Big Ed's Place

It’s been harder to maintain my Blissful Ignorance this past week. The end of the week found me sliding into low energy due to the usual stresses and lack of sleep. We’re in a stage where our toddler doesn’t believe he needs to sleep, and that’s making it tough on his parents. There have been more than one time where I just wanted to zone out and flip to my habitual news sites. I have resisted, though.

The writing continues to be faster as well. I finished the edits on TMI and sent it to Nick. I reviewed the publisher’s proof of Irie no Kaubutsu. I also knocked out the final scripts for pages 37-40 of Deep Dish. I think I could grow to like this pace.

The hard part of the experiment, however, is seeing how upset I really do get when I see political ads now. I haven’t been able to entirely avoid them–when I’m driving I can’t always pull my hands from the wheel to change the radio station immediately. And there was the time I was trying to set up the DVR and failed to mute the TV–catching too much filth disguised as campaign commercials before I could track down the TV remote. It feels like being hit in the eyes with a flashlight after having gotten accustomed to living in a warm cocooning cave. It fucking hurts.

Which implies I’m likely to continue it. My mood’s up and I’m happier? The downsides seem pretty minor in comparison. Besides, I really want to finish some of my queue, and the only way to do that is to find more time. This seems to be one of the ways to do so.

I knew a woman once who had a successful phone sex career. She did well in part because she took her calls at her computer wearing a headset, which allowed her to take notes during the conversation. Then, when the client called back, she could quickly remind herself what they’d talked about and whatever personal details he’d shared. Her clients felt they were special to her, when in fact they were little more that a well-organized tickler file.

The other major contributor to her success was that she was a masterful story teller. She knew how to drop the little details into a story so that it rang true, even when it was completely made up. She also often included little vignettes that showed her embarrassing herself or in other unflattering light. After all, why would anyone lie about things that don’t make them look good? Her confessional stories rang ‘true’ and garnered a quick large following.

For me, it was just one more data point on how much men (or at least many men) crave authentic voracious feminine sexual energy in their lives. Skim any Penthouse Letters book or free stories site aimed at men and you’ll see that most of the women in them are high libido, highly sexual women with low inhibitions. That’s what enough male readers want to be able to sustain those publications and sites. That’s the draw for many fantasies such as wife-watching. And yes, there’s probably a longer post in here somewhere, since I didn’t address this head on in my Power of the Feminine post. But the point for this post is that I wasn’t surprised that a successful phone sex operator was able to tap into that craving.

Unfortunately, she made a mistake. It was early October a few years back and had recently snowed here in Denver. So in one call, she mentioned that she was going to take a break and go skiing. Unfortunately, the client she was talking with knew that the Colorado ski areas weren’t open and so caught her in a falsehood. He was furious. She told me that he flew into a rage and called her all sorts of names before hanging up.

She was shocked, but ultimately dismissed it as a minor loss in her customer base. It wasn’t exactly a Crying Game surprise, after all. She also didn’t understand why he was so upset. She kind of understood, but she really didn’t get it.

I did.

Which is why I wasn’t surprised to read about the takedown of Alexa, the blogger of The Real Princess Diaries. Her blog was highly rated and followed, but she turned out to (probably) not be a high priced call girl in San Francisco, and instead appears to have been a man living on the other side of the country. I say ‘appears’ because the blogosphere is still humming with possibilities and accusations and I frankly can’t keep up, much less intelligently comment.

Now, I’d found Alexa’s blog a while back and enjoyed reading it from time to time–maybe once or twice a month. The writing was solid and it included all those little details that made it ring true. I recall one story where she described joining the mile high club on a cross-country flight with a couple of marines she’d met in the back of the plane. She devoted a couple of paragraphs to describing the difficulty of finding a position that worked in the lavatory, and what they were bumping into as they fucked. There was humor in it, as well as the sheer hotness factor.

At the same time, there were posts that made me go, “this is, at a minimum, exaggerated.” One of the stories, for example, was about putting on a sex show at a private party in a rich section of San Francisco. The details of how she got to the party sounded like they were straight out of Eyes Wide Shut (review coming soon). She had a story of being a weekly morning office blowjob for a regular, which besides being an amazing risk that not one of the pros I know would ever willingly take (too much risk of getting caught), the details themselves rang as contrived (walking there, the blowjob always on the same day of the week just before his secretary arrived but never actually getting caught, etc.). Finally, too many of Alexa’s stories were just plain hot, whereas the sex workers I know would say that the majority of their memorable encounters were just weird. “Hot” was a rarity when they were doing it for pay. It was a job with its good days and its bad days, and how many of us truly remember the specifics about our average or slightly average days?

