Liner Notes for April 2022

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I know February is the shortest month, but honestly April feels like it goes by much quicker – those extra two days really just vanish into the lengthening daylight hours and the changing weather and the anticipation of real spring. I don’t even know where the time went… but wherever it went, it left behind a whole month of new stories! Let’s take a look at them together.

Unjust Desserts: Anyone who knows me in real life knows that one of my personal interests is cooking. I’m not much more than barely competent in the kitchen myself, but I love the science and the aesthetics and the history of food – it’s one of the few remaining art forms that hasn’t been affected by recording technology, despite our best efforts. You can film a concert and set a once-in-a-lifetime performance into fixed form for eternity, but a great meal from a brilliant chef exists only to be consumed. That fascinates me.

And so yes, this took a lot of my interest in food and blended it with mind control to do a lot of bodily transformation fic, which isn’t usually my gig but which I’m always peripherally aware of due to its crossovers with my particular kink. I’ll admit, I expected it to be a bit better received given how many times I hear people ask me for transformation and hucow stories, but who knows. Maybe I should have centered it on Sammie’s experience instead.

You Can’t Resist It: I’ll be honest – this one was pretty much just Mark Ruffalo’s “That’s my secret, Cap, I’m always angry” transposed into a ‘horny for mind control’ fic. That’s not to say I’m not happy with it – there’s nothing quite so much fun as writing a monologue from a sinister brainwasher who’s getting off on the demonstration of their complete and total power to reshape their victim’s will, and I liked putting in the little details of how the supposedly plucky young heroine tracked him down and figured out what was going on. But yeah, it was really just a vehicle to get to that gag at the end. Because let’s face it, a lot of people do want to just pack it all in and become a mindless sex slave in this economy.

Zipper: I’ve mentioned it before, but I really do love single-word titles – there’s just something so punchy about them, something that lends itself to multiple interpretations and double meanings and powerful, vivid images. Even though there’s no other meaning to this particular word, I feel like it immediately and intensely focuses the mind on that gleam of metal and what lies behind it, which is perfect for a story about hypnotic focus.

It also gave me a chance to talk about some of the more complicated aspects of hypnosis kink in the real world; as much as we like to imagine for fantasy purposes that hypnotizing someone makes them into a helpless slave with no will or volition, or that there’s a binary between ‘resisting completely and shaking off all those insidious suggestions’ and ‘obeying mindlessly’, the reality is that human beings are messy and confusing and the boundary between a suggestion you get and a compulsion you have is every bit as messy and confusing as everything else. Cleo didn’t lose her ability to walk away when she started submitting deeply to her hypnotist, and she didn’t lose her kinks and turn-ons when she had her break-up. There’s not always a clear and obvious line of demarcation between what you want and what you’re being controlled to do, which is what makes long and occasionally tedious discussions of ethics so important.

Dark Necessities: This was super heavily inspired by a particular scene in the Stephen King vampire novel ‘Salem’s Lot’ that stuck with me probably since childhood (my parents left a lot of very inappropriate books lying around the house when I was a kid, and although I was too young to have the attention span for a full-length novel, that one is full of little vignettes that are just the perfect size for an eight-year old. If not the right subject matter.) In it, the vampire Barlow visits with the local caretaker for the town dump just after sundown and has a friendly chat with him that shades very gradually into hypnosis and blood drinking, and it always caught my attention that this minor character is really the only one that Barlow views as worthy of his time and direct interaction. King is a very working-class writer (a trait I feel like I share) and so I wanted to write something about a working woman who’s singled out not as a victim, but as a potentially kindred spirit who’s ready to become something more.

Warning Sign: I don’t know why, but hacking of medical devices is where my mind always goes whenever I think of cyborgs. I mean, obviously I’ve got a kink, but also it’s just such a terrifying and fascinating notion to me that we could reach a future where prosthetics and augmentation reach these dizzying heights and have a whole new set of fears to deal with solely because some people are assholes (although it’s worth mentioning here, outside the context of fiction, that a lot of the treatment of human augmentation to overcome disabilities is written from a very ableist perspective in general and those cyborg body parts aren’t really the solution people think they are, and the people who are living with them and using them as we approach this future aren’t being listened to the way they should be when they talk about the real problems with cyborg limbs and cybernetics as a mobility aid).

Honestly, that lengthy parenthetical really is the tweet here, because this is about someone who gets a cyborg prosthetic they’re told will fix all their problems and finds out that no, there’s a whole host of practical issues that were downplayed by a medical establishment so proud of their achievements and glowing with the glamour of Helping the Helpless that they didn’t really take on board the feedback from the people who had to use the damn things. Couple that with the very real and very scary obsession with linking every damn thing to a computer network and not thinking even once, let alone twice about the way hackers are always ten steps ahead of security experts (not to denigrate security experts, but they’re fundamentally in a reactive position which puts them at a disadvantage) and you get a story that sits squarely in the middle of a lot of uncomfortable truths. It may not be sexy, but I think it’s good.

And that’s April in the books! Join me next week for another blog post, and next month for another Liner Notes!