Forty Years of HOM Fiction

I'm realizing it's forty years since I started writing HOM fiction. Forty years, plus or minus a few months.

I was in junior high, eighth grade, when I secretly started writing about "mouthholding," as I called it. This was back in 1976-77, so it was back before the era of the Internet, in fact back before the days of home computers. I wrote with pencil in a big leatherbound calendar book which I kept carefully hidden in my room.

At first I just jotted down a few brief remarks, as if in a diary. Soon I was writing at greater length. I wrote about mouthholding incidents I'd experienced or witnessed. I wrote out dreams or fantasies I'd had. I wrote fictional stories about mouthholding, or female hands or long fingernails, or mouthtaping. Once in a while I included pencil sketches.

You understand, back then I had no idea how to classify or categorize my secret fascination with mouthholding. I had no way to connect or relate it to anything else I'd ever heard of. I'd never heard of fetishes. My mouthholding fascination was simply there as an unintelligible and incomprehensible secret inside of me, a meteorite of absurdity which had fallen into my life.

My big sister held my mouth a lot, to shut me up, to keep me quiet, or sometimes just for the hell of it, and I secretly liked it. I was also electrified when I got my mouth held a few times by one grade school teacher, and once by an older sister of a friend of mine, and once by another older sister of that same friend. And I witnessed a few other "mouthholds" by teachers (always female), and by several other females in my environment.

I wrote it all up in my hidden calendar book. But I could never understand why these incidents affected me so strongly. And living back in those pre-Internet days, I had no way to find out if there was anyone else like me, or if I was the only person in all the world who was strangely fascinated with mouthholding.

By the time I was sixteen, I wrote two multi-chapter stories set in a vague future sexual dystopia, a post-apocalyptic world where an elite class of dominant large-handed women known as the Arsenal ruled over the community through mouthholding and mouthtaping and physical domination. The Ballad of Going Egyptian, and The Ballad of Jacki the Strong... I remember one leading woman in the Arsenal was based on my hot high school math teacher. :-)

The closest thing to these two stories in my latter-day HOM fiction is my story, Aviatrix. Where did I come up with such a strange fictional world back in high school, growing up in a small farm town? There were some really odd elements in there, such as the notion of the "oxygen diet," or breathing being optional, which originated in my two Ballads and has surfaced again in Aviatrix, and in my Tiger's Eye novel, and in chapter four of my newest story, Smotherflight.

The two Ballads were well written, and I wish I still had them today. Because after several years I grew fearful of my parents or my sister finding my calendar book, and I burnt it.

Then I went off to college, and in those years I was writing more mouthholding fiction, writing new pieces and rewriting some of my old vanished stories, at first by pencil and then by typewriter.

Several years out of school I got my first computer, though I was not yet online. Still, having a computer revolutionized my private writing hobby. I transcribed my older written stories to my computer and shredded the original hard copies. I started writing more and more stories, dozens of stories, short stories and novellas and essays and autobiographical self-analysis. I wrote up an alphabetical dictionary (The AdTape Vocab: "Mmmmhh, mmmm hmmm mmmmmmh!") of words and elements and motifs from my stories. I rewrote and expanded the two Ballads. Also I wrote a complete 64,000-word novel, The Tiger's Eye, and an unfinished 47,000-word novel, The Adventures of an English Public Schoolboy.

It wasn't until 1999 that we got a home Internet connection, and soon I stumbled onto the online HOM community. Mr. Smother's SMN, HOM Bondage's SH! Online, Mark's movie database on GeoCities, and other HOM websites. It was a revelation to me: So I'm not the only one in the world! Those first several years online, I was mostly just a lurker. I only rarely spoke up and commented in the HOM community. But I continued working on my longtime private hobby of writing HOM fiction.

Then came June 3, 2003, "a day that will live in infamy." My hard drive suddenly went out on me, and with it, almost everything I'd written up till then. Everything was lost, except for four short stories which I happened to have on a floppy disk. Right, I kept backups of videoclips and the like on 100-meg zipdisks, but somehow I thought it was "more secure" not to make backups of my stories. Given the subject matter, I hardly dared try to get it retrieved. Since then I make backups often!

But I kept on writing, and in 2005, inspired by Jenny from Sweden and Harold and other early HOM fiction writers, I began sharing my HOM fiction online at one of Mr. Smothers' discussion forums. Soon, early 2006, I started up Tales from the Yellow Hand, and here we are all these years later with something in the vicinity of 120 pieces of HOM fiction, including many many short stories, and my (second) Tiger's Eye novel, and a couple of novellas.

So you see that Tales from the Yellow Hand is but the tip of the iceberg. Behind my stories on this blog stands a history that goes back forty years. I sometimes wonder how many people out there were toiling away, writing niche fetish stories in private with no hope, no dreams of an audience, in those years and decades before the Internet brought us all together...

It's been a few years since I've written a letter like this to my readers. Probably this fortieth anniversary is a good time to do it again, to explain to my readers new and old what my site is all about... a blog devoted to hand fetish, nail fetish, and female-dominant hand-over-mouth, with a strong but not exclusive emphasis on femdom HOM fiction. And like I said, it has a long history behind it...

Best regards,
Jim