But while I doubted the veracity of many or all of Alexa’s posts, I didn’t spend much time on it because this is, after all the internet. Isn’t there a famous New Yorker cartoon that says, “on the internet, no one knows you’re a dog?” I read her posts firmly aware that they could be complete bullshit, but it entertained me from time to time and that was the whole point.

Obviously, it wasn’t for someone else. It could be a simple case of mental instability on the part of the person who outed him (Remittance Girl has some scary examples in her comments section, including one from me about an author friend I know that was cyberstalked). However, having read the original screed, I don’t think it was.

The person who did the outing was pissed. They did a lot of work, fueled by anger that was more than casual, in order to do the attack. While several sordid details of possible other improprieties have come out since then, few were included in the original post. This was personal, and whether it was because of some flame war that spiraled out of control or something else is currently unknown.

But I couldn’t help thinking of the phone sex worker I knew, by analogy and extension.

Because we, as an aggregate and often as individuals, want more from the internet than mere entertainment. Sometimes we want accurate information. Often we want community in ways that the physical world cannot easily provide. And sometimes we want connection.

I’ve been there. I celebrated my 25th birthday alone in an apartment with a pizza, a rented VCR, and some movies, trying to pretend I wasn’t desperately lonely. I had a year in which I went months when my only physical touch with another person beyond a handshake was a lapdance. The internet, still in its infancy, was a fucking godsend.

The internet allowed me to maintain some semblance of human connection. It allowed me to be emotionally honest in ways that I just couldn’t with those I spent my time with face to face on a daily basis (as most were coworkers). It allowed me space to sort out more of who I was and what I thought–trying on personas and growing from the experience. In some ways, it helped me stay sane.

And I think it’s that sense of connection that is at the heart of both the sense of betrayal and some of the reaction to it. “Alexa” apparently was false in some of her personal connections with others on the web. They felt betrayed. In response, there was a take down, which betrayed “her” in personal ways. It’s in that sense that Remittance Girl’s comments about the vibrancy of the web strike home with me.

I think a lot of the vibrancy of the web is in the connections. We can meet and relate with people all over the world with whom we might not otherwise ever become aware of. We can find support and friendship and community and the occasional good idea. Which just makes it sad when it’s perturbed by something like this.

Which is ultimately where I end up. There are plenty of places debating the particulars of Alexa and in the end, those particulars won’t matter much to most of us. It’s not like we’re the person that’s been destroyed, after all. But that doesn’t mean it’s not sad for the rest of us that it happened.

This past week, I decided to conduct a “quality of life” experiment I dubbed “Blissful Ignorance.” From last Monday through the election, I would not check any news or sports websites, nor read the newspapers, nor watch TV news. I’d awoken to how I was so very pessimistic and cranky in my daily life and how much of that was due to my sense that the world’s going to hell. Now since this is a sex and writing site, I’ll skip the political rants and also skip whining about why sports was also bringing me down and just talk about how it’s going.

One week in, the biggest surprise for me is how much checking news or political sites was a habit. I’d read them over breakfast, a handful of times a day, and when I was in the process of procrastinating other stuff. Not doing it has created an unexpected void in my time. Admittedly, it’s not a big chunk of time–five minutes here, twenty minutes there–but it added up to more than I thought.

So some of that has been filled with writing. Despite only have two lunch hours to write this past week, I managed to finish the crappy first draft of TMI and do three editing passes. It stands at 2915 words. I need one more editing pass before I send it on to Nick for his review/edit. That will probably take a while since he has to get Ch18 of Summer Camp out first, but that’s okay by me.

I also completed the full scripts for pages 33-36 of Deep Dish. When I’ve been averaging 2-3 pages a week, to do a little more than that as well as the TMI work is quite heartening. This experiment may be worth it.

It may be worth it for other reasons. I’ve certainly been less cranky this past week. I don’t know if there will be a point where I will regret not knowing what’s going on in the world. I’ve certainly been disdainful of people who don’t follow the details enough to intelligently vote or otherwise participate in the political process, so the biggest discomfort so far has been the sense that I might be a hypocrite here. We’ll give it another couple of weeks to see if I can get over that.

So The Ugly One is now released at a handful of ebook retailers, Amazon among them. I’ve of course popped over as a ‘customer’ to see how it looks and have been fine tuning some of the information. Unfortunately, it’s clear that there are two things missing: “customers who purchased this also purchased” and reviews.

