Part 1 - In the Beginning.

I guess the real question is why I ever wrote at all. All those nasty nouns, verbs, sentence diagrams, parts of speech, punctuation, spelling just gave people reasons to complain - usually in red ink! 1+1 is easy and is always 2, right? (Well, it was until I got into college, but that’s another story) Well, in the very beginning, it was usually because someone required me to write. Teachers and professors through school, my Mom (“send your grandma or this friend a nice thank you note and tell them how much you enjoy xxxx”) and then when I entered the service, writing was everywhere on the job. Logs, records, evaluations, incident reports, Article 15 investigations, award nominations - a whole lot of very specifically stylized, highly formatted writing.

And very little, if any of it, for recreation, pleasure or diversion. Nope, not for fun! Writing was WORK!

And then I had something of a critical decision point in my life. I read a book - My Darling Dominatrix (MDD) by Grant Antrews (1992) - and was affected on a very emotional and visceral level.

Now, I have long had an unusually romantic view of Dominance and Submission dating back to when I first started thinking about my Tab A into someone else’s Slot B. Why you ask? Glad you did. I know that is an uncommon viewpoint, but I am, at heart, a starry-eyed romantic. I wanted to don my shining armor, pledge myself to my lady-fair, earn her favors, fight her dragons and live Happily Ever After making her deliriously happy. My vision was that if you want to do that well, first you have to learn what it takes to make the lady happy. Logically (and who but an engineer would try to apply logic to romance?) who would be better qualified to teach these life lessons than a lady-fair? Someone who already knows exactly what a lady-fair needs and wants, and moreover, is willing and able to school her prospective knight errant on all the finer points of good lady keeping.

And if that meant the armor was shining satin, not steel and that the lady-fair did double duty as the dragon whose fire needed to be endured and overcome in her service, well, I was a enough of an athlete to know that very little gain comes without some pain. Okay, you may not make those connections for yourself, after all, it is an outgrowth of trying to be logical about romance, but I did, and to some extent, still do.

However, while I fantasized about what I came to call “Loving Dominance and Submission,” that type of relationship was never to be. When I fell in love, my soul mate did not share this fantasy, and so we didn’t explore it. She because she did not find it appealing or even slightly interesting, so the only way I would ever experience this first hand was with someone other than my soul mate. On the other hand, I viewed such interactions, even without intercourse or ‘other sex’ (which all the experts claim is NOT necessarily part of the D&S relationship) as still being lovemaking. Still, I had a need and looked for ways to explore, at least vicariously, my fantasies. Certainly, I still tried to do the whole knight errant thing for her, but she was never the dragon. I would not trade a second of our time together for anything.

So I looked for books, articles, any information I could find that would help me understand this part of me. And certainly, there were a lot of mixed messages about BDSM and D&S available to the hesitant explorer. My earliest explorations were my Dad’s Penthouse magazines with their ‘letters’ section which often offered a sub-section entitled Domination and Discipline. Those were arousing but probably not too realistic if one is to look at them honestly. As I grew older I hit the (adult) bookstores and found other stuff that was equally titillating (which was the intent of the authors), but lacked depth of feeling and any sense of ‘us-ness’, of connection beyond the glands. It wasn’t until finding online resources in the late 1980s, early 1990s, initially bulletin boards and later the pre-spam USENet news groups, that I found people who actually did this stuff - for real - and as part of relationships instead of just hot sexy hookups. I learned quite a lot from them, including the whole Safe, Sane and Consensual mantra that was the core value of their relationships.

At this point in time, I got my copy of MDD and was prepared to enjoy. I mean ‘darling’ and ‘dominatrix’ in the same title - this was gonna be good!

It was devastating. First and foremost (spoiler), every dominant female of note in the book dies badly, leaving the hero alone and bereft at the end. Additionally, these dommes were some pretty (very) fierce dragons. In at least a couple of scenes the result was the hero was laid up recuperating.

