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It looks like the end of another month is upon us, and everyone knows what that means – it’s time for another Liner Notes! (Well, probably not everyone. There are probably plenty of folks who don’t even have an Internet connection, for example. But, you know. You. And some other people with similar interests. Look, it’s not important. Let’s just get on with it, okay? Okay.)
You Broke Like Glass: When I saw this title, I instantly imagined a Sinister Hypnotist confidently telling their latest victim that their resistance had already been overcome so easily once that it wasn’t going to be a problem to break their will again. But on thinking about it, I thought that it might make a more interesting story if that was the lie, and they were really trying to gaslight their victim into thinking they’d been hypnotized before so that they didn’t put up any resistance to what they believed was a reinduction. It was a little tricky to make clear in the story, since obviously the victim would believe they hadn’t been hypnotized either way, but I like to think that there are enough clues to make it clear to a discerning reader.
It’s also another one of my M/M efforts. As I’ve mentioned in the past, I’m trying to do those every so often for those people out there who want to see gay male hypno-content. There traditionally hasn’t been a lot of overlap between gay men and other sexualities in the hypnokink community for some reason, and I’m hoping that maybe there’s some benefit to blurring that bright line just a little.
S.O.S.: This one’s a little… complicated. I was thinking about doing another superhero story, but I didn’t really have anything in particular in mind; I just knew it had been a while since I’d done one, and I was randomly brainstorming while looking at song titles. And when I saw “S.O.S.”, I thought that maybe it was going to be an acronym that meant something different than people usually meant by that kind of thing. Which led me down the trail of word puzzles, and it occurred to me that it would be kind of neat if someone was hiding “S.O.S.” as a message in their speech by speaking in word puzzles. And why would they do that? Well, because they’d been brainwashed and this was the only way they could reveal their secrets.
That, in turn, led me back to this piece, which I’d written some time earlier on my Tumblr page. I’ve said in the past that I really don’t like letting the bad guys win in my superhero stories, both because superheroic fiction is to me a fundamentally optimistic genre about things turning out better than they do in real life and because it’s easier to brainwash the same hero twice than to come up with a whole new superhero to enslave for the second story. So this flash story nagged away at me, and when I had to have a brainwashed superhero show up speaking in a weird code that Sharpe had to decipher at the last moment, it kind of clicked together.
I don’t think it’s my sexiest superhero story, but I like the plotting and I like that Doctor Null feels like a real threat. And I like Shadowstryke, enough that she wound up showing up in the next Shadowstryke and Sharpe story as a third in what’s becoming a polyamorous triad. Which is good, because they’re going to need allies…
Dolly Dagger: This was blatantly inspired by descriptions of an old horror film from the thirties called “White Zombie”, starring Bela Lugosi. I read about it in a book on zombie cinema, and the author vividly described a confrontation between Lugosi’s Murder (that’s his character’s actual first name, Murder – clearly his parents had a pretty good idea of how he was going to turn out) and a secondary, repentant villain. Murder carves a “voodoo doll” of the other man as they’re arguing, and it saps his will and transforms him into a zombie as the scene plays out.
I liked the idea of it, but I’ve grown less and less comfortable with the idea of actually putting voodoo in my stories; I did it once, in an old story of mine called “Zombie” about arrogant white people treating someone’s religion like a superstition to their eventual downfall, but I didn’t feel like I could make it work in this context and it seemed very rude to try. So instead I made a nod to the inspirations involved, but made it a very different magic and a very different magician. Similar outcome, though. Don’t mess with mind controllers, for they are subtle and quick to anger.
Just Like Christmas: This was one of those ones that flowed pretty smoothly from concept to execution. I saw the title and immediately pictured a hypnotist having a chance encounter with someone sexy and unexpectedly hypnokinky, and naturally the obvious way for that to happen would be for them to already be doing some light public play with their existing partner when the potential third person stumbles on the two of them together. Which meant that it was going to be a threesome, which is definitely the fantasy of lots of people in all kinds of kink and even relatively vanilla sex.
It felt really obvious that it should be genuinely consensual and respectful pretty much off the bat; after all, the whole point of this was that Duchess was getting something amazing dropped right into her lap, someone who was absolutely gagging for both hypnosis and lesbian sex. With that going on, why fuck with dubcon? So I made a pointed effort to spell out the negotiation rather than just leaving it to the imagination, and I think the story is stronger for it. Everyone involved feels like a real person, and that makes me very happy – this is one of those stories that I feel has amazingly positive representation, with a butch black lesbian as the protagonist who’s also a college student and a thoughtful, loving Dominant. I hope someone out there sees this and thinks, “Oh, that could be me!” And goes out and does hot, good, kinky things to someone they love.
And that’s a good note to close on – see you next week for another blog post, and next month for another Liner Notes!