Dale O’Flaherty makes comics, and he’s a recent college graduate weighing the possibility of making that a living. He answered my questions (I’m Dan Copulsky) in June and July 2010.
You recently graduated from college. What are you doing now or planning for the future? Could you imagine trying to make a career out of comics, or do you think of creating them more as a hobby?
At the moment I’m unemployed. When I realized I would have all this free time on my hands at the start of the Summer I knew that I’d have an opportunity to try to get into comics. The problem I had before was that I was so busy with college I didn’t have time to produce comics and I would make one or two over the space of a week and then I wouldn’t put up anything new for a month or something. I’ve realized that I need to have a better internet presence if there’s to be any hope of me supporting myself through this. So at the moment the idea is to produce daily content (whether journal comics or doodles) and post thumbnails and panels from a longer work I’m currently roughing out and by the time the longer work is finished I should have enough journal comics to put out a couple of minis which will hopefully do well enough to pay for the print run of the longer one.
As far as making a career out of comics goes, I really like the idea of being self employed and doing something I love. The one problem is the comics scene in Ireland is very small from what I hear, but England isn’t that far I guess.
I also have some other non comics stuff on my radar planned like a camping trip and a lab position lined up that should keep me busy for a couple of weeks. And a lot of books to read. So many, oh my goodness.
Can you say anything about the longer comic project your working on?
Yeah, last summer I went to Electric Picnic (its a 3 day music festival in Ireland) and I got sick halfway through and had to go to the hospital with a case of appendicitis. When I was in the ambulance talking to my friend on the phone about how weird it was I knew I wanted to do a comic about it. Unfortunately my last year of college got in the way, but I still thought about it and and did bits and pieces on it here and there, but I realized that it would be silly to start it without doing a script and thumb-nailing it because it’s the longest thing I’ve tried doing. So I did out a rough list of plot points in chronological order recently to try to sort it out in my head and figure out where it was going and if there was any overarching theme or if it was just a bunch of stuff that happened. And I was worrying for a while that the comic wouldn’t work well as a whole. But funnily enough the one thing that ties it all together is that nothing turns out right. I make all these plans and everything just sort of goes wrong. I almost miss the train to Laois (I thought it was a bus and spent an hour outside waiting for a bus freaking out), I pitch my tent in the first camping ground I come to which quickly becomes packed, I miss a lot of bands, I forget sun cream, and when I do have to go to the hospital I spent two hours trying to call someone who is at the festival that can find my tent and pack up my stuff. It’s sort of funny how shitty my luck was that day, although pretty much everything did turn out okay in the end (although I had to leave my tent behind and I never got to see The Flaming Lips).
What kinds of comics (short, long, autobiographic, fictional, funny, serious) are you interested in making?
Right now I’m more interested in using journal comics to try to tell a longer story. There’s only so much you can do with short journal comics and I don’t think I’ve quite gotten the hang of those yet. The longest I’ve managed to do journal comics was for 30 days in June back in 2007. It was driving me mad at the end, it felt like an obligation instead of something I wanted to do. Although I think doing a short comic every day is a good exercise. I might try it again. I might do hourlies again sometime soon. Although I don’t know how John Campbell manages to do those for a whole month I’m sick of them by the end of the day! I have to draw really simply when I’m doing hourlies (kind of how John draws), otherwise I’m spending most of the hourlies sitting around drawing hourlies. I’m not sure how Lucy Knisley manages it. I haven’t thought of doing fictional comics yet. Maybe if I come up with a story that’s good enough. The comic I’m doing at the moment is a bit funny and a bit serious. Me and my friend are talking about where our lives are going at the moment but we’re also just drinking and goofing off so it’s a bit of both. I wouldn’t choose one over the other though, I like the story telling opportunities that both raise and each have their own advantages and disadvantages.
Though your artwork is beautiful, it seems like you’re still in some ways early in the process of learning your craft. What kind of support and advice have you received from readers and mentors?
Thank you! Yeah, I’ve always drawn since a very early age, but I’ve never had any formal art training (I think it shows as well). I started doing comics properly around June 2007 and posting them to Livejournal. Eventually I got linked by Ryan Pequin (which was a cool coincidence since his comics inspired me to start my own) and then I had all these artists I’ve loved tell me they liked my stuff, which was insanely flattering and a little bewildering. Yeah, I’ve been getting advice and constructive criticism on my stuff for a while now and its really helpful to have a community of artists and enthusiasts critique a drawing or let you know where you can buy good art material. As for specific advice, John Allison (this was on his blog I think) said to keep a proper sketchbook. I do most of my comics in my sketchbook but most of my drawings or quick doodles on printer paper. I need to get into the habit! Joseph Lambert is my sketchbook idol. His stuff is so good.
