Gift bag

This post is a mixed bag that starts with a gripe which turns into a cheer, and after that it's all uphill into EMC fetish nirvana.

So, okay, if you don't have an adult blog on Blogger yourself, you might not be aware that earlier this week Google sent a mass email to all us pervs saying we were officially no longer welcome and had until mid-March to vacate the premises. Well, you can imagine how pissed off I was. I fully expected to make this weekend's blog entry a combination gripe session and plea for advice about where to move my blog. Fortunately, I instead get the chance to say, "Suck it, Google!" My fellow pervs (who obviously have more sense than I do) didn't wait till the weekend to complain - and they complained very loudly and to the right people. Because of them, Google was forced to retract its words and pretend it didn't mean them the way it really did mean them. And as for me, I avoid the hassle of moving all my shit. So again I say (because I can), "Suck it, Google!"

Now onward and upward. Earlier today I found a Facebook group dedicated to Hajime Sorayama, joined it, and immediately found myself presented with images like the one you see at right. Yes, some blessedly twisted souls decided to stage one of my favorite statufication pieces with actual live women. I am in heaven. There's lots more great art in that Facebook group (although sadly, nothing quite this elaborately staged), so if you have an FB account, jump on in; the water's fine.

Moving on again, I'm still working on my heavily revised, much hotter, and retitled "Sucker Punch" (now to be called "The Final Adventure of Doctor Theodore Steele and His Intrepid Assistant Franny"). In last week's post I said the story had turned out to be much shorter than I remembered, and that I thought I'd better combine it in an anthology with "If Wishes Were Horses" and "What to Expect from Your Alien Brainwashing." Well, since then I've been seeking advice from other indie erotica writers (some in the EMC crowd, some in a Facebook group) about how to combine and price the triad. I think you'll like their suggestions as much as I do. My plan now is to release "The Final Adventure" first, alone, and price it at $0.99. A month later I'll release "If Wishes Were Horses" alone for $0.99. Then, a month after that, I'll publish the two together along with "What to Expect" as an anthology (new working title "Dark Spaces") and sell that for $0.99. All this seems counter-intuitive to me, but I've never had a head for business; and the people who do have a head for business say this is the way to go.

Are you happy yet? Well, let me see if I can make you even happier.

1. Again, on the advice of one of these business mavens, I've repriced almost all the existing books in my Amazon catalog from $2.99 to $0.99 (and Sleepwalkers from $3.99 to $2.99).

2. It works out even better for you and for me if you have a Kindle Unlimited membership and  borrow the books instead of buying them (Just read the whole books, okay? The magic doesn't work unless you read at least most of the way through.). Yes, this is even more counter-intuitive than what I said above, but it's true - and in fact, it's true for every Kindle ebook that sells for $1.99 or less. I won't bore you with an explanation unless you ask for it; but I will tell you that the best way to support your favorite indie authors on Kindle is to borrow rather than buy - again, if the price is $1.99 or less, and if you at least flip through all the pages to the end. Otherwise, buy. And review. Reviews mean a lot to sales.

3. I'll need some beta readers for my upcoming stories, and I'll also need some people willing to actually review the books on Amazon; so when the time gets closer, I'm going to offer a few Advance Reader Copies. I haven't figured out the fine details yet, but this is the gist of it. I'll choose the ARC recipients in my usual way, by asking people to volunteer in the comments section. The winners will get to beta-read Word versions of one, two, or three stories on the condition that they post reviews once the stories go live on Amazon. Once their reviews go up, I'll give the winners free actual ebooks of the stories they beta read and reviewed.

Well, I'm certainly in a good mood now that I've shared all this...and I hope you're in a good mood now that you've read it.

Sweet dreams.

Point to ponder

art by Hajime Sorayama

I've noticed a trend among some of the people who talk to me by blog and email: an unusually high number of them say they have Asperger's Syndrome. I have it too. I finally got diagnosed last year, after at least two decades of trying to convince people that I should get tested. My symptoms aren't always obvious, so no one believed me. I didn't entirely believe myself. And AS is a hell of a thing to live with even when you know you have it. It's a lifetime of offending people without meaning to, of not understanding what people really want or need from you, of shame for screwing up again and again when you know you're too smart to keep making the same mistakes.

