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Author's Notes: Mark and Kim by Yogloo

Warning: This article does not contain any depictions of sexual situations or activities. It does, however, discuss such scenes in a very up-front way, and it contains spoilers. If you have not read the Mark and Kim series, are under the age of 18, or are easily offended by such things, I suggest you don't continue reading this article. Thanks.

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Hi everyone! This is Yogloo, author of the "Mark and Kim" series. I thought you might enjoy this behind-the-scenes look into what went into creating these stories - you can think of this as a sort of commentary, Making Of, Deleted Scenes, etc., in which I hope to convey some of the thoughts, ideas and creative process that helped shape the characters and direct the action.

First off, I want to say I really appreciate all the wonderful comments you've all left me over the years, both for this series and my other stories. While I'm not the most prolific writer around, it's very gratifying to know that people enjoy my work. Thank you, sincerely. :)

I did want to say that I've gotten a number of requests for story commissions over time. I wrote "Beyond the Clearing" (Friendly Tentacles) as a commission for Thief_Takari on FurAffinity, but I did so mainly because I felt her request fit particularly well in relation to the two stories I'd already done, and I was pretty well inspired to write at the time anyway. But aside from that, I've decided to stick to writing my own stuff, flattered as I am by the requests. Unfortunately, life keeps me busy enough that I couldn't guarantee any sort of decent turnaround time for a commission, among other things.

So, Mark and Kim. Who are they? What are they about?

When I wrote Tea and Ecstasy, I had originally set out to just write a quick little piece of porn exploring what would happen to an average guy at a desk job when he suddenly gets uncontrollably horny. I'm sure it's a pretty common fantasy, but I couldn't really write it without giving the poor victim at least a little backstory. I'm sure it's no surprise that I based many aspects of the main character on my own life and experiences, though I will be quick to point out that Mark is NOT me. :) But I wanted the reader to care about him, to understand that he really was just an average guy who's got his own little quirks and kinks. And who better to subject him to this ordeal than the woman he loves? A woman who is just as kinky as he is, if not more so?

I found as I wrote the story that I had created a pretty compelling set of characters. My first draft of Tea and Ecstasy was just all about the jacking off and making messes - the introduction and conclusion actually came later. But once my story was done, Mark's story begged to be told from the beginning. And so, First-Time Freshman took flight and mostly wrote itself - I merely committed the words to my text editor. This story really let me flesh out both Mark and Kim as real characters, and further, it allowed me to emphasize the fact that they weren't just about sex. The sex was truly an expression of their growing love for each other.

Now, I'll freely admit that Tree's Company, the first story I've written with a genuine threesome in it, was based on a personal fantasy. I'm sure it's a common one, but I thoroughly enjoyed exploring the idea of Kim being so kinky that she'd actually initiate an act seen as such taboo in our culture. I also had a lot of fun playing to Mark's weaknesses - he was still very new to this whole sex thing, and while he had a lot of stamina and enthusiasm, he was inexperienced and easy to tease. And yeah, it was probably a little gratuitous in spots, but it was loads of fun to write.

You probably noticed that several years passed between the release of Tree's Company and my latest work, The Business Trip. Why so long? Well, two reasons. One, Real Life took over for a while. I can make all sorts of excuses about being busy with work, taking care of my pets, making home improvements and doing all the other usual Real Life things. But ultimately, it's enough to just say writing wasn't really a high priority for me.

But two, I wanted to give Mark and Kim some time to mature. I had somewhat unintentionally used a writing technique known as "in media res" - where you begin a story partway through, then go back to the beginning in the form of a flashback. Mark had given us a peek into his present-day, then told us about how his strange and wonderful relationship had begun. But I struggled with finding an elegant way to bring him back to the present - he wasn't always going to be a young, naive college student. He had a job now, and he had a life to live. And while I wanted to write another story about him, I didn't just want to write "more of the same". To be honest, average guys are pretty boring, even if what they do in the bedroom can be kinky as hell. And at the same time, I didn't want to write something that was so far out there that it didn't fit - the Friendly Tentacles series was one outlet for that sort of fantasy.

