When i sat down to tap out the opening sentences of my debut novel, God’s Mercy, at the beginning of August, i thought i knew what it was about. Chastity – the tall, midsized, pagan, masochist – was essentially me, and i was going to have her endure my darkest fantasies strung together by enough plot to make it compelling. Now, sitting with the most personal 274k words (across two books) that i have ever written, i know that the Descent Duet was never about that at all. And Chastity – for all that we have a lot in common – was never the character closest to me. Jeffiniah is.
Let’s be very clear; unlike Jeffiniah, i have never tortured, raped, or imprisoned anyone. i am also not a sadist, or a late in life virgin, or a Christian. On paper, Jeffiniah and i have almost nothing in common (although being so nervous we turn up thirty minutes early to a first date is something we share). But, despite being based on my partner’s roleplay character rather than mine, Jeffiniah became the character where i explored something i have never written about in depth: what it means to feel beyond redemption, but to desperately chase it anyway.
It’s been about a decade since i completed a piece of fiction writing, and what triggered a decade of writers block was the catastrophic unmasking of the darkest part of myself. Back then, i wrote fanfiction in a fandom i won’t name (although i accept this post may lead to people putting the pieces together), and i was pretty damn good at it. i churned out around 300k of interconnected standalones in about a year, while also running a popular fandom tumblr page. i had eyes on me, and influence for the first time in my life. And, like Jeffiniah, i had a mission. i would rid the world of evil. my witch hunt was against depictions of rape and abuse in fiction.
Did i have those fantasies at the time? Of course i fucking did. They have been a constant feature of my brain for as long as i can remember. Torture first, imagining being loaded onto the conveyor belt in the supermarket and dissected by the shop assistant as a small child, The Machine from The Princess Bride when i saw it for the first time age eight, a complex maladaptive daydream about being a vampire held in captivity to train vampire hunters that started around age 9 and hasn’t yet fully stopped. Rape came into the picture the day i learned what it was and was what i thought about for every orgasm i had from my first until age thirty-two. It’s still my go-to fantasy, but one of the incredible gifts kink has given me is the ability to turn off my brain TV during intimacy and sometimes (although not every time), to cum from what is happening and not a fantasy. But what is happening is, more often than not, consensual non-consent. Being a victim is the closest thing i have to a true fetish.
So why the crusade? Shame. The biggest enemy of any kind of positive growth. i didn’t want anyone to know what i was, so i roleplayed the opposite. i wanted to punish people for so shamelessly enjoying the thing that was eating me alive and making me feel i deserved to die alone. And, more than anything, i wanted to stop. i dreamed of a world where depictions of rape were banned in all media, where i would not sit down to read a book or watch a movie and find myself suddenly, painfully aroused, then masturbating silently in the bathroom and contemplating suicide. If i could bully people out of creating my pornography, maybe i would be free.
People got sick of my bullshit, fast. And i got sloppy. i wrote a fic where a character got gangbanged by huge-dicked demons. It was very explicitly consensual, there was a yes in almost every line of dialogue, but the themes of overpowering, overwhelming violence and forced pleasure showed the truth. People started questioning what i was really into, and why i was so invested in policing the fantasies of others. They saw through me, and i couldn’t confess, so i crashed out. i disappeared, cut off what few friends i still had, and started taking drugs instead. Long time followers know that part of the story. The short version is, yes, heroin reduces rape fantasies. It also nearly killed me. 12 step recovery only intensified the shame, and after a messy few years of attempted celibacy, i decided to try a radical new approach. i would carve out the shame instead. And now i’m here – with a tiktok, a blog, a podcast, and an upcoming novel that all tell the absolute truth. i am a masochist, a submissive, and i have rape fantasies. And i’m cool with that.
i like to think i do some good these days. i get regular messages and comments from people who feel less alone with their kinks and their shame, thanks to things i’ve written and said. Once again, eyes are on me and i have influence, and now i take that responsibility incredibly seriously. i want to help, not harm, and i think that i do. But i still wake up in the night thinking about the damage i did, the shame that was mine and that i forced onto others. The wounds that i inflicted that some people may still carry. There is nothing i can ever do that will undo that. It is, within my value system, unforgivable. And i still try. i get up every single day and try, because what else is there?
So much of those feelings run quietly in the background. It’s sometimes easy to ignore, and i don’t think i realised the weight of it until i started to write Jeffiniah. As fictional characters often do, he likes to just say stuff when i’m writing him, abandoning my careful notes to take the scene where he wants it to go. And he said things like this:
“Now he can see them all, nursing their wounds in cold dark prison cells awaiting their deaths, and the thing that is haunting them all is him. The humiliation, the violence, the things he did to break them down. He knows that he is beyond redemption. Did that come before he lost his draw to God, or after? Regardless, it is not God’s forgiveness that he needs to beg. It is the forgiveness of the witches who can never give it.”
By the end of book two, some people will see Jeffiniah as redeemed. Some will not. That goes for characters in the book and, i expect, readers. i wanted this story to leave people questioning what makes someone truly irredeemable, and how much does it matter that they really try? Jeffiniah crosses lines that almost all of us would consider unforgivable. my own sins are maybe smaller, and more understandable to most. But they feel so fucking heavy sometimes. The most honest thing i wrote in these books was the line “sometimes a hopeless prayer has value, all the same”. Funnily enough, Jeffiniah being who he is, immediately followed by him telling a lie. i don’t think anything i do can make up for who i have been. i don’t think, even, that any of my work will measurably change the pervasive shame conditioned into society as a whole that teaches us that our desires make us unlovable. But i’ll keep trying. God’s Mercy is the latest iteration of my hopeless prayer.
