On the way – “Madeleine Wakes” – a story of voyeurism and exhibitionism

A quick update on where I’ve been the past several months. Other than taking care of a new baby boy (my first), who has taken up a lot of time, I have also been working on a new book that is currently weighing in at around 150,000 words, or twice the length of my last novel, Submitting to Her.

It’s not femdom, this time, it’s a tale exploring voyeurism and exhibitionism within a marriage. The working title is currently “Madeleine Wakes”, and it’s about a young married woman recovering from years of debilitating and serious depression, and the husband who has cared for her all that time, and the journey of sexual discovery they both take as they re-discover their desire for each other in new and unexpected ways.

It’s been an interesting book to write, with a central theme being the difficulty of communicating to your nearest and dearest within a marriage, particularly after a long period in which the sex seems to have died down.

The book actually developed from the writing of one of my previous titles, Anarchy of the Heart, which was ostensibly a story about a couple experimenting with a little partner-swapping on vacation just prior to their wedding. That book was supposed to be an attempt to take a fairly common group sex fantasy – swapping partners on vacation – and explore realistic thought processes that might go through the protagonists’ minds as they went about swapping partners for the very first time.

As I was writing Anarchy, I discovered that if that situation happened in real life, the couple would likely be incredibly nervous at every stage, and that unlike the kind of group sex stories I toyed around with writing in college (and actually, I didn’t write many of those stories on the whole), my male protagonist was not going to be first and foremost thinking about the fact that he gets to sleep with another woman – if he was in the kind of relationship heading toward marriage, chances were he’d be most concerned about the fact that this scenario will see his beloved partner sleeping with another man. The thing was, along with jealousy and fear, Anarchy showed to me that there could be a funny kind of excitement in being able to watch your partner seduce and sleep with someone else.

So while Anarchy goes off and follows the classic partner-swap, Madeleine goes back to another couple and charts the rekindling of their relationship through the husband and wife discovering new sexual fantasies revolving around his voyeurism and her exhibitionism. In this case, the husband discovers his obsession with watching his wife going through a sexual renaissance after recovering from her illness, and when it all comes out into the open, the two of them play some games with their developing fantasies that gets a little more serious as they progress, and eventually involve the question as to whether the husband might want to watch his beautiful wife being sexual with other people.

Madeleine Wakes is just about complete as a first draft, and will then require a little editing, so hopefully it will be available fairly soon.

That’s it for this update. Lots of other stories on the way, I’ll reveal more soon.

Max