Le Pant, Le Pant, Le Pant

Last weekend was hectic, the beginning of a long hectic period for myself and Lady Ru’etha that should last well into spring…but I know that’s no excuse for not blogging! So I’ll talk briefly about the insanity that was last weekend.

As She’s mentioned (and if you’re not following Her on Twitter and reading Her blog, why not? It’s not like it costs money…) She came for a visit last weekend, one that was nearly catastrophically disrupted by winter storms where She lives. She made it here at 1 AM, so utterly fried that I pretty much poured Her into bed, and then joined Her myself.

But that didn’t stop us from making dinner for a friend the next day, which involved (for me) switching around my sleep schedule to help with the preparations. This time, unlike CONVergence, She had me take naps to keep myself alert. One of the benefits of being at home instead of out at a con. The dinner went well, although there was not much hypno-play…although there was one wonderful, tantalizing moment where She put us under just long enough to remind us that future dinners would probably involve plenty of tranceplay.

And then it was bedtime, and this time, She was a lot less fried than before. Which means that I actually don’t remember big chunks of it…well, that’s not true. I remember staring into Her eyes, and I know She was saying something all that time, and I know it was incredibly hot…but I don’t remember anything specific about what She said. Just that it was hot and good and that it went all the way down into my brain while my eyes locked on Hers. Oh! I remember that She took away my ability to talk. I couldn’t even respond, just listen, until She gave me permission. It was nummy.

And then the next day was spent snuggling until it was time for the plane to take Her away again for a little while. We got a little weepy, but it’s nice to know that these goodbyes are among the last we’ll ever have. (Well, I mean, we’ll still say goodbye when one of us goes to the store or something. But it’s not really the same thing.)

And if that doesn’t sound hectic…trust me, it was more hectic than it sounds.

Simple Evangelism

Last night at work, my co-workers were having a bit of a chat about a trip they took to a local bar the other night. (This happened on a Friday night, and since they don’t begrudge me getting my Friday nights off when they all have to work, I don’t begrudge them not inviting me to go out with them after work Friday nights.) They discussed the drinks they had, what they planned to order when they went back the next time, and how one of them wound up throwing up afterwards.

Needless to say, I was a little skeptical of the “fun factor” of a night like that. The topic quickly morphed into a more general discussion of alcohol and the fun it could cause, and I was frankly unable to contribute. Because, honestly, my only drinking story is, “I had a daiquiri once.” (It was in high school. My future brother-in-law made it, said it didn’t have much alcohol in it and I should try it. I thought it was good, but that it would taste better without the rum. )

So since I didn’t contribute, I spent most of my time listening. And there were quite a few stories, but they all seemed to end with, “And I wound up puking in the (insert location here.)” It made me realize just how much better hypnosis is as a recreational activity. It feels incredibly good, it offers all sorts of fun options to liven up your evening, but you never get hung over and you never wind up puking anywhere. Hypnosis is a way to alter your own consciousness, no chemicals required. I’m really glad I got into it.

Hypnosis. Won’t you?

A Bit About Collaborating

As you might have read on thrall’s blog, or for that matter, on mine, we’re working on a story together. (Depending on who you talk to, in fact, we’re working on three stories together. Sorry, but I’m never going to get bored with that joke.) She has graciously given me permission to tease as much as I want, so I can say that the first story will be called, “A Hazy Shade of Winter” (I’m so grateful to both of my collaborators for indulging my obsession with song titles!) And it has to do with…

Nah. Not going to go that far. After all, I’m a terrible tease too. But I will talk a bit about our collaborative process, since I can do that without giving too much away (and because I’m still not quite ready to tell you the other thing Lady Ru’etha brainwashed me into enjoying…)

This all came about at the infamous meet-up between myself, thrall, and Lady Ru’etha that all three of us have blogged about. Lady Ru’etha mentioned She’d really like to see the two of us collaborate…and as you might have guessed, that was something that really got both our attentions by that point in the weekend. thrall discussed a story idea she’d been batting around about a ******* that ****ed *****, and it sounded interesting and unique and as someone who loves interesting, unique ideas, I wanted in.

This isn’t to say there weren’t hurdles. You’d think the whole “she writes nigh-apocalyptically dark stories about the total enslavement of whole worlds, and I get weepy when my main character gets a paper cut” thing might be a hurdle, but not so much as you might imagine. No, the big hurdle is that I work nights, and she works days. We’ve got about a two-hour window to write in any given session, and even that involves letting the phone wake me up instead of my alarm (something I ritually assure her is just fine, and she ritually apologizes for.)

