another rider...but I can't say anything more about it than that. Just Be Prepared. :-D

Second, I got off to an excellent start on "Spy vs. Guy" over the weekend. The characters are pretty much writing themselves, which is always a delight and makes for a great finished product. Guy Wylde and his merry band of brainwashers are turning out to be a really fun group to hang out with. I hope you'll enjoy them as much as I do.

Oh, and while we're on the subject, did you know that the Transporter was secretly gay?

Now, finally, here's a little tidbit of genuine science that fits quite nicely with my plans for brainwashing Mr. Square-jawed Superspy.

A Peek Beneath the Duct Tape: Ethna Redux

I was first introduced to the ancient Irish fairy tale of "Ethna the Bride" through an e-mail conversation that veered from Oscar Wilde to supernatural MC and back to Oscar's fairy-tale-writing mother, Lady Wilde. Her version of the story, for any of you that haven't gotten around to reading it yet, is here.

My first thought, on reading Lady Wilde's version, was, "Wow, those mysterious mid-air voices were almost too helpful, weren't they?" And close behind that came, "I wonder if Ethna was really all that glad to be rescued from a life of ecstatic, immortal slavery."

Then, of course, my authorial gears started turning. It didn't take me long to wonder if there might be some other fairy close to Finvarra - a wife, perhaps - who could take an interest in Ethna and steal her back again, this time for good. So I did some online research; and lo and behold, I discovered that not only did Finvarra have a wife, but she was a goddess! Even better, she had her own separate fairy mound far, far away from her husband's.

At first I thought Oonagh's mound was Knocksheegowna, an actual mountain on the far side of Ireland from Knockma. You can imagine how that tickled me. I even found a lovely panoramic image of the view from the summit here, which I can't resist sharing even now that I know it's not Oonagh's mound, just because it's so lovely. I wrote the first draft of Ethna Redux with Kerovan confronting Oonagh at Knocksheegowna, so it's a good thing I had sara castle to fact-check me (and a good thing I had Lady K to catch another embarassing error). Damn, what a difference a single letter makes! Oonagh's actual mound, Knockshegowna (with one "e") is in Tipperary and is, in fact, only a couple of hundred feet taller than Knockma. But hey, at least it is taller. ;-)

As I said in a previous entry, I modeled Finvarra in large part on Cluracan as depicted by Neil Gaiman in the Sandman series, and also on fetish model Perish. There's also a hint of the Galadriel-Celeborn dynamic in Finvarra's relationship with Oonagh. I've always had the idea, in reading The Lord of the Rings, that Tolkien wanted to give Galadriel a mate who was her equal; but he just couldn't do it. Galadriel is just too glorious to have any equal. Celeborn comes across as a mere hanger-on.

As for Oonagh, details online were scant, but I used everything I could find: the hair, the rainbows, the dewdrop gown - even her reputation for devotion, though I had to pervert that one a bit. ;-) Unfortunately, I couldn't find any images of her that weren't a) inaccurate, b) incredibly cheesy, or c) both; so you'll have to content yourself with the painting of the legendary Celtic queen Medb (a.k.a. Maeve) at left above. I actually did have this image in mind when I wrote the "Bride, meet wife" scene. Medb's attitude here is pretty much what I imagine Oonagh's to have been, and Medb was famously insatiable in bed.

Interestingly enough, Medb is said to be buried atop Finvarra's mound. Funny how these things work out.

And now for Kerovan. First of all, I dredged his name from another, longer version of the Ethna story that I found during my online research. This version is incomplete because it's just excerpts from a book Google is trying to sell you; but if you're interested in having a peek, click here. Anyway, I didn't find anything else in this version that I wanted to use besides the hero's name; the rest of it was just too sappy.

But again, about that hero....Once I really delved into the story, I found myself admiring Kerovan too much to just dump him by the side of the road like I do with most of my other so-called heroes. Kerovan is the real deal. He's very much a product of his time; but he's a good, brave man who will go to any lengths necessary to free Ethna from slavery. He just doesn't understand that slavery is what she really wants.

Oh, and by the way, that's not something I made up for the story just because I liked the idea. You can see Ethna's essential passivity even in Lady Wilde's version of the tale. In fact, she's so passive that I had a hard time making a heroine of her at all, though I did my best. Just as I did with Kerovan. That's why I left his final decision entirely in your hands. Whatever you want for him is what he gets. He deserves it.

The opening act

Before the main attraction, "Ethna Redux," hits the stage sometime on Sunday, I thought you might enjoy whiling away the time with another visit to roperookie's expanding gallery on Deviant Art. He's been posting some lovely - and for him, uncharacteristically romantic - new stuff lately. Have a look.

And yes, I do already have the "Peek Beneath the Duct Tape" on Ethna written. I'll post it here as soon as I see that the story is up.

Benedict Campbell goes Salvador Dali one better

Yeah, I've noticed Benedict Campbell before now. He has a small but fairly interesting gallery on Model Mayhem, and I even chose one of his pictures there for my first Ecstasy of Surrender collection. But it was his new gallery on io9 that really made me sit up and take notice. He's not just photographing interestingly made-up models anymore; now he's adding in all kinds of cool digital effects to deliver us a world full of beautiful cyborgs: male, female, and something tantalizingly in-between. The picture below probably isn't the the one all of you will like best, but it did give me an excuse for a great subject line, so here you go: