Barahir: Blog

As I write, chapter 9 of Fidèle is in the queue. There will be a short holiday break before posting resumes. I'll be spending time with my high school- and college-age nieces, and while I'm quite happy to defile fictional nieces the presence of my actual nieces makes it impossible for me to write or edit erotica.

This is a chapter that might confuse people who are looking at the tags, and especially anyone who sees that I've actually placed highly in the Clitorides for BDSM content in my previous stories, because there's a dominance/submission scene in this chapter and it's...awkward and clumsy, to say the least. Almost the opposite of what someone looking for that sort of thing wants to read; a group that includes me. All I'll say for now is that it's deliberate. When the theme returns - and it will - things will be much different.

My optimistic belief that this story would start appearing back in August or September didn't take into account that it would eventually start eyeing the one million word threshold as something well within its reach. I don't need an editor, I need a carpenter to crush my fingers with a mallet to force me to stop writing.

Anyway...

It's finished, but of course there's always that pesky final editing pass. What's it about? The title says it all.

Posting will be erratic, especially over the holiday season, but I did want to at least make a beginning while it's still 2017.

Wait, it's what year...?

(That sounds like a battery-powered sex toy. I should trademark the name now.)

I'm extremely honored to have been nominated in a number of categories and to have done well enough to place in several. I know an extremely long work of fan-fiction isn't going to be to everyone's taste, so I'm grateful for every reader. Even though I wouldn't call The Cage & The Key a BDSM story, overall, I'm still quite pleased that the chapters that were received recognition.

Work on the new story - completely original this time - has slowed. I could blame being unexpectedly busy, and that would indeed be part of it, but the fact is that I've been struggling through my least favorite part of long-form adult stories: writing intricate sex scenes. For better or worse, the scene that's bogging me down is one that has to happen (in detail) because multiple elements of it are crucial to the plot. Still, the endgame is in sight. And I might as well reveal the title now: Fidèle.

Once I'm about 60% done with the final editing pass, I'll start posting. At this point, a July release is possible but slightly optimistic. We'll see.

I'm 16 chapters into an original novel I expect to top out at around 30-35 or so. I'd hoped to get it written and published before the new year, just to have a proper entry for the Clitorides, but that's not going to happen; written might be possible, but edited isn't.

The story grew out of a not-all-that-whimsical notion to reconsider a standard (albeit controversial) erotica trope, and from there exploded and deformed into something I don't believe I've ever read. I'm sure that's not the case, and that someone's already trodden this ground, but my personal experience doesn't encompass a story that goes where this one does. That's both exciting and terrifying, because I have to assume there's a reason I haven't seen this outcome before.

In any case, expect publication to begin in January, at the earliest. February, at the latest.

The Cage & The Key is a sexual coming-of-age story, and stripped of Tolkien's universe and characters it would still be one (though I'd have to write a lot more of the interstitial plot I was able to leave out of this version). I started it knowing it had to have an end, and the point I chose seemed like a reasonable one...Éowyn's journey from trapped innocence to libidinous freedom is complete...but of course there are many stories yet to be told. Most of them are already rather extensively outlined, and I could easily pick one of them up and give it a go.

I don't know if they will be told, though. (I don't know that they won't, either.) As seems sadly inevitable, the stories that most interest me are the longest ones, and taking any one of them on is a commitment I'd like to step away from for a little while. Also, I'd like to avoid writing in someone else's universe until I've done something in my own.

On the immediate horizon is a slightly less lengthy tale - the current outline estimates it at about 25 chapters, but I remain dissatisfied with said outline and it may be whittled down - in an original, modern, real-world setting. As with the previous story, I won't publish until the content is settled and it's ready for a final editing pass. The most optimistic possible timeline puts that several months into the future (I'm working on chapter 7 right now), but we'll see.

To the extent there's a point, it's this: there may be relative silence from this account for a while. Or I may write one of the shortest codas, just for fun and to have something published: the tale of the day Faramir finally told Éowyn that he's always known everything that's going on. But my primary attention will be on the new story. And another project will be going on behind the scenes: a complete re-edit of The Cage that will fix some cosmetic errors and reduce the number of cliffhanger chapter breaks (a last-minute choice that proved extremely unpopular). That'll happen all at once, in the space of a single day, but if you suddenly wonder where 10 of that story's chapters went...that's where.

In any case, I'd like to thank both those who read, voted, and especially those who commented. I know the story didn't go where all of you hoped it might - as I said to one correspondent, one of the disadvantages of posting completed stories is that you already know how much you're disappointing some of your most enthusiastic readers - but, in the end, I think it went where it needed to. Most of all, I'm happy with the outcome.