Reviews are a funny thing, when you’re on the ‘reviewed’ end. A good one sets the heart aflutter and soaring. A bad one can similarly trigger black moods and second guessing. It’s hard to not take it personally.

At least, in my experience, at first. After enough similar reviews, it stops being relevant. The review becomes as much of a reflection on the reviewer as the reviewed.

For example, I had my annual performance review this past week. It was, for lack of a better word, fluff. I knew pretty much what my reviewer was going to say, even though I’d sent him different names as coworker references than I’d sent last year or the year before. I know what my employer thinks I should do better. I know what my employer thinks I do great. It’s been the same for the past 17 years, even though I’ve been with multiple employers during that time.

That said, when I first started my professional career 17 years ago, those reviews mattered to me. I wanted to understand what they thought of me and I was scared it wasn’t going to be good. So I’d prep for the reviews and do my best to put a good foot forward in the weeks leading up to the review.

So… now I’m looking at Amazon and going, “I need reviews in order to help sell this book.” The hidden question lurking beneath that is, how honest a review do I want?

Because let’s face it, positive glowing reviews help sales. That’s why there are ‘shills’ in the universe, who put up favorable reviews in exchange for something (this happens from time to time in the online reviews of escorts and other sex workers). But at the same time, reviews can often be arbitrary for no particularly good reason. It’s one of the reasons I stopped looking at my scores on Storiesonline. They didn’t tell me anything and when I realized that some people were giving me low scores simply to keep me out of the top 20, I stopped paying attention entirely (and if you haven’t read my satire on scoring on storiesonline, 9.7, go do so now).

But what if I get a quality review and it’s not positive?

Because in writing professionally, I’m really closer to that first or second year kid I was 15-17 years ago than who I am in my daytime job today. I know how good I am by amateur standards (storiesonline, etc.) But pro? I don’t have enough of a track record to be able to do a reasonable self-evaluation.

At the same time, The Ugly One is both my baby and an earlier work with some flaws. I’m a better writer now than when I first wrote it. It’s also more personal than many of my later works. Does the heart balance out the technical flaws? Are those flaws even noticeable?

The fear flows.

Now I know what I will do, of course. On Amazon, I’ll just wait and see what happens. Maybe I’ll get some reviews, maybe not. At the same time, I’ll actively submit my story to professional reviewers. Maybe they’re read it, maybe not. Maybe they’ll like it, maybe not. Maybe I’ll get some good feedback and maybe it’ll turn out that they just hate my style.

But by doing so, the fear won’t win. Which will make it easier for the next book and the next book and the book after that.

So I started the week thinking I’d continue to slowly increase my writing pace. I finished page 32 of the Deep Dish script and also knocked out page 33. Not a bad start, I thought.

Then in the middle of the week, I was exchanging emails with Nick Scipio and an amusing idea for a short story in his universe came to mind. Now normally, that would be the end of it. I have a lot of ideas after all. I’ve probably got a dozen for Nick’s universe alone. But given how little time I get to write, and how thick my queue is, I generally let those ideas slither on out of my brain and hope they’ll find other fertile pastures.

But this one grabbed me. And grabbed me hard. Like “big dog yanking little kid down the sidwalk” hard. Like “angler hooks shark instead of guppy” hard.

The title is “TMI” and it’s set between the Coulters’ and Hughes’ return from Utah and Paul’s week of insanity and is told from Chris’s POV. I figure it’ll be around 3kwords when I’m done, which is a nice little snippet. It’s more of one long scene than a tightly plotted drama, but I’m enjoying it.

And I’ve written 2,471 words. That’s over 10 times my normal weekly rate! I honestly can’t remember writing this fast in the post-baby era, and maybe not even in the post-wife-moves-in era. I slowed down only when I broke a glass bowl and sliced three fingers, which seriously hindered my typing. It’s not serious, so I hope to be back to full speed soon (typing this takes more time due to the bandages).

So where does my queue stand these days?  Well, here it is.

Publication Queue
Irie No Kaubutsu–expected to be published in the Tentacle Dreams collection by Republica Press this month.
Waiting for Rodin–to be published in Pill Hill Press anthology in November or December
Fantasy story under other pen name–to be published in spring.

Active Works in Progress
TIM–2471 words done on crappy first draft of approximately 3kwords.
Deep Dish–33 pages of 64 scripted, rest through detailed outline, 3 pages completed w/ full art.
Unmasked–3,466 words done on crappy first draft. Expected length ~10kwords.