I had, however, privately explored the idea of Mark being separated by circumstance from Kim for a little while, and being given the opportunity to play with Treesinger one-on-one. So when my muse finally decided it was time to write again, that became the central theme for the new story.

Right off the bat, I realized that this would be a much more difficult story to write. This would be the first time Mark would have to face a true moral dilemma. By now, Mark has been happily married to Kim for several years, the two are deeply in love, and he would never even THINK of being unfaithful, no matter how strong the temptation. And Kim still has a very strong kinky streak in her - the two frequently share their fantasies and reminisce about their past exploits, and their threesome with Treesinger is one of their favorites. But now, with being sent on a business trip, Mark would be away from his love for an extended period of time and would have to make do by himself. And he'd be in Treesinger's neck of the woods, so there was an opportunity for the two of them to have a wild night together.

The first draft of The Business Trip had Treesinger already waiting in Mark's hotel room when he stepped inside. She was already dressed in her black silk nightgown and was seated on his bed, drinking her special tea. They would talk for a bit, and she'd have him drink some of the tea, then put the moves on him when he started to feel its effects.

As you can imagine, this ended up not working too well, for two big reasons. First off, if you walked into your hotel room to discover a woman you hadn't seen in years dressed in lingerie there on your bed, you'd probably think you'd ended up in the wrong room, or that someone had broken into it. And further, even after recognizing Treesinger, Mark would probably not be really very well able to talk frankly or enjoy tea when she's already ready to go. The scene just wasn't working this way - I couldn't make it flow well, and ultimately it tried to get to the sex too quickly.

But the other, even more important reason, was that it threatened to destroy Mark's integrity. There was no good way for me to convey what I wanted - that Kim had arranged for this without Mark knowing - without either presenting it in a way that forced Mark to just take Treesinger's word for it (much less believable), or forced him to do something as drastic as actually call Kim to ask if it was okay. I would have been forced to choose between a buzz-kill and a breach of trust - even though Kim really did want the two of them to fuck like bunnies all night long, Mark would have had no way of knowing this, so he would have had to choose to do something that normally would have been wrong and disloyal. (And to be clear, Kim trusts Treesinger implicitly and intimately, but she trusts ONLY Treesinger in this way. To her, Treesinger is a wonderful playmate for Mark, but she would not tolerate him jumping in the sack with anyone else.)

Also, it's important to note that Treesinger faced a similar problem with integrity. She's definitely got the hots for Mark, but she's an honorable sort - she would never try to force herself on him (or anyone, really), and she has an immense amount of respect for his marriage to Kim. She doesn't want to supplant Kim, or even really be a substitute - she has no romantic designs on Mark, and she would never dream of intruding upon his relationship. So it was just as important that Treesinger have Kim's blessing for this little adventure as it was for Mark. If she hadn't been explicitly encouraged by Kim to have her way with him, it simply would not have happened, and if Mark hadn't gotten the message or didn't actually WANT to play with her, the deer would have stopped immediately, with no hard feelings. Thus, trying to justify Treesinger pushing the issue in the face of such uncertainty came perilously close to coercion, even rape, and I was simply not willing to go there.

So I settled on a more subtle approach. Mark ends up in his hotel room, has time to settle in and get his bath and just relax for a bit, before Treesinger shows up and joins him for dinner. This gave me a chance to focus more on rekindling the friendship between the two, as well as a vehicle to convey that all-important permission from Kim. I toyed with several ideas about how to get it across to him, and I knew that I had to nail the language just right. To be honest, Kim's little letter was the hardest part of the whole story - it was difficult to find the right way to say it such that he knew a gift of some sort was coming, but being his lovably naive self, he wouldn't be able to guess what it was right away. Then, when it was presented to him, he'd realize what his wife had arranged and know that she had given him her blessing to go ahead, reinforced by Treesinger's knowledge of Mark's kinks that she could only have gotten from Kim. I hope I didn't beat you over the head too much with this point in the story, but it was of paramount importance to me to preserve Mark's integrity, so as to let Treesinger's seduction proceed unhindered by a moral dilemma.

