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Journal of an Agent: An Afterword Note: This is a brief afterword on my erotic, celeb based story series "Journal of an Agent". It is meant as a sort of companion to the series itself, offering my thoughts on some of the history behind it, what celebs I used, why I think some things worked and others didn't and what I think makes it a pretty enduring and meaningful series in the world of erotica. I hope I don't come off as self-serving or egotistical in this, but that's up to you to decide. I just wanted to share some thoughts about the series that I couldn't work into the story itself. - Carnage Jackson Journal of an Agent sprung from my desire, early on in my erotic fiction career, to extend beyond the one story publishing to something that gave me more creative freedom, something that would use story lines and recurring characters to create a seperate but hopefully still realistic reality that worked in with other celeb series already established. The agent idea came from mainly two different sources: the legendary "Showtime" series by Anonymous and from a solitary story called "Natalie Portman Casting Couch". "Showtime" was and probably still is the most massive and indepth story undertaking in the celeb genre. Written in the late 90s, it focuses on a secret agent of sorts who infiltrates Hollywood and works his way into the hearts (and panties) of many stars who were popular at the time. The series, which consists of 10 parts, not counting the sequel that was written in 2001, is in my mind the blueprint for what a celeb series should be about: an engaging, intense plot, well written erotica parts and a likeable and humanistic main character. I strove with JOA to do something like that, by creating the character of Dean Simonds. "Natalie Portman Casting Couch" on the other hand, is an entirely different beast. It isn't a story that seems to have ever been completed (I have found two parts to it, but there seems to be a piece missing from between the two) and the author, Rude Rick, only published one story that I know of. It is also not a story for people who don't like underage sex, as it centers on an older Hollywood mogul taking advantage of young actress Natalie Portman (in a consensual way) by using the "casting couch" idea of sex for movie roles in Hollywood. Though I did borrow one of the characters from this story for one of my chapters in JOA, I mostly used this story as setting the tone for JOA: a slightly sex-filled Hollywood world where power and arousal act as partners in shaping the landscape of things. I was also fascinated with the idea of throwing a character into this Hollywood world where he is in a seat of power and has seemingly unlimited riches to do what he wants. Dean Simonds is the ultimate playboy, and a lot of that tone came from "Casting Couch", especially the mannerisms and seductions that Dean uses. So in December of 2000, I started Journal of an Agent. The original idea was to use the series to spotlight lesser known celebrities, celebs that I thought deserved fair attention and more exposure than they had gotten in the genre. I chose Racheal Leigh Cook as the first celeb to use and when I wrote the chapter, I solicited feedback from people asking me for suggestions on other celebs to use. I expected the series to run for a few chapters, maybe 5 or so, and then to move on to something more interesting or different. What I wasn't expecting though, was the response I got. The first chapter of JOA, in my own opinion, wasn't very good, but a LOT of people read it and a LOT of people wrote to me saying how much they liked it and wanted me to continue. I wrote a few more chapters, including a few of my favorites (the Jessica Alba and Alyssa Milano ones stand out as two of the best I did I think) and the suggestions kept pouring in. Though I really had nothing to gauge it by, I felt that given the high votes I was getting on erotica sites for the series and the massive amounts of mail - all of which I have kept and cherish for anyone who emailed me - I felt that I had the makings of a hit on my hands. As of 6/3/02, I know of at least 355,831 people who have read the series and that just counts the sites where the story is published and stats are available. I imagine about 200,000 more have read it other places. So I decided to get a little creative. The series went through quite a bit of dips in quality and story structure as it wove it's way along, perhaps the most embarrassing being about chapters 5-10, where I decided to get real ballsy and use either really obscure characters or try to create a good guy/bad guy idea with the character of Rick. It didn't work out and thankfully, though that block of chapters did get some mediocre feedback, I managed to salvage the series. It was almost as if it was reactionary on my part, because from chapters 11-15, I used very mainstream actresses, potential sex goddesses, as the featured celeb: Denise Richards, Jennifer Love Hewitt (and Aniston), Britney Spears...all of whom are hardly what I would call "obscure", but they did manage to win me back a lot of readers I think. The Denise Richards chapter alone, which stood atop Literotica.com's Top Celeb Stories listing for almost 2 months, brought in the most email out of any chapter. In chapter 15, I decided to be gutsy again and try to do a bit of intrigue and suspense, mixing in some plot (gasp!) with the usual formula of scene-scene-sex-scene. By turning Dean's long time assistant Julie into a raving psycho-bitch, I managed to squeeze some strong character development out of Dean, as well as return to some of that romantic stuff I liked from the Alyssa Milano chapter with #15. I had previously wanted to keep each story connected but seperate from the rest: meaning, you could come in at any chapter and enjoy it without having to know what had happened before. And for the most part I think I succeeded in doing this, but after chapter 15 I started to be more creative and work in a running storyline. It wasn't too complex really, just a few casual mentions of things that had happened in later chapters, but it was enough to satisfy me for a while. Chapter 15 also made me start to wonder when and how long I could extend the series for. I loved getting feedback from people and hearing from them, but just how venerable WAS Dean Simonds and his exploits? From chapters 16-21, I kind of toyed with the continuing story line idea, but this was an important time as I realized how long I wanted to make the series AND I came up with a running storyline that I could hopefully use for a few