Inside Mike Kimera

Christmas Cheer

2008-12-01T19:22:00.002+01:00

I've been busy not being Mike Kimera for a while. I've been focusing on putting the important things back in the centre of my life while still earning a living as an itinerant peddler of advice and best practice for a management consultancy.

It seems though that stories have a life of their own, whether Mike Kimera is around to nuture them or not.

ERWA have a Christmas Story feature in which Adrienne has posted some of her favourite pieces of festive erotica. I'm happy to say that a couple of my more whimsical pieces made the cut: "Christmas at Lake Woebecum" a tongue-in-cheek D/s version of the kind of thing more usually found on the Prairie Home Companion, and "Santa Claws" about a demon santa and mischievous woman who is both naughty and nice.

If you'd like a smile this Christmas take a look here. Enjoy.

With a bit of luck I'll see you next year.

One last thing...

2008-10-07T22:56:00.002+02:00

My thanks to all of you who left comments on my last post. They mean a lot to me.

I'm still working through the problems that I have to fix. I hope that I can find my way back by next year. I will if I can.

In the meantime, I have one last story on ERWA that you might enjoy (although the content is a little grim).

If you're interested, you can find "Paying For It" here during October.

Goodbye to Mike Kimera

2008-09-18T12:34:00.002+02:00

I've been Mike Kimera for nine years now. I've learned a lot in the process. I've even written a few things that I think were worth writing.

I need to stop being Mike Kimera for a while and just be me.

Mike Kimera has become someone that is more comfortable with himself than I should be at the moment.

I've made a mess of my life and I should be using all my energies to make things better.

Thank you to all of you have read my pieces over the years, especially those of you who took the time to comment on my stories.

I wish well

When your erotic imagination takes you somewhere you're ashamed to visit

2008-08-13T13:35:00.007+02:00

I recently went to see the 100th Anniversary exhibition of the work of Balthus at Fondation Pierre Gianadda in Martigny in Switzerland. I always find that paintings have much more impact when you see the real thing than when you see the catalogue reproduction. This exhibition was beautifully mounted. It was possible to walk through a broad selection of Balthus' work at leisure. Even though the exhibition was very well attended there was time and space to take in the emotional impact of the paintings.

Two things were immediately apparent: Balthus was enormously talented and he was fascinated by images of young girls that convey a deep and passionate eroticism.

Although none of these images show anything as graphic as actual sex, they show clearly the sexual nature of these young (sometimes very young) girls.

It left me startled. I couldn't make up my mind whether I should be outraged, whether I should be ashamed of myself for feeling the power of these paintings or whether I was imagining things as everyone else seemed to be browsing the exhibition as if it was another viewing Monet's Water Lilies.

I think that their power shows them to be art. I feel like a Victorian wanting to add a fig leaf to the Michelangelo's David but I can't get over how disturbing I found the images and how easily those around me accepted them.

I finally realised that what disturbed me about these paintings is that Balthus makes me see little girls the way a child molester does. He does it subtly and with skill and his vision has a certain type of truth to it. The verb that comes to mind to describe this is corruption.

I know, I know, I'm reacting on a purely moral basis here.

I'm sure there are gay artists who could make me see men the way they see them. I would be fascinated but I wouldn't feel corrupted.

What makes Balthus different is that I think that what he sees (and what he makes me see) is not the truth about these girls but a projected fantasy of what he would like them to be.

Silver Linings –good news in getting stories published

2008-08-10T21:21:00.004+02:00

It’s been a quiet year with my writing so far. I have a lot of stories part way through so I’m hoping for a burst of posts in the autumn. The good news is that the stories I have written are finding their way on to websites and anthologies.

One of this years stories, “Toying with Lily” has made it into Alison Tyler’s “Hurts So Good”

I’m pleased to see this story in print. I’m also proud to be in the company of the other authors in this collection:

The Sound of One Hand Clapping Nikki Magennis

Sting Jessica Lennox

No Substitute for Experience James Walton Langolf

Panty Lines Sommer Marsden

Lucky N. T. Morley

Testing the Water Teresa Noelle Roberts

Never a Rookie Craig J. Sorensen

Provocation Jay Lawrence

I Promise to Do My Best Teresa Joseph

Party Manners Morgan Aine

Trophy Buckle Rakelle Valencia

Toying with Lily Mike Kimera

Turnaround A. D. R. Forte

Flick Chicks Allison Wonderland

Equilibrium Anna Black

First Time Since Xan West

Omega to Alpha Diana St. John

Crossed Rachel Kramer Bussel

My Mainstream Girlfriend Stephen Elliott

Rock Paper Scissors Shanna Germain

All in the Wrist Alison Tyler

I also have a story in another anthology edited by Alison Tyler this year, “Open for Business – Tales of Office Sex”. Here’s a link to Gwen Masters’ Cleansheets Review of the anthology which says nice things about my story “Have A Nice Day”.

I know this all sounds terribly self-congratulatory and narcissistic. There’s certainly an element of that, but the excuse I make to myself is that while writing is a solitary pursuit that is really a struggle in which the writer tries to land the story that his imagination has hooked but which may still get away, publishing is a social activity where the writer gets to find out if the outcome of the struggle is enjoyed by other people.

This is a long winded way of saying that reading reviews of stuff that I put forward for publication helps maintain my motivation to write.

One of the questions I had in my mind was what motivates an editor to go through all the hassle needed to produce an anthology that all the rest of us benefit from but in which they get a maximum of one story of their own.

I found a good answer on Alison’s website Alison must be one of the most prolific erotica editor's around and I've often wondered where she gets the energy.

Take a look at her post on her latest book - a guide for couples illustrated with autobiography and favourite pieces of erotica called “Never Have The Same Sex Twice” – and you'll be infected by her passion for keeping that first time heat in (at least) the sex you write about.

Read her post entitled “Riven with Need” and you'll see how her fascination with passion is linked to an ability to feel the power of words the way most of us feel that it-always-makes-me-cry song.

I came away from her site thinking that my writing needs a shake up – I first started writing hot scenes I thought were stories. I want to find a way to use the technique I now have available to me to express the hot, sticky, risky but worth it, oh my god who'd have thought this was possible excitement I used to be able to produce.

Here’s the excerpt from “Toying with Lily”

Toying with Lily

The jeans are a deliberate act of provocation. Lily, my allegedly submissive “You can do anything to me. Anything at all. I’ll even call you, Daddy while you do it” mistress, likes to test my limits by defying me. She wants to see what I will put up with and what I will do to keep her in her place. She likes to be kept in her place.

At the moment, her place is standing in front of my chair with her hands behind her back and her head held high, waiting for me to flog, pinch, spank and fuck her to orgasm. We both know that by now she should be naked. Instead, she has chosen to present herself wearing tight-fitting jeans and a sly smile.

True, Lily is impressively naked above the waist. She is a fully fleshed woman, short without being in any way small. Her breasts are large and heavy, and when, as now, she holds her hands behind her back, they push out almost aggressively. Her stomach is soft and flows over the cruelly tight fastening of her spray-on jeans. At any other time, I might have relaxed back into my chair and considered whether to start by using the soft calf-leather hand-lash on her belly or by suspending weighted clamps from her nipples.

But now my focus is on her jeans and the smile that accompanies them.

I could just tell her to take them off.

Or I could throw her onto the bed, wrestle them from her, maybe even cut them off her, and then raise welts on her substantial buttocks with the crop.

But then I would be doing the obvious, which means I would lose the initiative and, if that were to happen often enough, I would lose Lily.

I don’t want to lose Lily. She makes me feel alive in a way that no one else does.

Death Grief Guilt and Getting Over It

2008-08-09T14:55:00.002+02:00

My dog died. He was a yellow Labrador who had been part of my life for fourteen and a half years. I loved him more deeply than most of the people in my life and this month grief has had me in its grip.

I’ve been through grief before; my father, my mother, my mother in law, my nephew. It never gets any better.

If you live long enough, everyone and everything you love will die and every time grief will ride you, wrenching bone deep sobs from you that strip you of all dignity. Letting you recover and then doing it again and again; triggering a renewed sense of loss each time you come across some small reminder of the life you shared. Grief multiplies death. It takes away everything that makes life bearable and leaves only pain.

My dog didn’t die in his sleep. He ate some wood that obstructed his bowels. It took a week of probing and x-rays and ultrasounds and eventually an operation before we finally had to have him put down. That week is etched into my memory. Why is it that the nasty, gut-wrenching things in life are so easy to recall while happiness fades like an old photograph?

I cried over my dog’s death. Cried. That doesn’t describe it. Crying sounds polite and controlled. I would stand with my eyes closed, my mouth stretched open obscenely wide, my hands by my side, my head thrown back, as great gouts of sobs forced their way out of me, taking my breath, shaking my whole body, filling my mind with nothing more or less that a howl of anger and pain and loss that, if it had words, would fire them like bullets, like grenades, like napalm at a universe that has this death in it.

You’re body won’t let you cry like that for long. It makes you rest and go through the motions of eating in between bouts of soul-crushing grief. And in those gaps when the parasite grief lets its host recover,guilt wormed its way into my mind. It became crystal clear that my selfishness, my unwillingness to accept that some things can’t be fixed, my endless ability to make facts fit my aspirations, had led to my dog spending the last days of his life in a cage in the ICU of animal hospital, in the company of strangers, combating pain until his heart could not stand it.

Guilt curled around my pain and squeezed until my previous sobs seemed mild.

My wife and I come from Irish families and so we did what we always do when grief rides us, we held a wake, just the two of us, a cluster of photo albums and bottle of Rijoa. With each sip of wine we took turns telling stories of our dog and why we loved him and what made him special. We laughed and we cried – just tears not sobs – and we let the memory of him fill us for a while.

It is a month since he died. I was scheduled for leave so I didn’t have to try and work in the immediate life-sucking period after his death. I got support, wonderful, heart-warming support, from the folks on ERWA. The periods of doing other things than grieve are getting longer. Life will return to normal soon.

Except that it won’t. The grief will visit less often. But each bout of grief leaves a scar on the heart. Our dog, who has been with us almost every day since 1993 will never be with us again. There is nothing normal about that.

Enough of sorrow. Let me spend a moment on love. Why should this dog mean so much to me?

Every morning he would wake and face the day as if it was going to be the best day he’d had so far. He was wilful and stubborn and persistent but never mean spirited or violent. He would respond to complex verbal commands but never admitted to knowing the meaning of “Bad Dog”. When my wife and I hugged he would wag his tail. If one of us was ill or sad he would lay beside us until we felt better. He loved unconditionally but was never obsequious or needy. He had a cartoon dog look that made strangers smile. He would walk into a room and expect everyone to admire him. He was everything a Labrador should be. He made me more human than I would otherwise have been. You can’t bullshit a dog. You have to be yourself and deal with what that means.

I miss him so much it hurts. It will always hurt. That seems to be the price the world extracts for letting yourself love deeply.

It may sound morbid but one impact of his death is to remind me of the reality of my own. He was with us fourteen years and yet, in retrospect, it seems like almost no time at all. In fourteen years I will be sixty five. Few of the people in my family have made it to seventy. Perhaps my dog’s last gift to me is to make me raise my head from the ruts habit and convenience and compromise have worn into my life and ask myself how I will make the next fourteen years worth living.

I don’t have the answer yet. I’m still at the point were getting through the day feels like an achievement. But I know it’s the most important question in front of me and I know that writing will be part of the solution. I’ll keep you posted.

My kind of video

2008-06-09T22:15:00.003+02:00

Most internet porn is a subtle as an ice ax between the eyes. It's rare to find something that engages the imagination in the same way that good erotic should. The piece below is remarkably restrained in this show-it-all-in-high-def world but I find it all the more erotic for that. Let me know if you agree.

Finding the magic ingredient in writing

2008-04-23T19:43:00.002+02:00

2007 was my worst year in terms of writing output, since I began writing in 1999. At one point I began to wonder if I’d simply lost whatever the magic ingredient is that causes the dough of plot and character to rise into bread.

I know it sounds immodest, but writing comes easily to me. At least the first blush of it does. The story mostly comes out in a rush of plot or emotion or character and then I work on it to tune the language, the images, the pace, just trying to get rid of all the stuff that isn't the story and when I've done that I hit it like a freshly cast bell and I listen for any cracks.

Last year I was tired, ill, depressed and way too busy and writing didn't come easily anymore. Time was an issue as usual but that wasn't really the thing. I had lots of stories in the WIP file and I tinkered with many of them, making them better but not getting them done.

It took me a while to realise that the magic ingredient that was missing was my own belief in the story. I didn't have the optimism or joy left over to envision the story as it was going to be. I kept seeing the weaknesses. Or I saw only a polished veneer that I didn't care for. And the more I tinkered, driven only by an urge to get the technical parts right, the less ability I had to generate any belief.

This year I’ve managed to get back to writing. It took two things to get me back in harness: I had to fix up my life - as Springsteen said, you have to learn to live with what you can't rise above - and I read everything I could find.

The first filled in some of the energy pits that were draining me. The second restored my sense of the boundless possibilities of writing.

There are so many wonderful writers out there. Reading them breeds stories in my head. Not plots but a sense of style or a willingness to confront or to throw back my head and laugh.

And I know that all these people sat before their computers alone and wove this stuff from their passion, their skill and their belief in themselves. Writers create by force of will and strength of belief. What could be more human or more magical than that?

Erotica: selling the sizzle not the steak and doing it with a smile

2008-04-10T01:07:00.005+02:00

Porn is about fast, unsubtle, sating of appetites - once the short strokes are over, porn loses its appeal faster than cum can dry. As someone on ERWA pointed out, erotica is about yearning not sating - erotica creates desires that linger even when arousal fades.

There's a saying in marketing, you sell the sizzle, not the steak. I think erotica is like that. It focuses on the cues that make the mouth water, that make you tingle with anticipation.

If this is true, then you don't actually need the steak. Erotica doesn't need the money shot. Porn without the money shot is a rip-off.

It also seems to me that erotica can use humour to sell the sizzle whereas humour is porn is just a reason to press the fast forward button.

Let me illustrate what I mean with a story: "Moira and the Babysitter". I think this story is both erotic and funny. You can judge for yourself what it's selling and how,

Im interested to know what you think

Moira and the babysitter

reproduce without written permission from mikekimera@yahoo.co.uk

There are things that you know you shouldn’t do but you go ahead and do them anyway. It’s like sitting paralysed at the wheel while you drive into an on-coming truck, it’s scary as hell and you know it’s gonna hurt but GOD do you feel alive while it’s happening.

My on-coming truck was called Lisa and she made me break one of the primary rules of suburbia: never, EVER, kiss the babysitter.

