Staycation

I'm going to take about a week off from blogging. Catch you again next week!

I wish I could write like this

I've written before about Tipping the Velvet, the miniseries; but it's taken me until now to pick up the actual book. I've only just begun - Nan and Kitty are still striking up a friendship that will blossom into something more - but I'm already in love with the author's (Sarah Waters) style. Every sentence is thick with eroticism, even something as prosaic as a description of Kitty taking off her stage makeup. Here, have a read:

     She sang on; then opened one eye very wide, and leaned close to the glass to remove a stubborn crumb of spit-black - her mouth stretching wide, out of a kind of sympathy with her eyelids, and her breath misting the mirror. For a second she seemed quite to have forgotten me. I studied the skin of her face and her throat. It had emerged from its mask of powder and grease the colour of cream - the colour of the lace on her chemise; but it was darkened at the nose and cheeks - and even, I saw, at the edge of her lip - by freckles., brown as her hair. I had not suspected the existence of the freckles. I found them wonderfully and inexplicably moving.

Then there's this bit, from a few paragraphs later. Nan is about to leave and takes off her glove to shake Kitty's hand, but...

     All at once she was the gallant boy of the footlights again. She straightened her back, made me a little bow, and raised my knuckles to her lips.
     I flushed with pleasure - until I saw her nostrils quiver, and knew, suddenly, what she smelled: those rank sea-scents, of liquor and oyster-flesh, crab-meat and whelks, which had flavored my fingers and those of my family for so many years we had all ceased, entirely, to notice them. Now I had thrust them beneath Kitty Butler's nose! I felt ready to die of shame.
     I made, at once, to pull my hand away; but she held it fast in her own, still pressed to her lips, and laughed at me over the knuckles. There was a look in her eye I could not quite interpret.
     'You smell,' she began, slowly and wonderingly, 'like-'
     'Like a herring!' I said bitterly. My cheeks were hot now and very red; there were tears, almost, in my eyes. I think she saw my confusion and was sorry for it.
     'Not at all like a herring,' she said gently. 'But perhaps, maybe, like a mermaid...' And she kissed my fingers properly, and this time I let her; and at last my blush faded, and I smiled.
     I put my glove back on. My fingers seemed to tingle against the cloth. 'Will you come and see me again, Miss Mermaid?' she asked.

Like I said, I've only just begun this book. I know there are dozens of incredible (and occasionally kinky) sex scenes ahead, and I can't wait to find them. Just think: if Sarah Waters can pack this much eroticism into a hand-kiss, what can she do with an actual lovemaking scene?

Luis Royo's ultimate BDSM fantasy

I've blogged about Luis Royo a couple of times already, and many of you already knew about him before you ever read my entries. He's a Spanish artist with a taste for fantasy, SF, and various kinds of kink.

At left is a dome commissioned by a Russian billionaire back in 2006, and below are details from some of my favorite panels. If you want to see the rest of the dome in closeup, just go here.

In my imagination, the various panels depict a harem kept by a powerful Mistress (Maybe she's the one on the pedestal at the center, tossing roses). Her most experienced slaves teach the newer ones the ways of pleasure, deepening their mindless obedience one orgasm at a time.

In one panel you can see Royo, his son, and the Russian billionaire peeking at the harem from behind a hedge. I like to imagine they're about to be ambushed by a company of mindwiped Amazons. I don't know what Mistress will do with them in the end, but they won't be in any condition to complain about it afterwards. ;P

Giving credit where credit is due

This is a post I've been meaning to make for awhile; I've just been distracted by other, more exciting topics. But it needs to be said, and now is as good a time as any.

These things are just matters of politeness:

1. If you share a picture that you found somewhere else online, tell your readers where you found it.
2. If it's a professional shot and you know who the photographer and/or model is, tell your readers that, too.
3. If you have only incomplete information about a picture you found, tell you readers as much as you know.
4. If you publish a story on the EMCSA and someone else helped you with it in any capacity (even proofreading), thank them by name at the start of your story.

I'm not thinking of any particular incident as I write this entry. It's more about an accumulation of annoyances over several years - annoyances about things done to other people and things done to me personally.

What it all boils down to is this: if you want credit for the things you do, then it only makes sense to give others credit for the things they do.

End of rant. I promise to give you something sexier next time around. ;)

I think you *have* to be a fetishist to appreciate this

Behold!

What it feels like

I haven't talked about my experiences with Virtual Hypnotist lately, but they're still going well. I continue to use one of the scripts I wrote for myself at bedtime every night, to help me get to sleep. By now, the background music (Men at Work's soporific "Down By the Sea") has become so ingrained in my subconscious that, if I don't have access to VH at bedtime, I can play the song in my head a few times and drop off pretty easily. VH is more fun, though. ;)

I thought you might like to hear how it feels for me, slipping off to sleep via hypnosis, so here we go.

