Big Ed's Place

Recently I read a story where the main character claimed on three occasions to have a nine inch cock. It was hard to take seriously, but it did trigger the basis of this blog.

All too often we get measurements in amateur erotica or porn stories. I make it a point to quit any story that includes the phrase “Well, I suppose I should tell you about my self…” in the opening couple of paragraphs because I know what’s coming next–numbers that are supposed to prove how desirable a person is.

Bleh.

For one, very few people can decently estimate how big something is just by looking. Draw a line on a piece of paper that you think is “nine inches” long and then measure it and see how close you are. Or pick something you’re familiar with like a dollar bill–how wide is it, to the nearest half inch? Yet all too often a character looks at a male character and remarks on his “seven inch cock.”

Sorry–small, average, big–that’s about all people can do by sight. Even one of my friends who used to work as a prostitute couldn’t tell by sight and she’s had a lot more cocks in view than the average woman (she could tell once she wrapped her hand around one, because she knew how wide her fist was).

Similarly, visual estimates rely on what’s adjacent. Place an average person next to a basketball player and they look shorter. Similarly, a woman’s breast size depends on her frame. a 32″ bust on a petite woman may be huge, whereas on a large woman, it’d be flat chested. The traditional 36-24-36 makes assumptions about height and build that just don’t fit most women.

Thanks to strip clubs and topless beaches, I’ve probably seen several hundred women nude from the waist up. I can’t tell the difference between a B and a C cup without checking the label. In fact, I once irritated a female playmate by remarking on another woman’s “large” breasts, which were actually smaller measurement-wise than my playmate’s.

So a quoted measurement is immediately a failure in my willing suspension of disbelief.

Furthermore, most exaggerated numerical measurements really fail to understand basic physiological mechanics. Bigger is not necessarily better. In cock size, width trumps length for pleasuring a partner, all other things being equal. Furthermore, length leads to the possibility of hitting a woman’s cervix, which is extremely unpleasant for both parties (been there, done that). So if the guy’s got 9 inches, where exactly is he going to put it? Or is he going to have to leave some hanging in the breeze?

For breasts, the number of nerve receptors is the same regardless of size. So bigger might attract more attention, but doesn’t automatically increase pleasure. Besides, bigger often introduces other problems such as back pain. There used to be some really big breasted (artificially enhanced, of course) porn stars that got decent publicity, but no more. It appears that the fad has passed. Thank gawd, because it was more grotesque than erotic.

So a measurement in a story just shows a failure of understanding and a failure of imagination. There are hundreds of ways to show that a character is desirable beyond assuming “bigger is better.” And I think the first step to good writing is taking one of those ways instead of providing a number.

Much of this past week, my family was on vacation in Mexico. The laptop did not come along for the trip so while I did some writing, it was by hand.

Which sucked.

Ironically, I think it’s been less than a year since I did most of my lunchtime writing by hand. I’d print out the work in progress, write a bit, then type it up in the evening. Hauling the laptop around has become my standard since then and the difference in output is huge, even if my shoulder is paying for it.

I’d forgotten how slow writing by hand is. Not only the mechanics but the “wait, let me back up and rewrite that sentence” aspects. Not only the duplication of writing and then typing, but the way I can’t do stream of consciousness and then tweak what I’ve written. It’s a completely different style of writing and I’ve clearly adapted to having my regular writing be on the keyboard (which, btw, is a reminder that switching to something like an iPad will slow me down gain as I adapt to a different interface).

So where am I at? I’ve completed the rewrite of Oral Histories into Broken and added some words, bringing the new version to 2264. I’m not sure how many of those to count as “new” words so we’ll just consider them new going forward from here. I also managed 1007 words on Unbelievable, bringing it to 1786 words. Only about 600 of those were written longhand, over multiple days and hours. I tacked on the next 400 in a quick hour one evening after we’d returned.

So I definitely need to keep the laptop as my primary writing tool. The production difference is just too huge.

