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.

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A discussion of our conventions of 'proper' language for dialogue in fantasy stories, with a short excerpt from the unpublished Ota Discovers Fire.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

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

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?

It's striking how much ineptitude can look like evil when it's combined with enough power.

Lesbians
Housewives
Nerds
Nuns*
Nurses

* This one's a little more nuanced. On the one hand, the absence of real nuns is really quite understandable and forgivable. On the other hand, fake nuns with teased hair, heavy makeup, pubic mohawks, and lace lingere are bo-ring.

I considered including babysitters, but I really don't know if some of these girls don't do a little babysitting on the side. I do rather suspect not.

Poll #1369489 Well dam
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Have you ever seen a dental dam used in a dental context?

"Bob, I hate to tell you this, but your new girlfriend? She's an AR-goggle virus."

"Not again!"

(shout-outs to j_shelbourne)

This Tuesday, the 10th, I'll be reading my fiction at Back Pages Books in Waltham, MA. This is a free event, it starts at 7:30; I don't know what order the four of us will read in. If you live in the area, I hope you consider coming by. It should be lots of fun.

I noticed yesterday that there's an erotica site that appears to be offering to pay very small quantities of actual legal tender for blog excerpts, so I figured I should send them something.

Candidates that occurred to me includ L'esprit D'escalier Part 1 and Part 2, Monsters Under the Bed, The List, The Art-Porn Manifesto, or some selection of syntactic creativity entries.

I'm not making this a poll, 'cause I don't want to circumscribe your choices. What do you think is the best stuff from here, that I should try to score wider distribution for?

Juliet Anderson is pretty awesome, but this old hardcore clip of hers is not her finest hour. The performances are undistinguished, and the crappy dubbing certainly doesn't help. HOWEVER: the soundtrack appears to be a funk cover of Flight of the Bumblebee. Yes, that's right: a funk cover of Flight of the Bumblebee. And while that may not actually be a good idea, it's ( the best bad idea I've encountered in a long time. )