I wrote this article back in 2005 and had it posted in a couple of places but it's not on the Web anymore so I thought I'd give it an airing here.

All comments gratefully received.

Erotica, sin, shame and secrecy

Writing fiction, particularly erotica, is a very intimate process. You mine, consciously or unconsciously, your imagination and experience. You discover what topics or situations or characters trigger and sustain your creativity.

As your fiction piles up behind you like a series of cast-off skins, themes and attitudes emerge that tell you and your readers something about how your mind works and where your heart lies.

Erotica as genre is often seen as an opportunity to escape from the real world into fantasy or to reinforce the idea that you are not alone in the cravings you have and the delights that you seek.

In my own writing, erotica seems to become more of an entanglement than an escape. Time and again I find myself writing about sin, shame, and secrecy.

If writing tells you about the writer then clearly I’m not one of these liberated souls who enjoy sex openly and honestly and dive naked into the pool, grin at their readers and say, “Come on in, the water is lovely.”

I’m more the guy you find in the kitchen at parties or reviewing the CD rack and wondering why the CDs aren’t alphabetised. The one who looks and longs but rarely acts and my writing reflects that.

The cool kids in the pool can write fine, sex-positive erotic stories about the transcendent joy experienced by those who open themselves in a healthy and honest way to their own desires. The problem is that those who share this experience are probably too busy fucking to read erotica and those of us in the kitchen, who eagerly seek erotica, are left either envious or, more likely, unconvinced.

So I try to imagine the people who read my stories finding parts of themselves in them. Some parts they will like and some will make them squirm but I still want them to experience a sense of recognition.

In my mind, my readers have a rich inner life, a craving for sex and a deep understanding of the nature of sin, shame, and secrecy.

To the kids in the pool, my readers are the sexually repressed folks who get off in secret to things they are too up tight to do in real life.

If one believes the women's magazines, then sexual repression is a bad thing. These poor repressed people could be fulfilled and happy if only they would self-actualise, embrace all of the parts of their nature as aspects of themselves, live in the here and now from time to time, put aside their inhibitions and just do it.

This is the Nike generation version of "turn on, tune in, drop out.” It comes out as "Open up, kick back, get off."

I'm unconvinced by the idea that just because something is nice it is also good. Some nice things are exactly the opposite of good.

When I write, I think about people who have to struggle to be good; people with strong sexual urges who demonstrate restraint rather than repression; people who, when the restraint fails, experience shame and regret mixed in with their underlying pleasure.

These people understand, at least at an intuitive level, the concept of sin.

I am an atheist by conviction but I find that an understanding of sin is an asset in writing erotica, so pardon me for a paragraph or two while I don my "Father Mike" costume and expound.

Most Christians are aware of the seven deadly sins but few seem to me to understand them. They are about excess. They are about persisting in behaviours that damage your ability to see the world in a way that enables you to choose good over evil.

Hunger is not a sin, gluttony is. Relaxation is not a sin, sloth is. Desire is not a sin, lust is.

Persistence in sin shapes the sinner, twisting them, perhaps crippling them, and making it harder and harder to be a person who does not sin.

Before we get to lust, let's start with gluttony. All of us get hungry. Many of us get cravings for particular types of food. A very few of us passionately desire food. Not all of those who passionately desire it are gluttons. The glutton MUST eat. The glutton will sacrifice their dignity, their income, their time, in order to eat.

In modern parlance this "sinful" behaviour is pathological: in other words, it acts upon the person in the same way as a disease.

Have you ever eaten to excess, to the point where it hurts to eat more and yet your hand still reaches out for another portion and your mouth chews food your mind knows you do not need and cannot process? To understand gluttony you must think of feeling that way persistently. Think of what it would do to you. What impact you would have on others. Think about the moral and economic implications. Then think about doing it anyway. Every day. Then you start to understand the sinful/pathological nature of gluttony.

To me, a person who has a strong desire for food, who knows what it means to eat beyond the point of satiation and who decides not to do that today, is showing restraint, not repression.

The analogy with Lust is obvious.

So imagine a reader who knows, deep in their gut, that if they gave themselves up to the sexual desire inside them, the world would not be enough. So each day, driven by their knowledge of sin and their desire to retain the grace to live well, they show restraint.

But each and every day is a struggle and some days they lose.

Perhaps on such days they read erotica. Perhaps this allows them to come to the brink, look over the edge but not jump off. And perhaps, having lost the struggle just a little, they feel shame.

