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From DebbieCync on October 27, 2019 Thanks! But there will be another ten chapters at some point, as I’ve started work on a sequel.

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!

Re: “Everything She Needs” From Lady Freelove on October 26, 2019 Thank you! I think a lot of it is (a) practice and (b) experimenting with new ideas. When I thought about writing “Wild Side,” I tried to think of what would make it more than just another father-daughter story, and then I thought about their having two levels of communication – the things they say, and the meaning beneath them. It was an experiment, but I think it worked. Thanks for the review. And keep on writing!

Re: “Wild Side” From Lady Freelove on October 26, 2019 Thanks! I really enjoy writing these two characters.

*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!