An Update about the For Your Pleasure series

[GTaggert]

I decided to write this here rather than in the Stories area because this isn't actually a story. And for that matter, if you read the introduction to the latest one, For Your Pleasure X, you saw a note about me taking the summer mostly off. That's still true, but some of the circumstances have changed just in the week or so since I uploaded that story. I decided to post this anyway because it's kind of interesting and kind of exciting, but I'm probably going to be writing and uploading my 11th story in the series in a month or so anyway. Let me explain:

Most of you probably know that Gordon Taggert is not my real name. It's a pen name that I have actually used in the past but have resurrected for the purpose of stories like these. I am actually a published author under my real name, but I'm not going to share that with you because the subject matter is so completely different. Sales of my other books would greatly suffer if people knew that I also wrote "quicksand porn" as one of my old professors called it.

That leads to my update. About 2 months ago (just before Easter) I ran into one of my professors from college on social media (under my real name, of course, we'll call him only by his first name, Tom). The chat lead to an exchange of emails and then to phone calls. He is retired now but is, in fact, only 72 years old, just 6 years older than me (meaning he was 26 when he taught the English Creative Writing classes I took from him when I was 20). In our chats and correspondence, I invited him to get an account here at quicksandfans.com. He had pretty much no idea that such a fetish existed, much less took in any stories that used it as subject matter. He declined the invitation to join quicksandfans but asked if I could send him the stories that I wrote. At the time, I had just completed For Your Pleasure IX. I sent the PDFs of all 9 stories to that point to him as email attachments. By the time he replied about them, I had written about half of For Your Please X, almost a month later. He asked if he could critique them and I said yes.

Tom agreed with 65sinking that the best part of my writing is the characters and how they have developed. His favorite character is Monica, not Angie (probably because Monica is black, like Tom). Unlike 65sinking, his favorite story so far (by far!) is FYP V (the murder mystery), not VI (the tornado disaster). He said there are two problems with my stories. One is that they're too long to be short stories but too short to be novels. But we agreed that, for publishing purposes, this could be solved by putting multiple stories together as a collection. The other problem, again for publishing purposes, is simply the subject matter. Tom says the stories really do contain hardcore porn, but it would be just as difficult (not to mention dangerous - more on that in a minute) trying to sell the stories to publishers who would sell them as porn as it would be to sell them to mainstream publishers. Tom did believe, however, that these are publishable stories. I told him about my attempt to publish the For Your Pleasure Trilogy on Amazon through Kindle Direct and that it sold exactly one copy. Tom said he had a better idea.

Tom said that if I could write the stories as a teleplay and remove some of the explicit sex, there might be a chance of selling it to someone he knows who could produce the stories for TV as a Netflix series. Tom asked if he could forward some or all of the stories to him and I said yes. The danger, as Tom and I have discussed, is the issue of my pen name. Even if I succeeded in selling the stories as teleplays (which would be difficult just because of the amount of nudity that would be required even if I took out the explicit sex), it would be somewhere between difficult and impossible to completely hide my real name from it. And that would be a problem with my wife and, for that matter, with Tom's wife. Tom says the stories are much more erotic than his tastes, and that's even after he has read Fifty Shades of Gray.

As of this writing, I have not heard from the TV producer that Tom sent my stories to. I'm writing the first For Your Pleasure story as a teleplay, minus the sex, and plan to send it to Tom once I'm done. This is why there might be a delay in getting For Your Pleasure XI out for a while. I'm not really taking the summer off; I'm just doing something else. I sent what I've done so far to Tom and he says it's the correct format for a teleplay (similar to screenwriting which is one of the classes I took from him in 1980 or 81). I'll share the teleplay with y'all, too, in the Stories section. I just thought I'd share this update with you. I'm actually thrilled that some people actually enjoy my stories enough to want to bring them to TV or publish them as books. We'll just see. I'll keep y'all posted.

[65sinking]

I'm really excited to hear about these potential developments, it would be really amazing if For Your Pleasure somehow makes the jump from the page to the screen, even if it has to be altered to cater to a different audience.

Having said that, I've been meaning to go back and comment on the more recent chapters of For Your Pleasure - it's been a great experience reading about Tammy, Caroline, the nuns, and events that unfolded in the wake of the opening of the outdoor quicksand pits.

[Fred588]

I decided to write this here rather than in the Stories area because this isn't actually a story. And for that matter, if you read the introduction to the latest one, For Your Pleasure X, you saw a note about me taking the summer mostly off. That's still true, but some of the circumstances have changed just in the week or so since I uploaded that story. I decided to post this anyway because it's kind of interesting and kind of exciting, but I'm probably going to be writing and uploading my 11th story in the series in a month or so anyway. Let me explain:

Most of you probably know that Gordon Taggert is not my real name. It's a pen name that I have actually used in the past but have resurrected for the purpose of stories like these. I am actually a published author under my real name, but I'm not going to share that with you because the subject matter is so completely different. Sales of my other books would greatly suffer if people knew that I also wrote "quicksand porn" as one of my old professors called it.