It would be a mistake to imagine that the shame is to do with sex. The shame is to do with lacking the strength to be who you want to be and the sure and certain knowledge of who your own weakness could allow you to become.

And with shame comes secrecy.

This kind of secrecy is not about hiding a lie but about bolstering the truth.

If I "come out" and say, "Actually, I spend most mornings wanking over porn, I mentally undress strangers, I occasionally have affairs and, if I could do it without getting caught, I would fuck the brains out of every pretty (and some not so pretty) thing in town" I might be being honest but I would not be doing good.

This kind of public statement would seem like an affirmation. It would change how others see me. It might encourage others to say, "I too want this”; which would be fine if "this" was the person I wanted to be. But if I aspire to be the kind of person who treats himself and others with respect and sometimes love, then when I read the erotica and when it gets me off and even when I recognise it says something true about me and those around me, I will not proclaim this publicly. I will keep my lapses secret in the hope that I may eventually succeed in living up to my aspirations.

So is my imaginary reader someone who denies his own nature, feels bad about himself for no reason and then cloaks his behaviour in a hypocritical secrecy? Or is he someone who understand goodness because he feels the pull or sin, experiences shame as an indicator that he has not yet lost all judgement and turns to secrecy as a lifeline that allows him another chance at goodness tomorrow?

I believe that one of the skills for a writer of erotica is to know how to raise these questions and leave the reader to invent the answers.

Trying out another genre - a police story

I'm one of those old fashioned folks who prefers crime fiction that isn't focused on helping me share the mind of a serial killer or experience the heat of an arterial gush. I like Raymond Chandler, Carol O'Connell, Harlan Coben, Barbara Nadel and Carl Hiaasen. They introduce me to people who hold my interest and places that seem real even though I've never been there.

Anyway. I've been thinking about trying to write a crime story. A while back I wrote a short story featuring Detective Claire Jardin in New York City. At the time, the story was an execrise to see if I could write a story with sex in it which wasn't about sex and which didn't use any words that would get diapproving looks at a WI meeting. But Claire stayed in my head. She wants me to tell the story of boy who confessed to murdering a woman he ought not to have had any involvement with. So while I let her fill me in on the details (at least enough for me to find out how the plot resolves itself, I thought I'd dust off her first fictional outing and post it here.

I'd be happy to hear any comments you want to share.

Thanks..

Till death do us part

© Mike Kimera 2002. All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without written permission from mikekimera@yahoo.co.uk

It was an upscale apartment that still managed to look elegant and spacious despite the clutter that a bunch of cops working a crime scene brought with them. Murphy, the uniform first on the scene met us at the elevator. She’s a good cop, young but keen.

“What you got Murph?” Martinez, my partner, asked.

“Two fatal shootings in the study, Detective, but neither of them are as cold as the guy on the balcony: David Reynolds. His wife’s lying dead in there, shot with his gun and all he says is, ‘Tell me when someone with rank arrives, officer,’ and goes out to look at the view.”

I walked past Murphy into the study. I’d get to the bodies later; first I wanted to get the flavor of the place. It was less of a study, more of a media room: Bang and Olufsen sound system, plasma TV, DVD player, commercial quality VCR and two computers, one with webcam. Very cool, very minimalist, very tidy. The only personal touch was the ego-wall, set behind the desk so visitors got a good view: photographic evidence of the success of Mr. David Reynolds, award winning maker of TV commercials and friend to the rich and famous.

I moved from photograph to photograph. Reynolds had a smile that never reached his eyes. There was only one “family” photograph, Mr and Mrs Reynolds on their wedding day. She was pretty and looked younger than him. The body language screamed trophy-wife. That’s why she was on the ego-wall for others to look at and not on the desk for him to see.

I turned to what was left of Mrs. Reynolds. The body was slumped against the wall, what used to be her face was splashed in arc of color behind her like a satanic halo. I squatted to take a closer look. ‘If those breasts are real there is no God’, I thought.

“The gun must have been right up against her chin,” Martinez said. I hate the way he creeps up behind me like that and he knows it.

“Yeah, seems almost malicious doesn’t it?”

“Not as malicious as what was done to Mr. Young-and-Handsome over there. Hey, Claire, you think it’s true that you can’t get into heaven if you’ve had your genitals shot off?”

“That’s what killed him?” I asked.

“Nope, I reckon the two shots through the heart at close range have to take the blame for that.”

