Walking into a trap may be the only way to create one.

Danger runs high for Vito when he arrives at the Eternal Dungeon, escorted by guards. In this royal dungeon, prisoners are "searched" for their crimes, by torture and by more subtle means.

Vito knows that he will be searched. But he has his own searching to accomplish, and to do so he must undergo the scrutiny of the queendom's most accomplished torturer.

Vito was beginning to wonder whether this dungeon's prisoners were questioned in pitch darkness. That was a matter of some personal concern to him.

In the battle-weary lands of the Great Peninsula, only one fate is worse than being taken prisoner by the Lieutenant: being taken prisoner if you are the Lieutenant.

As the world's most skilled torturer struggles with his change of fortune, he finds that his fate is intertwined with the destinies of an idealistic army commander, an affectionate prisoner, and a protégé who reveres the Lieutenant's art . . . but is on the wrong side of the conflict.

The beginning of the end for him (or so it seemed at the time) came in the moment that he stepped into the shadow of Capital Mountain and was assaulted by a stranger.

Title: Adversaries.
Author: Dusk Peterson.
Where to find me: Website, DW/IJ/LJ/Tumblr/list.
Series: The Three Lands, a fantasy series on friendship, romantic friendship, romance, and betrayal in times of war and peace. The series is inspired by conflicts between nations during the Roman Empire and the Dark Ages. You don't need to have read the other stories in the series to understand this one.
Categories: Original gen and original pre-het.
Length: Novella (34,000 words).
Feedback: Yes, please.
Rating: PG-13.
Warnings: Boilerplate warning for all my stories.
Summary: 

When an endangered slave visits an imprisoned spy, she discovers that she has more options in life than she had thought.

Life is not easy for Serva, the bastard daughter of the King of Daxis. Alternately treated as a slave and as a princess, she is distrusted on all sides . . . especially by her old rival from the nursery, her cousin the Prince.

When the Prince begins to hint that she is a threat to his ambitions, Serva must make a decision that will determine the course of her life. And that decision will determine the fate of a spy who is due to be hanged. . . .

Lying on my stomach in the passage, I held my breath. Knowing the man who spoke, I had no doubts as to what he was suggesting.

Title: Lost Haven: a master, his servant, and a disappearing island.
Author: Dusk Peterson.
Where to find me: Website, DW/IJ/LJ/list.
Series: Waterman, a historical fantasy series and retrofuture series inspired by the Chesapeake Bay oyster wars, boarding school rivalries in the 1910s, and 1960s visions of things to come. You don't need to have read the other stories in the series to understand this one.
Categories: Original slash. Age-of-sail fiction set on an island. Liege-master/liegeman and master/servant (part of a servantfic/slavefic series).
Length: Short story (5,000 words).
Note: This is a holiday gift story for my readers, written in response to a prompt by Yingtai, and is also written in response to the 50 Darkfics challenge.
Feedback: Yes, please.
Rating: PG.
Summary: Amidst a servant's nightmare, can a haven of hope be found?

Meredith has brought his beloved master to the island where he spent the happiest days of his childhood. But when danger descends upon them, they must seek refuge, and Meredith must confront the tantalizing sorrows and rewards of change.

Then he remembered (on the edge of his memory, like a smudge of land on the horizon of the Bay) the reason that he and his father had lived alone on an island where once hundreds of people had lived.

Plus, three recently reissued stories:

The New Boy (Michael's House). Running a business seemed a simple enough matter: you learned what the patron wanted, and you forced an employee to satisfy his needs. Then along came the new boy. ¶ PG-13; gen/slash; historical fantasy; prostitutefic; chan in the subplots (but no onscreen sex); e-book.

Night Shadow (Darkling Plain). A prince who could see beyond his borders but not see the people around him. . . . An enemy who would take any measure to get what he wanted. .. . And now a stranger has brought news to the prince of an approaching danger. ¶ PG; gen; historical fantasy; lord/liegeman fic; prisoner fic; e-book.

Re-creation (The Three Lands). What can you give a slave who, by law, can own nothing? That is the question faced by Peter, the teenage heir to the throne of an empire. Despite his father's desire that the imperial heir maintain a formal distance from servants, Peter finds himself drawn in friendship to the younger boy who serves as his slave. But a shocking revelation on the eve of the New Year forces Peter to confront his own motives for keeping the slave close by. And that in turn will help him understand the deeper meaning of the gift-giving festival. ¶ PG-13; gen/slash; fantasy; slavefic; royalty/subject fic; underage characters (but no sex); e-book and online fiction.

In the Silence (Life Prison)

The prisoner can't speak. He can barely see. He experiences only fear and the faint whispers of something he had once known.

But an intruder into his secure retreat from danger will pull him into awareness of what stands before him. What stands there is renewed danger. . . and the hope of something more.

