Bound for Bebop City Is Now on Smashwords and Amazon
Click here to get the book on Smashwords.
Here’s the short blurb:
Sweet, virginal Mincy lives in alternate timeline in the 1950s where everyone’s into sexual bondage and a drug called nersha renders teens uninterested in sex. But when they’re taken off nersha after their 18th birthdays, the teens turn into frenzied sex maniacs, filled with animal need. How will Mincy cope with the mad passion driving her to submit sexually to a Master? Who will that Master be?
The 1950s was a profoundly weird period in American history. Supposedly it is the era that is nearest and dearest to the hearts of American cultural conservatives. It predated women’s liberation, the civil rights movement and the hippie movement, all of which they still despise.
Women were still mostly homemakers – even though many of them had had the experience of working in industrial and corporate jobs during World War II when so many American men were busy being machine gun fodder. And black people were out of sight and out of mind.
The role of women was so constrained that there’s a subniche of BDSM called “1950s domestic discipline” that exists, though I don’t think it’s huge. (I don’t think it’s huge because when I checked keywords on Amazon for “retro domestic discipline” I only got eight hits. When I searched for “1950s domestic discipline” I only got 34 hits: better but not exactly a landslide. However, the keywords “domestic discipline” (which I think is just code for spanking) got over 10,000 hits on Amazon. But I think that covers spankings from all time periods, within the context of a husband/wife relationship.
In any event, here’s a scholarly paper on 1950s domestic discipline which covers the topic well.
A lot was going on under the hood of the 1950s that would lead to all the things conservatives hate. This was most especially true in the areas of music and dance. While the older adults in the 1950s were still hung up on standards and leftover big band music the young kids were getting with the “race music” the early rocknroll songs that would soon rule the popular music scene. (It was called “race music” by some because it was a genre created mostly by black musicians. First jazz, now rocknroll… it drove the racists nuts.)
That’s part of the point of the dance hall scene at Pop’s Sodium Shoppe, to show rocknroll creeping in as the Bloomed (those who have gone off nersha and had their sexuality restored) dirty danced to the early rocknroll while the unbloomed shuffle danced to modern electro rock.
I chose modern shuffle dancing because I find it a joyful and expressive dance but not particularly sexual – an asexual sort of dance, still full of emotion and pleasure, though. Here’s a video of a great shuffle dance to “Lost in the Rhythm,” an electro-swing hit. (If you just search for “shuffle dance” you’ll find a lot of dances that incorporate sexy moves like twerking into the dance. They’re dances but not really shuffle dances.)
As for the Bloomed dancing, I was thinking of something like this scene from Dirty Dancing only with more acrobatics, lots of nudity and some actual fucking.
Much of my portrayal of the aesthetics of the 50s is informed various books on the topic, but you can easily get a feel for the imagery of the era by doing an image search for “Fifties Aesthetic.”
My initial idea for the story was to put a new spin on first time stories by having puberty delayed until age 18 but then have it hit like a runaway freight train, and how does a society cope with that? Everything else spun off from that central idea. I hope you enjoy it… I enjoyed writing it, though it was tough.
Virgin Slave Girls of Parados Is Now on Smashwords
Click here to be whisked away to Smashwords to buy the book!
My latest work is a novella, a steampunkish (steam power isn’t widely in use just yet though it is being used for large industrial purposes, like pumping water out of mines) variation of the Old West. However, technology is advancing FAST, faster than anyone knows, in the Union, which is what the nascent United States is called in this timeline. Yes, it’s an alternate world SF steampunkish sexual bondage erotic romance set in a variation of the Old West. Now, that’s a NICHE!
(Actually, I’ll call it historical erotica since that’s an ACTUAL niche that really exists.)
The basic story is two friends who have just turned 18 go out for a night on the town in Parados in the Republic of Geronimo (think west Texas). Being adult women in a society where religion is pretty much just reverence for nature (and hence sex guilt tripping does not exist) and there’s something called “slave medicine” that is a safe, sure, easy and effective method of birth control, they’re both looking to get themselves collared and fucked.
Because of course in this alternative world everyone is also into maledom/femsub, basically master/slave sex.
I had so much fun fitting all this into a traditional Old West story. The best part was where I lifted a character from a classic Western comedy movie and put her in my story as is, though in a slightly different situation. (A hint: the movie is not “Blazing Saddles” but it is also a very funny movie that satirizes Western tropes very effectively.)
