Liner Notes: The Terminando
(alert: The Terminando Security Agency has this post under Yellow spoiler alert. A Yellow spoiler document contains minor direct spoilers and oblique references to larger matters. All readers are advised to proceed with caution. Random cavity searches may be performed at the discretion of the presiding Arbitor)
I decided I needed to tackle the question of what became of Victor. I needed to dispose of him, because we know that Eleanor is a widow two decades later, but I wanted to be non-fatal, because I'm a big softie. I'd kind of figured on the ol' alternate universe gambit from the start.
Compulsory Service felt like a good way to tie plot to sexuality; erotic novels run the risk of feeling like ordinary novels decorated with explicit sex scenes, and I was interested in avoiding that pitfall. Further, one of the underlying themes of Steampunk is the industrial revolution, turned, as it were, to eleven. Replacing the Steam Age with the Erotofluidic Age felt like a fun way to play with some of those ideas. (frankly, I didn't end up doing as much with this angle as I'd hoped to, though I Dewey's story does give us a little glimpse of the day-to day role of Compulsory Service)
I wanted to include a gentleman's club because they're cool, and potentially very sexy. When I tried to structure that, though, I ran into some interesting problems. You see, my own sexuality is such that most of my favorite erotic images feature a woman being "made" (for various values of that word) to submit sexually. This isn't, of course, very hard to integrate into a gentleman's club scenario. In fact, it's all too easy. A bunch of rich, privileged men forcing desperate poor girls to cater to their whims doesn't feel to me like a fun fantasy; it feels like sad and sordid history.
So, could I make the club co-ed? My attempts to envision this didn't feel like gentlemen's clubs anymore, and the society that produced them would have to be top-to-bottom profoundly different from Victorian culture as we know it (not that I hewed so terribly closely myself). The Violas, and their Brotherhood of St. Joan, felt like an elegant solution.
Given the Violas, I needed some way to get them tangled up in Victor and Dewey's problems. Ontological engineering provided an apt but potentially volatile avenue. I spent a lot of time thinking and talking about the events that became Chapter 5. The rules of my universe demanded that any tampering with ontological forces produce surprising and ironic results. Plus, I wanted very much to produce something that resisted any neatly didactic reading about genderqueer people. I like to think of the approach I settled on, with a great deal of help and input from my spousalbeast, as satisfyingly unsatisfying.
All the way through the writing, I had a looming problem. At the end, I knew I needed Dewey to return, and Victor to stay, at least for the next couple decades. I was not certain what the logic of that would be. Once again, as with Ontological Engine, when the solution to that problem struck me, it had an elegance and symmetry that makes me wonder if, on some level, I hadn't been working towards it without knowing so.
I decided I needed to tackle the question of what became of Victor. I needed to dispose of him, because we know that Eleanor is a widow two decades later, but I wanted to be non-fatal, because I'm a big softie. I'd kind of figured on the ol' alternate universe gambit from the start.
Compulsory Service felt like a good way to tie plot to sexuality; erotic novels run the risk of feeling like ordinary novels decorated with explicit sex scenes, and I was interested in avoiding that pitfall. Further, one of the underlying themes of Steampunk is the industrial revolution, turned, as it were, to eleven. Replacing the Steam Age with the Erotofluidic Age felt like a fun way to play with some of those ideas. (frankly, I didn't end up doing as much with this angle as I'd hoped to, though I Dewey's story does give us a little glimpse of the day-to day role of Compulsory Service)
I wanted to include a gentleman's club because they're cool, and potentially very sexy. When I tried to structure that, though, I ran into some interesting problems. You see, my own sexuality is such that most of my favorite erotic images feature a woman being "made" (for various values of that word) to submit sexually. This isn't, of course, very hard to integrate into a gentleman's club scenario. In fact, it's all too easy. A bunch of rich, privileged men forcing desperate poor girls to cater to their whims doesn't feel to me like a fun fantasy; it feels like sad and sordid history.
So, could I make the club co-ed? My attempts to envision this didn't feel like gentlemen's clubs anymore, and the society that produced them would have to be top-to-bottom profoundly different from Victorian culture as we know it (not that I hewed so terribly closely myself). The Violas, and their Brotherhood of St. Joan, felt like an elegant solution.
Given the Violas, I needed some way to get them tangled up in Victor and Dewey's problems. Ontological engineering provided an apt but potentially volatile avenue. I spent a lot of time thinking and talking about the events that became Chapter 5. The rules of my universe demanded that any tampering with ontological forces produce surprising and ironic results. Plus, I wanted very much to produce something that resisted any neatly didactic reading about genderqueer people. I like to think of the approach I settled on, with a great deal of help and input from my spousalbeast, as satisfyingly unsatisfying.
All the way through the writing, I had a looming problem. At the end, I knew I needed Dewey to return, and Victor to stay, at least for the next couple decades. I was not certain what the logic of that would be. Once again, as with Ontological Engine, when the solution to that problem struck me, it had an elegance and symmetry that makes me wonder if, on some level, I hadn't been working towards it without knowing so.