An Old Story: "Shoes"

Author's Forward:

This story was written in approximately 1995 as a submission for a website focused on what was then commonly referred to as crossdressing. The site was one of the first online spaces where what is now loosely known as the trans-community could gather. 

Contrary to current opinion, we were still coming out of the closet as a community then. You could find us on daytime talk TV - usually as a quick, easy ratings boost during sweeps week - telling the world our stories. Beyond that, we by and large hid who and what we were from everyone and everything with only a brave few daring to live openly as who and what they were. The idea of doing something other than "passing" as a woman to leave the label of transsexual behind like a butterfly leaves the cocoon was still a somewhat new idea. The only books about us then were either clinical texts or autobiographies. 

But that was changing.

In that environment, I wrote "Shoes." It was published online and remained up for a year or two until the site reorganized and my story somehow didn't make the cut for inclusion as part of the new site's archives. I suspect it was my use of the "R" word. My use of that word was a deliberate choice of what was even back then a cringe-worthy, unkind word to clue the reader in to the kind of family the story's main character was being raised in. Since that time in the late 1990's this story has been hidden away by me out of shame. 

I will hide it no longer. I post it here complete and unedited for the purpose of historical context. This was my second story ever as an author of Transgender Fiction. The first was written in the 9th grade and is lost to the mists of time. 

Shoes

In the long, hot days of a summer’s afternoon, it’s easy to forget that you’re five. From the vantage point of maturity you will look back and call those days the last true time of freedom that you will ever know. Everything you have or need will be given to you. You are old enough to live as a person in the world around you, but it is all new, and nothing is beyond your reach. Only in time will you think back on cookies and sunshine as the last oasis of joy in your life.

On that day, the day the rain has ended but you can still smell it through the rusted screen of your front door, the day that you run screaming into the kitchen and smell hot dough and melted chocolate accompanied by the ticking of a hot stove, the day when your brother and your sisters are all off somewhere that you don’t care about with your father, on that day you become eternal. Your mother chides you for making so much noise, but you see the smile she tries to hide. You breathe in the symphony that is your world and exhale all doubt that anything bad will ever happen to you.

Your mother hums, a plush giant that hugs you every day, kissing you to sleep with a brush of fingers across your forehead. Her eyes are on the dishes she is washing, her awareness of you reaching out, a cozy blanket that surrounds you whenever she is near, drifting through the air as subtle as an unworn perfume.

Warm cookies melting on the tongue, chased by the liquid white perfection of cool milk. Satisfying, but you ask for more. The answer is “no,” but then it always is. You ask again, knowing that your chances are good if you can ask just right. The answer is still “no,” but that’s alright. The cookies will still be there for before you go to bed, and there is always tomorrow.

You wait for your mother to see if she will do anything interesting, but she is still washing dishes and humming. And so you leave her, sad with the knowledge that she will only be close by.

The screen of the front door feels odd against your skin. Not bad, but rough as sandpaper. You know not to do more that rest your cheek against it. The sandpaper taught you that. Pain is not a goodness. Curious, you roll your face across it. You smile. It doesn’t hurt, but it feels strange. Opening your mouth wide, you make an O of your mouth and breathe through it, only to be surprised by the dry tang of the metal against your lips.

Careful now, you reach out with your tongue, touching the screen lightly. The taste of it is like it being on your lips, only wet and brilliant. You can only stand it for a second or so and a time, running your tongue over the roof of your mouth and swallowing between each try.

“WHAT are you doing?” You mother says to you, hands on hips and smiling from the doorway to the kitchen.

“Licking the screen door.” 

Her laugh is a benediction, accompanied by the pressing of her palm against her forehead. “Well, don’t. People will think you’re retarded.”

You giggle, amused. “I’m a retard. Duh! I’m so stupid.” You clump about the room in circles, staggering and waggling your head from side to side. “Duh, duh, duh!”

Your pleasure is infectious. She scoops you up with a kiss on the cheek and laughter, an increasingly rare treat. “Yes, but you’re MY retard.” She stares into your eyes, and you stare back at her. There is nothing else in the world but the rich brown depths that you find there. She hugs you, drinking you inside of her arms. You feel the warm, moist softness of her lips against your ear, but it doesn’t tickle. “I love you so much,” she whispers so softly that only the two of you will ever know that she said it.

