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.

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.

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

Painful sphincter cramps after an intense orgasm

(modulo various health crises, weddings, etc.)

I have recently gotten word that I will be participating in the Circlet authors' reading at VeriCon at Harvard University on Friday the 23 of this month.

I'll be reading from my forthcoming story, The Ontological Engine, or, the Modern Leda. This will be of particular interest to anyone who has enjoyed Victim/Victorian, as Ontological Engine is something of a prequel thereunto. It may also appeal to afficionados of invertebrate-oriented erotica, as it features several flying mutant geoducks in prominent roles.

I'm really excited about this--I love reading aloud, and I've never done a public performance of my own work before. It should be a blast. I'll have the stage for about fifteen minutes, and I expect the other Circlet authors to be almost as awesome as I am.

Admission to VeriCon is $15 for non-students for just Friday, or $35 for the whole weekend.

I will also be doing a similar reading at Back Pages Books in Waltham, MA on Feb 10, but I'll nag you plenty about that when the date draws nearer.

One of the things that keeps me from being the Productive Smut-Writing
Citizen I want to be is my predilection for the creation of circular
dependency trees, where doing A requires doing B first, B requires C,
and C demands the prior completion of A.

This week, the mighty bOINGbOING* picked up my homie Balan Nubilis'
essay in this venue from a couple years ago, whence it travelled to
Erosblog, and several smaller venues.

This actually presented me with a bit of a dilemma.

Balan's essay, posted in early '06, concludes with a stirring call to the pornographers of the
world to reach further afield in pursuit of marine invertebrates to
write porn about than the endlessly-recycled cephalopods.

What with one thing, another, and yet another, I didn't actually take up
his challenge until late 2008, when Circlet Press issued its call for
"steampunk" erotica, a solicitation that inspired me to fuse together
several disparate projects from my ideas hopper.

The writing process is like medical soujurns--inexhaustably fascinating
to the one who has experienced its travails, but deathly dull to anyone forced to
endure it second-hand. So I will merely say that I submitted the
long short story (or, according to some, novelette) "The Ontological
Engine, or, The Modern Leda," little enough after deadline, that it
took a relatively modest tantrum to persuade Circlet to accept it
anyway. This post commemorates its submission.

A couple months later, I recieved "unofficial" notice from the editor
that the story had been accepted for their genderqueer anthology "Up for
Grabs," rather than the steampunk one.

A month or so afte that, I recieved my contract, along with word that
UFG was still a couple months from publication.

So exactly when to crow about this here stayed murky, especially since
the publisher asked me to refrain from posting excerpts until it was
available for sale.

So. When I got the influx of BB readers, eager to read up on
lophotrochozoan nookie, I was conflicted--part of me was tempted to
append an announcement of the forthcoming story, another figured that
an ad for a yet-to-be-published pornographic e-book would be considerably more
annoying to readers than useful.

AND THEN I got word that Circlet was gonna do some public readings, in
which I might be invited to participate. More stuff to announce...but not yet.

So I sort of sat there vibrating through all this, waiting for something more to happen, that would collapse the whole loop.


* I liked it back when it was cool, and have the old pre-web print zines
and RIOTNRRD t-shirt to prove it.

(why the icon, I hear you cry. Well, my sweetie made it for me in mid-December, and, like a dork, I never actually posted anything during that months. I figure if stores can start their Christmas sales in September, I can damn well use my Rudolph icon through the end of January)

ETA: Did I mention the anthologies in question are all e-books? It looks like I didn't. Well, they are.

( Awesome. (SFW, actually) )

I: Did I get come in my hair?

She: it seems likely...

I: You mean, 'it's seemin' likely.'

She: Gaaah! [bite, bite, bite]

So I went around for a week or so, saying that I totally ought to write a spoof of Take Me Out to the Ball Game entitled "Tie Me Up with a Ball Gag, and that I intended to do so Any Day Now.

Eventually, the adorable mme_louise had a slow day at work, and sent me this:

Tie me up with a ball gag
Tie me up with a hood
Buy me some dildoes and nipple clamps
Fuck me until we both get leg cramps

For its root, root, root for a condom
I'd help you look if I could

But I'm tied!
Bound!
Muffled--but good!
With an old ball gag

Isn't she awesome?

You know how certain experiences cause you to look at the world in a new way? Now that I've scanned my toolchest and medicine cabinet with insertability in mind, I see the world of vaguely-cylindrical shapes much more intensely than before.

I paused in the doorway of the bedroom, trying to figure out how to enter without revealing my entire arsenal at once. Unable to devise anything, I just strode in, and then displayed each item before laying them out in a row on the bed next to my squirming sweetie.