Works I’m committed to
Giving Thanks–the 9th Holiday Series story. It’ll be short.
The Devil in the Details–a Summer Camp Universe story. Probably novella length, but maybe not.
The Boys of Summer–third Compassionate Courtesan Universe novel
Historical Fiction novel under other pen name

Highly desired additions
Honeymoon–If I decide to release The Holiday Series as an ebook, I’ll add a 10th story as the ‘bonus’ for folks who’ve read the entire thing here.
One-Eyed Dick and the Valley of the Sun–I’d really like to do a follow up story with Dick, and I’ve got just the nasty pun to end the story with.
A science fiction short under my other pen name. I like the premise, but not what I’ve written so far. I think a complete rewrite might be in order.
Some more short fiction I can submit to anthologies. Naked Twister and Caught Online are my current best ideas, but I’m sure I’ll have others.

and of course, there’s the Summer Camp Universe stories
The Size of Their Toys (Erin’s 16th Bday)
Mayflower (how Sherri and Susan met)
The Devil’s Due (if a trilogy seems apt after I write The Devil in the Details)
Kara’s bachelorette party (only after Nick gets far enough in the main story)

Whew! That doesn’t even include a lot of passing fancies or other whims and ideas. That’s several years of writing at my current pace. Unless, of course, the queue jumper pace becomes the norm. We’ll cross our fingers.

The Ugly One has been on my mind lately, since we’ve been working on the ebook. I woke up recently with my mind swimming with images from an incident in my past where I missed an interesting opportunity because of my belief that I was ugly.

I was single at the time and a good male friend of mine wanted me to meet his new girlfriend. He’d told me stories about how hot she was in bed–that after a boring marriage (she was separated, working on the divorce), she had gotten very exploratory. She’d show up at his place in a trench coat and lingerie. They tried all sorts of variations of acts and positions in bed that she’d never done. They found some interesting places outside of the bedroom to fool around, and so on.

So one night I drove the hour and a half to their side of town and we went barhopping. She spent most of that time talking with me and even being a little flirtatious, which I saw but didn’t understand. Finally it grew late and I told them I needed to get going. I was tired and I still had a long drive ahead of me.

My friend suggested I crash on his couch. Now I’d slept on his couch before and it was awful. I’m a big guy and his couch is small. There was no way to get comfortable and I’d barely gotten any sleep. So I declined.

My friend and his girlfriend pulled aside to talk and then he came over to me, out of her earshot. He said, “Look, she’s always had this fantasy of being with two guys at the same time, but she’s not quite ready to go through with it. So why don’t you come over?”

So here’s where the ‘ugliness’ kicks in. My thoughts were: Okay… they want to keep talking, I’ll sleep on the couch, then if all goes well, maybe in a few weeks something will happen, but probably not.

The idea that I was being propositioned for that night just didn’t register. It was incomprehensible. The thought was so ridiculous it didn’t even enter my conscious mind.

Why was it ridiculous? Because I believed that women don’t sleep with ugly guys they’ve just met and I was ugly. If a woman slept with me, it was because she considered me a good catch or because I was charming and romantic. In other words, if a woman had sex with me, it was because it was part of a relationship and she wanted the other parts of the relationship enough to tolerate having sex with an ugly guy.

So, since I didn’t want to sleep on that couch, I turned my friend and his girlfriend down.

The reality was, she was just getting a touch of cold feet. She did find me attractive and what she wanted was for us to go somewhere more private, give her a chance to get her courage up, and then for me and my friend to take the lead in seducing her.

So, being completely oblivious to this reality because of my own self-conviction that it couldn’t be true, I said goodbye and drove home. A few weeks later they broke up, permanently removing the opportunity. A few years after that, he and I were talking one night over drinks and he confirmed the true reality above. I’d blown it by walking away, and she’d interpreted it as me not being interested in her, which was why it was never offered again.

This was not the only time I unintentionally passed on sex because I just couldn’t believe that the woman was offering it.

One woman went so far as to invite me into her bedroom and kiss me standing next to the bed (after an evening that included a lot of sexually explicit conversation), but since it was a first date, I did the gentlemanly thing and left. The next day, of course, I realized that she had been practically begging me to seduce her–she didn’t want to take the lead, but she did want me to push her down on the bed. There was no second date because she said we were looking for different things. A few weeks later, I talked to her and found out she’d decided to get into swinging (after our date) because what she really wanted was simple no-strings sex.

