“The Best That I Could Do” Now Available For Purchase!

That’s right, folks! Just as my stories on the EMCSA have caught up with the end of “The Immaculate Collection”, I’ve got a brand-new book out with twenty-one brand new stories for you to check out in print-on-demand book form or affordable, downloadable ebook format! This one’s got it all–more Girls(tm), more WildRose, more Jack and Diane, lesbians, magic, and even songs!

And because I love you all so very much, I’ve once again gotten Sue-Chan to do a cover, I’ve cajoled Lady Ru’etha into giving me a lovely foreword, and I’ve even included a few pages of my commentary on each story! But what stories are in this collection, you ask?

Well, read on…

Yet More Memories of DragonCon

My apologies for the slight delay in posting; I really do try to put something up every Wednesday, but yesterday just seemed to sort of get away from me. I’m sure Lady Ru’etha will make it up to you all at some point by commanding me to post. 🙂

This is the final entry in the epic trilogy that is my recollections of DragonCon 2009; by now, we’re up to Sunday night, the final evening of the convention. Lady Ru’etha once again hosted a little hypnosis symposium for anyone who had questions or just wanted to experience trance; this one wasn’t as well-attended as Saturday’s, but I don’t think any of the people there minded. Fewer people meant more trance time for the people who wanted it, and a more intimate experience…and no, I don’t mean that sort of “intimate”, although there were a couple of people from Saturday night who got up the nerve to confess that they’d been enjoying hypnosis in a little bit more than a purely relaxing sense.

For myself, I didn’t actually trance that much. For the early part of the night (and I use “early” advisably, we started at 11:30 PM) most of the hypnosis revolved around one person taking center-stage while Lady Ru’etha put them under and everyone else watched. This was just close enough to one of my general squicks, humiliation, that I didn’t feel totally comfortable volunteering. It wasn’t actually humiliating, you understand. Nobody was having anything mean done to them. But something about everyone in the room staring at me while I got hypnotized made me just slightly twitchy. Luckily, Lady Ru’etha made it very clear to everyone, in a polite but firm way, that nobody had to come up who didn’t want to and nobody should pressure anyone.

So for me, a lot of the evening was sitting, chatting, and watching. I answered some questions from people while Lady Ru’etha was trancing other people out (I’m not a formally-trained hypnotist, but as Lady Ru’etha will mention, I’ve picked up a lot from Her over the years.) I watched a little bit of hypnotic fun, as one person was allowed to be a cat for a good fifteen minutes or so (one of their personal fantasies) while another spent some time in Robot Mode (from Lady Ru’etha’s “Robotic Initialization” series, also one of their personal fantasies.) I did have a little time spent in trance, of course. Lady Ru’etha demonstrated Her Voice trigger a few times, and the people who had it installed (all of Her pets, and one or two close friends) dropped like a rock the moment She said, “Voice commands deep trance now.” (She’s putting out a CD of that particular induction very soon. I wonder how many people will drop for Her next year when She says that.)

Once again, it was a very late evening, only this time we had to get up bright and early for the last day of the con. It was emotional, as last days tend to be; we’d all spent almost a full week in each other’s company, but it wasn’t enough. It never is. Lady Ru’etha got to formally place a new collar one of Her pets, who is also one of Her husbands (and he is, whatever the law might say) and She and I tranced each other for about an hour before I had to leave for my flight. (First I tranced Her, then She tranced me. This is where the biting came in, for those of you who remember a few posts back.)

I’m already looking forward to next year.

More Memories of DragonCon

So on Saturday afternoon at DragonCon, I attended the “Hypnosis Facts and Fiction” panel. It was very well attended, although for a moment at the beginning I was deeply concerned that it was going to be derailed by a Bat. Shit. Insane. Cosplayer who started the whole thing off by asking how she could develop resistance to hypnosis because her arch-nemesis was an evil telepath. (I shit you not. This happened.) But she got shut down very quickly and deftly, and the panel proceeded to be a nice discussion of hypnosis, what it can do, and what it can’t do. (It was also crashed by David Fonteneau, but he was a welcome crasher with some very nice contributions on stage hypnosis and nobody minded that he didn’t actually have a badge. Shhh! Don’t tell any con staffers! 🙂 )

There was no actual hypnosis at that panel; that waited until 11:30 or so, when a room opened up and Lady Ru’etha could do a group induction. This was also quite well attended; about twenty to thirty people showed up and enjoyed what I swore at the time was a ten-minute long group trance, but which turned out to be twenty-eight minutes. I remember thinking that I wasn’t going as deep as usual, despite the happy tick of the metronome acting like an anchor to my brain…but when I came out, I found major time distortion and parts of my memory that had fogged over. (I’m familiar enough with Lady Ru’etha’s group inductions to know what probably happened during that time, but the line between imagination and reconstruction is blurry enough that I won’t bother trying. I just know it was niiiiice. 🙂 )

After that, She did a long period of questions and answers, of which there were a lot–the “hypno-posse” from Thursday night had been joined by a lot of new faces, so there really were a lot of people who’d never experienced deliberately induced trance before and had a lot of questions. (One of my Lady’s standard lines: Everyone has experienced trance. Everyone experiences it several times a day, because it’s a natural state of consciousness. You might not have been formally hypnotized, but you’ve been in trance.)

