ISSUE 1 AUTHOR INTERVIEW: BETHANY BAKER
What’s better than a size difference mommy kink smut story? How about a size difference smut story where the mommy is a sexy dinosaur? Bethany Baker, author of “Sapient Species Special Sexual Services” (featured in NYGEL’s first ebook issue), chatted with us about finding scaly inspiration!
NYGEL: What piece of media was your gateway into monsterfuckery?
BB: I'm perhaps unusual (or maybe not!) in having jumped straight into the deep end through the infamous Corruption of Champions game by Fenoxo. For those unfamiliar, it's a text-based RPG game centered around the fantasy of exploring a corrupted world full of imps, demons, centaurs, spider-girls, plant monsters, and more. There are random encounters as with any RPG game, and the winner gets to, let's just say, "have their way with" the loser. It's hard to beat the density of CoC in terms of getting introduced to a wide variety of monsters and encounters! Needless to say, I was hooked.
NYGEL: What creature or character is your biggest 'hear me out'?
BB: It's gotta be the eldritch horrors for me. The formless, nameless, sapient-but-not-in-any-way-recognizable-to-human-consciousness betentacled creatures. Sometimes you just want to be thrall to an otherworldly being, y'know? Saves on rent!
NYGEL: Did anything in particular inspire you to write this story?
BB: I'm a "grab bag" sort of writer, where I like setting myself the challenge of throwing out a series of unrelated or semi-related ideas and finding the connection between them. I was on an ovi kick and decided it had been too long since I wrote something scaly. My pieces for this one were eggs + something dragon adjacent + femdom + explicit consent + make it weird. Once I find the thread that ties it all together, the rest crystalizes around that!
NYGEL: If you could add a monster romance to any existing story, what would you choose and why?
BB: Funnily enough, I get inspiration for a lot of my stories by thinking in this way! I love to look at classic action and horror plots, then say, "Okay but what if monsters and what if spicy." Some stories stay close enough to the original material that I publish them as fan works, such as my Little Shop of Horrors parody, "Breed Me, Seymour" which features a femdom Audrey II x Seymour plot. Others are more loosely inspired, such as my upcoming romantasy featuring a grumpy wolfish demon and a black cat FMC, whose dynamic borrows a bit from the Bayonetta prequel game, Cereza and the Lost Demon.
NYGEL: What would you like to see more of when it comes to weird and spicy fiction?
BB: I'm a sucker for nerdy "research" erotica. Like hmmm we must analyze the reproductive rituals of this newly discovered species. Works like that evoke a sense of curiosity and openness around spicy encounters that many of us lose as we get older, or have difficulty finding to begin with. There's almost a playfulness with the reader, daring them to keep their "research" hat on even as the scenario gets hotter and hotter. I'm also a big fan of inconvenient arousal, so there's a lot to love in that kind of story!
Want to read more scaly smut? Check out “Sapient Species Special Sexual Services” in Issue 1, and be sure to leave room for… eggs 😉
Bethany Baker (she/they) writes monster romance that blends the familiar and the fantastical, the erotic and the emotional, the silly and the sexy—into one downright tasty concoction.
When she's not baking cookies or writing smut, she enjoys collecting weird animal facts and going for walks with her partner. She has two cats, who go by "Disaster Bean" and "Chaos Baby" more often than their actual names.
https://www.instagram.com/bakecookieswritesmut/
