I dunno how it is i stumbled on your writings, but I LOVE THEM!!
Cant single anything out, the whole boy-neuter thing just rocks
If i have any bargaining chip, its the potential of a story. I can write ok, just lazy and tend to read others. But if I may submit a request, some expansion on the popularity and acceptance of neutering would be SO hot. Your lead-ups are fantastic, so gently encouraging voluntary submission in a boy.. yikes, your LOVELY, and please PLEASE keep writing!
Operation Sugar Plum, part 1 is an extremely well-written and fully believable story so far. The author has created a complex and detailed plot and produces dialogue that sounds natural and right - both very difficult tasks that most authors fail to accomplish.
That said, the story is so well written that it's worth doing a bit of nit-picking on the details. Only VERY good stories are worth the effort to nit-pick!
Legends about the kidnapping of street children (mostly boys, but sometimes girls) from cities in Latin America for sale as slaves in the Middle East are of long standing. They have been seriously investigated many times and never confirmed - but certainly never disproven either! Ascuncion has never figured in any legend that I have heard in the past 30 years, but it makes more cultural and political sense than many of the cities where such trade has been claimed.
Adding Neutersol to the story is a stroke of brilliance. There are certainly enough young (as young as 5 or 6) slave boys KNOWN to exist in the Gulf States (re: Anti-Slavery International data and the November, 2002 law AGAIN prohibiting slavery in the U.A.E. with a fine for trading in slaves, though not for owning them). While surgical castration of slave boys would probably be discovered by various outside observers, use of chemical castration would be more difficult to detect. The boys wouldn't even, necessarily, know that they had been castrated, only that, as they got older, their testicles never developed. If Chem-Cast, Neutersol, or some other agent hasn't been used already, I would expect that experimentation WILL occur.
There is little doubt that eunuchs still persist in the Middle East, though the "official" claim would be that they were all castrated before the abolition of slavery. I have seen well-documented reports of large numbers of eunuch attendants at important shrines in Mecca and Medina as recently as the early 1990s. I had a Saudi friend in graduate school who claimed in 1967 that his family owned two eunuchs, one a young Somali who had been castrated in 1964 - well after the kingdom "officially abolished" slavery in 1962.
As the story indicates, the most commonly documented slave boys in the Gulf States are Indian, along with Pakistani, and Bangladeshi boys. There is also excellent documentation of Afghani boys (and girls) as young as 9 and 10 being sold into the area as recently as 2002.. Southern Sudan has again become a source of Black slaves with ASI adequately documenting the castration of two boys of 10 and 12 in the mid-1990s for household service in Khartoum. There are also very believable accounts of Sudanese slaves being traded into Libya, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia.
With the break-up of the Soviet Union, there has been ample documentation of trading of women and girls both into Western Europe (for prostitution) and into the Middle East. If there were a demand for young boys, I would expect that the Russian gangs would be happy to supply it. They are probably doing so. There are certainly enough street boys in the various cities, ranging from Prague, on to the east. A couple of years ago, I saw a documentary (title escapes me) on street boys in Prague who catered to German pedophiles. One of the boys in the documentary had been born in New York City and his family had returned to the Czech Republic after the revolution. They had failed economically and he landed on the streets. He was about 12 and was interviewed in impeccable Bronx dialect.
With everything else going on, there is no reason to doubt that somewhere in South America would contribute slaves to the Middle East. Paraguay makes more sense than most of the rest of the continent.
That said, there are some cultural details that don't ring true for the story. Santiago Lopez sounds wrong for a Brazilian. A Portuguese dialect is the national language of Brazil, though the country has welcomed immigrants from as many countries as has the U.S. A less "Mexican" sounding name would seem more "real." Something more like "Gilberto Kubitchek," a real Polish-Brazilian I know. Or Carlos DaSilva, or Chico Yamaguchi, or another name indicating the multicultural nature of Brazil. (The city outside Japan with the largest Japanese population in the world is Sao Paolo, Brazil.)
(Remember that the "great liberator" of Chile was Bernardo O'Higgins and that German immigrants mostly run that country today. Northern Italian immigrants dominate Argentina and the recent past president, Carlos Menem, is Arab-Argentinian. The city with the THIRD largest Jewish population in the world is Tel Aviv. NYC is first and Buenos Aires is second.)
The foods being planned for the boys also don't ring true. I know both Brazilian and Argentinian cuisines (though not Paraguaian). What you propose seems like Tex-Mex, not eastern South American.
Minor details, but verisilitude on the very minor points makes the entire story much more believable.
Great job so far, and these points really are minor nit-picking.
Dear Jesus, thank you so much for your kind remarks and helpful hints about my piece "Operation Sugar Plum". I don't look on it as nit-picking; I'm always ready to learn about things I don't know, and have never been fortunate enough to visit any part of S.America.
I should explain "Santiago Lopez". It's a name I fished out of my memory. He was a band-leader of the late 1940's, contemporary of Edmundo Ros.
Judging by the letter preceding yours, at least I have found a formula that keeps some of the readers happy!
A belated reply to the guest who wrote me on 27th May. While I'm working on the next piece there is plenty of material (and not all by me) in the index already. Start with "Neutersol Pediatric", a vade-mecum for castrating young boys in the home. Then "Just the right age" begins with a bunch of youngsters all speculating just what it would mean to have their balls pricked. Pleased to learn he finds the topic readable - it's surprising what NASTY ideas turn up on this site.