It was a Saturday night I was home early from unsuccessful date, again! Another boyfriend running scared of a woman with a kid. He’d been looking for some action and I’d been looking for… hell I don’t know, maybe just to meet a man who didn’t turn out to be a complete shit whose every move was not determined by a desire to get laid without having to spend too much money to do it.

Do I sound harsh? Yeah? Well walk a mile in my shoes and see if you feel any different.

I got in and shouted to Lisa to let her know I was home. Lisa and I go way back. When she was 10 years old I was often the babysitter for her and her younger sister. She’s great with Sam, my little boy, and she’s always willing to baby-sit at short notice.

Maybe if I’d been less pissed at Jack, hereinafter to be referred to as JackAss, I might have paid attention to how Lisa was dressed and how hyped she seemed.

“Nice dress Mrs D,” she said as I walked into the family room.

“Not Mrs, Ms. Anyway, you should call me Moira, you’re old enough now.”

“Didn’t the date go well?”

“It went the way my dates always go. My maybe-Mr-Right turned out to definitely-Mr-Wrong. All dick and no spine. Shit, sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.”

Lisa laughed. “It’s ok, Moira. Like you said, I am old enough now.”

I should have heard the sirens going off and seen the lights flashing at the tone of voice she used but I was too busy extracting my feet from the toe-killing stilettos JackAss liked so much.

“But you like men don’t you?” Lisa said. “I mean you like sleeping with them?”

That got my attention. Especially the ‘them’ part. I wondered what she’d heard and from whom and how much of it was true. I looked at Lisa properly for the first time. She was pretty but tense. Which I guess made her pretty tense. Groan. This stuff happens in my head when I get nervous and I’d suddenly realised that I was nervous. I decided the best thing was to give Lisa as honest an answer as I could.

“Well, let me check my memory,” I said, pretending to think back “Yeah I like it. With the right guy doing the right things.”

“I guess I’ve never found the right guy,” Lisa said.

She sounded sad. I assumed some young shithead had taken her cherry and broken her heart. I hoped she hadn’t gotten pregnant by whomever it was. Nineteen was too young to be a single mother. I know, that was how old I was when “Mr. I’m a quarter-back, you’re a cheerleader, we should do it in the back of my SUV,” unleashed his two million sperm in a race to my womb through a hole in a broken rubber. The lucky winner produced Sam.

I put my arm around her and said, “You ok, Lisa?”

She leant against me and nodded her head. Then she said, “Can I ask you something? Can you like guys and like girls too?”

Woah, I could see where this was going. This is an uptight State. We don’t teach the joys of lesbian love in our High Schools. I was suddenly very aware of my arm around Lisa’s shoulder. If I took it away now, she’d think I was freaked out. I decided to lift her head so I could see her eyes clearly and then just slide my arm off her like it was no big deal.

“What do you mean, like?” I asked.

“You know. Like. Like to watch. Like to be with. Like to touch.”

Jesus. Suddenly I’m back in senior year, smoking dope at the back of the bleachers with Judy Sorrenson. We were practising kissing. Only so we could do it better with boys later you understand. Except it went further than that. We practised biting each other’s nipples and riding each other’s fingers. But Judy said it didn’t count because we were stoned and anyway we didn’t take our clothes off. Damn, I wish we had taken them off. Judy was hot.

“Moria?” Lisa is looking at me anxiously. She thinks I’m avoiding answering her. I am not going to let her think I disapprove.

“Listen Lisa,” I say, “it’s ok to like girls and boys but you have to be real careful who you tell. Do you like girls that way Lisa?”

There. That was smooth. That was professional and caring. This was going well.

“Not girls,” Lisa said. “I like you.”

Then she kissed me. A desperate, needy, snatched kiss, that seemed to anticipate rejection but went ahead anyway.

I just sat there like a piece of stone. I’d been kissed by my nineteen-year-old babysitter. What the hell was I supposed to do now?

Lisa started to cry. “I’m sorry,” she said, through her tears. “Please don’t tell Dad. Please. I won’t do it again. I won’t. I promise. I’ll get a boyfriend and everything. It’s just that you look so nice and I‘ve watched you for so long and I wanted to… please don’t tell please.”

That’s when the carwreck started. I should have reassured her and sent her home. What I actually did was kiss her.

Initially I just wanted to stop her crying, you know. I liked Lisa. She was a good kid and she didn’t deserve to be traumatized because the woman she had a crush on freaked out. I meant to show her that everything was ok. A sort of hug, only with the mouth.

The first couple of seconds were on plan. She stopped crying and just let her lips touch mine. She had very soft lips. And she smelled good. And the touch of her long hair against my hand felt comforting.

I think I must have closed my eyes, because I never saw her hands move. She held my head gently and pushed her tongue into my mouth. It wasn’t the “hey babe, feel this? Well wait till you feel Big-Boy inside you, moving the same way” sort of kiss that so many men use. It had a sense of wonder to it. An exploration of something that wasn’t you but that wasn’t entirely alien either. I stopped breathing. My nipples were telling me that I’d at last found a good kisser.

Then she dropped her hands, sat back and looked at me. I must have looked like a guppy, with my mouth hanging open and my eyes almost crossed. For a split second I was worried that she might not have liked it.

Lisa stroked my face and said, “That was just how I had imagined it. Thank you.”

I started to smile but I froze when Lisa started to push off the spaghetti straps to the little dress she was wearing.

“Do you like my breasts?” she said, looking down at them and pushing them up for my approval. She ran a thumb over her right nipple. It looked like the eraser on the end of a HB pencil. “Do you think my nipples are too long?”

Now I don’t go around checking out other women’s breasts or anything. I mean Lisa’s looked nice but they wouldn’t normally have turned me on. It was just that she was so close to me and I could still taste her in my mouth and it probably didn’t help that I hadn’t been laid properly in almost a month, Mr JackAss and I not having gotten past the blow-job stage. I couldn't look away from her nipple.

“Lisa,” I said, “we shouldn’t…”

She lifted my hand and placed it on her breast. I was only aware of two things, the heat of her skin against me and the little anticipatory spasm between my legs.

I stood up.

“Lisa, this has to stop. We are not lovers. I’m too old for you. And besides, your dad would kill me.”

Well that was better. Apart from the last sentence, I’d sounded like a sensible, caring adult. And we weren’t touching any more. I began to think I’d find a way out of this that didn’t involve pleading insanity.

Lisa got off the sofa and knelt in front of me. She rested her head against my belly just above my pubis and wrapped her arms around my legs. Short of hitting her, I was trapped.

She kissed my belly. “Oh God, I wish my belly was flatter,” I thought. Then she looked up at me and said. “You’re not too old. You’re only six years older than me. I know you don’t love me yet, but I want you to be my first. I’ve wanted that for a long time.”

She looked cute kneeling in front of me like that, her dress almost around her waist, her hair falling down her back, and a wide, hopeful smile on her face. Part of me was saying, “Go with it. Do the kid and yourself a favor.” The part of me that I LIKED was saying “Did you here the ‘don’t love me YET’ statement? This is way out of control. DO SOMETHING.”

And I would have listened. Really I would. If Lisa hadn’t slid her hands under my skirt and rolled my panties down. Damn, I should have worn pantyhose. A Victoria’s Secret thong is just way too easy to remove.

I reached down to stop her. I was going to push her away. This was wrong. I wasn’t going to play. I was very firm on that. Then her tongue touched me and my hands just rested on her head. I don’t remember parting my legs but suddenly there was room down there for her to lick in all the right places. “Why the hell can’t men ever learn to do it like that?” I thought.

I was twisting Lisa’s hair now and leaning my head back and… the phone rang.

I felt like I’d been released from some kind of fairytale spell. I stepped away from Lisa and picked up the phone. She was playfully crawling towards me. I didn’t know what I’d do when she got there.

“Is that you Moira?” a voice said as soon as I picked up. It was Lisa’s mother.

“Hi Mrs. Flannigan,” I said desperately pulling up my panties and straightening my clothes. Lisa scrambled to her feet and started to tuck herself back into her dress. She looked anxiously at the door as if it was about to be forced open by the sex police. I knew how she felt.

“I thought I saw your car.” Mrs Flannigan said, “Terrible thing to be home so early on a Saturday night. I’m sorry to bother you, but if you’ve finished with Lisa, I could use her at home to help me hang these new curtains.”

“Sure thing, Mrs Flannigan, I’ll send her right over.”

There was silence after I put the phone down.

“That was your mother,” I said.

OK, so I state the obvious when I’m under stress. I had no idea what to do next.

Lisa laughed. “Guess we almost got busted,” she said. Then she kissed me quickly on the lips and said, “That was great. I knew it would be. I better go before Mom starts asking questions.”

“What happened to Miss Vulnerable Teenage Lesbian Virgin?” I thought. One minute it’s all intimacy and passion, next minute it’s like we’re discussing cheating on a term paper.

I was in a mess. My libido was shouting, “Hey, who switched the power off? I’m not done yet?” My nice side was going “Phew that was close, let’s pretend nothing ever happened here tonight.” But mostly I was thinking, “She can’t just up and leave!”

Some of all that must have shown on my face because, Lisa slowed down and gave me a real affectionate look. She put her hand on my forearm and said, “That was special. Thank you. And don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone what we did.”

What WE did? I didn’t do anything. Yeah right. And that was exactly the problem.

When she got to the door she hesitated and said, “Mom will be out on Wednesday. I could come over. Call me. Bye Moira.”

Wednesday night. Four whole days away.

Ever thought about doing something you shouldn’t and known you were going to end up doing it anyway?

"Toying With Lily" a new story up on ERWA

2008-04-04T12:36:00.003+02:00

ERWA has a BDSM: Powerplay theme this month with an array of high quality stories:

Authority 102
by Oxartes

Girls Gone Wild
by Helen E. H. Madden

Plans for the Weekend
by SMOTP

Savitri, The Devoted Wife
by Seneca Mayfair

The Preparation
by felicia Mansur

and my own

Toying with Lily
by Mike Kimera

I've posted an extract from "Lily" below, to give you a flavour of the thing.

If BDSM doesn't press your buttons, you might enjoy some of the other stories on the ERWA site this month

Babylon Nights
by Oxartes

Gravity
by Helen E. H. Madden

Extract from "Toying with Lily" (C) Mike Kimera 2008

The jeans are a deliberate act of provocation. Lily, my allegedly submissive, "You can do anything to me. Anything at all. I'll even call you, Daddy while you do it." mistress, likes to test my limits by defying me. She wants to see what I will put up with and what I will do to keep her in her place. She likes to be kept in her place.

,,,,,,,,

"It was thoughtful of you to keep your jeans on," I say, closing my hand around Lily's collared throat and forcing her back against me. I have large hands and I have often used them to deprive Lily of air at crucial moments. "I'm sure it's a polite way of letting me know that you don't need to be fucked today."

"No!"

The word escapes before Lily can stop it. Remaining unfucked is one of the few punishments that would really make Lily suffer. To paraphrase Rhett Butler, Lily is the kind of woman who needs to be fucked often and by someone who knows how. That's one of the reasons she is here with me instead of with her loving husband: I know how.

I also control when.

"How many days has it been now, Lily?"

"Four."

I'm impressed. According to the rules, Lily is not allowed to have an orgasm for two days before we meet. It gives our meetings an edge. Four days of restraint will have honed Lily's hunger to a razor's edge. And yet she couldn't resist defying me by keeping her jeans on. Still, if Lily could move in a straight line from need to satisfaction she wouldn't be dependent on someone like me to bind and beat her along the path to release.

Erotica, sin, shame and secrecy

2008-03-29T18:44:00.002+01:00

I wrote this article back in 2005 and had it posted in a couple of places but it's not on the Web anymore so I thought I'd give it an airing here.

All comments gratefully received.

Erotica, sin, shame and secrecy

Writing fiction, particularly erotica, is a very intimate process. You mine, consciously or unconsciously, your imagination and experience. You discover what topics or situations or characters trigger and sustain your creativity.

As your fiction piles up behind you like a series of cast-off skins, themes and attitudes emerge that tell you and your readers something about how your mind works and where your heart lies.

Erotica as genre is often seen as an opportunity to escape from the real world into fantasy or to reinforce the idea that you are not alone in the cravings you have and the delights that you seek.

In my own writing, erotica seems to become more of an entanglement than an escape. Time and again I find myself writing about sin, shame, and secrecy.

If writing tells you about the writer then clearly I’m not one of these liberated souls who enjoy sex openly and honestly and dive naked into the pool, grin at their readers and say, “Come on in, the water is lovely.”

I’m more the guy you find in the kitchen at parties or reviewing the CD rack and wondering why the CDs aren’t alphabetised. The one who looks and longs but rarely acts and my writing reflects that.

The cool kids in the pool can write fine, sex-positive erotic stories about the transcendent joy experienced by those who open themselves in a healthy and honest way to their own desires. The problem is that those who share this experience are probably too busy fucking to read erotica and those of us in the kitchen, who eagerly seek erotica, are left either envious or, more likely, unconvinced.

So I try to imagine the people who read my stories finding parts of themselves in them. Some parts they will like and some will make them squirm but I still want them to experience a sense of recognition.

In my mind, my readers have a rich inner life, a craving for sex and a deep understanding of the nature of sin, shame, and secrecy.

To the kids in the pool, my readers are the sexually repressed folks who get off in secret to things they are too up tight to do in real life.

If one believes the women's magazines, then sexual repression is a bad thing. These poor repressed people could be fulfilled and happy if only they would self-actualise, embrace all of the parts of their nature as aspects of themselves, live in the here and now from time to time, put aside their inhibitions and just do it.

This is the Nike generation version of "turn on, tune in, drop out.” It comes out as "Open up, kick back, get off."

I'm unconvinced by the idea that just because something is nice it is also good. Some nice things are exactly the opposite of good.

When I write, I think about people who have to struggle to be good; people with strong sexual urges who demonstrate restraint rather than repression; people who, when the restraint fails, experience shame and regret mixed in with their underlying pleasure.

These people understand, at least at an intuitive level, the concept of sin.

I am an atheist by conviction but I find that an understanding of sin is an asset in writing erotica, so pardon me for a paragraph or two while I don my "Father Mike" costume and expound.

Most Christians are aware of the seven deadly sins but few seem to me to understand them. They are about excess. They are about persisting in behaviours that damage your ability to see the world in a way that enables you to choose good over evil.

Hunger is not a sin, gluttony is. Relaxation is not a sin, sloth is. Desire is not a sin, lust is.

Persistence in sin shapes the sinner, twisting them, perhaps crippling them, and making it harder and harder to be a person who does not sin.

Before we get to lust, let's start with gluttony. All of us get hungry. Many of us get cravings for particular types of food. A very few of us passionately desire food. Not all of those who passionately desire it are gluttons. The glutton MUST eat. The glutton will sacrifice their dignity, their income, their time, in order to eat.

