Hey there, traveler!

LiveJournal is a great service, but it offers zip in the way of visitor-tracking. Therefore, I have a favor to ask of you: please leave me a comment letting me know who you are, and how you ended up here. No more detail than you're comfortable with, of course. Thanks much.

So, yeah. Circlet's having technical difficulties. I'll post a link when Part 3 goes up.

Comparisons to previous works is a little tricky here. I like Lisabet Sarai's Thorne Smith comparison, except that I hadn't actually heard of Thorne Smith before (he wrote humorous Jazz Age contemporary fantasy novels). "An S&M Gilbert & Sullivan" is probably ill advised. "P. G. Wodehouse, with more bestiality" is also probably not the tack we want to take. "If you combined the mad science of Girl Genius with the playful eroticism of Xxxenophile" might be more on target.

That Audiobook Thing

So what's going on with Ontological Engine is this: Circlet is posting new chapters every Wednesday. Chapter 3 goes up day after tomorrow; the exceptionally perverse (if I do say so myself) fourth and final chapter goes up on the eleventh. Chapter 1 is free for nothing; the others are a buck each.

Ota Discovers Fire

I got word today that Circlet has accepted my sorta-werewolf slangy high fantasy story for their e-book anthology The Long Journey Home.

Tales of Tesla Hall

I also got a very warm rejection note for Miss Pierce's New Position, praising the story, but calling it a mismatch for the antho I submitted it for. This means that now it's time to turn my hand to a Daedalus & co. book proposal.

Ruthie's Club

Turns out Ruthie's quietly disappeared a few months ago. Apparently, Ivan has been having some scary health problems, incompatable with running a weekly web magazine. Please keep him in your thoughts.

22 minute MP3 for 99¢.

12-minute MP3 file

Please be nice to Circlet's server and download rather than streaming.

ETA: Link is currently b0rked. I'll update this entry again when it's back up.

The link should be working again. Let me know if you have any problems.

Another Wordle. Damn, this story ran long.

Two reviews of Up For Grabs have appeared in the last few months, both of which single out Ontological Engine for comment. That's twice as many reviews as my free fiction ever got, which just goes to prove...something.

At Rainbow Reviews, Erin Schmidt wrote:

The real crown jewel in this treasure chest of sci-fi, though, is Vinnie Tesla's magnificent "The Ontological Engine, or, The Modern Leda." In this tongue-in-cheek (pun intended) tale set in the Victorian era, Daedalus Tesla (cousin of the famed Nikola) carries out bold sexual experiments. It has all the turn-of-the-last century charm and magic of the novel or film The Prestige, but with many more saucy ejaculations.

(she does not clarify whether "saucy" is here being used in the literal or metaphorical sense, so you are free to take your pick)

At The Erotica Readers Assoication. Lisabet Sarai wrote:

The final story in the book in Vinnie Tesla's bizarre and hilarious pseudo-Victorian opus, “The Ontological Engine, or The Modern Leda”. This bawdy tale, which reads like The Pearl on acid, seemed to me to have little connection to the book's theme, but it is so funny that it's worth the price of the book all by itself. Here's the first paragraph:

It is imperative that I make this utterly clear from the start: my motives in the affair of Miss Pertwee were the very highest. Desire for personal gain, worldly fame for the name of Daedalus Tesla, or selfish pleasure of any sort were absent from my mind at all junctures. I hope that my setting down the bare facts of the case will suffice to clarify that the dreadful outcome which resulted arose despite the noblest intentions on my part, and could never have been reasonably foreseen.

It continues in this vein, a delirious marriage of Frankenstein and Thorne Smith, until my stomach hurt from laughing and my husband begged me to stop dragging him away from his own book to read him juicy snippets.

In other OE news, ceciliatan tells me that the four part podcast reading will start appearing on the Circlet website Any Day Now. You can be sure I'll be pointing you to it when that happens.

And a sequel is starting to emerge, even more perverse and over-the-top than the last one. But hopefully shorter. The current working title, just to pique your cuoriosity, is Miss Pierce's New Position.

My Author Chat has officially ended, though the discussions in the comments are continuing to some degree. Here's some of what I posted:

I'm Vinnie, and I'll be your host for this weekend.

An intro, with a long excerpt from Ontological Engine and a bit of the story of how I came to write it.

Flash-Stroke Contest-y Thing

A call for Flash Stroke SF, along with the promise of a new short-short of my own, which, um, still hasn't happened.