Do you see where I'm going here? This isn't a "poor, pitiful me" post; it's an explanation for why I developed a mind control fetish - and perhaps why so many other Aspies are into it.

If you're an Aspie and a sub, fantasizing about being totally controlled means fantasizing about being unable to screw up. If you can only do what your controller wants you to do, you can't offend or disappoint. You're perfect.

Or if you're an Aspie and a dom, (I assume) you can fantasize about the people you control being unable to take offense. They'd be totally accepting - loving - no matter how socially inappropriate you were with them. You could do no wrong in their eyes.

I have no data to back up my theory, just a few conversations; and I know there are lots of other reasons for people to develop an EMC fetish: feelings of inadequacy, revenge fantasies, lust for power, lust for surrender.... (Some of those could apply to Aspies, too. I won't say I've never written revenge into my stories; and looking back from the other side of my diagnosis, I realize I was taking revenge on the bullies who mistreated me because of my difference.). But I have a hunch that there are more Aspies among the EMC fetish ranks than among most other fetish ranks. And since Aspies are obsessive by nature, we might be some of EMC's most devoted fans.

That's a nice thought, isn't it? As long as none of you go all Annie Wilkes on me.

10...9...8...

The next post I make will be the call for beta readers to help me with "What Do You Give the Alien Who Has Everything?" I'd say there's a 50/50 chance that the call will go out next weekend; otherwise, bar catastrophe, it'll go out the following week or weekend. Either way, I figured I should go ahead and make an announcement. It's a heads-up to those of you hoping to be beta readers (because, remember, I'm only taking the first three volunteers). And it's also incentive for me to write like the maniac I am.

But for everyone anticipating the story, here are some eye candy clues for you to enjoy. The photos generally come from Model Mayhem, and I've credited the photographers and models at the bottom of the post. The art is by Hajime "He Who Never Fails" Sorayama, and the rest of the pics came from wherever I could find them.

 

          

Model Mayhem credits: Image at top by Gil Perron. Woman in white in first row is Hexabelle. Mermaid is Thao N. Living statue is Michael Foster with body painting by Liz Berczel.

brain dump

There's been a lot going on in my head lately, some of which will interest you and some of which will not. I'll stick to the stuff that will interest you, but bear with me if this post veers too far into stream-of-consciousness.

1. One of my favorite fetish artists, Hajime Sorayama, has a new book of art on the market; and he also has a bunch of fantastic new paintings on his Facebook page. Go have a look.

2. I'm still working on my Choose Your Own Adventure story, which will be called "What Do You Give the Alien Who Has Everything?" It's a lot of fun to write, but also very challenging, and this sucker is going to be huge when it's done. I mean really, seriously huge. That's the nature of the CYOA beast. Anyway, I still need two or three beta readers, but the size of the book means I need to give bigger thank-you gifts to those who accept the challenge. Here's the new plan: volunteers (chosen on a first-come, first-served basis) will receive a free final version of the e-book, another free e-book (either one I've already published or an IOU for one I haven't published yet), and a choice of personalized Easter eggs to be embedded in the CYOA. If this interests you, just keep the idea tucked away in your brain for now. I'll keep posting updates until I reach the end of the draft stage, at which point I'll ask for volunteers.

3. Back in March I blogged about a weird/cool/MC-themed book called Annihilation, the first in a trilogy that I couldn't wait to read in full. I said that the author, Jeff Vandermeer, had already written books 2 and 3 and would be releasing them in the coming months; and that I planned to pick them up right away because Annihilation was that damn good. Sadly, I've only just picked up Book 2 (Authority) today. All I can tell you so far is that it's off to an excellent out-of-left field start. In the very first chapter, you get the kind of huge revelations you'd normally expect to find at the end of the third book in a trilogy - which, of course, means there must be dozens of bigger revelations down the pike that I don't even know enough to anticipate yet. This is very exciting. Also, thanks to the wonders of e-book technology, I can search back through Book 1 for words like "control" and "thistle" and even "breakfast" and see how Vandermeer was planting seeds (another of his clue-words) in Book 1 for ideas he develops in Book 2 - and presumably develops further in Book 3.