You mentioned trying to have more of an online presence. Aside from posting comics more regularly, are you thinking about anything like setting up your own website or creating something you could sell in an online store?
Yeah, I really need to get up off my butt and do comics more often! I find it hard to balance art stuff and life which is really weird considering I’m not working at the moment and have plenty of free time. I think I need to have structure, otherwise I end up pissing away whole days doing nothing in particular. I think a website would help me keep a proper updating schedule because there is an obligation for content otherwise people would quickly forget you and your website. I think I obsess too much about having nice art (I don’t think it shows), which means I have little art freak outs every now and then so I don’t post for ages, but I think I need to stick with it. I love looking at cartoonists’ old work where you can look back and see how they’ve progressed. I feel I’m at a very early stage, but I have an idea of where I need to go so hopefully in a couple years I can look at the stuff I’m doing now and not be too embarrassed! I’ve heard ComicPress is pretty hard to use so I might just start using Blogspot (and Tumblr) for the time being. Man, I’m pretty awful with computers. I’ll probably need help with a website sometime soon. Yeah, I keep getting bugged to start making stuff that people can buy which is as good sign as any I guess. Yeah, I think I’ll start putting out minis sometime very soon.
Other than Ryan Pequin and Joseph Lambert, what work (comics or otherwise) inspires and excites you the most?
Oh jeeze, I know I’m going to end up leaving some people out accidentally. Sorry in advance if I’ve left you out! Let’s see, MS Paint Adventures is probably my favorite comic at the moment. it’s pretty amazing watching the story (Homestuck) grow organically and seeing how Andrew can take something someone mentioned ages ago and make it this prominent story element. If you didn’t know, most of it is made up as he goes along—you’d think he was a story-wizard or something. Actually, he probably is. Order of Tales just finished up recently, that was amazing. I love Evan Dahm’s art work. Renee Engstrom (of Anders loves Maria) and her partner Rasmus Gran have started to do comics together, I like those. John Alison started a new comic after Scary go Round ended. It’s called Bad Machinery, it’s so good. Adam Cadwell does a comic called the Everyday (which is ending soon!). I really like the art work, it’s clean black and white artwork (although he has experimented with color) that is balanced well between realism and cartoony exaggeration. One of his friends in the strip is another great cartoonist, Marc Ellerby. Marc does Ellerbisms, which is this really funny autobio comic that can be really sad at times. Philipa Rice does this great comic called My Cardboard Life. I had the pleasure of looking at one of her strips in person, it’s really neat to see someone doing a collage comic. Joe Decie does great autobio stuff with an ink wash. He’s recently been experimenting with watercolors. I’ve learned so much stuff about journals from him. Shug Raine did this zine called Reet! which was awesome. He’s recently been working on completing his first long form work (Find Comet, Hit Comet, Watch Comet, Sleep), which I’m looking forward to seeing how he wraps up! There’s this guy on my Livejournal called dragoninstall who does this amazing bonkers comic called Shitcomic. None of it was plotted out in advance and none of it makes sense, but it is awesome! There’s another guy on my Livejournal called deathchalupa who does these amazing journals, he has such a distinctive style. I can’t wait to see more stuff from him. Both Liz Prince and Maris Wicks are awesome and have had a huge influence on my style. Penrod Pulaski is probably my favorite person doing journals at the moment, he’s so good! Even though he’s really technically accomplished he has this great sense of humor as well. I’ve only recently got into Dustin Harbin’s comics but his journals are amazing. I wish I was that good. Box Brown and Pranas T. Naujokaitis both do awesome comics. Hey Pais is a cat who does journal comics. Robin Le Blanc is a great photographer and writer (who sells prints here). Vicki Nerino and Britt Wilson (Uterus Parade Press) are the most awesome, gross, funny people doing comics at the moment (with the possible exception of Harvey James, who sort of transcends gross and funny). That’s really all there is to say on the matter!
There are more interviews in the works, but it seems like I’m a bit too busy to keep up with once a week. If you’re interested in joining the staff and conducting interviews for QuestionRiot.com, shoot me an email at dan@questionriot.com and tell me a bit about who you are and who you might be interested in interviewing.
Jake Kessler will soon complete his graduate studies at Full Sail University and enter the world of professional video game production. I think that’s pretty cool. Jake also happens to be my cousin. I’m Dan Copulsky, and Jake answered my questions by email in June 2010.