The LOLs

A discussion of the relationship of erotica and humor.

They may not have invented the verbose subtitle,but they perfected it

A personal history of my relationship to Victorian porn.

Fantasy and Language

A discussion of our conventions of 'proper' language for dialogue in fantasy stories, with a short excerpt from the unpublished Ota Discovers Fire.

I know several of youse guys first found my journal through my friend Balan Nusnubilus's awesome tentacle sex essay. Therefore, you may be interested to know that he has agreed to participate in the discussion over at circletpress. Head on over and draw him out (and I don't mean with an escargot fork). He may be shy, but he knows a thing or two about penis-fencing.

I'm up a little later than usual to kick off my Author Chat at circletpress, which officially began at midnight, EST. Frustratingly, there seems to be a hold-up on the posting permissions, so my actual Reign of Terror looks like it may not be starting until after my first cup of coffee in the morning.

Once that happens, look for a bunch of little essays, much flogging of Up For Grabs, a new flash stroke story as soon as, um, I actually write it, and a special guest appearance by special guest dr_nusnubilus, who was kind enough to open an LJ account for the occasion.

Penis-Fencing: Dangerous or Decadent?

Certain hermaphroditic flatworms don't come with a sexual orifice pre-installed. Instead, they battle over who gets to penetrate whom. This article, though, isn't just about this fascinating mating stategy--it also touches on the ways political and aesthetic baggage can color what scientists see.

A Breeding Congress

Marbled Salamanders of the eastern US mate in vernal pools in the fall, gathering in masses that sometimes contain tens of thousands of individuals. These are called, awesomely, congresses.

Spermatophores, for the uninitiated, are the packets of sperm laid down on a jelly-like base by male salamanders at the peak of sexual stimulation. A female salamander at the appropriate stage of receptivity will straddle a packet, squat, and incorporate the sperm mass into her cloaca. In many species, the courtship activities between male and female are elaborate, with behavioral signals and mating dances lasting for an hour before both individuals are "ready." Such is not the case with marbled salamanders. The frenzied activity of the congress results in spermatophores being deposited everywhere.... Females hardly need to squat, just pick up a spermatophore on the run.

I posted about my fascination with story-labeling systems some years ago. My dipping my toe in the e-book waters recently led me to blunder onto another distinctive coding system, this one from Phaze, a publisher of "ultra-sensual romance."

My story, The Ontological Engine, or, The Modern Leda is now available for sale as about half (it's pretty long) of the Circlet Press e-book anthology Up For Grabs. It's a Victorian tale of a mad scientist of questionable moral standards, his dashing young assistant, a minister's daugher with an extraordinary talent, and three extremely amorous flying geoducks. My partner says she thinks it's the best thing I've written yet, and I'm inclined to agree with her.

In addition, final production work is being done on a four-part podcast of me reading the story aloud. which should be available on Circlet's site in the next couple weeks.

In the following excerpt, the narrator, Daedalus Tesla, is searching for a suitable source for the Vital Fluids which emanate from human beings in a state of sexual arousal, and which he hopes to use to power his mysterious Ontological Engine. To this end, his attention has fallen on Eleanor Pertwee, daughter of the local vicar. His assistant, Victor Dalrymple, has also taken an interest in Miss Pertwee, but for more conventional reasons.

( A most bold and impetuous hot-house marrow )

I want to start a discussion about something, and I'm having a hell of a time framing my question effectively. Bear with me if I flail a bit here.

Here's two things I've been thinking a lot about lately:

1. What is "realism" in fiction? How desirable is it, how important? What are the different things we are referring to when we use that label? Is there anything distinctive about our standards for realism in porn, as distinct from other genres of storytelling?
   
   
2. What is identification, and how does it work? The usual model (at least in a pornographic fiction context) goes something like this: You start reading a story. You pick a character whose role best matches your tastes, either by gender or some other criterion, and then you project yourself into the story thus, imagining yourself doing and done-to as that character is.
   
   I think what actually happens is more complex and subtle than that. I'm not sure how eccentric that is of me, and therefore how much work I should actually be putting in to being persuasive on this point.
   

These are old. What's new is trying to bring these lines of thought together. I had a conversation with a friend lately where she talked about how certain failures of realism blocked her from identifying with female characters, and therefore from enjoying those stories. She cited this as one of the advantages, for her, of reading M/M slash over heterosexual fanfiction.

