Alongside my ‘normal’ voted-upon stories, I’ll also be working on other projects, usually from one of two areas: either commissions or experimental pieces I write when I’m hit particularly hard with inspiration. And Ophelia Blinked is an experimental piece I thought up last year, and I’ve chipped away at writing it whenever I felt the need to, but don’t worry, it hasn’t taken a lot of time away from writing my main stuff. I’m sure 99% of my readers don’t care even if it did, but whenever I release something that isn’t “the next chapter,” one eager reader will inevitably email me asking me why I am so slow to write chapters of my main story but “have the time” to edit past work and write other stories. I’m sure I don’t even need to comment further on that.

From this point onwards, I will be spoiling the new piece I have posted. If you want to read it spoiler-free (and I’d recommend it), go read it first before reading this.

There are a lot of aspects to this story that I’ve wanted to write for a while now. Number one, the story is told from a point of view of someone that isn’t anxious and overanalyzing everything around them. Even when I have more confident protagonists, the story isn’t from their point of view. Here’s a depressing thought – the only story I wrote before this that was told explicitly from a point of view and wasn’t anxious and overanalyzing everything was Breathe. Jeez.

My tendency to write from a similar POV over and over got so prevalent that at one point a $20 patron asked me to write from the POV of a cocky arrogant person, as opposed to a shy anxious nerd. I definitely agree with them, it’s a personality I like to write but I need to be careful not to get too comfortable with what I already like. Part of this story was born out of the idea that, if you were to recap a story that took place and you were specifically arrogant, why would you be arrogant about it? My solution was, a guy thought a girl was being a smarmy hypocrite.

As well, I’ve really wanted to write mind control stories for a while. Mind control is such a cool concept, but much like with the powers themselves, it’s really easy to get carried away when writing about mind control. Either the character that has mind control powers is the villain, or their powers have to be specific somehow, or there’s no stakes. The character can mind control their way out of virtually any problem. There is no “will they won’t they” tension in a mind control erotic story; the fun is instead placed in the corruption. But most stories I’ve seen either make every sex scene the exact same after the first few (“she was all hesitant but then I warped her mind and she suddenly needed my genitals so badly, I sure solved that problem quickly, golly gosh there sure seems to be virtually no conflict or any plot to be honest, just a dude hypnotizing and fucking different chicks over here,”) or they raise the stakes to silly levels and make the protagonist the new world leader or something.

So, as my own solution to stopping me doing that before it could even begin, I decided to do a mind control story from the point of view of a mind controller, but one that had a lot of self-control. And to be honest, I really enjoyed writing the character of Randy. One would assume that Randy, being a man that can use mind control but consciously doesn’t, is a good person, but nope, he’s actually a scumbag that thinks he’s a lot better morally than he is. And this moral ambiguity is deepened by the fact that Ophelia isn’t that great of a person herself.

For the record, since I know that a lot of people come out of reading stories going, “Hmm, who was the good guy in this story?”, the answer is neither character. Randy and Ophelia are bad people, but Randy is much worse. Ophelia is just a childish brat that has a heightened sense of self-importance, but Randy takes that personally and effectively ruins her for being inconsiderate. Instead of my characters that are practically swallowed up by their remorse and self-doubt, Randy has neither, and that’s what makes him both a scumbag and really fun to write.

That said, it was clear this had to be a one-off. Randy is clearly going to get no character arc, not when he holds all the cards like this, and the story is about their dynamic more than anything. The third thing I wanted to challenge myself with in this story was the lack of any actual two-person sex. I wanted this story to be about the deprivation, Ophelia badly needing release and being programmed to only want it from one source, only for that source to deny her that release ever again. Deprivation is an interesting fetish, and I find it all the more fascinating in a mind control erotica. So many mind control stories are about a guy hypnotizing a girl and fucking them. It’s very clear that in those circumstances, the guy wanted sex. But in this story, Randy hypnotizes Ophelia to crave sex from him, only to deny her. The motivations are… more interesting, to me at least.

Whether this is your thing or not, I hope you at least enjoyed the story. If not, I totally understand. This is decidedly not a feelgood story. I may dabble more with supernatural stuff in the future, but for now, I’ll be focusing on continuing my reality-grounded high school stories. I’ll talk to you all next week.