In modern parlance this "sinful" behaviour is pathological: in other words, it acts upon the person in the same way as a disease.

Have you ever eaten to excess, to the point where it hurts to eat more and yet your hand still reaches out for another portion and your mouth chews food your mind knows you do not need and cannot process? To understand gluttony you must think of feeling that way persistently. Think of what it would do to you. What impact you would have on others. Think about the moral and economic implications. Then think about doing it anyway. Every day. Then you start to understand the sinful/pathological nature of gluttony.

To me, a person who has a strong desire for food, who knows what it means to eat beyond the point of satiation and who decides not to do that today, is showing restraint, not repression.

The analogy with Lust is obvious.

So imagine a reader who knows, deep in their gut, that if they gave themselves up to the sexual desire inside them, the world would not be enough. So each day, driven by their knowledge of sin and their desire to retain the grace to live well, they show restraint.

But each and every day is a struggle and some days they lose.

Perhaps on such days they read erotica. Perhaps this allows them to come to the brink, look over the edge but not jump off. And perhaps, having lost the struggle just a little, they feel shame.

It would be a mistake to imagine that the shame is to do with sex. The shame is to do with lacking the strength to be who you want to be and the sure and certain knowledge of who your own weakness could allow you to become.

And with shame comes secrecy.

This kind of secrecy is not about hiding a lie but about bolstering the truth.

If I "come out" and say, "Actually, I spend most mornings wanking over porn, I mentally undress strangers, I occasionally have affairs and, if I could do it without getting caught, I would fuck the brains out of every pretty (and some not so pretty) thing in town" I might be being honest but I would not be doing good.

This kind of public statement would seem like an affirmation. It would change how others see me. It might encourage others to say, "I too want this”; which would be fine if "this" was the person I wanted to be. But if I aspire to be the kind of person who treats himself and others with respect and sometimes love, then when I read the erotica and when it gets me off and even when I recognise it says something true about me and those around me, I will not proclaim this publicly. I will keep my lapses secret in the hope that I may eventually succeed in living up to my aspirations.

So is my imaginary reader someone who denies his own nature, feels bad about himself for no reason and then cloaks his behaviour in a hypocritical secrecy? Or is he someone who understand goodness because he feels the pull or sin, experiences shame as an indicator that he has not yet lost all judgement and turns to secrecy as a lifeline that allows him another chance at goodness tomorrow?

I believe that one of the skills for a writer of erotica is to know how to raise these questions and leave the reader to invent the answers.

Trying out another genre - a police story

2008-03-27T00:41:00.006+01:00

I'm one of those old fashioned folks who prefers crime fiction that isn't focused on helping me share the mind of a serial killer or experience the heat of an arterial gush. I like Raymond Chandler, Carol O'Connell, Harlan Coben, Barbara Nadel and Carl Hiaasen. They introduce me to people who hold my interest and places that seem real even though I've never been there.

Anyway. I've been thinking about trying to write a crime story. A while back I wrote a short story featuring Detective Claire Jardin in New York City. At the time, the story was an execrise to see if I could write a story with sex in it which wasn't about sex and which didn't use any words that would get diapproving looks at a WI meeting. But Claire stayed in my head. She wants me to tell the story of boy who confessed to murdering a woman he ought not to have had any involvement with. So while I let her fill me in on the details (at least enough for me to find out how the plot resolves itself, I thought I'd dust off her first fictional outing and post it here.

I'd be happy to hear any comments you want to share.

Thanks..

Till death do us part

It was an upscale apartment that still managed to look elegant and spacious despite the clutter that a bunch of cops working a crime scene brought with them. Murphy, the uniform first on the scene met us at the elevator. She’s a good cop, young but keen.

“What you got Murph?” Martinez, my partner, asked.

“Two fatal shootings in the study, Detective, but neither of them are as cold as the guy on the balcony: David Reynolds. His wife’s lying dead in there, shot with his gun and all he says is, ‘Tell me when someone with rank arrives, officer,’ and goes out to look at the view.”

I walked past Murphy into the study. I’d get to the bodies later; first I wanted to get the flavor of the place. It was less of a study, more of a media room: Bang and Olufsen sound system, plasma TV, DVD player, commercial quality VCR and two computers, one with webcam. Very cool, very minimalist, very tidy. The only personal touch was the ego-wall, set behind the desk so visitors got a good view: photographic evidence of the success of Mr. David Reynolds, award winning maker of TV commercials and friend to the rich and famous.

I moved from photograph to photograph. Reynolds had a smile that never reached his eyes. There was only one “family” photograph, Mr and Mrs Reynolds on their wedding day. She was pretty and looked younger than him. The body language screamed trophy-wife. That’s why she was on the ego-wall for others to look at and not on the desk for him to see.

I turned to what was left of Mrs. Reynolds. The body was slumped against the wall, what used to be her face was splashed in arc of color behind her like a satanic halo. I squatted to take a closer look. ‘If those breasts are real there is no God’, I thought.

“The gun must have been right up against her chin,” Martinez said. I hate the way he creeps up behind me like that and he knows it.

“Yeah, seems almost malicious doesn’t it?”

“Not as malicious as what was done to Mr. Young-and-Handsome over there. Hey, Claire, you think it’s true that you can’t get into heaven if you’ve had your genitals shot off?”

“That’s what killed him?” I asked.

“Nope, I reckon the two shots through the heart at close range have to take the blame for that.”

“Ok, Murphy take us to see the grieving husband,” I said. I’d had enough of dead bodies for one evening.

“There’s something else you should see first, Detective,” Murphy said. “There’s a tape in the VCR. I checked on it cos the player was still warm when we arrived.”

She looked like she wanted my approval. I smiled at her and she pressed PLAY on the remote.

The first shot was a close up of a very aroused man forcing his way into an asshole that looked way too small to take him. I glanced at Martinez and we both looked at Murphy who was actually blushing.

“It gets better,” Murphy said, “I mean it gets relevant.”

It sounded like the way the New York Times might review porn flicks but I soon saw what Murphy meant. The next shot was Mrs. Reynolds sucking Young-and-Handsome. I learnt that Mrs Reynolds was a swallower, not a spitter and that the shot to Young-and-Handsome’s groin had blown away a substantial endowment. The film continued as a series of fast cuts of Mrs Reynolds and her lover imaginative variety of different positions.

“Switch it off Murphy, we’ve seen enough,” Martinez said.

“Well done for finding this, Murphy.” I said. “What do you think it tells us?”

“Apart from the fact Mrs Reynolds dyed her hair?” Martinez asked sarcastically.

Murphy and I both glared at him.

“Well, the picture quality is strictly amateur, all the shots are fixed camera, the lighting is poor, but the editing is very professional.”

“You watched this tape with these bodies in the room and that’s what you noticed?” Martinez said.

“That and the fact that the tape started from the beginning so if someone watched it tonight they rewound it afterwards,” Murphy replied.

“Maybe you should be doing my job,” Martinez said, with just an edge of irritation.

“Maybe she already is.” I said and he laughed. Martinez never manages to be in asshole-mode for long.

********************

When we got to the balcony Reynolds was on his feet, taking in his expensive view over Manhattan. I doubt that he was pleased by what he saw; it was probably just another kind of ego-wall.

He turned to face us and said, “I take it that the absence of uniform means that you are the ranking officers?”

His accent was very Brit and his question seemed more like a put down.

“I’m Detective Claire Jardin, this is Detective Raul Martinez.” I said, flashing my shield.

He ignored Martinez but offered me his hand with such confidence that I found myself shaking it. His grip was light and dry. No macho squeezing. No smile either.

He made sure that I saw him checking me out from toe to head, then he smiled and said, “So you are a Detective, Ms Jardin? How sad to have one’s illusion’s punctured. It would have been nice to believe that in real life homicide detectives are as young and as pretty as the ones on ‘NYPD Blue’.”

Martinez bristled with hurt macho pride on my behalf. Absurdly, I was struck by how sexy my name sounded when he pronounced it the French way. Clearly he knew how to be charming and had chosen to be insulting. I wondered what he wanted to gain by making me mad at him. I decided to give him some space to see if I could find out.

“You’re certain you want to talk about this now, Mr. Reynolds?” I said, “You’ve been through a significant trauma. You could talk to us later, with your lawyer present if you want.”

“A significant trauma, Detective? Is there another kind?”

I could see Martinez making a fist. He hates being patronized.

Reynolds smiled and said, “I’m sorry, that was rude of me. I appreciate that in this demonstrative, litigious society my restrained emotional reaction and my aversion to lawyers are regarded as deviant. Let’s just attribute that to me being an inscrutable Brit and get on with it shall we? I don’t want this to take all night. I have an important meeting in the morning.”

The Brit thing was clever, it made it much harder for me to read him and being nasty is so much easier to sustain than being fake nice. The evening was getting interesting.

“Why don’t you tell me what happened here, Mr.Reynolds?” I said, trying to sound as dumb as he thought I looked.

“Please, take a seat. Would you like a coffee? I’m afraid I don’t have any donuts but I could send out for some?”

I let the jibe slip by and took a seat. If Reynolds was in the mood to talk I didn’t want to distract him.

“I didn’t kill my wife, Detectives but to substantiate that I need to take you through some rather tiresome details. You see, although I am a very successful man, I am not a very nice one. People pretend to like me because I am successful. I think I am successful because I don’t waste time being nice. I am not without emotions but I’m selective about who I let see them.

My wife, Heather, was one of the few people I let inside the circle as it were. She knew what I needed and she gave it to me. Frankly, she was never a very adventurous lover but she was beautiful, obedient and faithful and for me, that was enough.

We had our fourth wedding anniversary last April. Things had settled down very well. I was pleased with her and I had told her so. I even increased her allowance. Then one day I forgot my wedding ring. I returned home to retrieve it and found Heather sweating under some toyboy she’d picked up. I watched for a while, unseen. The boy wasn’t particularly talented and Heather seemed a little desperate to me. I could almost have felt sorry for her but you see, she wasn’t inside the circle anymore. She had betrayed me. For me she had ceased to be real at that point.”

“Did your wife know that you had seen her that day?” I asked.

“Good question, Detective. It must be all that training you received at the taxpayers’ expense. I assure you that we will get through this much faster if you just shut your mouth and listen.”

“Are you always this aggressive to women Mr. Reynolds?” Martinez asked. “Did you have to teach your wife to shut her mouth?”

“Ah, you must be the bad cop then. So Ms Jardin here must be the one I’m supposed to want to please. Perhaps that technique works on the American MTV generation, I just find it irritating. If you will both be quiet I will give you my statement and you can be on your way to whatever bar it is that you wash away the memories in.”

He was good. I wondered if he’d ever been an actor. He was certainly being one now.

“Your partner is almost right, Ms Jardin. I did indeed set out to teach my wife a lesson. One that she learnt tonight in fact. The dead young man littering my study works under the name Lance Strong. Apparently he felt the name would get him into soaps. Unfortunately his coke habit made it hard for him to remember his lines and even soaps demand that of their actors these days. He auditioned for one of my commercials. Instead I hired him to have sex with my wife. Actually, his brief was two-fold: to broaden her sexual horizons to the point where she needed his particular kind of action and to make her fall in love with him.”

“You hired a man to have sex with your wife?”

“Oh, do keep up, Detective Martinez. I hired him to turn her into an emotionally vulnerable slut. There was of course one further condition of his employment. He had to do all of this on film. It was the best role of his young life. I’d fed him the material he needed to seduce her: her favourite films, the music she liked, the things she thought were romantic. I baited the hook and she swallowed it live on film. Lance turned out to be a better name for him than I had thought. He had enormous stamina as a lover and he got poor Heather to want things that I knew she would be embarrassed to ask future lovers for. There’s a tape in my study if you need the details. I’m sure it will be a success at Precinct parties.”

“So how do we end up with the dead bodies in your study, Mr. Reynolds?” I asked, wanting see what happened if I pushed.

“Ah, that was most unfortunate actually. Not at all how things were meant to resolve themselves. In this case, real-life deviated from my script.”

There was something different in the way he made that comment. I got the impression it was the first completely honest thing I’d heard him say.

“You see, at my suggestion, Lance proposed to Heather last week. The poor girl was so grateful. And she had such creative ways of showing her gratitude by then. It produced some remarkable footage.”

He licked his lips. I’m sure he wasn’t conscious of it. I knew then that he had watched every moment of his wife’s betrayal many times, savouring it. Getting off on it. He was right; he wasn’t a very nice man.

“So this evening they came into my study together so that Heather could ask me for a divorce. It was a poor choice of venue as it turned out. It is the only room in which I keep a gun. It is licensed of course. I just wish I’d kept the desk drawer locked. Still, guns don’t kill people, people kill people, don’t you agree?”

Not a nice man at all.

“After Heather told me of her new-found love, I showed her the tape. I thanked Lance for a job well done and told him that I intended to give him a bonus. I should have been paying attention to Heather, not Lance. The tape affected her more profoundly than I had expected. It was too much of a shock for her. While I was shaking Lance’s hand, Heather took my gun from the drawer and shot him between the legs. Before I could react, she shot him twice more in the chest. Poor Lance.

I know I should have been afraid for my own life but at the time I didn’t think about that, I just wanted to get the gun away from Heather. Then I realised she was about to shoot herself. We struggled. The gun went off. I was unable to stop her. She literally lost her head.

I’m afraid that means that I will test positive for gunpowder residue and you may even find my prints on the gun. I realise it puts me in a bad light, Detectives but I like to be honest. I can supply tapes covering every encounter between my wife and her paid-for-lover, plus a copy of Lance Stone’s contract. I’m sure that a competent lawyer would have no difficulty convincing a jury to see this for the murder/suicide that it was.”

We asked him questions for another thirty minutes but his story didn’t change. He even wrote it down for us. I was certain Reynolds was lying but there was so much truth in what he said that I couldn’t find my way to the lie.

Reynolds stayed on his balcony when we finished with him. He asked to be informed when the bodies had been removed. He made it sound like a request to get rid of the leftovers from a room service meal, but I wasn’t completely buying the calm and in control act. I figured he was in no hurry to go back into his bloodstained study. I told Murphy to keep an eye on him. It would have been embarrassing if we had had to scrape him off the pavement because I’d misread how stiff his Brit upper lip really was.

In the elevator, on the way down to the lobby, Martinez said, “He’ll get away with it you know. The jury will watch that tape and condemn her not him. I bet they ask for a copy to watch over night. I bet they won’t want to miss a moment.”

I saw the lie and the truth then. We didn’t get out of the elevator when it reached the lobby, we went straight back to Reynolds’ apartment.

