Monthly Archives: August 2021

This is a follow-up to my previous post, “Poetry and Perversity,” heralding the arrival of my latest ebook. Check it out here first before reading this one!

Yes, a new Goddess enters the Gallery of Alluring Femdommes in my Irv O. Neil Erotic Library…

Alongside Darva Chan, Cruelty Queen of the Piano…

Alongside Yolanda Thumm, Cleavage Teaser Par Excellence…

Alongside Marina Blendow, the amazonian neighbor many a subbie wishes would move in next door…

Alongside Mistress Paige, the sweet young woman eager to explore her dominance with a susceptible older man, the NYC pandemic lockdown be damned!…

And alongside Talena Vorell, an attorney whose skill in the courtroom is matched by her cruelty in the secret humiliation room of her sumptuous apartment!

Enter…

TAMARA, Eternal Dominatrix!

Depicted in watercolor by the genius of Sardax, today’s premiere painter of femdom fantasy.

This was the first time in over two decades that I got to collaborate on a project with the famed British artist Sardax–be sure to visit his website here–who illustrated some of the stories I wrote for Leg Show magazine in the ’90s and early 2000’s. Editor Dian Hanson would assign him to do the art for my stories, as well as those of many others of her excellent group of writers.

Sardax gave me the basic idea for TAMARA, which I liked a lot but which also presented me with a unique writing problem! My fellow fictioneers, in particular, will relate to this:

Although I had read many of the great Russian writers, except for Dostoevsky’s novels such as Notes from Underground and Crime and Punishment, my reading list was mostly restricted to a handful of short stories and novellas by Chekhov, Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Gogol, which I enjoyed for their own sake as stories but also studied from a technical point of view. Other than that, I knew very little about Russian history or culture. Instead, I basically taught myself to write fiction by osmosis, using the work of writers from many nations, observing and noting what they have done technique-wise, and then applying it almost instinctively in my own work.

But Sardax is fascinated and knowledgeable about Russian literature and language–he even made his own translation of “Tamara,” which is used in the ebook–and I wondered how I could adequately prepare to write about Lermontov, the Tamara poem, and things Russian. I worried that, in the short time I had blocked out to research and write the story, that I wouldn’t sound as if I knew what I was talking about.

Then it occurred to me: I would make my protagonist, Emanuel Z. Shepherd, just as minimally informed about Russian lit as I was! 😉 He would be obsessed with the poem “Tamara” alone, and its creator Mikhail Lermontov (1814-1841), but not know much else about Russian culture or writers. His obsession with Tamara would be primarily a romantic one, not a literary one. This freed me to focus on the poem and its creator, and not obsess on my lack of confidence (always a drawback when you’re writing) when it came to my scanty knowledge of things Russian.

My hero stresses more than once in the story that he is NOT a scholar of Russian literature, but he doesn’t let this stop him from trying to see the papers of a renowned literary expert on the poem “Tamara.”

Similarly, I did not let my own lack of credentials make me feel so intimidated than I couldn’t write the novella. I “found my way into the story” (a phrase I like to use) by employing my protagonist’s lack of scholarship as a way to limit what I had to know realistically about the subject too. This calmed my nerves and allowed me to write. All I really had to now comprehend about Russian literature was what Emanuel knew. I could proceed, as he did, as a relatively uninformed traveler into a rarefied world of Slavonic literary criticism, without worrying that I had to know anymore about it than I actually did!

Further identifying with Emanuel, and wanting to give him backstory about why he was obsessed with the poem, led me back in the 1970s, when the streets of Times Square were filled with the allure of streetwalker-temptresses in platform heels and hot pants, to me (and to Emanuel!) a modern version of what caught the attention of lonely travelers in the Daryal Mountain gorge in the Transcaucasian country of Georgia back in the 13th century where legendary Princess Tamara beckoned men into her castle. Suddenly the full plot fell into place. I felt the story had to happen over forty years ago in that world I had known, and had been enthralled by, when I moved to New York in the ’70s. I sensed that the blandishments of the hookers of Eighth Avenue’s “Minnesota Strip” (they were not called “sex workers” then, a relatively recent euphemism) would provide a perfect prelude of befuddlement, enticement, and sexual submission for Emanuel, preparing him for the ultimate experience that awaits him at the hands of professional librarian Tammy Lubotshvili, who transforms herself at night into the whip-wielding Princess Tamara. 

I also learned an interesting thing about my femdom fiction when writing TAMARA, Eternal Dominatrix. I hesitate to call the male characters of my stories “heroes” since there isn’t much derring-do about them in the conventional sense–unless, of course, one considers the recognition, acceptance, and surrender to one’s kinky desires to be heroic, and, in our rigid society, maybe it is! But as I wrote TAMARA it occurred to me that these submissive characters of mine, encountering the various dommes who conquer and control them, are very much akin to the warrior, the merchant, and the shepherd whom Mikhail Lermontov wrote about in the 1830s–men ensnared by Princess Tamara into her dark tower. In a sense, I realized, all my femdom stories have been not so much tales of dramatic conflict (there usually isn’t much of that), but rather have always been part of one long “narrative ballad” about travelers/wanderers/seekers into the dimension of female domination and male submission; stories that serve primarily as descriptions (whether arousing, insightful, humorous, disturbing, or questioning) about their experiences there. Whether they are named Princess Tamara; Ginny Fostill (in Revenge by Fitness); Becca (in Humbled by a Brat); Sorceress Selikka (in She Made Him Pay); Dr. Amber Zlonek (Slavery Is Your Future) or Theresa Pendillac (In Trance for a Tramp), they are all the Sexually Dominant Female for whom I, as well as the “heroes” of my fiction, eternally yearn in a seemingly unquenchable quest.

You can find all of my femdom erotica in the Kindle stores on Amazon sites worldwide.