When I first wrote the bedtime script, I was trying to put myself in a state of near-mindlessness; I thought that was the best way to still my thoughts enough to get to sleep. Well, I haven't managed mindlessness with my bedtime session (Oddly enough, I have managed it with my morning session...but that's a little too personal to go into ;)). But even though my thoughts still bounce around a lot during my bedtime session, I am becoming deeply hypnotized. I just don't realize it until the program ends with the command for me to get up and go to bed.

This is where things get cool. The script tells me that it will be easy for me to raise my arms, remove my earbuds, and get up; but it's not. I've become so relaxed by now that it feels like I'm deep underwater. My limbs are heavy, my movements slow, and performing more than one action at a time is more than I can handle.

I can't time myself, of course, but my guess is that it takes me about 15 seconds to get out of the chair.

Picture this. I'm in front of my computer with my chair tilted back and my feet up on a stool. My elbows rest at the point where the chair's arms connect to the back, and my hands are loose in my lap with my fingers lightly curled. "Now go," the program says. "Go to bed."

My arms draw outward until my hands are barely touching my body (To move them any further would just be too much work). Then slowly, oh so slowly, my hands move upwards, fingers grazing the sides of my torso and then the sides of my breasts. Now I move them inward, toward the "V" where the separate earbud cords join together and snake off toward the computer. At this point my hands have to rotate so my fingers are in a position to grasp the cords. Then my grip has to open a bit and my fingers feel their way upwards, looking for just the right spot to grasp the cords and tug.

But even after that, I'm not through. Now I have to lean forward and place the earbuds with their cords carefully on the computer desk. Otherwise, they might drag on the floor and the chair wheels could roll over them, potentially destroying them. Only after I'm sure the earbuds are safe can I get up from the chair, putting one foot on the floor at a time, and head off to bed.

After all of that, it's no wonder I feel sleepy enough to drop off right away.

*The image at the top of this post is by Kassandra Vizerskaya.

More fun with nudity

Look what I found, barely an hour after my last post about half-naked men. This time they're fully naked, and they're for hire.

Be sure not to miss the final question!

Naked asses and frying chicken: who wins?

In a sense, we all do. ;) But I think the lady with the mostly-nude male harem took home the jackpot. ;P


COCKTAIL TIME! from EIT! on Vimeo.

Thanks to the silent ones

Cyan stories don't get much recognition from the EMCSA crowd, but I know people read them even if they don't comment on them. For instance, I haven't received much feedback on "How Did It Come To This?"; but Stat Counter shows me how many readers are clicking through to my blog from the story.

I don't have any personal information about my visitors, but the statistics are nice in their own way. They let me know people are out there, all around the world, enjoying what I have to say. That's a great feeling.

So let me return the favor. I don't post on every forum I visit, or e-mail every writer who floats my boat. I appreciate the privacy of lurking, and I appreciate the fact that you stopped by even if you didn't say anything. You might not have known it, but you made me smile.

A Peek Beneath the Duct Tape: How Did It Come to This?

I hope I fooled some of you with the red herring in How Did It Come To This? - and I hope none of you dropped the story before you found out it was a red herring. If I ever wrote another vampire tale (and after collaborating so successfully with Jukebox* on The White Album, why should I?), it certainly wouldn't have a vamp as traditional as Jimmy would have been...if he'd been a vamp.

Admittedly, my first idea for a hockey-player-vs.-figure-skater story did involve a Nosferatu, but there's a reason the story didn't work out that way. I couldn't make it work out that way; it would have been too boring. I didn't get enthusiastic about the tale until I realized Jimmy didn't have to be a real vampire; he just had to seem like one. Then it occurred to me that the lyrics to "Time Is Running Out" would fit incredibly well with an EMC story, and I got really enthusiastic.

I don't know how many m/m fans are also Muse fans (though the "belldom" phenomenon would suggest some overlap ;)), so I won't go into much detail about the Muse-related Easter eggs in the story. If you're not a fan, you won't even notice them; and if you are a fan, you'll get a few extra laughs from the story. Here's a hint: Aside from TIRO and "Hysteria," I've referenced at least seven other Muse songs; and I've also given each of the band members his own hidden shout-out.

Not all the Easter eggs are Muse-related, though. Larry Szymanski isn't a fan of Stephen King, but I am, so there's a reason for the capitalized "It" in the fortune cookie scene. You'll get "It" if you've read It. ;)

Speaking of which, my first idea for Jimmy's fortune was a fortune I received myself: "Good sense travels on the well-worn paths; genius never." Eventually I worked this out to be a bad translation of something like, "Good sense always travels on well-worn paths, but genius never does." In other words, genius goes its own way.

That's Jimmy, I think. He succeeds even though he never takes the well-worn paths and never does the expected. In fact, he's so instinctive in his actions that he doesn't always realize what he's doing, himself. I wasn't sure about that at first, but in the end I realized he was just playing by ear and having fun. Of course, he never doubted he'd get Larry in the end. After all, he's not just a genius; he's a fae.

Good thing he's an iconoclast fae, though. Imagine what could have happened to Larry if Penelope had gotten hold of him!

*My collaboration with Jukebox was so successful that I think some of his influence carried over into this story. You can see it mostly in the humor and in Jimmy's banter.