Where It All Comes From

So yeah, I went for it. It takes a LONG time to plot out, scene by scene, everything that happens in a story, justify it and then actually write it. Quite often characters may run off into different directions as I write, and I have to pull them back so the plot progresses.

Note, -- while the stories are numbered, that's really only to determine the order they should be read in. The conclusion was originally just named Conclusion, -- not numbered, - since it's end of the Ingrams company anyway, but the whole series is designed so that, should I chose to, I could come back and write another Ingrams story much later and insert it into the timeline. There're no definite plans to do so right now, but who knows what the future holds. Better to leave that door open.

Ingrams & Associates Prequel: Broken

This one has a confusing timeline. I've never really sat and worked it out, but it's got post war tomb raiding, mixed in with a TV show in the 50's and 60's, and then jumps to the 2010's... I've no idea if it actually works in terms of real timeline, but the story does, so I left it alone.

The story deals with the classic cuckold issue of when your woman, -- who is higher in the social strata than you are, and it's very obvious that's the case, -- is taken by someone demonstrably better than you are. I've always believed that no one takes that lying down, and there's always a core spark of rebellion and retribution in them, and this is the core of the story. I am still quite taken with the idea of him unburdening himself once a year to a bed locked person, who can hear him, but not pass on his story.

The Uncle in this story is actually based on a great uncle of mine, who was actually a very famous TV presenter of a kids show on UK TV.

April is an amalgamation of three different women I know. Her visual appearance is one woman, her investigative and thinking processes are another, and he ability to view sex as something divorced from an emotional connection is yet another. She's grown over the years into her own person, and I have a much better mental model of her now than I did when I started. She's detached, oh so smart, thinks she's got the world by the tail, and it requires a couple of pretty heavy bad news situation for her to cut down to size. But, she also has a strong moral code, tries to do the right thing, and can be a bad ass when she really has to be. The kind of person you definitely want as a friend, and not an enemy. She does have a sense of humor, but far less than say, Megan, who is the good-natured good time girl. April is a little more ruthless and gets angrier at the injustices of the world than is really appropriate for her position in life, and I do actually have two stories that I've outlined that go into that side of her. Maybe I'll finish them sometime.

I still have no idea why April's mother let go in those end scenes. It was just appropriate that she did, so she did. I think there are several possible reasons why she did, but none of them were in my mind when I wrote it. It just seemed... right, at the time. It's a shame because I wrote myself into a corner there, where I can now visualize a story where, instead of her mother dying, she finds her towards the end of her Ingrams career. I can just see the dialog between them, her mother trying to explain herself and then April explaining who she has become. What I should have done was have April's mother captured by the bad guys and her Uncle being told she was killed, later. That would have left that door open. Oh well, you live and learn.

Ingrams & Associates #1 -- Double Bluff

This entire story was based around the concept of a man cuckolded and caring for children who weren't his, but with the twist being, unknown to everyone else he already knew that, and had taken steps to actually balance things out by impregnating the wives of the men who had cuckolded him.

I did want to write a story exploring D/s a little bit, and since I needed a reason for April to have something to actually do, plus a reason why the guys wife had cuckolded him in the first place (i.e. she was an alpha, as was he -- their entire marriage was a battlefield, with hot sex thrown in), it seemed to fit in here.

Plus, it gave me a way to introduce the Big Bad, even if slightly. I was intentionally not going to refer to the Big Bad again for a few stories, let it settle.

None of the people in this story are based on anyone -- they are all made strictly for the plot requirements.

The hardest part about writing this was being imaginative with the D/s situations. I'm not into it personally, and have not got that much interest, even in an anthropological way, so it was hard to come up with new situations and reactions to it. I did my best though.

I did like the sub April ended up bringing in, -- I have an itch at the back of my mind to use her again in another story. I've no idea how yet, but we'll see what time and the subconscious throws up.