A recent Slate article explored the “sexual economics” on college campuses where women outnumber men by a meaningful number. Men don’t have to work as hard to get women interested in them and can be bigger slackers and still get laid. Furthermore, the article goes on to discuss how young women are agreeing to more casual sex and more sex that isn’t what they want in order to have boyfriends. Guys don’t have to make commitments because there are plenty of other women available, so why commit to just one?.

Now I’m not sure how much I buy those broad brush conclusions. I’m sure they’re accurate in some microcosms, but it’s not been my personal experience. However, I have spent time with a very large number of women who’ve had trouble finding decent men. While the demographics were different (single men over forty seem to be scarcer than single men in college), it did leave me wondering at the time–why are there too few decent men?

I can kind of understand the lack of men in the senior citizen crowd. The men have died. I also get it in some inner cities. Thanks to US current judicial norms, a lot of the men from the inner cities are in jail, many on drug related charges. But middle class suburbia?

As best as I can tell, there are two main reasons. One of those is too high standards. One woman I know who was single into her late thirties had a checklist for guys that was so long that it was ridiculous. A man I know who’s still single in his mid-forties only chases after women who are model quality beautiful. He doesn’t catch many of them. Needless to say, when it takes two to tango, too high of standards by either party takes them out of the dance.

The second main reason I can discern is guys who give up, and thereby take themselves out of the dance. The few single men over 30 that I know have basically stopped trying to date. They seem to keep plenty busy, but of course I don’t know exactly what they do with their spare time. If a guy doesn’t want a family, gets plenty of companionship from his male friends, and has some sort of arrangement for sex (or a low libido and doesn’t miss sex), then why go through the effort of dating?

Because let’s face it, dating can be hard. A guy has to put himself out there and risk rejection. He’s got to demonstrate a modicum of social skills that aren’t necessarily taught. There can easily reach a point where just playing video games is preferable to dealing with people. Which is unfortunate.

Now these are, of course, my completely unsubstantiated opinions. Maybe the problem is simply that the fraction of guys who are decent guys is too small. We have no way of knowing if the jerks are 10% or 50% of the male population (or 100%, but we won’t go there). Maybe the populations are skewed more than I encounter. Maybe there are a ton of men somewhere else, like the military, where they’re complaining about the lack of good women.

Or maybe, as the Slate article implies, the availability of easy sex encourages the guys to slack off. Why become a decent man if you’re getting laid anyway?

No answers, I’m afraid. But for too many women of my acquaintance, it’s a common question.

Sometimes I’ll be plugging away on a story and hit a point where I’m forced to stop. I get a sinking feeling in my gut and I realize the story just isn’t working. It’s usually a difficult, wrenching moment. I have to take a break from that story and remind myself that it’s okay if they don’t work from time to time.

When this happens, I’ve got a couple of choices. I can power through, set the story aside, or rework it. Powering through relies on me trusting that it’s “good enough” and that at least some readers will still like it. It’s usually a hard slog in that case, but I have done it (and no, I won’t say which stories fit that category).

Usually I set it aside. Giving my brain backburner time to figure it out helps. Sometimes I’ve even sent it out for critique, though in all cases where I wasn’t sure, all the critique did was confirm it wasn’t working.

Many of those set-aside stories end up in my ‘abandoned’ folder. Time passes, I look at them from time to time, and nothing breaks free. Eventually I just clear them out of my work in progress folder.

But sometimes, either as the story sits there or as I plug forward anyway, I see what’s not working. It’s usually an “a ha” moment in the shower, which can be a real pain since my laptop is not waterproof.

But this is my Sunday post–what does this have to do with my writing status?

Well, this past week, I had the “a ha” about what I’d called Oral Histories. As a result, this week’s writing was ripping it apart and rebuilding the story. I didn’t do much else, in part because I was still hung over from rolling Take it to the Bank out the door in under a week, and in part due to the usual real life demands on my time.

Oral Histories had been my crack at a Summer Camp story set right after Chapter 18 in the main story. I wanted to write about Chris’s reaction to Elizabeth breaking the rules and had this idea that he’d talk to Beth about it. I managed 2200 words before I was forced to say, “this isn’t working.” I hated the title. I hated the planned ending. It seemed to ramble way too much. At least two of the conversational sequences felt forced.

