Big Ed's Place

So my wife and son were out of town this past weekend, leaving me alone to ‘bach’ it. It was a great weekend of writing, doing home repairs and other chores that had built up, and otherwise being a bum. Okay, not so much being a bum, but when you get to do the chores on your own schedule, it feels like being a bum.

And, as bachelors sometimes do, I also spent more time than normal surfing porn. What can I say? It was late, I was tired, the wife was out of town, I hadn’t checked out what was new on storiesonline in a while…

…and I promptly discovered why it’d been a while. Too much chaff for the wheat, even with Lazeez’s noble efforts to help make it easy to identify which is which.

What stunned me was that I started two longish highly rated serials which I just could not finish. They weren’t good. Now I happen to like stroke material from time to time, so I’m quite willing to tolerate crappy quality in small bites. And this weekend, I discovered that ‘in small bites’ is key.

A Penthouse Forum letter is a good example. It’s not sterling writing and is designed for one thing–get the reader hot so their imagination can take over and they can get off. But they’re also short–flash length as a rule, though occasionally a few thousand words (if it’s a feature in the Penthouse Letters magazine). Mercifully short.

So what mystified me was how long these crappy all-stroke serials were. As a reader, I was quickly bored, because it became clear that the only thing that the next chapter would bring is a new set of story codes. Or maybe a character with a new name and superficial differences from the current characters so that we could repeat the scenes written to date.

Fine. There are certainly readers that would be happy to consume these serials. After all, at some point it’s not much different than just going onto the next Forum letter. I can easily imagine a reader digesting them one chapter at a time, getting their ‘fix,’ and then moving on.

So for me the real mystery was why the authors wrote them. Writing is a ton of work. Even if you’re not editing, and not trying to write something good, it still takes time to get words down on the page. I can write maybe 500 words in an hour, though I know some authors that can easily double that. But even using 1000 words an hour, we’re talking days and days to write these stories.

Without them getting better.

Now, I’ve certainly been a proponent of writing purely as a hobby. My analogy used to be that writing was my golf equivalent. I just wanted to go out a couple of times a year and have a good time. I wasn’t interested in studying the videos or hiring a pro coach or getting obsessive about it (yeah, that’s changed).

But even then, I was interested in ‘playing a good game.’ I wanted to give it my best shot and do a little better than I had the attempt before.

Well, if these authors are doing that, I can’t see it. All I can see if a ton of words that really aren’t going anywhere. So maybe I’m missing something. Or maybe it just takes all kinds.

I made it.  I finished the first draft of my tentacle sex story, which has changed titles once again to be a more accurate Japanese Translation.  The file name is still Monster Cove, so that’s what I’ll refer to it in this post.

The final ride was fast and furious.  I didn’t get any writing done until my wife and son left on a trip to visit her brother.  Then it was solid writing for two nights, followed by some editing the third.  I got it sent to my team Friday night.  Final word count was 6500, which means I knocked out a little less than 1500 words those last two nights.

What a rush.

Two of my team members have gotten back to me.  They were happy and liked it overall.  One pointed out something that is going to be difficult for me to fix, but is a texture thing.  In other words, the story won’t fall apart if I don’t fix it.  So I think I’ll make my deadline of Wednesday.

So what did I do on my Saturday when my family was out of town?

Dealt with a queue jumper, of course.

I started having visions of Deep Dish as a graphic novel.  I have no idea how to get the thing published, but the ideas and the fire were there.  So I knocked out a one page synopsis, a script for the first three pages, and a long file of descriptions of the characters and the locale.  In total, 2700 words.

Whew!

It was a giddy furious ride and I’ve pretty much hit a stopping point.  I need some review and then I need to work that ‘how to get the thing published’ issue.  I figure that Deep Dish and Monster Cove will pretty much consume my writing time this next week.

And right now, I don’t know exactly what’s next.  The top of my queue would be Unmasked, The Devil in the Details, or whichever story I’m going to do for the “Indecent Proposal” call for submissions.  I’m leaning emotionally towards one of the first two, but given how long it took me to get Monster Cove together, prudence would suggest the last of these.  I really don’t need more “just before the deadline” stress than my day job already provides.

