Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Centurions: Sex Mage Sojourn

ONE
“Just a simple stake out, you said! Oh, this should be wrapped up in five minutes, you said! Why did you have to jinx it?!” Shockwave glared at his teammates. All around them, a swarm of robots continued to pour from every nook and cranny of the warehouse, where what was supposed to be a simple drug sale bust had evolved into a superhero versus robot cluster fuck. And not the fun kind.

Max Out rolled his eyes as he socked another robot hard enough to knock the five behind it aside like bowling pins. “Says the guy who jumped the gun and decided he couldn’t wait two more minutes for everyone to get into position.” With a burst of super speed, he dismantled a dozen more.

“How was I supposed to know this place was a storage facility for the Robot Master’s old clunkers?” Shockwave held out his hands and fired a wide beam of pure force to plow through another wave of robots. The humanoid machines struggled to get back up, apparently heedless of the fact that half their bodies were currently bent out of shape, and a few were missing limbs. Like zombies, they continued to march toward the superheroes in their midst with no care to their own safety; their broken and worn-down parts protested this activity with loud, metallic shrieks and sparks, but the robots heedlessly advanced forward.

“This is getting us no where,” said Growl, his weretiger form looming over his teammates as he hurled two more robots into the oncoming horde. The three men backed up forming a circle as the robots made an ever-tightening ring around them.

“Agreed,” said Max Out. He scanned the horde to see where the thinnest part appeared to be. Then he shifted his internal energies to “max out” his durability. “Growl! Pick me up and start charging that way! Shockwave, follow in our wake and keep the path from closing up!”

Friday, December 2, 2011

Resisting

As his Master instructed, Max waited in the locker room after practice, until the dojo was closed. When he felt a slight tingle across his balls, that was his Master’s signal that he should come back out onto the floor, naked.

Max did so, not hesitating as he strode out onto the matt, where his Master waited. She, however, was still dressed in her gi. What Max did not expect was a couple other women to be present, watching from the stands. Two of them were fellow students, while the other was another instructor.

Max swallowed, feeling a touch of nervousness. “Master,” he said. “I was to understand this would be a private lesson.”

“The lesson, Maxwell, is to learn to focus despite distraction, particularly of this nature,” she said.

“But…”

“If you came in knowing exactly what to expect and prepared to tune it out, it would not be an adequate distraction. Understand, I don’t wish to embarrass you, but facing your embarrassment is going to be part of this. It is, after all, a key factor of your arousal.”

Thursday, December 1, 2011

On Sequels and Continuations

Sometimes, I get comments and e-mails from readers asking me if I plan on doing a sequel to a story, or if I’m going to continue a story. Unfortunately, the chances of anything I've written seeing a genuine sequel or a continuation are pretty slim. I apologize if this disappoints some fans of my work. I’m not against the idea of sequels or continuations, and in fact, I’ve actually tried doing some, which usually results in failure, hence they don’t get posted. There’s several reasons for this.

1) I am constantly coming up with new ideas, and I very quickly get bored with reusing the same material over and over. Frankly a lot of my ideas use the same one or two story formulas, and most of the sex tends to be pretty much the same stuff over and over, so I’m especially susceptible to getting burnt out on stuff.

This is why I keep trying to tackle different situations, settings, genres, etc, with each new major story. I want to keep trying new formulas and combinations of elements to keep things interesting and fresh. Unfortunately, revisiting the same characters tends to lead to stagnation of the concept.

2) Very often, everything I set out to say or do with a character ends up getting done in a single story, which is to say, the character becomes “finished” in my mind. If the conflict that drove the story gets resolved, and I don’t see any more seeds of conflict, I just really don’t have anything left to say.

For example, the main conflict in Kat’s First Boytoy is Kat deciding whether or not she’s really going to use her powers to seduce and sexually dominate Ben, as well as convincing Ben to submit to her once she does decide to go for it. This all wrapped up by the end of the story, and thus the conflict is over. After that point, the only thing left for me to write about would just be more sex scenes involving the two, but I feel that would be just be stale.

Of course, I could introduce a new conflict, but the only thing I’ve ever come up with as a legitimate Kat sequel ends up coming off as a repeat of the Violet vs. Sarah story, and well, I already mentioned my issue with repeating myself too much.

