Introduce the title of your story: A Perfect Place to Hyde
Genre/Category: Seduction
Provide the link: https://www.lushstories.com/stories/seduction/a-perfect-place-to-hyde-part-one
1. What first inspired you to write this particular story?
In 2020 I wrote a short story for the 'Masturbation' comp entitled 'Where To Get Off', featuring a frustrated teacher named Jed Martin, who resisted the advances of a provocative student on the night of the senior prom. That story ended with a sense that beating off in the knowledge that he'd kept his professional integrity gave him no satisfaction whatsoever. It was the right ending for the comp - obvs - but I wondered what happened to him afterwards. And since he taught English Literature, I wondered what lessons he might learn in his frustration from Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde - where the doctor of the title learns how to divide his dark side from the rest of himself, so that it might indulge itself without any consequences for his professional reputation...
2. How did you come up with these characters?
Jed was already established by the previous story - and while he's someone working in education who's struggled for years with his wild sexual urges, please don't go seeing him as in any way autobiographical. If that were the case, however, then Lily and Clara might be viewed as composites of students who I've met over the years - the sweet but more innocent kind of flirt, and the blossoming adventurer on the cusp of wildness (or possibly already experimenting with it). Since the story is all entirely fictional, however, I must have 100% made them up, mustn't I? π That said, Clara's development during the story is definitely reminiscent of how a good friend of mine started out on her sexual journey. And the good friend knows it.
3. How does it differ from some of your other stories?
Well it's more of a journey than many. It begins with a flash-forward of an intensely debauched scene, and then takes eight chapters to get back there. I didn't intend it that way, but frankly I was taking characters - a professional guy who'd mostly experienced sex in the context of long-term relationships and a pair of relatively inexperienced teenage students - who'd just met, from mild flirtation to out-and-out depravity in a single day, and I wanted to do it in a way that felt organic and believable. But the biggest difference is the narrative style - namely the pov of a fourth-wall breaking, cheeky, conversational third-person narrator, who tries to make the reader complicit in what the protagonist is doing, and who uses all manner of playful narrative devices to explore the situation in what I hope is a fun and fresh way.
4. What was the most challenging thing about writing this piece?
Keeping it real, keeping it fun. Having Jed behave in a way that is, frankly, unconscionable, while keeping readers on board with all that he's doing, however depraved. Also, transitioning between the irreverent comedy of the seduction sequences and the intensity of the actively sexual ones, without it feeling like two stories mashed together. And getting to the point where Lily, the more hesitant of the two girls by far, feels compelled to do everything she does - not by Jed, or even by Clara, but by her own deep-rooted motivations.
5. Anything else you want to tell us about it?
While this starts off as Jed's story, and it's his experience that the reader follows, it becomes as much about the very different journeys of Lily and Clara. That wasn't my express intention - this was to be first and last the story of Jed liberating his 'Mr Hyde' side. But the more I wrote, the more the girls' personalities asserted themselves on the story, in keeping - I think - with the overall theme of human duality, i.e. we all have that division within us. By the end, while we leave the story's central location with Jed, we've been party to three characters' process of indulging primal aspects of themselves they'd never fully realised were there.