The “a ha” was that I had the wrong title. It is now Broken. The title change forced clarification into the rest of the text. I figured out a good ending fairly quickly and bounced the rewrite plans by Nick (always important when writing in his universe). Then I spent my time shredding and rebuilding the text.

I’m back up to 1695 words. They’re flowing much better this time, and I’m confident I’ll get through it in time, though I may return to my other queued stories first. If I do, it’ll be that I have the confidence that now it works.

By now, you’ve probably heard of Avenue Q, the 2004 Tony Award Winning Musical Comedy. It combines the puppetry of Sesame Street with a decidedly adult turn. Besides a lot of cursing and sexual innuendo, there’s actually on-stage sex–between puppets. It’s toured a couple of times and I recently caught it for a second time. That should immediately clue you into how much I’ve enjoyed it–I was willing to pay premium prices to see a show that I’d already seen before.

The basic premise of the play isn’t important–we meet a bunch of characters, some of whom are puppets, some of whom are actors, all of whom are poor and struggling and living on the same street (Avenue Q). They struggle with relationships and personal growth and eventually arrive at “happy for now” endings.

What I happen to love is the way the songs stab directly at things we don’t say, but are true. The most controversial song is “Everybody’s a Little Bit Racist,” which pokes fun at PC beliefs that we’re not biased at all. Of course the most famous song is “The Internet is for Porn”–again, something that was nearly 100% true for the first decade of the web and arguably still true now. But even songs like “There’s a Fine Line” point to things we know but generally don’t state. The tunes are hummable and enjoyable and how often do you really get to hear people praise “Schadenfruede”?

So–if you haven’t seen it, I recommend going. If you want to get a sample, you can always catch the soundtrack via the link below.

Okay, I stole the title of this post from Avenue Q’s song, “The Internet is for Porn,” which I saw last weekend during its Denver tour stop. In many ways, the song was so hilarious because it’s true. Porn has driven much of the internet for some time.

But that’s well trod ground. Instead, I want to muse about one of the uncomfortable realities of being an erotica writer. If I’m doing my job right, somewhere there’s a guy grabbing his dick as he reads my stories.

It can be a mildly disturbing image. I’m heterosexual and I admit that I kinda like the image of a hot woman reaching for her vibrator when she pulls up my stories (and it has happened), but the world does not consist solely of hot women, even if your definition of hot, like mine, is reasonably broad (yes, GF, you qualify). So the visual of a guy taking care of business in front of his computer screen is not one I particularly want in front of my eyeballs.

But the reality is that most consumers of online porn and erotica are men. Most of my audience is men. I’m not exactly writing lesbian romance stories here. Which brings me back to the reality–if I’m doing my job right, I’m going to inspire some guys to “doubleclick.”

Now, obviously, that’s not my only “job” when I write. Primarily, I intend to entertain. I also like to inspire thought, which at least for me is entertaining. Yes, there are times I want something mindless for my entertainment, but Hollywood and TV do a great job of providing that. So I write what I want to read. There are some stories on this site that barely rise above stroke. There are some that have so little sexual content as to barely qualify as erotica. After all, one of my personal favorites is Eye of the Hurricane, which is neither happy nor erotic.

I repeat. I write what I want to read.

This has meant that I’ve passed up some professional calls for submission because while I’ve got the skill, the topics don’t particularly grab me. I’m going to read the story myself a dozen times before the main audience sees it so I’d better like it.

It also means, for an erotic scene, it has to have appeal to me. Now I’m not going to be doing any doubleclicking to my own story–any residual arousal gets squashed when I’m fumbling for a way to avoid writing ‘thrust’ for the third time in a single paragraph. But it has to get my pulse up. If it doesn’t, then I’m not doing it well.

And that’s the dirty little secret of erotica, particularly of the internet variety. The writer isn’t supposed to admit, “I wrote this because I found it hot.” The reader isn’t supposed to admit, “I found this so hot that I did something about it.”

One of the things that makes Avenue Q so much fun (and that’ll have to be a separate post) is that it dares to say what we don’t normally openly admit. The internet is for porn, and that’s ultimately kinda cool.