“Ok, Murphy take us to see the grieving husband,” I said. I’d had enough of dead bodies for one evening.

“There’s something else you should see first, Detective,” Murphy said. “There’s a tape in the VCR. I checked on it cos the player was still warm when we arrived.”

She looked like she wanted my approval. I smiled at her and she pressed PLAY on the remote.

The first shot was a close up of a very aroused man forcing his way into an asshole that looked way too small to take him. I glanced at Martinez and we both looked at Murphy who was actually blushing.

“It gets better,” Murphy said, “I mean it gets relevant.”

It sounded like the way the New York Times might review porn flicks but I soon saw what Murphy meant. The next shot was Mrs. Reynolds sucking Young-and-Handsome. I learnt that Mrs Reynolds was a swallower, not a spitter and that the shot to Young-and-Handsome’s groin had blown away a substantial endowment. The film continued as a series of fast cuts of Mrs Reynolds and her lover imaginative variety of different positions.

“Switch it off Murphy, we’ve seen enough,” Martinez said.

“Well done for finding this, Murphy.” I said. “What do you think it tells us?”

“Apart from the fact Mrs Reynolds dyed her hair?” Martinez asked sarcastically.

Murphy and I both glared at him.

“Well, the picture quality is strictly amateur, all the shots are fixed camera, the lighting is poor, but the editing is very professional.”

“You watched this tape with these bodies in the room and that’s what you noticed?” Martinez said.

“That and the fact that the tape started from the beginning so if someone watched it tonight they rewound it afterwards,” Murphy replied.

“Maybe you should be doing my job,” Martinez said, with just an edge of irritation.

“Maybe she already is.” I said and he laughed. Martinez never manages to be in asshole-mode for long.

********************

When we got to the balcony Reynolds was on his feet, taking in his expensive view over Manhattan. I doubt that he was pleased by what he saw; it was probably just another kind of ego-wall.

He turned to face us and said, “I take it that the absence of uniform means that you are the ranking officers?”

His accent was very Brit and his question seemed more like a put down.

“I’m Detective Claire Jardin, this is Detective Raul Martinez.” I said, flashing my shield.

He ignored Martinez but offered me his hand with such confidence that I found myself shaking it. His grip was light and dry. No macho squeezing. No smile either.

He made sure that I saw him checking me out from toe to head, then he smiled and said, “So you are a Detective, Ms Jardin? How sad to have one’s illusion’s punctured. It would have been nice to believe that in real life homicide detectives are as young and as pretty as the ones on ‘NYPD Blue’.”

Martinez bristled with hurt macho pride on my behalf. Absurdly, I was struck by how sexy my name sounded when he pronounced it the French way. Clearly he knew how to be charming and had chosen to be insulting. I wondered what he wanted to gain by making me mad at him. I decided to give him some space to see if I could find out.

“You’re certain you want to talk about this now, Mr. Reynolds?” I said, “You’ve been through a significant trauma. You could talk to us later, with your lawyer present if you want.”

“A significant trauma, Detective? Is there another kind?”

I could see Martinez making a fist. He hates being patronized.

Reynolds smiled and said, “I’m sorry, that was rude of me. I appreciate that in this demonstrative, litigious society my restrained emotional reaction and my aversion to lawyers are regarded as deviant. Let’s just attribute that to me being an inscrutable Brit and get on with it shall we? I don’t want this to take all night. I have an important meeting in the morning.”

The Brit thing was clever, it made it much harder for me to read him and being nasty is so much easier to sustain than being fake nice. The evening was getting interesting.

“Why don’t you tell me what happened here, Mr.Reynolds?” I said, trying to sound as dumb as he thought I looked.

“Please, take a seat. Would you like a coffee? I’m afraid I don’t have any donuts but I could send out for some?”

I let the jibe slip by and took a seat. If Reynolds was in the mood to talk I didn’t want to distract him.

“I didn’t kill my wife, Detectives but to substantiate that I need to take you through some rather tiresome details. You see, although I am a very successful man, I am not a very nice one. People pretend to like me because I am successful. I think I am successful because I don’t waste time being nice. I am not without emotions but I’m selective about who I let see them.

My wife, Heather, was one of the few people I let inside the circle as it were. She knew what I needed and she gave it to me. Frankly, she was never a very adventurous lover but she was beautiful, obedient and faithful and for me, that was enough.

