A Love Beyond The Struggle: How A Billionaire Rape Story Became A Dark Romance

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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.

I Know Why The Buffalo Are Exploding

I have so much fun writing. But when I read the posts in the r/writing and r/scifiwriting subreddits on Reddit.com, and so many of them are about all the stress and unhappiness people go through when writing, I have to wonder.

For example, I am really enjoying putting my hot female Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin characters through the wringer in “Conquest of Incel World.” In the Rex Stout novels, Nero Wolfe really hates driving (or being driven, he can't drive) in cars, being certain that the car will crash momentarily. Archie is of course a very capable driver, the only one Wolfe trusts, and enjoys Wolfe's discomfiture enormously.

Well I decided that Nitro Wilde, my Nero Wolfe prototype, should also have a terror of being driven. And so should Moxie Maven, my Archie Goodwin character, because on Collar World self-driving cars are the norm, and accidents are exceedingly rare. They're both terrified when they wind up in a car driven by a human, what's even worse, a car driven by a human in heavy traffic made up of cars and trucks driven by humans. Moxie is much less terrified than Nitro, but she feels it, and for this reason is sympathetic with Nitro's terror, rather than simply enjoying it as Archie does with Nero.

(Well, also, Moxie and Nitro are women, who tend to be more empathetic than men.)

As a long-time voracious reader, it's pure pleasure to get in there and really fuck with favorite characters like Archie Goodwin and Nero Wolfe. And doing it in a way that many Nero Wolfe fans would find deeply distressing, well that's just icing on the cake! How can you not enjoy that?


When I read other authors whining about how HARD it is to write and edit, I just have to roll my eyes. Get in there and have some FUN with what you're doing, maybe your readers will have fun with it, too.

Then again, sometimes I wonder if I'm like the Ed Wood character in the movie “Ed Wood.” Ed clearly loved his job, every bit of it, he enjoyed filmmaking, even though he was objectively just awful at it. Maybe when I write my stories, I'm like Ed, looking at random film clips and exclaiming: “The buffalo are exploding, and no one knows why!”

Or maybe I'm the one who knows why the buffalo are exploding.

In a totally unrelated note, yes, some fairly nerdy, geeky things go on at science fiction coventions. But there is also this:

 This was clearly just a shot taken in a con hallway where two Slave Leias are warming up the boys. That's bringing the sexy!