Ingrams & Associates #2 -- Retreat

This one was hard to write. I knew I wanted to set it on an artificial island, because then none of the antagonists could get away -- they were all stuck in proximity to each other. The idea was to show case some of the technology that April gets access to, as well as make the point that Ingrams & Associates were truly international. I liked the idea of her slowly screwing her way through everyone on the island, looking for the bad guy, and then discovering it was another woman who was doing the same as her.

But the main thrust was supposed to be a mental duel between April and the antagonist. April was supposed to fuck someone, find that the other woman already had, and she had to overcome whatever the other woman had planted in the way of suggestion, and then plant a few of her own. The issue was, they were in a confined space and at some point, they'd have to come into open conflict, and I honestly couldn't think of enough 'things' that April would have to overcome to make it compelling.

There is still some elements in the story from the original intention -- where April is 'taken' and given a sexual experience that blows her mind, and where she is decidedly not in control (which was supposed to be the second to last event in the story, that she has to overcome) is there, but the other cat and mouse aspects, when I tried to write them, just weren't that interesting. It was all too cerebral and the sex suffered from it being over thought.

I did like the introduction, making the point that barring very special circumstances, it was nigh on impossible to have a 'normal' relationship for one of these characters. I had to make April try and fail in order that this became obvious. I honestly had no intentions of using the character at the end of the story to wrap it up, -- that just fell into place as I raced towards the finish line.

The location stuff was fun, -- I've never been to Fiji, but a friend has, and it was funny to sit and grill him on it, without him having a clue what I wanted it for.

Ingrams & Associates #3 -- American Life

This one was actually finished before Ingrams #2, -- this one just flowed out and once I started, it just kept coming. I wrote this over three weeks, up till then a record for me.

I knew exactly what I wanted to do with this one going in. I knew I was going to do the reverse order diary, and go backwards in the life of the dead hero, making him more and more cheerful and upbeat. I was more worried about what the auto formatting on Literotica was going to do with all the italics than anything; there are lots of stories were the formatting has messed up and entire pages are italics.

I knew I wanted this guy to be the quintessential good guy, -- continually shit on, but finding ways to be a decent human anyway, just because that was who he was. It's all a bit saccharin to be honest, -- I had a scene in the diary where he talked about doing auto erotica asphyxiation when masturbating to make him seem more human, but it stuck out like the Pope in a brothel, so I took it out.

The character of the cop grew organically, -- he was never really intended to be in the story for the whole flow, only really to be in it at the beginning to spur April on. As I got further into the story, it became apparent that obviously I like this guy, plus I needed someone for April to have sex with at the end. The end sequence with him meeting Tara and April hooking them up came as much as a surprise to me when I was writing it as it did to the reader. It just happened, because they were both there. Originally I had some idea of the two of them meeting and the detective throwing a few snide remarks her way, but it just got out of hand. I know I've seen the scene with two people comparing sex wounds before, in Chasing Amy, and what happened between them was a variation on that.

I missed two things in this story, -- one I intended to put in and one that was brought to my attention. The first, that was actually written in another file, was having Maryann at the funeral, where some comes to April to ask if she's satisfied or not, and having her spar with Jessica. That scene is actually going to be in the ebook version of this. The second was having April deal with the kids at the water who accused the dead hero of unsavory activities. That one I simply missed.

The character of Maryann will be used again. She was supposed to be two things, -- one was the fact that Ingrams people aren't super human. They fuck up and make mistakes and things don't always go their way. April is entirely read by Maryann, and it's supposed to put her in her place a bit. The second is that Maryann herself, IS April. She's the April forty or fifty years in the future. Older, wiser, seen a lot and done a lot, -- this is who April will end up being, assuming she doesn't get killed first. Maryann actually seems a little too omnipotent on reading this again recently, -- she should have got a couple of guesses wrong.

Overall, I was really happy with this story. The funeral scene imbued a ton more emotion than I was expecting. I think the wrap up at the end went on too long, but there was much to be said.