You’re currently finishing up a Master of Science in Game Design. What coursework does that entail, and what will having that degree mean you know?
The program is called Game Design, but it’s really more game production. My classmates and I are being trained as producers—which is sort of industry slang of middle managers. We know the ins and outs of the development process, we know how to motivate people, we know how to organize tasks and manage the asset pipeline, but we don’t typically do any coding or create any art. Any code or art background we might have is now an ancillary skill; it’s not core to what we do. The design part does come in a little bit—we are expected to be designers as well as producers—but the largest part of our training here is in production.
The GDMS program here at Full Sail University is a 12-month program, which is a pretty radical schedule. Each of my classes has been ten eight-hour sessions, and every four weeks I’m finishing one class and starting another. As for the coursework itself, that varies somewhat from class to class. One month in my Project Management Principles class, the seven of us who were students that month had to collaborate on all the assignments, taking turns being in charge of the team. Together we created a 300+ page Project Management Plan for a hypothetical game project, complete with budget estimates, policies and procedures, milestone scheduling, risk management, and a dozen other things. We did all the pieces one at a time, and then when it was done we had to take that 300 page conglomeration of everyone’s work and make it fit together as though one person wrote it. That was four weeks. That fast pace is demanding—there’s a joke about Full Sail students only sleeping on the weekends—but it’s forced me to become a better student. When all of your work for a semester is due in under four weeks, you don’t have time to procrastinate. You get a lot of those bad habits blasted out of you.
So the first seven months go like that. Then the last five months of the program are Final Project, where we masters students are put in charge of a team of ten or so undergraduate students who are being trained as Game Developers (programmers) or Game Artists. As a team, we have five months to basically go from concept to a finished game, pretty much on our own. At the same time as all of this, each of us masters students are also writing a thesis—a 30-page academic research paper on a subject of our choosing. So we have to balance our time between managing the team and making sure all our research and writing and editing gets done. It’s hard sometimes, having to multitask like that, when you really want to be focusing on one thing more than the other.
I know you’ve loved playing and creating games for years. How did your interest in games develop and become something you wanted to pursue as a career?
When I was in high school, the coolest game I’d ever played was StarCraft by Blizzard Entertainment. It was a pretty neat RTS (real-time strategy game) with a cool story and these great little scripted conversations between the characters. But the best thing about it was that it came packaged with Blizzard’s proprietary level editor at no extra charge. So as soon as I bought the game I had access to most of the tools that were used to make the game. I could jump right in and make scripted levels every bit as in-depth and polished as the ones in the game itself. Then Blizzard released WarCraft III, which was StarCraft in 3D with exponentially more features, and once again they included a World Editor. The ability to make levels that matched the complexity of Blizzard’s games was put directly into my hands.
So making maps for these games became a sort of hobby for me throughout high school and undergrad. I was studying Writing at Florida State, and in between assignments and going out and doing college-y things with my friends, I was making all kinds of levels and maps and campaigns. Some of them were more RPG-esque, where you had a hero character you would level up by fighting monsters and learning spells, and others were things like tower defense or more traditional RTS maps. The great thing about these editors is they didn’t require you to know code or being able to create your own 3D models—all of that was done for you—so you were able to go straight from concept into really rapid prototyping. It let me focus a lot on the design aspects of making a game rather than get bogged down with technical constraints.
But it was only ever a hobby. Around the end of undergrad, though, I was at a crossroads. I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do with the next 30-40 years of my life. I had studied Writing but come out with the surprising realization that I didn’t love it as much as I thought. I was looking in a few other directions—law, teaching, I was even a Campus Ministry coordinator for a year—but I knew if I could find something I loved I’d be so much happier. My best friend has a diagram tacked up on his kitchen wall, and it’s got three circles labeled “Things I Love Doing,” “Things I Am Good At,” and “Things People Will Pay Me to Do.” The overlap between all three is supposed to be what will make you happiest for your career. One day I just woke up and realized, that’s games for me.
What does an admissions department seem to be looking for when picking students for a program like yours? Do other students in the program have backgrounds similar to your own?
Full Sail takes people from all over, with varying backgrounds. Mine’s in Writing, my partner Dave’s is in Literature. There are people in my program who came from Math, Business, Art, Music, Film… and there are even guys who went through one of Full Sail’s programs for undergrad, either Game Dev or Game Art. Some people came here straight out of undergrad while some people worked for a while first. We have kids too young to drink coming in, and we also have 30-somethings with spouses and kids. It’s pretty varied in terms of that kind of thing. What’s more important is what sort of skills you bring to the table, and for skills you don’t have, what are you willing and able to learn. You need to be good with people, communicating with them and mediating conflict. You need to be driven to get everything done. You need to be able to multitask. You need to be able to string words together on paper without sounding like a moron. More than anything, though, you need to be able to say “I don’t know this, please teach me.” Nothing is more fatal to this kind of career than the attitude that you already know everything.
