Big Ed's Place

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.

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?

I realized that my recent posts imply a lot of sexual experience may create a different mental image for readers than that created by The Ugly One. Am I the playboy with lots of sexual experience or the unattractive guy who has trouble getting a date?

The truth is, of course, I’ve been both. At different times in my life.

I grew up as a pretty normal kid, albeit with a strong interest in sex. I was busted for stealing my dad’s Playboys to look at when I was 7. The major turning point in my young life was junior high, when I became the target of three bullies and faced social ostracism for a variety of reasons (that part of The Ugly One was true). Nonetheless, I survived, had my first sexual experience with a partner at 17, and lost my virginity at 18.

In doing so, I came of age in the middle of the AIDS hysteria. My peer group engaged in serial monogamy and I spent my entire college career (undergrad and grad) in one of three long term relationships. The middle of these was with a woman I was madly in love with and thought I’d marry, but it didn’t happen. The third of these was with a woman who was in love with me, but I was too busy chasing a ‘friend’ to be emotionally available. Friends and Benefits is loosely based on this period.

Then I entered a dating and sexual desert. My ‘friend’ had made it clear that the only reason she wasn’t sleeping with me is that I was physically unattractive to her (though the “to her” part was hard to remember). Meanwhile the woman I’d wanted to marry in college informed me that, even though she’d loved me, she hadn’t particularly been attracted to me physically or sexually. On top of that, my dating attempts were disastrous. On two occasions, I had women laugh in my face when I asked them out.

I was never particularly handsome. But I felt truly ugly then. I based The Ugly One on my emotional experiences during this time of my life.

That period ended when I turned 30 and two women independently said they wanted to have sex with me. Just for the sex. It took a few years for me to stop calling myself ugly and to truly believe that it was my energy and attitude that mattered more than my actual physical appearance.

During that time, my early 30′s, I ended up going on a tear, like most people tend to do in their early 20′s. I had many partners and explored both tantra and bdsm. That period ended when I met my wife when I was 35. I knew on the first date she was The One(tm) and we’ve been together for seven years now. I started writing again the first year we were together and am obviously still doing so today.

So I know both the pain of loneliness and the heady excitement of sexual experimentation. I know open relationships and deep monogamy. That breadth gives me a lot to draw from for my stories. All I have to do is pick a point in my life and put myself mentally and emotionally there, before I begin to put the words down on the page.

Remittance Girl recently posted about disclosure, and mused about her own need for emotional privacy, even in blogging and writing. I was touched. As writers, and online bloggers, we tread a fine line between revealing all and maintaining that private space which sustains us and often serves as the wellspring of our best work.

I’ve wondered about it myself quite a bit. Where exactly is the line?

Now many of us maintain online personas that are separate from our daily lives. I try to, though it’s not easy. There are perhaps 20 or 30 people from my daily life who know about this site because I’ve told them. There’s at least one person who found my site first and figured out who I was. Most people I don’t tell, but wouldn’t be too put out if they connected my identities. However, there are probably another dozen people who I absolutely don’t want to connect the two.

That latter list is why I recently did all the legal paperwork so I can do finances and contracts as “Ed Magusson.” It cost me a fair amount of money, but makes me feel a little more secure. I don’t have to worry about someone making a tip jar donation and then realizing that we work together or live in the same neighborhood in exchange.

But that just makes it harder to connect my online persona with the one that drops my son off at daycare, not impossible. A serious investigator could go through my posts and my stories and do a pretty good job of triangulating who I am (that is not a challenge, btw).

So I sometimes wonder what details I should obfuscate and which are okay (note: some are intentionally incorrect specifically to make it difficult for any determined investigators). It’s not always an easy call. Admitting I live in Colorado narrows me down to one of five million people. That’s probably not an issue. Besides, it doesn’t take too many of my stories to figure it out anyway. But my career field? My views on local politics?

The thing is… some of these details are important for stories that contain emotional honesty. I really can’t blog about some of my frustrations in writing without mentioning I have a toddler. It’s just too key–he’s frustrating, wonderful, and exhausting. It drives me nuts that taking care of him cuts into my writing, but there’s absolutely no way I’d want it the other way around, where my writing cut into taking care of him. So if I want to share the part of my soul that’s writhing into knots about not writing–well, I have to share that detail.