¶ PG-13; gen/slash; e-book.

Images came, like flickers of a candle: Dark stones. Dark metal. Faint fire. A spoon in his hand, as someone urged him to eat. A stinking pit that he knew he was duty-bound to fill. A loom nearby that he vaguely remembered he had once known how to work, but which now stood as silent as the rest of his world.

Cell-mates (Life Prison)

Sentenced to life in prison, Tyrrell didn't have many opportunities for bed-play . . . unless he could count what the guards did to him as "play." So his future seemed brighter when he was paired with a cell-mate he'd been eyeing for a long time with affection and lust.

If only Tyrrell could keep from becoming his cell-mate's latest murder victim . . .

¶ PG-13; gen/slash/het; asexual and bisexual characters; e-book.

They had to settle the issue of sex first.

Never (The Eternal Dungeon)

She was attending the ball at the palace to dance. That was all. Which made it annoying to face a proposal of marriage from a guard who was distinctly not the sort of man she would ever consider marrying. Certainly not.

It was even more annoying to find that she kept thinking about the man. Why would she want to continue to speak to a guard who rudely implied that she led a frivolous life?

And why oh why were all the balls in the capital suddenly so boring?

¶ PG; het/gen; 50 Darkfics challenge; e-book and online fiction.

He had not seemed a threat at first, even after it became apparent that he was attending as an honored guest. He had no fortune, his face was pleasant but nothing to boast about, and he said not a word about his deeds, though he might easily have done so, with the Queen's medal of honor glittering upon his chest.

Title: Green Ruin.
Author: Dusk Peterson.
Where to find me: Website, DW/IJ/LJ/list.
Series: The Eternal Dungeon, an award-winning historical fantasy series set in a land where the psychologists wield whips.
Categories: Original gen/het/slash. Friendship. Flangst. Humor.
Length: Short story (5,000 words).
Feedback: Yes, please.
Rating: PG-13.
Warnings: Drinking. Boilerplate warning for all my stories.
Note: You can read the story as part of the free PDF zine Wanderlust: A Travel Anthology, edited by T. Spoon for The Slash Pile. The story is also available for sale as HTML and Kindle e-books
Summary: Three guards and a mysterious substance provide a temptation too great to be missed . . . especially when two torturers add their skills to the mix. Soon three very different men – a married man who is committed to respect and honor, a bachelor harboring secret desires, and a soldier with an unfulfilled ambition – will find themselves caught in a trap. Their rescue will come from an unexpected quarter.
 

During the dawn hours at the Eternal Dungeon, as the day shift yawned itself awake and the night shift yawned itself to bed, the talk turned, as it always did, to the injustices of being a guard.

Plus, two recent e-books:

Isolation (Life Prison). A prisoner's life takes an unexpected turn when he learns he may be able to play a role in changing conditions the harsh conditions at Mercy Life Prison. To do so will mean risking what remains of his life, as well as turning away from the only life he has known. What reward can he hope to receive in exchange for such a sacrifice? ¶ PG-13; gen, within a gen/slash series; historical fantasy; prisonfic.

Curious (Life Prison). Backbiting, threats, violent encounters, forbidden desires played out at night and in stark daylight . . . all this Ulick must face in his new job as a prison guard. At the center of the maelstrom lies Merrick, a foul-mouthed prisoner with a notorious reputation. But behind Merrick stands another man, hidden in the shadows, and Ulick's future depends on what that man wants of him. ¶ PG-13; gen/slash; historical fantasy; prisonfic.

Thinking about it, I've decided that bringing Jell-O to a gathering of leathermen wasn't my big mistake. My big mistake was bringing it on the night that Master Trent was attending.

Plus, two recent e-books:

Debt Price (Master/Other). No one would pay his debt price to gain him release from prison. So he sought to pay it himself by offering the only thing he could, his body. But one man would require more. ¶ R; gen/slash; historical fantasy; prisonfic, slavefic.

Searching (The Eternal Dungeon). Walking into a trap may be the only way to create one. ¶ PG-13; gen/slash; historical fantasy; prisonfic.

A decade before e-books and self-publishing shook up the publishing industry, an author faced a dilemma: When you've written stories in a genre that is rarely published, what do you do?

At the beginning of 2002, Dusk Peterson (a journalist, history writer, and aspiring professional novelist) stumbled across the fan fiction community, where tens of thousands of readers and writers enjoyed gay genre fiction, which publishers rarely published.

Peterson's Muse didn't want to write fan fiction. That didn't matter. Gleefully, Peterson began posting male/male stories with original fantasy settings and characters to "slash" fan fiction e-mail lists, at the same plunging into fanficcers' world of online fiction, "songvids," conventions, celebrations of movie premieres, and endless discussions of literature, history, sexuality, and ethics. In the process, Peterson became part of a community that was taking advantage of the Internet's power in order to distribute stories, art, and videos that couldn't be professionally published.

