Madeline's Awakening

a little levity in the "Mapping the Boundaries of Love" saga

This essay, as well as all past and future “My Filthy Hobby” essays, are no longer paywalled. You can read about why here. I’m no longer offering a paid subscription option; everyone who had a paid subscription before December 15 will have received an email with the direction I’ll be taking over the next year to keep the steamy stories coming to you. Meanwhile, if you’re looking for a way to support my work and get a good deal on my smut, you can subscribe at SubscribeStar or Ream, or buy my stories at your favorite ebook retailers or directly from me.

As soon as Madeline appeared in "Off the Leash," sucking off the male stripper she had hired within minutes of the trio's arrival at the casino, I knew she needed her own book. The next image that flashed into my mind was of a petite, dark-haired woman wearing nothing but blue body paint, a unicorn hat, and a great big smile, dancing through a party scene, and I immediately fell in love with her.

I'm not sure what she's dancing to, but Nile Rodgers probably arranged it. It's got a big, bouncy bass line, a disco beat, and some serious pizzazz: definitely something to get Madeline's little ass shaking. She's the sort of character who steals the spotlight with her enthusiasm and joie de vivre, but is also happy to invite others (sometimes many others ...) into the groove. Once she has an idea — in this case, being the center of a gangbang — there's nothing that can possibly dissuade her from it. She latches on to the goal, no matter how crazy, and makes her filthiest dreams come true.

After Petra's angsty reaction to the SExC convention, it was a delight to write about someone having the opposite reaction. Madeline was made for a scene like the swingers' hotel takeover, a sexual dynamo with a very "yes and" attitude toward any experimentation. She absolutely exhausts the first two lovers she finds, and it takes an uncounted, and perhaps uncountable, number of lovers to finally wear her down. And even then this little Energizer Bunny of Fucking isn't really worn down, as her friend Casey soon discovers (much to her delight).

I hadn't written a gangbang scene for a while — there's a glimpse of one in "Cassie Keeps the Curfew," but the last sustained bang was "Crossing Swords With the Fencing Club" — so I was excited to get back to one of my favorite topics. I wanted Madeline's gangbang to be special, and also a little bit educational (I've gone down some fascinating and filthy rabbit holes in my gangbang research ...), which is why I introduced a gangbang coordinator to the scene. The character of Debbie Dare is based on podcaster/sex educator "Toronto Unicorn," whose podcast and YouTube channel you really need to check out if you're interested in the realities of gangbangs, swinging, and sex clubs. My favorite episodes are the ones where she describes scenes that she arranges for friends and associates, often with lots of gear and lube (and water and snacks); I wanted Madeline's experience to be fun and empowering and special, and I think Debbie succeeds in delivering that. Maybe if Petra had joined Madeline, instead of going off with Cynthia and Martin, she would have had a much better time ...

Writing the snippets of the other two gangbangs that happen in parallel to Madeline's was fun, too. The Spanish woman who wants to be called a filthy whore during her gangbang is played by Amarna Miller in my head, another sex education personality who fascinates me. That mixture of degradation and empowerment is a weird buzz, something that comes up often in the BDSM stories I like to read but seldom write.

And Patricia, of course, is enjoying a sex contraption not unlike what the narrator of "Proprioception" and "Concurrence" enjoys, though it's a little more dungeony. The character is based in part on a friend from college who had an outwardly mousy and meek presentation, but who discovered kink with her boyfriend and told us a few titilating and enlightening impact play and bondage tales after a few glasses of wine one night. I don't know what ever became of her, but I hope she's still having fun with the handcuffs and floggers!

Madeline's actual gangbang is a little more dreamlike than any of the standalone gangbang stories I've written. It's probably closest in nature to "Erato and Morpheus": the point of view is a little tighter than in most of my stories, and the sense of being overwhelmed and consumed in the heat of passion is what I most wanted to convey. While Madeline is a very active, sometimes aggressive, lover in other encounters, I wanted her gangbang to be more of a "Calgon, take me away!" scene. (I was at a very impressionable age when those Calgon commercials first appeared, and my personal sexuality is probably best conveyed by a lady lounging in a tub full of decadent bubbles — if that tub had also been occupied by the actors from the "Irish Spring" commercials of the same era, you'd perfectly encapsulate my cleanest/dirtiest fantasies ...)

Part of me wishes I had just written Madeline's story, and skipped Petra's and Casey's — those were hard to write, Madline's was a breeze. And I also want to spend a little more time with Madeline. My current project as I'm writing this is "The Contours of Desire," the Petra/Phil/Jessie wrap-up, and I'm holding out a Madeline sequel as a little reward to myself when I finish it.