********************

The camera was in the ceiling of the study. We played the tape on his plasma TV. Things went just as Reynolds described them until he switched on the tape of his wife and her lover. Heather Reynolds laughed.

“God, Lance, you were so big and so hard I thought you were going to split me wide open.”

The camera was fixed on Heather so I couldn’t see Reynolds’ face, but I suspected this was were reality parted company with his script.

Heather was rubbing herself up against Lance now, both of them watching the screen. “Mmm, I do love the taste of fresh meat in the morning,” Heather said, her hand stroking Lance’s crotch. Lance kissed her.

Heather broke the embrace and turned towards Reynolds. “What’s the matter, David? Things not going as you planned? Lance told me about your pathetic little plan on the first night we met.”

Heather leant forward, her hands on Reynolds desk. The tape played on, unregarded behind her.

“You were right, David, after four years of lying under a dried-up emotional cripple, I wanted to be taken by a real man. But do you know what the best part was? Do you know what used to make me scream with pleasure? It wasn’t that you’d chosen such a stud, or that you were paying for me to get properly serviced for a change, it was the thought of you watching Lance taking me and getting off on it because you love the size of him, because you wanted it to be you he was in, not me.”

Reynolds was only just on camera but I could see him reaching for the desk drawer.

“I don’t want a divorce, David. You and I are going to stay married and if you ever try to change that I’ll expose this twisted little plot and take you for every penny you have.”

Heather turned to Lance.

“Why don’t we give him one last thrill Lance? Let’s do it on his anally-tidy desk.”

Lance stepped towards the desk. He was reaching for his fly when the first shot hit him. Reynolds moved into camera-shot, placed the gun against Lance’s chest and fired twice. The camera was on his face as he turned towards Heather. There was nothing in his eyes except hate.

Heather backed against the wall. She didn’t shout or struggle. She seemed mesmerised by Reynolds’s eyes. He placed the gun under her chin and fired.

For a few moments he stood over the body. Then he put the gun in her hands. His movements were calm. He switched off the tape and rewound it. Slowly he moved to the phone. He dialled 911. He gave his name and his address and reported two deaths by gunshot. Then he sat on the desk, looking up at the camera until Murphy arrived at the scene.

********************

“So how did you know the camera was there?” Murphy asked.

We were at Raj O’Rielly’s, home to Irish booze and Indian food and beloved of every cop in the precinct.

“It was what Raul said about not missing a moment. Reynolds photographed everything. He wasn’t going to miss the last chapter in his wife’s humiliation.”

“But why leave the tape there for us to find?”

“Maybe he thought we’d need a search warrant to search a crime scene,” Martinez said.

“Or maybe he was thought we were too stupid to figure it out.”

I was remembering Reynolds’s behaviour on the balcony. The way he had provoked me. The performance he had given.

“I think,” I said, “that he wanted to get caught”.

“Claire,” Martinez said “to almost quote the great Ozzy Osbourne ‘I love you to bits but you’re completely nuts’.”

I laughed it off and went to get some more Guinness to go with the Rogan Josh, but even in the middle of all that noise and life, I was haunted by Reynolds looking up at the camera as he sat on his desk. There had been nothing at all behind his eyes. Not even hate.

Eroticism, ecstasy, sin and Remittance Girl's "Splinter"

2008-03-19T21:43:00.003+01:00

I've recently read a work in progress from Remittance Girl (her site is a wonderful source of well written stories - visit it here). The work is called "Splinter" and is about a young woman, with a desire to become a nun, who expresses her devotion to God through self-chastisement (meaning she flogs herself until she overwhelmed by the pain). You can find the story here.

When rg (Remittance Girl) shared the story on ERWA, she asked whether or not is was erotic.

Most of what I write is labelled as erotic but it seems to me that the meaning of the word has leached away, like a poster that has been too long in the rain, so I decided to offer a definition of eroticism.

Eroticism is not about sex or arousal, it is about sexual desire.

Currently, gratification is all the rage: sex on the first date and no later than the third; porn that presses all the buttons to get the minimum time between stiff and sticky with the maximum bang.

Gratification is not inherently erotic.

Desire is as much about anticipation, about restraint and constraint as it is about release. Release may be a consequence of desire but it does not measure its strength. The strength of a desire is better measured by the persistence of the erotic impulse.

Ecstatics have the ability to focus completely on the source of their desire - whether that is God or music - and transcend everything except the experience - the rapture -provoked by their sustained concentration on the object of their desire.

This rapture is an intensely physical experience. It has been suggested that ecstactics are “wired” differently to the rest of us – their Autonomic Nervous System, the ANS, responds to certain stimuli and produces a mood changing chemicals that provide a truly overwhelming experience. (see here)

rg's story walks an interesting line - whether what is being experienced is religious ecstasy or an addiction to an erotic desire for pain.

The ecstasy is physically the same. The source of the desire is different.

I think that rg’s story only engages with the erotic in part 2. The Main Character believes that something was taken from her. She is no longer able to perceive her own motives for inflicting pain on herself as pure. Therefore the ecstasy she experiences has lost its innocence. It has been eroticised.

The strength of the desire and the experience of the rapture have not changed. What has altered is the perception of the object of desire. Appropriately enough in this Catholic setting, rg manages to associate the erotic with the sinful. At the point that the desire is eroticised it also becomes sinful – the Main Character literally acquire carnal knowledge.

If rg’s story is labelled as erotica, then one could argue that it engages the reader in the erotic in part one as well as part two. This is not a first person account. The fact that the Main Character doesn’t acknowledge the erotic nature of her desire until part 2 doesn’t prevent the rest of us from seeing the erotic (and the sinful) in her actions in part 1.

Rg chooses to set her story in a halfway house - halfway perhaps between impulse and gratification. She has a priest who shares the same erotic impulse as the Main Character. In part 2 of the story he restrains the Main Character

from acting on her impulse while at the same time experiencing sexual arousal.

As any Catholic will know, sin is matter of thought, word or deed. Even if no action is taken on the impulse, the presence of the impulse is sinful. The same applies to eroticism. The impulse is erotic whether or not it is acted upon. The sustained experience of the impulse, even when the opportunity to act upon it is denied, actually increases the erotic charge. One has to wonder whether the priest's arousal stems from the external evidence of the Main Character's actions (the blood) or from the recognition of the strength of her erotic impulse.

I recommend her story to you (part 3 is now on her site).

Taboos in Erotica

2008-03-06T10:22:00.002+01:00

In ERWA we’ve been having a discussion about the restrictions placed on erotica that don’t apply to main stream writing. If you want to be published (at least in the US) you need to avoid the big four taboos: Incest, Rape, Bestiality and Childsex.(the last being any sexual act involving any person under eighteen).

The restriction arises because erotica is assumed to have arousal as its aim and using these topics for that purpose is seen as obscene.

Take a look around the Internet and you’ll find a lot of porn written around these themes and a lot of it gets the whole kick out of a kind of fetishistic view of the acts involved and which tends both to turn the people in the stories into sub-human fetish sex objects and to avoid any confrontation with the physical and emotional realities of the acts themselves. This, of course, is what makes them porn.

I would hope that erotica would treat the themes differently, exploring the emotional and physical realities of the experiences. Of course that doesn’t mean that they would get published.

The debate on ERWA made me ask myself what I want from writing erotica and what restrictions I would place on myself.

I decided that I want my stories to bite. I want them to stay in the reader’s head. I want them to change the reader by making them confront things, identify with things, reject or accept things. This raised the question of my responsibility as a writer.

My tagline on my email is: “What you read is not what I wrote. I provide the text, you provide the meaning.” My take on my responsibility reflects this view.

I believe I have to take responsiblity for the intentions behind what I write and the integrity and skill with which I realise the intention. I can't take any accountablity for what the reader actually reads or how they are changed by the experience.

Below, I’ve offered a flasher and a short story which take on some of the taboos and which demonstrate what I mean. If you think they are likely to offend you, don’t read any further than this.

If you do read the stories, I’m interested in your views on the stories and on what you expect from erotica.

The Third Word
© Mike Kimera 2006. All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without written permission from mikekimera@yahoo.co.uk

Please, Daddy

That’s what I whisper in his ear when I am spread and he is hard and
sweat is all that is between us.

Please, Daddy

Passes my lips like a promise or a plea, rousing his lust, stirring my
memories, mixing his lust and my guilt

Please, Daddy

A prayer offered to this bar-met stranger, the right age but with the
wrong face, as he pushes into me

Please, Daddy

As always, pleasure and shame race through me, my present and my past
bound together. Perhaps this time I will finally release the third
word.

Please, Daddy. Stop.

Nadica

Nadica had Saul tied to the bed by the time I got there. She was kneeling astride his hips, holding his long thin cock at the base and rolling it against the soft swell of her belly. It left a little trail of silver precum just below her navel. Seeing it against her like that, you wondered how she ever fitted it all inside her.

It wasn’t that Saul was so huge, he was only a little longer than me, though I’m thicker and can stay hard longer, well Saul’s in his fifties now and he does OK for guy with grey hair on his balls, no it was just that Nadica is tiny, three inches shy of five foot and slim with it.

Nadica never fucks naked. The first time I had her she wore a white blouse and striped school tie, with a knot so large that the rest of the tie barely made it between her breasts. She wore the shirt open with the tie around her neck, not around the collar of the shirt

Normally, I’m not an adventurous guy when it comes to sex, I’m just grateful when a woman opens her legs for me and lets me hump until I’m done, but there’s something about Nadica that changes that. The tie was part of it. As she rode Saul’s cock and sucked me off, I couldn’t just stand there and enjoy it; the tie demanded to be pulled. I wrapped it round my fist and used it to drag her head further down my shaft. Nadica loved it. Saul told me later that her cunt had spasmed so hard it hurt. When I came in her mouth, she let the semen dribble down onto the tie, then she stuffed it into her mouth like a gag and lay back on Saul’s chest until he managed to come inside her.

Today she’s wearing a pink angora cardigan that is so tiny it only comes part way down her arms and won’t close across her breasts. With the top button fastened and the soft material falling away on either side, Nadica’s breasts seem even larger than usual. Her breasts are full and conical and sit absurdly high on her narrow little chest. Every time I see them my hands wants to feel their weight and my mouth yearns to suckle. The cardigan is sweet and soft and innocent but Nadica makes it into an incitement to wickedness. I think that Nadica has seen a lot of wickedness in her short life.

Saul doesn’t know how old she is. She had no papers with her when he found her, a week ago. We have decided that she must be at least twenty; it would be hard to live with ourselves if we had decided anything else.

Saul’s not even sure where exactly he picked her up. He’s a careful man. You have to be careful driving a truck that close to the Bosnian border, even if the truck has UN written on the side. The war there is getting nasty. Stories are starting to come out about a massacre in Srebrenica – the UN troops just stepped aside and let the Serbs get on with killing every male and raping every woman. We’re talking thousands of people here. I can’t imagine hating badly enough to sustain that much evil. Of course, it’s not just the Serbs; the whole country is soaked in an acid bath of pain and fear and hate.

Anyway, somehow Nadica managed to stowaway in Saul’s cab. He didn’t find her until he climbed into the sleeping area at the back. He said she looked small, tired and very young, wrapped around a scrappy bag of clothes. Stupidly, he assumed she wasn’t dangerous. He was wrong. Her knife was long and sharp, with serrated edges. The kind of knife a soldier carries.

When she pressed it up against his neck he thought he was going to die. Then she fucked him. With the knife against his throat, she straddled him and sucked on his tongue. He tried to touch her but she pricked him with the knife hard enough to draw blood. After that he let her get on with it. She worked his cock with her hand while she licked away the blood from his throat. Then she rode him until he came. When Nadica fucks she goes into her head. She chants. Always the same chant “datata, datata, datata.”

Saul reckons he could have taken the knife then but just when he was thinking of it, she fell forward onto him, wrapped her arms around his neck and started to cry. Saul held her. Nadica brings that out in you. After sex she seems fragile and precious and you want to hold her forever and protect her from harm.

Saul fell asleep with Nadica in his arms. When he woke in the morning she’d tied his hands and feet with belts and taken his wallet. He thought that she’d robbed him and was thankful that she hadn’t cut him before she left. Then she came back, bringing his wallet and a warm baguette.

He tried to talk to her but her only response was to massage his cock and then sit on it while she fed him chunks of bread that she sliced with that serrated knife. Then she brought him off by hand, licking her fingers afterwards like his cum was jam.

When the sex was over she untied him, cuddled up next to him and went to sleep.

Saul drove her home. He couldn’t bring himself to leave her behind. I tell myself that that’s because Saul is a kind man, which is true, but part of me, the part of me I don’t let out in public, knows that it’s because sex with Nadica is addictive. It’s not like anything else you’ve ever experienced. At least not like anything I’ve experienced.

Saul asked me to come and see Nadica because I’m good with languages. I think he was also a little frightened by the effect she was having on him and by what would happen if he stayed on his own with her.

I tried French, German, and Italian with no success. I only learnt her name by pointing at my self and giving mine and then pointing at her. On the third attempt, she smiled, said “Nadica” and then sucked the finger I was pointing at her. I tried for another twenty minutes or so, then Nadica disappeared into the bedroom and came back out dressed in the white blouse and school tie and nothing else. She climbed on Saul’s lap, facing me but rubbing herself against him. Then she beckoned me to come over.

The sex was… compelling. My senses were overloaded. I couldn’t believe what was happening. Nadica works at sex like it’s a form of dressage. Then, when she‘s into it, she starts with the “datata” chant. Over and over.

We’ve fucked her every day for the past week, always as a threesome. She won’t do me if Saul isn’t there. Won’t even look at me.

When I’m with her it’s like the world goes away and there is an overwhelming sense of… well, thrill. Not lust. Certainly not love. It’s that feeling you get when you know that you’re crossing a line; that you’re doing something you will regret but you’re going to do it anyway; when all the normal rules fade and all that’s left is you and your desire and what you’re prepared to do to sate it.

Nadica is playing a new game today. She looks me in the eye as she straddles Saul’s cock and then presses down hard, forcing it up her arse. She leans back, her hands behind her on his chest, her breasts pointing upwards, jutting out from beneath the angora cardigan and she spreads her legs, inviting me to fuck her.

I’d promised myself that I wouldn’t come here today. I’ve been doing some research on the web. Nadica is a Serbian name. It means Hope. That gave me the clue, so I checked an online dictionary for a translation from Serbian to English. Nadica isn’t chanting “datata”; she’s saying “Da, Tata” – “Yes, Daddy”.

When I found that out, I sat in front of my computer and let it sink in: the dressage sex, the chanting, the desire to sleep when not fucking, the refusal to fuck naked, the refusal to fuck at all when Saul isn’t there.

