Old Blog Entries

Law School Joke

Little vs. Epic Porn

Experimenting with Writely

Dude, She's Your Sister

I sent my sister the link to this website today. She is three years younger than I am, probably twice as neurotic, but definitely three times as talented. One of my earliest memories of her is asking her to lie down so I could stomp on her stomach as hard as I could—y'know, for fun. I suspect she'd consider that little scene a cipher for decades that followed.

Well, sis (and no, I never call her sis in real life), this time I'm the one who's lying on the metaphor-carpet. Feel free to stomp away. Despite what you may read here, I promise I am not into that kind of thing.

Exit Pater Familias

My father's visit went well and porn free. He stayed at the Uppity-Up Swanky Hotel™. We toddled around downtown a bit then hung out, making fun of bad TV and arguing about the news. (I think we're one world-historical figure away from Kurdistan declaring independence and triggering World War III. Dad thinks the Kurds are too isolationist, practical, and well-bribed to get suckered into nationalism; Iran's annexation of Shiite-dominated southern Iraq for its oil wells, on the other hand, are Dad's pick for Armageddon.) Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory remake comes on the TV. I wait for Violet's blueberry scene, and say, "This is a sexual fetish, by the way. Body transformation and inflation fetishes are very popular. There's a lot of potential sexual tension in scenes like this."

Dad looks askance. "You're kidding," he says sourly.

Dad has never read Roland Dahl, so he doesn't know how freaky those stories got and how many fetishists they probably created. Nevertheless, I've decided that he isn't quite ready for goo girl porn. Meanwhile, Tim Burton makes millions bringing his fetishes to the mainstream. Such is life.

The Pater Familias Cometh

My father wants to read my porn.

It's my fault, really. All he did was call my cell phone and ask, "What's up?" Unfortunately for me, his phone call came about a week or so after I first launched my story wiki, on the day I checked the site statistics for the first time and saw the story had gotten over ten thousand page hits. I was flying kinda high, so I told him that I was writing a novel on the Internet and people were actually reading it. Naturally his next statement was something like, "Wow! Lemme see!"

My father has been an aspiring novelist on the borderline of commercial success since before I was born, you see. He's always been interested in my writing; he's even entertained helping me set up a game publishing company. (That's what I wrote—pen and paper RPG designs and supplements—before the need to develop a real career swallowed up my time and brain and It's Always Time got me writing again.) He's had editors tell him, "good story, but add a few graphic sex scenes, please," and he's obliged. So the idea of me writing erotica really didn't faze him.

But, I told him, it's not just porn; it's really, really weird porn. "Try me," he said, and even over the cell phone I could hear his shit-eating grin. My father has been divorced, single, and (most importantly) on the Internet since the early Nineties, so as far as I know he could be a nebbish real estate and stock portfolio investor by day, and a leather clad ponyplayer by night. If real life were anything like the comic books I'm parodying in It's Always Time, he'd not only already be a reader of the story, but he'd also be Maradon's secret identity or something similar.

I bring this up now because he's flying into town today celebrate his birthday and my promotion. (My career is officially reinvented! But if anyone can figure out how I can make enough money from writing weird porn, let me know and I'll quit the IT/legal consulting business and write this stuff full time.) He's going to ask for my pseudonym and website address again, this time in person.

Should I tell him?

Reality Glomps

I am covered head to toe in diet root beer. No, really; my hair is cloyed with root beer. It's drying on my (formerly) new dress shoes—the square toed kind that I call "Frankenstein shoes." My shirt looks like I sweat maple syrup. And let me be the first to tell you: it's not kinky at all.

Along with my uncertainty in employment comes an uncertainty in living arrangements. I don't want to sign a 12 month lease for what may turn out to be a 6 month engagement. So I'm in temporary housing; I've been in two corporate housing complexes this summer. Mrs. Oblimo's new job, meanwhile, has her and Miss. Oblimlett living in a perfectly comfy townhouse four hundred miles away; not that I'm bitter. Anyway, so I've been living out of my car and swanky furnished suites these past several weeks in a state of obscenely luxurious homelessness.

And now we come to the root beer. The unopened can of root beer, you see, was inadvertently left in the backseat of my car where it had rolled out from a plastic grocery bag unnoticed. Well, I finally tried cleaning the car this evening, and Lo! A can root beer to mine eyes did appear. The heat index had reached 105 degrees Fahrenheit today, and the can was positively swollen with potential energy. I had the can in my hands just a few inches away from the trash when it decided to give me a lesson in air pressure, and exploded.

Some fantasies should remain unrealized. Being glomped by a root beer meliae is one of them.

Job vs. Porn: FIGHT!

I have a rule: I only post an update if it concludes a scene or ends in a joke or cliffhanger. Thanks to real-world pressures, the bit that I've got to show so far doesn't qualify. It's not even enough to make it to the cutting room floor. What to do? Well, cheat, of course! Create a third category—Scraps—and post it there.

