Commentary for "Upside Down and Inside Out" - or, why and how I stuffed ~18 kinks into an SGA story

This month's mini-challenge at kink_bingo is "all you can kink," a.k.a. How Many Kinks Can You Stuff Into One Fanwork? (Insert joke about kink fisting/stretching here.) Lacking the time and/or focus to create something new right now, I took a look at preexisting stories and learned that my personal record for number of distinct, kink_wiki-recognized kinks contained in a single fanfic appears to be about 18.

(The mini-challenge may have inspired the creation of a spreadsheet to find out. There may have been illustrative bar graphs. Please don't judge me.)

The honor belongs to Upside Down and Inside Out (also on the AO3), an SGA Santa Madness story I wrote a few years ago for companion in kinkiness sabinelagrande and which was subsequently podficced—for Kink Bingo, even—by Sabine herself. As though anticipating this mini-challenge, one of the first comments on the fic was: "How did you get all of that into that space? Holy skamoly."*

It's odd; before Kink Bingo came along, I didn't really think in terms of individual kinks that could be strung together to make a story. I wrote what I thought was hot, or interesting, or to explore something I'd seen or heard about. The stories were all quite kinky—my early writing is filled with bondage and toys and pervertibles and breathplay and issues of consent, etc. etc.—but except for maybe bondage, the elements didn't always stand apart, like how I just categorized them, you know? Then Bingo happened, and the fic-writing process changed. Kinks got quantified. Kinks became a basis on which to build a plot. I haven't been able to shake that way of thinking ever since.

I'd like to think and write more about that one day, but the point here is that "Upside Down and Inside Out" fell somewhere in between the two story-building methods. Sabine's request included 11 kinks, and I wanted to include as many of them as possible. That meant thinking about which of them combined well and how they might lead to a scenario. The brainstorming went something like: "If John and Rodney [one of the requested pairings] are in a room because aliens demand they perform a ritual [check AMTDI off the list] that involves John tied up and hanging from the ceiling [ditto suspension + bondage], and if John's been switched into a woman's body through offscreen shenanigans and he wants Rodney to take him out for a spin anyway [gender play + bottom!John], then Rodney can do stuff like spank and finger him while he's hanging there [spanking], taking control and talking all the while [dom/sub + verbal humiliation/dirty talk]…"

The story took shape like puzzle pieces fitting together. ( I rounded it out with more stuff I thought was sexy, yet it wasn't until this week that I realized how many other kinks got folded in there. )

Comments? Thoughts? Questions?



*You will see the irony of this when deelaundry, who left that comment, posts her mini-challenge fill in the next few days.