As a final project, you and another producer are leading a team of seven programmers and five artists to produce a 3D real-time artillery game, called Cast Away. What’s the process of putting that together like?
On day 1 of Final Project you come in and the EPs (External Producers, Full Sail professors) divide up the studio (everybody starting Final Project that month) into teams. You find out who your team is, who your partner is if you have one, and you start getting to know them. You get to work right away, because after the first week you have Pitches, which is where you actually give a presentation pitching two ideas to the EPs for games you want to make. They’ll pick one of them to greenlight, and that’s what you’re making for the next five months. Before production can actually start, though, there’s about a month and a half of documentation that needs to get done. (This is where having taken that Project Management Principles class comes in handy.) There’s a team Charter that spells out policies and procedures, like what hours each day the team is going to meet, what days are going to be off for weekends, and what the protocol is for dealing with human resource problems. There’s a Design Document, which spells out all the features that are going to go into the game and what priority each one is. Then there are Technical and Art Design Documents, which take the base Design Doc and extrapolate it to spell out what’s demanded of programmers and artists respectively. All of that needs to be finished before you can start actually making the game.
So right away, your five months for production is really more like three, three and a half. Once all the documentation’s done, the first milestone is called Proof of Concept (POC). That’s the most basic working build of the game that a person can sit down and play for five minutes: it’s typically got nothing but placeholder art assets, no music, very few gameplay features, just the bare bones mechanics of the game. For us that was moving and shooting. After POC, we have a new milestone due pretty much every two weeks: Feature Frag 1 and 2 are turned in by the end of the third month of the project, and then a week later is Alpha. By Alpha, all of the game’s core gameplay features and the majority of the art assets are supposed to be in, along with the bulk of the sound assets. (Since there isn’t anybody on the project team trained in sound design, Full Sail has a sound guy who’s supposed to create all the sound assets for the games—we tell him what we need, we show him the tech is ready to support it, and he gives it to us as soon as it’s done. I guess you could say sound is the one part of the game that’s outsourced.) After Alpha, we get another three weeks before we deliver Beta, which is supposed to be the vast majority of the finished game. There’s another three weeks after Beta to tighten things up, fix bugs, playtest, balance the game, that kind of thing, but by Beta the game should be functionally complete or pretty close. If there are any sounds or art assets still not finalized by Beta, there better be a good reason.
The final version of the game (Gold) is turned in three weeks after Beta, and all the teams give a big Final Presentation in Full Sail’s auditorium. This is the part my team is building towards now. Presentations are a big deal, and they’re always open to friends and family. It’s basically us showing off the game, going through what we did and demonstrating ten minutes or so of gameplay on the big screens. After Final Presentation, the only thing left is a week of Archiving: gathering up all the documentation, updating it to accurately describe the finished game, and binding it together for both us and Full Sail to keep a permanent record.
When you’re managing people who have art or coding skills you don’t have yourself, how do you know what’s reasonable to expect from them and how much time they should have to complete things?
Before this project, I wouldn’t have known how to answer that. Now of course I’ve had some experience working with these guys, so I have a frame of reference. In the early days, though, there was always an extent to which I just had to trust people when they told me what was reasonable. Then I watched them and saw what they did. There are always other resources we can turn to for help, like our EPs or other professors, or even other team members—pull them aside and go, is this a reasonable estimate for this task? What I’ve found, on my team at least, is that there isn’t a lot of reason for people to mislead you on something like that. At the end of the day, everybody’s here because they want to be here, they want to make this game, they’re at least as passionate about it as you are. They aren’t going to undershoot their estimates because they won’t be able to finish on time, and they aren’t going to pad their estimates either because that means less ends up going into the game in the end. It’s very rare that someone will be way off in what they tell us, and if that happens the rest of the team usually speaks up and goes, “Wait, that doesn’t make sense.”
At the same time, though, managing students is a delicate operation sometimes. We’re nominally in charge, but it’s very much on us to get them to do what we want. We aren’t holding these guys’ paychecks, and they aren’t getting health insurance for being part of the project—all we have to motivate them with is the fact that we’re all here, we all paid a lot of money to come here, and we all want to make a game, so let’s get it done. It’s a lot of hours and a lot of work all around, but you can’t just bark orders and expect people to get to work. You have to get them on board with what you want to do. You have to get them to love it. If you can do that, it solves a lot of these issues for you—people will do their absolute best for the game, because they’re with you that that’s what’s important.