Why? Beside my attention-whoredom, I want to demonstrate the momentum that still exists behind my story wiki. I am dedicated to see this thing through to the end (yes, it has an end, technically only eight key scenes away, but they include a bunch of long, wicked sex scenes (and it looks like I might even have to add a Chapter Nine to fit it all in, dammit)). In case you are curious, here are the working titles of each planned remaining scene:

1. Resurrection
2. More Meliae
3. Back to SRU
4. Black Cherry Strikes Again
5. The Sword and the Line
6. Orgy!
7. Showdown
8. Coda

There is good news, though: all the real-world stuff interrupting the story might, just might, result in an awesome new job—quantum leap in my career path, actually. (I switched careers with the turn of century and had to start from the ground-up all over again.) With greater responsibility comes greater power to manage my time. Wish me luck!

O Muse, Bugger Off

Note to Erato: Ten hours of driving interrupted by a busted radiator hose and a night spent sleeping in my car in the parking lot of an automechanic's shop does not help me write porn! O Muse, if you desire this thing finished any time soon, please distract your aunt Fortuna Primigenia from mucking about. How? You're Erato, I'm sure you'll figure something out.

Origin of Sex III: Origin of the Sexes

I could talk about Plato's tale of the first humans, all conjoined hermaphrodites, but Hedwig and the Angry Inch has already said all that's needed to be said short of actually reading the Symposium. I could talk about the fact that God creates Adam as a conjoined hermaphroditic twin in the first Book of Genesis, a very accurate and ancient reading of the line nowadays translated as "Man and woman He created them" but would literally translate into "Adam and woman, God created him together" if Biblical literalists and creation scientists actually cared about what the Bible really said. Some blogger named Neil Gaiman already beat me to it in a comic book called Sandman or something. I hear it's kind of popular. *Cough*

Anyway, so all I'm left with is game theory practiced by the bacterial hermaphrodites of two and a half billion years ago, the inventors of sex and death. "Hermaphrodite" isn't the best descriptor for them, however, because although they had invented sex, they didn't get so far as inventing the sexes. They swapped genetic code willy-nilly. And who could blame them? Their lives consisted of the following:

1. Float in the sea.
2. Bump against stuff, then:
1. If it's edible, eat it.
2. If it's fuckable, fuck it, and reproduce genetically diverse offspring.
3. If you're any good at step 2, go back to step 1, otherwise, go to step 4.
4. Die alone.

The most interesting bits were the steps in the middle. The offspring whose genetic diversity helped develop traits to loop through step 3 lived to pass those traits on to the next iteration, while those who were really good at step 4 became chalk. Any gamer could see that the do-or-die step was number 2. "Bump or Die" was the name of the game. The development of sensory apparatus was a few zillion generations in the future, so smart-bumping was not an available strategy. In fact, there was only one overall strategy: use the energy from the food you eat to grow. The growth strategy came in two flavors: grow big or grow thataway. If you grew big, you'd have more surface area, and thus the odds of you bumping against something would increase. If you grew thataway, i.e., crawled around by extending pseudopodia, you'd covered more territory and thus the odds of you bumping against stuff would increase. So three alternative tactics emerged: put all your food energy into growing as big as possible; put all your food energy into moving as fast as possible, or; divide your food energy between growing big and moving around.

The big-as-possible and fast-as-possible tactics were inherently cooperative. The fast swimmers, progenitors of spermatozoa, were more likely to bump into a big target. The big targets, the originators of ova, were more likely to get bumped into by fast swimmers. The little-bit-of-both bacteria became chalk. And there you have it: Man and woman He created them with a little game of Bump or Die. Not really romantic, is it?

Auto Erotica

I can't write about sex when I drive, of course, but I certainly think about it. Anyone with sufficient exposure to American pop culture associates driving with sex consciously or otherwise. The inspiration I get while driving is second only to the inspiration from reader feedback. My six hour road trip last night did not go as planned—three hours in I drove straight into the most spectacular thunderstorm I'd seen in years. Chain lightning crawled sideways from horizon to horizon, turning the clouds to burning phosphorus. One Holiday Inn overnight stay later, and I still have three hours to go. But thanks to my brainstorming during the drive, I think the upcoming scene will be much hotter than I originally thought—again, at least consciously. I decided Ursula had a four-poster bed because it fit her character, but subconsciously I must have known the use to which Galatea is about to put those bedposts.

Sleep prevents pr0n

Got home from work yesterday at 6:00 PM, decided to rest my eyes for a few minutes before dinner and working on the rough draft of the next update. When I opened my eyes, it was 5:00 AM. Oops.

I tried writing porn in an office cubicle before: bad idea. I don't have to be turned on to write. In fact, if I'm turned on, I can't write because I lose the observer's distance that lets me think about what turns me on or what could turn on a reader. I'd also much rather be doing something else than writing. But I also can't write when I'm turned off, either, and my cubicle is one oblong, taupe-colored turn-off. I need be in neutral gear to write.

Experiment: Write about Dee and Galatea having sex in his cubicle at work. See if you are no longer turned off by your cubicle afterward. If that doesn't work, sneak into your wife's new office and write porn there this weekend. Remember not to ask wife to read your blog until Monday.

