Big Ed's Place

I’d thought about doing a “what’s the story?” for the picture below, but realized it was really too obvious. Either the picture’s staged, or the couple just really really really had to get busy right then and right there, which may have been the result of alcohol or other inhibition lowering drugs.

I’m guessing it’s staged because it’s too much in the open, in too bright of a day, with way too much skin showing. I’ve had a lot of sex in public places and those are pretty much no-no’s.

Because, at least for me, the thrill is the risk of being in a public setting and the adrenaline rush that accompanies the possibility of getting caught–but I don’t want to actually get caught. It creates too much opportunity for huge complications, from arrest to getting photographed and the photos boosted to the web (a serious problem when every cell phone has a camera) to simply have the person catching you be an asshole and ruin the mood. Only in fantasies do observers watch quietly or join in.

So the number one trick to sex in public places is to arrange it so that you’re likely to see anyone coming before they see you. Since it’s difficult to look around 360 degrees constantly (not to mention up, if you’re in a city), this usually means picking a place with some sort of “back wall” that prevents people from approaching in one or more directions. It also usually means fooling around at night, when shadows work to your advantage and people can’t see as far.

That’s not to say that sex outdoors in the warm sun can’t be fun, but I will always remember the time we were fooling around in a mountain meadow and had just finished up when a hiker appeared. If he saw us, he never let on, but my heart didn’t stop pounding until we were well on our way home.

The number two trick is, like many things, plausible deniability. E.g., “I swear, your honor, she was just sitting on my lap. The accuser couldn’t have seen anything because of the way her long loose skirt covered us both.” The key is usually noise and rhythmic motion. If both of those are limited and subtle, it truly can be hard to tell what people are doing.

Now I say this as someone who’s had a lot of sex in public places and to the best of my knowledge never gotten caught. Just about every public flashing or public fooling around scene in my stories is based on a true past experience (and if you want to know if a specific scene is, ask in the comments). The hiker in the field is as close as it’s been and I plead youth and excess hormones.

Now that isn’t to say that some of my “never did it’s” won’t show up in future stories. I’ve had a number of ideas that never came to fruition due to a lack of adventurous partner at the time it seemed possible. For example, I wondered if one could get away with sex on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. I heard a claim that it had been done in the 70′s but Google is failing me on finding more details. In the post 9/11 world, I wouldn’t try, but I could easily see writing a story set in an earlier time period where the protagonists pulled it off. I also had a photography session in the University library scheduled with a woman who chickened out before we did it. If you ever read a story involving a trench coat, stockings, and nothing else between the stacks, you’ll know where it came from. I also have plenty of ‘true’ experiences that haven’t made it into stories yet, but may sometime when the right characters call.

Which means that, in the end, I can “get away with it” the best in fiction. I enjoy it, and I intend to continue to enjoy whatever flights of fancy cross my mind in future stories. Just no amused cops in the middle of the day.

As I write this, I’m feeling like Charlie Brown landing on my back after the football got yanked. Earlier in this month, I saw a Call For Submissions that inspired my queue jumper Center Stage. Unfortunately, I spotted it mid-month and the due date was February 4–not a lot of time for me given how infrequently I can find time to write.

But Center Stage pulled at me, so I decided to give it a shot. This week I pushed especially hard, which was emotionally difficult because I’m still tender from the hard push in December. I managed 2,305 words, bringing it to 3,429 words. I’m close to the end and if I were to guess right now, I think it’d finish at a little under 5,000 words.

So when I realized that, the back of my mind nagged me because the call for submission said stories had to be under 4,000 words. I decided to doublecheck the call, and discovered it had been withdrawn.

So I ran hard for a deadline only to discover it gone. Aim to kick the football, then no football.

Now, to be fair, I still have what I think will be a good story. I’ll certainly finish it, but the resistance to pushing myself has been heightened even more.

Anyway, it’s also the end of January and those 3,429 words are all I managed for the month. Life just intervened, and I’m actually okay with it as a result. Hopefully February will be better.

