Mad(dening) Scientists - Announcing 'Her Submissive Experiment'

As I may have previously mentioned, I didn't have the smoothest start to the year, and it's been something of a bumpy return to writing (the pile of rejected drafts I've been working on now almost dwarfs the pile of grumpy letters I've been obliged to send to builders, although it is nothing to the pile of excuses I have had explaining why, for instance, they aren't coming this week).

However - somewhere in between sweltering in an apparently endless succession of heatwaves and being told that such-and-such isn't actually covered by my policy - I have at least been trying to write. I'm finding that valuable even when I then throw the result away: sometimes, something just... clicks. 

In this instance, it was the frankly daft idea that the duality built into Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde had some genuinely excellent potential to be reset in the context of modern gothic erotica.

Unfortunately, all of the currently available evidence  makes it pretty clear that the exact moment my brain has a daft idea in which I posit "can I warp a classic tale to suit my own fascination with femdom and denial" is also the exact moment that the 'Anna, wait! Is it possible you're a tad obsessed with power?!' sign vanishes in the rear-view mirror, usually followed by the few motorcycle cops the Literature Police can still afford to have patrolling the backroads of my brain. 

(Do not be too hard on how few of those patrols the Literature Police now run. The bill for danger money must be massive).

Anyway - in this instance, I found that the idea practically wrote itself. A brilliant scientist concocts a serum that, because of some nebulous "impurity", does not quite work as intended - it sparks lust but inhibits orgasm. 

Which was already, if I say so myself, exactly the kind of concept that could arrest my thoughts where they stood, but my brain also went one step further - indeed (spoilers?) one step too far - and imagined that rather than take the drug herself, she would slip it to her attractive, unwitting junior researcher, thus ensnaring her good and proper.

The gigantic ethical problem of trying to write that could (just possibly) have been handwaved with some kind of consent-wallpapering twist like "aha, the lead researcher was the Edward Hyde-type monster all along!", but I didn't quite love the concept - and happily the question never really arose.

Principally this is because the original junior researcher - on my scribbled post-it from when this absurd conceit first struck me she is the nameless "little quiet, mousy, redheaded freckled woman, recently dumped(?)", presumably supplied by Submissives R Us (venture capitalists: call me!) - absolutely refused to have any part in that kind of nonsense from the very moment I started writing.

This has happened to me before, with a character I'd already been writing, of course, but this was literally Becky's first appearance on the page. I'm not even kidding: the first line I hammered out on my typewriter was "Becky Stevenson was wearing boots again", which I admit has a deliciously du Maurier promise to it, but it also absolutely nailed down Becky as anything but a quiet mousy little victim: she was wearing boots and she wasn't going to be gulled into submission by some sick little drink-spiking fantasy, regardless of whether or not she might have been dumped.

And at that point I discovered I had gone from 'daft idea of twisting Dr Jekyll into a kinky sex positive story of deliciously gothic D/s' into 'genuinely fascinating interrogation of what submission means and whether it can still have meaning if the submissive compels herself'.

This is, of course, not a million miles away from (one of) the questions I was asking in Sense of Submission, which sees Joe struggling to understand just exactly what it will mean - and take! - for him to submit to Grace and the women of Brinkmere Court, but in this instance I found the Creepy Science angle gave it an additional bite I hadn't accounted for.

Anyway, with Becky Stevenson quite properly refusing to fit into the loosely-sketched "helpless victim" space I had tried to cram her into (in my defence, it was a small post-it note!), I was faced with a new problem: it slightly gummed up my plan for the scientist - Jameela Haider, she was called, on the grounds that "Hyde" was too obvious even for one of my pastiches - to be both the genius and monster, and that was sort of a problem...

...until I realised it was no problem at all. They could both be geniuses, and both flawed, and both struggling with their private wants (that is, to be absolutely clear, their wants in terms of kink; neither Becky nor Jameela is remotely unsure about their wants in the sense of their sexuality: Jameela is a lesbian, Becky is bi. I am, first and foremost, here to write extremely hot literary kink, not to write queerness specifically as a source of angst. No shade on people who like reading angst, of course, but writing it gets me down).

At the risk of belabouring the point, Her Submissive Experiment does sit alongside Her Ascendant Intern as a sapphic story, although it is doing something rather different - this is more gothic, I think more overtly kinky, and built around the tension between a dominant femme and a submissive butch character with a dual point of view and interiority for both of them, in a way that Intern deliberately witholds (for reasons that are obvious if you've read Intern, and kind of spoilers if you haven't, sadly, so I can't explain!).

Anyway - the premise I found I had once I met my characters was "Becky is a confident, brilliantly smart butch scientist who happens to desperately want to submit sometimes (for example, literally any time Jameela glances at her and raises an eyebrow; she has it bad, poor thing). Jameela desperately wants Becky, but is also horribly conscious that she is sort-of Becky's superior in the workplace and she's absolutely terrified of doing anything that might make Becky uncomfortable."

That is, to be honest, a much more Jekyll-and-Hyde kind of plot engine than my original post-it provided: it runs almost entirely on the rich tension of public perception and private desire (rather than the twisted rubber band of "here is the orgasm control drug I helpfully invented to drive this story") - and as soon as that thought struck me, I was away. Rather than Kinky Gothic Science Horror I found I was writing Kinky Science Gothic Romance and if those sound quasi-interchangeable written down in a blog, I promise they feel different on the page. 

So anyway - I had my characters: brilliant, dominant, agonisingly ethical Dr Jameela Haider; brilliant, submissive, gorgeously soft-butch Dr Becky Stevenson. 

I had my premise: there's a serum that can impose some lovely kinky orgasmic denial on a subject.

I had my new discovery, Becky rolling her eyes and informing me that if anyone was going to give Becky Stevenson an orgasm denial serum to ensure she knelt for Jameela, it was going to be Dr Becky Stevenson, thank you very much.

And simultaneously I discovered Jameela staring at me and demanding to know under what circumstances she would ever give the woman she secretly adored and wished to dominate a drug that would drive her, panting, to kneel at Jameela's feet? 

Jameela's ethical standards became annoying to me at about the same time Becky started going crazy because she had been giving Jameela every possible sign of please step on me and getting blanked every time. Simultaneously, Jameela was privately melting every time Becky tilted her head and the sun glinted off Becky's side-fade, so they were both pretty desperate for me to write a happy ending.

...I mean at that point there really wasn't any way to stop the plot from becoming a kinky erotic romance, was there?

Somehow, I had gone from

Plot synopsis: "generic evil scientist does something terrible to make her junior researcher submit <twirls invisible moustache>"

To the genuinely much more interesting

Plot synopsis: "ethical, dominant, scientist doesn't dare make a move on the junior researcher desperate to submit to her, so the junior researcher determines she's going to force the issue at last <twirls leash provocatively>

Oh - yeah. Also, it turns out Becky can be a bit of a brat.

I would argue it is more readable than Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, but I don't mean that as a burn on Robert Louis Stevenson, who had to write within the confines of his era. He never had the context in which to write a modern, dual PoV interrogation of sapphic kink and desire and the erotic and emotional significance of one of those little spoons you use to stir vending machine coffee.

Whereas, once I'd had the admittedly reckless idea, I couldn't really help myself. 

...that's probably where Becky gets it from.

Her Submissive Experiment is available now*.

*actually, it's been available through many distributors, including Smashwords, for five days or so, but still not on Amazon, who publish fine but exceedingly slow. And, as everyone knows, waiting is the absolute worst and I am morally opposed to it, so I am publishing the announcement now 😅