What does your career outlook look like to you?
What I’ve been led to understand is that a lot of the industry is structured similarly to Final Project. You have leads or producers leading teams of artists and/or developers, they report to higher producers, sometimes up and up and up. Design is a little different, because some kinds of studios need full-time designers and some don’t. Companies that make games like MMOs (massively multiplayer online games), or smaller episodic games where a new episode is coming out a couple of times a year, they need people full-time to write and design regular content additions. A lot of other kinds of studios, though, they only need designers around during the early part of the development cycle, where the game is being drawn up on paper. So they’re more likely to hire designers (especially junior designers) as consultants for six or eight months at a time, and then maybe give them a permanent position later if the designer has proven himself/herself, and if the studio has a need. That’s one reason I’m really glad I’ve come through this program at Full Sail, because design is something I might have been able to do decently at before, but now I have this other marketable skill: I’m a producer. That should help me find what I want, which is a more permanent position.
As for prospects, I’m not sure what to expect. I’ve just started putting together applications to send out to places, and until this game project is finally finished I really just have a resume and cover letter—my actual application is pretty toothless without the actual game demo to go with it. I’ll send out a bigger wave of applications in August when the game is finished, and then we’ll see if anything comes of it right away. I’ve always had a lot of confidence in my speaking skills, and I know I’d be a great designer-producer, so I kind of feel like if I can get in a room with these guys for an interview I can sell myself. I just need to get in that room.
Given the right situation to work on whatever you wanted, what sort of games would you be most interested in creating?
Games for me are about two things: They’re stories, and they’re entertainment experiences. In that way they’re a lot like movies. The kind of games I want to make have definite narratives, whether that’s more of a drama or high fantasy or science fiction story, or something lighter with less depth. Playing games like Mass Effect (from BioWare) is a lot like watching a feature film of a TV drama, and writing for a game like that would make me really happy because I’d get to really flex those creative muscles. But the most important thing is for games to be fun. People have to want to play them, they have to enjoy playing them, and they have to get sucked in or “immersed” to the point where they want to come back and keep playing. I would love to work on a game like World of WarCraft, which has this huge depth and rich narrative to it, with new chapters and areas being added all the time, and where there’s always something else fun for the player to do—he/she is never finished.
A part of me also wants to keep working on things that can be modded or edited or expanded by the player, where they’re given that framework to work in—the way I was able to work within the framework of StarCraft and WarCraft III. I think that dynamic, where the player jumps into the role of the designer and gets to just mess around and create things, is a lot of fun—I’d like to make that available to new people the way it was made available to me.
Emsony Seton spent a summer working as a professional dominatrix in a BDSM dungeon. She was kind enough to tell me (Dan Copulsky) all about it. We talked by email in June 2010.
How did you decide you wanted to work in a dungeon, and how did you get a job doing it?
I‘ve been interested in BDSM for a long time (I was playing around with tying myself and friends up in elementary school), but had only managed to incorporate light elements into my personal relationships. Stuff like fooling around with handcuffs, riding crops, ball gags, and light bondage. I’ve generally been more of a submissive with partners, and I was interested in trying domination. I worked at the dungeon for a summer and left, reluctantly, when offered a position that I could put on my resume.
I found the dungeon through a Craigslist ad. After I sent an inquiry and a picture they called me back and we set up an interview. As a security measure, the manager wouldn’t give me the address of the dungeon until she could see me on the street with the security camera, so she gave me a time and a corner near a subway stop. I called her from there, and she told me the address once she saw me and figured out that I probably wasn’t a cop.
How did working at the dungeon work? What were your hours, how did you get sessions, and how much did you get paid?
There were usually anywhere from 7 to 12 girls on a given shift. When we weren’t in session there were three rooms we could hang out in, two common rooms and a kitchen/ laundry room. While on shift we weren’t allowed to leave the building, and there was no guarantee of booking a session. When clients came they would meet with the manager and describe the kinds of activities they were interested in and what kind of mistress they were looking for (i.e., skinny girl for sensual domination, solid girl for heavy spanking, etc). Once the manager figured out what the client wanted there would be a “meet” in which whoever was interested in the session would meet with the client one-on-one for five minutes to introduce themselves and figure out what he wanted.
