A Siren's Tales
The hotwife effort that became a poly epic
This is another entry in my ongoing “My Filthy Hobby” series, in which I offer some thoughts on the stories I’ve published. This week, a look at A Siren’s Tales, a collection of interconnected stories featuring an unnamed narrator who goes from hotwife to menage partner.
One of the first stories I published on Medium was Proprioception, a gangbang story that makes creative use of a blindfold and a sex swing. It’s still one of my favorites, and I use it frequently as a “reader magnet” in newsletter promotions to encourage people to give my writing a try. I like the way it plays with sensation and perception, the way the narrator has to describe her experience without access to her eyes’ input, and the sensuousness of the fucking. It’s a very different tone than the more humorous gangbang stories, like The Center of Attention or The Pinball Queen’s Debauche.
I also like it because of the narrator’s voice. When I write this character, I hear her voice very clearly. She has a little bit of an accent — I think she’s Greek? — and has an interesting way of mixing formal locution, classical references, and deeply filthy language. Unlike some of my other strong-willed characters, though — like Casey from Casey’s Story or Jessie from A Dip in the Lake and The Contours of Desire — this nameless character has never given me any grief, no matter how crazy a situation I suggest. If anything, she’s game for making it even crazier; I’ve got some incredibly horny characters (Mia from the Fox Run Swingers Club, Madeline from Mapping the Boundaries of Love, and Katie from Fun for Four come to mind), but this lady beats them all.
Originally, I wanted to write her as a “hotwife” character, because that seemed to be where the big erotica readership was gravitating. A lot of my favorite writers work this kink almost exclusively, and since I was new to the scene I thought that would be a good place to start. Alas, as I’ve noted before, it’s not my personal kink, and it’s hard to write erotica that you don’t understand on a primal level. In my reading of it, the hotwife kink is all about a power dynamic between the partner who is engaging in sex outside the marriage (almost always a woman) and the partner who gets off on the infidelity (almost always a man). There’s an undercurrent of marriage-as-property-arrangement, especially in the “reclaiming” scenes, where the husband takes his wife to bed and demands her filthy confession. As a bit of an Emma Goldman anarchist, I’ve always found that a little uncomfortable; I’m definitely not going to look down on it as a kink — all consensual kinks have a beauty to them, and I can certainly appreciate this one — but I have trouble getting turned on by it.
My hotwife efforts with this character were failures largely because she doesn’t really want to be a hotwife. Not that she doesn’t want to fuck the men her husband lines up for her — she does, very much, and very enthusiastically. But she doesn’t want to fuck them away from her husband and then return to tell him her stories; she would prefer to fuck them with her husband. In fact, she’d prefer that her husband fuck them, too. Hence the arrival of Zacharias, in the liminal space of the lake house, and the turn of “A Siren’s Tales” toward being a bisexual menage. Once that happened, I was writing the kink that turns me on, and the stories flowed much more easily.
When I decided to pull the various stories of Patrick’s wife together, most of them published on Medium, I wrote some new pieces to pull them together and make them somewhat coherent. Most of these revolved around the growing relationship with Zacharias; of these, the last one — “The Satyrs Dance at Dawn” — was the most fun to write. I wanted Patrick and Zacharias to have a scene of their own, with the narrator as an observer but not a participant (at least, not until the final sentence — I mean, she can’t let that all go to waste!). I think it’s quite a successful scene, if I do say so myself, and sets the tone for some future stories where the relationship between the men in this triad will get some attention.
In addition to dipping into the bisexual menage world, “A Siren’s Tales” has a setting in common with much of the CorneliaVerse. Though it’s never named in the stories, Patrick and his wife have their lake house on Lake Makanogin, a place we first see in The Night of the Storm, and is the setting for The Contours of Desire and part of Dido Reclaimed. Obviously I’m pretty invested in this lake and its neighbors, and I’ve got plans for more fun in these woods. (I suppose cabin, camping, and canoe smut is my other niche.)
I have plans for these characters, too. Because she’s so interested in classical myth, I want to take her to the Mediterranean and set her loose in the lands of Calypso, Circe, and Aphrodite; I think she’d be a lot of fun abroad, and it would be an excuse to dig into the classical myths myself. One of the things that holds me back is her namelessness. At first, her name didn’t come up because the stories were short and told in first person. Then it became sort of a challenge to keep her nameless, as if she were an anonymous ancient bard spinning tawdry tales. But now almost any name seems not quite enough to capture all of her facets. I think of her as a sort of goddess figure, embodying many aspects of love and desire, and certainly worthy of the worship she receives.
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