I thought I knew what it meant. I thought I knew what she’d been through in Serbia. I thought I’d never let myself fuck her again.

Then Saul called me and now I’m here.

Nadica is sliding back and forth on Saul’s cock, just a fraction of an inch at a time. Her cunt is wet. Her eyes are closed. She’s waiting for me. Soon she will start to chant.

In the next few seconds I will discover what kind of human being I am.

A curious thing about writing erotica...

2008-03-02T20:08:00.003+01:00

A curious thing about writing erotica, or at least erotica that you want to see published some day, is that you have more constraints on subject matter than writers of mainstream fiction.

If a mainstream author writes about underage sex it's an exploration of a rite of passage in contemporary society, or, as in the case of the wonderful movie, "Juno", an Oscar winning script.

If a writer of erotica does a story on the same thing, they place themselves beyond the pale?

Why?

Litigation. The writing of erotica is seen as exploiting taboo subjects to stimulate and pervert their audience.

Well, I write erotica but I also write whatever I think will make a good story.

I think the story below is both fun and thought provoking. It's fast, witty, sexy and not necessarily a comfortable read (I know, I'm SO modest).

Yet I hold out no hopes of seeing it published anywhere.

I post it here for your enjoyment. Please feel free to comment

Mary, Margaret and Me

“Good Morning.”

The voice that has woken me is female, young, playful in a slutty sort of way and I have no idea who it belongs to. I try to sit up in bed but my skull is membrane-thin from last night’s alcohol and my brain slops against it like an egg yolk hitting a windshield. I groan and decide it would not be wise to try and open my eyes.

“Y’don’t look well, Uncle Patrick. It must be the whiskey me mam was pouring down you last night.”

UNCLE Patrick. It comes back to me in a stomach churning rush. One bad idea following rapidly after another like staggers on a high-wire had brought me back to Mary O’Rourke’s door and, it seemed, to her bed.

“Anyone would think she wanted you too drunk to do anything, the way she kept filling your glass. Why d’ya think that might be, Uncle?”

That’s right. I didn’t fuck Mary last night. I got drunk. No. She got me drunk. Then she must have put me to bed. From the looks of things she must have stripped me naked before she tucked me in. Well I hope one of us enjoyed it.

“You’re a fine looking man. She’s not had a man like you these past five years or more. You’d think she’d want you sober and upright, not drunk and prone.”

I force myself to open my eyes. The light hurts but the view is worth it. At the foot of my bed is a girl of nineteen or so. She is wearing pyjamas that are tight across the arse and don’t have enough buttons fastened on the shirt. She’s looking at me like I’m her next meal and she’s really really hungry. I’ve seen that look before. Now I know exactly who she is.

“I’m not your uncle, Margaret O’Rourke, and if your mother knew you were in here she’d take a broom to you.”

“That’s right,” Margaret says, coming around the side of the bed, towards me. “You’re not really my uncle. She just wants me to call you that so everything will seem respectable.”

Margaret sits on the side of the bed, close enough for me to reach out and touch her. Her pyjamas are white with a little red cherry motif. It shows the girl has a sense of humour.

“She’s very respectable, these days, y’know. Right now she’s off at Mass. Can’t be missing Mass on a Sunday, can she? She’ll be there for an hour or more yet.”

Margaret stretches out on her side across the bed, just below my feet. She rests her head on one hand and holds the other behind her on her arse, placing the few shirt buttons she has fastened under a pressure they are unlikely to survive. Then she grins at me.

The pain in my head has started to recede. I can only think that this is the result of the blood in my body rushing south to give me the sturdiest of erections.

“Of course, she wasn’t so respectable when you and she were at it like rabbits on Viagra.”

With a flexibility that only the young would take for granted, Margaret sits up in a semi-lotus pose and leans forward. Her skin is creamy and smooth and her breasts are high and taut and God Damn It, I shouldn’t be looking at them at all.

“She’d have been my age when she was fucking you, wouldn’t she? Do y' remember what she was like then, at all?”

Oh I remember all right. It was remembering Mary O’Rourke that made me decide to stay the weekend in Dublin instead of going straight back to New York. Mary was my first lust. We burned for each other. She’d drag me into the backseat of her father’s car and straddle me like she was taking possession of her territory. Then she’d hold my mouth to her breast and fuck me, rocking slowly back and forth on my cock, muttering ‘fuck me y’ bastard,’ like she was saying the Rosary.

“She was beautiful. She still is. And you have a filthy mouth.”

“Oh, you’d be amazed how filthy this mouth can be,” Margaret says, looking me straight in the eye.

I swallow hard as I imagine her doing the same. God Almighty, how the hell did I end up here?

“They say I look like me mother”, Margaret says. “So does this remind you of anything?”

Margaret scoots onto all fours with her tightly clad arse pointing right at me, then, looking back at me; she works her hips in a slow but firm figure of eight.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Mary used to call that churning because if she did it long enough it produced cream and turned me to butter.

Mary was the best thing that ever happened to me. I’d realized that yesterday, after I’d finished my business and had let my mind wander to times past. She was fun and bright, and sexy as all get out. And I’d left her to find my fortune just when hers had taken a turn for the worse.

“Well, if that tent pole pushing up the sheet is anything to go by, you like what you see, Patrick.”

Margaret turns around and prowls slowly up the bed towards me as she speaks.

“I’ve a thing for older men, Patrick.”

Margaret’s arms are on either side of my legs now. She looks wonderful. I can positively smell the youth of her.

“Would you like me to do you, Patrick? For old time sake?”

My reaction isn’t planned. It is pure instinct. And it isn’t the kind of thing you brag about in the pub.

“Margaret O’Rourke, stop this at once!” I spit out these words as I shuffle backwards away from Margaret, like a drunk trying to get out of the path of a speeding car.

“Do y’not think I’m pretty, Patrick?” Margaret pretends to pout. Then her hands reach up to the buttons on her pyjama jacket and she says, “Would you like a closer look?”

It takes an effort but I look the other way and say, “I’m your father and you will stop this right now.”

Margaret doesn’t say anything. She just gets off the bed, walks to the door, opens it a little and shouts: “Ma, you were right. He knew all along.”

She looks back at my stricken face, grins and then adds, “Oh and he’s not a complete shit. I can even see why you fancied him… when he was younger.”

My head is in a whirl. What has just happened here? When Mary fell pregnant I’d was all set to go to New York and there was no way I wanted a kiddie to stop me. So I’d played the shit and said I’d no way of knowing that I was the father. Mary hadn’t argued. She’d planted her boot on my arse and told me not to come back, but she hadn’t argued.

“Margaret. What…?”

Margaret laughs. “The test was my idea. I knew all about you and Mam and how you walked out on us. When you showed up yesterday, I bet Mam that I could get you to admit who you are – Daddy. Now you’d better get dressed. Mam will want to speak to you in the parlour.”

“Margaret, I’m sorry.”

“No. You’re not. You’re surprised, embarrassed even, but you’re not sorry. And you’re not my father in any way that matters. Now get dressed and try to find where you left your dignity.”

I sit in bed for a moment, trying to take everything in. I realise two things. I have a daughter I am proud of and when push came to shove I wasn’t a complete shit. Which means that I shouldn’t keep acting like a complete shit. I dress slowly, take a deep breath and head downstairs to apologise to Mary.

Toblerone and Exotic Dancers

2008-02-05T10:59:00.000+01:00

I live in Switzerland so I can’t ignore the 100^h Birthday of the most famous and most innovative of Swiss Chocolates: Toblerone.

When I was growing up in the UK there was a memorable, slightly psychedelic, animated ad for Toblerone which had the surreal feel of the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine”. It was accompanied by a “New Seekers” type song that went

Toblerone
out on its own
Triangular chocolate
that's toblerone
Made from triangular honey by triangular bees
from triangular flowers in triangular trees
a-and *O-O-OH* Mr Confectioner pleease!!
GIVE ME TOBLERONE

Now that’s effective advertising – I remember the words more than twenty years later. At the time it seemed to make Toblerone out to be a kind of LSD. But then, English ads often carry a second meaning – the copywriters must have been grinning when the got Cadburys to go with

A finger of fudge

is just enough

to give the kids a treat

Anyway, Toblerone (in England we call it Toe – blur – own. In Switzerland they call it Toe- bluh – roh – nay because it links Tobler’s name to torrone – the Italian word for nougat) is still out on it’s own after 100 years.

It’s been owned by Kraft foods since 2000 and currently is ranked 17^th amongst global confectionary foods brands – impressive given it has had limited distribution in the US for the past thirty years or so (hey, I’m a consultant; I get paid to know this stuff). The current marketing tagline is: "Lose yourself in the Toblerone triangle." – Further hints at the hallucinogenic power of chocolate, honey and nougat – or is it just the triangular shape that makes the difference?

The triangular shape, which allows you to snap off one triangle at a time and pretend that you’ll leave the rest to later, is the link to the exotic dancers in the headline of this blog entry

It’s often stated that Tobler gave the chocolate its triangular shape because he was inspired by the Matterhorn but Theodor Tobler was in his twenties when he came up with the idea and he was the king of marketing cool of his day so I wasn’t surprised to learn that Matterhorn (booooooring) had nothing to do with it.

According to Tobler’s grandson, Andreas, the idea actually was inspired when Theodore went to the Folies Bergeres in Paris (a very naughty place to visit at the time) and saw the dancers forming human triangles as part of their act.

You have to admire a man who sees pretty, athletic women form a triangle and goes “Mmm, I’d like to pop those in my mouth one at a time.”

The print market for erotica is dead? Not with editors like Alison Tyler and Rache Kramer Bussel around

2008-02-04T00:54:00.000+01:00

2007 saw a further contraction of the print market for erotica. The long-running Blue Moon / Avalon imprint was killed off. Orion and Neon both cut back on their plans, including cancelling commissioned novels.

The publishers that remain have narrowed their calls for submission so that you they can hit a particular niche, preferably with a sure-fire formula – for example erotic romance must have a happy ending. Apparently that and not the passion that people feel and express, is the defining characteristic of romance.

In this context it is particularly pleasing to see some editors having significant success in pitching short story collections to the publishing houses. Rachel Kramer Bussel has done well with the “He’s On top” and “She’s On Top” pair of D/s books and has more on the way.

Alison Tyler has managed to pitch an Erotic Alphabet series (now don’t you with you’d thought of that?) to Cleis. Putting something like this together is a lot of work. You have to handle the publishers and their lawyers. You have to push out calls for submission and deal with authors like me (Alison wanted one of my stories for "H is for Hardcore" but I was ill and didn’t get the contract to her in time) and you have continuously to publicise the books in the press and on the internet.

Alison was kind enough to give me a second chance to contribute to her series and I now have “Have a Nice Day” (one of the raunchiest things I’ve ever written) in her appropriately name “I is for Indecent” and “Other Bonds Than Leather* (my favourite this-is-what–it’s really-like BDSM story) in “L is for Leather”. The covers are cute. The authors cover a wide range of styles and content but all pack a punch.

So when I hear “e-books killed the print erotica market, aint it awful” line in writers’ formums I remind people of Rachel and Alison and point out that if you have the energy and the talent and the persistence you can make print work.

I wish them continuing success.

Flash Fiction: Super Bowl XLII

2008-02-03T18:50:00.000+01:00

Flash Fiction, stories of 200 words or less, is as much fun to write as it is to read. I use them to test my ability to put a bigger punch in a smaller package.

I've put this little piece together as an exercise in writing outside my own culture - for me football is played by fast fit lads who kick the ball around without a break for two fortyfive minute sessions, not by steroid-enhanced gorillas in armour who jump on each other in rehearsed ballet moves and take a rest every few minutes so the promoters can sell more advertising.

Anyway, here's a little offering from me to keep you amused on Super Bowl Sunday - even if you think NFL means Non-Fat Latte.

“You’re sure you want this?”

“Don’t I look sure?”

"You look wonderful. Wearing nothing but a Patriots shirt is a nice touch. But what about Matt?"

"Your brother, my husband, the one we’re about to cheat on - again? I’m wearing this shirt in his honor. He’s sure the Patriots will get the first touchdown."

"Where is he?"

"Downstairs, in front of the plasma, grazing on chips and guacamole. I offered to put an X in Superbowl XLII and he said he’d prefer pizza. That’s why you got the booty call draft. Hell, even I told him I was ovulating and that we could call the baby Brady. Made no difference."

"You’re ovulating?"

"Of course not. Does stupid run in your family? Anyway, even if I was, there’d be no way of proving which of you was the father."

"Yeah but if the babies mine I want it called Moss"

"That’s what I like about you. You understand the value of a good catch. With Matt only the touchdown counts. Now bend me over and show me how deep you can go in the end-zone."

"You gonna be my wide receiver?"

"Honey I’m lubed up to be your tight end"

Back to writing: “Blind Faith” – my first story for 2008 – is up on the ERWA website

2008-02-02T01:02:00.001+01:00

Hi folks,

I’m glad to have 2007 behind me. On the whole it was not a fun year. It was my least productive writing year since I started in 1999. I’m determined not to let history repeat itself. 2008 is going to be a GREAT writing year.

So far, things are going well. The folks over at the rolling writer’s workshop that is the Erotic Readers and Writers Association helped me to kick start the year with their theme of the month.

January’s theme was fetish. I wanted to do something that avoided the whips/leather/latex stuff and straddled the line between vanilla and something more. I came up with “Blind Faith” a gentle piece about blindfold public sex. The story revolves around the transformational nature of a fetish – in this case a blindfold. The sex is hot, the setting is real, but the focus is the experience of Faith and how it is affected by her fetish.

Here’s a small sample

Faith shivered at the thought of being on public display, but she did not leave. Instead she touched the strip of heavy white cotton that was tied around her wrist. It was her magic amulet. It had the power to transform her from her day to day self into someone to whom amazing things happened. After all, how many recently divorced, thirty-five year old Englishwomen found themselves standing on a harbour wall, looking out at the Alps and waiting for their lover to arrive?

If you’d like to see the whole story, please go here. http://www.erotica-readers.com/GD/S/Blind_Faith.htm

I’d love to hear what you think of it.

“Best New Erotica 7” (now available to pre-order) is my 5th BNE in a row

2007-10-14T01:25:00.000+02:00

I’m proud to say that, for the 5^th consecutive year, I have a story in the Mammoth Best New Erotica anthology, edited by Maxim Jakubowski. “Best New Erotica 7” is now available for pre-order from Amazon (although it won’t be published until January).

I always send Maxim a selection of stories to choose from and I can never predict which one he’ll take. “Best New Erotica” is an eclectic publication and, apart from the fact that the stories have to have been published (print or online) somewhere in the relevant year (2006 in this case) they have little in common.