We had our fourth wedding anniversary last April. Things had settled down very well. I was pleased with her and I had told her so. I even increased her allowance. Then one day I forgot my wedding ring. I returned home to retrieve it and found Heather sweating under some toyboy she’d picked up. I watched for a while, unseen. The boy wasn’t particularly talented and Heather seemed a little desperate to me. I could almost have felt sorry for her but you see, she wasn’t inside the circle anymore. She had betrayed me. For me she had ceased to be real at that point.”

“Did your wife know that you had seen her that day?” I asked.

“Good question, Detective. It must be all that training you received at the taxpayers’ expense. I assure you that we will get through this much faster if you just shut your mouth and listen.”

“Are you always this aggressive to women Mr. Reynolds?” Martinez asked. “Did you have to teach your wife to shut her mouth?”

“Ah, you must be the bad cop then. So Ms Jardin here must be the one I’m supposed to want to please. Perhaps that technique works on the American MTV generation, I just find it irritating. If you will both be quiet I will give you my statement and you can be on your way to whatever bar it is that you wash away the memories in.”

He was good. I wondered if he’d ever been an actor. He was certainly being one now.

“Your partner is almost right, Ms Jardin. I did indeed set out to teach my wife a lesson. One that she learnt tonight in fact. The dead young man littering my study works under the name Lance Strong. Apparently he felt the name would get him into soaps. Unfortunately his coke habit made it hard for him to remember his lines and even soaps demand that of their actors these days. He auditioned for one of my commercials. Instead I hired him to have sex with my wife. Actually, his brief was two-fold: to broaden her sexual horizons to the point where she needed his particular kind of action and to make her fall in love with him.”

“You hired a man to have sex with your wife?”

“Oh, do keep up, Detective Martinez. I hired him to turn her into an emotionally vulnerable slut. There was of course one further condition of his employment. He had to do all of this on film. It was the best role of his young life. I’d fed him the material he needed to seduce her: her favourite films, the music she liked, the things she thought were romantic. I baited the hook and she swallowed it live on film. Lance turned out to be a better name for him than I had thought. He had enormous stamina as a lover and he got poor Heather to want things that I knew she would be embarrassed to ask future lovers for. There’s a tape in my study if you need the details. I’m sure it will be a success at Precinct parties.”

“So how do we end up with the dead bodies in your study, Mr. Reynolds?” I asked, wanting see what happened if I pushed.

“Ah, that was most unfortunate actually. Not at all how things were meant to resolve themselves. In this case, real-life deviated from my script.”

There was something different in the way he made that comment. I got the impression it was the first completely honest thing I’d heard him say.

“You see, at my suggestion, Lance proposed to Heather last week. The poor girl was so grateful. And she had such creative ways of showing her gratitude by then. It produced some remarkable footage.”

He licked his lips. I’m sure he wasn’t conscious of it. I knew then that he had watched every moment of his wife’s betrayal many times, savouring it. Getting off on it. He was right; he wasn’t a very nice man.

“So this evening they came into my study together so that Heather could ask me for a divorce. It was a poor choice of venue as it turned out. It is the only room in which I keep a gun. It is licensed of course. I just wish I’d kept the desk drawer locked. Still, guns don’t kill people, people kill people, don’t you agree?”

Not a nice man at all.

“After Heather told me of her new-found love, I showed her the tape. I thanked Lance for a job well done and told him that I intended to give him a bonus. I should have been paying attention to Heather, not Lance. The tape affected her more profoundly than I had expected. It was too much of a shock for her. While I was shaking Lance’s hand, Heather took my gun from the drawer and shot him between the legs. Before I could react, she shot him twice more in the chest. Poor Lance.

I know I should have been afraid for my own life but at the time I didn’t think about that, I just wanted to get the gun away from Heather. Then I realised she was about to shoot herself. We struggled. The gun went off. I was unable to stop her. She literally lost her head.

I’m afraid that means that I will test positive for gunpowder residue and you may even find my prints on the gun. I realise it puts me in a bad light, Detectives but I like to be honest. I can supply tapes covering every encounter between my wife and her paid-for-lover, plus a copy of Lance Stone’s contract. I’m sure that a competent lawyer would have no difficulty convincing a jury to see this for the murder/suicide that it was.”

We asked him questions for another thirty minutes but his story didn’t change. He even wrote it down for us. I was certain Reynolds was lying but there was so much truth in what he said that I couldn’t find my way to the lie.