“Phone?” you ask. “Phone,” I respond. The way we collaborate is, she calls me up on the phone, with her on a speakerphone and me on a hands-free headset, and we both open up a Google Document at the same time. Then we take turns writing, a few paragraphs at a time, while we discuss what we see taking shape on the screen. (Some of these discussions get a little…odd. I don’t think anyone would expect two writers of explicit erotica to be worrying over whether someone sitting on the floor could see over the edge of a bed. This was actually solved by the two of us getting up, going to our respective beds, and sitting down next to them, by the way.)

This is a huge, wonderful advantage in collaborating, because it means the story really does take shape with both of our inputs at once. We’re not breaking it up into “you write this, I’ll write that” sections, or trading off as the perspectives shift; we’re writing together fairly seamlessly, so that in the end, I doubt anyone will be able to tell who wrote what bits. (Which is also true, by the way, of “Joy To the World”, my second collaboration with Lady Ru’etha. Anyone who thinks that Lynn’s bits were Her and Michael’s bits were me needs to work harder on their guessing skills. )

It’s been a fun experience for both of us (well, it’s been a fun experience for me, and if she’s complaining, she’s doing it after I hang up ); I’m not sure how I stack up against her other, quite illustrious collaborators, but for my part I think she’s doing a great job putting up with my idiosyncracies. I really look forward to seeing what people think of the final result…

…assuming she doesn’t read this and decide never to speak to me again, of course.

Unison

You know, I’ve talked in the past (or, at least, I think I have) about how much fun the “call-and-response” mantra can be in tranceplay. (And, as always, “how much fun” is a euphemism for “how damn sexy”.) But it wasn’t until tonight that it clicked that there’s something even more fun. It takes just a little work to set up, but it’s very well worth it.

Lady Ru’etha has, over the years, installed a number of mantras in my brain–phrases that She repeats often enough, or that She has me repeat often enough that I know them by heart and have internalized them. Simple things like “obedience is pleasure”, “surrender is bliss”, et cetera. Just nice little ways to reinforce my submission that are very fun to repeat. (“Very” is a euphemism for “fucking”.)

One of these mantras is, “Everything I say makes so much sense.” She says it to me, I repeat “Everything You say makes so much sense,” and we can while away long, happy hours echoing that back and forth. (Hey, it beats reality shows.) Now, you might wonder how much I’ve internalized it…and in fact, sometimes so do I. Today I was thinking about it out loud, as it happens. We were discussing some minor domestic matters–right now, the linen closet is filled top to bottom with board games, card games, jigsaw puzzles, and so forth, and She suggested a couple of weeks back that She would prefer to have that space free for, well…linen. At the time, I said that it was one of my life-long dreams to have a closet full of games for my friends and family to come over and play, and that as much as I wanted to obey, it was going to take me a while to get over that.

Today, as I mentioned going to IKEA tomorrow and picking up a cabinet for said games, I commented on how comfortable I was with the idea. “Intellectually,” I said, “I can remember not wanting to do it, but emotionally, it’s just not there anymore. Because You said You wanted to move them, and everything You say…”

And She chimed in with perfect timing as we said in unison, “…makes so much sense.” And that? That was unbelievably fun. There’s something astonishingly thrilling about knowing that your mind has been so perfectly molded that your Owner can speak in that rapport with you, can predict your thoughts because She’s put them there. That’s a fantasy that is a lot of fun to indulge.

(In a later post, I might talk about other things She’s said that make so much sense to me now. If you’re good.)

Formative Experiences: Jack Chalker

I might have used this opening line before, but it’s pretty common when mind-control fetishists get together to have the question come up (I almost feel like I should call it “The Question”…but then you’d think I was talking about Renee Montoya…) “How did you get into this kink?”

There are a lot of answers, almost as many as there are sci-fi and fantasy series. I do think the two go hand in hand; explicit sexuality in the “cult” genre (SF, fantasy, comics, et cetera) is usually sublimated into “control”. You never actually say that Dark Phoenix is much better in the sack than Marvel Girl ever was, you just imply it through having her mind-controlled into wearing skimpy outfits and behaving more generally “outrageously”. And so people who grow up reading this stuff pick up the subtext, and wind up associating sex with control, particularly mind control.

One of the big sci-fi authors to go ahead and make this implicit link explicit was Jack Chalker, author of sci-fi series like ‘Rings of the Master’, the ‘Well World’ saga, and ‘Four Lords of the Diamond’. His series featured plenty of sex (a lot more than I realized when I bought my first Chalker book as a 7th grader, and almost certainly a lot more than my parents realized as well.) But the sex was linked with mind control…or rather, the mind control was linked with sex. Chalker openly had his characters do things with their mind-controlled slaves that other writers only hinted at.