Similarly, there’s an emotional honesty in my fiction that can only come from having been there, done that. Now I haven’t done everything I write about–then this would be memoir instead of fiction. But I cull enough real situations to infuse them with honest emotion, as best as my wordsmithing allows.

The Ugly One wouldn’t be the same if I had been born beautiful (as my son seems to have done, but as his Dad, I might not be objective here). Friends and Benefits wouldn’t be the same if I hadn’t had a relationship like the one Joe had with Sharon. My shorter stories have pieces of me in them as well, to varying degrees of depth. I don’t always plumb the emotional depths, after all Dr. Seuss Provides the Girls isn’t exactly Shakespeare or even Theodor Geisel. But there are still pieces of my mind emotional state in even it. Three women at once? Hey, I understand that temptation. It’s real even if it’s light.

But there’s a level of privacy there still. I don’t have to admit which parts are drawn from the depths and which are solely figments of my imagination. I don’t have to even put it there in the first place. But obviously I do put it there, and even admit to it later.

So where’s the line? I think it’s different for every author, so that question is… where is it for me?

I’m still pondering that with just about every story or “my history” post.

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.

I may have spent my twenties thinking I was ugly (see my post here), but life changed in my thirties. Not my appearance so much as my attitude. And the defining moment was a conversation with an acquaintance who became a friend.

In my early 30′s, I started exploring tantra and bdsm. I also studied David Deida’s work, though these days I do not have the unbridled enthusiasm for his work that I did then. I wasn’t completely celibate during that time, though I didn’t have any regular lovers either. It was one of those occasional ‘friends with benefits’ that suggested I spend some time with “William.”

William and I met for an early dinner at a neighborhood Italian restaurant not too far from my house. We talked about a variety of things, but eventually the conversation circled around to my frustrations in dating, and in my self-perceived unattractiveness. We kept our voices low because, while the restaurant was not full, we were the only men in the place, including the visible staff.

William noted this and circled his finger to indicate the room. “The reality is,” he said, “you can have any woman in this room. Even the married ones. The question is–which one and why?”

I was gobsmacked. On the surface, that statement seemed ludicrous, but deep down, I knew it was more true than false.

That truth hit me on many levels. First, it attacks the concept that sex was ‘scarce.’ That’s a cultural construct that seems less true with every passing generation these days, but the truth is that it’s a lie. Any guy–and any gal–can get laid if they truly want to. It’s just a matter of what constraints they put on the act. For example, a woman, no matter how ugly or fat, could walk down to a bar and offer sex to anyone who wants it, and it’d happen. Similarly, a man can get laid in most cities for a few hundred dollars and a phone call. The constraints of “have to like the guy” or “not gonna pay for it” are what make sex more scarce.

So, what made it scarce in the restaurant? Mostly the constraints I was placing on myself. “It wasn’t right to try to pick up a stranger.” “I shouldn’t flirt with waitresses.” “Ooh, she’s not gonna be interested, I shouldn’t even try.”

That last one is a killer. It brought back memories of high school when all my friends were lusting after a cheerleader “Karen.” Toward the end of our senior year, “Karen” revealed that the only reason she’d ever gone out with her boyfriend was because he had been the only guy to ever ask her out. She would have loved to have gone on dates with my friends, but their own “I’m not good enough for her” is what prevented them from getting a date with her.

This is not a problem that pickup artists have. A true pickup artist knows that it’s really not about him–it’s about the image of him in the woman’s mind (and vice versa when the genders are reversed). If she sees him as exciting, or mysterious, or funny, or whatever it is that turns her on, she’ll overlook the receding hairline and the asymmetrical ears. A true pickup artist plays to his target’s fantasies and desires and lets it roll from there.

Which was part of William’s point. It wasn’t the scarcity of sex that was holding me back, but my own efforts or lack thereof. Furthermore, I wasn’t a fumbling teenager with no skills around women. I knew enough about paying attention, projecting strong masculine energy, being present, etc. to be capable of being a pickup artist. That was the second truth that whapped me upside the head. Maybe seducing a woman would have been a problem when I was 18, but I wasn’t 18 anymore. It was time to treat women, be it during sex and seduction or simple interactions, by being a man instead of a boy.

