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Posted. Whew!

...I’m sorry but I draw the line at sifting through giant spider poop. Just long enough to outdrink everyone with the beer bong! Even if you’re not, that many legs is definitely a bit of a brain squirm! And those eyes! Seven years time. Yua’s birthday. There’s a knock on the door. It’s Shannon, from the party. She just says: “Nice.” And that’s another great thing you have with their rerlationship I figure. They have a real understanding. Similar to how she probably really didn’t need to confirm he remembered the safe word because It seems like with her experience and that close bond she’d stil be able to tell he wanted things to stop. Thanks so much for writing a story and taking part! Us non contributing readers are basically leeches. Leeches, I say! (Well, just me then. No offence to the busy/un-motiviated folks!)

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!

I’ve just posted my story for the AFF Halloween Party, titled “Day of the Deadly.” When the narcos killed Graciela’s brother Enrique, all hope of getting their village out from under the cartel’s thumb died with him. But on the night when the veil between this world and the next grows thin, there may be one more chance.

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!”

Author notes (Warning: SPOILERS) Lynn Senior’s murmured comment to the central air conditioner—“You hear me, baby? Hold together”—is what Han Solo says to the Millennium Falcon in The Empire Strikes Back. The zebra in Lola’s nightmare is a nod to Phineas and Ferb, in which Candace sometimes sees a talking zebra in her dreams. Lynn’s nightmare about an evil baseball team wearing clown makeup was inspired by the 1970s street gang film The Warriors, in which one of the gangs wears baseball uniforms and face paint and carries bats. The bit about a badly ventilated pipe making a banging noise when the water is running is a real thing, which I experienced at my parents’ old house. (Warning: TMI) Lincoln’s sleep-sex is inspired by a few events from my own life. I once woke up to find myself making out with my wife, who’d had no idea that I was asleep when I initiated it. According to her, I’ve done a few other things like that, which I was not aware of at the time. Four square and pickleball are both real games. According to the internet, perennial ryegrass is a recommended lawn grass for the northern U.S. It is said to be hardy and able to endure a lot of foot traffic, which makes it ideal for the Loud family’s yard. During a typical night of sleep, we go through multiple REM cycles, and each one includes a larger proportion of REM sleep than the previous one. As a result, you spend more time dreaming later in the night than you do soon after you fall asleep. This is why only some of the girls were affected by the sound of the hose pipe each night, whereas many of them were affected by the sex sounds made by Lincoln and his bed companions, which always happened later in the night (at least until the hose pipe mystery was solved).