Big Ed's Place

After I completed A New Year, the idea for an entire series of stories centered around exhibitionism and the holidays settled into my brain. It didn’t take long to sketch out the entire arc and pick the holidays that would be featured. Of course, I had foreshadowed a trip to Santa Fe in A New Year, but A Valentine’s Surprise was the story that really locked in the plan.

For this story, I wanted something brazenly exhibitionistic, but done by Jennifer instead of Jen. Of course Jen would help, but I wanted to show Dave appreciating his girlfriend and her ‘surprise.’ It didn’t take long to pick specifically what she was going to give him as a present–something different, unique, and in my opinion, hot. How many guys would love to have such a personalized DVD when they were on travel?

Dave’s surprise in return is stolen from real life incidents. I enjoyed writing it as much as I enjoyed my wife’s expression when she found her own necklace in a package of kettle corn.

When I finished A Good Christmas and posted it, I received several positive emails.  Feeling a little heady, the words just seemed to flow.  I completed this story (here) in a little over a week.  Thus,the Holiday Series was born.

The primary inspiration for this story was something that happened to an acquaintance (not the same person who was the inspiration for Dave, though).  My acquaintance had been blindsided by a divorce request from his wife.  Despite his desires to keep the marriage together, she was adamant, and her answers on why she wanted it were vague and unsatisfying.  Then a few months after their divorce, he ran into her and her new boyfriend and discovered she’d started seeing the new boyfriend (who he’d never heard of before) prior to asking for the divorce.

On the one hand, he was relieved because he now had a solid reason for the divorce.  On the other hand, he was furious because he’d been cheated on, about as much as one can.  This residual pain about being cheated on became part of Dave’s personality from this story on out.

A Good Christmas was my first story under this identity. I’d done some writing in the early 90′s and posted two stories to alt.sex.stories. The comments were… unkind. While I continued to write for more personal audiences, I quit publishing my stuff anywhere.

Of course, that didn’t mean I’d been offline. In 2003, I lurked in several yahoogroups devoted to erotica or hosted by erotica authors. Frank Downey decided to throw a storyfest for Halloween that year, inviting anyone who was interested to post a story on Halloween. It looked like fun, but I continued to lurk.

Then Frank announced a storyfest for Christmas. This story showed up in the back of my mind and kept pushing its way forward. At the same time, some friends of mine were pushing me to start releasing my stories again. So I decided to give it a shot and released this story into Frank’s group, and then later into other locales. I’ve kept writing since then.

This story was inspired by a friend of mine who’d gotten asked for a divorce around Thanksgiving the year before. He’d ended up in a memorable relationship with an exhibitionistic redhead just before Christmas, so I swiped the premise and then changed the characters around. Ironically, he actually did recognize himself when he stumbled on my work years later. Fortunately, he was amused rather than pissed.

I had no idea this would turn into an extended series when I wrote it, and it does contain one major regret. I intentionally chose to have the two female leads have similar first names on a whim, not realizing how hard it would make keeping them separate down the line. At the time I’d written the story, I’d dated four Jen’s or Jennifers, including two that were physically similar. I thought it would be cute, then to do the same. Needless to say, nowadays I am wary of anything that seems “cute.”

Story ideas are cheap. Time to write stories is dear. The result is a queue. Sometimes stories grab ahold of my imagination and jump the queue.

Of course, that’s a pretty simplistic statement, that hides a lot of details…

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(the story is here)

I took a substantial break between writing the first four Holiday Series Stories and this one. When I returned to the series (after The Ugly One), I wanted to write something light. Fortunately, the holiday that was next up–the guys’ birthdays, lent itself to something fun and sexy.

I’d placed Will’s birthdays in May/June as part of the background for the first story, because I wanted it six months away from Christmas. It wasn’t too hard to put Dave’s nearby to allow for the story. The only question left was the gifts.

For that, the obvious was a striptease. How can one have a series on exhibitionism without a striptease or two? It is, perhaps, the oldest exhibitionistic sexual act, going back to Salome and the Dance of the Seven Veils that led to John the Baptist’s demise. I decided that the striptease would be the central scene of the story.

The songs used in this story are “You Can Leave Your Hat On” by Joe Cocker, “Black Velvet,” by Alannah Miles, and “I Touch Myself,” by the DiVinyls, all excerpted just a little to allow them to fall under the fair use clause of the copyright laws. I recommend listening to them all, if you can.

I chose “You Can Leave Your Hat On” because it is the archetypical striptease song. It’s also extremely easy to choreograph a striptease to for an amateur–just follow the words.

“Black Velvet” is sultry, bluesy, and definitely a song to evoke passion. I once had the pleasure of watching a group of fully clothed women sway and dance to it and it raised my pulse more than any nudity would have.

The DiVinyls song rounded out the set because I wanted something that moved from seductive to blatantly sexual. The image seemed to fit with characters who would do just a little bit more than ‘show.’