Taking Stock

For long time followers of my stories there have been many changes. My stories started in a genre most commonly called discipline fiction, but which maybe can be described better as a sort of soft BDSM. I'll freely admit that I created them by disassembling the common tropes in the genre and reengineering them into new stories. It was a genre of set patterns and established archetype characters which made it a doable genre for a novice writer. It was also a genre of uncomplicated plots, culminating in the world being set right by the ideal hero.

Only a few days ago, I was. Listening to a piece on NPR on the male heroes of Hollywood up to the development of the rating system, heroes who were the idolized male figure, impossible and unreal in their perfection. They were strong and brave and beautiful, and they never failed. As I was listening to the piece, it seemed to me that those heroes might not have disappeared, but only shifted genres to romance fiction and especially to the genre of gentle slash bdsm.

Film critics remark on the single dimensional perfection of film heroes, and as a writer I felt the opposing pull of fulfilling the needs of the story with a perfect hero versus the need for greater realism and multi-dimensional characters. For a time, I tried to balance the two, remaining in a genre where I was continually pushing on the borders of acceptable. I wanted a dominant who felt like a real man and not Fred Astaire and John Wayne rolled into one. Readers of Reality Check can see the shift in my characterization, not that I've ever been satisfied that Milton doesn't appear as the perfect hero and dominant. After all, the man does manage a harem with unbelievable ease. Ultimately I decided Reality Check could remain in the world of John Wayne and Fred Astaire. The series was named Reality Check for a reason; it was never meant to be more than a fun romp. The ending was grittier than the beginning, but it was still very much a utopian world.

The Unbreakables was born as a bit of a light diversion, created with the idea of writing short stories in a universe where Kor and I wouldn't struggle with the ethical questions of bleeding dominance to realms outside of the bedroom. For its readers, it is obvious that it shifted from its original framework to a large project that has escaped the realms of BDSM and romance fiction. I am not good at writing similar stories with different clothes and quickly become bored. For me, writing is at least partially about the challenge of pushing my skills and trying to write something better each time. Just as I felt imprisoned in the strictures of discipline fiction, BDSM romance has demands and expectations. To those few who persevered to the end of Empires, I am sure you are aware that the romance and BDSM elements were increasingly being flimsily tacked onto a story that now about something far different. It is with this in mind that out future goal is to rework the Unbreakables to fit into the fantasy and adventure world where it will hopefully find a broader audience.

For me, the purpose of posting fiction to the internet has always been to facilitate a discussion between the readers and the authors, a discussion that I hoped would help me hone a craft in which I am far from an expert. Unfortunately after struggling with various story venues, I am less and less certain such a discussion is possible and more and more certain that desiring such an exchange is somewhat as realistic as finding a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Honestly while there has been pleasure at times knowing that I have brought a speck of joy to the reader, my experience in these venues has mostly been unique and frustrating to put it as delicately as possible.  Ultimately for a number of reasons, creating a culture to broaden and strengthen the writers craft seems impossible or at least impossible for me. My experience has been that the connection between the reader and the writer is fragile. Some writers have complained of a culture of entitlement from the readers where they seem unaware of the time and effort to create even a slightly readable story. Certainly I think this does come into play, but I am also inclined to believe that often silence or the frustrating and demanding replies to write more, quickly is more of a hesitancy to expose oneself and an unsureness as what is proper as well as desire to remain anonymous in a world outside the accepted norms.

No matter the cause, all my attempts to facilitate communication have failed. Within the group forums, I either felt that I was coercing responses or being ask to become a character within one of my own worlds, an experience which I found very disturbinng as I write worlds of strongly questionable ethics. Groups are also rapidly dominated by a few, and it takes constant vigilance to make those with opposing viewpoints feel even halfway welcome. Group politics are not my strength. Groups also, in my opinion, encourage the readers to attempt to train the writers to produce works to the readers' fantasies. I have both experienced this and watched it happen with other writers, most who quit writing altogether after either several collective rounds of silence or a snowballing thrashing for daring to cross some unwritten rule of the genre. Personally I don't mind being blasted for rule breaking in a genre; I was often courting it, as an irate response can often help shape a story. For me, what is backbreaking is the silence, and for any who have read The Unbreakables, the silence is vast.

Blogs are perhaps not the ideal forum to develop an interplay between the reader and the writer, but as I write outside the bounds of fan fiction, there are few other venues. Most of the various collecting and aggregating sites outside of Wattpad are either fan fiction or strongly pornographic.  As the start of the Unbreakables could be considered within a fannish realm as it followed an AU BDSM type universe. We did post on AO3, but AO3 is a home for fan fiction and its readers. It's an excellent site, but it's not the right shelf space for the Unbreakables or any future works. Fiction moving away from pornography and hurt/comfort has a lonely world on the internet. At this point, I doubt is any of my future fiction will be available either here or on AO3. The primary driver of traffic to this blog is Tarabeth's Tearoom, and understandably readers are disappointed at my current output just as readers on AO3 are disappointed to find no Holmes or Stiles or any other of their favorite characters.

For now, I will leave all my current posted stories available here, but as the revision continues on the Unbreakables it will be removed for the long term goal of moving toward publication. Over the last two years, I removed a significant portion of my earlier fiction from this site to distance myself from some of the elements that I found uncomfortable. I will probably repost those as an orphaned archive for those who wish to read them. Some of them make me wince, but I also oppose censorship, and there removal is definitely censorship. They will trickle back up as I have time. (They have started to trickle back in The Attic.)

To all those who have stopped by and enjoyed the stories, thank you. Onward and upward or maybe downward; only time will tell.