Recently, I’ve been thinking about some old, lost, intimate friendships.

Now I should be clear that I use the term “intimate” to be emotional rather than physical. I can have sex with someone without an emotional connection. That’s not to say there isn’t an intimacy there, but it’s rather different. The parts of my soul that I bare, if I do bare them, are rather different than what I share with emotionally intimate friends and partners. For me, the most intimate activities involve conversation. I bare my soul through words–not what I do in the bedroom (though I must admit, cuddling can be awfully intimate).

This should be no surprise to readers here. I often write about my life, and I try to bare my soul, sometimes hiding it behind a veneer of fiction, sometimes not. I believe that’s how we connect, and why not be the one to start? I think it strengthens my fiction and makes it more authentic and it certainly gives my other work here more style.

Given what I share here, it should be no surprise that I share pretty openly in my daily life. The people who reciprocate often become friends, if there’s enough of a connection or other relevant circumstances. It provides a deeper support community for me, and it allows me to be truly supportive of others.

The hard part, though, is that often life circumstances change and so must the nature of the friendship. I noticed this first when friends started getting married. Certain conversational topics, like sex, dried up. While they might have been willing to talk about what they did with their boyfriends/girlfriends, they wouldn’t bring up anything about life with their spouse. I “got it” when I got married myself (there’s a reason there are no stories about sex with my wife on this site).

However, it’s not just the development of new intimate relationships which can crowd out the intimate friendship. I’ve had several die because the awkwardness of sustaining it was too much to bear. We discovered some serious barrier, like politics, that made it difficult to maintain respect for each other and thus be able to share openly. Others saw the onslaught of life changes, such as kids or relocation take their toll.

But sometimes, a relationship will hit a level where there’s nowhere else for it to go. This has been most often occurred to me in friendships with women. We reach a point where greater intimacy would require sex, and that’s not going to happen, so we back off. Then we discover that it’s damn difficult to sustain a friendship at a lower level.

In some ways, that’s what happened with the friendship that was the inspiration behind Friends and Benefits. The actual relationship went differently than that in the story, but still ended with a dispute about the nature of the friendship itself. She didn’t want to date me, and called me “ugly” on more than one occasion. I was tired of the sex play that wasn’t escalating or being either physically or emotionally fulfilling.

Yet recently I realized that, at its peak, that friendship was more intimate than relationships I had with some former lovers who remain in my life. With the former lovers, there was a clear post-intimacy path. We kept some parts of our connection and let others go because they were clearly no longer appropriate. Some of those relationships have then faded, like all friendships do, until we just exchange Christmas cards. Others maintain smiles and wistful unspoken memories. At least one had a “whoa! Is she attractive! Wait a minute, I used to date her.” moment.

So, with my old friend, I can’t help wondering if we’d have stayed in better touch if we’d actually become lovers, and then ex-lovers. It’s an experiment that can’t be tested, of course. Nor would I want to if it meant missing out on meeting my wife.

There are other memories of past relationships that have flitted through, recently. There’s also some realization that some of those types of emotionally intimate relationships aren’t appropriate anymore. I kind of miss them, even though I wouldn’t trade what I have now for them at all.

So I guess it’s just nostalgia of the rose-colored glasses kind. Maybe that’s just a sign that I’m getting old.

It’s been crazy here, with various life stresses and unexpected busyness. We’re trying to teach the baby how to soothe herself to sleep. It is not going well, and so I’m getting very little sleep. It’s been very hard to focus, and my day job has required a great deal of focus.

Nonetheless, I finally managed to get Holiday Sights out (see the ebook page). I also added 699 words to Center Stage this past week, bringing it to 1,124. So clearly there have been some coherent moments in the week. Just not at this precise moment.

Hopefully I’ll have a better update when ingesting caffeine actually helps.

In today’s modern world, it’s too often to take the dominance of Western culture and economies as normal. Yet for much of history, it was actually the East that was the pinnacle. While Europe wrestled with Dark Ages and Middle Ages and more, both the Near East and the Far East flourished. So why, with a head start, did China not end up dominating the world instead of the Europeans?