“I love you too, mommy.” You hug her harder, and she pets your hair.

She sets you down and you follow her into her bedroom. It’s your special privilege because you’re the baby. Your brother and your sisters are too old to be allowed in there except on special days like Christmas and Easter. She’s making the bed, just like she does every day, humming a tune that she only hums when daddy’s gone.

It’s boring you to tears, but you don’t want to leave. The closet door is open. You look inside. 

The floor of the closet is covered with shoes. Mommy’s shoes are on one side, and daddy’s shoes are on the other. You can tell the difference because even though they are all big, daddy’s are much bigger. They look different too. Some of mommy’s shoes have the high heels she only wears for special dress up times, like for church or going out with daddy nights.

There’s another pair of shoes there too that don’t belong. They are too small to be mommy’s shoes, but they have high heels like her dress up shoes. You take them out of their box and pull them out to show her. “Are these your shoes mommy?”

She glances over her shoulder for a moment while tucking a sheet in. “No, those are your sister’s shoes. She needs them for her choir concert for school.”

School is boring, and so is the older of your two sisters, but the shoes look fun. Setting them carefully on the floor, you slip your sock clad feet into them, almost falling from having to stand on tip toe to wear them. They are too big for you, but that’s OK. Everyone’s shoes are too big for you. Daddy’s shoes are even harder to walk in. These are almost easy.

“Look mom, I’m a girl!” You play with your hair like your oldest sister does, and try to look like you could be in the school choir too. You think it’s funny, like pretending to be stupid when you licked the screen door.

Mommy isn’t smiling. She looks at you walking in the shoes. Her face is worried, but she turns away. “That’s nice, dear.” 

You walk a little more, but now you are nervous. Mommy doesn’t always pay attention to you, but it’s usually because she is busy. Now she is only pretending to not pay attention. It’s the way she doesn’t look at you right before she gets mad, like when you fight with your brother or your sisters over a toy or the TV and mommy pretends to not hear you yelling. She’s watching you without looking, trying to decide if she should be angry yet.

“I’m sorry, mommy.”

She turns to you and smiles. “What for, honey?” Her smile is all wrong, and her eyes are hard and deep inside her skull.

You shrug and look away. Wearing the shoes isn’t fun anymore. “Never mind.”

You take off the shoes and put them back in the box in the closet. Mommy isn’t humming now, and the only sound in the room is the rumpling sounds as she makes the bed. You leave before she is finished and go into the living room to play with the stuffed animals that belong to the younger of your two older sisters. You don’t have any of your own, and you can only play with hers when she isn’t there.

For a brief moment, you have a best friend. You can hug him just like mommy hugs you, and he loves you back just as much as you love him. It doesn’t matter that you made mommy stop humming. It doesn’t matter that you’re playing by yourself. You take your favorite friend, the rabbit with the super soft body and the long, funny ears to the screen door. You tell him how funny the screen door tastes and he licks it too. He says it tastes like carrots and you laugh at him. The two of you begin to debate what the screen door tastes like, lemonade without the sugar or carrots.

And then it’s over. The back door opens and your brother and your sisters are back. Daddy is back too, but he always pays special attention to your brother. It makes you feel like a baby. 

Your sister takes your favorite friend away from you, even though she isn’t going to play with him. Yelling at you, she stands over you to try and make you feel bad because she is bigger than you. After a while she puts him back with her other stuffed animals. None of them like her, because she doesn’t play with them enough. They like you because you pay attention to them and talk to them, even when you can’t play with them.

Mommy is talking with daddy in the quiet way they do when they talk about secret adult stuff. Daddy stares at you while mommy talks, and it is almost as bad as the way mommy doesn’t look at you at all. It feels like the worst trouble you have ever been in, but neither of them say anything angry to you. They just look tired. Mommy goes to start making dinner. Daddy goes outside to work in the yard. Your oldest sister goes to her room and your brother goes outside with your dad.

Sitting by the window, your sister comes over to you and begins to poke your arm while she talks to you. “You were bad. I can tell. What did you do wrong?”

“Nothing,” you lie, ignoring the poking.

“Liar. Tell me what you did.”

You don’t want to answer her, but she will only get mad if you don’t say anything. “I don’t know.”