This game turns out to be a great way to use up a large number of expired condoms quickly. Other findings, approximately in order:

• The wrappers on the candy canes turned out to be a bit too rough. That round didn't last long. Yeah, I could have unwrapped them all, but it would be fiddly and time-consuming.
  
• Candles are a nice traditional choice. Unlit, 'cause we're chicken.
  
• The hexagonal screwdriver handle was fun.
  
• The extra-large Sharpie worked very nicely. The metal is initially cold, but warms fast. By now, her clit was seriously swollen, and she was squirming and whimpering every time I stopped touching her to switch to a new toy.
  
• The travel-sized lube bottle was a hit. Knotted into a condom, it was just barely small enough to disappear completely, with just the rim of the condom peeking out. I may well make good on my threat to make her run errands for me that way at some point.
  
• The hammer handle was a nice, rounded, interesting shape, and a particularly nasty sight with the head protruding.
  
• The Robutussin bottle was tricky to get a condom onto. I got some yummy noises out of her, rolling the base against her vaginal sphincter, but it didn't quite make it in.
  

There were some dedicated sex toys mixed in there as well (turns out that dildoes are insertable too--how 'bout that!). When she came, it was loud and long, with the thick end of the NJoy in her. Then, because I was late for work, she volunteered to clean all the toys for me! I am a lucky, lucky perv.

The other day, I was at my local bookstore cafe. I finished my mocha, put my book away, and got up from my stool. Something in my knee went pop, and for three agonizing seconds I struggled not to collapse to the floor. Then it popped back and I hobbled over to the counter.

A high school soccer accident left me with a knee that does that very occasionally, but this was the first time it's happened this century, and it was rather milder than they used to be.

I accepted the offer of a bag of ice from the young woman at the counter, limped back to my stool, got my novel back out, and settled in to ice my knee for a while.

Then the endorphins hit. A giddy sense of well-being washed over me, shoving aside my fretting about how I'd manage the walk home. It faded very slowly over the next twenty minutes or so, leaving me feeling very equal to whatever challenges my injury would produce.

I'm sure the effect has happens to me before. But the combination of the extremely sharp, brief pain, with the immediate quiet, comfortable period thereafter allowed me to observe it in unusual isolation.

So, yeah. I can definitely see the charms of this drug. It's the delivery mechanism I'm not too crazy about.

By the way, the walk home was fine, if not entirely painless. My leg was stiff and uncomfortable the next day, and all but normal the day after that.

I'm gonna step down off my usual pontificatory hobbyhorses here, and talk practical like.

For the past several years, I've been in the habit of buying my condoms in bulk from RubberTree.org, Their extremely no-frills site was more than made up for by a good selection and generally unbeatable prices.

When my sweetie discovered that her cunt is happier with non-latex condoms, comparison shopping found that RubberTree was actually being undercut for once. Where you can easily pay $2 per for Avantis at your local CVS, and RubberTree was offering them for $1.25 each in bulk, Ohio megapharmacy Hocks.com actually gets down to a dollar per if you order more than 200 at once, which I was happy to do.

For oral sex and sex with other partners I was still favoring latex, and so still ordering from RubberTree. I placed my most recent order with them in January of this year. I got a confirmation e-mail, but my credit card wasn't billed, and the condoms never arrived. Their contact e-mail is bouncing, and they're not responding to any of the voicemails I've left them, so it would appear to be a ghost site at this point--still accepting orders, but not actually doing anything with them.

This means that I'm in the market for a new condom supplier. Any recommendations?

My choices of products:

For coitus:

The Pleasure Plus. Tangled history notwithstanding, it delivers the goods. Most women in my experience are pleased-to-indifferent with them, but some find its extra folds a little irritating.

For fellatio:

My current fave is probably the Durex Natural Feeling Unlubricated,* but I'm still shopping around. LifeStyles Assorted Colors Unlubricated are surprisingly nice...and so festive! My great frustration here is that reservoir tips trigger my sweetie's gag reflex. I know of exactly one brand of condom without lube and without a reservoir tip--Trojans, and they are just thoroughly thick & unpleasant if you want to actually feel anything through them.

For cunnilingus:**

Saran Wrap. $2.60 for 100 feet at Shaws. Also comes in pretty colors, and makes a fun bondage material, though my inner Al Gore recoils at the waste.

