Off the Leash

My unexpected journey into a dark tantric tale

This is another entry in “My Filthy Hobby”, brief essays on each of my published stories. The full essays are available to paid subscribers (along with access to the stories themselves), so if you like this kind of thing, you know what to do!

Also, just a quick reminder: this month’s Dollar Deal is The Pinball Queen’s Debauch, a truly raunchy gangbang story that I’m sure you’ll love - get it for just 99 cents at your favorite ebook retailer all month long! You can read my essay on “The Pinball Queen’s Debauch” here, and a little essay about gangbangs here.

When I started writing "A Dip in the Lake," I imagined that it would also contain what would become "Off the Leash." The plan was that I would have alternating chapters — one telling the story of Phil's fling in the woods with Jessie, the other telling the story of Petra's wild weekend at a swingers' convention at the casino hotel — and in the last chapter our lovers would re-unite and we'd have a heartfelt celebration of their renewed vows of monogamy. It seemed like a nice romantic arc, something a little less raunchy than the gangbang stories that preceded it. I had some vague notions of maybe dipping into more traditional romance at some point, having got my writing chops back, and this seemed like an idea that would let me stretch out a bit.

What I didn't bank on was that the story that became "Off the Leash" was quite a bit more substantial and involved, with a bigger cast of characters and some rich back story, than the simple little pastorale of "A Dip in the Lake." As I wrote, the chapters about Petra got longer and more complicated, dwarfing the story of Phil and Jessie. At last, I threw up my hands and performed radical surgery to separate the twins and give Petra her own story.

It wasn't until I was quite a bit into that story that I realized that her friends, Madeline and Casey, would need stories, too, and that I would need to find a more inventive way to bring the story full circle. That's how I became ensnared in "Mapping the Boundaries of Love."

During the research phase for "Off the Leash," I read a few "swinger hotel takeover" accounts, some purportedly true, quite a few definitely wildly fictional. I like to think that my account is on the wilder side of the wildly fictional — informed by research, certainly, but I wanted to create a bacchanal that would overwhelm Petra's senses and keep the reader on her toes. The escape from the Overlook Hotel sequence of "The Shining," during which Danny and Wendy catch glimpses of all manner of mayhem as they flee (the man in the bear/dog costume has haunted my nightmares for decades ...), was also in my mind, but a sexy version: I wanted Petra to feel both arousal and fear at the delights on offer.

I went down quite a few rabbit holes doing research for this story. For example, I am not a poker player, at all — cribbage is more my speed — so getting Petra's first meeting with Martin at the poker table right was harrowing. And I still don't know if it's full of glaring errors; no one has mentioned any, at least. I also did a little cocktail research, going so far as to get the ingredients for Martin's drink of choice, the Godfather (I usually have Irish whiskey on hand, but I got Scotch for this experiment): it's not a bad drink, though probably not my first choice. But then, Martin's not really my first choice, either.

Martin was a surprising character. He appeared unbidden while "A Dip in the Lake" and "Off the Leash" were part of the same project, standing in the shadows with his silver-flecked hair and earring stud. I hadn't had a silver fox show up in any of my stories yet, and a casino hotel seemed like a good place to find one. I wasn't sure what to do with him — was he a hero or villain? A teacher or seducer? It turned out he was a little of all of those things, but his role turned darker as I explored him further in "Casey's Story."

His wife Cynthia was modeled in part on Roxy Fox, a sex educator/podcaster/performer with a distinct and alluring blend of tantric mysticism and BDSM. With her accent, dark hair and eyes, and delicate, alluring tattoos, I find her fascinating but also a little frightening. (You need to listen to her podcast episode about her gangbang experience, which sounds very much like the sort of story I write …) Cynthia turns a bit sinister as the story goes on — perhaps more sinister than Martin, becoming a sort of goddess of destruction in "Casey's Story" — but at the beginning, at least, there's something very seductive about her. More than Martin, indeed, I think Petra is drawn erotically, spiritually, and psychologically to Cynthia.

While doing research on tantra, I ran across a fascinating article by Janet Hardy, published in Salon in 2013 with the headline, "My tantric 'awakening' turned me off sex," that I used as the template for the experiences Petra and Casey (as recounted in "Casey's Story") had with Martin and Cynthia. In her recounting, Hardy had been mixing tantra and BDSM in a heady brew of sexual exploration, and experienced a kind of orgasmic sexual experience that had devastating repercussions:

It was like grabbing a live wire -- slower, deeper, more systematic, but with the same inescapability and the same terror. And it was the deepest ecstasy I’ve ever felt, like orgasm times a hundred, from the tips of my hair to the ends of my toenails.

I've never had this kind of sexual experience, though I did once have a scary experience as a kid, living in West Germany, when I was plugging our television into a converter box. Something was loose in the box, I think (this was a big, bulky item, probably twenty years old at the time, that had been passed from family to family rotating through the US Air Force bases), and when I plugged it in, I felt someone grab my shoulder and give me a tug. I resisted, and it tugged again, and again, and again, until I realized that there was no one there and that I was holding a live electrical current and couldn't let go. Something shorted out, and I fell backward on my heels, and was put off television for a bit as a result. I can imagine that the sort of experience Hardy describes would put one off sex, too.

I went down a few rabbit holes of research into the dark side of tantra and meditation working on "Off the Leash" and "Casey's Story." It's a powerful practice, tapping into deep currents in the psyche — whatever your spiritual or metaphysical worldview, the balance of physical and psychological energies that tantra promises is heady stuff. In these stories, Martin and Cynthia are, I think, playing recklessly with energies they don't understand and can't control; I'm currently in the middle of writing "The Contours of Desire," which seeks to reconcile the pastoral "A Dip in the Lake" and the intensely dark "Off the Leash" and "Casey's Story," and I have high hopes that Jessie is the key finding a way through to light and love, even if it's different light and love than Petra and Phil had going in.