Reynolds stayed on his balcony when we finished with him. He asked to be informed when the bodies had been removed. He made it sound like a request to get rid of the leftovers from a room service meal, but I wasn’t completely buying the calm and in control act. I figured he was in no hurry to go back into his bloodstained study. I told Murphy to keep an eye on him. It would have been embarrassing if we had had to scrape him off the pavement because I’d misread how stiff his Brit upper lip really was.

In the elevator, on the way down to the lobby, Martinez said, “He’ll get away with it you know. The jury will watch that tape and condemn her not him. I bet they ask for a copy to watch over night. I bet they won’t want to miss a moment.”

I saw the lie and the truth then. We didn’t get out of the elevator when it reached the lobby, we went straight back to Reynolds’ apartment.

********************

The camera was in the ceiling of the study. We played the tape on his plasma TV. Things went just as Reynolds described them until he switched on the tape of his wife and her lover. Heather Reynolds laughed.

“God, Lance, you were so big and so hard I thought you were going to split me wide open.”

The camera was fixed on Heather so I couldn’t see Reynolds’ face, but I suspected this was were reality parted company with his script.

Heather was rubbing herself up against Lance now, both of them watching the screen. “Mmm, I do love the taste of fresh meat in the morning,” Heather said, her hand stroking Lance’s crotch. Lance kissed her.

Heather broke the embrace and turned towards Reynolds. “What’s the matter, David? Things not going as you planned? Lance told me about your pathetic little plan on the first night we met.”

Heather leant forward, her hands on Reynolds desk. The tape played on, unregarded behind her.

“You were right, David, after four years of lying under a dried-up emotional cripple, I wanted to be taken by a real man. But do you know what the best part was? Do you know what used to make me scream with pleasure? It wasn’t that you’d chosen such a stud, or that you were paying for me to get properly serviced for a change, it was the thought of you watching Lance taking me and getting off on it because you love the size of him, because you wanted it to be you he was in, not me.”

Reynolds was only just on camera but I could see him reaching for the desk drawer.

“I don’t want a divorce, David. You and I are going to stay married and if you ever try to change that I’ll expose this twisted little plot and take you for every penny you have.”

Heather turned to Lance.

“Why don’t we give him one last thrill Lance? Let’s do it on his anally-tidy desk.”

Lance stepped towards the desk. He was reaching for his fly when the first shot hit him. Reynolds moved into camera-shot, placed the gun against Lance’s chest and fired twice. The camera was on his face as he turned towards Heather. There was nothing in his eyes except hate.

Heather backed against the wall. She didn’t shout or struggle. She seemed mesmerised by Reynolds’s eyes. He placed the gun under her chin and fired.

For a few moments he stood over the body. Then he put the gun in her hands. His movements were calm. He switched off the tape and rewound it. Slowly he moved to the phone. He dialled 911. He gave his name and his address and reported two deaths by gunshot. Then he sat on the desk, looking up at the camera until Murphy arrived at the scene.

********************

“So how did you know the camera was there?” Murphy asked.

We were at Raj O’Rielly’s, home to Irish booze and Indian food and beloved of every cop in the precinct.

“It was what Raul said about not missing a moment. Reynolds photographed everything. He wasn’t going to miss the last chapter in his wife’s humiliation.”

“But why leave the tape there for us to find?”

“Maybe he thought we’d need a search warrant to search a crime scene,” Martinez said.

“Or maybe he was thought we were too stupid to figure it out.”

I was remembering Reynolds’s behaviour on the balcony. The way he had provoked me. The performance he had given.

“I think,” I said, “that he wanted to get caught”.

“Claire,” Martinez said “to almost quote the great Ozzy Osbourne ‘I love you to bits but you’re completely nuts’.”

I laughed it off and went to get some more Guinness to go with the Rogan Josh, but even in the middle of all that noise and life, I was haunted by Reynolds looking up at the camera as he sat on his desk. There had been nothing at all behind his eyes. Not even hate.

Eroticism, ecstasy, sin and Remittance Girl's "Splinter"

I've recently read a work in progress from Remittance Girl (her site is a wonderful source of well written stories - visit it here). The work is called "Splinter" and is about a young woman, with a desire to become a nun, who expresses her devotion to God through self-chastisement (meaning she flogs herself until she overwhelmed by the pain). You can find the story here.

When rg (Remittance Girl) shared the story on ERWA, she asked whether or not is was erotic.

Most of what I write is labelled as erotic but it seems to me that the meaning of the word has leached away, like a poster that has been too long in the rain, so I decided to offer a definition of eroticism.