The first story of mine that Maxim published was “Deserving Ruth” in “Best New Erotica 3”. I was very excited to see this in print. I still think it is one of the short stories I’ve written. I like it because it has a good hook at the beginning, it pulls of a first person POV, it’s crammed with sex scenes and it’s driven by strong emotions: guilt, lust and most of all, love.

Here’s how it starts:

“My wife says you like to come in her mouth, David.”

We are only one drink in to the evening and this isn’t the conversational opener I’d expected. I nurse my bottle of Bud and say nothing.

Lars puts his arm around my shoulders, leans his head down towards mine and says, “Mei Mei does have a talented tongue, but I always wonder about a man who is able to resist her tight little cunt. There’s something about the grip of a wet cunt on your cock that a mouth just can’t match, don’t you think?”

I am very aware of the heat of Lars’ body next to mine. He is dressed in Levis and tight fitting black t-shirt and he looks like six foot four of pure muscle. For a moment it occurs to me that he could snap my neck without breaking sweat, but he is smiling and from the tone of his voice we could be talking about cars or sports.

I glance over at Mei Mei. She looks small next to my wife, Ruth. They both have the same long black hair and have conspired to wear matching outfits, black silk shirt-dresses that stop inches above the knee and tie with a simple belt at the waist. Their makeshift uniforms emphasise how different they are. Ruth has a strong Slavic look; her breasts and hips seem almost swollen and over-ripe compared to Mei Mei’s compact Malaysian frame. The two of them are talking animatedly, leaning forward, their faces almost touching. Ruth’s hand rests on Mei Mei’s knee, her fingers pointing along the line of her thigh. Sexual intent seems to flash between them.

“Ruth has nice breasts, David,” Lars says, “You must enjoy pressing her tits together and pushing your cock between them.”

I feel the beginnings of an erection and I wish Lars would take his arm off my shoulders. I have never fucked Ruth’s tits, she has never let me, but I have often wondered what it would be like.

I continue looking at the women to give myself time to decide how to get Lars to move his arm without causing offence. After all, this is his house and I was brought up not to insult my host.

Ruth’s hand is now out of sight, underneath Mei Mei’s dress. Mei Mei leans forward and pushes her tongue into Ruth’s mouth. There is something staged about the kiss. The tongues are too visible. I know that, out of the side of their eyes, they are looking at Lars and me, putting on a show for us.

Ruth is in charge of course. Ruth is always in charge. She was the one who brought Mei Mei into our bed. She told me that they met at one of those Manchester Sauna clubs that doubles as a swingers swap centre. Mei Mei was new and all the men had been trying to get her attention. Ruth pushed them aside, pulled Mei Mei’s head back by the hair and then kissed her. Mei Mei kissed back and opened her legs slightly. Ruth said that Mei Mei was so wet she could have slid her whole fist into her cunt. As it was, pushing two fingers in was enough to cause general applause from the watching men.

Normally Ruth doesn’t involve me in her promiscuous adventures, but she always tells me about them. She wants me to know the lengths that she goes to to find satisfaction.

Ruth has a set routine. Whenever she gets really horny she goes to the club and fucks. Then she comes back and tells me all about it. She makes me sit in the living room with the palms of my hands on the arm of the chair. If I move my hands she will walk out of the room and not tell me anything more. If I stay still, she will talk me through every detail, all the while coaxing my cock to get harder and harder. Then she’ll let me be her last fuck of the day.

For “Best New Erotica 4” Maxim took “American Holidays”. This is the longest piece I’ve ever had published and at 21,328 words I was surprised that Maxim had room for it but it turned out to be a good decision as the piece received positive reviews.

“American Holidays” is a novella about a group of characters who are all connected. Over the course of Memorial Day, Independence Day, Halloween and Thanksgiving, each character gets to tell their story.

This piece came about because Susannah Indigo at Clean Sheets offered me the chance to write a series, with each story appearing on Clean Sheets at the appropriate time of year.

I like the piece because it’s written in the first person with each section being a different person (something creative writing classes constantly tell you not to do) and because each story has to complete, connected to the others and relevant to the holiday it’s named after. For me, the best thing about the story was having the space to get to know the characters as people and having the pressure to give them each a distinctive voice. Here’s the opening to “Thanksgiving” the final section of “American Holidays”. It’s told from Helen’s point of view. She is a Femdom, happily married to Peter. The story takes place at her mother’s house on Thanksgiving. I loved the opportunity to think through what it would be like for a D/s couple to spend the night at the Dominatrix’s childhood home. Is a Domme still a Domme to her parents? Here’s how it starts.

“You want me to sleep here?”

“Well this is where you slept when you lived here, Helen. Why should it change now? I thought you’d be pleased to have your old room back.”

I try to read my mother’s face. She must being doing this deliberately. And she must know that I can see what she is doing. But she still has that innocent, not-quite-connected-to-planet-earth look that she uses to avoid any minor questions about her decisions that my father might be rash enough to voice.

I stare in disbelief at the single bed that I slept in as a child. It’s a very narrow single bed.

“I know that you prefer to ignore the fact that Peter and I are married mother, but he is my husband and I expect to have him in my bed. We can’t sleep here.”

“Really, Helen, I have no idea where you get these impressions from. I have no opinion about Peter. As I said at the time, who you chose to marry was up to you.”

What she’d said at the time was “Are you sure you want to marry Paul, dear? He’s such a bland man. I can see the advantage of having someone manageable but marriage needs a little spice if it’s to last. I’ve always preferred to wake up to Huevos Rancheros, the problem with Paul is that he’s just so… oatmeal.”

I‘d stood there, with my hands balled into fists and my jaw clenched, trying to quell the desire to hit her.

“His name is Peter, mother,” I’d spat out.

“You see, dear, not even his name is memorable. Ah well. It is your decision of course.”

Now, seven years later, I find myself having to bite back my anger one more time. My mother is talking. I’m trying not to strangle her.

“I didn’t think that you and Peter would mind being separated for one night. I’ve given him the fold-down bed in your father’s den. He’ll be perfectly comfortable. I had to give the guest bedroom to Troy and Dianna; after all they have the baby to think of.”

The baby. Of course we should be thinking about the baby. My younger brother (what kind of mother calls their kids Helen and Troy?) produced a grandchild right off the bat. I of course committed the sin of putting my career ahead of my duty to deliver grandchildren, although even that became Peter’s fault in my mother’s mind. “If Peter has a problem dear, I can recommend an excellent clinic.” My mother had left that helpful tip on our answerphone in the second year of my marriage. Peter played it back to me when I got home from work.

I don’t resent the fact that Troy and Dianna got the big bed. I resent the implication that Peter is so bland that I won’t even notice his absence.

“I want him here with me, mother.”

Even I can hear how petulant I sound.

“Well if it’s that important to you, dear. I’ll ask your father to move the fold-down bed in here. I’m sure he won’t mind. Although of course he has only just set everything up the den. But then your father always makes sure that his little Helen gets what she wants, doesn’t he?”

I don’t believe it. She is still

“There won’t be a lot of room in here. You’ll have to fold up the bed before you can open the door. But, if that’s what you want…”

Oh God. It is always like this. A constant trickle of words that erode my will. I either have to get angry or to shut down and give in. Giving in is easier. If I push her now, the topic will come up at dinner. And again in the morning. And in the next time we come to the house. If there is a next time.

“Never mind, mother. Peter can stay where he is. Let’s just concentrate on getting dinner ready.”

“Well, if you’re sure, dear.”

How did this woman live so long?

“You look tense, Helen. Why don’t you take a moment to freshen up? Dianna is changing the baby in the bathroom but you can use the en suite in the master bedroom. I’ll be in the kitchen when you’re ready.”

And then she is gone. The relief is physical, like when your ears pop at altitude.

For “Best New Erotica 5”, Maxim went with comedy, picking “I want to watch you do it”, which later became the opening story in my “Writing Naked” short story collection. This is a lightweight tale meant to amuse as much as to arouse. I like the story because I managed to use dialogue to keep the past fast and to deliver one liners. It’s quite liberating to get away from the burden of descriptive prose

Here’s the first 500 or so words:

"I want to watch you do it."

We've been kissing; really kissing. My eyes are still closed and my mouth is wide open when Karen pulls away to make her bizarre statement.

"Do what?" I say, trying unsuccessfully to pull her back into my arms.

"I want to watch you masturbate."

"What? No. I mean, why?"

"You need a reason? I thought you did it several times a day." Karen places her hands on her hips and holds her head to one side in that way she does when she wants me to know that I'm being difficult.

"I do not. Well, not several times. Once or twice maybe. When I'm by myself."

Karen looks unconvinced.

"What do you think about when you do it?" she asks.

"I don't know. Coming, mostly." I'm feeling foolish and confused now.

"I think about being fucked," she says, "with my hands tied above my head in the centre of a Moorish harem." She holds her hands up and sways slightly at the hips. "With the Sultan taking his pleasure while his other wives stroke themselves from sheer excitement."

I try to grab her hips but she twists away, falling back on to the sofa, legs spread wide.

"Or I imagine I'm on stage," she says, "men and women lining up to lick me to orgasm. It's a charity Lickathon, televised around the world."

Her hips thrust forward and her head rolls from side to side on the cushion. I stand between her legs and she sits up. This girl has very strong stomach muscles. Her face is just in front of my fly and I want desperately to be in her mouth.

"Are you sure you don't want to masturbate? You look as if you need to."

She's laughing at me, the cow. But my cock never gives up and I hear myself asking, "Couldn't we just fuck? You've made me as hot as hell."

She sits back on the sofa and folds her arms. "No. I want to watch you do it."

"But why?"

"I want to know if you look the same."

"What?"

"You know, whether you still get that 'I've-been-constipated-for-so-long-but-it-will-soon-be-over' look."

"Bloody hell." If I was a real man, I'd leave right now.

"Don't take offence. I'm just curious." She makes that sound so reasonable. Like it's something every woman has to find out eventually.

"Look, I'll strip if it will help," she says and starts to unbutton her blouse. I'm still thinking about sulking until she reaches the third button. She has beautiful breasts.

She looks up from under her fringe, her hands frozen on the fourth button, and says. "Wouldn't you like to stand over me while you do it? Hmmm?"

"What if I knelt?" She slides to the floor in front of me. "And touched myself like this?" she says rubbing one prominent nipple with her thumb.

"Fuck," I say. I'm so eloquent at these moments.

"No, wank. Come on, you'll enjoy it."

For “Best New Erotica 6” I sent Maxim a list with some serious stories in it: “Writing Naked” which won the Rauxa Prize for erotic writing for 2005; “Nadica” a short, edgy, tale about making choices; “Burger Queen” about sex from the point of view of an obsessed sociopath and a comedy piece called “It may not be art, Darling, but it pays the bills” an insider’s view of the making of a grunge porn movie.

Almost as an afterthought I sent a strange little story called “Eve’s Freedom”. This is one of the few stories I’ve ever sent directly to Clean Sheets without going through the writers list on ERWA first. Maxim decided it was the one he wanted. There’s much less explicit sex in this story but the idea is quite powerful. It was originally going to be a comedy piece, based on the Encounter Groups that were so popular once upon a time, with the title “Wankers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your inhibitions” but once I started to write, Eve got into my head and the story become about how love, even when unrequited, can free you.

Here’s the opening of “Eve’s Freedom”. It uses a lecture device that I enjoy. After this opening we get inside Eve’s head and discover what she does to make herself free.

“Wanker. Jerk-off. Tosser.”

With each word, Zach points aggressively at one of the people in the circle around him. Even I, who have seen this performance many times before, would flinch if that finger were pointed at me.

“These are all terms of abuse. Terms for abusers.”

Zach’s rich, deep voice loads the word “abusers” with such a burden of shame and guilt that some of those in the circle will not meet his eyes. One of the older women, the kind of woman I know Zach prefers, blushes until her pale skin almost matches her auburn hair.

“And yet, we all do it. Every one of us masturbates.”

Zach’s hands are open now; his arms are outstretched as he turns slowly to include the whole circle in that “we”. And surely if he, Zach, a man so beautiful, a man with such an electric sexual presence, a man that we all secretly want to be touched by, masturbates, then it must be OK. Mustn’t it?

“So why is something that we all do…” he paces the circle, trailing the question with him.

“That we all enjoy…” People are starting to smile.

He pauses, as I knew he would, in front of the auburn-haired-blusher; squats with graceful ease, looks into her face and says. “Something that some of us enjoy a great deal…”

She blushes again, but she is smiling now and making eye contact with Zach and we can see she would like a great deal more contact than that.

There is a moment of tension when we all wonder if he will touch her, when we all want him to touch her, when it seems that touching her is the only natural thing to do, and then, with a smile that is almost a caress, Zach stands and resumes pacing.

Zach’s motion, his interaction, his potential have charged the air with sex. Into this atmosphere he launches his loaded question:

“So why does this activity, this little bit of finger fun, get so much abuse?”

Some people are smiling at the word play, but no one laughs. Zach’s body language makes it clear that this is not a time for laughter.

“I will give you the answer in one word: FEAR.”

Zach cuts across the circle in diagonals, keeping the momentum, underlining his point, reeling us in for the argument that will make us special.

“History teaches us that society uses terms of abuse to suppress that which it fears. And what it fears most are those truths that set us free.

I am a wanker.” Zach says, pointing at himself.

“You are a wanker.” The young man Zach points at winces, as if Zach had jabbed him with a stick.

“And you are a wanker.” Zach points quickly at a woman on the other side of the group.

“And you are a wanker.” This time Zach twists around as he makes the statement, and points at the first person he sees.

Zach smiles and spreads his arms. “We are all wankers. And we should be proud and yes, even grateful, that we are wankers. Wanking will set us free. And that freedom, that willingness to take our pleasure into our own hands, that refusal to be ground down by guilt and shame and the expectations of others. That freedom is what makes us frightening.”

The group stumbles over the turbulence created by this idea. A gaunt grey-haired man, the oldest in the circle, lets out an involuntary snort of surprise which he stifles when he feels Zach’s gaze upon him.

“I can see that not all of you believe me.” Zach says, walking slowly towards the man. “But in your hearts…” His voice drops and he seems to be speaking only to the man in front of him “In your heart, I know that you want to believe me.”

The room is completely silent. The mood of the group balances on a knife-edge between ridicule and acceptance. How the man reacts to Zach will colour everything that follows.

“It is your desire to believe, your need to be free, your dissatisfaction with a life filled with half-truths, that has brought you here.”

As Zach says this he touches the man on the wrist. It is not a sexual act but it is an emotional one: a blessing, a gesture of acceptance, maybe even of forgiveness. The old man nods his head, the knife blade twists and we all tumble towards belief.