That leads to my update. About 2 months ago (just before Easter) I ran into one of my professors from college on social media (under my real name, of course, we'll call him only by his first name, Tom). The chat lead to an exchange of emails and then to phone calls. He is retired now but is, in fact, only 72 years old, just 6 years older than me (meaning he was 26 when he taught the English Creative Writing classes I took from him when I was 20). In our chats and correspondence, I invited him to get an account here at quicksandfans.com. He had pretty much no idea that such a fetish existed, much less took in any stories that used it as subject matter. He declined the invitation to join quicksandfans but asked if I could send him the stories that I wrote. At the time, I had just completed For Your Pleasure IX. I sent the PDFs of all 9 stories to that point to him as email attachments. By the time he replied about them, I had written about half of For Your Please X, almost a month later. He asked if he could critique them and I said yes.

Tom agreed with 65sinking that the best part of my writing is the characters and how they have developed. His favorite character is Monica, not Angie (probably because Monica is black, like Tom). Unlike 65sinking, his favorite story so far (by far!) is FYP V (the murder mystery), not VI (the tornado disaster). He said there are two problems with my stories. One is that they're too long to be short stories but too short to be novels. But we agreed that, for publishing purposes, this could be solved by putting multiple stories together as a collection. The other problem, again for publishing purposes, is simply the subject matter. Tom says the stories really do contain hardcore porn, but it would be just as difficult (not to mention dangerous - more on that in a minute) trying to sell the stories to publishers who would sell them as porn as it would be to sell them to mainstream publishers. Tom did believe, however, that these are publishable stories. I told him about my attempt to publish the For Your Pleasure Trilogy on Amazon through Kindle Direct and that it sold exactly one copy. Tom said he had a better idea.

Tom said that if I could write the stories as a teleplay and remove some of the explicit sex, there might be a chance of selling it to someone he knows who could produce the stories for TV as a Netflix series. Tom asked if he could forward some or all of the stories to him and I said yes. The danger, as Tom and I have discussed, is the issue of my pen name. Even if I succeeded in selling the stories as teleplays (which would be difficult just because of the amount of nudity that would be required even if I took out the explicit sex), it would be somewhere between difficult and impossible to completely hide my real name from it. And that would be a problem with my wife and, for that matter, with Tom's wife. Tom says the stories are much more erotic than his tastes, and that's even after he has read Fifty Shades of Gray.

As of this writing, I have not heard from the TV producer that Tom sent my stories to. I'm writing the first For Your Pleasure story as a teleplay, minus the sex, and plan to send it to Tom once I'm done. This is why there might be a delay in getting For Your Pleasure XI out for a while. I'm not really taking the summer off; I'm just doing something else. I sent what I've done so far to Tom and he says it's the correct format for a teleplay (similar to screenwriting which is one of the classes I took from him in 1980 or 81). I'll share the teleplay with y'all, too, in the Stories section. I just thought I'd share this update with you. I'm actually thrilled that some people actually enjoy my stories enough to want to bring them to TV or publish them as books. We'll just see. I'll keep y'all posted.

I think the advice about toning down the sex is probably sound if your goal is to get your idea into something commercial. For some examples of how that might be done, llow me to suggest looking at my script for a movie (would be movie) called "Planet Robinson. I posted it here a number of years ago and the files are still there, so a simple search on "planet robinson," or just "robinson" should find it easily. There are five or six quicksand scenes, one of which is a little on the erotic side but still well within what could work in a PG or R flick.

[GTaggert]

I think the advice about toning down the sex is probably sound if your goal is to get your idea into something commercial. For some examples of how that might be done, llow me to suggest looking at my script for a movie (would be movie) called "Planet Robinson. I posted it here a number of years ago and the files are still there, so a simple search on "planet robinson," or just "robinson" should find it easily. There are five or six quicksand scenes, one of which is a little on the erotic side but still well within what could work in a PG or R flick.

Thanks; I will definitely check that out! BTW this is being looked at for TV-MA television, probably on Netflix (according to Tom), not a motion picture. But you never know...

[GTaggert]

Hey fans of For Your Pleasure! I thought it would be a good opportunity now to update you on the latest that is happening with the possible move to TV production for the For Your Pleasure story series. I'm currently in a quieter period in the development of all this, so I thought I'd share some news.

First of all, Tom's (my former professor who has been acting as a sort of "agent" for me) assistance in all this has been really quite incredible. He acted as a go-between with me and a producer who happens to be a friend of his. This friend (who Tom wouldn't tell me the name of) has done a couple of Netflix series' and knows some others as well. Long story short, Tom forwarded the first 3 stories of the series to him. About 2 days after that, the word came back that the producer had read the first story and was, at least, intrigued, and told Tom he was going to continue with the second and third stories. In the meantime, I was instructed, through Tom, to convert For Your Pleasure 1 to a teleplay format. Tom gave me the instructions and I wrote it. I was told that the story would likely make a 2-hour series premiere or perhaps the first 2 episodes of a first season of the story.

