I am a fifty-five year old criminal defense attorney living in the northeastern portion of the United States. I have written a series of BDSM novels exploring the emotional and sensual extremes of human behavior. The attraction of the BDSM format is that there is juxtaposed the two extremes of human sexuality. On the one side is the subject, powerless to regulate her sexual life, exchanging, either willingly or unwillingly, her control over her body for the freedom to experience its pleasures without the responsibility to govern herself according to conventional sexual mores. On the other side is the actor, a man, or men, who have abandoned any and all restrictions on the pursuit of pleasure and are able to remorselessly strip away the humanity of the women who they make their victims. There are few among us, I would hazard to guess, regardless of gender, who have not wished to be one or the other, or both, at some time in our lives.

But who among us is capable of reaching the true apotheosis of desire? The characters in my novels often struggle with their fates. Shame and remorse creep in after a newly made slave has undergone the most explosive sexual climax she has ever experienced, at the hands of a master who casually sends her back to her cell or hands her over to another when he has finished with her. A master, his burning lust finally abated and satisfied, rues, if only momentarily, the objectification and suffering of his female victim.