After last week’s gunning start, this week continued the run. I knocked out 3000 more words on what became “Take it to the Bank” and even submitted it to the Call for Submissions (total length, 4300 words, just under the 4500 maximum for the call). That’s a heckuva week for me.

Of course, now I’m going to pay for it a bit. Too many chores and other tasks got postponed while I wrote. Also, we’ll be taking a family vacation next week, which means there’s a lot of prep that has to be done. Nonetheless, even if I get no words down this week or next, it’s already a good month. I’m pretty pleased.

On the flip side of patting myself on the back, I do recognize I need to keep pushing forward. Yes, I need to catch up on those chores. But I can’t slack off either.

Because there’s something critical about maintaining a regular pace. Even if a runner picks it up for a pace, they can’t stop when they get tired. They just have to slow down. The marathon doesn’t stop just because a mile marker was passed.

So I’m feeling good. But it’s time to catch my breath and keep moving.

Recently, I’ve had the opportunity to critique the work of a handful of other authors. It’s a challenging and interesting endeavor.

Critiquing differs from reviewing in the intended audience. When I review something, I’m doing it for the potential consumers of whatever I review. On this site, my reviews are for you, the reader. I have no obligation and indeed no particular concern for the providers. I don’t worry about whether they like or are offended by my review. I don’t provide suggestions for them to possibly undertake. I might see how something could be improved, but mentioning it is mostly to inform the readers about a perceived shortfall.

Critiques, however, are for the producer. The author ultimately wants feedback on how to improve their writing–if not in that specific story, then in some future story.

This is hard.

I’ve read many critiques that were merely typo and grammar corrections. I’ve read many critiques that were two sentence attaboys. I think these are only of minor assistance. Sure, catching typos always helps, but it doesn’t go to the heart of writing. Similarly, I’m thrilled to know someone liked my work enough to write me the two sentences, but beyond that, such critiques don’t offer me much concrete to work with. When I was a new writer, those attaboys were wonderful and almost necessary in getting me to continue to write. Writing is a lonely enterprise and a writer is a lousy judge of their own work (we know what we intended to write, which makes it hard to evaluate what we actually wrote). The praise is a lifeline to sanity.

The next level up in critiques is when the person doing the critique gets enough sense of the story to know how they’d do it. What they’d do differently and, without not necessarily being conscious of it, what it would take to make it better. Often such a critique is very insightful.

The hard part with this is that the critiquer might not be any better than the author. Furthermore, the author may not have enough sense of their own style to realize they should say no.

For example, I recently sent my science fiction story to a friend for a critique. He thought the main character was too sarcastic to be sympathetic and suggested some changes. Sympathetic main characters are important, right?

Except I knew that making any of his suggested changes would completely change the tone of the piece. The story was greys and blacks with a lightning dash of white. Turning the main character into a warm lush human wouldn’t have accomplished my goal.

Which gets to the heart of the problem of a critique. The person doing it has to be capable of separating out what’s really wrong with the story from what the critiquer says is wrong with the story. They might not be the same thing.

And, being aware of this, it’s made it hard to do critiques. I can sift through and see what I really think is wrong and report on that. I can point out inconsistencies in plot. If I know the author well enough, I might even be able to point out inconsistencies in tone or voice. But after that…

I’ve decided that the best ‘art’ is simply to convey my reactions as a reader. It doesn’t make the author wrong or right–merely informs them of what one reader went through and felt. I’m not sure that it’s what will be expected in many quarters, but I do, in the end, hope it helps more than other approaches.

We’ll just have to see.

It wasn’t a bad week for writing. A Smile on my Face debuted at ERWA, and I submitted my science fiction story for professional publication. I also managed 612 on Unmasked, bringing it to 5631 words. Then things took off.

I’ve decided I want to see if I can have a story published in Penthouse. It’ll be fiction in their Penthouse Letters magazine, since they don’t take open submissions in their main magazine. The idea came to me this week, and I knocked out 779 words on what will be a ~3000 word story.