While that's probably the most important detail in writing this story, it certainly wasn't the only thing that went through multiple revisions. I wrote and later tossed out a detailed conversation between Mark and the collie running the front desk. The ferret serving the wolf and the deer in the restaurant originally took a more comedic approach to waiting on them - I had him start out in German, then tease Mark with a British accent, then use French mannerisms, etc., all the while making Treesinger just about fall out of her chair in laughter. While it was cute, I decided it was too distracting to the scene, so I chose instead to just make him formal, polite and (thankfully) bilingual.

Speaking of bilingual, I'll freely admit that I don't know a single bit of German. But it seemed appropriate to include German phrases in the story, so I apologize to any actual German speakers for my horrible grammar. (Google Translate for the win!) For those who are curious, "Guten abend" means "Good evening", and Treesinger really did order Sauteed Leeks with Walnuts, as well as a pot of hot water for tea. The waiter's response to that was, simply, "At once".

More generally, I found it fun to research various things about the setting, since it was the first of my stories to take place in a real location. Both dishes are things that typical German hotel restaurants would serve, and the leek dish that Treesinger ordered is specifically vegetarian (I figured a deer eating meat wouldn't make a great deal of sense). And the model of the Allianz Arena really does exist! Both the real arena and its model are supposedly quite stunning - if you ever do find yourself in Munich, try to swing by it at night.

You might be wondering what my fascination is with that bizarre tea - doesn't that sound like my characters just getting high off of an illicit drug? It's certainly true that one could interpret it that way, but I prefer the idea that it's an all-natural aphrodisiac that just happens to have a particularly strong effect on Mark. It was the vehicle for the first story, and since it worked so well there, I figured it would be fun to revisit the concept in this one. And as you already know if you've read my stories, I like to push the boundaries, while still keeping things reasonably believable. The tea was a convenient way to not only ease the two into their wild night of passion, but it added to the experience by heightening their arousal (and, admittedly, Mark's productivity) well beyond normal.

Another thing you might have noticed is that this is the first story I've written in which the female doesn't end up with a swollen belly at the end (at least, not explicitly stated). Yeah, it's a kink - the male (including the tentacles in their series) produces so much cum that it literally inflates the female. It's something I personally get off on, and I like it as a sort of end state, a physical sign that the two characters are totally satisfied. So then, with Mark being more experienced and having built up his stamina, and then having many times the amount of that aphrodisiac tea in his system, why did I decide not to go that route this time?

Well, truth be told, the first draft of the finale did have Treesinger ending up with a rather massively swollen belly. I also had Mark referring to her as "his doe", more to speak to the heat of the moment rather than an actual feeling of possession. But I realized that these things actually detracted from the point of the story. The story wasn't really about how much cum Mark could produce, but rather how much he and Treesinger turned each other on and how uncontrollably horny they were getting. I chose to focus on the frenzy of activity and passion between the two of them and, frankly, to let the reader decide if the concept of cum-inflation was important to them or not. Certainly if you've paid attention to that in the first few stories, you might imagine it here. But I felt it was best left unsaid - the point of the story was to focus on the unique relationship between Mark and Treesinger, and how that relationship is an intimate extension of the love between Mark and his wife.

Ultimately, I'm pretty happy with how this turned out. There are a lot of things I originally wrote or considered and decided not to include, even though I personally found them to be quite hot. It's always a challenge to write erotica in a way that keeps each new scene fresh and fun, and I hope I've managed to do it in a way that satisfies. :)

On to some reader feedback!

I've gotten a number of comments, a few public but most private, suggesting that Mark, Kim and Treesinger's romps in the hay should result in one or both of the girls becoming pregnant, so I just wanted to talk about that for a bit. Sorry to disappoint, but Mark and Kim decided early on that they weren't going to be having kids, so they took all the necessary steps to ensure they could enjoy each other's bodies without having to worry about that particular consequence. :) (From my own POV, there's something very primal about the concept of impregnation, and I can certainly see why some people enjoy it. But in my opinion, it's not a decision to be made lightly, so none of my characters will be getting pregnant, either because they physically can't or have decided they don't want to.)

