Did you read Wishbone and Names of My Beloved and wonder what happened next?
I don’t deal well with finishing books. I do not get a warm feeling of accomplishment. I get post-partum depression. After I finished Names of My Beloved, I spent some time writing outtakes that examined various characters’ lives in an attempt to start the next book. I ran into two problems with this.
Whenever you write a prequel, some of the events are predetermined, and the story takes on the aspect of a tragedy. Plenty of writers pull this off just fine, but I didn’t feel that I was one of them.
The other problem is the Age Issue. If the poorly-specified rules for erotica are that there are no minors, I couldn’t write something that happened when a character was growing up.
So I went forward, and I chose to follow Styrax. What happened to him after he left the scene in Names? At the same time I got some feedback from a beta reader. She asked me a quite reasonable question: how does the other half live? Shieh Yeras, Styrax, and the rest of the named shih-aan characters are educated upper class types. What is it like to be a low-class shih-aan laborer with no rings, an obligate carnivore who has trouble affording meat? I could write that book and welcome readers to explore more of Feras-aan.
The problem was that Styrax is, well, speak as I find, a vanilla. It’s even built into his name.
Styrax is the name of a genus of shrubs and small trees from which humans have harvested aromatic resin since time immemorial, just like frankincense and myrrh. If you’re looking to buy the solid resin or the sticky essential oil, you should shop for benzoin, which is the proper name for the stuff. You can buy a small container of benzoin resin for under $10 on etsy. You’ve undoubtedly smelled benzoin before as it is a very common bass note in quality incense. Its fragrance is dreamy with prominent vanilla notes. Like frankincense and myrrh, which were special enough for gifts for an infant god, it has been assigned therapeutic properties.
If you read the Thousand Night and One Night, you’ll recognize benzoin immediately:
[I]t was a lady of tall figure, some five feet high; a model of beauty and loveliness, brilliance and symmetry and perfect grace. Her forehead was flower white; her cheeks like the anemone ruddy bright; her eyes were those of the wild heifer or the gazelle, with eyebrows like the crescent moon which ends Sha’aban and begins Ramazan; her mouth was the ring of Sulayman, her lips coral red, and her teeth like a line of strung pearls or of camomile petals. Her throat recalled the antelope’s, and her breasts, like two pomegranates of even size, stood at bay as it were, her body rose and fell in waves below her dress like the rolls of a piece of brocade, and her navel would hold an ounce of benzoin ointment. –Arabian Nights, Vol. 1 (Chap. 4) Burton trans.
And because it’s a trope, you’ll see it over and over, either because it recurred in the original text the way an oral formulaic recurs, or because Burton was lazy (and a humongous perv; he also translated the Kama Sutra for the titillation of the British Empire).
Both Names and Styrax contain some homage to the Thousand Nights and One Night, because it’s the fount of all stories.
But if Styrax was a vanilla, I’d already written him asking Wishbone not to be nice to him. At all. Perhaps there would be an opportunity to turn him kinky if he met the right person. That’s what I set out to write. And after four years and 250,000 words, I believe I succeeded.