They had a chance, even as late as the 1400′s. Sixty years before Vasco da Gama sailed around the Cape of Good Hope into the Indian Ocean, the Chinese Explorer Zheng He arrived at the Cape of Good Hope from the other direction. His fleet was significantly larger and the Chinese Empire much more powerful. Yet Portugal, later supplanted by other European powers, ended up owning the trade routes. Europe surged economically and culturally and surpassed China so that a few hundred years later, they were carving it up as part of their own empires.

So what happened?

In a word: bureaucracy.

The Chinese bureaucrats, who ran the country regarded the explorations as a waste of money and resources. China already was the Center of the Universe. Why spend any effort on barbarians? To add to the problems, they passed laws that restricted foreign travel and made it a capital crime to build big ocean going ships. The laws therefore made it impossible for any enterprising individuals to engage in exploration or trade outside of the bureaucrats’ control. There was no way an explorer could fund himself (or get another nation to fund him, as the Italian Columbus managed with Spain). The bureaucrats ruled.

Laws and bureaucracy killed the creative, explorative efforts of the Chinese people and eventually led to their destruction as a nation.

Now as much as we all tend to snarl about bureaucracy, it exists for some understandable reasons. Bureaucracies are put in place to manage and govern things on large scales. However, it doesn’t take long for them to do what they are really good at, which is maintain the status quo.

Deficit hawks in the US Government have known this for some time. It’s damn near impossible to kill a program once it’s established. No matter how outdated the agency or department, it can survive because the defenders of the status quo will fight harder and dirtier than those trying to end the program. After all, it’s the defender’s jobs and livelihood at stake. Most of us would fight hard ourselves.

And if we’re honest, most of us like the status quo. Not only is change scary, but chaos is usually downright frightening, if not hazardous. There have been studies that show that corrupt economies can succeed–if the corruption is stable. As long as someone knows what bribes they have to pay who, they can survive and even thrive. People can be creative because they know the rules. It’s when there are no rules that growth and creativity become impossible.

The major advantage of democracy, as practiced in the West with various checks against mob rule, is that it allows small slow change. The status quo is largely preserved without being stifling. Similarly, regulated capitalism allows ‘creative destruction’ where inefficient firms fail and new companies rise up, but chaos is still averted. The marketplace has rules and does not descend into “he with the biggest weapons makes all the rules.”

Which brings us to SOPA. By now, if you’re reading this, you’ve certainly heard about the Stop Online Piracy Act that magically appeared in the US Congress a few months ago and, if passed, would allow the Government to shut down IP addresses if any users of those IP addresses posted pirated content. This would allow them to de facto censor any cite that the bureaucrats chose, anywhere in the world (since the US controls IP assignments). It’s bad law and I strongly suspect it will be defeated in it’s current form (too much publicity), probably to rise up again more quietly in a different form later.

Why will it rise up again? Because SOPA is a perfect example of law and bureaucracy preserving the status quo. In this case, preserving the status quo of the media conglomerates, from music to movies to books.

A prime example of the media conglomerates getting the law changed is the Copyright Term Extension Act. In this law, pushed through with substantial lobbying by the Disney Corporation, the duration of copyright protection was extended by twenty years. The proponents at the time were attempting to get copyrights extended in perpetuity, so that creative works would never enter the public domain.

Spider Robinson addressed this in his Hugo winning story, Melancholy Elephants. His point is simple; a perpetual copyright will stifle creativity.

This isn’t hard to understand. While there are allowances for ‘fair use’ and ‘inspired by’ uses of copyrighted material, those allowances are only as good as one’s lawyers. If Disney decides to go after a writer or film maker that borrowed from them, however distantly and indirectly, do you think that person has a chance against their army of lawyers? Even if they’re right? The legal fees would crush them. The current legal system is designed not to reward those who are right, but those who can outlast the others. Big corporations with deep pockets have a serious edge. The filthy rich executives at Disney cannot afford to let The Mouse enter the public domain in any way, shape, or form, if they want to stay rich doing what they do now.

