Wronged By Him and Wronged By Her

A Savior at last?

I felt the urge to cap today and went looking for some images to inspire me.  I actually wanted to cap both on Wednesday and Thursday, but I got caught up looking at the images, instead of 'listening' to them.  So instead of looking at each gallery one at a time, I went to fuskator and opened up each gallery that had any hint of a story into its own tab.  I opened up 16 galleries from the first page alone.

My idea was to give them a brief look.  It would either inspire something, or not.  I figured I could get through about 50 or so galleries fairly quickly.  I honestly didn't expect the first gallery I opened to inspire me so strongly!

Maybe it's because it was set in an office that got me as I've always loved a good secretary story.  If you haven't had a chance to read the interactive story "The Office: Swimming in the Pool" over at Locked In Lace, you need to.  It may be just the perfect forced femme office story out there (it helps that with all the choices it qualifies as the 10 best forced femme office stories all by itself!).

The only problem is that I often see an office scenario as between a man and the victim.  I still get tingles a thought of a female exec turning me into her sexy girly bi secretary, but its just more powerful to me when its a man.  So I think it's only natural that even though these images were of two women, that I still started it with a man doing the transformation.  I thought about giving a couple quick paragraphs saying how Damien forced Pete to be Petra, and then spend the rest of the story on Steffie not only keeping Pettra as is, but using her in a more thorough way than Damien ever did.  But my mind just kept running with Damien.

I should pause here and mention that my first thought was having this be a blog exclusive, using Calvin/Caitlyn as the victim.  I was thoroughly enjoying Caitlyn's journey.  And if I enjoy it, I know that either Jennifer and/or Petra would enjoy it too.  Seeing as our gal here as red hair, I changed it over to Petra.  And as long as I was making it for a Havenite, I changed the random man and woman into Damien (Dee) and Steffie (Shysteffie).

So I had a pretty long story involving Damien transforming Pete, but I knew that I would only have so much space.  I didn't want to look for another image, and there was no man to use, nor any image of just 'Petra'.  So no matter how much I wrote, I would have to end it with Steffie coming into the picture.  I finally settled on an ending point for Damien, and brought Steffie in with a glimmer of hope.  But this was one full page in MS Word.  To keep it even, I would have to write a full page of Petra/Steffie for the second panel.

Before I started writing up that second page, I really sat back and considered ending this with just the first panel.  First, it would end on a kind of 'high' note, and I know Petra likes those more than I do.  But mostly I was afraid of writing so much.  You see for the past month or so, I've been having a harder and harder time with writing.  I think this is my annual 'writers block' showing up.  But instead of bowing to it and now making any caps, I'm pushing my way through.  I feel good about making caps, but its more of a struggle.  And I think that struggle shows in the writing.  If I start a second panel, I wouldn't be able to try it and can it if I couldn't write something.  That's just not the way I work.  If the second panel doesn't work out and I sent the story down in flames, I would end up canning the entire caption.

I must have sat there for a good 20 minutes just staring at the screen.  I had an idea of how the second panel would go... it would be Steffie slowly crushing any of Petra's hopes of returning to 'normal' and in fact using her more than Damien did.  Parts came through (like the doctor's visit, and dealing with the clients in a more 'hands on' way... but it didn't seem to flow.

I finally decided that I would give it a try.  A gamble, as I was really happy with the first panel, but I didn't want to let my insecurities and 'problem's dictate to me when and what I would write.  I'll keep trying to shoot for the best stories I can... I'd rather occasionally fail at that, than not ever try it.

So I started writing again.  The first panel took maybe 30 minutes to write.  The second panel took closer to an hour.  I don't think the writing is as good as the first half, but the overall emotional ride is far better in my opinion.   The 'high' of going to the party.  The 'low' of getting forced into a life unwanted.  The 'high' of getting saved.  The low of getting forced to remain in the life unwanted.  The low of this continued life being worse than before.

But then again I could be blowing smoke up my own ass.  If you think this would have been better as a single panel, let me know.  I want to be able to judge these things better in the future.