Eroticism is not about sex or arousal, it is about sexual desire.

Currently, gratification is all the rage: sex on the first date and no later than the third; porn that presses all the buttons to get the minimum time between stiff and sticky with the maximum bang.

Gratification is not inherently erotic.

Desire is as much about anticipation, about restraint and constraint as it is about release. Release may be a consequence of desire but it does not measure its strength. The strength of a desire is better measured by the persistence of the erotic impulse.

Ecstatics have the ability to focus completely on the source of their desire - whether that is God or music - and transcend everything except the experience - the rapture -provoked by their sustained concentration on the object of their desire.

This rapture is an intensely physical experience. It has been suggested that ecstactics are “wired” differently to the rest of us – their Autonomic Nervous System, the ANS, responds to certain stimuli and produces a mood changing chemicals that provide a truly overwhelming experience. (see here)

rg's story walks an interesting line - whether what is being experienced is religious ecstasy or an addiction to an erotic desire for pain.

The ecstasy is physically the same. The source of the desire is different.

I think that rg’s story only engages with the erotic in part 2. The Main Character believes that something was taken from her. She is no longer able to perceive her own motives for inflicting pain on herself as pure. Therefore the ecstasy she experiences has lost its innocence. It has been eroticised.

The strength of the desire and the experience of the rapture have not changed. What has altered is the perception of the object of desire. Appropriately enough in this Catholic setting, rg manages to associate the erotic with the sinful. At the point that the desire is eroticised it also becomes sinful – the Main Character literally acquire carnal knowledge.

If rg’s story is labelled as erotica, then one could argue that it engages the reader in the erotic in part one as well as part two. This is not a first person account. The fact that the Main Character doesn’t acknowledge the erotic nature of her desire until part 2 doesn’t prevent the rest of us from seeing the erotic (and the sinful) in her actions in part 1.

Rg chooses to set her story in a halfway house - halfway perhaps between impulse and gratification. She has a priest who shares the same erotic impulse as the Main Character. In part 2 of the story he restrains the Main Character

from acting on her impulse while at the same time experiencing sexual arousal.

As any Catholic will know, sin is matter of thought, word or deed. Even if no action is taken on the impulse, the presence of the impulse is sinful. The same applies to eroticism. The impulse is erotic whether or not it is acted upon. The sustained experience of the impulse, even when the opportunity to act upon it is denied, actually increases the erotic charge. One has to wonder whether the priest's arousal stems from the external evidence of the Main Character's actions (the blood) or from the recognition of the strength of her erotic impulse.

I recommend her story to you (part 3 is now on her site).

Taboos in Erotica

In ERWA we’ve been having a discussion about the restrictions placed on erotica that don’t apply to main stream writing. If you want to be published (at least in the US) you need to avoid the big four taboos: Incest, Rape, Bestiality and Childsex.(the last being any sexual act involving any person under eighteen).

The restriction arises because erotica is assumed to have arousal as its aim and using these topics for that purpose is seen as obscene.

Take a look around the Internet and you’ll find a lot of porn written around these themes and a lot of it gets the whole kick out of a kind of fetishistic view of the acts involved and which tends both to turn the people in the stories into sub-human fetish sex objects and to avoid any confrontation with the physical and emotional realities of the acts themselves. This, of course, is what makes them porn.

I would hope that erotica would treat the themes differently, exploring the emotional and physical realities of the experiences. Of course that doesn’t mean that they would get published.

The debate on ERWA made me ask myself what I want from writing erotica and what restrictions I would place on myself.

I decided that I want my stories to bite. I want them to stay in the reader’s head. I want them to change the reader by making them confront things, identify with things, reject or accept things. This raised the question of my responsibility as a writer.

My tagline on my email is: “What you read is not what I wrote. I provide the text, you provide the meaning.” My take on my responsibility reflects this view.

I believe I have to take responsiblity for the intentions behind what I write and the integrity and skill with which I realise the intention. I can't take any accountablity for what the reader actually reads or how they are changed by the experience.

Below, I’ve offered a flasher and a short story which take on some of the taboos and which demonstrate what I mean. If you think they are likely to offend you, don’t read any further than this.

If you do read the stories, I’m interested in your views on the stories and on what you expect from erotica.

The Third Word
© Mike Kimera 2006. All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without written permission from mikekimera@yahoo.co.uk

Please, Daddy

That’s what I whisper in his ear when I am spread and he is hard and
sweat is all that is between us.