The unsavory ending of the guy who killed the hero was a bit gory and probably a little too much, on reflection. I wanted April to have a ruthless streak in her that doesn't come out very often, but I think I went overboard on that. Ah well, can't get everything right:)

Ingrams & Associates #4 -- Beneath the Surface

Interestingly, this was never part of the original series, -- it was supposed to be five stories, not six. Then I got a hankering to write a real love story. It was supposed to be about 10k words, and then I got into it, and I wanted to make the falling in love part believable. Not just "And then they fell in love, the end". I wanted lots of little touches, of him doing stuff for her, and her doing stuff for him, all the little stuff that happens as you fall in love. And, of course, that takes words and time and it just grew and grew.

Of course it couldn't be April who fell in love, -- I have plans for her and she wouldn't be a very good agent if she had a guy in tow, -- so it had to be Megan. Megan is also more fun that April is anyway, and it was kind of interesting to see April from someone else's perspective. She's not always nice, and while she does the right thing for the right reasons, sometimes if you are the one on the other end, it's not always easy to see that. It was kind of fun to make April a bit of a bitch for a change.

The intention was never really to explain April and Megan's mission at all, have it some vague thing they'd never go into details on, because, frankly, some of the shit they do would appall 'normal' people. I had to go way more into detail in order to get to the end where the hero had to do something heroic, -- stupidly heroic, in fact, -- in order to seal the deal with Megan. In doing so, I had to go into more detail.

One interesting aspect was that I had one person tell me how great the detail of locations in Boston was. I've never been there, nor have I been to Washington D.C. or the surrounds when I wrote American Life. It's all done with research and Google Earth. The same with the Violins, -- I've no idea what a good violin is, -- I relied entirely on amazon reviews!

The Oyster Band does exist by the way. Their lead singer used to be my English Teacher at school in fact.

The gas thing in the tunnels is also real, although it does take some very very specific circumstances to have enough gas to burn the way it does in the story. I screwed up how gas chronographs work, -- I know what they do but not how they work, -- so that was some lack of research. My bad.

The trip Megan and Thomas take is one the family and I took the year before, stopping all the same places we did. The sushi restaurant is real, and yes, we did actually have Ryan Reynolds sitting at the next table. We did not, however, indulge in a kissy face fest, and nor did they. More's the pity. Who wouldn't want to make out with Blake Lively?

The whole sub story of Thomas forgiving the man who killed his parents by accident literally just evolved out of attempting to put some real therapy in the story. It was something he had to overcome, Megan was there to help, and suddenly it was this sub thread that just seemed to happen, organically.

I did have real issues with the end of the story. I needed Thomas to do something that proved his love for Megan, but would also reflect his own carelessness and devaluing of his own life. I toyed with a bunch of approaches, -- him deliberately giving himself up to the enemy to get them to let her go, him putting himself on the street to tempt them into an attempt on his life so then the FBI has a reason to go in and start arresting people, but none of them really worked. As it is, I still don't quite believe his reasoning for going in to get Megan himself. In situations like this, it's clearly smarter to let the trained people deal, but that doesn't make for decent narrative, so I had to convolute a situation where Thomas would go in himself. The worst part about doing that was making April stupid enough to let him just go off and do it. That was out of character for April and I wasn't happy about that.

Ingrams & Associates #5 -- Personality Flaws

This was designed to be an exploration of hypnotism and mind control, Ingrams style. It was also designed as an intro to the conclusion story. Once you read it, and then the conclusion, you can see why.

The issue with this story was to try and make it different from the excellent Conumdrum from KezzA67 That story is so well written, it's pretty much covered everything from the BDSM and mind control point of view, and I didn't want my version to just be a rehash of that. I did, at one point, consider using some of the characters from Conundrum in my story, -- the same ex SAS guys that rescue April at the end, - but decided against it, given the grief I already had on Lit over Stone Cold.