Then the next day, a short burn call for submission showed up. It’s also 3000 words, but the submissions are due in two weeks. It’s also something I’m actually interested in writing (one night stands) rather than the usual calls for things like Gay Cowboys. I jumped in with both feet and managed 1225 words on it in one evening and one morning.

Then, alas, life reared its head and I lost my time to write. Pesky errands. Pesky chores. Pesky need to eat.

Still, that’s over 2600 words in a week. The engines are racing…

Often, erotica is shoved into a ‘taboo’ corner where it’s unacceptable to be openly consumed or created. Magazines and books don’t come in plain brown wrappers any more, but erotica and porn companies still use neutral sounding monikers for billing and shipping. Due to the opprobrium, most erotica writers use pen names. Additionally, both porn and erotica exploded when it became easy to consume them in the privacy of one’s home. VCR’s meant that people didn’t have to get caught going into adult movie theaters, or endure an unpleasant environment while they were there. Similarly, the internet dramatically increased porn consumption, with porn leading the way in many developments.

One unintended side effect of the disdain and marginalization of porn, however, was that it created a world with almost no limits. It has been like the traditional Japanese concept of shame. Once a Samurai brought shame on himself, well, it didn’t matter how much shame. There wasn’t a gradation going from “bad” to “worse” to “awful.” The line had been crossed and that was it.

But if the line has been crossed and it doesn’t matter, why not take it to the limit? What difference does it make, really, to cheat on your wife twenty times instead of five? Or to spend three days on a drug induced binge instead of one? There are obviously some celebrities in the news recently who’ve made that calculation.

Similarly, porn saw the rabid push to the limits. Rule 34 is proof of that. So is the explosion of some of the most tasteless boundary pushing porn imaginable. If being taboo or being shocking is all you have to differentiate yourself, and there’s no social penalty for being shocking because you’re already across the line, why not go for it?

So… cue the problem with where the line gets drawn. There is a movement in many quarters to bring quality erotica out from behind the line. Or to move the line so that “erotica” doesn’t have the disdain in popular culture. Of course, that’s much of the basis for the erotica vs. porn definition fight. Erotica is on the “acceptable” side of the line and porn is on the other.

Now rather than wade into that fight in this particular musing, I want to go back to my original metaphor and ask–is there really only one line? Or is there more than one? Or is there really a gradient?

And I’ve come to believe there are really two lines. The first is when something gets looked down on socially. The second is when it motivates a section of the population to actively go after the producers.

That second line, in porn, is clearly child pornography. I’ve discussed my views on it previously and don’t wish to repeat myself about how it should be treated. Instead, I’d like to steer into the area of fictional child porn.

In written erotica, or cartoon erotica, there are no actual child victims. It all comes from the creator’s imagination. As such, I believe it should be harmless and, in America, protected under the First Amendment.

But what I think doesn’t matter. I know of several erotica authors who have run into legal difficulties as a result of using pre-teen characters. Red Rose accepted a plea deal after facing criminal charges for obscenity. Frank McCoy chose to fight his, even though it meant traveling from Minnesota to Florida to defend himself. Dorsai was contacted by authorities and warned but not charged. I know of a handful of other cases that have other complications as well (like the authorities actually finding child porn on the author’s computer). All it takes is a prosecutor out to make a headline or acting out of personal moral revulsion to make someone’s life hell. It’s not necessarily a consolation to win the legal case if you’ve been dragged through the mud along the way.

This is, surprisingly, not purely academic for me. I recently had an opportunity to do graphic novel scripts for a new website for pay. Anyone who’s followed my Deep Dish discussions here knows that I would love to do more graphic novels, but having to pay an artist is holding me back. However, the website was going to allow comics that had pre-teen characters involved in sexual situations. Even if I was willing to be associated with a site that allowed that from a personal taste and morals standpoint, the legal jeopardy is too much to risk.

That’s what made me aware of this second line. Post-puberty teenagers–okay, that’s a grey area since the age of consent varies so much. Pre-puberty? Line. Big Red and flashing, for those who see it. And for me–I’m not going to cross it, even by second hand association.