And wow, did he ever. One character in ‘The Rings of the Master’ was physically altered so that her hormone balance would only stabilize during pregnancy…she’d become a sex-crazed nymphomaniac until she got pregnant, and then come to her senses for nine months or so until the kid came along. Another, in ‘Four Lords of the Diamond’, was captured and turned into a sex slave by the villain of the piece…with, of course, a little twist that I won’t reveal, just in case anyone reads these on my recommendation. And in the ‘Well World’ saga, as the villain remakes himself as the perfect physical specimen, he takes extra time to make sure that his new body is capable of unlimited orgasms. Because honestly, who wouldn’t?

Chalker’s stories were never “high literature”, but they were always consistently entertaining, even the bits that didn’t involve sex. And there’s no question that reading his books right around the time I hit puberty is one of the reasons I wound up the way I did. On any map of “The Way to the MC Fetish”, he’s got to be a prominent waypost.

Potpourri

Nothing particularly profound is leaping to mind at the moment (this is the wonderful thing about blogs, the hecklers have to wait until the comment section to reply to a straight line like that) so I figured I’d just string together a few random tidbits for you today. In no particular order:

• Wiseguy, a wonderful author in his own right, conducted an interview with me as part of the semi-regular Author Spotlight feature on the MC Forums. You can find it here.
• As thrall reported on her own blog, we are in fact collaborating on a trilogy of linked stories (it’s extremely amusing to me that she keeps referring to it as a three-chapter story, and I keep referring to it as three linked stories. Guess which one of us does multi-parters and which one of us does stand-alones. ) But whether chapters or stories, each one will have its own title, and if you stop reading at the end of one, you’ll feel like you got a real ending. (Even so, we don’t plan to start posting them until we’ve finished all three.) I might tease with a title, but I’ll have to check with thrall first.
• I have a new laptop, and it is helping my productivity to no end; you ever notice how you always get the best ideas when you can’t write? Well, not so much for me right now. I’ve written about a half dozen stories on it (unlike Lady Ru’etha, I don’t tend to name my computers; they’re always just filed in my head as “Brain Extension” and I feel weird naming body parts.) This now pushes me into August of 2011 for unposted stories. See why I put out the books?
• This is always where the obligatory “hypnosis features prominently in the news/media/pop culture!” item goes in lists like these, but I honestly haven’t heard about anything. Really, I get plenty of hypnosis in my daily life, I don’t need to go searching for it.
• The Spiral Awards should be opening their nominations fairly soon. Just thought I’d drop that hint now, while it’s still fresh.
• And as a final, minor note of happiness, the posting of “Joy To the World” last month helps Lady Ru’etha check off one more item in Her “100 Things in 1000 Days” list. She’d had “Write two collaborations with Jukebox” on there, and this and “I Can’t Wait” make that a reality. This doesn’t mean we’re not planning on doing another, though. We’ve talked about…but I might be hinting too much, there. Watch this space.

And that’s all I can think of for the moment. Next week, I’ll try to post something a bit more substantial…but as a tease, it’ll require finding the cord to download things into my mp3 player.

Earworms

Sorry, but I’ve had this stuck in my head for weeks now, and I just need to get it out.

With apologies to Katy Perry…

You gotta help me out

It’s all a blur last night

We shared a taxi and I wound up following you

I lost my memory, you took my motel key

You had the most seducing looks

You enslaved me

I kind of tranced out

And wound up sinking deep down

Mind’s blank and empty

Remember what you told me

“Shut up and put my pussy where your mouth is

That’s what you get for waking up my sex slave

Soon you’ll be forced to helplessly obey me

That’s what you get for waking up my sex slave”

Why are these lights so bright?

Why are my nipples tight?

Dressed up in latex, why am I wearing a collar?

Can’t call for help now

My deep self wants to obey

Mind’s blank and empty

Remember what you told me

“Shut up and put my pussy where your mouth is

That’s what you get for waking up my sex slave

Soon you’ll be forced to helplessly obey me

That’s what you get for waking up my sex slave”

You got me into this

Total mental overload, horny and I lost control

Can’t send an S.O.S.

