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I talked about Sabriel in an earlier podcast episode, closer to when The Slap was released.
Transcript
Somewhere near me, someone has a problem. The problem, they’re convinced, it can be fixed with a hammer. Now I swear, I can barely if at all hear them if I walk down the street, but it’s echoing through the attic spaces above these old row houses. If you don’t know what a row house is, imagine like… a whole line of town houses, basically. Everyone kinda sharing a wall, and apparently attic space as well.
It’s not like impossibly loud, but the little green meter on the right hand side of my screen, it bounces around in the same rhythm as the hammering. So I do know that means the microphone picks it up. Now Monday I didn’t record a single word, because I don’t like repeating myself. And so as the week went on, I don’t know, it just basically became like a comedy in its own way, of weird little noises.
So I’m recording this mostly train-of-thought podcast episode. It might make it to you a little later than usual, but you’ll forgive me. You’ll simply be excited to hear from me, right? And if the hammering actually starts while I’m talking then I’m just going to roll with it.
Now recently I put Party of Perversion, that session, on sale for a little while. Now in case someone, anyone was wondering what method I use to decide which sessions to put on sale, I confess there… ooh, I confess.
Okay, take us to like a little dark room, you can choose which side of the screen you’re sitting on. You can even be on my side, come sit with me, right? Well, there is no grand marketing scheme behind it. Now I know, maybe there should be. The truth is I know that the whole FOMO it works. Hell, it works on me. So yeah, there’s some people out there who want to listen to my sessions… and I don’t mind helping them make a choice. Look at this one, it’s five bucks cheaper than usual!
And as far as choosing the sessions goes, it’s simply that I’ll get a message that mentions a session, or reminds me of a session, and I want to make it easier for my listeners to explore it. So there’s no divine spark, or marketing team right there on speed dial. It’s just pure whimsy, that’s all.
So Party of Perversion was picked up by a few people, a few of my lovely listeners who hadn’t heard it before… and that was fun, because I have some comments on it now, some new takes. And I love these fresh perspectives.
And then on a semi-recent Friday, I was sitting in a tea room with my laptop, basically vacillating over what to create for this week. And actually, I was also writing a pros and cons list of publishing a few short stories that I’ve written. I’m still considering a few different venues, few different ways of doing it, and of course there would likely be an audiobook. I suspect it would be quite easy for me to find someone to record my words, right?
Oh and then I was also thinking about Sabriel. Now it’s funny how Sabriel sessions come to be. They basically never start out as Sabriel sessions. I’ve had a few people ask me about the name… now I do get that in certain cultures the name Sabriel it might come across as quite feminine. That’s actually not the goal. It’s similar to like… Gabriel. That type of name. So anyway, that’s Sabriel. The first Sabriel Session is Violet, and that came to be, before I even had a name for this character. This person… this Eternal Suitor.
Now Violet is as much about how it feels to be a seducer, as it is about being the… seductee? I’m sure that’s a word, it just sounds nicer than “target”, or “victim”. Right, I know… some of your are like “No, use victim!” you like that better.
But Violet brought about that whole idea of having a certain someone who’s the subject of that kind of play. It’s pure hypnokink, right? I know that I’ve explained that before, but let’s tread back over familiar ground. You enjoy that, right? I know how many of you listen to Press Play every morning… and just as many have decided they’d rather reinforce the POUR trigger every night before sleep.
That’s actually a perfect example. It isn’t at all about the traditional BDSM, Femdom kink. You know I love some worship, or some chains, or some mild feminization… or more. But I’m never going to be one of those expert rope tops who can make beautiful harnesses. I can do a very nice mermaid tail. And I’m probably always going to be out-knotted by boy-scouts and fishermen alike. It’s a bit too fiddly.
But hypno for the sake of hypno, it’s the Sabriel wheelhouse. I’ve always enjoyed this conversational style, with lots of confusion and poetic language. Oh, and strange, half-remembered references to pop culture. I love getting a message from someone that says basically “I love such-and-such session, but I was just thinking about it while I was cooking, gardening, showering… whatever… and I realized that it is riddled with Madonna lyrics.” or “I’ve heard X three times before, but this time I realized that you were describing this movie scene and now I have to figure out what streaming platform it’s on.”
I admit for me, it’s sometimes… like over the weekend, wandering through some shops, and it seems like everybody is (for the little indie ones) they’re trying to match their music to their merchandise even moreso than their customers. Oh man, it’s crazy to get all these different songs in your head, and one of them was actually from the 50s, and I only had a little snippet of it, and it took a very deep dive into lyrics to just figure out what the song happened to be.
So that’s why you get a bit of that in the sessions, there’s songs from all eras and other little references, because if they’re plaguing me and they want to be in my brain, I’m going to put them in your brain as well.
No these sessions like PTTFO and Party of Perversion that take a simple narrative and turn it on its head. They cut and chop and change perspective. They have timelines that are deliberately hazy. So I’m not even certain if those two use the Sabriel trigger itself, but they’re written for him, and he is you. If you’re listening to this, I have no doubt that you’d like to be Sabriel.
And then there’s narratives like The Apartment, The Trick-or-Treat session, and The Slap. I am going to be talking more about The Slap in an upcoming podcast episode. The first two, they’re are about amnesia play. The Apartment, too, is about Mind-Over-Body type control. The Trick-or-Treat sessions are subtle mindfuckery. If you’ve never listened to them, well… no spoilers. No spoilers for The Last of Us, either… it is a decent show though, I was surprised by that.
Now the only thing I’ll say is that both sessions is they’re about lying to Sabriel. Big, fat, bold-faced lies that leave him feeling embarrassed, or satisfied, depending on what he chose. Oh, and they’re not spooky, even if they are Hallowe’en sessions. If I ever venture further into the supernatural, that’ll be in the Listening Room, for sure.
Now The Slap, it was going to be a Listening Room session. I was writing it at the same time Financial Domination one was in the works, and it felt similar in tone. And as I mentioned I’m not going to tell you more about The Slap at this moment because I do have something planned for that coming up.
So anyway, when it comes to Sabriel it’s on my mind because for the first time, last week, I set about writing a Sabriel story that actually is a Sabriel story from the very beginning. It’s written for Sabriel, as opposed to being a circumstance that he sort-of fell into. Now it is in the early stages right now, I think it might not appear until April but we’ll see.
Now last week I did release a 15 minute sleep session as a precursor to a longer project that’s in the same wheelhouse there. Now I’ve worked with the editor and a musically-inclined listener to make something that ties together hypnotic techniques and those binaural beats. We listened to Weightless by Marconi Union. If you haven’t heard that, you need to listen to that. And then devoured everything we could about why it works, and made something that brought together all the best parts of hypno, brain-trickery, and music into something cohesive.
Now I have to say I am getting replies back from the sleep one, and I am just thrilled. I absolutely love it when you get how the music and the words are just… picked and polished and perfected to be something that I want to be in your ears.
So I think today’s rambles happen to be most of… a bit of just about everything. Looking forward to hearing your feedback, especially on the different sessions, and I’m trying my very best to get this newest Sabriel one done, because it’s… I don’t know, it’s just that story that you just have to share.
