Practically a week, and I'm living down to expectations by only just having finished with "The Subject of Dolores Fessler" last night (the first installment of a complete FantasTickler read-through)! Before launching into the immediate subject, let me first laud praise on the publication as a whole: this e-zine delivers the slick sheen of a professional publication, with a generous bounty of content and sky-high presentation value!
I shall not quote your entire post, but will of course reply to it in full here, as it is a most generous and insightful review!
You are right about the influence of Heavy Metal magazine. In my teenage years, one of my friends -another avid lover of the European continental style of comic books/graphic novels- would often let me borrow old copies of this magazine -though in its earlier French incarnation: Metal Hurlant. Reading through those volumes has left a deep impression on me that still resonates today. Another influence were of course the early tickling fiction anthologies by MTJ Publishing; and my goal was to combine the experience of the latter with the visually exciting presence of the former.
The story you've reviewed was indeed my very first attempt at writing a short tickling fiction story. Of course I have written my own fetish comic scripts as an auteur artist during the MTJ days, and I have written a small amount of fiction to accompany my "Gargalesia" art collection (and its ill-fated sister project, "Profundis"). Overall, I think I may have hammed up the doom-laden atmosphere too much, carried away as I was in the moment of writing, to the point where it almost enters the realm of the preposterous. But it is what it is, and I after many revisions I was satisfied enough to see it published.
My writing is a strange process, very intuitive, and, for the most part, very much train-of-thought. Usually I will start off with a vague concept (I say usually, as I've written several more stories since) without knowing where the narrative will go. The endpoint/resolution usually materializes as an idea somewhere in the middle of the process, and then its a matter of creating the tension arc between the start and end, and going back in to polish, and insert other ideas and concepts I thought of along the way. It seems to be a very organic process, letting the nether echelons of my mind dictate what need to be written, rather than trying to control the narrative. An almost Jungian approach to creating, I dare say.
The main character, was intentionally left as a "blank" for two reasons; first, indeed I wanted to get across the devastating effect the prolonged torments have on the Institute's captives' minds, almost entirely wiping their memories over time -this is a motif that will recur in future Valserik stories, and others. The second reason is that I wanted her to be a vessel for the reader to explore the world of the Institute almost from like a first-person videogame. So she had to be an "everywoman" onto which the reader could project themselves. She might make a return in future stories, but of that, I'm not sure. I have been writing a f/m Valserik story, which briefly features a blonde captive that
could be her, but again, I like to keep things ambiguous, and leaving much up to the reader -and myself- to speculate about. Because the process is so organic and so intuitive, I find myself being as much a reader as I am a writer.
Dolores Fessler needs a backstory indeed, and I have the rough outlines written down already, and I hope to do a future story focused very much on her; her motives and her crimes. But she's a formidable presence within the lore of the Institute, and I'll have to do a lot more work on her to make her a bit more interesting than the average dominatrix -as you rightly pointed out. Yes, I did think of her as a "Mengele of tickle torture" but refrained from explicitly referring to that historical monster, as I didn't want to stray entirely into the realm of literary horror.
The Wormery and the Labyrinth are concepts I will devote stories to in the future. I do tend to leave "story hooks" in my writing. These are intentional, so they can act as connection points to link with other, future tales. This is especially true for the stories in the Gargalesian setting (which will see publication in future issues of FantasTickler magazine) forming an interwoven universe, with many cryptic references within itself and to the outside. And many of these references are not planned additions, merely things I will suddenly remember while writing, and they present themselves giving a unique flair to the story, and a cryptic meaning, and sometimes they might even determine the plot itself as I go along.
In the light of the above, the inflation-bondage devices are another interesting aspect. since this theme also emerged unplanned. There is something oddly alluring about it, I find too, myself, even though it isn't a major kink of mine. You bring up other, everyday items that are inflatables, and it makes me wonder, perhaps things that we perceived as "fun" at a younger age, can become fetish fuel when we grow up? Perhaps that could be true for tickling itself as well. The armchair psychologist in me is certainly intrigued by such an idea. Of course, I am well acquainted with fetish gear such as inflatable latex sleepsacks, from seeing them depicted in BDSM media, but it isn't a thing that usually features in my (art)work, so its sudden emergence in the flow of the story was interesting to say the least.
