InBrightestDay

Posted!

I’m going to be the last one to post; I’m really sorry about this! I’m really hoping to have it up before Christmas, and rest assured, you will all get reviews from me!

Crap. I swear I’m working on mine. I would be done by now, but I’m also helping someone else write something for another site (if you want to blame someone for this...uh...JayDee will do). Fair warning: Moonlit Snow is a dreaded NoSex story. Hopefully the fuzzies will be warm enough that it will be nice to read, though. Assuming this site is still here a year from now, I promise some proper smut for next Christmas!

We all have new reviews from @Thundercloud! Thanks! I wanted the initial approach to the house to slowly build a vaguely creepy atmosphere. Are there jorōgumo in Inuyasha, or is it just the mention of yōkai in general? I’m so glad that worked out. I had a lot of fun writing the initial segment where it’s dark and Yua is just this creepy voice from the darkness, and we know something is moving around up there, but we can’t see her. As for the sexy part, I’d never written any bondage before, so it was kind of tough to do. BDSM often involves some level of physical pain, but I figured that while Cody is submissive, he is not a masochist, and in fact if Yua caused him any real pain it might bring up bad memories of the house he came from, so the closest I got to pain was that little prickling thing she does with her claws. Out of curiosity, what did you mean about the plot twist at the end? As for more like this, there is another story that features Yua and Cody called Parlor Games, but that doesn’t have any sex in it. There is eventually going to be a considerably bigger story with these two where we find out how they met, and as I’ll be shooting for erotic horror/dark romance there, that one will have sexual content.

I might have a thing. I got to introduce Yua and Cody for Halloween, so for the Holiday anthology I might be able to introduce Elis and Lady Aldreda. They live in a medieval fantasy world, though so it would just be a winter solstice celebration (their version of New Year’s) rather than any real-world winter holiday. On top of all that, I was prodded by an author on another site to write a thing I’d outlined but been afraid to write and...you know what? Put me down as a “hopefully.”

If it is bad, you’re in good company. Around Halloween, I had a lengthy conversation with InvidiaRed over insect mouthparts due to a throwaway line in his story, and just yesterday I made an author on another site blink by explaining how much research I had to do to figure out if you could use water to hide from something that sees infrared. *notices everyone else staring* It’s more complicated than it seems, okay? The infrared spectrum is huge!

Yua’s secret backstory confirmed. It actually sounds like something that would be fun to continue. Out of curiosity, why did you go with writing it as a period piece? I apologize for nothing. The funny thing is that the prompt apparently came from someone named Agoras, which sounds like a cool name for a demon. The skin-suit actually sounds like a cool and really creepy idea too!

A lot of the jokes are about how humorously unremarkable the couple is, but they work! Ones that spring to mind are probably Mal’s introductory line, “did you know this is the place with the longest name beginning with X...” icebreaker line. That it works makes the whole thing. I actually imagine that’s right. “Erotic Couplings” which is the vanilla stuff with no specific kinks, is the single largest category on Literotica (Incest is the second largest, and BDSM is third...I’m sure it’s a masochistic category so it enjoys being third). I haven’t read any Naruto fanfics, so I’ll have to take your word on that one. That makes way too much sense.

Well, as if my “stories to be written” pile isn’t big enough, now I’m thinking about a romantic comedy involving a man and the naiad who has come to inhabit his toilet cistern.

As I recall Mizore is how you learned about yuki-onna. And yeah, a bit of research shows that Keito is a sadistic minor villain from the show, and is indeed a jorōgumo. She even kind of looks like how I described Yua’s in-between form (a woman with black and yellow spider legs sprouting from her torso). Hers sprout from her abdominal muscles, which is a look I considered, but I felt like it would be potentially gross for the readers to imagine. Granted, that was no doubt the intended effect with Keito. I did actually find a sympathetic jorōgumo story after I left that last post. It seems episode 7 of Dororo features a jorōgumo who, after narrowly escaping combat with the protagonist, is rescued by an unsuspecting human whom she eventually falls in love with. Also, while Rachnera from Daily Life with Monster Girl isn’t a jorōgumo, she is technically a non-bad spider woman. I wasn’t counting her before since DLwMG is primarily a comedy. And yes, anime can absolutely be culturally enriching, especially the series that introduce mythology or aspects of Japanese culture! Thanks!