Now, of course, that doesn’t mean that I could automatically persuade any of the women in the restaurant to have a quickie in the bathroom. What a given woman finds seductive is very personal. It might be a zipless fuck with a man she just met, but it might be roses and love poems and a long slow seduction with hints of marriage, like in many romance novels. The latter takes a lot more time to build and develop, but is still possible for a pickup artist.

Which is why the second part of the sentence also hit my profoundly. “Which one and why?” There’s a huge difference between picking the woman just looking for a quickie good time and picking the married woman who’s unhappy because her husband’s neglecting her and who might be intrigued by a prospective husband #2. To an amoral pickup artist, the distinction might not matter, but to me, it did. My “why” had to be more than “because I thought she’d be a good fuck.”

There are ways, of course, to be an ethical slut, to have an honorable one night stand, and to serve another person sexually without any intent of becoming husband #2. I don’t need to review them here, but simply state that all of them require considering the other person as a person, and not just a target or a score.

Of course, that conversation with William didn’t turn my life around immediately. I still made mistakes in life and in dating, and struggled to accept what I’d realized was true. I had many days where I slid back into old mental patterns instead of sticking with the new ones–that it wasn’t the women, and it wasn’t my looks that mattered. It was my energy and my actions. But, eventually, it sunk in.

By the time I was 34, my life was full of playmates and lovers, all of whom I dealt with in high integrity. Then, at 35, I met the woman who became my wife. The ‘why’ was different, and that made all the difference in how I approached her and what happened after.

As a coda, my wife rolled her eyes when she read The Ugly One, written well after we were engaged. She’d never noticed my ‘deformities’ at all–to her I was, and am, simply handsome.

The folks over at Oh, Get a Grip! have been blogging about beauty recently, and much of what they’ve written has amused and touched me. Like many mature souls, they understand the difference between superficial beauty designed to sell products by making all the rest of us feel bad, and true beauty, that comes from inside and radiates out. I’m glad, because there was a long period where I didn’t.

That fact should be no surprise to any regular reader here. I did write The Ugly One, after all. In that Author’s Note, I describe how John’s journey is modeled on my own. What I didn’t discuss was how close his physical description matched my own. Basically, I took each of my features and exaggerated them a little. But often, it was just a very little.

In my 30′s, I discovered that my looks really didn’t matter that much. My attitude mattered far more, and that’s what I wrote about in The Ugly One. There’s a future blog post sometime about “you can have any woman” which was a shocking revelation in my life and as much of a turning point as anything that John went through.

But my teens and twenties were a different matter. The bullies that started in on my in seventh grade targeted my appearance, of course. And my lack of fashion sense. And my awkwardness. And all the other usual targets of bullies. It didn’t help that I grew 6.5 inches in eighth grade. At a half an inch a month, my clothes never fit and I was horribly awkward. I’d trip over my own feet walking down the hall sometimes because the coordination just didn’t keep up with the growth.

And then in my twenties… wham. After grad school, my social and sexual life completely dried up. I managed a whopping three dates a year for several years, and none of those were second dates. When I complained about them to my best friend, “Sharon,” she’d cluck sympathetically without making suggestions that really helped.

And yes, the quotes there mean I’m talking about the woman who formed the basis for Sharon in Friends and Benefits. We had a friendship that included “benefits” similar to those in the story, but with the same limitations. We never sexually touched. Despite me wanting to, she said that I “wasn’t physically attractive enough” for her. There were times I was flat out in love with her, but it didn’t matter. I didn’t make her physical appearance grade and so I was not an eligible romantic or sexual partner.

Needless to say, we are no longer friends.

But, as I said, I got wise. I learned how much confidence and attitude really mattered. That’s not to say that grooming and style don’t have a place, but those were skills to be learned. But beauty was truly in the eye of the beholder, and what mattered was not beating myself up to change my appearance, but finding more mature ‘beholders’ to be with. And that has made all the difference.

So, it’s been a long hard week, with way too much to do for my job, and the standard not enough time to do it. I brought work home multiple nights and worked through lunch all but two days. It’s a little hard to write when that happens.