I also had fun inventing some bordello tech in a world without steam power.
I’m also very pleased at how the cover came out. It’s basically two images that have been merged to form one. I spent hours looking for the right stuff on the commercial art site I use and found these gems. It wasn’t luck, really, I took some deep dives into some rabbit holes on the site to find just the art I was looking for.
And the sex scenes were fun, too. I built toward the big sex scenes by including short sexy scenes in which Matty and Arlene meet various friends in town, including one in punishment stocks who’s getting vigorously “punished” at the time (she’s basically free use while in the stocks) one who’s a pony girl, and one who’s a slave whore with a tale to tell about how she became one. By the time Matty and Arlene get tied up and have their big sex scenes with their hunky Masters, they are, well, “hot and bothered” barely describes it!
Of course, I could be lying about all this. But I’m not. Read the book and find out… I dare you!
Abducted, Roped & Raped Is Now On Smashwords
Click on the pic to be whisked to Smashwords and get the novella!
(For those who don’t know, a bodice ripper is a subgenre of old-time romances that were essentially rape fantasies. They passed muster because they were not at all explicit, in fact, you could read a bodice ripper and never even know that a rape had occurred. They way it worked is, say an 18th century pirate captain captured a comely woman of good breeding after a sea battle. He drags her into his cabin and rips off her bodice (it’s some kind of undergarment they used to wear on the outside). She shrieks. Cut to some time later. They’re both fully dressed again. He’s all smirky and happy and she’s all shy and timid, as was the custom of the times. That’s how you knew a rape had occurred. That was about as explicit as it got in those days.)
Then I realized that the title would show up in alphabetical listings a lot better if it was just “Bodice Ripper.” So “Bodice Ripper” it was.
Then I did a little keyword research and discovered that “bodice ripper” isn’t exactly a popular keyword nowadays. I might be at the top of a pile of relatively rarely-searched-for titles, which means low sales because not many customers.
So I tried a different subgenre that fits the storyline along with some terms that describe what happens in the story. The title I came up with is “Abducted, Roped & Raped: Enemies To Lovers.”
That worked a lot better in the search engines. I’m on the second page of search results for “Enemies to Lovers” which is a term that gets over 10,000 hits on Smashwords. That’s MUCH improved.
Now as to the matter of updating the “Enemies to Lovers” trope, that has proven difficult for me. Since rapes were not only not explicit but could just barely be inferred in the old days, it was fairly easy for authors to sidestep the moral and ethical issues of rape just to slide a little fantasy fuel in there. (In fact, there’s a thread on Goodreads about 80s authors having to rewrite their books to eliminate even the INFERRED rape scenes in order to get published on Amazon, which has disappointed their fans who LIKED the original version.)
But I wrote an explicit bodice ripper: the male lead (Cal) repeatedly rapes the female lead (Melody) and it’s described in long, explicit detail, “rape for titillation” as the Smashwords form describes it.
Now I’m personally fine with writing “rape for titillation” fiction. Basically it’s because fiction isn’t real, and publishing rape fantasy fiction doesn’t make rape more commonplace (or “normalized”). I wrote a blog post explaining why with cites and everything. Click here to read it.
Clearly, my morality is not the basis on which censorship exists. Censorship exists on the basis of “I’m in power, I make the rules, f&&k you, writer.” In the case of Amazon I’m sure it’s a matter of balancing on the edge between profitability (they don’t care really about the morality of what they publish) and how much shit the prudes are shoveling over this and that. (“Prude” being my term for whoever advocates censoring sexuality in fiction, whatever their declared rationale might be.)
But the problem was, I had to figure out a way to write characters who might reasonably behave as bodice ripper characters do, in the modern day. And that was tough. Frankly, it was unreasonable behavior for the historical times it was supposed to be in.
So what I did was look for a character who was well outside traditional morality. And I feel I created one in Melody Chastain. Is she your average girl next door? Of course not, nor should she be. But I feel that a character like the one I created might conceivably have done what my character did under the same circumstances.
You’ll just have to read the novella to find out what she did and why and decide for yourself on that point. Bwahaha! as they say…
Housekeeping Area
Do not read beyond this point. This is just where I put stuff to link to from other pages and so forth. A scrap heap. Or study the heck out of it if you like. It’s your time and attention.