Zach moves back to the centre of the circle, ready to catch us as we fall. Everyone is looking at him. He looks at me. I wait until the first heads start to turn, then I walk towards him.

So this year I sent Maxim my list:

“Brave enough to cry?” is a story sex and war and rock and roll. It appeared on Erotic Readers and Writers Association in April 2006. Word count 6,295

“Up in the morning” was published in “Cream: the best of the Erotic Readers and Writers Association” Edited by Lisabet Sarai in 2006. It’s about an older married man who still wakes each morning with an erection and the choices he makes in dealing with it. Word count 2,259

“Postcards” Is the story of how a couple fuels their passion during enforced absence.

It was published in “Aqua Erotica 2” edited by Megan Worman in 2006. Word count 2,357

“The Last Taboo” Fat Frank loves fucking his wife but it would be bad form to admit this to ‘The Lads.’ Appeared on Erotic Readers and Writers Association in April 2006 and is now in the Treasure Chest. Word Count 1,249

“Hand Jobs” This is a monologue about a man who likes getting hand jobs from whores. Appeared on the Erotic Readers and Writers Association in August 2006 and is now in the Treasure Chest, Word count 1,427

To my surprise, Maxim picked the “Hand Jobs” which is both the shortest piece I sent him and the least conventional in style.

I re-read the piece to see if I could figure out what made it attractive to him.

It is a monologue given by an ordinary man in his sixties from the North of England who has always needed sex and has always dealt with that need with a quiet dignity.

What distinguishes the story is that, although the monologue is all about his sexual experiences, at the end of this short piece you feel as if you know a lot more about this man than how he likes to get off.

Maxim’s willingness to select this kind of story is one of the things that makes him such a successful editor.

These are turbulent times in the publishing business and the house that publishes the Mammoth series has just changed hands. I hope that the new owners recognise the strength Maxim brings to the table and give him the scope to continue to edit anthologies that stimulate and surprise.

Praise for “The Dresden Files” and a Discovery About American Paperback Book Design

2007-10-01T23:39:00.000+02:00

I’ve just discovered “The Dresden Files” by Jim Butcher and now I have a new writer to admire to the point of envy.

Last time I was in the US, I saw one of the Dresden books being promoted at Barnes and Noble but they only had book eight and I’m one of those folks who just HAS to start at book one. So, a few months later, I finally get around to ordering first two in the series “Storm Front” and “Fool Moon” from Amazon. I read them back to back and enjoyed every page.

Harry Dresden is the only publicly practicing Wizard in Chicago. He works alongside the Special Investigations Unit of the Chicago Police Department to deal with all the super-natural nastiness that no-one wants to admit exists. He lives alone, he has a dark past, he wears a black duster coat, a cowboy hat, boots and jeans (sadly this is an accurate description of my winter wardrobe – what can I tell you – it keeps the rain off) and he has trouble with authority figures and likes to be chivalrous with women, even one’s who’d rip his arm off if they even thought he was trying to protect them..

Put like that this sounds like pulp-fiction – clichéd to the level of a Hollywood “treatment” – think “The Long Goodbye” meets “Tales From the Crypt” with a touch of Spaghetti Western thrown in. Hey, it would have more going for it than “Resident Evil 3”.

But the wonderful thing about these books is that they are genuinely surprising and original. Every monster has a new twist. Every plot is more complicated than it seems. Then you realize that the books are linked and that the whole thing is thought through and that Harry Dresden is much more than a macho magician with a penchant for coats with mantles – he has ethics and weaknesses and he changes as the books go by.

I gulped down the first book like an ice-cold beer on a too-hot day, When I caught my breathe and said “wow” a few times, I put my reader persona to one side and asked myself the writerly question: “How did he do that?”, swiftly followed by “How could I do that?”

The immediacy and emotional impact of the books come from the fact that they are told in the first person. I love writing in the first person and I lost count of the number of times that I’ve been told that although that might work for short stories, it’s not viable for novels. What Butcher shows is that it’s viable for a novel IF YOU’RE GOOD AT IT.

Butcher’s books move along at a fast pace. He is a master a short chapters – eight to twelve pages – each of which starts with a hook and ends with cliffhanger or a punch-line – which may be one reason that he can continue to use the first person. This means that you get straight in to every chapter and you’re always keen to reach the next one.

Plot is central to these books. Each book sets out a problem for Harry to solve and Butcher walks the tightrope of maintaining suspense while providing the reader with all the information necessary to solve the problem. Butcher keeps the promises his opening chapters make to the reader and each book ends with a resolution – of course, in line with the structure of the chapters, each of the first two books has ended by setting up a sequel.

But the most important thing is that Butcher has rethought the mythos without violate or belittling it. He’s taken a cliché and made it into some new and fresh.

Of course, reading a book is a physical as well as an intellectual exercise. I carry books with me everywhere and read them when I dine alone on restaurants, or when my dog and I complete the morning walk with café and croissant at the local patisserie. I like the physicality of books, the weight of them in my hand, the smell when they are new, the texture of the paper in my hands. These days I sometimes indulge myself with hardback versions of books by authors that I HAVE to read RIGHT NOW, like Terry Pratchett or Ben Elton but mostly I buy paperbacks and most of them are from the UK (I live in Switzerland). I read a lot of science fiction and I’ve never liked the garish covers that American publishers use.

With the Dresden books I made an exception. I preferred the covers on the American books – they seem more in keeping with the content of the books than the arty English versions that seemed more obsessed with the concept of files as stationery than they were with Dresden as a Wizard (copy the two covers for book one and you’ll see what I mean).

So I decided to put up with the smaller size and the crappy typeface they chose. And I made an interesting discovery – one morning I was putting on my duster and my hat to walk the dog through the rain to the patisserie, and trying to figure out where to put my copy of “Fool Moon” when I realized that American paperbacks are designed to fit in the back pocket of your jeans.

How cool is that?

I think Lee Cooper should start an ad campaign with women looking intently at the jean-clad ass of a cool look guy. He thinks they’re checking out his clenched curves but actually their trying to read the title of the novel in his pocket.

Another thing that makes it cool is that, in French (which is what they speak around here) a paperback is called a Roman Poche, literally a Pocket Novel – now I know why.

Disgraceful conduct by a Colombia University Professor

2007-09-25T22:21:00.000+02:00

Yesterday I watched the live broadcast of a speech that the Iranian President had been invited to give at Colombia University.

At least that's what I tuned in to watch.

What I got was a long verbal assault on the President by a Colombia professor who was supposed to be doing an introduction.

He was rude, inaccurate, cowardly, and did a great disservice to his university and to the good name of American hospitality.

If you think a man is vile, you have every right to say so, but if you invite him as your guest then you should treat him (and the rest of us) with respect. If you can’t do that, then you should be honorable enough not to accept the task of introducing your guest.

For the most part, this professor's actions backfired.

The Iranian President (a man I approached with deep suspicion) came across as reasonable and honorable by comparison to the Professor, who sounded like one of those communist apparatchiks that used to disparage democracy and defend communism.

Can you imagine President Bush trying to cope with similar treatment if he had been invited to address the students at Oxford or perhaps Tehran?

The professor's introduction also colored my response to the questions asked to the President. It is fair enough to ask questions that put a President on the spot but it seemed to me that these questions showed a lack of self-awareness by the (American) students asking them. The questions were valid enough but the implied context was “How can you do this? Why aren’t you like us?” when perhaps the problem is that there are too many similarities between America and Iran.

The President was asked about why he is developing nuclear power, as if such a thing was outrageous, yet America is the only nation ever to have used nuclear weapons and leads the world in their development.

He was asked why he supports terrorists, yet America has long fought proxy wars by sponsoring terrorists including terrorists who have attacked Iran. Without the American people the terrorists in Northern Ireland would have been much less well funded.

He was asked why women are not accorded equal rights with men, yet America has an astonishingly high rate of violence against women and has consistently refused to amend the constitution to grant women equal rights.

He was asked why homosexuals are victimized in Iran. He replied that there are no homosexuals in Iran. This is an answer the Christian Right in America hold dear in their hearts. An answer like that could make be enough to get a man elected to the Senate.

The most interesting question was - why did he want to go to the site of the WTC. He explained that he wanted to pay his respects and looked puzzled that this needed any explanation.

But then the whole event showed that, at least in Columbia University, respect is a concept that is not understood.

Writing beyond what you know – telling old truths in new ways

2007-09-12T02:16:00.000+02:00

In art classes, students are often asked to draw the naked human form. The fact that the body is naked makes it a greater challenge than if it were clothed. Clothes are easier to draw and they set the body in a social context: social status, period, personal taste. Clothes would have allowed the students short-hand ways of sending a message via their painting.

The naked body is difficult to draw. We are programmed quickly to spot oddities in the human shape so the artist has take care to get the proportions of the body right or we will be distracted or unconvinced. The artist also needs to decide on what they are doing with this naked body: making a photo-accurate copy? Trying to capture the spirit of the sitter? Drawing attention to particular attributes of the body itself? Making the body into a more abstract statement, a thing of shadow and light that starts from the human form but reaches outwards towards something more spiritual?

I think that, for those of us who are trying to learn to write, the equivalent challenge to drawing the human nude is to write beyond what we know. By doing this, we remove the props that produce easy prose – local colour, stereotypical characters, well established conventions for interaction that we can present without having to analyse.

For those of us who are trying to learn to write erotica, this challenge becomes the challenge to write beyond our own erotic experience. This might be done by writing from a different gender or by writing about a sexual orientation other than your own or by writing about a fetish or kink that you have no experience of.

I’m going to focus on writing about the relationship between dominants and submissives but what I’m about to say could equally apply to any sexual demographic: gay, lesbian, bi, old, age-gap, plushy, necrophile, dog-lover etc.

The first step in this exercise is to put superficial realism to one-side. No one lives life the way it is in books. Books describe only those things in a life that are of use to the story, yet most of us stagger through our days besieged by details and much of the time we only understand what the storyline was after the event. That's why books are so much better than life. It's also why reading (and writing) is ultimately less important than living.

So your task as a writer is to pull out those things in the Dom/sub relationship that make it what it is, to help your readers to identify with that world, to make your characters unique and human and credible, and yet keep the focus on the act(s) of dominance and submission that are the launch-pad for the story.

How do you do this when you have no personal experience of the Dom/sub scene?

Some writers might do this via research. But this is like dressing the nude before you write about it – it doesn’t really help you to get closer to the inner truth of the story.

I suggest that you start with questions that will help you apply your imagination to understanding and conveying what you see when you look at the nude in front of you. Try the following:

Why do Doms behave the way they do in the Dom/sub relationship?

How much control do they have?

How much does being a Dom define who they are?

How successful (or unsuccessful) are they in integrating this into the rest of their lives?

What was their first time like?

What is sex like now?

What is it in this behaviour set that is absolutely essential to satisfying the motivation that drives them to the behaviour?

How has that changed over time and why?

What do they look for in a partner and why?

How do they find it?

What makes them ashamed or afraid?

What would they decline to do?

What makes them proud?

What makes them feel more complete?

Are sex and love cohabitants in this person's life or do they have different addresses?

As you play with these questions and the answers they produce, reach into yourself. Make the story about you even if it is not about your actual experience.

Start of by telling a story about your first time in a Dom/sub relationship. Given that you personally have not spent much time tying someone up and hitting, flogging, pinching, biting, twisting, and waxing them until they cry with pleasure and relief starting at the beginning makes our task easier.

Imagine you've found a woman who you know wants you to be dominant when you have sex. What is the Dom’s reaction?

If he has to stretch his to figure out what is required of him then he’s not going to be a convincing Dom. He is trying to be something he’s not in order to please his lover. This is almost certainly doomed to failure – like most passions, this one is hard to fake. So the challenge of the story will be the gap between will and performance, desire and intent, and the extent to which the participants in the relationship will acknowledge that it and they are failing.

If, on the other hand, the woman’s desire to submit awakens a hidden or suppresses desire or one that has been surfacing for some time but remained unnamed and un-acted upon then how the does the would-be Dom feel? He might feel gleeful and afraid at the same time. It doesn’t matter that fear isn't part of the porno paint-by-numbers BDSM story play book. What matters is whether his anxiety resonates with you and your readers and whether it helps to move the story forward.

So how does our novice Dom get started?

She's waiting. He ties her up because he knows she wants that and because it is expected but he immediately understands that this is a preliminary not the act itself. What urge surfaces in his mind then? What is the thing that he is going to do that he wouldn’t normally let himself do? Hit her? Fist her? Force something into her? Slap her with his cock?

And how does it feel FINALLY to let yourself do that?

What have you learned about yourself?

What have you learned about her?

And what if she liked it and you didn't? Or you did and she didn't?

And so on and so on

The purpose of these questions is to explore the emotional reality of a sexual act.

Graphic, hard-core sexual images are used in erotica for quick warmth, to light the fuse of the story. Emotional realism is what gets beneath the skin of the reader and stays in the mind after the initial heat has subsided.

II recommend the BDSM section of the Treasure Chest of the Erotic Readers and Writers Association as a source for Dom/sub stories that have this kind of emotional realism.

Check it out and see which stories resonate and then ask yourself:

Why do they resonate? Because they sound real? Because you'd like them to be real? Because the confluence of restraint and release, desire and fear, dominance and submission, pain and pleasure captures the existential defiance inherent in a sexual act that, for a while at least, stems the entropic tide of universal decay? Or because it gets you from hard to soft in the shortest possible time?

What are the writers paying attention to? The mechanics of this toy and that knot? The gynecological detail? The taboos being broken? The slap of leather on Willow (or whatever her name is)? The nature of the relationship between D and s?

In one way or another, most of these writers are trying to get beyond threadbare formulas and pantomime characters to an emotional reality that drives the behaviour of the people in their stories.

And therein lies the challenge of writing beyond what you know: the opportunity to tell old truths in new ways.

Writing beyond what you know lets you step out of your skin and into someone-else’s.

If you can do that successfully, then there is a strong likelihood that your readers can follow your footsteps.

Gog, Magog and President Bush – how Europe sees American fundamentalism

2007-09-09T20:38:00.000+02:00

This picture of President Bush (extended to show the hands of the President and the solider behind him folded in prayer) appeared today in “Le Matin Dimanche” (A French language Swiss Sunday paper)

To understand the impact of the picture, you have to bear in mind that Europe is a much more secular place than the US. To give an example, it is illegal in France to wear anything at school that indicates religious affiliation, be it a Christian cross or a Muslim headscarf.

You would never see a European President praying with the troops (although you will see them with heads bowed on 11^th November, the day that commemorates the end of World War I). The Europeans do not have Christian armies. They do not assume that God is one their side.