SOPA is the same gut reaction. Digital piracy undercuts the status quo. The media conglomerates can no longer get away with charging high rates for content, like they could when you had to buy a CD or a book or go to a theater to get their content. They can no longer control when and how consumers get the content–by restricting their film from appearing in foreign countries for example (aside: one acquaintance of mine points out that she’d pay for legal copies of ebooks if she could get them, but she can’t in her country. Amazon et al won’t sell them there. So what choice does she have?)

So SOPA is an attempt to use the law and bureaucracy to preserve the status quo. The eventual SOPA successor will attempt to do the same thing. If they succeed, we’re likely to end up like the 16th century Chinese, with a lack of creative improvement or true innovation (why produce something new if The Mouse lawyers can say a ‘oops, you borrowed from us, give us all the money you made or we’ll sue’?).

Except the true kicker is, the only way to preserve the status quo is to destroy the internet, much like the Chinese destroyed their ocean going fleets, because piracy isn’t the real problem, it’s the shift to a digital economy.

The status quo cannot survive when it costs nothing to make copies of content. The entire structure of the media conglomerates is based on the fact that it does cost something; that’s how they contribute value, or used to contribute value. People paid them for the distribution of the content via records, books, CD’s, and newspapers. That distribution required physical objects (an “atom” economy) that meant there was a cost to making copies and the conglomerates could do it better than individuals could. After all, if you want a book, you can always copy it by hand, but wouldn’t it just be cheaper to buy one at the store?

Apple and Amazon have figured this out. Apple isn’t charging 99 cents for a song. They’re charging 99 cents for the ease of finding the song you want, the knowledge that it’ll be of good quality and virus free, the security that it’s ‘legal’, and the awareness that you’re actually helping the creator of the content. Apple doesn’t spend its own money on the content. It spends it on making it easier to deliver the consumers the content they want. Amazon is as much of a master of this, if not more.

Now I’m not a fan of pirates. As a content creator, it chafes me when someone else makes money off of a story I wrote and I get nothing (and yes, it’s happened). I do consider that stealing. But going after the pirates is like trying to go after slave traders. They’re clever, ruthless, and there’s always more ready to replace the ones you destroy, as long as there’s profit in it.

Which is the key. As long as there’s profit in it.

The way to stop digital piracy is economically. The slave trade didn’t end because slave traders were destroyed. It ended because people stopped buying slaves (via cultural and legal shifts in much of the world and war in the US). Similarly, the mobsters of the twenties weren’t put out of business by law enforcement nearly as much as they were by the end of Prohibition.

iTunes and Amazon are the way to defeat piracy. People will pay for reputable distribution and ease of access. That’s just not the business model the media conglomerates have been following for the past century.

The new business models require creativity in business. They can support creativity in content creation. Laws and bureaucracy can’t. It’s as simple as that. SOPA’s a mistake, as its successor will be, but we can’t expect much else from those who need the stability over the creativity to remain rich.

Last Thursday, we received a call about a death in the extended family. Friday, we put all four of us (two adults, two kids under four) on a plane for the funeral. Everything went fine and we were glad to make the trip, but it was a trip. It was exhausting, by the time we dealt with the last minute logistics, the emotional drain of the funeral, and then having to catch up with all the missed work, chores, and projects that didn’t get done while we were traveling. I’m still seriously wiped out.

Additionally, I’ve had to do some editing for other people. When it rains it pours, right? I had three writers, whom I promised to edit for, send me stories all last weekend. I’ve completed editing for two of them, but not gotten to the third. I hate leaving other writers hanging for a long time because I hate when it happens to me.

Between the editing and the catching up, I didn’t get much actual writing done. I had a queue jumper show up Friday (Center Stage) and knocked out 425 words on it. I like the premise and the characters, but am not sure how much time I’ll be able to get in on it in the next couple of weeks. We’ll see.