Once he chose one of us and negotiated the activities of the session the client would pay the manager $160 for an hour long session, of which we were paid $80. I worked three days a week, twice on the night shift (5:30pm-1:30am), and one day on the day early shift (10:30am-6:30pm). The amount of money I made in a week varied quite a bit, but I usually averaged about $460 plus tips.
What was the scope of activities included in the job, and how much room did you have to choose which clients to work with or negotiate what you’d do with them?
There was a pretty broad range of activities that went on. Intercourse and oral sex were quite decidedly not permitted—hand jobs were more of a gray area. Some clients expected a “happy ending,” particularly during a sensual domination session, and others would offer to tip extra. Sensual domination was popular, and usually involved humiliation, cock and ball torture, maybe some bondage, and light spanking, caning, or whipping. There was role play (think babysitter, nurse, therapist, schoolgirl, horse or puppy trainer), medical play (enemas, catheters, rectal exams, general sexually inappropriate nurse shenanigans), watersports, scat, sub sessions, electric play, latex, wrestling, face sitting. We also had some more eccentric fetish sessions. My first session was with “Smoking Charlie.” He was interested in being forced to smoke, and came regularly with a special tube that he fitted over his mouth. In his session I would inhale from the cigarette, then expel the smoke down his throat.
Some managers would pressure us to take on a session if a client seemed to be considering leaving the dungeon without booking a session. But we could always refuse to meet with a client, or make it clear in the meet that we weren’t interested. We had a lot of freedom to establish our own limits—some mistresses wouldn’t do any sub sessions. One of the veteran mistresses who gave training sessions to new girls said that when she started she carved out a niche for herself by focusing on enemas. Reading up on different fluids to use, perfecting her technique, and just generally expressing a whole lot of enema enthusiasm.
Who was your favorite client?
Man, it’s hard to choose just one. I had three regulars who were a lot of fun. One guy, “Walter,” was into skinny girls with prominent hipbones and ribs. He would bring his own mini spotlights to illuminate my body, along with a skimpy shirt for me to wear and black fabric to drape in for a slow unveiling. He also brought other mistresses into session. We would lick each other’s bodies, suck on nipples, and caress each other with ice cubes. Incidentally, these sessions were my first sexual experiences with women. Walter came every week, and he even brought me a card and a dozen roses on my birthday.
“Bill” was also great. He was into face sitting, golden showers, wearing nipple clamps, and body worship. The best thing about him was that he was just terribly earnest and excited. He seemed genuinely happy to be there, not ashamed of his interests. He would huff Rush throughout the session and say things like “Oh, this is so kinky! You turn me so on” in his thick German accent. Often he would book a half hour session and come within 10 minutes.
But my absolute favorites were wrestling sessions. I had one client, “Trent,” who wanted to wrestle until one of us tapped out. He ultimately wanted to lose (sessions would end with him lying on the floor jerking off while I stood with a foot on his chest or spit in his mouth) but he fought hard during the hour. There were rumors that he had broken people’s ribs and injured shoulders in past sessions, but the most damage I experienced with him was having the wind knocked out of me.
What about your least favorite?
In general, the most unpleasant clients were the ones who were struggling with guilt about their kinks or about visiting a sex worker. Those sessions always left me feeling sad and uncomfortable, and those clients were usually disrespectful and poor tippers.
My least favorite session was with “Pussy George.” My impression is that he was a kind of initiation for new girls, and most mistresses wouldn’t session with him more than once. He wasn’t entirely clear about what he wanted from the session when we met. I knew he wanted pseudo-medical plus pussy worship, but what he really wanted was a hand job and to go down on the mistress. I wasn’t comfortable with oral-genital contact with clients, and when I refused to let him perform oral sex on me he got crabby and compared the session to being promised a steak supper and receiving only a hamburger (hamburger being, I assume, looking at me rather than sticking his tongue in me).
Could you describe the physical space of the dungeon? How was it laid out and what sort of equipment was there?
The entrance to the dungeon was a really innocuous looking unmarked doorway in the fashion district. Clients and mistresses had to be buzzed in at the main entrance, then again at the door upstairs. There were three main dungeon rooms; the blue, red, and black dungeons. The black room, my favorite, had an attached bathroom, a king sized leather bed with attached suspension straps, a St. Andrew’s cross, and a suspension cage. All the rooms had pain-inflicting instruments along the walls, but a lot of that was more for show. We had drawers and racks of whips, riding crops, canes, dildos, and other equipment in the office.