I've also had a few people ask me why I chose to write the Mark and Kim series from a first-person perspective. This is an interesting question - I didn't really make a conscious decision to do this at first, but rather it just sorta happened on its own. In Tea and Ecstasy, I originally started in the traditional third-person, but I wanted to describe how the character felt, what was going on inside his body and mind, and it seemed appropriate to tell it from his point of view. Once that story was written, it made sense to write the rest of them from the same POV. But to be sure, this narrative style is challenging. Because it's average-guy Mark telling the story, I have to rely on his ability to convey the words, actions and apparent emotions of the other characters, without inadvertently giving him special powers. This makes for an interesting storytelling experience.

Also, the first-person perspective gives me some interesting flexibility to convey Mark's own emotions and thought processes using different writing styles. When he's relaxed or thinking fondly of something, he tends to be pretty conversational. When he's nervous or tense, he mixes his internal thoughts with more rigid sentence structures. When he's doing something elaborate, he switches to more elaborate prose. And when his hormones are pumping and he decides to take the lead, his language becomes appropriately more aggressive. If you noticed the (hopefully subtle) changes in style, good for you! I assure you they were quite deliberate. ;) I've experimented with this type of narrative from the omniscient third-person in a couple of other stories, and it does work to some extent there too. But I think it works particularly well from Mark's personal perspective - by giving you a glimpse into his most intimate memories, he also attempts to share his experiences with you on more than one level.

Finally, I've already been asked if there will be more stories beyond this. And the simple answer is: I don't know yet. There might be, but if there are going to be more stories in this series, I want them to be explorations into new areas of Mark and Kim's relationship. I very much want to avoid writing "more of the same". Case in point: An early draft of The Business Trip had Mark reaching orgasm many more times than he ended up doing in the final version, but I realized that even mind-blowing orgasms can become boring if there are too many of them - it's impossible to describe each one in a way that doesn't just make you go "Oh, he's cumming again". The exploration of fantasies can easily suffer from the same problem - I could write another tea scene, but you've already read two whole stories on that now. And while it made sense for Treesinger to repeat her "opening moves" on Mark like she did in the dorm, that was the only major action I wanted to repeat - it served as a way to rekindle the chemistry between the two of them and to get Mark fired up enough that he felt empowered to take things in a different direction. Sometimes it can be good to repeat things, but in my opinion it works best when it opens the door to exploration into new territory.

So basically, if I do write another story in this series, it needs to cover new ground, even if that's just a variation on the central theme. And there are a number of things that these characters COULD explore, but I'm pretty sure they won't because the subject matter just doesn't fit into their world. (For example, you're unlikely to see a tentacle monster appear in this series, fun as that might be.) Ultimately, I'm going to leave it up to them. If my muse decides at some point that there's another facet of Mark's life and relationship that he wants to share with the world, I'll be happy to write it. But until then, Mark and Kim plan to enjoy their married life, and their many, many romps in the hay, behind closed doors. :)

By the way, I've also been asked for writing tips, and again, I'm flattered. I don't have any real specific tips, but here are some general points:

* Know your characters. I think it's important to not just write the actions in your porn, but to know enough about your characters to understand what motivates them. What turns them on? What turns them off? What are the little things they're likely to notice as they walk down the street? In high school, I took a fantastic Creative Writing class that focused a lot on incidental character development exercises, and by the time I'd finished, I had developed a number of skills that would later prove very useful in developing the characters in my adult stories. It can be helpful to spend some time writing little "day-in-the-life" snippets about something innocuous your character might do, like making himself a sandwich or talking to himself in the car. Even just asking "What would this guy do?" can help shape your story in subtle but important ways. I do a fair amount of that in my daily life, imagining what my various characters' reactions might be when they see an idiot taking up two parking spots, for example. :)

