The Rope
Written: 1994-1998 (Prolog through Part III), 2001 (Epilog)
The Rope. The Rope is the first real thing I ever wrote, the first piece of fiction that ever came from deep inside, where the passion is, where the big boys play, where the Beast lives. The Rope is the first erotica I ever tried to write, the first time I wrote exclusively about BDSM, about dominance and submission, about the entity that became known to me as simply, the Beast. The Rope gave the Beast its name at least to me. Like, I walked into the party, the new party, the party that I wasn't sure I would be staying very long at. Someone hands me a drink and says, "Try this, it's called erotica writing". Someone else walks up and slaps me on the back and whispers, "Feel that? That's passion. Use it." And then this incredibly sexy woman comes up with someone who's face I recognize because it's my own and says, "I'd like you to meet someone - he knows a lot about you."
I wrote this when I was in a little group of similar writers on the infant version of AOL - back when there was still a Prodigy and Compuserve and AOL was the service of choice because you got so many minutes a month and as long as you kept track you just paid the flat rate. Prodigy had the little hourglass thingy that turned into a different thingy whenever you tried to enter something that would cost you more than your monthly rate. And Compuserve - that was a brainiac service for, well, brainiacs. AOL was almost exclusively text based and loaded screens fast, something that was huge in the days before broadband and even 56K modems. Anyway, I digress.
Our little group was very into the horror and sadistic aspect of writing, trying to gross each other out with successively more intense and sadistic stories. Both were very talented writers and I've probably read a lot of their stuff under their other names without knowing it. I started The Rope as simply a one or two part story (it ended up being three parts with a prolog and epilog so I wasn't that far off) and the format was that the first part would be "here and now" and the second part would be fantasy-land. By the end, the two would meet, there would be some final revelation and things would climax. Which was pretty much where I went with it. Except, of course, that a lot of the perspective was female. And the self revelations were mine.
The Rope is, by far, the story that got the most feedback. I was thrilled when I would get positive emails saying that I nailed it - how could I know what women think about D/s? One dear friend who has since slid into the Net void, told me in her first correspondence with me that she read The Rope and went outside to her back stoop and there under the silent moonlight, cried. That send shivers up and down my spine. Nothing in this world is as rewarding to a writer as knowing that my work has caused an intense emotion like that.
I use lyrics from Teri Nunn while she was with the band Berlin, as well as lyrics from Metallica. I hope neither sues me. To me, these two songs define my feelings towards D/s and help me to give a name to the Beast.
Toran