So we’ll see. I can let the rush die down before I decide. Because it’s certainly been a heady couple of days.

Sometimes life throws things at you that just have to be turned into stories.

Babe in the Night was inspired by an actual evening with my son when he was only a few months old. Like the beginning of the story, he was colicky and I was up late trying to comfort him. When I finally got him quieted, I heard my neighbors out in their hot tub. It didn’t take more than a moment to realize I could see them as well.

Now my neighbors were in their suits and nothing sexual happened that evening, at least in the short time I watched, but it got me thinking… what if?

And this story was the result.

(note: This story was originally published at Clean Sheets)

A few weeks ago, I had a dentist’s appointment. Now my day job has gotten to the point where my coworkers and I joke that a trip to the dentist is more pleasant than coming into the office, and I shared that on twitter. As conversations go between erotica authors, it didn’t take too long to put a naughty spin on the idea of a trip to the dentist. I rather quickly rattled off ideas for four possible stories based on the concept of a sexy dentist.

Now I’ve often joked that I have many many more ideas than I have time to write. In this case, it’s clearly true–my queue is calling me far too strongly to let a story about a sexy dentist jump the queue. But I thought y’all might enjoy the concepts, or possibly the insight into how my mind works.

***
Sexy Dentist #1: Service with a Smile
In Denver, there’s a small chain of men’s haircut salons where the stylists are all attractive women who dress in lingerie. In Seattle, there are baristas who serve coffee in bikinis. So in this story, the dentists have taken the same concept and run with it. So our protagonist shows up to discover the receptionist, dental hygienist, and even the dentist herself are all only wearing skimpy sexy lingerie.

Unfortunately, it turns out he has a serious dental problem. The procedure stretches on and on and it’s driving him crazy–both the discomfort/pain and the fact that he’s staring down the cleavage of these sexy women. So they decide to offer him ‘relief’ by giving him a ‘happy ending’ or one type or another. This could easily be done as a humor piece.

Sexy Dentist #2: Hurts So Good
Who says that “Little Shop of Horrors” can have the only masochist who visits the dentist? Okay, maybe they can, because a submissive would make a better story. The protagonist discovers that he loves visiting his sexy dentist. Yeah, there’s some pain, but he gets to lie back and be completely taken care of, while admiring her shapely form and sultry voice. However, she *does* know she’s a Dom, and picks up on his latent submissiveness. Which, over the course of a few visits, she brings out, until they agree to do his final visit after hours. With him tied to the chair. And her attractive hygienist, also a submissive, helping. If he’s a good boy, who knows what might happen?

Sexy Dentist #3: Unexpected fillings
The protagonist is the hygienist. She’s young, attractive in the way that former ugly ducklings are, and beginning to wonder about a client that keeps coming in–far more often than most people do. Every time, it’s somewhat painful for him, and the dentist says it’s really not necessary for him to come in so often. But he does. She likes him, but isn’t sure what to think of him.

The dentist figures out that he’s got a huge crush on the hygienist and is too scared to do anything about it. So during one procedure, the dentist starts teasing the client and getting the hygienist to flirt a little with him and flash him a bit. Of course the innuendo is too much for the guy and he confesses his feelings. The hygienist realizes that maybe they should get together, and the dentist encourages them to ‘spend some time together’ after the dentist leaves. The story ends with the client ‘filling’ the hygienist.

Sexy Dentist #4: When Flossing is Not Enough
The protagonist is the hygienist again. She has a client who’s always flirting with her, which she tries to brush off. One day he compliments her about her breasts and she realizes a button on her blouse is undone. At the end of the session, he leaves a tip for her.

She’s confused, but after discussing it with the dentist, they decide there’s no harm in taking tips. But after another visit, she realizes that the tip was directly related to the cleavage shot.

She needs the money. She decides what the heck, and gives him another cleavage shot. Another tip. Over the next several visits, she dresses more and more sexily, and his tips get bigger and bigger. Until he suggests that she give him a hand job for a very big tip. She needs the money–so what does she do?