Please, Daddy

Passes my lips like a promise or a plea, rousing his lust, stirring my
memories, mixing his lust and my guilt

Please, Daddy

A prayer offered to this bar-met stranger, the right age but with the
wrong face, as he pushes into me

Please, Daddy

As always, pleasure and shame race through me, my present and my past
bound together. Perhaps this time I will finally release the third
word.

Please, Daddy. Stop.

Nadica

© Mike Kimera 2003. All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without written permission from mikekimera@yahoo.co.uk

Nadica had Saul tied to the bed by the time I got there. She was kneeling astride his hips, holding his long thin cock at the base and rolling it against the soft swell of her belly. It left a little trail of silver precum just below her navel. Seeing it against her like that, you wondered how she ever fitted it all inside her.

It wasn’t that Saul was so huge, he was only a little longer than me, though I’m thicker and can stay hard longer, well Saul’s in his fifties now and he does OK for guy with grey hair on his balls, no it was just that Nadica is tiny, three inches shy of five foot and slim with it.

Nadica never fucks naked. The first time I had her she wore a white blouse and striped school tie, with a knot so large that the rest of the tie barely made it between her breasts. She wore the shirt open with the tie around her neck, not around the collar of the shirt

Normally, I’m not an adventurous guy when it comes to sex, I’m just grateful when a woman opens her legs for me and lets me hump until I’m done, but there’s something about Nadica that changes that. The tie was part of it. As she rode Saul’s cock and sucked me off, I couldn’t just stand there and enjoy it; the tie demanded to be pulled. I wrapped it round my fist and used it to drag her head further down my shaft. Nadica loved it. Saul told me later that her cunt had spasmed so hard it hurt. When I came in her mouth, she let the semen dribble down onto the tie, then she stuffed it into her mouth like a gag and lay back on Saul’s chest until he managed to come inside her.

Today she’s wearing a pink angora cardigan that is so tiny it only comes part way down her arms and won’t close across her breasts. With the top button fastened and the soft material falling away on either side, Nadica’s breasts seem even larger than usual. Her breasts are full and conical and sit absurdly high on her narrow little chest. Every time I see them my hands wants to feel their weight and my mouth yearns to suckle. The cardigan is sweet and soft and innocent but Nadica makes it into an incitement to wickedness. I think that Nadica has seen a lot of wickedness in her short life.

Saul doesn’t know how old she is. She had no papers with her when he found her, a week ago. We have decided that she must be at least twenty; it would be hard to live with ourselves if we had decided anything else.

Saul’s not even sure where exactly he picked her up. He’s a careful man. You have to be careful driving a truck that close to the Bosnian border, even if the truck has UN written on the side. The war there is getting nasty. Stories are starting to come out about a massacre in Srebrenica – the UN troops just stepped aside and let the Serbs get on with killing every male and raping every woman. We’re talking thousands of people here. I can’t imagine hating badly enough to sustain that much evil. Of course, it’s not just the Serbs; the whole country is soaked in an acid bath of pain and fear and hate.

Anyway, somehow Nadica managed to stowaway in Saul’s cab. He didn’t find her until he climbed into the sleeping area at the back. He said she looked small, tired and very young, wrapped around a scrappy bag of clothes. Stupidly, he assumed she wasn’t dangerous. He was wrong. Her knife was long and sharp, with serrated edges. The kind of knife a soldier carries.

When she pressed it up against his neck he thought he was going to die. Then she fucked him. With the knife against his throat, she straddled him and sucked on his tongue. He tried to touch her but she pricked him with the knife hard enough to draw blood. After that he let her get on with it. She worked his cock with her hand while she licked away the blood from his throat. Then she rode him until he came. When Nadica fucks she goes into her head. She chants. Always the same chant “datata, datata, datata.”

Saul reckons he could have taken the knife then but just when he was thinking of it, she fell forward onto him, wrapped her arms around his neck and started to cry. Saul held her. Nadica brings that out in you. After sex she seems fragile and precious and you want to hold her forever and protect her from harm.

Saul fell asleep with Nadica in his arms. When he woke in the morning she’d tied his hands and feet with belts and taken his wallet. He thought that she’d robbed him and was thankful that she hadn’t cut him before she left. Then she came back, bringing his wallet and a warm baguette.

He tried to talk to her but her only response was to massage his cock and then sit on it while she fed him chunks of bread that she sliced with that serrated knife. Then she brought him off by hand, licking her fingers afterwards like his cum was jam.