3) Very often, the sequel ideas I get end up being pretty much not erotic at all, which, well, kind of defeat’s the whole purpose. Either the stories end up being all about the psychological consequences of being victimized by abusive Sex Mages (which can lead to horribly dark territory I don’t even want to get into regardless), or it ends up being more about the superhero/adventure action than anything else. If the sex is an after thought, than it’s not an erotica. And I presume that when you want me to write a sequel to an erotic story, you plan on that sequel also being erotic, not a psychological horror piece or a schlocky action story.

To correlate with this, sometimes making an erotic sequel just really doesn’t make any sense in terms of the established character. For example, some people want to see a story where Sarah breaks out of prison, tracks down Dough and Violet, and gets her revenge by turning them both into her sex slaves. Yeah… no. If Sarah ever did break out? She’s not going to turn them into her sex slaves. She is going to outright murder them. The thing about Sarah is that it was never really about the sex; sex was just the medium through which her magic worked. It was all about the power. Sure she enjoyed sex, but it was never a motivation, it was a weapon for her to use to control people, and in the case of Doug, it was her means of gaining more power for herself. Violet and Doug defeated her and stole her power; ergo they deserve to die in Sarah’s eyes.

Similarly, Feel Girl isn’t motivated by sex either. She’s motivated by the thrill of being a supervillain. Sex is her weapon, shield, and means of controlling others, but you better believe that if, given the opportunity to switch her powerset to something much more directly destructive or controlling, she would switch to that in a heartbeat. Ergo, a sequel involving her, more than likely, would mean joining or forming a team of supervillains who would more than likely be immune to her power, and using their resources to advance her supervillain “career.” She would not, as was once suggested to me, go buy an island and build a mansion where she could be waited on hand and foot by men she cockteases into serving her.

4) I started writing a story, but for some reason, it completely crapped out on me, and I couldn’t come up with any way to continue it that didn’t either feel forced, stupid, or contradictory. Or, I just plain ran out of ideas. Unfortunately, sometimes, this happens after I have already posted part of the story, and I end up left with a dud that isn’t finished. These days I try not to post things too soon, and if I do make that mistake, I try to cap off what I’ve already written as much as best as possible, with varying success. Unfortunately, stories like this, such as Sandy the Psychic Cougar, The Erotic Misadventures of Jamin Frey: The Golden Hook, and Centurions: Curse of the Druj, just aren’t going to get finished. I ran into a wall or a gaping canyon, and I’m just not going to be able to get past it unless I do the whole thing over from scratch.

And yes, I did finally manage to do that with one of them, a rewrite of Sandy, set in the Sex Mage World. Unfortunately, even that one crapped out on me at the end, resulting in a sloppily written conclusion, and even getting that far was like pulling teeth trying to get it out. It’s not an experience I wish to repeat, so even a remake is unlikely to occur for the other stories.

5) Specifically in regards to the Just A Little Scenes: These are not, and never were, intended to be full stories in the first place. Most JALS are just scenes I came up with that I couldn’t manage to expand into a bigger story, so I just capped off the scene at the ends to try and make it more self-contained. Occasionally, I’ve taken a scene from a failed story I only partially managed to write, and decided to cap it off and make it a JALS as well. As such, JALS by their very nature aren’t really meant to continue. I tried it once, with the You My Goddess sub-series, but well, personally I think that while the first one is one of the best erotica/porn I’ve ever written, the sequels felt flat and forced to me.

However, it is true that some JALS can lead to bigger story ideas. Violet and Sarah, for example, started off as JALS characters, who were reimagined in the Violet vs. Sarah story, and a few JALS served as prototypes for the Sex Mage World setting, so in that sense, the JALS do lead to other things.

6) Heck, if nothing else, I also just plain can’t stand it when a story doesn’t know when to end, and sometimes, the best way to end a story is to tease the readers imagination so that they can draw there own conclusion as to what further sexual adventures the characters might have. Again, if the conflict is already established and resolved, and all that’s really left is for the characters to just keep having sex on a frequent basis, well, I know I can’t please everybody, and my own tastes tend not to jive with a lot of other people’s preferences. Ergo, after showing you the sorts of things a dominant psychic woman can do to her non-powered male sub, in some ways, it’s better to leave it to the readers imagination where that can go from there, rather than just dragging them through scene after scene of sex, sex, and more sex, that will ultimately just grow stale.