Sealed With A Kiss

A kiss can change everything

So yesterday after posting "Stay" I was in an odd mood.  I kind of wanted to cap, but wasn't fully invested in doing so.  Next up on my cap debt list is Kaitlyn and I haven't capped her in  along time.  But without checking on her preferences, I think she is similar to JaySeaver.  In other words, her preferences don't match up well with mine.  I know she likes humor in her caps, so I might focus on that, but it wasn't the mood I was in.

You see, writing hot and heavy caps tends to leave me in the mood to continue writing... but after I write softer more delicate stories like "Stay" I tend to be drained creatively.  I can see potential in a lot of images, but just can't crank the cap writing engine over.  Even moving into smuttier material doesn't help.  There's just no GO.  So it's an odd mix, and I don't have a good way to deal with it.  So I do what I do most times after I've capped... I look at images.

I don't expect to find anything that inspires me enough to even try, but I feel better when I go through the motions and have proof that I didn't just waste some good energy.  So when I came across the set that this photo came from, I didn't have high expectations.  I think the thumbnail was a BJ pic which so long as it's photographed well always draws my interest.  The image set was fairly standard fare.   Attractive woman and attractive man getting it on.  It had one or two phots where she was wearing clothes, but most of them were of her completely nude.  They have sex (both oral and standard... no anal) in several positions.  It was photographed well, but really nothing special.  But nestled in the middle of the set was this closeup image of them kissing.

The idea hit in a flash.  He and his wife had gone down the role of feminizing him, but she couldn't bear to be the 'man' any longer, so she brought one into their relationship and surprised him by having him close his eyes before getting kissed for the first time by a man.

The idea was simple and yet for some reason VERY powerful to me.  I think it's the moment in the photo.  You can picture the feminized man anxiously anticipating kissing his wife just a fraction of a second before the realization hits that those lips aren't his wifes, or even a woman's.  There's this french photographer named Henri Cartier-Bresson that said that every photograph should capture a single moment, and that there is only ONE moment that is correct to capture.  This image displays that idea perfectly:

If he had snapped this photo a single moment before or after he did, it would be completely different.  That's the way I saw the photo I used in this cap.  A moment before, and the subject is still expecting to be kissed by her wife/husband.  A moment later and she IS being kissed by a man.  But at that moment she is equally expecting to be kissed by a woman and realizing that she is being kissed by a man.

I know a lot of people will look at the photo (in the context of the story) and just go 'meh... should have used the BJ pic' but the entire story came from that one single decisive moment and I think it's the ONLY image that could be used with this story.  So many of the images I use in caps could have been captured moments before or after and it wouldn't make any significant difference.  So when I see an image like this, I just get so excited.  It really does empower me more than any old BJ pic.

But sadly, while I was energized and empowered.... my creative batteries remained drained.  I tried a paragraph or two, but they were just bad writing.  I wasn't telling a story, I was just laying out facts.  It felt more like a police report than the beginnings of what I hoped to be a sensual story.  So I shelved it.

But I couldn't get it out of my head.  As I was eating dinner with my family, I was picturing that photo. I was imagining that story.  As I was watching the season finale of Whale Wars, I was adding little details to it.  As I was playing Assassins Creed: Brotherhood (got it on a great sale at from Steam!) and Team Fortress 2, I was shivering as I heard the woman's voice in my ear.

It even appeared in a dream even if only in passing.  I don't recall the dream but it wasn't a 'Caitlyn' dream at all... I was my normal masculine self, but as I was walking through a building I looked into a room and saw that moment.  I even saw the wife/husband behind the subject read to encourage her down to her knees.

So when I opened the image back up into Photoshop and fired up Word I was so ready to write.  I immediately wrote those first lines (He could feel her getting closer to face, but kept his eyes closed.  She had promised that this would be the moment that he finally realized what it was to be female.) and then sat back.  I wanted to think through what little details would be in and which ones would be left out, but I just felt compelled to get those first lines out.

Normally I write and edit as I go along.  I change perspective (writing it as a narrator, writing it from the subjects perspective, using dialog, using inner dialog or thoughts...), I change tone (loving, cruel, sensual, sexy, horny, funny...), and I change the story.  I do this on the fly as I feel that I want to get the idea out and will fix it up in later edits.  Many times I end up with a story that needs a lot of fixing to keep the perspective tone and story all moving together.  But I wanted this to be different.   So I mentally mapped out what I wanted to show.  I decided on a perspective and wanted to stay with it throughout.  And most important I decided on a tone.

And when I had all that straight in my head I started typing.  Besides floundering around a few times for a particular phrase or word, I wrote this in one motion.  I didn't give any thought to editing it down when I realize it was going to be longer as I hadn't imagined what the design would look like.  I just wrote.

And to be honest, besides a quick read when I was done, I didn't edit it at all.  There may be quite a few errors in this, but I know that if I went in to edit I had a big chance of changing it, and that's the last thing I wanted to do.  So if there are errors... sorry about that.

The length of the story dictated the basic design.  I don't have anything else in my bag that will be visually satisfying and allow for this wall of text.  I started to pick the colors out of the photo, figuring a nice pale flesh tone would work with a darker brown accent.  But when I started down that way I felt that it didn't match the tone of the story.

Now a lot of the time, I let design dictate design and not the story.  Sure, if it's a bolder more 'in your face' story, I'll use bolder colors and vice versa.  But this time I wanted the story to be held and enhanced by the design.  So I went with a pale pink/purple instead.  I even let the story dictate the background image more than I normally do.  In this design I generally try for very few lines in the background... just something abstract that will flow well behind the text.  I found several background images that would work, but they either seemed to happy and intense, or two sad and bland.  And I just didn't want them to effect how the story was read, even if it was done in a small subconscious way.

When I came across the delicate petals growing and reaching further up, I saw the arc of the story in it.  The subject is growing and changing into something far more delicate than he was.

Now I know that most people are going to read this cap and either go 'Nice cap' or 'Meh... moving on' and I'm fine with that.  But this cap, more so than any cap I an remember creating recently, is just about perfect to me.  Maybe I'll feel different about it later, but ever thing about this matches that gut punched feeling I got when I first saw the image, and that is just rare for me.