@GeorgeGlass reviews After Party! Cody enjoys the game sometimes. Like the story says, he’s glad they don’t do that every time they have sex, since he enjoys their more normal time in bed. He is naturally more gentle and submissive, though. The “Hollywood royalty” thing was me trying to find a good way to describe just how well she wears her (apparent) age. I’m glad it worked! The alien sense of morality is something from the myths I really wanted to incorporate. I never defined this term in-story, but yōkai is a word that describes a wide variety of magical creatures from Japanese mythology. The word is often translated into English as “demons”, but that’s horribly inaccurate. Yōkai come in many forms, but the closest western equivalent to them is probably the Fair Folk from European and Celtic myth, primarily because, like fairies, yōkai have a very strong sense of morality, but it’s different from the kind humans have. I was painfully aware of that stereotype, and definitely wanted to avoid it. It seems like in any story featuring a spider woman of some kind (jorōgumo or otherwise), she always has to be preparing to kill and/or eat the male character or something like that. Yes, sexual cannibalism (the technical term for when the female of a species eats the male during or after mating) is well-documented in spiders, to the point that several Latrodectus species have actually gotten their name from it (widow spiders), but even among those species it doesn’t occur 100% of the time. The frequency of sexual cannibalism depends on a number of factors, including how aggressive the female is, how well fed she is in general, specific nutrients in her diet and, I swear I’m not making this up, foreplay. So yeah, I got a little fed up with how ubiquitous this idea was, and wanted a story where the spider woman is genuinely threatening and creepy, but it turns out that while she’s a threat to other people, she isn’t one to the male lead, and that was the genesis of this couple. Yua is a jorōgumo just like you’d read about in the old tales, a seductive, flesh-eating monster...and yet in spite of everything you’d expect, she adores this boy she’s chosen as her mate. It makes her a somewhat more interesting character to me.

After Party gets another review! This one comes from the awesome @CloverReef This may sound a bit odd, but thank you for that! I definitely wanted sweet, but I was worried that I lost creepy in the process, so I’m glad to hear that I did get both feelings in the story. Don’t count on me to do that crafting thing as well in any other story! As for the brief glimpses, that was very much intentional. See, this was originally supposed to be a sequel. I mentioned this in my response to JayDee, but I have a planned story called The Spider House, which is going to be about how eighteen year old Cody is forced one day to go near the neighborhood haunted house. It’s covered in webs and the forest around it is crawling with spiders, so the local folks all just call it the Spider House. To Cody’s surprise, a beautiful woman named Yua lives in the Spider House, and the two begin to bond. After Party was originally just catching up with Yua and Cody two years later, but when I had the mad impulse to throw this into the Halloween Party, I realized I couldn’t depend on readers knowing who these characters were. Still, I didn’t want to spoil too much of The Spider House in the process. Obviously I spoiled that Yua is a creature from Japanese mythology, but aside from that I tried to keep things vague: that Cody had a rough life and that Yua rescued him, but not what was rough and how she did so. I’m glad that actually paid off. I loved writing that whole thing. I was shooting for fear of the unknown, and I felt like Yua was at her creepiest there in the beginning, when we know she’s some kind of spider-themed creature but we don’t yet know what she looks like, we can only hear her voice and see the web shift and hear the wood creak as she moves around. Hearing that you got so absorbed that you forgot to take notes is an amazing compliment. And this is also an amazing compliment! I was very nervous about the sex scene, as I always am when I write them. It’s only the third one I’ve ever written (well, the third one involving the main characters; there’s a tentacle scene involving a minor character in another story), and the first time I’ve ever written anything involving bondage. It’s also my first try at a dominant/submissive relationship, but given that Yua is a giant, intelligent spider, and given the (arachnophobe warning: link leads to spider pic) size and power difference between female spiders and their male counterparts (yes, those are N. clavata males and a female in that photo), female dominance seemed like the right way to go for the character. Tragically, “porn writing skillz” is not something I can tell my family about or put on a job application. As far as making Yua erotic and beautiful in her in-between form, it was sort of a balancing act. Jorōgumo (the specific type of yōkai that Yua is) have been depicted many different ways. One of the more common depictions is the “drider” type (like a centaur, but with a spider instead of a horse for the lower body), but I didn’t want to go that far in the monster direction. I liked the other common type of jorōgumo illustration, a woman with spider legs sprouting from her back, and used that as the base, adding a few more spider characteristics like the six eyes and the claws on her fingertips. I think the eyes were what I was most worried about turning people off, and JayDee does seem to have felt a little squirmy over those! I think something that helped was the sensory deprivation aspect of the bondage. Since the story is told from Cody’s PoV, once Yua webs over his eyes, we experience the world through what he can hear and feel, so it’s really just like he’s with a normal woman, with only occasional reminders that she’s anything else. The one idea that I came up with in the scene that I was kind of proud of was the idea of Yua talking while her lips were touching Cody. I thought the idea of feeling her lips brush against his skin as she spoke, or her, as I wrote it, caressing him with her breath, was kind of hot. Hey, the only part she destroyed was the shirt!

