Greek Harem: Honey Trapp #3 Now Available on Amazon and Smashwords

  

Cover of the Smashwords edition of Greek Harem. Here's the link!

Cover of the Amazon edition of Greek Harem. Here's the link!

In the third installment of the Honey Trapp Snappy Stories, Honey infiltrates a Greek shipping oligarch's harem of pay-for-play slavegirl beauties. Her goal: to help discover how the oligarch's shipping firm is sliding past regulations aimed at preventing the use of bunker oil as fuel. "Something funky in the bunky oil indeed!" (Bunker oil is basically what's left over when you refine crude oil into gasoline. It's very low-grade stuff, full of sulphur dioxide and particulate matter which is toxic to human beings and other living things, which is why there are regulations concerning its use, pathetically limited though those regulations are.)

This plotline gives me plenty of chances to indulge in some really fun orgy scenes and also some ultra-kinky public bondage sex action at the Art Institute for the Sexually Insane. It was great fun to write those scenes, which is probably why they constitute the bulk of the novella.  And it was fun to play with the personalities of the four slavegirls other then Honey, their perceptions of themselves and one another, and to contrast a pay-for-play harem where anyone can leave if they want to, and the issues of historical harems which were not consensual and which sometimes led to bad results, like people getting killed.

I also had some fun with nomenclature and myth. All of the local slavegirls have names from Greek mythology. One in particular stands out. Her name was initially Iris, but I decided for some reason, which was probably my subconscious at work/play, to base her on a the face of a remarkable woman I'd seen in some porn photo. (I've looked all over for it, I know it's somewhere in the huge folder I call my "Archives" but I can't find it.) She had a bull-like quality to her face, except that it was very feminine, not masculine at all. You might think cow-like, but we associate cowlike with being kind of placid and sleepy-looking, and that didn't match this woman's face at all -- she was very alert and aware-looking, just very confident-looking as well. Like a bull that absolutely owns its paddock. 

While writing the description, I remembered that there was a Greek myth about a woman mating with a bull, and sure enough, there was. A quick trip to Professor Google showed that a woman named Pasiphae offended the gods somehow, and she was cursed with lust for the Cretan bull, even though she was married to King Minos. She subsequently gave birth to the Minotaur, and also several human children, including a woman named Ariadne. I decided it would be fun to rename Iris the bull-faced woman Ariadne, thus ever-so-subtly implying that she is a distant descendant of the mythical Pasiphae, and the bull traits still show up in her children, however watered down. I didn't make Ariadne's descent part of the plot, but I did have some fun with the characterization. I'll say no more.

Also, check out the covers of my book. They are a good indication of the differences between Amazon and Smashwords censorship rules. There are two main differences between the two images. The Amazon image wears no gag, the Smashwords image wears a gag. And the Amazon has a thong strap and a but of cloth covering the portion of her butt that's visible from the side. The Amazon image does not.  

I very much wanted a gag on the Amazon cover, I thought it kicked up the sexiness and kinkiness of the image a lot, but I did some research and other Amazon books with the words "Gagged" right in the title (like "Bound and Gagged") did not have pictures of gagged women on them. I've gotten away with such imagery in the past, but after looking at all the boos with "Gagged" in the title and no gags on the cover art, I decided better safe than sorry. I also covered up the butt bits, negligible though they were, because Amazon does not like to acknowledge that women have butts. I wasn't so put off by that because I don't think it affected the image much.

I also put the collar, leash and wrist cuff on the woman, because those do show up on the covers of kinky titles on Amazon. Plus, the cuff is plausibly deniable, there's nothing to distinguish it from a bracelet.  And I also used the "Scale" tool to make the woman's body a bit thicker than in the original: she's one of those leggy fashion model whippet types, which is great, but I suspect erotica readers like a little more flesh on their models. That said, I absolutely love the strutting stride of the model, the way her head is thrown back, the general go-for-it attitude her whole body projects. Sales of this book are going VERY well, I suspect the cover might just have something to do with it.

What do you think? Leave your comments, oh, just anywhere.

Plotting and World-Builiding are Interlinked And Can Help Avoid Cliches

Breaking News! "Road to Aquibonya" has been published on Amazon! It has already passed review and is being distirbute it on their sites, which can take hours. So ... maybe semi-breaking news ....


The Immortal slavegirls in “The Road to Aquibonya” are a great example of how plotting and world-building are interlinked, or can be interlinked, and how good world-building can help you enjoy cliched writing.

My original concept was to have a slavegirl who was magically cursed to be immortal and young, and to make any man she fucks revert to being physically 26years of age every time he fucks her. She's a practical source of immortality, so long as her owner keeps fucking her. Talk about a stable relationship.

But over time, as her qualities become known in the world, such a woman would inevitably become a commodity. She would be very attractive to rich and powerful men, who would probably do a lot of vile and despicable things, such as killing other rich and powerful men, to get their hands on her. And of course they'd keep her in chains once they got her, because they wouldn't want her to escape, and more to the point, would not want her stolen.

This implies a long and unhappy history for said Immortal slavegirl, kept in chains and raped a lot, because of course said rich and powerful men wouldn't care if she wanted to be fucked or not. That's why it's a curse.

Problem is, what we have there, despite the sexual element, is a pure MacGuffin plot, with the Immortal slavegirl serving as the MacGuffin that the good guy, the bad guy and everyone else wants to obtain/control. The story kind of writes itself, a pure damsel in distress line, and that's the problem. The stories that write themselves get written a lot, and are generally cliched and trite and dull because chances are, the reader has already read the story, or something much like it.

Then I thought, why not have a whole race of Immortal slavegirls? Instead of having just one rare slavegirl, have them be commonplace. Why not make them a part of their world, an element of society? They would be commodity, but a common commodity, hence not the MacGuffin that a single Immortal slavegirl would be. There would probably be an active trade in them.

I liked this because it led to some interesting world-building. How would having slavegirls that could make you immortal be a commonplace thing affect people and the nations around them? Especially if there were some places that had a lot more of them than others?

But with commonplace slavegirls that could make you immortal, and who really liked having sex, especially kinky sex … didn't just accept their lot in life as slavegirls, but absolutely loved it … I'd lose a lot of the dramatic tension I'd had with the single MacGuffin slavegirl. I had created the basis for an EXCELLENT party and an interesting world, but not much conflict.

Eventually, I figured that I could solve that problem by having a SORT of penalty element to their nature: make the slavegirls half succubi – hence their magical immortality power  – who have to be fucked every day before midnight or they turn into full succubi and they kill you by fucking you to death – yes, it's death by snu-snu! Even better, the slavegirl has to have an orgasm or she goes full succubus. It would make for a certain amount of difficulty in distributing them.

 This might not a problem with a single Immortal slavegirl, but what if you had a dozen of them?

Well that brings the dramatic tension right back into the story, and in an original way, I think. World-building avoids cliched plotting, for the win!