Liner Notes for December 2021

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Bit of an odd entry this month, as Simon’s break falls on the end of December so there’s one story that’s posted everywhere but the EMCSA. Obviously that’ll be rectified in a few days, but I always try to do my “Liner Notes” pieces before the end of the month, so we’ll just have to acknowledge that sometimes other people take vacations but I never do. (That’s totally untrue. I take vacations, I just build up a little bit of a queue first so y’all don’t know it.) Speaking of, let’s talk about these stories that were written in June of 2020, shall we?

Even Numbers: This wasn’t a story I intended to write when I first did “Plain Gold Ring”; at the time, my intention was just to write a story where the hypnotist put someone under, found out that it made them horny, and went, “You know what? We’ll do something about that another time if you still feel the same way.” (Which is an important behavior to model, even if fantasies like mine are usually about instant gratification.)

But when I finished it, I realized I kind of had to see it through to a satisfying conclusion. By the time that sank in, I was several stories past it and it felt weird to just pick it up the next night, so I wrote “Worth the Wait” to show the negotiation process. And I knew that there would have to be another story that showed the consummation of their relationship. When I saw this title, it reminded me of some delightful induction techniques I’ve used in the past that felt like they would fit very well into the dynamic between Rosita and Mateo, and everything flowed from there.

Accident Waiting to Happen: I’m always a sucker for “mind controlled person thinks they’re doing something of their own free will, but they’re really following a post-hypnotic suggestion that puts them right back into the same situation that initially got them into the sinister brainwasher’s evil clutches” as a trope. I’m also a sucker for “seemingly innocent device has a mind-controlling side effect, and the person who figures it out first uses it to lock down any potential opposition to their will”. And “lesbian mad scientist” never goes badly with those other two. So you can probably see how this one unfolded pretty naturally from my natural predilections.

Quickie: To a certain extent, explaining how I got from seeing “Quickie” to writing a story about a quickie feels a bit like putting a hat on a hat, but obviously there are a lot of considerations and paths this one could have taken. I decided I wanted it to be fairly romantic, but in an intense and kinky way because the whole point of a quickie is that you really want to jump the other person’s bones as fast as possible and they feel the same way. And I wanted it to be a story set at some kind of a public place, because that increases the urgency of the situation. And because it was going to be fast and urgent and public, that made it likely to be something involving manual stimulation, which all led to a very dominant, very intense lesbian encounter. And because I do like flipping the script a little on dominant lesbians, I decided to make the butch one the sub. From there, it was almost just a matter of stenography.

Name It After Me: Obviously, this is written as a kind of sequel to the novel (and extremely faithful film adaptation of) ‘Rosemary’s Baby’. I took my initial inspiration from Stephen King’s discussion of the story in the non-fiction book ‘Danse Macabre’, where he suggests that Rosemary’s actions at the end constitute a grudging acceptance of her role as mother to the child. And to me, a child who’s being raised by a pack of Satanists and a lapsed Catholic is going to have some contradictions in their worldview.

So even before I wrote out Guy’s story, I knew he was going to wind up having trouble following in his father’s footsteps. I enjoyed filling in the little details, showing the progression as he found his own footing and became his own person (even as I wound up very glad that he was nothing like Adam in ‘Good Omens’, another story along the same lines but one that takes ‘The Omen’ as its starting point). And I also knew that he’d wind up repeating his dad’s mistakes in one key way, by impregnating human women. I think it’s one of my better endings, and I wound up really enjoying Guy as a character who you shouldn’t like but can’t help sympathizing with.

And that’s December in the books, taking 2021 with it! Thanks for spending another year with me, and I’ll see you in 2022 for another blog post!