Who "I" am

I, Emily Tilton, if I exist, am a human rights lawyer who resides in Greenwich, CT. It's more likely that I'm actually someone else, who wishes she were as free to play out her real fantasies as Emily Tilton is.

EXPLORATIONS is a narrative version of my nearly lifelong quest to reconcile my submissive erotic orientation with my ethics. In this blog, as in the books of EXPLORATIONS themselves, when I'm writing in italics, I'm writing as the "real" me--35 year old lawyer Emily.

Over the many years since I became aware of my sometimes unbearable craving for ravishment, spanking, and above all anal domination, I have tried to come to terms with that craving in more ways than I can count. The first of the ways was by reading, voraciously, every piece of good BDSM erotica (and of course also a ton of bad BDSM erotica) I could find.

Eventually, I read "Story of O." As is reflected throughout EXPLORATIONS, it changed my life, though the change has been gradual, and continues to this day. The idea that other women might share the lusts I have by turns been ashamed of and defiantly proud of, that a woman like the real Pauline Réage might write so beautifully of those lusts, and work them out so thoroughly and even pitilessly on a character, put Réage's famous pencil in my right hand. Or, to put it in the terms of EXPLORATIONS, it put my left hand on the keyboard of my laptop and my right hand in my lap, if you know what I mean. I started to write spanking stories.

But because I'm interested in helping myself and others understand how BDSM can be lived within a mostly vanilla existence, the way most of us have to live it, EXPLORATIONS has a unique element that I hope will set it apart and make it useful: I have created a fantasy-version of myself (keeping to the tropes of the genre I know so well, fantasy-Emily is an eighteen-year-old virginal bride with a self-abuse problem), whose fantasies and "realities" are the central subject of the stories of EXPLORATIONS, while keeping my authorial, real voice in the margins, explaining and analyzing, and revealing from time to time the much more mundane, real version of the things I have transformed in the story of my fantasy-self. This doubling of the "I" in the first-person narrative of EXPLORATIONS might make the series worth exploring all on its own.