Anyway, that’s the curve balls so far in 2012. We’ll see how quickly I can get back into a writing routine.

For this one, the story’s pretty obvious, but I can’t help wondering about what happened before and what might happen after.

We’re at a party. There’s been drinking. These three decided to get it on while everyone else was elsewhere in the house. When the others came back, they stumbled on the scene. Note the surprise on the onlookers’ faces.

So… what led these three to decide, “out here in the living room is good enough, we don’t need to find a bedroom?” And what happens next? Are they going to stop and perhaps relocate? Let the others watch? Or perhaps this will turn into a general orgy?

All interesting speculations…

No, not my funeral, despite being sick enough this past week to wonder if a funeral might be warranted. I’m out of town for a family funeral this weekend. I haven’t done much writing–mostly trying to get Holiday Sights out with all retailers. More when I return.

I’m sick. Being sick, I realized that there are really levels of sickness. From least sick to most sick:

1. Too sick to kiss.
“Sorry, dear, I don’t want to give you my germs.”

2. Too sick to fuck.
“I just don’t think I could maintain any vigorous activity for any length of time.”

3. Too sick to get a blowjob.
“I appreciate the offer, honey, but I don’t think it’d do me any good. I really don’t feel well.”

4. Too sick to jack off.
“Yeah, I’ve been lying around all day in bed with nothing to do, but I really don’t feel well.”

5. Too sick to look at internet porn.
“Please. Take the laptop away. Just let me rest.”

6. Too sick to have a threesome with two hot bi babes wearing stockings and sexy lingerie.
I’ve never been this sick.

Hopefully I’ll be well soon.

I wrote quite a bit in 2011; more than I expected actually. In twelve months, I managed about 76,000 words, scattered across a wide number of stories. That’s about 50% more (~26,000 words more) than 2010 and I’m impressed that I managed that, given the birth of my daughter and other major time consuming life events during the year.

I finished three Holiday Series stories (Unmasked, Giving Thanks, and Honeymoon), two of which were released here and the third is a ‘bonus’ story in the ebook to be released any day now. I completed two Summer Camp stories (Broken and FYI), the latter awaiting Nick’s approval. I released A Smile on My Face and Sights on the Night Shift as ebooks, along with four other short stories and Friends and Benefits, which were completed in earlier years. I also sold Take it to the Bank to Oysters & Chocolate. I also have four short stories submitted in various locales. One of these will probably appear under a different pen name later, but I’m not sure what I’ll do with the other three if they get rejected again. Additionally, I completed a few flash stories and will publish two of them here in the coming year.

That’s ten completed erotica short stories in 2011, not counting the flash stories. I’m pretty pleased with that.

Additionally, under my science fiction pen name, I completed five stories and sold one. Of the others, I’ll put three back into circulation in the new year and trunk the fourth. The last rejection identified a serious flaw in it and so I need to let it sit.

The story counts don’t include stories that aren’t completed, nor the blogging time here. So overall I’m pretty happy with the year. I certainly wish I could have done more, but given what time I had, I managed pretty well.

So what’s the plan for 2012?

Well, I’m still feeling that out. It’s been much harder to write since my daughter was born. This is partially related to the fatigue from never getting a complete night’s sleep. I’m just too exhausted by the time we get both kids to bed in the evening for that time to be useful for anything that requires brain cells.

I do know I want to clear some stories from my queue. I expect to tackle the next Devil story and I’m wondering whether it’s time to start the third Compassionate Courtesan novel, Boys of Summer. Of course, I also have a string of Chris Coulter stories I’d like to write, but those are likely to be limited by Nick’s speed. I can’t get too far ahead of him or it constrains him in ways he does not like. I also know there’s a bunch of queue jumpers hanging around the edges waiting to be written.

After that, I’m not really sure. Mostly, I’m tired. My baby girl is almost six months old, which means six months without a solid night’s sleep. We’ll just have to take it one day at a time.