Carissa Montgomery Feeling The Changes Coming

 

I made this vidcap from Kink.com video number 35037, featuring Carissa Montgomery and The Pope doing a little sweaty wrasslin. It's amazing how often beautiful images show up in well made bondage videos. Just thought I'd share this one with you.

"Abducted, Roped & Raped: Enemies to Lovers" Now Available on Smashwords

 

Click on the pic to be whisked to Smashwords and get the novella!

"Abducted, Roped and Raped: Enemies to Lovers" was originally going to be titled “The Modern Bodice Ripper” because that’s what it is, a modern take on the bodice ripper theme in a contemporary taboo erotica setting.

(For those who don’t know, a bodice ripper is a subgenre of old-time romances that were essentially rape fantasies. They passed muster because they were not at all explicit, in fact, you could read a bodice ripper and never even know that a rape had occurred. They way it worked is, say an 18^th century pirate captain captured a comely woman of good breeding after a sea battle. He drags her into his cabin and rips off her bodice (it’s some kind of undergarment they used to wear on the outside). She shrieks. Cut to some time later. They’re both fully dressed again. He’s all smirky and happy and she’s all shy and timid, as was the custom of the times. That’s how you knew a rape had occurred. That was about as explicit as it got in those days.)

Then I realized that the title would show up in alphabetical listings a lot better if it was just “Bodice Ripper.” So “Bodice Ripper” it was.

Then I did a little keyword research and discovered that “bodice ripper” isn’t exactly a popular keyword nowadays. I might be at the top of a pile of relatively rarely-searched-for titles, which means low sales because not many customers.

So I tried a different subgenre that fits the storyline along with some terms that describe what happens in the story. The title I came up with is “Abducted, Roped & Raped: Enemies To Lovers.”

That worked a lot better in the search engines. I’m on the second page of search results for “Enemies to Lovers” which is a term that gets over 10,000 hits on Smashwords. That’s MUCH improved.

Now as to the matter of updating the “Enemies to Lovers” trope, that has proven difficult for me. Since rapes were not only not explicit but could just barely be inferred in the old days, it was fairly easy for authors to sidestep the moral and ethical issues of rape just to slide a little fantasy fuel in there. (In fact, there’s a thread on Goodreads about 80s authors having to rewrite their books to eliminate even the INFERRED rape scenes in order to get published on Amazon, which has disappointed their fans who LIKED the original version.)

But I wrote an explicit bodice ripper: the male lead (Cal) repeatedly rapes the female lead (Melody) and it’s described in long, explicit detail, “rape for titillation” as the Smashwords form describes it.

Now I’m personally fine with writing “rape for titillation” fiction. Basically it’s because fiction isn’t real, and publishing rape fantasy fiction doesn’t make rape more commonplace (or “normalized”). I wrote a blog post explaining why with cites and everything. Click here to read it.

Clearly, my morality is not the basis on which censorship exists. Censorship exists on the basis of “I’m in power, I make the rules, f&&k you, writer.” In the case of Amazon I’m sure it’s a matter of balancing on the edge between profitability (they don’t care really about the morality of what they publish) and how much shit the prudes are shoveling over this and that. (“Prude” being my term for whoever advocates censoring sexuality in fiction, whatever their declared rationale might be.)

But the problem was, I had to figure out a way to write characters who might reasonably behave as bodice ripper characters do, in the modern day. And that was tough. Frankly, it was unreasonable behavior for the historical times it was supposed to be in.

So what I did was look for a character who was well outside traditional morality. And I feel I created one in Melody Chastain. Is she your average girl next door? Of course not, nor should she be. But I feel that a character like the one I created might conceivably have done what my character did under the same circumstances.

You’ll just have to read the novella to find out what she did and why and decide for yourself on that point. Bwahaha! as they say...