Origin of Sex II: Ring-ring, ring-ring, ring-ring, Banana Clone

Did you know that each domestic banana you have ever eaten was a clone of the others? Cultivated bananas have not had sex, have been cloned by the replanting of banana-plant cuttings, for thousands of years. Lacking the genetic diversity that sexual reproduction brings, bananas possess little to no resistance to infection and parasitic attack. Forget the bird flu; agriculturalists have been fighting banana pandemics for decades. One false move and the world will be bananaless save for the artificially flavored strawberry-banana frozen desert and any resultant honey nymph she-males. A banana extinction level event is imminent.

This same susceptibility to extinction, however, has given the banana immortality. When an organism reproduces asexually, an actual, physical part of it survives the destruction of the rest. Since the Stone Age, there has been one master banana plant that humanity has been dutifully clipping and then replanting across the planet. In all the world, there is but one banana. It's probably pure coincidence that our failings in banana horticulture reflect a greater fallacy of thought: Everyone is just like me; all men think the same and have the same tastes; so what's the big deal of having just one banana? As SB would say, "It's a dick thing."

What the Hell am I talking about? I dunno, but I think it goes something like this: before there was sex, there was no death, only die-outs and extinctions. Despite our desire to make them so, children do not turn out to be Mini-Me. When those first two bacteria had sex, unzipped their double-helixes and swapped amino acids, they became the first individual animals to live out an individuated life cycle and die. Death by sex. Death by individuality. Now that takes style.

Superheroes, by the by, die not from the losing of individuation like the rest of us aerobic, sexual animals, but from the gaining of identification. The threat of unmasking a superhero's secret identity replaced the threat of death in as the climax of suspense in comic books and cartoons, since kids were the superheroes' targeted demographic and no one over thirty ever remembers how utterly devoid of innocence their childhoods actually were. That's the reason why sex in superhero comics and cartoons is so taboo, and ergo so kinky and funny. When we mortals die, we lose our identities, our selves are extinguished. When a superhero dies a bodily death, it's a negligible loss. You can expect a resurrection in a few issues. To truly die, a superhero must be identified—he or she must be unmasked. For us sexual individuals, death is the great unknown that we all must face alone, in ultimate privacy. For superheroes, to die is to be made known to others, to be exposed publicly. The superhero is, by nature, asexual, a juxtaposition that can make superhero sex as hot and funny as Hell.

Sex was taboo in superhero comics just as much a death was, for the same reasons—protection of the illusory innocence of the readership. And, surprise, surprise, when a superhero like Peter Parker went out on a date, what was he anxious about? Not sex; he wasn't even thinking about how to get to first base! He was anxious about accidentally revealing his secret identity to his girlfriend. At least, that's how it started. It didn't take producers of mainstream comics very long to embrace the blatant, latent fetishism that guys and gals in tights and masks beating each other up provides.

The fact that It's Always Time is a superhero team secret origin story disguised as porn should not come as surprise, so I'm not putting this sentence in spoiler tags. If you are surprised I'm talking about superheroes, you ought to read more carefully, although there's no need to read this blog with any care whatsoever, or even read it at all. I suspect my ramblings will remain sophomoric; I am writing in order to keep writing, after all, to keep my brain on the subject, as I try to storyboard Ursula's upcoming envelopment in my head, figuring out what aspects of the scene make it kinky and need to be described, and how to make it exciting even for someone who hasn't looked at Jeff Cordova (aka Sebastian)'s fan art and thought, "Okay, I admit it: that's hot."

The Origin of Sex

About a billion years ago, two oxygen-breathing bacteria invented sex and promptly died of it, thus giving one of the funniest ways to die, not to mention one of the most important lessons for writing good smut, an early start. Over two billion years before screwing yourself to death came into vogue, however, the title of the very most funny way to die had already been won by an entire, globe-spanning ecosystem of anaerobic bacteria, which, in the quest for ever-increasing productivity through photosynthesis with little regard to environmental controls, ignored the toxic, byproduct waste gas known as oxygen, and blissfully farted itself into extinction. Flatulence is universally recognized as the most sure, albeit blunt, weapon in the humorists repertoire. Ancient Greeks mandated the insertion of fart jokes into even their most sacred theater. In his novel Galapagos, Kurt Vonnegut demonstrated that finding humor in flatus is the one universal element of humanity's design. While farting yourself to death may get more giggles per gallon, death from sex has all the style, so it is libido and destrudo and the humor found in both which interests me most.

Why a blog?

I wanted a place to write down what the heck I'm doing and thinking in between updates. It's a self indulgence, I know, but I'm not expecting anyone to actual read this; it's a place to collect and review my thoughts and activities to see what I can do to increase the quality and quantity of fiction on the site! As well as a page on the wiki I can access at work without violating IT's usage policy.
I am not expecting any readers, but in anticipation of them, any information that I would consider spoilers will be tagged and hidden like this....Okay, smartass, you asked for it: the very last two words of the story are "Oh, shit." No, I'm not kidding.