There was a sound system that was controlled in the office. We could plug mp3 players in and play it throughout the dungeon and common areas. After Michael Jackson died there was a lot of punishment inflicted to the beat of “Thriller” and “Billie Jean,” but my personal favorite session music was The Velvet Underground, Nick Cave, and World/Inferno Friendship Society.
What were your coworkers and bosses like, and what was the social atmosphere of the dungeon? Were your coworkers doing the job for different reasons than you?
Some of the clients seemed to think that only the truly desperate would choose to work at a dungeon, but I don’t think that was the case. For most of us working there it was our first foray into sex work. A lot of us were college students or recent college graduates, although there was a core group of women who had been there for years and practiced power play and BDSM more as a lifestyle than a job or recreation. They mostly kept to themselves and were dismissive of new girls.
Some of my coworkers had a history of addiction or used prescription medication and alcohol to self-medicate, but it wasn’t as though we were all uneducated or incapable of any other sort of work. One of the managers went to Harvard. Another girl was leaving to attend Yale on scholarship. One girl came in only on Sundays and worked as an accountant during the week. For some it was an income supplement, for some it was a career, for others it was mostly for pleasure. Like me, a lot of the girls had played with submission in their personal lives and wanted to explore domination.
There was some workplace drama and cattiness, but no more than what I’ve experienced in more traditional work environments. In between sessions we spent a lot of time talking, reading, smoking, eating take-out food, and dabbling around on the internet.
We had four different managers, two of whom were former mistresses, and “the Man” who they answered to. He would stop by on occasion, and had a habit of assigning somewhat arbitrary fines for things like lateness, eating outside of the kitchen, or leaving locker doors open. His English was passable but not quite proficient, and he would post signs in our common rooms saying things like: “NO CLICKS (sic) IN THE DUNGEON,” “I KNOW SOME GIRLS WILL THINK IF YOU WANT VACATIONS THIS IS GOOD IDEA TO EAT IN THE ROOMS,” and “FREE DRUGS FREE GOSSIP” (meaning, presumably, that the space was to be drug and gossip free).
Do you think your experiences working in a dungeon will affect your future relationships?
I think that my experience in the dungeon made me more sensitive to power dynamics in everyday life, as well as more sexually assertive and open to trying new things. I realized that before working in the dungeon my definition of “sex” had been quite narrow—mostly just penetration or oral-genital contact. Before working as a dominatrix I thought that I was pretty exclusively heterosexual. While I think that’s still my primary orientation, there’s more ambiguity now—there are plenty of sexual activities that don’t require an erect penis that can also be a turn on for me.
I was afraid that having worked sexually with so many men in a professional context would mess with my own experience of sex, that maybe I would end up jaded or desensitized, or would always feel like a service provider with romantic partners. So far that hasn’t been the case.
I imagine that my having been a sex worker, however briefly, will scare off some potential partners. I think that’s probably a good thing. It’s a litmus test of sorts—anyone who can’t accept my interest in sex and kink, or demands a clean past, would likely not be a good match for me.
Are there things you’d only do if you were getting paid for them? Are there things you’d only do with a partner you weren’t working with professionally?
It’s hard for me to imagine engaging in infantilism role play without being paid for it. I had some sessions in which I diapered, powdered, spanked, and verbally humiliated clients who acted like infants for the hour. It just really isn’t a turn on for me, and everyone I did infantilism role play with seemed ashamed and unhappy about it. So I think that’s something I would pretty much only do if I were getting paid for it.
During my first weeks I had a lot of sessions in which I was the submissive. They seemed easier because I could jump right in without constructing a mistress persona or mastering technical skills. But they were also more dangerous, and it felt a bit disingenuous—I can’t sub to someone I don’t respect or trust, and I think that clients could sense my resistance. Once I gained a bit of experience I tried to avoid sub sessions and stick to domination.
I won’t exchange fluids in session (or, okay, I won’t receive fluids in session—I’ve done golden showers and spat in people’s mouth). I also wouldn’t have intercourse or oral sex with a client, cuddle with them, or fall asleep next to them. And, although some sessions were definitely an adrenaline rush, I actually tried to prevent myself from becoming sexually aroused in session. Because desire and arousal involve a loss of control that I’m not willing to mess around with in session.
Alana Joli Abbott is a writer and editor. Her work includes fiction, nonfiction, comics, role playing games, and contributions to shared worlds, among other things. She’ll say a bit more about all that. She answered my questions (I’m Dan Copulsky) in June 2010.
In terms of both profession and personal identity, what do you do?
How I self-identify is constantly changing, but mostly I think of myself as a writer and a mom. Professionally, I’m a freelance writer and editor who works a couple of days a week at the local library reference desk.