That's the advantage of writing your whole epic before you publish the first part: you have the control (hah) to do precisely this sort of seed planting. It's a major reason I didn't start posting Sleepwalkers online until I was near the finish line, but you can also chalk that up to anal retentiveness. Hmm, well, I suppose Vandermeer might be just as anal retentive as me, to do what he did with his Southern Reach trilogy. I have no idea about his personality, but it strikes me that you have to have a certain bloody-minded perfectionism to write that way (J.K. Rowling certainly had it, and look how far it got her. Love or hate the Potterverse, you have to admit she kept total control of a very complicated plot over the course of seven books. David Lynch couldn't even keep control over Twin Peaks for two seasons).

And now I'm struggling not to babble about Authority. The things I've read so far wouldn't count as spoilers to anyone who's read Annihilation, but they'd be huge spoilers to anyone who hasn't, so I'd better keep my mouth shut. I'll just say that Vandermeer has a talent for creating very odd, flawed, and totally believable characters who refuse to fit the molds you want to put them in. I already have a very different opinion of the Southern Reach and the people who run it, especially the new kid on the block who is also the new protagonist on the block: poor, ironically nicknamed "Control." Half of me wants to kick him, and the other half of me wants to hug him. It'll be interesting to see where Vandermeer takes the character.

Some Sorayama art you probably haven't seen before

It's been too long since I went looking for fetish art by Hajime Sorayama, and a lot of new stuff has cropped up in the meantime - not least an official Facebook page. It doesn't have much content, but seeing that it existed, and that it contained some images I hadn't seen before, started me off on a new Google Image Search. I founds tons of interesting new images on this page - but warning: if you follow the link link, you might end up spending an hour or two over there; and you'll have to weed through some bad quality images in search of the good ones. It's worth the trouble, though.

Here are a few of my new favorites from today - leaning toward the images that suggest mind control or other types of bondage. Most of these pics came from the sites linked above, but I've scavenged them from other places as well.

Sorayama also has a longstanding official website, which you can find here.

first of two posts this weekend

Sometime on Sunday I plan to make a post about "Found MC" - a fascinating scene from semi-classic literature that I somehow never connected with MC before. Maybe you haven't, either, but I hope you'll enjoy.

It will take a little while to type up the whole scene, so in the meantime I'll share the Facebook page I've just begun. I'll be happy to accept friend requests from anyone who doesn't strike me as an out-and-out lunatic. I don't have much content yet except for a metric ass-ton of fetish art by Luis Royo, Hajime Sorayama, H.R. Giger, Boris Vallejo and others; but I think that will more than satisfy you. ;-) Have a look.

A Peek Beneath the Duct Tape: Sleepwalkers, Chapter 5

Let's start with the most important topic: Shara's induction of Wizard. I know most of you saw it coming, and most of you thought the brown-skinned Peacekeeper that Wizard noticed on her first run to PP was Shara. She wasn't. That Peacekeeper was a Level Four; Shara was posing as a Level Five (and was, in fact, in the basement of PP at the time). I threw you a red herring. But just to be fair, I gave you a chance of catching it. In fact, I even told you, in my Peek on Chapter 4, that you might spot a typo that wasn't a typo.

By the time I wrote this chapter of Sleepwalkers, I was pushing myself a bit to come up with new ways to describe orgasm. Thus the post here (For the record, I patterned a later orgasm in "Sleepwalkers" on the "electricity" image at the top of that post). Flowers seem pretty incongruous in connection with Wizard, both as the free person she used to be and as the Level Two she is now, but that's why the image works for me. Sexuality is exotic to Wizard. She used the skein to masturbate, but she was a virgin and she had no idea how much better sex felt with another person. The experience was so overwhelming that even though it robbed her of her selfhood, she couldn't forget the glory of it.