There were several things I wanted to get in to this story, -- I wanted to go home to the UK, and do all the usual American In England stuff. I wanted April to actually have a friend for a change, someone who knew what she did and liked her anyway.

I wanted there to be some actual honest to god therapy in there. For a company whose whole reason for existence is clandestine therapy, there honestly doesn't seem to be that much going on in most of the stories. There's some desultory therapy in Beneath the Surface, but it's not even April doing it! So this time, I thought there should be some actual conversation of that nature.

I also wanted April to not necessarily fail, but to have an outcome where it's someone else doing shit to her, instead of her doing shit to other people, -- for her to be on the receiving end for a change. And I wanted it to end with her killing someone, and having to overcome that.

The life the ingrams people lead has to come with some responsibility and consequence. You can't run around doing what they are doing and always getting away with it. At some point, the crows are going to come home to roost and they have to cope with the consequences. That's really what this story is about.

It's considerably darker than most of the Ingrams stories, -- the rape, for example, were very hard to write. But I needed to go down this path to set up the conclusion appropriately.

Incidentally, this is the first story where, when I was done, on the first pass it became apparent that some of the plotted points didn't work. Originally, the team that came in to rescue April were armed with machine guns, and were mowing down the bad guys, willy nilly. But when I did that, it became clear that this wasn't really defensible later. Ingrams would have been responsible for effectively mass murder, and once the authorities got wind of it, Ingrams would be have been on the hook, for it. Plus, it made April's killing of the bad guy that much less important. It was just one killing among a bunch of them. Given that, I had to go back and make it so the invading forces didn't kill anyone, just take them out of consideration for a while. It took a bit of research to figure out how to do that.

As it is, Ingrams is still guilty of a paramilitary raid, which is not something to be sneezed at in the UK in terms of legal ramifications. And while April probably would have got off prosecution, she never was brought to trial for her actions. Which is troubling but, needs must, in stories like this.

Ingrams & Associates Conclusion -- Downfall

The last of the Ingrams stories, this one took me the longest, -- just shy of two years. I wrote a bunch of other things in between, because this was just so long and so hard to get right.

I knew from the start this was going to be Personality Flaws part 2. The concept of the story being related, but not a two-part story, I first saw with the Harry Harrison Stainless Steel Rat series, with the two stories about 'the grey men' being two books that complimented each other, where one set up the other, but they weren't just continuations. That's what I was trying to emulate here.

In fact, the biggest mistake I made was that the Personality Flaws should have been like the third or fourth story, not the fifth, so the conclusion just follows on.

Chris Morgan was always going to be April's ideal man, - he had to be really, for her to leave Ingrams and follow him, on his crusade. But then I was tasked with working out who her ideal man would actually be. Serious, because she is, but with more of a sense of humor. Dedicated. Good. Experienced. He had to be her equal, without overwhelming her.

The end fight was a hard one to get right, and I went back and forth on Chris having the victory over Turnbull, and April doing it. I didn't want April be relegated to Damsel in Distress, but to make Turnbull credible, he had to be capable of overwhelming her. In the end, I went for the middle ground, where it was a desperate ploy, -- Chris Morgan inspired, -- that allowed her to triumph. It was April who ended it, -- as it always should have been, bearing in mind the series was always about her, -- but she wasn't some superhuman doing it.

Kim I introduced in the last story, realizing that my original intent, -- that Megan would be the one doing the rescuing, -- would never fly, because if Desirea was a double agent, then they'd be on the lookout for her. I had to find someone that Desirea wouldn't know that well, and that's where Kim came from.

One thing that did suddenly happen that I didn't foresee or plan was the inclusion of Gene Rainer, from the first story. I'd introduced him with intent of him showing up in other stories, and then just completely forgot about him. It was only on a walk with the dog, where I was thinking about characters I'd introduced and not done things with, that he came back and I realized I needed to inject him somehow, so he became the bomber and then the courier, destined for death.