Introduction and thoughts about the novel

“Maragana Girl” came into my head rather suddenly in May, 2004, shortly after I began learning how to use the 3-D art program Poser 5. As I was looking at available downloads for various Poser projects, I came across a picture of a file for a reception area that looked a lot like a courtroom. In a flash the idea came to me to write an erotic discipline story about a young college-age student from the US forced to undergo a corporal punishment in a judicial setting. I could incorporate the themes of public humiliation, forced nudity, and a rather severe judicial punishment into a story that also would allow the character to adjust to an imaginary foreign culture and ultimately find redemption through punishment.

As the plot took form in my mind, I had to come up with both a main character and a setting in which to place the story. I knew right away that I wanted the character to be “typically American” in her personality, but at the same time not the typical helpless white female that seems to dominate erotic discipline fiction. Over the next few days a main character called Kimberly Lee took shape in my imagination, especially after I downloaded an Asian figure from a Poser vendor site that made it easier to actually visualize what she might actually look like in real life.

The writing of “Maragana Girl” and my learning how to use Poser were two projects that complemented each other. The Poser models gave me ideas for scenes and characters, while writing the novel gave me ideas for Poser pictures and a sense of direction of where I wanted to go with my Poser art. Over the summer and fall of 2004 I progressed with both projects.

The way I wrote “Maragana Girl” differed from the writing of my first novel “The Wanderings of Amy”. I wrote “Maragana Girl” from beginning to end, always keeping in mind where I was going with the plot and the characters. When writing the chapters of “The Wanderings of Amy”, I was experimenting much more with setting up erotic discipline scenarios and learning how to write fiction. It was only later on that I wove the previously written discipline scenes into a plot and story line for the Amy novel.

My purpose in writing the two novels remained the same. As was the case with writing "The Wanderings of Amy", "Maragana Girl" is a reaction against a trend that I see in erotic discipline fiction. I get very irritated by an erotic discipline story that only concentrates on one form of punishment, monotonously taking a helpless unthinking submissive character from one routine whipping after another, from one machine-like disciplinarian to another.

It is important to me to create characters with problems, self-doubts, and mixed motives for doing things. Most importantly, it is my goal to create characters with complicated lives, full of human flaws, interesting, capable of making their own decisions, and that I actually can feel concerned about. When I read erotic fiction, I am as much interested in the characters and their motivations as I am in the sex and discipline scenes. As I wrote I actually cared about my characters, and in some ways felt I got to know them, even though they are nothing more than figments of my imagination. I also wanted to incorporate a general theme running throughout the novel, that all of the events in Kim's life, including her relationships with her sister and her friend Tiffany, had an ultimate purpose, the salvation of the novel's characters and of Upper Danubia. I guess in that aspect I am typically American, I like a story with a happy ending.

Whether or not I succeeded in accomplishing my goals with "The Wanderings of Amy" and "Maragana Girl" ultimately is for you, the reader, to determine. But anyhow, that is my hope, to create fiction that goes beyond simple erotic discipline.

A final note: My fiction uses both the American system for measurement and the metric system for measurement, depending on where the story is taking place. Because Upper Danubia is a European country, it uses the metric system, which is reflected in my narrative. Whenever my narrative moves to the United States, units of measurement will be given in feet instead of meters.

For readers unfamiliar with either of the two measurement systems, here are some basic comparisons:

1 meter = 40 inches or 3 feet and 4 inches
1 foot = 30.5 centimeters
1 mile = 1.6 kilometers
1 kilometer = 0.62 miles

1 kilogram = 2.20 pounds
1 pound = 0.4536 kilograms
432 grams = 15.24 ounces or 0.9524 pounds.

Maragana Girl - Chapter 1