New(ish) story on Literotica - "Let Sleeping Beauties Lie"

I say newish because those of you with good memories will recognize this as the Sleeping Beauty Mimic story from the H-space bestiary super short stories I put out a while ago.  I fleshed the story out to add more background and let Bate have a little more fun with the monster girl before his inevitable grisly demise (and it is grisly, that editor's note at the top is there for good reason!)

Let Sleeping Beauties Lie

The H-space bestiary shorts have given me a quandary for a while.  I'd like to put them in some sort of collection up on Amazon (and maybe reveal a bit more of the mystery around Bate and why he keeps dying).  I don't think the stories in their current state are good enough.  They were only originally intended to be placeholders to show off an unusual monster girl without having to develop a plot of how the protagonist ended up in the monster girl's sexy clutches.  I've been looking at taking the better ones and filling in the story to bring them up to the standard of the other stories in my collections.

It's a... trickier process than I thought.  Still trying to figure out the most efficient way of doing it as at the moment it seems even more time-consuming than writing a brand new story from scratch!  (On a more positive note, I have been chipping away at a few new bestiary stories - this time full stories rather than quick sex scenes ' n ' grisly death.)

The other thing I'm quite relieved about is that the story was accepted and is now live on Literotica.  Originally it was rejected and this post was going to be very different - me bemoaning how my usual Bad End stories were no longer acceptable and wondering if I'd ever have anything up on Literotica again.

I wouldn't have blamed Literotica for that, to be fair.  This story does feature one of my nastier bad ends and we live in the sort of outrage-hungry times where owners of sites like Literotica have to walk a fine line in what they allow.  Sucks, but that's how it is.  It would have also made continuing the Succubus Summoning series on there tricky.  At some point Nyte would be Nyte and then I'd have a chapter I couldn't put up.

Fortunately, rather than mope around in a funk, I reread the rejection note, saw that it mentioned "snuff" and then PMed Laurel (Lit's head honcho) for clarification.

While I have seen my good (vile) self referred to as "The Snuff Guy", I don't consider what I write to be snuff.  I think I've written on this before.  Snuff in erotic literature is generally writing from the perspective of someone getting their rocks off by killing someone else.  The sexual titillation comes from the act of killing.  You can do this in regular horror to depict a particularly nasty character, but it's a little trickier in erotic horror.  With erotica the purpose is to sexually arouse and titillate the reader.  If the reader is getting turned on by putting themselves in the shoes of someone killing someone else there is a real risk of feeding unhealthy fantasy.  Now, as far as I'm concerned, fantasy, even unhealthy fantasy, is still fantasy.  If it remains fantasy it's harmless, no matter how sick other people might think it.  The nightmare scenario is if someone indulges that fantasy, develops a liking for it, finds fantasy is no longer enough, and then - to try and recapture that same thrill - takes it into the real world.  With that risk, you can understand why a site like Literotica would not want to publish that type of story.

Then you get to my stuff.  There is sex.  There is death.  And while I do like to blur one into the other, the viewpoint is always from the victim, and the sexual arousal comes from the sex stuff the succubus is doing to them rather than the death stuff.  The death stuff is also nearly always supernatural in nature, and therefore impossible to copycat into the real world.  That to me is the important distinguishing feature between "snuff" and regular (even if extremely squicky) erotic horror - is there a risk someone might copycat this and cause a tragedy in the real world?

I didn't get a reply from Laurel (I imagine she's way too busy to be fair - Literotica gets a massive number of submissions every day), but as the story is now live it must have been given a second look and deemed okay.  This is an important thing to remember, if you're having stories bounced by Literotica, remember they get a ton of submissions daily.  Sometimes it's worth giving Laurel a (polite!) PM to check if a story got bounced by the filters by mistake.

I'm happy anyway.  The horror in erotic horror is still allowed at Literotica (although I should flag my nastier stories a little better next time!).

Hope you enjoy the new(ish) story!