She did several rapid inductions–this is a technique for putting someone under that involves rapidly overwhelming their conscious mind with more input than they can handle in a short period, then at the exact moment where they’re overwhelmed, giving them just the right little “nudge” into hypnosis. Her induction involved moving Her hand rapidly in front of their face as their eyes followed it, then pulling them forward and saying “Sleep,” just at the moment where their eyes lost focus and started to glaze. It’s an absolutely adorable thing to watch.

Particularly when it involved a very, very adorable young woman in a corset who wandered in on her way back from a rave, saying, “I heard they were hypnotizing people in here!” But I’m getting ahead of myself a bit…

Lady Ru’etha made sure that everyone who wanted a turn got one, then started letting people goof around. We had two light and sound machines (the same things that got into my head so damn bad last year) and a couple of people tried them over the course of the night. Including the friend who’d joined us Thursday night, whose hypnosis interest seemed to have grown exponentially with a couple of days to think over what she’d experienced. (She also turned out to be an amusingly good subject, too; there were a couple of hypnotists in the room that night apart from Lady Ru’etha, and so she wound up dazing out more than a few times over the course of events.)

We all actually wound up going under a lot; Lady Ru’etha is more than a little mischievous when it comes to triggering trances, and She was in a room where at least five people had gone under for Her often enough that they were conditioned to respond to Her trance triggers (deliberately installed or otherwise.) We’d very frequently get into situations where She was hypnotizing one person, and when She looked up, three or four people had gone under.

I recall that after everyone had gone through at least one induction, one woman came back for seconds…and because, as I say, Lady Ru’etha has a mischievous streak to Her, seconds became thirds became fourths before She let her out of the chair. She’d wake her up, give her just a couple of seconds to realize that she was, in fact awake…and then snap Her fingers, or pick up the woman’s arm and drop it into Her outstretched hand, or just say, “Sleep”, and she’d go right back down again. It only lasted about two minutes, but the look in that woman’s eyes by the time she finally got up…OK, by the time she was finally allowed to get up…told me that she was heavily fractionated.

And a few more people joined us over the course of the night–mainly because the girl who was “just curious” about hypnosis on Thursday was telling people up and down the halls on her way to the bathroom, “It’s so awesome, they’re hypnotizing people down there! Go check it out!” Which led to a few people detaching themselves from the knot of dancing, parties, and raves in the central lobby (DragonCon is a serious party con), and wandering in. Including one very attractive girl in a corset who walked in saying, “I heard they were hypnotizing people in here!”

Turned out she’d just had her first experience with hypnosis about a week earlier when a stage hypnotist did a performance (we actually suspect that it might have been the aforementioned David Fonteneau), and she wanted to try some more. And she did…Lady Ru’etha blogged about this on Her own blog, but even at the time, I could see that little light in Her eyes that said, “I’m going to enjoy this about as much as an person can enjoy an essentially G-rated trance.” 😉 She gave the girl a rapid, a pocketwatch induction that left me craving so bad that I went up to Her a little bit later and asked for the same, and left the girl pleasantly drifting for a good twenty minutes (at her own request–she was clearly enjoying the trance experience, and when asked, “Do you want to come back up?”, said “Not yet.”) And meanwhile, her boyfriend found the light and sound machine…

By this point, Lady Ru’etha Herself was pretty hilariously fractionated. She commented to one person that She was probbly the easiest subject in the room, and I surprised both of us by running my finger down Her forehead and being quite gratified as She slumped sideways against me. (She’s adorable in trance. It makes me want to cuddle Her like a teddy bear.) I brought Her right back up, because it was Her party and I didn’t want Her to miss out on the chance to hypnotize people left, right and center, but it was a good example of how just the rapport trances were enough to leave Her fractionated.

My pocketwatch induction was right towards the end; I asked Her if She could hypnotize me with the pocketwatch (She has three, all presents from pets) and She cheerfully obliged. There’s something so deep-down satisfying about a traditional pocketwatch induction. It just feels so inevitable–you know what a pocketwatch does when a hypnotist dangles it in front of your eyes, you know what happens when you follow a pocketwatch with your eyes and they start getting heavy, and you just know that you’re going to sink into trance. (I think that the next time I ask Her to do it, I’m going to ask Her to compel my eyes to stay open, instead of compelling them to shut. I love that moment when your eyes flutter and roll back, and I’d love to try to extend it a bit longer.)

The whole evening was a long, happy blur of hypnosis, and it was about 3:30 AM by the time we finally headed back to the hotel room. We’d made a lot of new hypno-enthusiasts, probably more than a couple new hypno-fetishists, and what with all the fractionation, I think I lasted about thirty seconds between the time I lay down and the time I fell asleep.

