Maragana Girl - Introduction and thoughts on the novel
“Maragana
Girl” came into my head rather suddenly in May, 2004, shortly after I began
learning how to use Poser. As I was looking at available downloads for various
Poser projects, I came across a picture of a file for a reception area that
looked a lot like a courtroom. In a flash the idea came to me to write an erotic
discipline story about a young college-age student from the US forced to undergo
a corporal punishment in a judicial setting. I could incorporate the themes of
public humiliation, forced nudity, and a rather severe judicial punishment into
a story that also would allow the character to adjust to an
imaginary foreign
culture and ultimately find redemption through punishment.
As the plot took form in my mind, I had to come up with both a main character
and a setting in which to place the story. I knew right away that I wanted the
character to be “typically American” in her personality, but at the same time
not the typical helpless white female that seems to dominate erotic discipline
fiction. Over the next few days a main character called Kimberly Lee took shape
in my imagination, especially after I downloaded an Asian figure from a Poser
vendor site that made it easier to actually visualize what she might actually
look like in real life.
The writing of “Maragana Girl” and my learning how to use Poser were two
projects that complemented each other. The Poser models gave me ideas for scenes
and characters, while writing the novel gave me ideas for Poser pictures
and a sense of direction of where I wanted to go with my Poser art. Over the
summer and fall of 2004 I progressed with both projects.
The way I wrote “Maragana Girl” differed from the writing of my first novel “The
Wanderings of Amy”. I wrote “Maragana Girl” from beginning to end, always
keeping in mind where I was going with the plot and the characters. When writing
the chapters of “The Wanderings of Amy”, I was experimenting much more with
setting up erotic discipline scenarios and learning how to write fiction. It was
only later on that I wove the previously written discipline scenes into a plot
and story line for the Amy novel.
My purpose in writing the two novels remained the same. As was the case with
writing "The Wanderings of Amy", "Maragana Girl" is a reaction against a trend
that I see in erotic discipline fiction. I get very irritated by an erotic
discipline story that only concentrates on one form of punishment, monotonously
taking a helpless unthinking submissive character from one routine whipping
after another, from one machine-like disciplinarian to another.
It is important to me to create characters with problems, self-doubts, and mixed
motives for doing things. Most importantly, it is my goal to create characters
with complicated lives, full of human flaws, interesting, capable of making
their own decisions, and that I actually can feel concerned about. When I read
erotic fiction, I am as much interested in the characters and their motivations
as I am in the sex and discipline scenes. As I wrote I actually cared about my
characters, and in some ways felt I got to know them, even though they are
nothing more than figments of my imagination. I also wanted to incorporate a
general theme running throughout the novel, that all of the events in Kim's
life, including her relationships with her sister and her friend Tiffany, had an
ultimate purpose, the salvation of the novel's characters and of Upper Danubia.
I guess in that aspect I am typically American, I like a story with a happy
ending.
Whether or not I succeeded in accomplishing my goals with "The Wanderings of
Amy" and "Maragana Girl" ultimately is for you, the reader, to determine. But
anyhow, that is my hope, to create fiction that goes beyond simple erotic
discipline.
A final note: My fiction uses both the American system for
measurement and the metric system for measurement, depending on where
the story is taking place. Because Upper Danubia is a European country,
it uses the metric system, which is reflected in my narrative. Whenever
my narrative moves to the United States, units of measurement will be
given in feet instead of meters.
For readers unfamiliar with either of the two measurement systems, here
are some basic comparisons:
1 meter = 40 inches or 3 feet and 4 inches
1 foot = 30.5 centimeters
1 mile = 1.6 kilometers
1 kilometer = 0.62 miles
1 kilogram = 2.20 pounds
1 pound = 0.4536 kilograms
432 grams = 15.24 ounces or 0.9524 pounds