Lube:

Liquid Silk in a slam dunk. It doesn't get sticky, it doesn't pill, and it doesn't cause yeast infections. Sadly, it's expensive as fuck (usually $20 for 8½ ounces) and not always easy to find. Good Vibes offers a clone, but I prefer Liquid Silk slightly, and the imitation isn't all that much cheaper.

What do you guys like, and where do you buy it?


*Durex gets big points off here for a flashulent, broken website that thwarted my attempts to extract the actual product name.

** Or cunnilinctus if you prefer. And you thought I was pedantic...

I can debate with flat-taxers, Iraq war enthusiasts, even Defenders Of Traditional Marriage and the God-Given Suburban Nuclear Family, with relative equanimity. For one thing, the battle lines are well-demarcated. Everybody knows that the debate has both sides.

People who go about claiming that the problem with our culture is that fat people* aren't made to feel enough shame and self-loathing keep managing to reduce me to incoherent sputtering over and over again.

*which usually turns out to mean 'fat chicks**'

**which usually turns out to mean 'women whose body type is not to my taste'

When I first became interested in sex, I was instinctively very secretive about it. I didn't talk about it to my friends, to my parents, to anybody. I snuck into my father's Playboy collection, I hit the sexuality section of my middle school library (yay, liberal private school!), I rifled through the racier novels on my parent's bookshelves, and I kept my mouth shut about it. Fundamentally, I did not believe that the people around me were having similar experiences. I felt utterly isolated.

Eventually, in my mid-teens this illusion dissipated somewhat--I realized that my peers (the male ones, that is) had libidos too, that they masturbated,that they too were hoarding porn, I joined, in a small way, the underground economy of glossy porn magazines circulating at my high school.

A little further on, I caught on that most people weren't quite as obsessed with sex as I am--it's a bell curve, and I'm neither at the apex, nor out in the windswept plains of the statistical anomalies.

Sex advice columns are constantly filled with people anxious to know "am I normal?" The columnists nearly always reassure them that they are. Sometimes, the more accurate (though probably less comforting) response might be, "No, but there's nothing wrong with that." You have a footie pajama fetish? Well, that's relatively uncommon, but so what?

I have idiosyncratic tastes in female appearance. What are they? Well, you see it's not that simple. I mean, I can tell you some of the obvious markers. I have a thing for women with short hair, for women in men's clothes, particularly if they have curvy, feminine figures. I'm often drawn to women with glasses, women who bite their lower lips when they're thinking. But I've also been attracted to many, many women who had none of those qualities, and been left cold by women who appear to match all those criteria. A map of my attractions would be some sort of fractal shape with nodes and splittings, dead patches, spinkled islands, intricately folded coastlines.

Is everyone like that? I don't know--I've never been anyone else. Lacking data to the contrary, I've ventured to assume that other people are more like me than unlike, As a starting place, it leads to a few interesting places.

For one thing, it makes hash of the notion of sexual orientation as some sort of essential quality. An interest archipelago (I think Delany uses 'rhizome' for similar configurations) may straddle the gender International Date Line or lie wholely or mostly on one side. To try t assign a fundamental essence to the owner on this basis is absurd, and no less absurd when a gay activist does it than when a homophobe does.

A great many people, especially men, espouse a sexuality wholly congruent with our cultural standards. People who resemble this year's crop of actresses and models are pretty, all other people are icky.

I'm a little skeptical. Some subset of these people are certainly telling the ugly truth. Their erotic universe is really that circumscribed, and that malleable. The rest, though, are driven, not by desire but fear. They have desires that they won't acknowledge, perhaps even to themselves, because they're so anxious to be normal.

What are the proportions of these two groups? I wish I knew.

Last summer, I checked Shorter Views by Samuel Delany (yes, dear, you can stop reading now*) out of the library and read it at a frantic pace. It changed everything. Delany writes about sex and genre and culture in enormously sophisticated, powerful ways that complimented my own thinking in some places, providing the missing pieces I'd been groping for, and blew down cherished prejudices elsewhere. At the time, I expected that I'd be writing about it constantly here.

More recently, I sat down to figure out why I haven't been. The answer I came up with isn't terribly flattering. I like to appear wise and sophisticated here. I like it when people tell me I'm a deep and original thinker. A lot of what Delany writes about is semi-popularization of ideas from cultural theory, poststructuralism, and feminist theory, areas where I am butt ignorant. Being confronted by the mass of potent, dauntingly intricate prior art where I've been trying to show off was humbling. Writing about it in any remotely honest way, full of 'Delany says that Foucault says that blah blah blah,' is even more humbling.