*nods* My work here is done. There is only one correct response to that. I like the thought process, and the end result almost has an Indiana Jones vibe, which is awesome. Oh, that wasn’t quite what I meant; I agree that F/F was the way to go there. It’s just that there’s a pair of siblings here bonded as intimately as possible during a sex scene. I personally wouldn’t know whether to add the incest tag or not. I think you made the right call, since the siblings aren’t having sex with each other, but I do go back and forth a little bit. No problem! I decided early on that I was going to review all the entries in this anthology (except mine, of course, as that would get harshly self-critical pretty fast), and as I worked my way through I was genuinely curious as to what your contribution would be. This was a nice surprise!

After Party gets its very first review! From @JayDee I was primarily worried because of the emphasis placed on the genuinely loving relationship between the two. I noticed everyone else doing stories about death and violence, and here I posted the only Yua and Cody story (yes, there will be at least two more of them) where Yua doesn’t kill anyone. True, she does threaten to do it, but Cody talks her down. The character design for Yua owes a lot to some art of this particular type of yōkai, and also to the real world spider at the center of the myth, Nephila clavata. Her silk being golden in color, for instance, or the black and yellow colors on her spider legs. Even the robe she wears is colored the way the female N. clavata’s abdomen is (blue and gold bands, and there’s a red portion of the underside). Her eyes are part of that as well. While I couldn’t find images of the eye arrangement on N. clavata, I did find close-up photographs of the eyes of N. pilipes, a related species, which is where I got the “two pairs in front, a third pair on the sides” arrangement. I was going to put this in an Author’s Note, as I do so often, (until I saw that there were no ANs on any of the other Halloween stories, so I didn’t write one), but how Cody and Yua met is the subject of a story in the works (I have a scene or two written), called The Spider House. That story features Yua in a far more menacing light. I suppose she does stay creepy if you’re arachnophobic. As for the bondage aspect, I had to do some research, similar to the tentacle scene in WitS. A lot of it I couldn’t use, since due to Cody’s past, I knew Yua would never cause him physical pain during their games. The one thing I figured I could use was this thing called a Wartenberg wheel, which was once a medical diagnostic tool (to measure nervous sensitivity), but is no longer employed in that capacity, and these days apparently tends to be used for BDSM (even the Wikipedia article mentions it, amusingly enough). It’s got these little metal spikes that sort of prickle on the skin, and I figured Yua could simulate that feeling by very gently using the tips of her claws. And yeah, Yua’s so powerful that Cody can’t really make her do anything, so he figures he’ll just get her to play with him, and that’ll distract her long enough that she’ll calm down. And at 683 years of age, she knows exactly what he’s doing...but she also knows she’ll enjoy it, so she just rolls with it. Yua and Cody owe a bit to Abby and Owen from Let Me In (or, if you prefer, Eli and Oskar from Let the Right One In), but unlike Abby, who is understandably unhappy with what she has to do to survive, Yua is more fundamentally inhuman, in the way yōkai generally are. So yes, Yua can