For your creative process, how does the writing fiction compare to writing nonfiction, or contributing to games or comics?
Each of those areas works differently, and even different styles of nonfiction require different types of thought! I work on a lot of reference series, writing short, concise articles that have to be synthesized from various other articles. The way I work on those is pretty straight forward: read the material, analyze the important parts, then put it back together in my own words.
Writing a history article is similar, but has a lot more fluidity, because the style isn’t as rigid. My article “Cruising the Thimble Islands” had a lot of the same analysis and synthesis, but I used a lot more of my own style, and invested myself more deeply in the research, doing interviews alongside reading books.
How does that compare to working on comics and games?
I write comics panel by panel. I took half of an online screenwriting class when one was offered through Barnes and Noble University, and even just the first few sessions helped me learn how to think about movement in writing. In prose, you write out what people are thinking and feeling—everything appears in your head and can be transferred directly to the reader. In screenwriting, according to what I learned, you can’t transmit any of the character’s thoughts; your audience sees everything through action. Comics are somewhere in between, since you reveal what’s going on with the characters through both short prose (if you reveal it at all) and images. Working with an artist also means, to me, leaving some gaps and details for my partner to fill in—describe too much and I’ve basically taken away all of the artist’s ability to move, but describe too little and we may end up creating different stories. So comics are a great balance in describing what I want a page to look like without taking control of the narrative.
Writing for games means leaving even more holes in the narrative, especially with adventure writing. The key there is to provide a framework inside of which the players and game master can tell the story and make it their own. Even writing about the world in descriptive text means leaving holes for the players to fill in—I try to hint at potential adventures or story ideas, but the settings only ever really come to life in the minds of the players, or in novels based in the same setting, which is what I’ve tried to do with my fiction writing set in shared worlds. (Both of my published novels, Into the Reach and Departure, are tie-ins to a game world.)
How do you approach writing fiction?
With my own fiction, I start without an outline, usually with just a scene or a feeling. I do research when I feel the story needs it, but it’s not the same kind of synthesis writing; instead, it’s taking the ideas presented in the research and running with them, working little details into the bigger story, and making sure that the details and the plot serve the characters. I’m very character driven as a writer, and I’m definitely a “pantser,” as they say in the blogosphere. I don’t like to work from an outline, because I feel like it spoils the surprise at where the story is going, and I have less motivation to write more of the story when I know how it all turns out.
You were a fan of Joss Whedon’s Firefly since you saw a preview trailer the winter before it came out. You then got a chance to contribute to the licensed role playing game based on the TV show, Serenity RPG. Is adding to a famous universe you’ve been a fan of as totally awesome as it sounds?
It was really incredible. Not only did I get to play in Joss’s ‘Verse, but I got to work with Margaret Weis as my editor for part of the project. (She’s just as amazing an editor as she is a writer.) Firefly really impacted the way I use language and the way I think about language, so having free reign to write in the linguistic style of the show was incredibly enjoyable. I’d do it again in a second if I had the opportunity.
How do you make the connections to work for different companies and on different projects? Is it something you have to consciously focus on it does it come naturally through doing the work you’re already doing?
Right now, I have enough clients to keep me busy, especially with my new “mom” role, so I’m not making a lot of effort to seek out new gigs. Much of my reference work comes through networking with people I used to work for, or who used to do work for me, when I was an in-house editor at Gale, now Gale Cengage, in the Detroit area. I did a lot of networking a few years running in the gaming industry by going to conventions and handing out my business card. The contacts I made there, and through ENWorld’s forums, made connections to other gigs, and I’ve been lucky to have my work show up in fiction anthologies and games based on hearing about opportunities from people I met. Most of that networking is still working for me, and more comes out of blogs I read and comment on. The self-perpetuating networking is nice, and as long as I’m busy, I don’t worry too much about stepping up and focusing more on that aspect.
How much do you think of projects as steps towards some greater success, and how much do you just relish the work you’re currently involved in?
As of now, I’ve stopped taking work that isn’t worth doing just for itself, whether that means for the payment at the end or for my own fulfillment. Earlier in my career, I did a lot of work for free, or for product credit, in order to establish myself. Volunteering like that is a great way to start making contacts and have writing samples to show around. These days, however, if it’s not work that I enjoy doing, it had either better pay very well or mean working with editors or project managers I really respect and enjoy working with. Of course, the best scenario would be doing work that I love for editors who are amazing and are paying me plenty of money! That’s a dream I’ve yet to realize.
