THE VELVET TRAP SERIES - HISTORICAL
A prestige literary drama set in the queer underworld of 1930s–40s Chicago.
Beneath the surface of polite society, a sanctuary pulses with jazz, secrets, and longing. The Velvet Trap series explores the psychological cost of desire, tracing Prohibition’s fading glamour through the Depression’s erosion to the paranoia of wartime. Anchored by the ruthless elegance of Vivian Moreau and the haunted precision of Dr. Eleanor Wentworth, the series is both historical fiction and psychoanalytic excavation. Lushly written and subversive, the series architects erotic power with a decadent modernist brush, risking a queer vision of pleasure and peril.
3. Shadows of the Velvet Trap - Historical Novel, Chicago 1942
Dark. Seductive. Corrupted. Amid buried secrets and wartime surveillance, passion mutates into obsession, and every act of care becomes a gesture of control. Coming in 2026.
Chicago, 1942. The Velvet Trap is now a pulsing swing club on the South Side of Chicago. Vivian runs the VIP floor with pragmatic wisdom, while Eddie manages the dance floor with easy charm. Until a plain envelope arrives. A photograph of Eleanor, nude and enraptured in the arms of a woman now wanted by multiple governments, drags Eddie into a tightening spiral of blackmail and betrayal. As more photos follow, fear and fascination turn to obsession. Her urge to protect becomes a need to possess, and intimacy edges toward violence.
Eleanor, now a training analyst at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, resists the rise of ego psychology — a pathologizing force that threatens her queer legacy — and faces a seductive student, a frightening loss of self-mastery, and the pull of silence over truth.
Shadows of the Velvet Trap is a noir-tinged descent into power and possession, where love is weaponized and every truth casts a shadow.
2. Secrets of the Velvet Trap - Historical Novel, Chicago 1935
Psychological. Intimate. Elegiac. A psychological slow-burn that interrogates erotic power and emotional control. 97,000 words in 50 chapters. Chicago, 1935. As the Great Depression deepens, psychoanalyst Dr. Eleanor Wentworth takes on Edith “Eddie” Langley, an aggressively unfeminine young journalist accused of a crime. Their sessions begin in defiance and ignite unsettling confessions before spiraling into an erotic transference where power becomes a game neither controls.
Eleanor and Eddie discover their volatile sessions are only the beginning when they encounter each other at the Velvet Trap. Hidden beneath a commercial laundry, the club becomes a crucible of control and confession, and a vivid ensemble joins them: Vivian, Eleanor's oldest friend, the club’s owner, and a dangerously loyal woman; Violet, Vivian's tempestuous married lover and Eddie’s closest friend; Victor, Eleanor’s paternalistic mentor and moral compass; Elisabeth, a Viennese émigré whose warmth offers Eleanor a rare sense of safety; and Charlie, Eleanor’s gentle husband, whose quiet bisexuality contrasts with her internal chaos.
Sensual, moody, and orchestral, Secrets of the Velvet Trap explores how defiance shapes identity and interrogates the unconscious compulsion to risk what we fear for what we want.
Published by Tantalizing Tales | Summary of Chapters 1-28 | Chapter List
1. Tales From the Velvet Trap - Historical Story, Chicago 1929
Atmospheric. Transgressive. Yearning. A lush, character-driven initiation story built on class, shame, and longing. 9000 words in 6 parts. Chicago, 1929. Beneath the velvet shadows in Prohibition’s twilight, the Velvet Trap hums with jazz, danger, and forbidden heat. Vivian Moreau, a tuxedoed proprietress with a pistol in her pocket and desire in her eyes, rules this hidden sanctuary for the city’s most decadent outsiders.
When Violet Sinclair, a married socialite suffocating in her well-appointed life, crosses the threshold, she’s unprepared for the hunger Vivian awakens in her. What begins as curiosity becomes an illicit, slow-burning affair tempered by shame and obsession. As bootleg wars threaten the club’s fragile peace, Vivian must decide how far she’ll go to protect Violet... and what she’s willing to become in the process.
Tales from the Velvet Trap is a story of inversion and initiation, where desire dissolves morality, and love compels most when it's dangerous.
Published by Tantalizing Tales | Chapter List
DARKLAW SERIES - EPIC FANTASY
Ambition. Love. Apocalypse. When gods rise, nothing is forbidden. Avestine, a fallen hero turned outlaw, must face her brother’s armies and her own insatiable hunger for power. Driven by dark passions, Avestine can't relinquish possession of the woman destined to end the world, even if it unravels a thousand years of prophecy.
BLOOD DRIES (novella) Avestine fights to master her own ambition, as well as a world fraught with power struggles and dark secrets.
DARKLAW SAGA (novel) An outlaw must conquer not only her brother’s army but her own insatiable ambition. And what of her love for the woman prophesied to end the world?
SAVAGE SINRU (illustrated series) She came into the world like a storm — dark-eyed, cursed, ravenous — to challenge the powers on earth and defy the dominion of demons.
ALL WRITING
ILLUSTRATION
I paint most of the covers for my stories. I'm a digital painter using Procreate, Clip Studio Paint, and Adobe Photoshop. I use an iPad Pro for creating and a desktop computer for edits. I often write about my process on art posts.
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BIO
Author, Artist, Analysand, Academic | Chasing jouissance and embracing transgression | Saketopoulou fangirl | https://linktr.ee/teresa.social
I write about lesbian women who desire and how they experience pleasure. I don't write about women who want to be desired and how they provide pleasure. Desire is power. It establishes subjectivity. It creates sovereignty. That's the niche you'll find here.
I am interested in what is felt to be transgressive because it is that experiential excess that will ultimately contribute to the subject's feeling overwhelmed enough for anything new to occur... What makes one's sexuality perverse is not the precise script enacted but the imbrication of transgression with the intensities of the body's libidinal excitability. (Sexuality Beyond Consent by Avgi Saketopoulou) I'm a voracious consumer of contemporary philosophy, history, and psychoanalysis focused on language, power, and subjectivity. My favorite thinkers are Freud, Bataille, Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, Kristeva, Nussbaum, and Saketopoulou. My favorite fiction comes from Dostoevsky, Ursula Le Guin, Marge Piercy, Graham Greene, Fitzgerald, Bataille, and Edgar Rice Burroughs, as well as lesbian pulp fiction, surrealist, decadent, gothic, modernist, and comic books.
----- The illustrations above were painted by the author in Procreate. Vivian and Violet from Tales of the Velvet Trap (1929). Secrets of the Velvet Trap (1935): Vivian, Violet, Eleanor, Eddie. The black and white are Eleanor and Eddie in Shadows of the Velvet Trap (1942). The lower painting is Avestine and Rook from Darklaw.
