Metawriting: Straight Town Notes #4

It’s in the thick of these sorts of stories, barreling towards a climax and conclusion which has become clear, that I find myself wondering why I write these sorts of stories. The sort I am talking about is a broad category, but it doesn’t include all of my writing either. It also isn’t a category I feel like accepts an easy definition, either. “Straight Town” is in the category. “Into the Night of God” is another one. I would also say that parts of City of Bears, from the latter entries, would fall into this same category. There are other stories that contain elements of this category, but I think these are probably the most extreme examples of what I am trying to point out. It might not even be that the stories have all that much in common, beyond a sense that they contain a really deep, fundamental darkness that I try to isolate from my other writing as best I can. It is a darkness that makes it difficult to enjoy these stories in a conventional manner, I think–conventional in the sense that it gets my dick hard, and makes me want to jack off. 

It feels like punishment, in some ways. It feels like truth telling, in others. It feels like horror subsumes the pornography, coating it, keeping the form of it but corrupting it in a way that is no longer sexy, but now simply unsettling. I’ve called it anti-porn in the past, and I think that term still holds better than any other I can think up. The stories no longer feel like fantasies, but more like nightmares I am trying to dredge from some deep part of myself, but that sounds melodramatic. What I do know, is something separates these stories from the majority of my work. They are the stories I do not usually go back and read again, but they are the ones I remember writing, the characters I remember most, the ones that take the longest time to conceive and write, and the ones that I tend to mull over for a long while after the fact. But always, I find myself wondering why I write them.

They are not easy to write, for me. It is an exercise in (or exorcism of) some deep something inside myself, something I do not particularly enjoy accessing or acknowledging. Most readers–or at least the ones I hear back from, which is a small percentage of the total, I know, don’t seem to find them sexually stimulating, though some enjoy them on other levels, find that they resonate with themselves in ways they weren’t expecting. What I do not receive, are people telling me they found these stories “hot,” or “sexy,” or anything like that. They are hard to read, and they are hard to write, but I think they offer something more important than an orgasm–or at least, they feel that way to me. A more lasting sort of catharsis.

I’ve been thinking about flogging and pain play lately. It has been quite a while, since before I moved here to Portland, since I had any real intense pain play. It is not something that I ever really expected to enjoy, since my first experience with an abusive fellow was so negative–but with other, more caring doms, it is something—truly beautiful, what you feel under the paddle, or the flogger, or electro, or clamps, or whatever else. But one thing I do not do during pain play, is cum. Kills my erection, every time, for hours. Once I just accept this as something that happens to me, I discovered I didn’t particularly mind it–I was getting more catharsis from the pain/pleasure itself, a physical sense of pleasure that rose higher and lasted longer than any orgasm I’d ever had–so why should I complain about it, really? While not something I have done before, I’ve read anecdotal accounts that guys who are into fisting experience something similar. That orgasm is not the end of the play–the play itself creates sensations and pleasures beyond mere orgasm–the act of play itself is the pleasure and the release. 

This category of stories feels like that, when I write them. A sense of catharsis and release deeper and more resounding than an orgasm would be, a story that speaks to some deeper pain/pleasure inside me that requires satisfaction just as much as my cock might. I don’t know if this is something that readers experience–I imagine, from my conversations with some of them, that they do to an extent. 

So perhaps this story isn’t a blowjob, but a whipping. A really severe whipping. Or at least, it feels severe to me. The only story that has been harder to write than this one, I think, was “Into the Night of God,” and I am eager for it to be completed, so it can rest. So I can rest, for a while, before taking something like this up again. It also means that this story can’t be for everyone–because not everyone wants to get whipped, not everyone has the same pain/pleasure barrier than allows them to enjoy it, not everyone has the same emotional capacity and practice to sustain themselves against it–and I understand that, there’s no shame in not enjoying this. But I do, on some deeper level. I hope you can allow yourself a moment of catharsis too, as it comes to a climax, but if not, I understand.