***
So… it took me about 10 minutes to come up with those ideas–more time to write them down than conceive of them, actually. If I were to pursue one of them, I would certainly only pick one. Which one would depend on my mood and what I felt like writing, or whichever one had a character or visual that grabbed me. If none of the grab me enough to be a queue jumper, the idea gets filed away (in a folder on my computer, naturally) and it may or may not come back later, depending on my mood.

And that’s where story ideas come from some times. A casual twist in every day life that spawns one or more possible story lines. And that’s just a quick peek into how my mind works.

It’s been a horrible tease of a week, here. It started off with all signs of imminent spring, even reaching the mid-60′s on Wednesday. I spent my lunch hour that day sitting outside writing–it was glorious and a true shame that I had to return to work. Then Thursday night it opened up and dumped snow, which continued into Friday.

Similarly, it was a tease for writing. I snagged a free evening and two lunch hours and made great progress. Then Thursday lunch hour was spent looking for lost glasses (which I did find, but not until the end of the day), Friday lunch hour was spent with a computer expert getting rid of malware on my wife’s computer, and Friday night was a bust.

Ya see, I have a wonderful wife. Early in the week, she offered to let me have a ‘coffee shop night’–I could take my laptop and abscond to the local coffee shop and write for a couple of hours. It was a glorious dream to look forward to. That was to be Friday.

Aside–I was actually once in a group of engineers waxing poetic about a similar birthday gift from my wife last year. She got me a gift certificate to my favorite coffee shop and told me to take off for a couple of hours while she watched the then 1.5 yr old. The other parent in the group was nodding her head knowingly. Meanwhile, one of the young male engineers was making it pretty clear that if sex wasn’t involved, a gift from my wife wasn’t very good. I did manage to avoid saying, “look punk, when you have a kid you’ll understand how kid-free time is more precious than orgasms” simply because I knew he just wouldn’t get it.

Then Friday it snowed. Then our toddler got seriously sick. Coffee shop night disappeared in the press of more urgent needs. Toddler’s fine now, but no writing happened later in the week. The progress at the beginning was a tease, just like the weather and the dreams of unencumbered time.

At least the first of the week was good. I managed 1058 words, bringing my tentacle sex story to 5084. I’m in striking range–about 1000 more words to go, I’m figuring, maybe 1500. That’ll complete the Crappy First Draft and then it’s edit, edit, edit.

I don’t write teen coming of age stories. This is partially because I remember my teen years pretty well and don’t particularly want to relive them. For me, they were a mixture of fear, dread, overconfidence, unreasonable hope, and way way too much soap operatic drama. In fact, when I see a lot of popular entertainment, from soap operas to reality TV, I wonder if perhaps too many people never really got out of their teen years except in biological age. I don’t particularly find the egotistical gyrations over petty stuff and popularity to be particularly entertaining and so have little desire to be the creator of such work.

That said, another reason I don’t write teen coming of age stories is that the temptation to be preachy would be very very hard to resist. I find I’ve got way too many ‘lessons learned’ that would have been useful back then, assuming I was actually willing to listen. The latter (listening) is unfortunately a trick, as a current relative demonstrates to me regularly. He’s 19 and he’s confident as hell and has repeatedly brushed off advice from us old fogeys twice his age. I roll my eyes, confident that he’ll learn, probably the hard way. If I bite my tongue hard enough we can have a pleasant time together without me being preachy.

Nonetheless, some of the advice I’ve long thought about snuck out in a twitter hashtag and I had a request from Dan Lyke to post it someplace more durable. So… climbing up on my soapbox:

• You are not immortal.  But you’ll accomplish a lot more if you forget that fact in most circumstances.
• You will regret the things that you did not do far more than the things you did.
• It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.  And if you do it when you’re older, you can buy cooler toys.
• The phrase “I might be wrong” is one of the most powerful you can ever say.
• Know the difference between being right and being wise.
• If you’re going to do something illegal or immoral, make it deliberate. Don’t slide into it.
• There is more power in listening well than in any other social skill.
• Don’t attribute to malice that which can be attributed to stupidity.  It simplifies your enemies list.
• Everyone has a price, though it’s rarely measured in money. Knowing your own price makes you stronger.
• The least-drunk person in the room calls the shots. Consider whether you want to be drunk or in charge.