There are other examples of lesser magnitude, but the common thread was that “I’m ugly. Therefore a woman would not want to sleep with me for the sex. Therefore this seduction/offer/flirtation can’t be real.” Fortunately, I eventually woke up and discovered that it wasn’t true at all.

And hopefully I showed that transition in John’s life in The Ugly One. A bit more dramatically and compact than my real life, but isn’t that what fiction is for?

Well, if I was crawling in my last writing status, I guess I’m toddling now. I managed to finish the script for two more pages of Deep Dish, bringing me up to 31 pages done. I got started on 32, but didn’t finish it.

Furthermore, some other parts of my writing life made some progress. We have the ebook of The Ugly One ready to go and available in all the major sites now. I’ll add a webpage and links for it soon (hopefully later today, but no promises). We also have a Lulu print-on-demand version ready to go and I’ve ordered a proof copy. If that looks okay, I’ll also add links for it here as well. I also now have the remaining art for The Holiday Series, for when I can finish writing those stories.

It feels good and I’m back to the place where I whine about lack of time rather than lack of interest. We’ll see how this coming week goes.

This past week, Slate published an article titled Kindlerotica expressing surprise that Amazon was selling “pornographic” ebooks and even giving them away for free. I waded into the comments, along with several other erotica authors and readers, and the author (James Ledbetter) did his best to rebut some of the attacks on his article.

The article takes the standard salacious but conservative spin on sex that we see so often in the press. “We’re shocked at this! (but let us promote our article with sexy pictures of mostly naked women).” The trope here is old and tired–use the titillation of the sexual content to draw an audience and then condemn it as bad. It’s Jerry Springer lite. It’s Hooters claiming it’s a wholesome family restaurant. And now it’s Slate.

Getting past the promo banners, the article really lacks a lot of meat. It can be summarized as:
1. There’s porn available for Kindle at Amazon.
2. Some of that porn is given away for free.
3. Free porn is very very popular.
4. There’s a side trip talking about how it’s “men’s erotic fiction” indicating that that’s somehow bad and that women are unlikely to be reading it.
5. Amazon could draw flack for selling this material, especially since they are listed as the publisher for many of these books.

So, what’s missing?
A. No comments from Amazon. Apparently Ledbetter didn’t bother to contact them to get their side of the story.
B. No meaningful research into what other ebook retailers sell. In a reply to me in the comments, Ledbetter said the bn.com and borders.com don’t sell comparable work, but it took me all of the 30 seconds to find them. So he didn’t actually do the research.
C. An effort to research the actual audience for the books. The side trip drew most of the ire in the comments in large part because Ledbetter was asserting without a shred of backup evidence.
D. Any analysis of how free porn is different from free books of other genres.
E. Any serious examination of what it means for Amazon to be the publisher vs. just a retailer for other publishers, notably erotic small presses like Samhain (which he cites in the article).
F. Any evidence beyond speculation that Amazon could have trouble for selling this.

So–is this journalism, or a puff piece no better than a tossed-off blog post? Given the lack of factual backing or serious research, I think that answer is obvious.

What this piece does reveal is that Ledbetter was surprised to discover free eporn on Amazon. In fact, that’s about all it reveals.

Well, I can get into the same spirit. I’ll zip over to Amazon… checking their ebooks… oh my! There’s eporn on Amazon! I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked! Particularly because none of it is mine (yet)!

Now doesn’t that deserve the same serious consideration?

Well, life’s busy but I actually managed to script a page in Deep Dish this past week. Only one page, bringing me to 29 done. I opened page 30 during lunch on Friday, but in the 10 minutes I had to write, I didn’t see how to go forward. Such is life sometimes. At least I’m starting to crawl.

It was actually disconcerting to hit the block on page 30. I stared at the detailed outline and realized I had no idea how to set the visuals for the scene. It was like I was a baby again and I knew that there was a word for that fuzzy yellow thing on the couch, but I had no clue what that word was. I was befuddled, waiting for someone to explain “Big Bird” to me, except for my story, there was no helpful parent around to give me a prompt.

Now I know I’ll get through it. I have the dialogue, after all, so it’s just figuring out the views and the settings. Sooner or later I’ll break through and ‘see’ it. Or someone will put on Sesame Street and I’ll be reminded what I’m doing. I have walked before, even if I’m crawling now. It’s just a matter of time…

So we’ll see what the next week brings.