chapters to make people not only want to read it chapter by chapter but also to give myself something interesting to write (admittedly, writing the same old stuff but in different locations can get kind of boring). So in chapter 24, I started the assisnation attempt on Dean storyline, weaving it through 4 chapters which had some of the series best stuff (and best feedback) and some of the hottest, most popular women in it. I wasn't sure how people would react to the violence in some of the scenes, especially since it was, at least according to feedback I got, fairly intense, but it seemed to go over pretty well, which to me was very surprising. The continuing storyline was a lot of fun but it was also a lot of work, as I was constantly re-reading the parts I had written previously to see what I had done, and often just wrote by whatever came to my head as I put fingers to the keyboard and typed away. There was a few continuity errors in chapters 24-28, but damned if I will point them out to you. What's done is done :) I ended the series with a bang in chapter 30, mostly for two reasons: the first was to answer all the requests I had received over the 1.5 years it took me to finish JOA that I just never could work into the series, and the second was to make the story as memorable as possible and (hopefully) not be accused of not having enough sex in a story or of writing weak endings. I liked chapter 30 a lot, but only time will tell how well it sits with people who get through the 29 chapters before it. In the end, JOA taught me a LOT as an erotica writer. It taught me about hitting on popular and unpopular celebs, and that sometimes your suspicions on who will be well received are right on the mark and sometimes they aren't. Surprises to me in terms of the massive popularity that the chapters received, not to mention the reads the chapters got include the Jennifer Lopez chapter (23), the Denise Richards chapter (14) and the Sarah Michelle Gellar (24) chapter. You would think that hot, "it" girls would be why these are so popular, but that wasn't always the case. I was surprised to see that my Britney Spears (13), Cameron Diaz (29) and Penelope Cruz (16) chapters all were not very well liked and as such scored low on sites like Eroticstories.com and Literotica.com. This I think has a lot to do with the frame of mind I was in when I wrote them, particularly the Britney Spears chapter, which I wrote to get people to stop asking me to do one on her (I wrote a much better one that you can find on this site called "Britney & The Photos" for those of you interested in the teen queen). Most of all, I learned that who people love in the celeb world and who they want to read about is a very fickle and unpredictable thing, but is something that makes working in this genre all the more exciting. And what about Dean Simonds? Why do I think he works so well in the series? Well, first off I think that Dean represents just about every straight male who is abreast of pop culture. He's a regular, grounded guy who was thrown into a world of glamour: he is a sort of outsider to Tinseltown around him, but somehow manages every time to get the girl and (if possible), save the day. I described Dean's general traits early on in the series but as time wore on, I started to leave it out, except for the size of his cock, just to make him seem more anonymous and faceless. Readers knew that he was apt at not only pointing out the flaws in some of Hollywood's most pompous situations but also could handle himself under pressure like a normal person. And as for his big penis size...well, that was something I later regretted, because it seemed to conflict with the "everyman" idea that I had created around the character. Rest assured that in my other pieces of fiction that I will undoubtedly publish, the male characters will be a bit more, ah, realistic in genital size :) Before I close this out, I would just like to thank everyone who made writing this series so much fun. The people who gave me great ego boosts and story ideas when things started to flag on my own, the people who offered me criticism for things that they deemed unrealistic or not possible or just plain dumb and especially the people who actually read the series like a critical reader and saw it as more than a piece of stroke work, as something that I put a lot of time in creating. JOA, I hope, can stand near the many other celeb series out there like The Harem, Showtime and Shadows of Hollywood. I tried to make it as timeless as possible so that 10, 20 years down the road, people who knew who the celebs were at the time can still enjoy them as they remained frozen in time through out the series, never aging and staying beautiful and pedastaled forever. Finally, a bit of some trivia with the series that some of you might appreciate or find humorous: - The name "Simonds" came from a movie poster in the room where my computer is of the Adam Sandler movie "Happy Gilmore". The movie was produced by a guy named Robert Simonds, whom I don't know anything about but whose last name I borrowed because I needed a name for the main character. - The Dugan character also came from this same poster (Dennis Dugan) as well as two individuals names for Julie Carr, the assistant to Dean who goes psycho. (Julie Bowen, who can now be seen on the television show "Ed" and Warren Carr, another person involved in that movie.). No offense or harm was meant to any of the real life people I used in this story, I was simply desperate for character names :) - Dean Simonds is also the name of the main character in my first ever erotic story, "Natalie Portman: Rave Girl", which can be found on my site. - The scene where Jennifer Love Hewitt accidentally puts on porn is based on something that actually happened with my girlfriend's best friend. It was quite funny in real life and, at my girlfriend's heeding, I couldn't resist throwing it into the series. - Wondering how I wrote the scene where Dean's car goes underwater so well? That actually happened to me, albeit not nearly as intense. Driving home late one night during a storm, the road flooded and my car ran off the road and sank over the dashboard into a ditch. Scary stuff. - I slipped in a few particular numbers all through out the series: the number 8 pops up a lot when it was appropriate and my birthday, 4/17, is also in there at least once. See if you can find all the placings I did. Thanks again for reading the series, not to mention this lonnnggg afterword, and stay tuned for more stories to come in the future. Carnage Jackson |
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