IF YOU ARE HERE BECAUSE YOU ARE JUDGING "SOUNDBITE" ANCILLA AND WANTED TO AVOID THE EXPLICIT SECTIONS: Read on. This page will give you the context you need to understand the sections of Ancilla that you are assigned to judge.

IF YOU ARE HERE BECAUSE YOU READ ANCILLA AND WANT TO SEE THE COLLAGES I POST ON INSTAGRAM TO PROMOTE IT: Read on.

IF YOU HAVE NOT YET READ ANCILLA, AND YOU DON'T WANT TO SEE SPOILERS: Skip this page. And avoid reading the text that goes with the art in the pages that follow.

CHARACTERS

I chose to leave my characters unnamed, for reasons I elaborate on in the Afterword to Ancilla. Major characters get use-names/nicknames. These use-names are subject to change as the roles the characters play to each other evolve. 

ancilla

"ancilla," or "assistant/servant/handmaiden/house slave/attachment" (later, "eromene," which is Homeric Greek for "beloved") is the protagonist. After the prologue, at the start of the story, she is turning twenty-one years old. She is an only child who comes from a wealthy background, and is a product of private schools and an unhealthy amount of religious fanaticism (not that there is anything such as a healthy amount of fanaticism). When her parents discover her bisexuality, she is forced to choose between "conversion therapy" and being disowned. She chooses the latter, and thus loses her family, her college scholarship and enrollment, and her financial security in one fell swoop. As a result, she is a tightly wound bundle of traumas. Her path toward making peace with her past and moving on from it is an inevitable part of her quest for truth and enlightenment, and her personal growth is a main focus of the plot. 

All three novels in my Magnum Opus trilogy will be told from her perspective. 

"ancilla" is the title her mentor gives her at the start of their formal relationship. It's a complicated word, due to the fact that it means something different now than it did in ancient Rome. These days, we hear about things being "ancillary." We don't have ancillae. That is not part of our culture. Therefore, as such, "ancilla" is an imperfect label. It reflects the imperfect awkwardness of her relationship with her mentor.

I avoid labels almost as much as I avoid proper names in the Magnum Opus. The word "bisexual" does get used to describe my protagonist, as do the words "sexual submissive" and "switch" (she is the latter; she takes the former role for instructive purposes, which is another main focus of the plot of Ancilla). Labels that describe her, but that I don't use explicitly, are "cis woman," "polyamorous," "autistic," "Fire bender," and "psychic vampire." However, she does not learn in this first installment of my trilogy that she is a vampire.

Magister

"Magister," or "Teacher" (later, "Erastes," which is Homeric Greek for "Lover") is forty-one when he meets the woman he eventually assigns the name of "ancilla." He is shy, reserved, and in his own way, almost ridiculously wholesome. 

I created him in response to toxic stereotypes I've seen in works of "dark romance" and "erotic fiction," and no, those stereotypes were not limited to those associated with the character of Christian Grey in the Fifty Shades franchise. Where dominant male main characters in such genres are often insanely wealthy, "Magister" is on a budget; where they are controlling, "Magister" is supportive and wants to help my protagonist find her own way; where they are aggressive alpha males, so-called "natural" dominants, "Magister" is happy to let other people take the lead in situations that don't have anything to do with sex; where they exhibit some signs of machismo and toxic masculinity, "Magister" is secure enough in his manliness that he can have a passion for things like cooking, opera, reading, and playing tabletop role-playing games without a need to overcompensate for his "odd" interests by acting hyper-masculine. He does have a jealous, possessive streak, and it eventually becomes a problem, but he does his best to keep it under control. I don't treat his jealousy as a character virtue. I also don't treat his shyness and introversion, his intellectualism, his emotional vulnerability, and his eccentricity as flaws.

His function in Ancilla is to be my protagonist's initiator and tutor. He teaches her in multiple areas, including philosophy, art history, comparative literature, Thelemic magick, and of course, sex. I invoke an obsolete, mostly dead trope for this novel: Erastes and eromenos - Lover and beloved. In its original form it underpinned the social structure of parts of ancient Greece. An older, well-connected man would take a younger man roughly between the ages of fifteen and twenty under his wing and be his sponsor. And lover. This is obviously not healthy today, and has rightly aged as well as milk, so I tweaked it a little. Both "ancilla" and "Magister" are adults when they start their relationship with each other, and I do my best to make it obvious that he is not preying on her or exploiting her in any way. The relationship is something she requests. And "Magister" is not particularly well-connected or privileged, so there is no power imbalance other than what is necessary for the purposes of the relationship itself, and those parameters are negotiated.

As with my protagonist, "Magister" gets a few implicit traits that I choose to not name in the narrative. He is heterosexual, demisexual, naturally monogamous, autistic, and a cis man. He is also a vampire and an Air bender. Unlike my protagonist, he is perfectly aware of his vampiric nature. He never gets around to talking about vampirism with her, and yes, that is one of the few unhealthy things about their relationship. His strong Air affinity makes him intellectual, but it also makes him a bit of a ditz at times. Air-headedness. 

"Magister" and "ancilla" have the misfortune to be soulmates in the Platonic sense (Google The Symposion if you are unfamiliar with the concept). This, despite the finite nature of the Teacher/student relationship. The way they cope with this is another important part of the plot.

