Striving for perfection

Strive on Simone... Strive on!

This is a cap that I made for Simone.  I've been working on it for awhile but had a lot of issues from image selection to tone to final edit of the story to the actual layout.

First thing I should say is that I wanted to go in a slightly different direction for Simone in this cap.  Previously I've made her a specific Mistress.  Someone who was creating a slave for herself.  And while I still wanted that mistress like confidence, I wanted her to be a little softer around the edges.  Recently Simone has updated her preferences and mentioned wanting more elegance, sensuality and romance.  So the first thing I did was look for elegant photos.  I bypassed fuskator and went straight for google images.  Here are a selection of images that I pulled out to use all from the search terms 'woman, elegant, sensual, romantic':

They all had a little story behind them, but I kept coming back to that third image.  I kept seeing the way she was looking at the mirror and thinking that it was vanity.  But each time I thought that, I corrected myself and tried to think of something other than vanity driving Simone.

Finally this morning as I looked over the images again I realized I could use that conflicted feeling.  People looking at her and thinking that she's being vain, but when in reality she is just trying to be the perfect woman.

Going from that thought, I went right into writing.  The hard part was trying to make the story go beyond 'they think I'm vain, but I'm not'.  I hate to say it, but to finish the story I fell back on the whole 'Mistress' thing.  Sure, she's not transforming a specific person or talking to one of her slaves... but she does want to change the worlds men into women.  So in that regard while I still like the story, I missed the mark of writing for 'Miss Simone' as opposed to 'Mistress Simone'.

Design wise, this was a nightmare.  I knew I wanted to crop the image in rather tight... but that left me an odd area for the story.  It would obviously fit on the right hand side, but I didn't want to cover up the mirror. So I ended up spending a lot of time trying to get it to fit around the mirror.  I think that this works out... but after being so close to it, I'm not 100% sure that someone won't try to read the two middle paragraphs as a single paragraph going across her arm.

At this point though, I believe that the cap is as good as it's going to get.  If I keep playing with either the story or the layout, I have a very good chance of just fucking it up.  So.. I hope both Miss Simone and all the other readers out there enjoy it as is!