* Write what you know, but be willing to push your boundaries as well. As I mentioned earlier, it's possible to get stuck writing "more of the same" - it might be safe, but if it's all you write, it can limit your audience. With each new story, I try to push things just a little bit further than before, even if at first I might balk at the idea. For example, I almost didn't want to write The Business Trip because I didn't know if the essential moral dilemma Mark would have to face was safe to pursue. But as I explored it, I came up with ways to approach it that allowed him to encounter it without compromising his integrity, and eventually to test his own limits in the heat of the moment. And I found it both quite exciting, and a very interesting learning experience personally. So my advice here is: If you approach your fantasies with an open mind, you'll probably find there's a lot of neat stuff you can play with just outside your comfort zone. ;)

* Write about what turns YOU on. I know, you're interested in writing for an audience, and this is something that I think all writers are going to struggle with at some point. You want to write something that everyone will enjoy reading. But the thing I've learned is that you can't please everyone, no matter what you write. And ultimately, it doesn't matter who you please - unless you're doing a commission for someone with a specific request, the most important person you need to please is yourself. That's part of why I tend to take a very long time to write my stories, and furthermore why I'm not entertaining commissions. The things I write into my stories are things that get me off, that I get personal satisfaction from writing. And while it probably sounds a little cavalier of me, I basically don't care so much who else enjoys them - I know that there are people out there who share my particular fetishes, and so those will be the people who enjoy my stories. And I'm sure there'll be people who are genuinely turned off by my writings. But ultimately, I think the best advice I can give here is to make sure you write something that you're happy with - people will be able to tell that you wrote it with confidence, even if they don't personally like it that much themselves.

* Just like with art, use models, references and research. In the course of writing The Business Trip, I did more than two dozen Google searches for things like German landmarks, the distance between Munich and Bavaria, vegetarian German dishes, translations from English to German, and even searching for women's dresses and lingerie. I've also watched a lot of porn (who hasn't?) and garnered ideas from it to shape many of the acts depicted in this story. It might seem tedious to do so much research, but I found it really helped - both to lend realism to an inherently unrealistic universe, and to give me ideas on where to push boundaries and where to back off.

* Never throw anything away. A writer's group I went to years ago had a great idea that I'm sure many of you have heard. Create a "mushpot" - if you write on physical paper, then your mushpot would be a folder or a space in your filing cabinet. If, like me, you prefer to type on a computer, create a directory on your hard drive. But either way, when you write, never just throw it away. Save your file or place your paper in your mushpot and keep it around. Occasionally browse back through that space - even if you think what you wrote at one particular time was the dumbest, most juvenile thing you've ever done, you'll be surprised how much inspiration you can derive from it. (As an example, some of my mushpot snippets include a horny feline sneaking into an army barracks for a gangbang, an alien on trial for murder, and a Superman-like plot in which a planet explodes and a human from that planet transforms into a dolphin on ours. I never really went anywhere with those ideas, but the army one did give me some inspiration years later for scenes in both "The Studs at Stilton Farm" and "Beyond the Clearing". ;))

* Finally, a couple of good books on the subject of adult writing certainly can't hurt. My personal favorite is "How To Write a Dirty Story", by Susie Bright. This book touches a lot on creative-writing exercises and techniques that don't necessarily apply only to erotica, as well as some specific ways you can "heat up" sex scenes in virtually any type of story. She also talks about how to avoid what she calls "sex writer burnout", how to deal with it when it does happen, and how to keep sex writing from hurting your sex life. I got a lot of good inspiration from it and probably should sit down and re-read it sometime soon.

I hope you enjoyed The Business Trip and the Mark and Kim series, and that you've enjoyed this little glimpse into the strange world that is my creative process. It's certainly not the most organized of processes, and I'm sure there are a number of little things that I missed, that could have been refined further to make it the Absolute Perfect Story. But I greatly enjoyed writing it, and I hope you've gotten just as much out of reading it. :)

-- Yogloo