She pauses, thoughtful. “Liar. Tell me what you did.” 

Too sad to wipe them away, your tears find comfort on your lips, leaking into your mouth. They are not bitter, like the screen door, but they should be. Their taste should match the feelings that make them. “I don’t know what I did wrong.”

Your pain is enough to satisfy her. She skips away, singing the alphabet song, knowing that you can’t keep the letters straight when you try and sing it. Outside the window, the sun is slowly drying away the remnants of the rainstorm. There is a bird at the feeder. It pecks at the contents, its motions too sudden for the eye to follow. You tap at the window hoping to make friends, but it only startles the bird into flying away.

“How,” you wondered then, “could a day that began so well end so badly?” In later years you will know, but on that day, the taste of the cookies is just a memory. All you know for certain is the taste of your tears.

On Reading WoT For The First Time

At the time the first Wheel of Time books came out, the norm for fantasy trilogies were either single stand-alone books, franchise books that were published serially without end, or trilogies. 

I mistook "Eye Of The World" for the first book in a new trilogy and immediately put it on a mental wait-list for purchase. After all, the author was an unknown to me then. I found it interesting that the only copies I saw then were in trade paperback format, not hardcover. Being young and poor (-er) at the time, I only bought paperback books. Why - my reasoning went - pay full price for a book that's going to come out in paperback? EotW was the first book that messed with that, because it wasn't really either a paperback or a hard cover. What it wasn't was a trilogy that was finished, so I did not buy it. 

When "The Great Hunt" came out, I was even more intrigued. The trade paperback format looked really good, there will still no hardcover books that I could find anywhere, and people were starting to talk. I would go to a book store and if there were two people in the scifi / fantasy section, they would be standing near EotW and discussing it. If there was only one, they would ask if I had read it yet, then tell me it was a "must read." Those small gatherings were like little mini-conventions. I was a little afraid of the fervor of those spreading the word of Robert Jordan, but also intrigued. How good did a book have to be to get that kind of word of mouth? But I was young and poor-ish, so I put off buying the paperback as long as I could. 

When I finally did buy the first book (in paperback), I waited until a Friday night when I knew I had no plans that weekend to read it. I binge read it, as I did with all books I read at that time, and walked away as punch-drunk in love with it as all those weirdos from the bookstore. By Saturday night I was done. On Sunday morning I walked to the mall (something like a five mile walk?) and bought the trade paperback of tGH. I managed to maintain enough self-control to wait to read it until the next weekend. Then I was furious with myself for not waiting longer because the third book wasn't out yet. 

"The Dragon Reborn" was the first installment in the series I saw available in hardcover. It was also the first hardcover book I ever bought. Imagine my chagrin when I finished it and discovered to my horror that it wasn't a trilogy. 

I was hooked. 

Every book after that I pre-ordered. For some reason, I recall the books being released late mid-week. Thursdays, maybe? Wednesday? I would buy them, then admire them for a day or two before I allowed myself to read them. The anticipation of the read was almost as good as the read itself. Those days were like the last day of school before summer vacation. I did things, but all I could think of the book I was about to read. 

I would take that Friday off - skipping class in college, taking a personal day once I started working - and read them straight through by Saturday night with almost no sleep and less food in between. I did drink Coke-Cola, though. Coke-Cola was my lifeline. There would be maybe some candy, or a brief break for a fast food run. Pizza was always a favorite because it meant I could spend less time procuring food and it lasted for more than one meal. Which meal didn't matter. 

The time between books was agony. Months and years sometimes of waiting, only for it to all be over in a span of a long weekend of reading. It almost never took me more than forty-eight hours to read a new book. For most of the books, I had a ratty old recliner that was great to curl up in, with a coffee table to one side to hold sustenance as I read. For me there was no "slog." There still isn't. I consumed each book in a state of near awe. My love of the books was a solitary thing I seldom shared. Critical thought took days or weeks after a read. There was a lot to be critical of, but none of it dimmed my passion for the books or the series. 

For "Memory of Light," I took a week off of work. I knew this one was special, and I wanted to savor it. By then, Robert Jordan was gone, but his work remained. I was also married during the last few books, forcing me to find ways to self-isolate to try and recapture the singular focus the readings as a single personal had allowed. I forced myself to go slow, to take breaks, to go for a walk or eat a meal, but there was no point. I still read aMoL in about three days. 

