"Queen of Revels" short story now live
My short story "Queen of Revels" is now live in the Ravenous Romance anthology Wicked Pleasures, edited by Cecilia Tan of Circlet Press fame.
"Queen of Revels" was initially written for another anthology that never got off the ground, so I resubmitted it to another. It's a fantasy story, about an immortal woman named Eb who was the model for the woman with black wings in the mural in the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii, and today rediscovers her place in the world in the modern BDSM scene. It actually grew out of my BDSM history research as I tried to imagine what that narrative would look like viewed forward instead of backwards. How would a person who had experienced slavery first hand feel about Master-slave roleplaying?
Something I wanted to include, but didn't quite work, was the idea that the immortal woman would perceive the world as a kind of cumulative layering. Every object or idea would make her think of something in her vast memory. A guy in a bomber jacket makes her think of real WWII bomber pilots. It would be something like the way Cayce Pollard perceives the world in William Gibson's novel Pattern Recognition, in which signifiers with depleted new-ness trigger her minor psychotic episodes.
I've been noodling about turning the idea into a longer work. I was intrigued by the idea of the immortal's regenerative ability. Usually, characters who have regenerative powers (e.g. Wolverine or Painkiller Jane) emphasize that they feel pain just like regular people. (Claire on Heroes is an exception.) However, a being with regenerative powers has less need to feel pain. Put another way, maybe an immortal being would have something better than the capacity to feel pain. They would be aware of injury, but not overwhelmed by it. What if, instead, using their regenerative power was actually pleasureable, and/or created an altered state of consciousness?
I also thought about the relationship between a few hundred unkillable and immortal beings and the rest of humanity. I didn't want them to be the "secret illuminati", but just one influence among many in history. One of the debates among the immortals is what secrets to tell humans, and particularly, the use of physical ordeal rituals to achieve altered states of consciousness. In this expanded story, Eb is the guardian angel of this idea, running from the Dionysian rituals in ancient Greece to the medieval flagellants to the flagellation brothels to the modern BDSM scene.