In the comments section below Chapter 5 on this blog, Uzobono asked me how the different levels function. I'll let you read my whole response for yourself, if you wish (and I really do recommend reading the comments on all these chapters), but my frame of reference for Wizard as a Level Two was Asperger's Syndrome. She still knows what emotions are, but she doesn't get them. Her world has been reduced to black and white, correct and incorrect. It's all binary, computer-like. [Edit: I don't mean to imply that Wizard is now functioning exactly like an Aspie. Asperger's was just a jumping-off point for me in writing Wizard as a Level Two. It wasn't a template. Some of what she experiences now is not Aspie-ish at all. For instance, people with Asperger's feel emotions just like everyone else.]

I don't know what else to say about what happened to Wizard except that it was the third most painful scene in "Sleepwalkers" for me to write. The second most painful was Shara's induction, and the most painful of all hasn't been published yet. You'll know it when you read it - but I think you also know by now that "Sleepwalkers" doesn't follow the typical structure of an EMC story. It really is a novel, with all that that implies.

Now a couple of quick notes:

There are a few characters who pop up just once or twice in the story to deliver exposition or provide an alternate viewpoint. Valencia is one of those. I like her, and her current mental state is both sad and hot, but this is her only scene.

At some point during the polishing phase, after I'd finished the entire first draft of the story, I realized that I'd written Melora as a sort of non-magical Granny Weatherwax. Granny has long been my favorite character from the Discworld series. I was tickled to see how she'd snuck into my story. Of course, the "real" Granny Weatherwax would be pissed as hell for what I did to her.

(The painting at the top of this post is by Hajime Sorayama.)

How many ways can you describe an orgasm?

The more erotica I write, the more of a challenge it is to find new ways of describing sexual climax. I can write about pulsing, throbbing, bells and gongs, feelings of electricity, fireworks, the mind going white, falling into an abyss, a flower blooming (That's one from my upcoming "Sleepwalkers"). Then, for men, I can add in guns and clubs and towers. But there has to be more, doesn't there?

I'm not talking about words for body parts (like "pussy" or "cock" or Ulorin Vex's adorable "ladyflower"), or about euphemisms for the sex act (like Shakespeare's "making the beast with two backs"). I'm talking about metaphors. Analogies. Poetry. How many different ways can you describe an orgasm? Feel free to leave ideas in the comments below this post. If I use any of them, I'll be sure to give you credit.

Then again, if you don't feel like commenting, at least you can enjoy these not-so-subtle metaphors. The art is by Hajime Sorayama, the song is by Cracker, and the skit is by Monty Python. It's an odd mashup, but I think it works. ;-)

Adventures in self-hypnosis

Lately I've been tinkering with my morning session, creating a more sinister second version as if the first version wasn't sinister enough! But I've had a very strange problem when I try to use it.

I've written a new scenario for the last part of the "suggestions" section that's loosely based on this Sorayama image, and I added into the script just after the part that puts me in deepest trance. At this part in the original morning script, I'm totally zoned out staring at spirals and subliminals; so I was hoping I'd still be deep enough when the Sorayama scenario kicked in to buy into it 100%.

Unfortunately, every time I've run morning2, I've still been so zoned out when the Sorayama part kicked in that I might as well have been fast asleep. I can't enjoy it because I can't pay enough attention to enjoy it. Even adding commands to pay close attention now don't help. The previous passage had just taken me too deep for anything else.

Now I've revised morning2 to put the Sorayama bit before the zoned-out bit. I haven't had a chance to run it yet, but I have high hopes. Meanwhile, as I was rearranging my script, I tweaked a few other lines and ran across one in the zone-out section that made me roll my eyes. Right there, in the original set of commands, was the suggestion that eventually I'd be able to go deep enough to become a mindless drone, just like I'd always wanted to be. I guess that command took hold of my subconscious a little more strongly than I'd intended.

