Promo art for "Sword and Submission."
I’ve been thinking about exploring a new niche, something I could
do well that had a pretty good fan base. So I asked myself, what is
the most successful BDSM erotica to date? The answer, obviously, was
“Fifty Shades of Gray.” 70 million copies worldwide in one year,
it dwarfs even MY sales! By about 70 million copies! I mean,
everything I’ve sold on Smashwords would be a tiny rounding error
compared with 70 million copies.
There are also
John Norman’s Gor novels to consider. (Norman is still with us as
of this writing, he’ll be 94 this year. Way to go, guy!)
The Gor novels are
not nearly as successful as “Fifty Shades of Gray” all 38 of them
having sold only 6 to 12 million copies over the 58 years they have
been on sale. And that’s quite a range, 6 to 12 million copies.
Still, even if you go with the low end of the range, 6 million
copies, in comparison all of my sales at Smashwords are, once again,
rounding errors, just slightly larger rounding errors, not enough to
matter, still.
So obviously,
if I were to come up with a way to combine the success of “Fifty
Shades of Gray” and the Gor novels, sales of such a book might be a
lot rounder than my other books, at the very least!
Ladies and
gentlemen, allow me to present to you my latest novel, “Sword and
Submission!”
It’s not on sale
yet, but it will be on Friday. And yes, it is a combination of “Fifty
Shades of Gray” and a Gor novel. Not any Gor novel in particular. I
suppose the closest analogue would be the stories about Talena,
daughter of the ruler of Ar and hence a Gorean princess. She, too
gets captured and enslaved, though not nearly as explicitly as
Princess Zindra in “Sword and Submission” does.
(Norman has his
flaws as a writer but he is excellent at letting readers know just
exactly what sexual things are going on without any explicit scenes
or language whatsoever. It’s called writing “fantasy fuel” and
Norman does it about as well as anyone. One of his best is a scene in
“Dancer of Gor” where the titular slavegirl character’s
virginity is auctioned off to 17 lucky winners at a tavern one night,
and she winds up hooded, naked and chained in an alcove, unable to
see the 17 men who “take her virginity.” He never explicitly
describes any of the sex, but makes it very clear she gets her brains
fucked out good and proper, all while hooded and chained in various
ways.)
I am well
qualified to attempt this project. I have read “Fifty Shades of
Gray” and I have read 30 books in the Gor series. (OK, most of the
later books I skimmed over the parts where he goes off on a rant
about “antibiological sex” and other such stuff, because those
rants last for page after page and are both tiresome and the same every time, occurring
several times in each novel, generally in conjunction with one of his
fantasy fuel sex scenes which I did NOT skim over.)
I know my material
very well.
In my story
everything is more explicit. But also much more romantic than
anything in “Fifty Shades” or any “Gor” novel. The romance is
not just emotional, it’s sexual. The sexual attraction between
Princess Zindra and Faswik, one of King Horth’s warriors, is
intertwined with the emotional attachment between them. It’s a real
romance, a sexual romance and a BDSM romance. It’s a very different
BDSM romance because it’s playing out in a time when chattel
slavery was full integrated into society and the BDSM aspects of it
were not recognized or understood.
I did a fair
amount of thinking about that aspect of my story. I had three levels
of slave sex to deal with: the BDSM understanding of it that a modern
reader and I would have, the primeval chattel slavery that existed in
Zindra’s Canoris and the slightly more advanced slavery that
existed in Horth’s Zandor.
It was easy to
work with the difference between Zandorian slavery and Canorian
slavery. I just let the characters note the difference between how
Zandorian slaves were treated and how Canorian slaves were treated.
For dealing with our modern understanding of BDSM slavery, I had a
hole card: the ancients recognized love slavery, or something like
it.
So there was a special class of slavery called “love slavery” that was
recognized by both Zandorians and Canorians as a special kind of
slavery that involved emotional as well as sexual relations between
Master and slave. Which of course happens between Zindra and Faswik (but only after Zindra got raped a lot so she could experience regular slave sex).
Zindra
didn’t recognize the nonconsenxual slave sex as rape and neither did the Masters who raped
her so much. They would have said it was not rape because Zindra was
a slave so she could not be raped, only used. Zindra would only
recognize the indignity of the rape as part of the catastrophe of
going from princess to slave, if she felt it as an indignity at all.
As you will know if you read the book, there will be many
distractions for Zindra.
I tried to give
Zindra and all the characters a primitive understanding of the world,
calmly accepting things that would alarm and even horrify modern
readers. Even relatively advanced Zandorians accepted slavery and
fucking slaves whether they liked it or not as perfectly normal and
OK activities for everyone but the slaves, whose opinions on that or
any topic didn’t matter unless the free chose to care about them.
As a princess, Zindra had never
stopped to think if there were any positive aspects to slavery
because it didn’t matter. It someone had pressed her on the topic
she would have just said they got pleasure from serving others,
especially noble others like herself. The usual self-serving, facile
bullshit that the ruling classes have engaged in throughout history.
So she gets
totally blindsided by her experience of slavery, especially with
Faswik.
I won’t go any
farther along those or any lines, lest I give too much away. I wrote
the book about Zindra and Faswik's experiences. You should read it!
