Since I lost a lot of the my original blog files during the fiasco of moving from wordpress to substack back to wordpress, I thought I start a new series of blog posts on the history of the books. Most of the stories behind them can be found in the books themselves, but that doesn’t make it to the blog or the world. Right now, I am in the process of releasing book four of the girl/Mistress series, so I thought I start here.
As I go into the history of the book and series, there may be some cringing moments for me, some things I may not be proud of but I’ve always been told that the past doesn’t define who you are but molds you into the person you have become. I also think that you never truly become something because we are evolving creatures, learning daily for everyone we meet. So, I’ll look at these histories with fondness rather than embarrassment.
Plain and simple, girl/Mistress is a Hannah Montana fan fiction, or at least started from one. In 2008 and 2009, I wrote a fanfic called, “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Mistress” for the fandom of Hannah Montana that shipped Miley and Lilly together. It was a BDSM sapphic romance that put Miley in the role of a submissive slave that craved a new Mistress after her original one, Traci Van Horn, left town. At a party, she meets Lilly and decides that this girl needs to be her new Mistress. Lilly does fall for Miley but only wants a girlfriend and doesn’t want to be someone who’d whip her into submission.
Well… that is not exactly where the story originated. We will go back to earlier than that. Before I even understood the concept of fanfiction, I used to write what they actually called RPF (real person fiction) and that was before I even understood that was a thing. I can think back to many stories I had written in my life about celebrities that I crushed on in my younger days. In 2008, I wrote a kinky BDSM story about Emily Osment. A friend of mine, shortly after I wrote that told me there was such a thing and explained fanfiction to me. No. I didn’t have any clue about Twilight turning into 50 Shades of Grey. Trust me, I was very sheltered and lived in my own little fantasy world for must of my life.
After learning that fanfiction was such a thing and about FanFiction.net, I set out to change that original RPF to a tradition fanfiction using Miley as the submissive and struggling Mistress as Lilly. It was one of the most popular ones in the fandom because at that time, no one was writing BDSM. Apparently that wasn’t true because off in Twilight land people were doing it, I just didn’t know about it. Neither did half the world. Nevermind that, on with the story. During the early stages of this fanfiction, I met a woman online who I might have called the biggest Miley Cyrus fan ever. She loved my story and offered to beta read for me and edit my simple story with more juiciness. We were a great team at the time.
The story went places that the original OMC (original main character)/Emily Osment story didn’t. We went dark. We went super smexy… no we went full on erotica. As the characters really developed themselves, we decided to write a tandem dual set of stories, two prequels. Mandy (my beta reader) wrote Traci Van Horn’s side of the prequel while I wrote Miley’s side. We worked together and released each chapter at the same time. It was brilliant… until it wasn’t. Mandy lost interest in the story (and me-yes we had a internet fling that transcended into reality). And with that, the prequel flopped and remained unfinished. I did ultimately finish the original “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Mistress” fan fiction… then shelved all of the other fanfic WIPs I had started.
In 2012, I started writing again. It took me three years to get over the aftermath I created with my torrid love affair (if it was truly torrid) love affair with Mandy to start writing again. This time, it was and original story. No fan fiction, other than the inspiration came from a real person. *More about that in another post. Again, I still knew nothing about EL James and her 50 Shades; but I dusted off “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Mistress” and decided the story was good enough to be changed into a original story idea. I think the entire fanfiction hit over 100K.
I had already self-published my first real novella, “Something Wilder” but I couldn’t bring myself to release the newly titled “girl/Mistress” to the world. Maybe I thought people wouldn’t like it. Maybe I didn’t think it was good enough. I don’t know. The project was shelved again but I kept writing. It wasn’t until 2014 that I pulled out the manuscript again and forced myself to finally finish it. I pulled the original prequel to it, got permission from Mandy (yes, we still talk) and added a half-hearted section in the front of book, which made the manuscript over 135K. I released the book in 2015 and by that time, I did know about 50 Shades of Grey but who the fuck cared because my story was about women. Very. Very. Different.
The book debuted in the Top 100 so I had done something right. Other than the fact that it got horrible reviews because I knew nothing about writing, nor did I know nothing about editing. It sucked. The book was a mess. My changes from fanfiction to real fiction were not good enough. The characters still sounded like they were in high school and underaged kink going on… because in my head, they still were. You can change the names all you want, but if you don’t completely rewrite, you have crap. I left the book up on Amazon, letting it live in obscurity until it stopped making money. Yes, it made money without promotion. I had quit writing too because all I got were negative review telling me that the writing was horrible and it looked like an uneducated teenager wrote it.
Finally, I said fuck it… and took all of my works from Amazon. Ever single book was horrible and the readers told me so. In 2020, like all people in the pandemic, we pull out of creativity for something to do. I started writing again. My wife says I have good stories to tell, but lack the knowledge to make them readable. LOL. Very true. But I pumped out a number of stories, only one of which made it to release. It wasn’t until 2022 that I found my tribe (or at least at that moment, I thought was my tribe). They were a band of misfit romance writers on Facebook that had online meetings and writing sprints. It was Adrian J Smith that told me that I should focus my writing to Sapphic readers because romance as a whole is flooded but their were holes in the Sapphic world and these women were hungry.
That’s when I brought out “girl/Mistress”. The book was crap. Really it was. But there was a solid foundation to the plot. It just needed some TLC and with this writing group, I learned a lot about how to write. They critiqued and offered suggestions. It was what I needed to pull up my bootstraps and give this project a serious attempt at something real. BUT… I had to ripe the entire 135K words apart and make sense of it. We had the original and prequel. If this was going to be a series, I had to start at the beginning. That would be Trixi and Megan (New names from Traci and Miley). But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that was not the real start of this world. Where did Trixi begin…?
And “Funeral of A Good Girl” came into play. The story and series starts with Trixi learning how to be a Mistress. Because we already knew that Megan’s life before Nikki was with Trixi (and April), we needed Trixi to have a little poly life. This book is 100% new work. None of this was in the original prequel. Using Mandy’s ideas, those came into play in book two, “You Are The Master” where Trixi and Megan met. Only the first three or four chapters were Mandy’s ideas (and with permission, I used them with a rewrite). This books documents the first part of Trixi and Megan’s story.
“Nothing Else Matters” really gets to the heart of how Megan spirals so far out of control that she is broken for what goes into the original “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Mistress” section of the story. This is for books four and five, which are yet to be released. The concept of the story had always been between the characters of Megan and Nikki, but Trixi had been such an integral part to the story that she ultimately is the main character of the series, even though she is essential absent for book four. *You’ll see.
And so we are at the present. Book four is with an editor… and book five (the finale) is still left on my hard drive in its original state. Crap!
I think all authors have a torch song, something that has been their pride and joy… or their blood, sweat, and tears. Trust me, there has been all of that with the girl/Mistress series. I love to hate this series, these characters, and Trixi. I think almost all the readers hate Trixi, but we can’t stop reading about how horrible a Mistress she truly is. Just like my writing… Trixi and I may be a lot alike. We both sucked in the beginning, but as we grow into our roles (Mistress/Author), we are learning how to be better at our crafts.