Even more difficult was that the author’s habit to set the scene for a scene, start it and then, fade to black and come back after the fact with only some less than detailed flashbacks to tell what happened and why someone was upset, or limping or stuck in bed. All interspersed with flirtatious, romantic, everyday life scenes that seemed disconnected from what happened ‘behind closed pages.’ Moreover, issues such as negotiation and after-care seemed to be behind the scenes if it occurred at all. All in all, it struck me as “Wham Bam, thank you Man, come back when you can handle some more of the same.”

I didn’t get it. There must have been something in the hidden scenes that explained why the hero hadn’t run for the hills, and in fact kept coming back and trying to do the traditional ‘wooing things’. Where were the parts where the made the romantic side of their connection work while motivating his continued effort to submit?

So for the first time in my life, I wrote because I had to ‘find out’ what the heck was going on and the darned author was doing the old “proof is left to the student” thing. I must have written 150 pages to fill in the blanks, not including multiple rewrites when the first try (or the second or the third or. . .) didn’t really explain to me the next thing the author presented in the book. In some cases, I just had to conclude that the hero at that point of the story was just ‘stupid in love’ with the title dominatrix and was no longer able to break away. Certainly, the author never gave any indication that his hero enjoyed the pain and other harsh experiences - exactly the opposite. So even adding my 150 or so pages to the author’s 500 plus, I still couldn’t make the story ‘work’. In the end, it was as if two different books got shuffled together like two decks of mismatched playing cards. Take the D&S parts out and you have a very racy, polyamorous romance novel except the heroines die at the end. Take out the romantic scenes, and well, the story was like a collection of short, disjointed play scenes and abuse - just involving the same characters.

Anyway, that is how I first started writing ‘fiction.’ I have never published those writings online or otherwise as they were too personal, made little sense without the MDD contexts, were largely unsatisfying and well, were essentially plagiarism. They weren’t my characters and it wasn’t my story - just my feelings. Bits and pieces of those ramblings have been repackaged into a few of my later stories. For example, Part 18 of SoulMates,

http://tigger-n-brandy.net/Soulmates/soulmates-TOC.html

is a scenario largely recycled from one of the ‘hidden’ scenes I wrote and rewrote many times. In my story, however, my hero up and left the heroine after this experience. That was the only logical outcome of the story I had written. That he came back to her as he did later in the story is because I couldn’t find a way for a happy ending that worked, so I cheated. I have on numerous occasions tried to do a redux on the story and ‘fix’ the story so the ending is not only happy, but made sense. I’ve yet to succeed. The story works up until that crisis point, and I can’t see how to modify any of the lead up without weakening the confrontation, but after that? The HEA is a cheat, but I got talked into posting it anyway by one of my online friends and was surprised at how much many readers liked what I’d written. I just don’t think they read the ending.

So, that is how it began. I started writing in a failed attempt to ‘fix’ MDD and then to try to resolve my reactions to it. My “loving dominance and submission” stuff (LDS - just love that abbreviation)

http://tigger-n-brandy.net/LovingD_S.html

is in large part written in reaction to news group and listserv conversations and debates that were going online at that point in my exploration of the ‘scene.’ Not surprisingly, they were often reviewed unkindly - as my Dominatrices were not ‘dommy’ enough or the story was not sexy enough, or was a little too (HA!) pedantic or was sort of dark. Well, the things that I reacted to struck me as dark and my only outlet at that time was to write that emotional response out, try to turn it around and get me to Happy Ever (or until next time) After.

And it was at this point that I wrote what I thought of at the time of publication as a fantasy based D&S story that I would later be told was my first “TG story.” I promptly responded by asking the person who told me that, “What the hell is TG?” That however is a topic for my next reflection where I will discuss that, along with my first interaction with a collaborator (and no, it wasn’t Brandy) and how I got the reputation of the ‘story-finisher.’

Thanks for reading. Warm furry hugs

Tiggs