Previous attempts to write this post foundered 'cause I have a lot of thoughts and ideas here, but an uncharacteristic lack of grand unified theories, so the posts ended up meandering for a while before trailing off in mid-paragraph. I want to try starting some discussion here instead, and see if that brings stuff together. Here are some questions...

• What kinds of realism are important to you? Are your expectations different depending on the genre you're reading* in?
  
• What makes a character compelling to you? What have you encountered that drove you out of the text?
  
• If you enjoy both porn that includes your gender and porn that doesn't, does that divide color the way you approach the characters?
  

I'll probably have more as I try to pull these threads apart.



* or watching movies or listening to podcasts or what have you

Poll #1406960 Ow!
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 34

Painful sphincter cramps after an intense orgasm

According to the USDOJ, in 2005, 757 Americans were murdered by the person they were married to. How many of those people used the internet to arrange their weddings is much harder to calculate. However, a cursory search of the internet turns up numerous websites shamelessly devoted to peddling the services of matrimony panderers (or, to use the euphemistic jargon of their sordid trade, "justices of the peace") to customers too naive to know the risks...or too debauched to care.

Now is the time to do something about this disgusting practice. Around the country, Attorneys General and editorial boards learned this year for the first time that PROSTITUTES ARE USING THE INTERNET, and are boldly stepping up to the Craigslist menace, realizing that if prostitution is banned from the Web, it will no doubt completely disappear. And even if it should somehow manage to survive being expelled from Craigslist, pushing prostitution further into the shadows will at least serve to make it safer and more humane for all participants.

And if the states do not act, and act aggressively, to ban wedding services on the internet, then perhaps the time has come to ask: Why do the authorities not care about spousal murder?

"Reading" is here used as metonymy for consumption of porn in any medium--watching videos, looking at pictures, listening to MP3s, what have you.
Poll #1390663 gettin' off
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 35

The usual relationship between reading porn and masturbating for me is:

(modulo various health crises, weddings, etc.)

Falsehoods propagate. Differ from the truth once, and it is likely that you will have to buttress your lie with more and more such to maintain the illusion. To pick a trivial example, buildings that remame their thirteenth floor the fourteenth in deference to the sensibilities of triskadecaphobes, then necessariy go on to falsely label every higher floor, calling the fourteenth the fifteenth and so on--not to protect anyone anymore, but just to be consistent.

---

I got clued into the #amazonfail scrum a little earlier than most, due to reading erastes, a writer of gay historical-romance novels who was publicizing the issue from early enough that she ended up being quoted in many of the professional-media articles that finally appeared in the day or two after the story had suffused the bloggodrome.

The stories Amazon has given out since are both vague and contradictory, but this much is clear: People who complained to Amazon customer service initially recieved responses exlaining that this was a nifty new feature to protect customers from offensive material.

When complaints reached a certain pitch, Amazon spokespeople told reporters that that the breadth of the derankings was due to a "technical glitch," possibly involving....THE FRENCH!!! and only some of the excluded works should actually have been excluded.

Where the line was actually intended to be drawn is still obscure, though I have seen several posts announcing approvingly that they will be excluding porn but not erotica, a notion on which my views are probably pretty clear already.

---

I was pretty confident, from the moment I heard about books like Howard's End and Heather Has Two Mommies getting plonked, that Amazon was gonna fold like a paper carjack on this one. What concerns me, amid all the debate about whether the across-the-board deranking of gay-themed material was an innocent mistake, a sinister plot, or a prank, is that the fundamental ickiness and stupidity of deranking ANY published books is getting elided.

To be fair, it's business-as-usual in the age of the internet giants. Do you really believe that of the hundred hottest Google searches, zero are sexually explicit? Years ago, I actually had a brief e-mail conversation on this topic with a Google PR person, until I asked asked how they decided what terms to exclude and she demanded to know who I was working for. Radio silence followed my protestations of independence.

So Google, pretty clearly, is lying to us. Their top hundred is actually the top hundered that they have silently, using unknown criteria, decided you are worthy to know about. Every Amazon bestseller list is now the same. Protecting you from accidentally seeing the titles of obscene works is now officially a higher priority than providing accurate information, so the actual sales rank of any book on Amazon is know only knowable inside the company.

Obscenity, by the way, is the issue here, not offensiveness, as shown by the now-well-publicicized first hit for a search for the word "homosexuality". Consumers of sexually-explicit material are a very special catetory of second-class customers to Amazon--they're still perfectly willing to take your money, but they don't want to disclose how much business they're doing with you--it might make the respectable customers uncomfortable. Comforting, isn't it?