Lydia

Lydia is a secondary character who only appears in two chapters: "Binah" and "Chokmah." She is important enough that "ancilla" bestows a nickname on her. She gets to be the encroaching hypoteneuse in a budding love triangle that has "Magister" and "ancilla" as its cathetoi. Lucky her.

THE PLOT

My protagonist encounters the man who will be the male main character of this novel in a bookstore, in a classic "meet cute." He is shy, so she asks him out on a date, Sadie Hawkins-style, and one thing leads to another. Upon finding out that he is very experienced in both ceremonial magic and sexual dominance, she begs him to take her on as his apprentice in both arts, which he does. 

She attempts to keep her food insecurity and dire poverty a secret from him, which is as successful as it is healthy. He supports her in a number of ways. Upon finding that she misses her college classes, he tutors her in some academic areas, to occupy her mind; when he discovers that she is starving, he gives her food. Eventually he moves her in with him so that her living conditions will be better and so she can afford to pay tuition for classes at the local public university. By this time, they have realized that theirs is not just a relationship of learning, but also one of profound love. 

Unfortunately, they are not perfectly compatible. She is polyamorous, bisexual, and leans more toward sexual sadism and dominance than not. She craves another partner to meet those needs. Also, due to her youth, she has a few wild oats to sow, and when she meets a potential girlfriend in a class she is taking in college, chemistry happens. He is monogamous, however, and does not know how to deal with his jealousy of someone who can meet the needs he cannot meet for "ancilla," even if the other partner is purely hypothetical and in the future. This is ultimately what tears them apart. 

Ironically, they separate after conducting a private wedding ceremony that unites their souls together as husband and wife not just for this life, but for all eternity. 

They do not get to reunite until the third book in the trilogy, Adept. Necromancy is involved. (He's a ghost by then).

Ancilla is explicit. There is more to the plot than sex, but "ancilla" and "Magister" are both BDSM edge players, meaning they play hard and sometimes dark, to a point that is potentially controversial in the BDSM community; and they go to extremes with kink that push or even cross the boundaries of what is safe or sane (everything does, however, remain consensual); their relationship is founded in part on "ancilla's" desire to learn how to do certain things to her lovers, and the two of them do not make love behind closed doors. People who want to read Ancilla and understand it while avoiding the explicit stuff can do so by reading this page, then reading the captions for the art in this book, before reading the sections of "soundbite" Ancilla that do not have an asterisk (*) marking the chapter. There are times that I wish Wattpad made use of page numbers. then I could just tell readers which pages to avoid if they wish to avoid reading sexually explicit material. Oh, well.

OR YOU COULD READ WHAT I PITCHED TO THE 2024 WATTY JUDGES (they didn't like it, by the way. Quelle surprise)

LOGLINE:

"ancilla," a recently disowned book nerd, meets and falls for a mysterious older man who becomes a positive influence on her life, but then she must choose between her developing identity and the most profound love she has ever known.

PLOT SUMMARY  (447 words)

Northeast Ohio, 1991.

The unnamed narrator, a bisexual college student who was disowned for refusing to pray the gay away, meets a shy, mysterious older man in a bookstore, a man who she later recognizes as a librarian she's seen in the downtown branch of the public library. They begin dating.

When she finds out he is experienced in both ceremonial magick and BDSM, she begs him to apprentice her and help her acquire skills and achieve enlightenment. He starts teaching her philosophy, humanities, and Western esoterica in Oxford-style tutorials, and teaching her sex and magick in practica.

Her studies progress, taking her to some surprising extremes.

After a brutal initiation rite causes her to lose part of her soul, her tutor calls it back by weaving a spell out of his own love, and their pedagogical relationship blossoms into a full-blown affair.

In addition to being neurodivergent nerds of a feather, magick-workers, and an almost perfect fit for each other, they are also both vampires, and they begin to feed symbiotically on each other's souls and life force. To put it in "ancilla's" own words, they "drink from each other as if they were wine."

They are true soulmates.

However, their relationship has unresolved, serious problems, to wit: their twenty-year age gap, "ancilla's" reluctance to reveal awkward things such as her grim living conditions and financial hardship, and "Magister's" need to settle down and monogamously commit and his fear that doing so will ruin his beloved's chance to have a full life. His insecurity is only made worse when he walks in on "ancilla" sharing a passionate kiss with a woman she met in her college classes.

"Ancilla" is a brilliant pupil, but makes for a problematic partner.

At the end of her studies, "ancilla" and "Magister" marry each other in a private, secret wedding ceremony that binds their souls and fates for all eternity, but that marriage cannot be completely fulfilled in this life. "Magister" informs her that they will be permanently separated once he drops her off at her dorm room at the university an hour to the north, where she has transferred her credits and enrolled full-time.

She spends months in mourning while she goes through vampiric starvation that mimics severe clinical depression, and only comes out of it when she becomes the dominant that "Magister" trained her to be, because sexual dominance has allowed her to feed on a new lover's energy the way "Magister" had been feeding on her, and she on him.

The plot has been structured on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life; each chapter is themed on a sephira and is meant to impart a lesson to both the protagonist and the reader.

I should also mention that the character of "Magister" was created to be the antithesis of every stereotypical, toxic male main character in literature; and Ancilla is my attempt to smash "dark romance" tropes (romanticized abuse), negative stereotypes about bisexual people, bi invisibility, and misrepresented BDSM to smithereens. Let me be clear: this novel is a wrecking ball.