That’s ten things, which is probably a good place for me to step off the soapbox. Maybe they’ll be useful. Or at least entertaining.

Well, it was a difficult week. I awoke Monday to find that Amazon was using me as a pawn in a fight with my state Government. Of course, they were doing it by screwing me, which I did not appreciate (my rant here). This took a fair amount of my spare time and my emotional energy to deal with, and there’s still work to do.

Then, in my day job–well, let’s just say it’s been a week of picking my words carefully. I am realizing more and more that my career success relies solely on my ability to say “that’s stupid” in a way that results in the audience nodding in agreement rather than protesting. This is, unfortunately, tricky and time consuming. It also takes a lot of emotional energy. As a result, the few lunch hours that weren’t working lunches have been spent rejuvenating rather than writing.

As a result, I only managed 562 words on Kaiju Irie, bringing me to 4026. I’ve got two weeks until the deadline, and another 2kwords to go, plus editing, plus getting it through my team.

That’s the stress. It’s not impossible to make the deadline. There are certainly short cuts and chances where I might be able to carve out more time in my future (fex: if the flight on next week’s business trip isn’t full, I can write on the plane). It’s just not comfortable.

And then the doubts creep in about the quality of what I’ll be delivering.

Because, for me, there’s usually a moment where I go, “this is as good as it’s going to get.” I realize that I could edit and edit and edit and probably improve the story, but I also recognize that there’s a point where I’m just rearranging words and not actually improving them. It’s like sanding wood–at some point, it’s as smooth as it’s gonna get unless you switch to a smaller grit sandpaper and if you don’t have it, it’s time to quit.

But stopping before that moment, or rushing to get to that moment, can introduce errors and problems as well. Is it “right” because it’s truly right, or is it “right” because I want it to be right? I’m well aware of my own capacity for self-deception and avoiding it takes having the time to step back and sit with decisions.

This is of course on top of the standard doubts that accompany releasing a story. There’s really no way to know how your baby will be received until you let it go, and sometimes it’s not so well received. This is a new audience for me on top of that, so we’ll have to see.

This one (found here) started with the airport scene. Many years ago, the inspiration for “Jennifer” picked me up in the airport, dressed as a sexy chauffeur. I realized I had to fold it into a story someday, appropriately embellished, and it wasn’t too hard to find a business in Denver that actually rents classic cars.

Once I knew the opening scene, I knew that I wanted to focus on the fallout from Fireworks. In my experience, life isn’t like the TV shows, where things wrap up at the end of an episode and everyone’s happy in the next. Issues burble on. They stretch out. People come back and say “yes, but….” I didn’t think there was any way that Will and Jen would be ‘fine’ solely from how Fireworks ended.

That said, I knew they’d talk, so the story that evolved is one that fit the characters well. The only major addition was the character of Austin, who is a shout-out to my logo designer. He and I discussed polyamory a bit, and I realized that his character was the perfect person to introduce the concept to my foursome. What they do with those thoughts will be left to the remaining two stories…

In The Ugly One, John had to teach Billy how to stand up to bullies. It’s a hard lesson–one that I struggled with, and one I hope my kid does not have to struggle with.

For the fundamental problem with bullies is that they don’t respect others. They push others around because they can. Not because the others deserve it (though there are studies that show that they will go out of their way to justify why their victims do deserve it) or because it’ll make the world a better place, but because they can.

This is particularly problematic in intimate relationships. In my uneducated opinion, much of spousal abuse, child abuse, and other dysfunctions are the result of one party sliding into the role of a bully. They push their partners around to get what they want because they can and don’t see the others as true people or loved ones.

Well, frequently bullying shows up in business. Why treat your workers right if you can push them around? That was the attitude in the late 19th century that drove unions into existence and is much of the anti-union backlash today. Walmart has crammed down their suppliers, forcing them to reduce their own profits and give them to Walmart or go under. Microsoft did it to many of their early competitors–shoving them out of business by sometimes shady means. There are many many other examples.

And now Amazon is doing it to me.

The issue is simple. I live in Colorado, if you hadn’t figured that out from where I’ve set most of my stories. Last week, the Colorado legislature passed a law requiring online retailers to collect sales taxes. Amazon retaliated by closing all affiliate accounts for everyone living in Colorado. You can read more about it here and here.

