December 18, 2008
While you're waiting for the next chapter of Allison and the Primdales, you can read my latest novella, A Perfect Match. It follows roughly the same progression of my other stories, with a slow buildup culminating in sex in the last chapter. Okay, maybe I'm stuck in a rut, but I've got some other stories planned later that won't be quite the same. This one's a bit shorter so it gets to the action quicker, but like my other stories, the sex is only the culmination of a relationship that's based upon something deeper. If you've read my other novellas and enjoyed them, you'll probably like this one as well.
Surprisingly, this one has nothing to do with incest. This is not the most original story out there, but once again, it's the characters and not the plot that give this one its charm.
Warning! The rest of this post contains spoilers. I suggest you read the story before coming back and reading what I've written here.
I got the idea for this story from a line in an upcoming chapter of Allison and the Primdales. One of the younger characters says, "I guess I just have a thing for child molesters." Taken in context, it's obviously just a joke, but I thought it would be fun to write a story around that quote. Although the line doesn't appear in A Perfect Match anywhere, it's definitely there in spirit. Basically, this is the tale of a young teenage girl attempting to seduce a reluctant pedophile.
I've read plenty of stories involving older men seducing younger girls, often a girl in the neighborhood. And of course, sometimes after they've done the deed, the surprise ending comes when she admits that she wanted it all along.
Sometimes it's the other way around, with a horny girl looking for sex from an older man. Usually if that's the case, the story reduces the man to a single character trait: lust. It simply assumes that the man is just as willing, if not more so, than the girl.
I wanted to do something different, to break the stereotypes. While the plot is essentially the same, this one is different from the ones I've read in two respects.
First, instead of hiding one of the character's emotions and motivations from the reader, I put them out in the open right from the beginning. From the moment I introduce the second character, the echo of the first sentence makes it clear that these two are eventually going to get together. I change viewpoints between scenes so that we can see the similarities and differences between the thoughts of the two characters.
Notice the trick I used for switching viewpoints. I don't like to jump between characters' heads in the middle of a scene because it just feels like I don't spend enough time in any character's thoughts to really get to know them, and it can be confusing for the readers to try to keep up with whose eyes they're seeing through. In A Perfect Match, I needed some way to switch viewpoints without this confusion. So I use the characters entering or leaving the room as a trigger to change the scene and the viewpoint. It keeps it nice and clean.
The second and more important way in which this story breaks the stereotype is that the man, even though he's a pedophile, is actually unwilling to give in to the girl's wiles. He's not just a horny old pervert; he's got depth and complexity.
The tension and even the humor of the story stem from the fact that they both want it, but neither wants to come right out and admit it, and it leads to them both concluding exactly the wrong things about each other. Leslie thinks Roger sees her as just a child, and Roger believes it's impossible for a teenage girl to be as excited about a thirty-year-old man as he is about her. So they dance around the issue, and their attempts not to appear too eager only serve to emphasize their incorrect conclusions when if they knew what the other was thinking they would have hopped into bed as soon as they met. In that sense, the theme of the story is the futility of playing all those games, when we really ought to be more open about our feelings.
I especially like the humor in the mirroring of ideas between the two characters, such as both of them fantasizing about him storming into the bathroom to ravish her body, or the idea that he's trying to get her drunk on vanilla extract. I tried to fit as many of these in as I could in order to show the reader that despite their differences, Roger and Leslie mostly think alike. That's why they're so perfect for each other.
Notice what I did with the chapter titles. (Warning! Self-congratulatory moment detected!) Each title is made up of two concepts, and each concept applies mostly to one of the two characters in that chapter. For instance, in the first chapter, Lust represents Leslie, and Fantasy represents Roger. In the fourth chapter, when they finally come together, the distinction vanishes and both concepts apply to both characters equally. I thought it was a clever touch. (Okay, the self-congratulatory moment is over. It wasn't so bad after all)
The horny young Leslie may be a fun character to read about, but I think Roger is the more interesting of the two. I would dare say that many of the writers and readers of ASSTR are much like him. They have their fantasies, but would never do anything in real life (although a girl like Leslie showing up on their doorstep might change their minds). In fact, Roger is quite noble in his own way, a hero who just hasn't been given a chance to do anything heroic. Can we really condemn him for his desires when any girl who wasn't as conniving as Leslie would be completely safe in his presence?
He sees his desires as something unnatural, a weakness in his own character. But really how unusual are they? Perhaps he's a bit preoccupied with young girls, but I would guess that most men find at least some thirteen-year-olds attractive. There's nothing magical about a girl's eighteenth birthday that suddenly turns her from a child with no sexuality into an object worthy of lust. Girls can be sexy at sixteen, fifteen, or even fourteen. Of course in my stories the characters, plots, and settings are all romanticized, so the girls reach that stage early. The difference between Roger and the average man on the street then is merely one of degree. He's not different because he thinks girls that age are attractive; he's different only because he thinks about them constantly.
Ironically, he breaks the stereotype because he believes he is the stereotype. He's gotten so caught up in the idea that men are the aggressors and women are the victims (especially when such an age difference is involved) that he can't see the truth; that Leslie wants to have sex with him. So he closes himself off, refusing to give in to his desires.
Roger's reluctance is what makes him so likable, but it's also what changes this story from pornography to romance. A true pedophile would have picked up on the signals from Leslie and acted on them right away. There would be no time for the two of them to get emotionally involved; it would be simply passionless sex. In this tale, though, they become friends before they become lovers. In fact, at one point I considered a surprise ending where they never do have sex, but end up as just friends with an understanding between them that there could never be romance. That would require a lot of skill to pull off, and I didn't feel up to the challenge, so I took the easy way out. Still, because they take so long to discover the truth, when it happens they understand fully what they're getting into. They realize that they are not so different after all, and that's what makes them a perfect match.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.