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.

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.

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.

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?

Via a path both arbitrary and tangled, I discovered yesterday that Spanking Blog had featured an old story of mine that I'm particularly fond of as their link of the day earlier this week.

Then, this morning, I found that ErosBlog, a pretty much top-tier sex blog, had picked up the link, and posted a different favorite bit.

Coming as it did on the heels of trinityva's double linking, this all left me feeling smug enough to need to brag about it here.

Holy shit! It's been almost a year since my last whiny rant here. How did that happen?

Well, I guess I'm back-ish. Hi.

I seem to have ended up developing a specialized vocabulary for some of the ideas I keep referring back to. This is a little glossary of the terms I've been using repeatedly:

( Muffins )
( Procrusteanism )
( The Archipelago of Desire )
( Gravity Wells )

After a psyching myself up for a couple months, I managed to dig into LiveJournal's layer system today and add a couple little features to the sidebar. I'm pleased--I think it looks pretty neat.

Over at VinnieTesla.com, I've started moving stories over to actually be hosted there, and taken a couple stabs at a reasonably attractive presentation for the site.

The lengths I will go to to avoid doing my taxes....

I just made my friend-of list visible. I'd had it hidden to give my readers a little dash of privacy, but after downloading this Greasemonkey script, I realized that that was really an illusion, and I figured it would be kinder not to contribute to any sense that that info is private. Just so you know.

Discuss the Victim/Victorian series here.

(This is an experiment in using my journal as a discussion forum for my fiction. I'm currently reposting the Victim/Victorian serial on ASSM at a rate of one chapter a day ((unless I screw up)) until I get to the new Chapter 7 next week.)

When I was a kid, I had a Dover book of origami instructions. Some of the sections, rather than teaching how to make a crane or a lantern, would be called, say, Base #3 or something, and would be abstract folds that would serve as a starting point for more intricate figures later in the book. Cookbooks often do a similar thing with versatile sauces or spice mixes, which then get referred back to repeatedly.

I've been tempted to do the same thing in this journal--to set down key elements in my thinking that I can then refer back to multiple times. Set against that is my urge to be friendly to new or casual readers. Also, the newest-to-oldest standard blog format kind of sucks for cumulative writing. unless you assume readers with diligent update schedules and commodious memories. Nonetheless, I'm gonna be trying to do a little more of that in the next little while, which hopefully will mean more, shorter, and more promiscuously interlinked pieces.

A lot of ASSTR folks have a page on their sites devoted to fanmail they've gotten. I've resisted the temptation to do this myself, primarily cause I have trouble imagining that many people would want to read such a page. I got an anonymous note last week, though, in response to TINASAA, that was nice enough that I can't resist sharing it:

This is the first sexually oriented story I have ever read where I did not skip ahead looking for the sexy parts, but instead slowed down and read the writing...just for the pleasure of the words and the way that they're put
together. You have a fine writing style. Its fun to read.

Okay, the sex isn't bad, either. (g)

And just to make my head swell a little more, the legendary Eli the Bearded, founder of alt.sex.stories.moderated and no mean avant garde pornographer in his own right, was interviewed for the latest issue of ASSTR's Journal of Desire:

HJ: Who are some of your favorite authors? Favorite stories? What do you look for in a good story?

EtB: Mat Twassel. Vinnie Tesla. Jack C Lipton. Hammon Wry. Shon Richards. Vulgar Argot. Alexis Siefert. Kenny Gamura. Bronwen SM. Ann Douglass. Anne747 (aka Anon747 and Anne Jet). Celia Batau. Crimson Dragon. Daphne Xu. Dr Spin. Dulcinea. Katie McN. Probably others I'm not thinking of.

Damn! I forgot to include one of my very favorite comments on the porn/erotica issue. This is from the immensely talented erotic photographer m_bluenote:

In photography, we have a similar schizm between Fine Art Nude Photography, Glamour Photogaphy, Erotica, and Porn. Near as I can figure, the differences are as follows:

-Anything in black and white [presented in a border] is a Fine Art Nude. It seems to help the case if you shoot outdoors in a nice, idyllic nature setting.

-Color images, taken indoors [preferrably in a "romantic" setting] constitute Glamour imagery. This is the sort of thing that women pay photographers for, ostensibly for the man in their lives, but more likely because they've always wanted to feel like a Playboy model.

-Erotica must...reapeat MUST be in black and white. No exceptions. When doing this type of art, one must be careful not to let anything show, it's all about implication. It's permitted to show facial expression that can be interpreted as resulting from sexual pleasure, but showing any kind of genital stimulation is out.

-Anything else, anything too intense, too emotional, too real, upfront, honest, done on the cheap or done strictly for money is just Porn.
The artist will be regarded as an opportunistic predator [see: Jock Sturgess, the Girls Gone Wild guy] and the subjects will be seen as mind-controlled dupes of the Patriarchy [rip Andrea Dworkin]. Ignore the fact that millions of people, male, female, gay, straight, seek it out, Porn is bad...bad...bad.

The point is: You need to do the art that matters to you. If people love it, you're on the right track. If people hate it, you're probably still on the right track.

The reason I forgot about this comment is that it was in the followup to my crossposting my original article to pornpositivefem. Much of why I write these pieces is to provoke discussion, and the discussion has often been at least as interesting as my own ramblings, so I've been scratching my head about the problem of memeber of different communities often not seeing the most interesting comments. One solution I've been mulling is to use fake LJ-cuts,

( like this )

so most people will end up posting in the same thread. Technically, it's a little deceptive, but I can't see how anyone's being hurt at all by it. Does it strike anyone as an obnoxious thing to do?

I noticed recently that some of my LJ Interests seem to be shared with people who appear to mean something else by them. Since this makes me wonder if anyone's been scratching their heads trying to figure out what I mean, I'm providing that information here.

Oosh and Dierdre are online sex story authors I admire. So are Mat Twassel, Nick Urfe, PleaseCain, and Selena Jardine.

ASSD and ASSM stand for alt.sex.stories.discussion and alt.sex.stories.moderated. They're Usenet newsgroups in which I've participated under this name. ASSTR is the alt.sex.stories Text Repository, an website that hosts most of the authors above as well as some of my own stories.

Sparks is kind of a pun. I was referring to the sparks that fly between people when there's chemistry, the electrical sparks evoked by my enthusiasm for Tesla coils, and Reno's twin city, where most people going to Burningman pick up their final supplies.

Supersnail is a website that features beautiful, fun portraits from Burningman. You can find me there, but I'm under a different name.

Grand Opening! was a sex shop near where I live. Now it's part of the Good Vibrations empire.

The Pearl is a famous Victorian magazine of pornographic stories. It influenced some of my own writing.

I ♥ ¶s refers to my annoyance with LiveJournal posts that are one huge run-together paragraph, as well as being a bit of ribbing toward my friends with "I ♥ >1" listed as an interest.

Rain dogs, according to Tom Waits, are dogs who have become disoriented by disappearance of scent trails after a rainstorm. It's also the title of what is perhaps his greatest album.

BSFSF and SIFSF are the two festivals of Flash Stroke fiction I've been involved in.

Other stuff should be transparent or easily Googlable. If I missed any, let me know, and I'll explain them.