Memories of DragonCon

DragonCon this year might as well have been named “HypnoFest 2009”, at least for me. Lady Ru’etha was in a playful mood all weekend, and there always seemed to be a small crowd of tranceplay enthusiasts around Her who wanted to watch, participate, or experiment for themselves. (I think She made about a half-dozen budding hypnotists, and a dozen or so more who like the feel of trance.)

The first night was a good case in point. The first evening of the con is always a little informal, since there’s no actual convention programming other than the line for registration (which took us two and a half hours all by itself.) I was up in the hotel room, dozed off, but when Lady Ru’etha came up and asked me if I wanted to accompany Her in meeting some people we knew from last year, I blinked the sleep out of my eyes and came along. (It wasn’t that I wasn’t tired; I just knew that a) I had gone to the con to be with Her, not to sleep, and b) I was going to spend enough time tranced out that I’d probably wind up more alert than if I slept.)

So we went and found somewhere quiet (we being my Lady, myself, two of Her fellow pets, two other friends of Hers that were staying with us, one friend from last year, and her new girlfriend who knew very little about hypnosis other than that her girlfriend was very, very enthusiastic about it.) Which meant that she was treated to a long, in-depth, personalized course on the ins and outs of hypnosis, complete with demonstrations from no less than five eagerly hypnotizable subjects.

I don’t actually remember a ton of it, to be honest. I remember my Lady used one of Her favorite triggers on me more than once (the “off button” She installed back in February of 2008, which I blogged about at the time.) I remember She had a habit of “accidentally” triggering people–when you’re in and out of trance very rapidly and frequently like we were that night, and you’re intently focused on the words of someone you know is an expert hypnotist, and you’re just generally craving the warm, drifty sensations of trance, there’s kind of a tendency to interpret everything as a trigger, and every trigger as meant for you. I recall Her saying one person’s name and snapping Her fingers; that person instantly slumped down in trance, to general giggles. Giggles that lasted about four finger snaps longer, as She moved Her hand in front of each person in turn and induced them the same way. 🙂

(It’s worth mentioning that Lady Ru’etha has never installed a “finger snap” trigger in my head; She’s never given me any post-hypnotics about it at all. But I was in a state where I wanted to go into trance for Her very badly, I was keyed in on Her very intently and could tell that She wanted me to go into trance, and so when She snapped Her fingers, my brain said, “A-ha! I know what that means!” And down I went.)

By the end of the evening, our new friend had gone into trance at least once herself (formally, at least; given the amount of careful attention she was paying to Lady Ru’etha, and the number of inductions and trances she observed, it’s highly likely that she had gone in and out of light trances several times over the course of the evening without even recognizing them as such.) But at the end of the night, Lady Ru’etha did an excellent hypnotic induction and put her under, and from the look on her face when she came back up, we could all tell She’d created another trance addict. 🙂

Which proved to be pretty prescient, as the rest of the con proved. But that’s for later. 🙂

Back From the Happy Place

Sorry about the lack of a post last week, but I was in the midst of flying out to DragonCon 2009 during the period where I would have written it. I’m now back, filled with all sorts of wonderful happy memories I’ll be sharing with you once I recover from five days of very little sleep, frequent and deep fractionation, extensive travel, and adjusting my sleep schedule from days to nights and back again. (I’m actually tired enough that I wouldn’t be posting at all if not for the fact that my Lady commanded me to, and doing what She says just feels so good!)

I’ll start at the end, though, with a brief but enjoyable experience on the last day of the con. Lady Ru’etha and I had found a nice quiet spot (much easier to do on the final day, when everyone is either attending the final panels, hunting for bargains in the dealers’ room, or getting the heck out of Dodge) and we took turns trancing each other and sharing warm snuggly hugs. (In this case, that’s not a euphemism–it was too public for anything really fun.)

But it wasn’t too public to do one very nice thing, right near the end; after I asked Her very politely (She loves to hear Her pets begging), She consented to mark me. I’ve never thought of myself as much of a vampkink person per se, even though there’s some inevitable overlap due to the “hypnotic eyes”, but She’s been doing play-bites and hickeys as an element of our face-to-face play since late last year, and it’s really started to develop a powerful effect.

So when She put Her lips to my wrist and nibbled, I felt the sensation of something flowing from me into Her. Not blood, I knew She hadn’t broken the skin, but it felt like She was drawing some sort of essence out of me. The effect was to make me feel weak and passive and dreamy, all at once. (Oh, and very hot. We had to take a few minutes afterward to let me relax a little. 🙂 ) I really did feel like She was drinking me in, leaving me helpless to resist Her commands and obedient to Her will.

(The observant among you might remember the post from around the 4th of July, where I mentioned getting a hickey while in deep trance. Unsurprisingly, most of the feelings above that I mention “spontaneously” feeling…hmmm. Yeah. Seems like She delivered a speech to me while I was hypnotized that talked about how common it was to feel that way when a beautiful, commanding woman marked you with Her lips and teeth.)

Have I mentioned lately how much I love this woman?