Can’t get the words out

I try to fight, I slip down

My mind is so empty

Remember what you told me

Remember what you told me

Remember what you told me, told me, told me…

“Shut up and put my pussy where your mouth is

That’s what you get for waking up my sex slave

Soon you’ll be forced to helplessly obey me

That’s what you get for waking up my sex slave”

“That’s what you get, baby

Pendant glitters, watch, watch, watch the glitter

You know you must obey me

You know you must obey me”

My Ideal MP3

So Lady Ru’etha asked me a bit ago, “What would your ideal MP3 be?” (Specifically, She commanded me to blog about it. Which I refused to do, of course. ) It’s an interesting question. In some ways, the simple answer would be “Voice”. It’s very nice–seductive enough to be erotic, but not so much that you can’t just listen to it to relax. There’s programming in it, which is a major hot button of mine, but nothing unethical or dangerous, which is pretty much guaranteed to throw me out of any induction file. (Not to name any names, but there are some hypnodommes out there that I can’t really go deep to even though they have a nice technique, because I feel like I have to keep one ear open for their suggestions.)

But I’ll assume that for purposes of this question, She’s asking “What scenario would be something you want in an MP3?” (I’m also hoping She’ll gracefully accept the compliment in the previous paragraph.) I have to admit, I’m not sure. I generally enjoy MP3s more when they’re about programming and control over fantasy scenarios (which isn’t to say that I don’t enjoy fantasy scenarios, just that I think my favorite fantasy is me, being brainwashed by a sexy hypnodomme. ) So it’d involve programming. But programming for what?

As I say, “Voice” covers so many of the yummiest programming areas, and Her other MP3s cover many of the rest. (At this point, I’ll point to the linkroll at the top of the page, and remind you gently that She sells “Voice” and lots of other fun hypnosis CDs and MP3s, because I love the thought of enticing people to listen to Her hypnotic voice…) Hmm…I’d almost say a “Serial Recruitment” file, one that programs you to want to get others to listen to Her, but I know that She’d never record that one. It’s not ethical.

I think that probably, looking at what She’s recorded already and what She’s got coming up, my ideal “wishlist” MP3 would be one that focuses on freeze-play. Something that involves heavy programming, submission, and that wondrous feeling of helplessness that comes from being unable to move or even think. And of course, it does go without saying that my ideal MP3 would be one recorded by Lady Ru’etha.

Behind the Music: Say It

And so once again, I pick up the irregular “Behind the Music” feature, which tells stories about how my real-life hypnosis experiences (which are what this blog is about) led me to write some of my stories (which are probably what led you here.) Today, we’re looking at “Say It”, which was a story I posted in November of 2008 (although, as with many of my stories, it was written much earlier. I think I wrote this one in mid-February of that same year.)

As with many of my stories, I kind of have to disappoint my readers and say that none of this happened…exactly. You’ve probably guessed from reading the story that Mark and Judy are myself and Lady Ru’etha, respectively, but we never had an experience like this, on a cruise or anywhere else. But Lady Ru’etha did meet a very nice couple at a hypnosis convention the weekend I wrote this, and She shared an interesting story with me about their meeting. (Which is, naturally, Hers to share or keep quiet, as She wishes.) She then dropped me into trance, and guided me through a fantasy of some of the things that might have happened, if I had been there and things had developed a certain way and we had wound up enjoying ourselves along the lines of…well, along the lines of this story. Then She had to go (She was still at the convention, and it was a very busy weekend for Her) and left me to float for a bit and enjoy the fantasy (while chanting the exact same mantra that wound up in the story) until my alarm went off.

When I woke up, I wrote this story. It isn’t one of my better ones, I think…it’s a little too eager to get to the fun, mainly because by the time I wrote it, so was I. But it is a notable first; I’d used a lot of words to describe hypnotized sex toys, but this is the first time I ever felt a strong enough connection to the character in the story that I actually described a character with the word “tranceslut”. That’s a pet name Lady Ru’etha uses for me when I’m under, and up until then it had felt too personal to share…but when I was typing out that mantra, it felt like it needed to be the exact same one I’d been repeating for the last hour. So I used it…and had a very hard time stopping my fingers when I got to the end of the story.

“Past, Present and Future” Now Available For Purchase!

That’s right, folks, just in time for Christmas (well, perhaps in time to use your Christmas money on a print-on-demand edition, but easily in time for Christmas if you purchase the super-affordable downloadable ebook edition), I provide you with another short story collection! As the title, “Past, Present and Future” suggests, this has a variety of tales from fantasy stories of long ago to science-fiction stories of the distant future, and everything in between!

As with my other chronological collections (this is the seventh, for those of you keeping track–I’ll be going back later to hit the ones I missed) I got Sue-Chan to do a lovely cover, and Lady Ru’etha to introduce me in perfect style (give both of them lots of thanks, please, I can’t say enough how much I appreciate their efforts!) It also features commentary on the creation of each story, for those of you who want to know why I write what I write.

And what do I write? Read on!