Nonetheless, it's been filling my head up enough that I'm just gonna have to try to overcome that, And you, dear reader, are just gonna have to deal with the revelation that I'm not omniscient after all. Which I'm sure comes as a terrible shock.

* My partner is really, really tired of me ranting about this book to her.

Just finished a first draft of Victim/Victorian Chapter 7, with only a four-year hiatus since the last episode. My fiction chops being a little rusty, there were a number of interesting observations to be made about the writing process in general and this project in particular. I was a little surprised and disappointed to learn that writing a sex scene where both characters had penises produced a little voice in my head going, "You can't do that! People will think you're a FAG!"

Jeez, I thought I killed that guy off years ago. Stupid cultural conditioning...

vinnie_tesla: I was thinking today about your observation that my postings are not revealing of myself.

vinnie_tesla: It occurred to me that a great many people are extremely frank and open in their net writings,

vinnie_tesla: thus revealing themselves to be, most of the time, boring and shallow.

vinnie_tesla: I live in fear that should I fail to filter, I might reveal the same thing.

vinnie_tesla: If you're wondering if I'm kidding,

vinnie_tesla: so am I.

---

And from another conversation:

vinnie_tesla: Yesterday, I kinda put my foot in it in an intersting way.

vinnie_tesla: I made a remark about chicks who "fuck women but only fall in love with guys" to a friend.

vinnie_tesla: She said, "You realize that that pretty much describes my biography, don't you?

vinnie_tesla: After a bit of high-speed introspection and a few probing questions,

vinnie_tesla: i concluded that the problem wasn't that relationship distribution, which is neither better nor worse than any other,

vinnie_tesla: but the attitudes toward male and female homosexuality that caused it to be fashionable

vinnie_tesla: in a way, it's one of the fundamental knotty problems of my sexual morality--

vinnie_tesla: i am radically pluralist,

vinnie_tesla: but there are patterns in tastes and practices that I think are unhealthy for the culture in their dominance.

vinnie_tesla: I don't want to suggest that they are inherently wrong,.

vinnie_tesla: but their position in the culture is harmful.

In my pubescence, I stole copies of Playboy magazine from my father. I particularly scrutinized the few vague and fleeting glimpses of labia majora I could find, trying to pry from those airbrushed photos the secrets of how women are made.*

Eventually, I got hold of more explicit magazines, and my anatomical understanding advanced a couple notches. When my father found my stash, he sat me down and gave me a talking-to. My posession and perusal of the Playboys, he told me, was almost okay, except for the stealing thing. Playboy celebrates the natural beauty of women, and there's nothing wrong with that. The Hustlers, on the other hand, with their obsessive preoccupation with genital closeups, were obscene and degrading, and I should not sully my young eyes with such filth.

In my memory,** he went on at some length about the moral, asthetic, and interpersonal incorrectness of Hustler's approach to the female body, with particular emphasis on their unhealthy fascination with women's genitals.

Dad, not for the first time, I must disagree with you. The obsession of Hustler's photographers with women's pink bits is matched if not exceeded by that of Playboy's photo editors. The latter is just an obsessive avoidance. A fascination with genitals on the one hand, a horror of them on the other: which of those seems healthier to you?

* The drawings in paperback sex-ed books from the school library were informative, but ultimately frustrating, as if a child were to ask "how does my digital watch work?" and be presented with a circuit diagram.

** for what it's worth at a twenty-year remove.

I never told my little anecdote from last year's pride parade, did I? I was paging through the incredibly hot birls2 community yesterday, and pictures of an FTM there reminded me of it.

I was on the curb waiting for the parade to begin, and rather furtively ogling a group of gorgeous baby butches a dozen yards down on my left. As the sun got higher, one of them pulled off her shirt, revealing livid scars under breastless pectorals for a moment, before donning a lighter-weight tee shirt.

I had two very strong reactions, more or less simultaneously: one was sadness: I like breasts a whole lot, and seeing where two of them had been removed the world seemed a pity to me. The other was a vicarious sense of giddy freedom. For most of her--or, his, I guess, now--life, it would have been a criminal offense for him to do what he now can do so casually--change shirts in public.

I posted this to ASSD yesterday:

*sigh* I'm off to ye olde hospital for an unanticipated  week of cool,
refreshing chemo. This means that A) I won't be updating the Mad
Science Festival site this week, and B) I'll have no excuse not to work
on my own festival stories. If all goes as planned, I should be back in
fighting trim well before the April 15th deadline. So you're not off
the hook just 'cause I'm doing some pretty unsexy mad science of my
own. I still expect stories. Got it?

Have fun without me, kids. But not too much fun. See you on the 30th if all goes well.