During the editing process, questions came up from critique or beta readers, not all of which could be addressed in the manuscript itself. In other cases, details were removed from the manuscript to make it flow more smoothly for the majority of readers. If you’re curious, here are some additional notes.
Negotiation & Consent
When Igloo and Charlotte play for the first time, several readers found it challenging to believe that their pre-scene negotiation could be so thorough and clinical. Although kinky people negotiate in many different ways, within the community of people who attend public kink events, the process is generally explicit, detailed, and emotionally detached. The only exception is when people are long-term partners and have already established norms.
The purpose of negotiation is to ensure that all participants are giving fully informed consent. Consent can’t be given when someone doesn’t understand what’s being proposed, so language must clear and unambiguous.
Even something as simple as a kiss, which vanilla people will usually assess based on body language, is often carefully planned. A negotiation could look something like “Are you open to kissing during our scene? My STI tests are ____, and I was last tested three months ago. I have no known new exposures since then.” The other party would confirm their interest (or not) and STI compatibility, thus establishing an agreement that kissing is acceptable for that particular scene. The next time the same people play, they might negotiate every detail again, or they might simply ask “Is everything we did last time still okay?”
Kink
Igloo ties a takate-kote (the box tie) in the style of Osada Ryu. She uses a single-rope, two-wrap futomomo. She prefers the Somerville Bowline, but uses a square knot for double-column ties. She uses Moco Nawa waxed jute by Mocojute. The carbon fiber crop, her favorite toy, is the Supercrop by Topspace.
I wanted to work in more of these details, but it turns out that most readers only want to know what limb is being tied. Sigh.
There’s a scene in which Igloo, feeling insecure about her relationship, laments the possible loss of coffee service in the morning. My editor made a comment about how that achieved both poignancy and humor. Ironically, humor wasn’t intended at all, although I can see how it might seem funny if you aren’t familiar with D/s rituals.
If you’ve ever seen a Japanese tea ceremony, then you have some sense of how a simple act of serving tea can acquire deep ritualistic meaning. D/s coffee service is not about delivering a cup of coffee. It’s about reinforcing and celebrating the nature of a Dominant/submissive relationship between two people. It’s a time to connect physically, mentally, and spiritually. It sets the tone for the day, and it is the start of a period for communicating. While there are an infinite number of ways to practice D/s, for many the coffee service or something like it—such as removing shoes upon entering the home—may be the most important ritual they share.
Tapestry v2.0
As always, my intent is to describe feasible technology. Tapestry 1.0 was a distributed, decomposed social network. I went as far as defining many of the APIs while I was thinking about it.
I believe it’s also possible to build Tapestry 2.0. Of course, there’s hand-waving when it comes to some details. But building containerized software, using web technology approaches to deploy to the cloud or locally is already being done. Indeed, as compute power and storage continue to increase, but latency remains somewhat constant, it’s an inevitable side-effect of trends in technology that we’ll see software move to the edges, as I wrote about in the Singularity series.
Blockchain (distributed ledgers) often address a problem that companies don’t want to solve: it eliminates a centralized role in owning, controlling, and managing data. The problem is that existing companies at meaningful scale don’t want to give up that power, so they aren’t going to use distributed ledgers. Meanwhile, companies who don’t have scale might be interested in using distributed ledgers as a differentiator, but they lack the influence to make a meaningful impact.