When I first started writing “A Love Beyond the Struggle” I thought I was going to write a billionaire rape story for publication on Smashwords. In fact the working title for it was “billionaire rape story.” I was writing to market, hurrah!
Unfortunately, it didn't end up that way. Early on, it got changed, though I wasn't aware of how drastically it was going to change.
After a bit of thought, I decided on Nero Wolfe as the model for my billionaire. Clearly, he'd make a GREAT billionaire, ruthless variety. But I couldn't do an exact Nero Wolfe map, even if I wanted to. Nero Wolfe had a finely developed moral sense, he was not a kidnapper or anything like it. Archie Goodwin, even more so.
So I came up with a darker Nero Wolfe, the billionaire Colin Whitworth. He maintains a harem of kidnapped women on his private island to keep him entertained while he makes his billions from green energy.
The idea here is to make Whitworth a force of nature thanks to all his money and power. He's so powerful that his sexual whims, illegal or not, ethical or not, get enacted, and there's no accountability for him at all … his money ensure it.
So his assistant Garth Goodwin (an Archie Goodwin analog, of course) would be a counterpoint to Whitworth who sees his amorality clearly but still enables it. Garth wouldn't be involved in the harem at all, other than helping with acquisitions and disposals. He would be the romantic lead.
And at some point after I came up with that dynamic for the story, I realized that I could write it for Amazon by having all the harem sexual action occur offscreen, in essence. Garth might know all that goes on in the harem, but he wouldn't describe any of it in any detail, not being deeply interested in it.
Which I realized makes for an EVEN BETTER story, because I can make the story chock full of fantasy fuel for harem bondage sexual fantasies, without having to describe any of them (hence complying with Amazon’s rule against nonconsensual erotica). All the nasty, dirty kinky sex stuff can occur in the reader’s nasty, dirty mind.
Sweet!
And that's when the story because a romance, specifically a dark romance. And of course, a very DIFFERENT kind of dark romance. I think it's an interesting and original story of a sort I've never written before. I've written other works that aren't erotica: “Slave Girls Of Outer Space,” “The Visitor From Incel World” and “The Love Invasion” but they were all basically science fiction adventures. This is a straight-up romance with no explicit sex whatsoever but SOOO much fantasy fuel. (Very Gorean, in fact, though Gor DOES have its sex scenes.) Will it work? Who knows?
You'll have to buy it and see what you think, if you like a dark romance. It’s $2.99 on Amazon or free if you have Kindle Unlimited.