absolutely be dangerous when provoked. As for those armed robbers...you might be seeing them soon. Yua and Cody are probably the most physically affectionate of the couples in my stories, but the age difference absolutely plays a role here, at least on Yua’s end. While she clearly sees him as old enough to qualify as her mate, there’s something almost maternal about the way she treats him a lot of the time. That’s the idea. When I say Yua stays a step removed from people, I mainly mean that she doesn’t really make friends (like a real spider, she’s content to spend a lot of time by herself). She does go into town with Cody sometimes, so people who know him know he has this older wife, but they don’t really know anything else. I figure she showed up at the outskirts of the party, long enough to see Cody being approached and the exchange with Shannon, and then she went back to the house. Some of that came from an exchange I had with @BronxWench early on in the writing process. She gave me the idea of Yua giving Cody some level of praise for, in this case, controlling himself during the game. I probably should have had Yua make sure Cody remembered the safe word before the game started, but I felt like that would give away the fact that this is a game with rules and all, so I worked on the assumption that Yua trusts Cody to remember it when they start, and only at the end does she check, just to make sure. I didn’t mention it, but the idea is that when they decided to start playing the game, they would have discussed what was going to happen so that Cody never got too scared. Thank you! That exchange (“Can I just sleep up here with you?” “Of course you may.”) was actually an idea I had before I knew what the sex scene was going to be like at all. I figure that sometimes Yua and Cody both sleep in the bed, with her looking completely human, and sometimes they sleep apart, with him in the bed and her, in her natural giant spider form, up in the web. I imagine that both of them sleeping in the web like this is a rare and special thing. Thank you so much for the review!

Thank you for the story! There are times I desperately want to see a quote posted somewhere, completely free of context, just to see how people react. One of these is now officially... Phone: “Rowan? Where are you?” Rowan: “I’m in FUCKTOWN and Guy Fieri’s the mayor!”

That is sad, but on the other hand, there are far worse things that could have happened to her considering the sort of vile magic she’s being exposed to. It’s a heartbreaking thing to have taken from you, but it’s the kind of thing a character can overcome, and often I find stories like that really inspiring. As far as taxonomy goes, most of the insects you describe go in the order Hemiptera (bed bugs are in the family Cimicidae, kissing bugs are in the family Reduviidae, subfamily Triatominae, and stuff like wheel bugs and assassin bugs are all in greater Reduviidae). Lice are, to my surprise, actually their own order (Phthiraptera), and weevils are beetles (order Coleoptera). We all have things that we’re kind of squeamish about. In my case, it’s roaches. No, really. I’ve actually handled a wheel bug (they don’t strike with that proboscis unless they feel threatened), as well as wasps and other bugs that can cause me real pain. I even rescued a brown widow spider (Latrodectus geometricus) from my garage at one point using a cup and paper, so I can honestly say that I am less nervous around bugs that can hurt me than I am around cockroaches. Doesn’t make any sense, but that’s the way it is.