I never know which suggestions are going to stick and which aren't, and the fact that I've commanded myself not to notice the deep suggestions in my morning program means that I hadn't thought about them consciously in ages. I'd forgotten that line was in there, but damn if I didn't zap myself good.

Anyway, this is all part of my continuing quest to find just the right level of trance. If I'm not deep enough, I tend to analyze the script instead of enjoying it and my mind occasionally wanders. On the other hand, if I'm too deep, I don't even know what I'm experiencing. I know there's plenty of middle ground between those poles, but I'm still trying to home in on it.

titillating tubing

I've had Sorayama on my mind lately. No point asking why - just enjoy!

Most of these images can be found at d4rkw00d.net

These are a few of my favorite things: H.R. Giger, Part I of II

I'm a little late with this week's mid-week post because I've just been having so much fun collecting Giger pictures that I couldn't stop long enough to write about them.

I assume all - or at least most - of you are already familiar with German superfreak H.R. Giger, the concept artist behind Alien, an early aborted version of Dune, a number of Necronomicons, and a bunch of other creepy/sexy fetish paintings and sculptures scattered from one end of the Internet to the other. But just in case you're not familiar with him, or in case you just want to know more (and get a good laugh at the same time), allow me to point you toward this Cracked article.

I've been collecting Giger art for quite awhile but haven't thought of blogging about him - I guess because I kind of take him for granted. After all, he's as much apart of the cyber-fetish scene as Sorayama, isn't he? Fortunately, I stumbled across a few great Giger sites this week, and those led me to a few more sites; so before you know it, I was off on one of my typical OCD image chases. Results below.

For anyone who wants to follow in my footsteps, here are the best places I've found for high-quality Giger scans. This site has the biggest, clearest images, but it's a little limited in scope. This site has more images, but they're not always the best quality. This site has the most complete collection - and also features art by some other artists I've featured on my blog: Luis Royo, Boris Vallejo, and Julie Bell.

And now, on with the show. As the Cracked article so humorously points out, a hell of a lot of Giger art is about dicks. But a lot of it's about vulvas, too. The part that interests me most, though, is the intersection between human and cyborg, human and inhuman. To me, a lot of these images suggest seduction and/or mind control by supernatural or mechanical means. Those are the images that really push my buttons - and, I hope yours.

And now, unfortunately, I'm going to have to sign off for a little while and go to work. Blogger is misbehaving and refusing to upload the rest of the images I have planned, so I'll try again this evening or tomorrow morning. Stay tuned for the rest!

This Is That - in White (Album) and Gold

First, just in case you haven't noticed Simon's note at the top of the EMCSA Recent Additions page, the September updates will be on random weekdays instead of the usual weekends. That means Jukebox and I aren't really sure when the next installment of The White Album will debut, but have no fear: I've already e-mailed it to Simon, so it will be in the next update. The only question is what day that update comes out. All I know is that I'd better get the next "Peek Beneath the Duct Tape" written ASAP so I'm not caught off guard!

But in the meantime, here's a bit of "This Is That" which didn't quite make it into my "Hazy Shade of Winter" Peek - and below that, a totally gratuitous second "This Is That" with a piece of artwork I never expected to see duplicated in real life.

At left is the picture I used with my previous Peek. The photographer is Calvato. At right is the gorgeous-but-horribly-named Nicotine, photographed by the almost-as-badly-named Photography Device. Honestly, you'd be amazed how many beautiful models with horrible made-up names you can find out there. One of these days, I'm going to do a theme post on that very subject, and right up at the very top of the page will be an enchanting young thing who for some reason chose to call herself Merkinstache (Don't know what a merkin is? You're better off that way).



And now, for your bonus viewing pleasure, here's what I thought was an incomparable piece of art by Hajime Sorayama - coupled now with a shot of model Curvz by Michael Helms, a.k.a. Pelicanh. Both Curvz and Helms have galleries on Deviant Art, so you can see several more shots in this series by following the Pelicanh link above. In fact, if you want to ruin the magic, you can even see how they achieved the effect by clicking here.