By the way, @Fred588 - just before I did this, I also read your Planet Robinson story. It was quite good, and I was a little surprised it never "went anywhere". Your teleplay format was quite good too, if the feedback I got from Tom and the Netflix producer are any indication. I was asked for a couple of revisions, but they were always just for formatting, not content. I also think this was mainly coming from Tom, not the producer.

The feedback from the producer was largely positive. He had no problem with the sexual content or the nudity, which surprised me (and Tom) a bit. He did say, however, that such content was very expensive to shoot, as getting actresses willing to do that much nudity was actually a little difficult, and many would want body doubles, which increases the cost. I was told that there were relatively easy (but still expensive) ways of shooting scenes involving sex that used careful angles, obstructions, head and shoulder shots, etc., to depict things without getting too explicit and thus stepping over the line into pornography. The main problem, he said (besides the expense), was that cutting the scenes from the narrative would take too much away from the story. He keyed in on the notion that the center of the story is the "Fantasy Fulfilment Center Focused on Female Pleasure" and that most such fantasies, whether they involved quicksand or not, would be sexual in nature. Long story short, he told Tom and Tom told me that they wouldn't be looking at buying my story at this time.

They were actually quite nice about it, Tom said, and even suggested another route I could go that might be an avenue for selling my stories. The Netflix producer liked the characters just like several of you have said, saying that they were believable and real. The producer liked Angie the best, just like @65sinking, but appreciated the diversity of the other characters.

I was given a website to visit and an instruction from Tom about creating at least one more teleplay episode (more if I can manage it). I have a Zoom meeting coming up in a week and a half with a representative of this new site. He will most likely request one or more teleplays. We'll see what happens. Tom won't be working on my behalf with this one; I'm on my own. After that meeting, I'll post another update and fill y'all in.

[Fred588]

Thanks for the complement rgarding Planet Robinson. The principal reason it went nowhere is I never made much effort to make it go anywhere. I showed it to two actresses who were here as models but that was about it. At this point in my life I would let someone try producing it but I would almost certainly not be interested in doing revisions.

[GTaggert]

Well,... shit.

Today has been quite the day. Around Noon my time I had a scheduled Zoom meeting with a company (Voyage Media) that helps connect story writers like me with producers who would be interested in making TV shows and movies. This was not a one on one meeting; there were about 20 of us watching a presentation by a host and then an extended Q&A session. It all sounded quite wonderful and promising until they started talking about fees. For many people, these fees would be very little of a problem, but for me they were a complete deal-breaker.

The fee just to "get in", registering for a place in this community (which, by the way, sounds terrific and very promising) is $349. It's not a prohibitively high amount of money, but I simply don't have it right now, and it would be impossible to get that amount before the end of the month. More importantly, it would be quite impossible to hide such a transaction from my wife who is completely unaware of my activities regarding the For Your Pleasure series (and needs to stay that way). And then, just to take the next few steps, a number of additional fees would be incurred. By the time I would get to the point where a potential producer would actually read my manuscript, I would have spent about $900 to $1000 and still be more than 3 years away from earning any money, assuming it was accepted at all. I left the meeting after giving the host my thanks.

My next step was to call Tom. I told Tom everything I just related above, and he said that, through him, I actually got closer to an actual producer than what I would have done in a year's time with the Media company I met with. Tom thought it would be easy and quick but was unaware of the fees. We talked for longer than the Zoom meeting! We discussed me doing something that the people at Voyage Media talked about at length: me doing the pitching to producers and such all on my own. Although it would take away the necessity to pay any fees, it would also reduce my chances of success from "slim" to almost zero. In the end, I made a decision and told Tom about it.

For Your Pleasure is not going to become a TV series or movie through any effort of mine. At Tom's suggestion, I am going to carefully rewrite and expand some of the stories and publish them through Kindle Direct. I made one previous attempt at this but didn't do everything the right way, so maybe I'll have better success with Tom's help.

In the meantime, I poured a lot of time and effort into creating the teleplay for the first episode of the potential series, and I decided I'm not going to let it go completely to waste. Attached, below, is the PDF of the teleplay I wrote (revised about 3 times) of For Your Pleasure. It was intended to be the first episode, a two hour series premiere. Tom still has a copy and says that if it catches someone's eye that he knows, he'll let me know and who knows? Anyway, I want you all (especially @Fred588 and @65Sinking) to enjoy what I did there. I will be publishing a new version of For Your Pleasure on KDP, writing new For Your Pleasure stories here on quicksandfans.com, and enjoying everyone else's stories and posts. I thank you for your support and advice. Enjoy the teleplay; try to visualize it as if it really was on TV.

NOTE: quicksandfans.com wouldn't let me attach a PDF to put here. I will instead put it in Stories, so please go there to see it. Thanks.

[Fred588]

With a shoot underway I willnot have time to look at this until early next week. Feel free to send me a reminder.

[Helen]

A very interesting read, especially as I might look to get into this. Still working out how all this works.

[GTaggert]

With a shoot underway I willnot have time to look at this until early next week. Feel free to send me a reminder.

Hi, Fred. You asked for a reminder, so here it is. Check out the For Your Pleasure teleplay in Stories.