This first volume in the Pixel-Stained series includes reminiscences, stories, and art from yaoi author/artist mdbl; Steve Berman, founder of the gay and lesbian speculative fiction publishing company Lethe Press; J. M. Snyder, founder of the queer fiction press JMS Books; and m/m romance author Emily Veinglory.

The only thing I lost that's a pain to reconstruct is my last letter to you. I'd written a lengthy letter that was along the lines of "OH MY GOD, THE PHANTOM MENACE ZINE ARRIVED, IT'S SO ABSOLUTELY GORGEOUS, I'M ABOUT TO HAVE A HEART ATTACK, YOU'RE AN UTTER SWEETHEART TO SEND ME THIS, KISS KISS KISS—" and as you can imagine, it's a bit hard to reconstruct that type of letter.

The Eternal Dungeon, a historical fantasy series on friendship and romance in a Victorian prison, has proved to be the most popular series I've written. Its omnibus e-book received three honors in the Rainbow Awards 2011, including winning the Best Gay Fantasy category.

The Eternal Dungeon is ten years old this year. Although I conceived the storyline some time in the 1990s, I began to write down the series on March 14, 2002. By the end of that month, I'd written 59,000 words about the Eternal Dungeon. (I spent the first half of the month finishing The True Master and writing all of the Life Prison novella. It was a busy month.) The first volume of the Eternal Dungeon series was serialized on slash fiction lists between September 2012 and January 2013.

If you've never read The Eternal Dungeon, then you can start here, with a story that can be read online or downloaded as a free e-book: The Breaking. (Story summary: The prisoner knew that the Eternal Dungeon was a place where suspected criminals were broken by torture, and he was prepared to hold out against any methods used against him – except the method he could not anticipate. Gen/pre-slash | PG-13 | hurt/comfort | 27,000 words | boilerplate warning for all my stories.)

If you've enjoyed reading the series, join the festivities. Chat with other readers of the series as I publish more Eternal Dungeon stories during the next few weeks. Post about some aspect of the series that intrigues you. Draw a picture of your favorite character. Post a vid about the series. Write a fanfic.  Let me and your fellow fans know how you're celebrating: post here or at my duskpeterson blog (you can post announcements, discussions, and creations there), or drop me an e-mail. If you'd like, I can link to your creation at Shared Universes, which collects links to fanworks inspired by my stories.

In the meantime, I would like to offer my profound thanks to the many slash fiction writers (especially these writers) whose stories spurred me into a frenzy of writing activity in 2002. Without the inspiration of those folks, most of the stories I've written in the ten years since then would not exist.

"Tell me you're gay!" Gary nearly knocked her to the floor as he scrambled over her. "Please tell me you're gay!"

Author: Dusk Peterson.
Where to find me: Website, Dreamwidth blog, InsaneJournal mirror blog, LiveJournal mirror blog, duskpetersonbooks (e-mail list with announcements of my fiction and vids).
Fandom: My original gen/slash Turn-of-the-Century Toughs 'verse. You don't need to have read any of the previous stories to understand these.
Word count: 1200 | 80 | 2200.
Ratings: PG-13 | G | PG-13.
Prompt table and blurbs | Series warnings.

#92: Wax (The Eternal Dungeon). The Record-keeper of the Eternal Dungeon goes in search of a very special supply.

#34: Broken (The Eternal Dungeon AU). Layle Smith is not always the ideal man for the job.

#10: Torture (The Eternal Dungeon/Life Prison crossover AU). The High Seeker of the Eternal Dungeon visits a foreign prison.

He knew what his prisoner's expression would be before he saw it: a mixture of apprehension, wary hope, and – the expression he had come to fear most of all – determination.

Here's a full list of the original slash and original gen stories I've posted online or published as e-books in the past year. They're original works of fantasy, historical fantasy, and contemporary fiction, which feature liegemen, servants, slaves, sailors, prisoners, bottoms, and/or 18-year-old students. (I also list a couple of fan fiction stories, in the litfic category.) As the boilerplate warning for all my stories puts it, "All of the stories feature love or respect, though sometimes it takes a while to get there."

The list below shows both my online fiction and my e-books. If you'd like to buy an HTML e-book containing all of my writings as of July 2010 (over a million words of fiction and 30 collections of fiction recommendations and nonfiction), visit Love in Dark Settings Omnibus. If there are any topics you prefer not to read about, be sure to read the warnings I link to.

If you prefer to browse by series or story cover, you can visit my home page. If you want to, you can Friend my blog or sign up for my updates e-mail list. ( The list of this year's storiesCollapse )