Trust me, I am the only person who’s going to bring up the mandible thing. I’m just into entomology, arachnology, etc., so for me “proboscis” doesn’t automatically suggest mosquitoes, but rather a wide variety of bugs, anything from the hypodermic needle of a mosquito to the curly straw of a butterfly to the nightmarish stabbing weapon of the Reduviidae, like this wheel bug (Arilus cristatus) here: Technically speaking, in horseflies, deer flies and mosquitoes, the mandibles, maxillae and “lips” combine to form a proboscis, a surprisingly complex anatomy for a simple-looking organ. The Reduviid proboscis is a far more unified structure. Like I said, I’m the only person who’s going to bring this kind of thing up. Don’t get the wrong idea. It’s not like you pushed one of my depression buttons and I’m going to be sad for weeks. No female angels have been harmed (yet) and due to the medieval fantasy setting, I don’t imagine Samus Aran will be dragged into this (yes, those are random as all hell, but those are the buttons I know about). Tragedy is also part of horror in many cases (comeuppance tales excluded, obviously), so periodically horror will also make me sad. That’s actually very touching. It’s very noble of her, which of course makes what happens to her all the worse. That’s part of what gets to me, I think. See, I could imagine two possible outcomes after the un-birthing scene. The first is that the newborn godling grows rapidly inside her and then tears its way out, and Trias dies lying in a pool of her own blood and shredded organs (we all know how this image got into my head). Thing is, that was probably the better of the two options, since after she died, her soul would presumably have been fine. On the other hand, if she heads back into Mortane because she’s been twisted into something evil, that’s way worse. I think we’re members of the same religion (different denominations, probably, but basically the same), so you understand what I’m saying when I mention the importance of free will, of choice. If you become something evil by your own choice, that’s on you...but if you’re made into something horrible, against your own desires, that’s both terrifying and deeply sad, and it’s worse if the people who should be your friends treat you as if what’s happened was your choice and therefore your fault… ...Of course, that doesn’t seem to be what you’re doing. And I may have misread that “never leaves Mortane” thing too. It’s possible Trias doesn’t want whatever’s been done to her to affect people outside of Mortane, so she’s staying there and suffering to keep others safe, in which case I can understand why her goddess would be so upset. Well, God was already planning to wipe the cities from the map before the two angels came to visit Lot and his family. I think we can assume the Sodomites and those who lived in Gomorra made a habit of doing crap like that (I’m not Jewish, but apparently stuff from the Talmud and Midrash has it they were extremely cruel to outsiders, thus making for an interesting comparison to Deliverance or The Hills Have Eyes, albeit Sodom and Gomorrah were extremely wealthy places instead of backwater hillbilly types). Attempting to rape two angels was officially the last straw, though. Well, that was a heck of a way to get me to read the story! Granted, you’re not the only author to make me come back to a story going “IS SHE GONNA BE OKAY!?” but it is kind of amusing that this is a legit authorial strategy.

Oh, absolutely. It’s like if Hitler wound up on the wrong end of the Archangel Samael (probably the main angel of death in Judaism). I think the approach you went with definitely still works. It’s just one of those things you understand better if you read the story a second time. It does make me wonder about Hel hitting on the receptionist, though.

*looks at the tone of my story* *looks at the tone of every other story* *realizes everyone else wrote either straight-up horror or dark comedy with heavy horror elements...and I basically wrote a warm fuzzies piece with the odd creepy element* So...is it too late to just delete my story and disappear?

So, one more time for those of us who are new: since the first chapter can’t be edited by just anyone, do we just post our entries, and then you’ll edit the introduction to add the new stories to the list?

Showoff.

Damn it, JayDee! I almost spat my drink all over my computer! Making it even funnier is the fact that when you referenced Blessed in that movie, that was exactly the line that sprang to mind. If I ever do that giant crossover, I’m definitely having Lupa say something about that and “GORDON’S ALIVE?” will be the first words out of Abdul’s mouth. Calista: “Dude, you have to stop referencing movies over a hundred years old.” Abdul: “I don’t have to do anything!” Kate: “Movies over a hundred years old?” Kevin: “We’re from the future.”

I might have a story. I’m thinking I want The Spider House to be something you can find from my profile page, but I have a story already started (it just sort of popped into my head one night and I wrote part of it; JayDee’s seen what I have) that I’m calling After Party that does feature the same couple and is set, as the title implies, just after a Halloween party. I’ll see if I can get it done in time.

I am seriously jealous, but also very proud! Congratulations on your first published book!