Asking For It

The accidental goddess, Makaela Mendoza endures several suitors' slavish devotions. Ironically, all she really wants is an honest day's work for an honest day's pay.

Asking For It is a novel of ideas masquerading as modern romance, Pygmalion revisited with a femdom twist. One mysteriously disappeared ex-World Champion MMA fighter, one handsome and successful film and television producer. Two men with one thing in common; They're both begging for a beating at the hands of Makaela Mendoza. Neither can deny her. Erotic and emotional, physical and financial, power exchanges between the three multiply. From simmering Platonic to downright tectonic, AFI chronicles Makaela's troubled career trajectory. Fundamentally modest, Makaela is ambivalent about bullying grown men. But she does have bills to pay. And let's face it, the guys are just asking for it.

• Is straight-up asking for things like intimacy in any way advisable?
• Are self-glamorization, flattery and subterfuge better, at least safer?
• Why do we tear people down over their personal preferences?
• At what point does a man's joy in serving a woman's needs make him a pervert?
• Is the opposite of ambition laziness, or rather contentment and good will?
• What is at stake emotionally for the individual running with the herd?

In new millennium North America the rewards of market capitalism prove increasingly deceptive. Internet economy and social media are in their infancy. Some years away from the advent of AI, many things are already not what, or even who, they seem. Our objects of desire seem more or less infinite. An overload of desires drives satisfaction further and further afield. The champion fighter and the successful producer are not the only ones 'asking for it' in this tale of ambition and amorous adventure. An aging philanthropist, a lesbian astrologer, and a washed-up hipster novelist all have their own errant desires to answer for. Power corrupts, money talks, sex sells. And the exacerbating power of the internet gives these aging adages new currency.