Dido Reclaimed
A story in search of its audience?
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 Dido Reclaimed, a sort of odd duck story that grew out of two scenes in A Family Condition.
I really like Dido Reclaimed, even if hardly anyone else has read it. It’s an ambitious little project — at 38,000 words, it’s my fourth longest story, riding the line between novella and short novel, and has a relatively complex tale to tell. The character of Dido Cook first appears in A Family Condition (also quite ambitious, at almost 46,000 words), in two memorable scenes. In the first, she’s a famous Hollywood actress who’s anxious to become pregnant, and who hires one of the main characters in “A Family Condition,” Vikki Viper, to join her and her husband in bed as a sort of fertility totem. And later, after Vikki Viper has taken a very strange journey into kink and D/s work, Dido appears again, as a Hollywood actress who wants to reclaim her sexuality post-pregnancy with a gangbang scene (it’s a Cornelia Quick story, which means that at 46,000 words there’s a minimum requirement of three gangbangs — it’s right there in the contract, trust me).
Originally, the Dido Cook gangbang scene was going to be a big part of “A Family Condition,” but as I wrote that chapter I came to an important realization: “A Family Condition” is Vikki’s story, not Dido’s; and Dido has enough of an interesting story herself that she really deserves her own book. As a result, the second Dido chapter became more of a sketch: we get a hint at the action, but it’s really about how it affects Vikki as the gangbang coordinator, and not about how it affects Dido as the gangbang participant.
“Dido Reclaimed” is set in the mid 1990s, and I really tried to capture the time period. It’s about a certain kind of celebrity that I don’t think exists anymore in quite the same way: an actress who is best known for a handful of small roles (Dido has starred in two sitcoms, one a success and the other a flop), but whose real cachet is her personal life. It was an era of extreme interest in celebrity fertility — I swear to god, every working actress did a nude pregnancy photoshoot for GQ or Maxim in that decade — and celebrity coupledom (which, I suppose, is still a big going concern). Dido is buffeted by external forces over which she has surprisingly little control; she finds her truest happiness in small things, like a peppermint mocha latte, but has trouble valuing what really makes her happy.
There are obvious real world parallels to Dido — I won’t mention any of them, because we really don’t need any powerful celebrities’ lawyers getting wind of a silly little dirty book, do we? — but she’s not based on any one celebrity. I tried to make her more of an “every-celebrity” character: a woman who often feels in over her head, who desperately wants people to be happy with her, and who is having trouble discovering what brings her joy.
Of all my stories, “Dido Reclaimed” has really performed the worst sales-wise, in comparison to the amount of effort that went into writing it. I’m sure there are a lot of reasons for it: I’ve gone through several iterations of covers and blurbs to try to market it to the right audience, but so far nothing has quite clicked. It’s not really a romance novel, as it fails to hit any of the expected beats; it’s too long to be an erotic short; and while it’s plenty dirty, it’s not really hitting any particular erotic kinks hard enough to put it into a pure erotica category. It’s probably closest in tone and themes to something like “Off the Leash” or “The Contours of Desire,” though those have the benefit of belonging to a series with a clear narrative arc.
I do have some ideas for building on “Dido Reclaimed,” though. I’d like to do a sequel about the making of a sequel to the movie that takes up a good chunk of the story, though that might be a bit meta. And I’d like to explore Dido’s relationship with the groundskeeper who provides her gangbang after-care. It’s still early in the book’s lifecycle — it was released at the end of January, so it’s practically brand new — so it may yet gain traction and find its audience. I still love it, and the writing of it was a valuable exercise, so I have hope that, like its protagonist, this little tale will eventually find a loving embrace.
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