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.

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.

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.

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 )

(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.

(modulo various travels, technology breakdowns, unfinished essays, etc, etc)

This is a little rerun from a discussion on alt.sex.stories.d a few years ago. Oosh, a writer I very much admire, wrote:

To be an erotic writer, you must write for her - whoever she is. You and I don't matter. She does.

I replied:

Unless I misunderstand you, I don't think I agree. The first duty of the ambitious smut writer is to follow her own erotic muse.

Here, try a test: go to the ASSTR Author Profiles section. Find one of the numerous profiles that says something like

Lance Suave

I write tasteful, sensual tales of passion to please the delicate sensibilites of the feminine reader. Drawn from my own sophisticated experiences in the art of love, each tale is cunningly crafted to excite passion. Ladies, if you enjoy my little writings, do please contact me and we
can chat. Or perhaps...more!

You want to go wash your hands already, don't you? Integrity comes from writing what you think is sexy, not what you think someone else thinks is sexy.

This is true for me as a reader as well as a writer. I'd generally much rather read someone's description of what they find hot than their description of what they think I might enjoy.

Yacht Club 4 is now live on my site!

This was originally gonna be a croquet-themed story. In fact, the rough draft on my Palm begins with a list of potentially-lewd quotes from the croquet scene in Alice in Wonderland that I was gonna work into the text. But I wrote Vinnie waking up, which became a morning sex scene, and then that became another morning sex scene, and before I knew it I had a story's worth of smut to post. As with all of the Yacht Club series, it ain't exactly Finnegan's Wake, but I do think it manages to have its moments of funny & hot, and some nice little descriptive touches I'm pleased with.

Special thanks go to my awesome editrix & muse, who helped enormously, and is impressively hard to distract when proofreading--I wasn't sure whether to be grateful or insulted. She is invited to step forward and take a bow if she likes. Or hide under her seat if she'd rather not be associated with this thing.
( Teasers! Get yer teasers right here! )

Morning People is part of the Yacht Club series, which also includes Guest of Honor, Unfamiliar Customs, Shopping, and The Most Dangerous Game.

Poll #1159182 Girlz N Da Hood
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 25

Clithood: one word or two?

I've been working on another Yacht Club episode in the past week or so. Originally, I thought it was called A Spot of Croquet, but now it appears to be called Morning People, so now I have a substantial backlog of Yacht Club episode ideas. Further. spexappeal has alerted me to a real-world development that cries out for incorporation into that universe.

On the current project, though, I realised the other day that I'd written the second sex scene all wrong. There were too many aspects of the dynamic between the characters and the particular activites engaged in that I wanted to save for the third act of the story. So on Wednesday, I went into a local bar during Happy Hour and rewrote the entire scene over the course of a couple Old Fashioneds. I'm such a narcissist that I can't bear to just drop the old version into dev/null, so I've decided to post it here.

In addition to rough, unprotected sex with the younger sister of the protaganist's girlfriend, the following scene features no proofreading, since it was cut before I even finished the first draft. You've been warned.

( No Redeeming Social Importance )

I've encountered a whole bunch of provocative stuff about the relationship of realism and fantasy in smut lately. It calls for a big deep, ambitious essay to try to link all these threads together into one scheme.

Unfortunately, I don't have a big ambitious piece in me today, so I'm gonna pull the pin on a couple ideas, toss 'em, and run.

( Moderation? Moi? )
( Spaceman Biff and the Unreality Continuum )
( No matter how PC I get, I can't keep up )
( Return of Procrustes )

I finally finished expanding my Write Club story from last month. The new, porntasticer, version is now up at my site. Have a look and tell me what you think.

In 2002, the very talented short-story writer selenajardine posted a message to alt.sex.stories.d. I'll reprint it in full:

So I was thinking. (Oh dear, what a dangerous occupation for a sweet
young thing like myself.) I've read a lot of comments, in the
FishTank and elewhere on this august newsgroup, about how tired people
are of reading about Perfect People. "Oh," they say, "thank you so
much for writing about someone fat/old/wrinkly/with an unpleasant
overbite, because I am so tired of reading about women with
magnificent scoops of flesh resting on their ribs, creamy skin,
perfect hips, beautiful pouting pink pussies, and excuse me just a
moment, I'll be right back."

Is this true? Are we really tired of reading about beautiful people?
I don't mean exaggeratedly perfect, of course -- the regulation
ten-inch cock surely makes everyone roll their eyes by now. But how
do we react when we read about someone with a roll of fat round her
middle, or stretch marks? What if he has a bald spot, or he's sixty,
or his biceps sag? How tired are we of beautiful people? And if we
are, why do we keep writing about them? Huh?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Let me run a bit by you again. See if you notice anything interesting:

thank you so
much for writing about someone fat/old/wrinkly/with an unpleasant
overbite, because I am so tired of reading about women with
magnificent scoops of flesh resting on their ribs, creamy skin,
perfect hips, beautiful pouting pink pussies, and excuse me just a
moment, I'll be right back."

There is no contradiction! The positive qualities Selena lists have no overlap with the negative. The difference, in other words, between the two descriptions, need not be one of the external facts, but of the narrator's (and presumably the reader's) emphasis and response.

When I started trying to write smut, I wanted very much to: a) portray my characters as attractive, and b) have their attractiveness reflect my own tastes, rather than received expectations. I realized soon that to do this, I needed to resist the temptation to describe my characters in terms of their difference from the norm. It's an easy shorthand to fall into, but once you start down that path, there are two characters in the room--yours, and the Barbie doll she isn't. The wording and attitude tweaks this demands often turn out to produce better, more vivid writing, anyway. Compare "she had unshaved armpits" with "the little tufts of honey-colored hair under her arms were a slightly clumped with sweat from her exertions."

This is also another instance of the good old 'show, don't tell' rule. The less comparative description nearly always ends up being more textured, and more precise. "Her manner was assertive." "She met my eye, her expression neutral. 'I want you to have dinner with me on Friday' she said."

A lot of my sense of how to do this stuff right comes from my love for smutty comics. A cartoonist naturally asserts, rather than comparing. A R. Crumb woman or a Howie Dard woman, or a Tom of Finland man is not just an expression of the artist's libido, but a persuasive one, at least temporarily. When I'm looking at one of their pictures, I have a sensation not just of what qualities the artist likes, but why, and for that moment, I share his desires. That is what I hope to be able to accomplish in prose.

I just put Victim/Victorian Chapter 8: Otherwise Engaged up, and the novella is now officially done, five years and a day after I posted the first chapter. Chapter Eight isn't really a stand-alone work, so if you haven't. you might want to glance at the whole story.

Let me know what you think--I'm eager for reader feedback.

Alexis posted both stories and her ruling last night,

Congratulations to Antheros on his victory. Apparently my friendly offer of cash to the judge backfired when it was misunderstood as some sort of sleazy bribe attempt. Next time I'll try offering cookies instead...

Write Club is a game they play on the alt.sex.stories.d Usenet group. Two contestants and a judge each pick three words, and then each contestant has three hours to write a story using all nine words. The historical archives make for very entertaining reading. In 2002, I had the privilege of judging Duel #23 between two of my favorite online sex writers--Desdmona and selenajardine.

Today I actually duelled for the first time. My opponent was Antheros; the judge is alexisinalaska. I haven't seen Antheros's story or the verdict yet.

( Lesson One (Mmm/F oral safe) )

( The Words )

( story notes )