Now, there are arguments that it’s a dumb law or a bad move by the Colorado legislature. I’m not so sure about that. You see, sales taxes are really paid by the purchaser. It’s just been convenient in the past to have the businesses collect them for the government. This was admittedly burdensome in the catalog sales era of even two decades ago.

But these days, it’s trivial. In fact, Amazon itself collects VAT taxes in Europe for the Governments there. They calculate and include sales taxes in the bills for some of their business partners in the states. Target.com and other sites manage to do it. Furthermore, the CO law gives Amazon an out–they can notify the buyers of what their purchases are and tell them to pay the tax. So, Amazon just has to keep track of your purchases over a year (they already do that) and send you a summary at the end of the year (they already send you ads several times a year).

However, by not collecting sales tax, Amazon gets a small price advantage over the bricks and mortar stores that have no choice.

Now, there are some who will still disagree with this law. I myself think it’s a bit shaky to define Amazon as a Colorado business. But the important point is–it has nothing to do with affiliates. Firing their affiliates did not affect the state’s ability to collect the sales tax one bit, unlike similar laws in North Carolina and other states.

It was purely to send a powerful political message to the CO legislature. “Mess with us and we’ll cost your citizens $37million.” In other words, it was the work of a bully.

Furthermore, it was done without any respect for their affiliates. Instead of enlisting them to lobby against the law, or providing advanced notice that they were going to shut down accounts, they just did it. The letter they sent out attempted to blame it on the legislature, but that’s clearly bullshit to me. If you’re being fair to your business partners, you give them warning. You don’t just screw them. That’s the work of a bully–yanking accounts without warning without regard for the disruption (or possibly to intentionally create it?).

Now I had a small stake in this. I was an Amazon Affiliate because I thought folks might be interested in learning more or possibly even purchasing some of the items I review. This certainly wasn’t for the money–I earned a whopping $2.80 from it (though anything that helps defray expenses is good). I saw it more as a service to you, the readers.

For I see this site as being more than the stories. I’ve had a long strong interest in human sexuality and as a result have accumulated a substantial personal library. I also have found films and music that just seem to fit the mood and sense I’ve tried to create here. There’s plenty of porn in the world. There are a lot fewer thoughtful, evocative, sexually themed works that are any good. Reviews are one way I can provide a service in helping sort the good from the bad.

But since this is not a service that my livelihood depends upon, I do not need to put up with bullying. Even if Amazon decides to reinstate their affiliates, I have no desire to do business with them. I will be reassigning my affiliate links as soon as I find appropriate homes. These will first and foremost be businesses that do not have qualms about working with adult sites (unlike iTunes who believes that all adult content must be banned from their store and from the iPhone). Second, they will preferentially be Colorado-based companies. We locals gotta stick together when we can.

Anyway, I realize that nothing in this post is particularly sexy or illuminating. It’s much less of a ‘musing’ as a polemic. But thanks for understanding.

It’s been a busy week, full of scrapping and scrambling to get work done on the website and also sneak in some writing.

The big push in my evenings has been to get the Tip Jar set up (see the tab on the upper right). This is an experiment, honestly. I like giving my stories away for free, and think that it’s essentially necessary in the digital economy, even though I have expenses to cover. I like the Tip Jar approach though, because it keeps the contributions voluntary. It also lets you, the reader, decide the ‘value’ of my work. We’ll see how the experiment goes.

Additionally, I’ve worked on getting Love’s Labor Found and Babe in the Night ready to post. I expect to release Love’s Labor Found early in the week and Babe in the Night two weeks after that. I’m looking forward to finally getting them out the door. Between these and the Tip Jar, it’s been a bit of scrapping with code and other production issues this week.

At the same time, I’ve been scrambling during lunches to write on Kaiju Irie. I managed 784 words, bringing me to 3464. It’s a little frustrating, because I’d hoped to pick up the pace even more (the deadline is looming). But at the same time, the words were flowing when I had the chance to write. So I think I’m in for some more scrambling for time, particularly in the next week because I need to reserve time at the end for my team to review the story before the 31st.