And then it was over. The ache of that is still in me and always will be. Fandom and the series to come don't come close to filling the hole in me left by Robert Jordan's passing and the completion of his vision. 

Better Late Than Never: "Bingo-Bango" and "The Sex Machine: Dimitri's Plan"

A kind fan noticed I was missing links to a couple of my stories. Links to "Bingo-Bango" and "The Sex Machine: Dimitri's Plan" have been added in the sidebar under My Writing. While I never made any post at all for TSM:DP, "Bingo-Bango" did merit a self-promotion post over at TGComics.com. Here's that post:

My latest story "Bingo-Bango" is now available for sale on Amazon.

Story Description:

An unexpected sexual encounter leads to an even more unexpected transformation. Trapped in the body of the woman that seduced him, this former man only has one option to become a man again: find another man that will agree to have sex with a young, willing, attractive woman. Once the act has been consummated, all he has to do is say the magic words for their roles to be reversed, turning the other man into the woman.

It seems like a simple enough plan. The problem is that whatever life this former man takes as his own is the one he'll be stuck with for the rest of his life. So which life will he choose?

(Transgender Erotic Fiction, Approximately 56,700 words)

This story is one of my most sexually explicit to date. While I haven't shied away from descriptions of sex before, the act of sex is a big part of the premise of this story. Because of that, there's a lot of "action" going on. There's also - kind of - two endings. The first is the one that resolves the main character's story, but there's also an epilogue that deals with another character's ultimate fate that I wanted to add in to wrap things up a little more tightly. My hope is that the two different takes on how the different characters deal with similar circumstances will make the story appealing to more people.

This was supposed to be a short story. Ha! I really need to work on that. I want to tighten my writing up so I can start putting out shorter stories more frequently. My goal for this year was to put out one story a month, ten pages each, or 120 pages a year. With this story I'm at about 100 pages. Here's hoping I can carve things down and be a little more prolific. Fingers crossed!

Last thing. This story is priced at $2.99, a departure from my other stories which were all put out at higher price points roughly based on length. This is a little bit of an experiment for me. If this story sells better with the lower price point, I will almost certainly put out all future stories at that price, regardless of length. (Old formula I was using was something like $0.50 / 10 pages unedited, adjusted downwards to make the price look pretty, if anyone cares.) Of course, you can read the story for FREE if you subscribe to Kindle Unlimited, so there's that.

That's all! I hope you all enjoy the story. Thank you as always for your support.

- Sara

... And the cover image for "The Sex Machine: Dimitri's Plan":

New Story: "Running On Empty"

After almost two years, it's time to put up a new story!

The story, "Running On Empty," is now available for sale on Amazon.

"Running On Empty" is the story of Riley Merchant, a college student with a troubled past and an uncertain future. I intend for this to be the start of a series of shorter, much more explicitly erotic stories than anything I've put out before. After some exposition to set up the universe, the story dives right in with graphic depictions of sex. If you like that kind of thing, you should like this story. If you like your stories a little more PG rated, this is not the story or the series for you! The rating here is definitely NC-17 / X.

I look forward to having an ongoing series in an existing universe I can use to blow off steam from time to time. Plus, I really like the idea of being able to write shorter, more frivolous stories that allow me to publish more often. While there is a meta-story, this series is intended to be some lite (as in low calorie, low mental effort) summer fun for me before going back to other unfinished projects. Those projects are less graphically sexual, are longer, and in general require more thought and effort to get right.

Story Description:

A young man comes home to find his roommate in possession of a real, true magic wand. While the wand’s power isn’t unlimited, there’s enough magic stored within it for the roommate to turn the young man into a sexy young woman cursed with strong sexual appetites and an eagerness to please. But now the magic stored in the wand is all used up. Without more, this man-turned-woman is at the mercy of his own seemly bottomless well of desire.

This story came in at 39 pages in my standard format. It's going up for $2.99, which seems to have become the new standard pricing over at Amazon KDP. While I might still set a higher price for my more typical stories, the ones in this series will all be the $2.99 price point. Or at least that's the plan right now. Oh, and if I ever do a compilation, that will be set at a higher price that's still a savings over buying the stories individually. Maybe even with a dead-tree format? Time will tell.

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.

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. 

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.