Saturday, December 16, 2017

What Women Want

Once upon an age ago, when I still had a proofreader to get feedback from, I asked her about a story I was working on. My friend - let's call her Susan - had read my stories and enjoyed them for years and offered me a lot of helpful feedback. So I asked her about an idea I'd had for a story set in a high school. The basic idea was an insensitive guy leaves a girl for a prettier, more popular young woman. She comes into possession of a device that lets her transform anyone in any way she wants. Pretty good setup for a TG story, right? I thought so too. I asked her to think about the situation and tell honestly what she thought she as a young woman that had graduated from high school not so many years before would do in that given situation.

Her answer surprised me. Actually, to be honest, she gave me several answers / scenarios. All of them left me confused and disappointed.

In one, she used the device to make herself better looking and joined the cheerleading squad to drive her ex mad with jealousy, so she could turn him down when he wanted her back. In another, she turned herself into a duplicate of the other girl so that the ex would have to choose between them based on personality instead of appearance. In another, she made all of the nice girls pretty and all of the mean girls ugly. Then there was the one where she turned herself into a copy of the girl so she could act out and get the girl her ex had chosen in trouble.

I think you get the idea. None of her ideas was in any way involved turning her ex into a girl.

When I asked her why, and this is the point, she said something that has stuck with me. I don't remember the actual words she used, but the idea she communicated to me was pretty potent. It boiled down to the idea that for the ex to pay, he still had to be her ex. If the girl in the story turned him into a girl, he would be too focused on his own predicament and not focused enough on her and how he had hurt her. She didn't want to change his body; she wanted to change his mind and mend his ways. Or put another way, the only revenge she wanted was emotional, and in her view a physical transformation could only get in the way of that.

Susan's feedback made me feel ashamed that I hadn't done a good enough job imagining the inner life of the women I was writing in my stories. What did they want? Why did they want it? Were the motives I gave to them realistic, or simply opportunistic attempts to move the story in the direction I wanted it to go?

While Susan's feedback hasn't stopped me from writing stories where the antagonist is a woman seeking revenge for ill treatment (The Birthday Girl is a great example of this), it has made me hyper-aware that the reasons a woman might transform someone are more complicated than a simple desire to make a guy "pay" for his bad behavior. In The Birthday Girl, for example, a transformation that first appears to be revenge for ill-treatment is revealed to be more about a desire to do whatever it takes to break a cycle of abuse. Punishment has very little to do with it. Preventing other women from being subjected to a cruel man's emotional abuse is the point. Katrina makes a huge personal sacrifice, giving up her very identity in exchange for one that is less than ideal, all so she can protect other women from a man she views as a menace. The man's transformation and potential redemption are secondary to Katrina. She doesn't transform him to punish him, or to save him; she transforms him to save herself and other women from him. If the way she goes about doing that seems like revenge, it's only because her goal is to force him to open his eyes and accept the reality that he is a woman and the world will see him and treat him that way. That's a story that I never would have told if it hadn't been for my proofreader's feedback.

All of which is prelude to my point. The story I'm currently working on - CJ, a Halloween story - is about a group of college students, most of which are female. While my own college experiences inform the story, Susan's feedback about her perceptions of motive have led to a story where the women relate to each other on an personal and emotional level, while the men in the story are focused so hard on the physical that they almost can't see the emotional impact of what they say and do. The main character, who is of course transformed, becomes torn between these two perspectives. That leads to an epiphany about how they see the world, and a choice about how that revelation informs their sense of self-identity. I owe that element of the story to Susan's perspective.

Damn, I miss having a proofreader.

Sunday, September 24, 2017

New Story: "Texas Hold 'Em"

My latest story, "Texas Hold 'Em" is now available for sale on Amazon.

I started working on this story in June of last year (2016). It was originally one of my procrastination projects, based on a simple, sexy premise: a guy loses his manhood in a poker game. Poker led to Texas hold 'em, which made turning the main character into a sexy Texas cheerleader an inevitability. The name of the game also led to what I think is an obvious double entendre. (Double. Get it? Bah-dah, bum. *Tish.*)

The story was originally supposed to end after chapter 13, Into The Sunset. By the time I got that far, though, the story and its characters had taken on a life of their own. What I intended as a short, fun, sex romp became a more serious dramatic conflict that segues into a romance. It felt very organic as I was writing it.

As for the romance itself, if you liked the ending of "The Party Favor," I think you may like this story's ending even more. I think that what I'm most proud of isn't where the story ends up, but the journey the main character takes to get there.

Story Description:

The popular saying about everything from Texas being bigger is the main reason Ken's favorite football team - and their famous cheerleading squad - is from the Lone Star state. When he has a chance to win big at his weekly poker game, he bets big and loses even bigger. Now he's stuck as a buxom Texan beauty, forced to cope with a body that's a real handful ... and then some! But the real game begins when the night is over and the stakes are raised to include his marriage, his children, and the direction the rest of his life will take.

(Transgender Erotic Fiction, Approximately 78,200 words)

The story is my longest to date. So long, in fact, that I'm working on a paperback version. Yes, it's long enough to be made into an actual book. It comes in at about 280 pages in dead tree format (closer to 190-200 in my standard working format; the smaller page size adds to the length). That version is going to be on sale as soon as I can get the *insert choice profanity here* formatting to do what I want it to do. If you can't wait, the ebook is priced at $5.95, unless of course you have Kindle Unlimited, in which case it's FREE with your subscription, as are all my stories.

Enjoy!

- Sara

PS - For those of you keeping tabs on what I'm up to, my Twitter feed is now probably the best way to keep track of me. Most of the time, I post there. If I have too much to say for Twitter to handle, I still use Blogger but include a link back to the post here in my Twitter feed. 

Sunday, January 1, 2017

The Blank Page


The blank page is often used as a way to portray writer's block. The image of a tortured writer staring at a blank page with nothing to write has become so common that it has become cliche.

I do not find that to be the case. I find the blank page liberating. Michelangelo is once purported to have said, "Every block of stone has a statue inside of it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it." In a similar vein, I would say that every blank page has a story inside of it, and it is the task of the writer to discover it.

And therein lies the problem. Unlike blocks of stone, every blank page is the same. If offers no clue as to what lies within. Worse still, every word is a chain meant to tame the infinite, invisible beast of imagination. It gives the beast shape and scope. It gives it more clarity and definition, delineating its nature, describing both what it is and what it isn't.

How sad it is to me to think of the poor soul that looks on a blank page and sees only ... nothing. For me, the blank page is a wonderment. A miracle, even. In it, I see worlds of infinite wonder where quite literally anything is possible.