Nonetheless, I did find a little time. I squeezed out another 293 words on Love’s Labor Found, bringing it to 6819 words. I also had a queue jumper show up. At first I thought it was a flash story, but it’s already 446 words long, and is pushing to be about 2000. Yeah, I could tighten it and do a fade to black, but the more it bounces around my head, the more it wants an explicit sex scene.

Which is one of the ‘problems’ with it right now–it’s bouncing around a lot. I suspect there’s actually three stories in the concept, though I don’t want to really write three variations on a single theme. So I gotta pick one. And that’s where the other interesting vagary comes in: no title.

Ya see, the title is usually one of the first things I come up with. In fact, the story often isn’t ‘real’ in my mind until I know the title. Heck, The Ugly One was a title before it was anything else. And once I have a title, I find that it flows into the theme and has a way of popping up in dialogue or other sentences throughout the story.

Heck–I’ve got great titles that don’t have decent stories under them yet. “Son of a Bitch”, for example. You know immediately from that title what the lead female character’s gonna be like.

So… no title. Maybe it’ll come to me this week. Maybe I’ll muddle through a bit more and it’ll come to me. Or maybe the story won’t gel and it’ll go into my unfinished and abandoned folder. We’ll have to see.

Anyway, the current queue:

In progress:
Love’s Labor Found (7th Holiday Series story)
Babe in the Night (submitted for paid publication to an editor who hasn’t replied in 2 months–about to be resubmitted elsewhere)

Likely queue jumper:
Untitled story

Firmly in queue:
Unmasked (Holiday Series story #8)
Giving Thanks (Holiday Series story #9)
The Devil in the Details (a Summer Camp story)
Boys of Summer (next Compassionate Courtesan Universe novel)

Potential queue jumpers:
The Size of Their Toys (a Summer Camp story)
Deep Dish (a Summer Camp story)
Historical Fiction novel (would be written under my real name)

Might get added:
Son of a Bitch (reworked short story)
The Devil’s Due (turn the Devil stories into a trilogy, but lacks clear plot)
Mayflower (how Sherri from the Compassionate Courtesan Universe meets Susan from Summer Camp)
Mainstream sci-fi short story (reworked from first attempt, would be written under my real name)
Any of about a dozen ideas that haven’t crystalized even this far

So that’s where I’m at.

The Price was a queue jumper that I just couldn’t resist. The central quote about how death is the price of sex is one that a friend told me over fifteen years ago and has stuck with me since. I imagined Sherri saying it and realized there had to be a story there.

Of course, there’s a little bit more than that. I wanted a story set slightly before The Ugly One with Sherri in it, as a bit of a link between it and Friends and Benefits. I also loved the idea of writing something “tight” that showed a battle of wits. I also enjoyed seeing what stories Sherri could tell that would sound outrageous and plausible at the same time.

This one took a long time to write. It was originally published at Ruthie’s Club in late May 2009 and is here now for your enjoyment.

This story was originally written in 2004 and 2005, released serially with new chapters approximately monthly. During that time, the most frequent comment I’ve received in email while writing this story has been “I identify with John.” It seems there are a lot of us “Ugly Ones” around. Unfortunately, there don’t seem to be as many Tamara/Lynn’s to help us out.

Tamara/Lynn is based on two real women. The first I knew only briefly. Like the fictional Tamara/Lynn, she worked her way through school while supporting a handicapped family member by being a courtesan in the Nevada brothels. She was beautiful, calm, very giving to her clients, and enjoyed her work. The second woman is a former prostitute who is now a counselor on sexuality issues. She regularly works with men who have problems with self-esteem around women and one of her techniques is the weekly “practice date,” like the Thursday evenings at Tamara/Lynn’s. This woman became a good friend before she relocated to Texas.

Jesse and Frank are based on real bullies that tormented me in seventh grade. My ultimate solution to avoiding the bullies was exactly the one that Billy used: finding friends so that the bullies had to either pick on all of us or none of us. It worked, though we never threw a party to celebrate.

All other characters are purely fictional except John.

John’s emotional journey is based on my own. That said, I’ve taken considerable artistic license in everything from his physical features to the orgy in the brothel. The biggest change is that I compressed eight years of my life into ten months of his. Even though the details are fiction, both the emotional struggles and the happy ending are true.