So this picture of the Commander in Chief of the US Armed Forces and Head of State, at prayer with Christian troops on the soil of a largely Muslim (though under Saddam a secular) State, was chosen for its shock value. It is meant to portray Bush as leading the US in a Holy War against Islam

I was ready to write that off to French xenophobia and move on when the title of the article caught my eye: “When President George W. bush saw the prophesies of the Bible coming to pass” is a rough translation from the French. The full article is available in French here.

The article arises from Professor Thomas Römer of Lausanne University. In 2003 he received a call from the staff of Jacque Chirac, then the French President, asking for information on Biblical prophecies associated with Gog and Magog. It seems that, when President Bush called President Chirac to ask for his support in invading Iraq, he positioned this initiative in the context of being on the right side in the long-prophesied war between Gog and Magog.

Those of you who have not read Ezekiel 38 and 39 recently may need reminding, as Chirac clearly did, that the war between Gog and Magog will take place in Israel. God, of course, will be on the side of the Israelis. The (probably Muslim) enemies of Israel will be lead by the anti-Christ.

It seems President Bush sincerely felt that he could persuade President Chirac to be on the right side by portraying the events then unfolding in Iraq as the start of the Gog Magog war.

In this context, it is hardly surprising that Chircac felt that having America as an ally in a holy war, lead by a President who took his foreign policy from Biblical prophets wasn’t the right course for France, where only about 30% of people claim any sort of religious affiliation and many of those are Muslim.

If this situation were not so frightening, it would be funny. Can you imaging the Chief of Staff meeting where the General and Admirals, and Commanders are asking “So tell me again, are we Gog or Magog and which one has the weapons of mass destruction?”

The pop charts in Switzerland are based on air-play time. The number 2 song in the charts is Pink’s “Dear Mr. President”. If you’re not familiar with the lyrics go here.

It worries me that American politicians, including those now standing for election, have no understanding of how they are characterised in Europe, which increasingly finds itself in the middle between two sets of heavily armed religious fundamentalists, the Muslims and the Jews to the East and the American Christians in the West.

Moving on - reading, watching and a little writing

2007-08-17T01:15:00.000+02:00

First I’d like to thank Amanda, Nicki, Jane and Anonymous for their encouragement after my last post. Sometimes it’s hard to know whether anyone reads what I write here or whether it’s just a means of me hearing my own thoughts. It’s cheering to get such positive comments.

I’m still reading a lot – I’m on the last few chapters of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” which I’m enjoying immensely but am reluctant to finish– and I’ve been watching some interesting movies. The one I was most impressed with was “A Love Song for Bobby Long” based on the book “Off Magazine Street” by Ronald Everett Capps. The movies stars John Travolta as a larger then life, ex-academic currently drinking himself to death in New Orleans with his best buddy and former student Gabriel Macht, until their lives are changed by the arrival of Scarlett Johansson. All of them give remarkable performances that are displayed to perfection by the skill of the director. I fell in love with the movie and I’ve ordered the book.

The reading and the movies got me thinking and I’ve started another story, a follow on from a piece I did a while back called “It may not be art, darling, but it pays the bills” which sits in the Treasure Chest at ERWA. It was about an English ex-RADA (Royal Academy for the Dramatic Arts) student making a grunge porn movie. It was a humorous, dick-in-cheek piece that debunked porn. At the end of the story, our heroine, who has a strong preference for women, despite the hetero scene she’s just been through, takes solace in the fact that her next movie is a lesbian piece. It was a throw-away line at the time but recently I’ve been wondering what the lesbian piece was and whether the reality of it would have been as comfortable as her expectations of it. So now I have almost completed a story called “Licking Little Nell”. I’ll keep you posted when it’s done.

In the mean time, I thought you might be interested in seeing a recent flasher of mine called “Driftwood” and the first part of a longer series of stories called “In Jack’s Hands”. It hasn’t been posted or printed anywhere yet and may need some revision after the next parts are written. I’d love hear what you think of it.

“Desire always outweighs the consequences,” he said

With neither shame, nor regret, nor pride

But a bone-deep certainty, as final as the grave.

Glad of the all-concealing darkness, I replied

With soft kisses, deft touches, and low sighs;

Perfume sprayed to hide the smell of rot and fear

Deepening the darkness, he covered me once more

His hard hot hunger filling me and consuming him

With flames that showed me only guilt-filled shadows

He peaked, I spasmed, our lust crashed onto the shore,

Then his sticky tide ebbed, beaching me like driftwood,

Hollowed-out, abandoned and praying for freedom from consequences

In Jack’s Hands

Jack’s wife is younger than me. His “She’ll-be twenty-two-next-April”child-bride is almost young enough to be my daughter; certainly young enough to be his. I think about that sometimes when I’m alone in this bed that he pays for.

She’s his second wife of course; his first left him once their children were grown. She’d left his bed long before that. Perhaps she’d sensed my presence there, like perfumed sweat on the sheets. She is the kind of woman who would rather starve than share a plate.

It had amused me at first, when he’d taken me to their bed, then taken me on it, riding me with my legs spread wide and my ankles held high, not so much screwing me as nailing me to the bed, making me cry out with every swing of his hammer.

Back then I’d assumed my youthful form was the source of his vigour. Now, when I remember how, leaning over me, soaked with sweat and pink with effort, he closed his eyes just before he came; I wonder who he imagined spilling into, me or his wife?

It’s not in Jack’s nature to be faithful. He’s a strong, slightly selfish man who takes what he wants and expects the rest of us to do the same.

He took me the first time that we met, ten years ago.

I was twenty five, had just moved to London after a lifetime in the frozen North and was determined to enjoy myself in the big bad city. I had a good body, a great smile and a very sexy little black dress that would get me in to almost anywhere.

That evening my dress and I were at a cocktail party in an expensive gallery in South Kensington. I’d come because I knew there’d be free champagne and rich young men, not all of whom could be gay. To my surprise the art turned out to be more interesting than the men: large bronze figures of naked women. These were not the fantasy nymphs of mass-produced, middle-class, middle-brow, masturbation-art, but real women with imperfect bodies naturally posed, that I thought were intensely sensual.

I found myself walking around the figure of a slightly heavy woman who was lying on her side. She had that just-come look. Everything from the trace of a smile beneath her closed eyes, through to the way her top leg lay slightly in front of the other, told me that she was resting in post-orgasmic warmth, though whether from her own fingers, that rested on her soft belly just below her hips, or through a good fucking, I couldn’t say. How she got to her afterglow didn’t matter. This piece was about how she felt when she arrived and the answer was very clear: entitled to be there.

Without thinking about it, I reached out to stroke the smooth line of her thigh, half expecting to feel warm skin beneath my fingers. I’d just reached her hip bone when someone very close behind me said: “I could never resist touching her either.”

I whirled around, hiding my hands behind me and blushing as if I’d been caught shop lifting.

I recognized Jack at once. His picture had been in the entrance to the show, above a sign saying “Jack Cavanaugh: Artist”. The head and shoulders shot had captured the strength of his forty-something face but it hadn’t shown how big he was up close. He was a foot taller than me and with shoulders so wide that I couldn’t see beyond him to the room full of people. It felt like there was just me and him and the naked woman behind us. I should have taken that for an omen.

“The eyes lie,” Jack said.

I felt his eyes roam over me like a skilful tongue, from my thighs, up my belly, lingering for a second on the free motion of my breasts, along the smooth length of my neck and finally up to my mouth. It seemed to me that I was already naked in front of him. It had been a while since I’d been naked in front of anyone. My body was telling me that I liked the idea.

“But touch always tells the truth.”

Jack took a step towards me, bringing him so close now that I could smell him: an alcohol top-note and a hint of Bulgari over a strong base of warm male. It was a scent that made me want to inhale deeply.

The lust in his eyes excited me and I tilted my head up, waiting for the first kiss. I didn’t know then that Jack never does the predictable thing.

He leant forward but instead of kissing me he took hold of my wrist and placed my hand back on the hip of the bronze. “Her name is Angie,” he said, “and she likes to be touched.”

Jack put his large hand over mine and traced the curve of Angie’s belly up to the fullness of her breast. In the process he turned me around so that I was facing her and he was pressed up against my back.

I knew I should say something but I had no words. All my concentration was on the surface of my skin: my fingertips on the cold bronze nipple, Jack’s hard hand on mine, the heat of him behind me. No words passed my lips but my whole body was broadcasting, “Fuck me. Please.”

Jack pushed forward, pressing his chest against my back. I shivered and pushed back into him.

“Close your eyes,” Jack said, “let your fingers tell you all you need to know.”

I cupped the bronze breast gently, imagining the weight of it in real life. Jack placed his other hand on my ribs, just below my breasts. It felt as if he was burning me but I wanted to move towards the fire, not away from it.

“Feel the how her breast fills your hand. Imagine it heavy, firm, hot and responsive. Run your thumb over the nipple and feel her shudder with pleasure.” With Jack’s hand on mine I could almost believe that the warmth came from the bronze beneath me. I’d never wanted to touch a woman but I found that I liked the idea of Jack making me caress Angie.

“I like my hands to know a woman before I sculpt her,” Jack said, sliding his hand over my breast and cupping it. “My hands tell me the truth about who she is and what she wants.”

To my acute embarrassment, when Jack’s thumb grazed my lightly clad nipple, I groaned with pleasure.

It was, I think, the signal Jack had been waiting for.

“Don’t let go of Angie,” he said “and try not to make too much noise.”

Jack wrapped his arm around my chest, squeezing me until it was hard for me to breathe. I could feel his erection, hard and hot, against my arse. I parted my legs in anticipation.

I was in a public place with a man who hadn’t even asked me my name and yet I was ready to bend over and let him fuck me in any hole he could reach. It was insane and intoxicating and out of my control. My legs were tensed, my eyes were closed. I was waiting impatiently for him to fuck me.

Of course Jack didn’t fuck me; he was too controlling for that. He fed my hunger rather than sating it.

Taking his hand off mine he slid it gracefully up my thigh, under my short dress, over my hipbone and then down between my legs. When he closed his wide hand over my cunt it felt like he was claiming territory.

Pushing upwards, Jack lifted me up onto tiptoe, pressing me into his erection, bending me closer to Angie. I waited for his strong fingers to force their way into me, wondering if they’d hurt and if I’d care but he didn’t enter me.

He didn’t even move my panties aside. He massaged me through them, working my labia and clit with a skill that had me breathless in seconds and made me come in less than a minute. Then he let go and stepped away from me.

I slumped against the bronze, my head almost resting on Angie’s ample arse, waiting for him to continue. Looking behind me in what I hoped to e a provocative way, I saw Jack, smiling and holding his fingers to his nose.

“I’d like to do you,” Jack said calmly, making no move towards me “You’d make a fine bronze.”

I couldn’t believe Jack’s arrogance. He had my juice on his fingers and he was talking to me as if we were having a coffee. I pushed myself upright, one hand on Angie’s thigh and moved towards him.

“Perhaps, I could persuade Angie to pose with you. You look so suited to one another.”

That’s when I tried to slap him.

I’d never hit a man before. I’d never hit anyone. But he’d made me so angry that I wanted to smash his smug bastard face so that he could never smile again.

I put all my strength behind the blow. He caught my wrist in midair and held it tight. He was still smiling so I let fly with other hand. He caught that one as well. Then with great speed and apparent ease, he forced both hands down and held them at the small of my back.

“Bast…”

My words were stifled by his kiss.

I should have bitten him or kicked him or both, God knows he deserved it, except I was too busy discovering how much I liked being held totally helpless by a large, powerful man who kissed me as if it was his right.

My eyes were closed when I heard that distinctive upper-class throat-clearing sound that expresses disapproval and mild irritation without requiring words to be wasted.

A tall thin man stood behind Jack. He was in his thirties, casually dressed but with a “groomed by others since birth” finish that spoke of breeding and not just wealth.

Jack let go of my hands but did not move away from me.

“The Culture Vultures are waiting to be fed. These people are too well-educated to touch a sculpture. They wait for someone to explain it to them so that can tell their friends why buying my work cost them so much money.”

Jack stepped away from me and turned towards the tall man.

“Campion, give this woman the address of my studio and set up an appointment for a session when the dragon lady is away.”

Jack moved towards the crowd that was waiting to hear him speak. Without looking back he said “Oh and Campion, find out her name for me.” Then he was gone.

“You can take your hands from behind your back now.” Campion said.

Although Jack had released me, I was still standing as if bound. I refused to let myself be embarrassed. I held out my hand towards Campion and said “My name is Tracey Muir.”

Campion shook my hand briefly but politely. His skin was soft and dry. His face was carefully neutral.

“This is Jack’s address, Ms Muir,” Campion said handing me a card. “You can have your session with him any time from Wednesday noon onwards. If you call that number, we’ll send a car for you.”

Campion started to turn away from me to follow Jack. I wasn’t ready to be dismissed. Some of the anger I should have directed a Jack splashed onto Campion instead.

“Are you always, Jack’s pimp, Campion?”

He turned to face me, looking at me properly for the first time. He smiled.

“I see Jack has found a brave one. Jack can sense bravery from fifty paces. The only thing I always am, Ms Muir, is Jack’s brother. In anycase, I believe the role you were casting me in was panderer rather than pimp.”

He stepped towards me, moving close enough so the he could speak without the possibility of being overheard. I wanted to step back but I didn’t want to look weak so I stayed put.

“Jack will be forty next week. You are somewhere in your twenties I would guess. Jack has been married for most of your life. His oldest child has just gone up to Oxford. You wear no wedding ring. Jack is a selfish, domineering, intensely passionate man who eats young women before breakfast. You need to decide who you want to be before Jack casts you in bronze. And now, like a good brother, I must join the crowd in time to applaud Jack for being Jack.”

He left before I could think of anything to say beyond “Fuck you” which was in danger of sounding like an offer in the circumstances.

That night I lay in bed, thinking over the encounter. So Jack was a married man who ate young girls before breakfast. It sounded like a good way to work up an appetite to me. Besides, the idea of fucking a married man had a certain illicit thrill to it. And it placed a limit. If he had a wife then things could never get too serious.

I didn’t want serious. Not then. Then I was twenty-five and he was a good story I would tell one day to shock my daughters. “I once bedded a sculptor you, know – very good with his hands. Even better without them.”

I decided to conclude my day with a reprise of Jack’s finger fuck. I rolled over onto my belly, closed my eyes and slid my hand into position trying to imagine Jack’s weight on top of me. Annoyingly I couldn’t get anywhere near the level of arousal that Jack had produced. My own hand felt more like Campion’s than Jack’s. An image popped into my head of me, naked, hands bound behind my back, sitting on Jack’s lap with my back to him and his cock up my arse and Campion standing in front of us, face carefully neutral, waiting to applaud Jack for being Jack. My arousal peaked and I fell asleep determined to visit Jack on Wednesday.