When the sex was over she untied him, cuddled up next to him and went to sleep.

Saul drove her home. He couldn’t bring himself to leave her behind. I tell myself that that’s because Saul is a kind man, which is true, but part of me, the part of me I don’t let out in public, knows that it’s because sex with Nadica is addictive. It’s not like anything else you’ve ever experienced. At least not like anything I’ve experienced.

Saul asked me to come and see Nadica because I’m good with languages. I think he was also a little frightened by the effect she was having on him and by what would happen if he stayed on his own with her.

I tried French, German, and Italian with no success. I only learnt her name by pointing at my self and giving mine and then pointing at her. On the third attempt, she smiled, said “Nadica” and then sucked the finger I was pointing at her. I tried for another twenty minutes or so, then Nadica disappeared into the bedroom and came back out dressed in the white blouse and school tie and nothing else. She climbed on Saul’s lap, facing me but rubbing herself against him. Then she beckoned me to come over.

The sex was… compelling. My senses were overloaded. I couldn’t believe what was happening. Nadica works at sex like it’s a form of dressage. Then, when she‘s into it, she starts with the “datata” chant. Over and over.

We’ve fucked her every day for the past week, always as a threesome. She won’t do me if Saul isn’t there. Won’t even look at me.

When I’m with her it’s like the world goes away and there is an overwhelming sense of… well, thrill. Not lust. Certainly not love. It’s that feeling you get when you know that you’re crossing a line; that you’re doing something you will regret but you’re going to do it anyway; when all the normal rules fade and all that’s left is you and your desire and what you’re prepared to do to sate it.

Nadica is playing a new game today. She looks me in the eye as she straddles Saul’s cock and then presses down hard, forcing it up her arse. She leans back, her hands behind her on his chest, her breasts pointing upwards, jutting out from beneath the angora cardigan and she spreads her legs, inviting me to fuck her.

I’d promised myself that I wouldn’t come here today. I’ve been doing some research on the web. Nadica is a Serbian name. It means Hope. That gave me the clue, so I checked an online dictionary for a translation from Serbian to English. Nadica isn’t chanting “datata”; she’s saying “Da, Tata” – “Yes, Daddy”.

When I found that out, I sat in front of my computer and let it sink in: the dressage sex, the chanting, the desire to sleep when not fucking, the refusal to fuck naked, the refusal to fuck at all when Saul isn’t there.

I thought I knew what it meant. I thought I knew what she’d been through in Serbia. I thought I’d never let myself fuck her again.

Then Saul called me and now I’m here.

Nadica is sliding back and forth on Saul’s cock, just a fraction of an inch at a time. Her cunt is wet. Her eyes are closed. She’s waiting for me. Soon she will start to chant.

In the next few seconds I will discover what kind of human being I am.

© Mike Kimera 2003. All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without written permission from mikekimera@yahoo.co.uk

A curious thing about writing erotica...

A curious thing about writing erotica, or at least erotica that you want to see published some day, is that you have more constraints on subject matter than writers of mainstream fiction.

If a mainstream author writes about underage sex it's an exploration of a rite of passage in contemporary society, or, as in the case of the wonderful movie, "Juno", an Oscar winning script.

If a writer of erotica does a story on the same thing, they place themselves beyond the pale?

Why?

Litigation. The writing of erotica is seen as exploiting taboo subjects to stimulate and pervert their audience.

Well, I write erotica but I also write whatever I think will make a good story.

I think the story below is both fun and thought provoking. It's fast, witty, sexy and not necessarily a comfortable read (I know, I'm SO modest).

Yet I hold out no hopes of seeing it published anywhere.

I post it here for your enjoyment. Please feel free to comment

Mary, Margaret and Me

© 2008 Mike Kimera. Do not reproduce without written permission from mikekimera@yahoo.co.uk

“Good Morning.”

The voice that has woken me is female, young, playful in a slutty sort of way and I have no idea who it belongs to. I try to sit up in bed but my skull is membrane-thin from last night’s alcohol and my brain slops against it like an egg yolk hitting a windshield. I groan and decide it would not be wise to try and open my eyes.

“Y’don’t look well, Uncle Patrick. It must be the whiskey me mam was pouring down you last night.”

UNCLE Patrick. It comes back to me in a stomach churning rush. One bad idea following rapidly after another like staggers on a high-wire had brought me back to Mary O’Rourke’s door and, it seemed, to her bed.

“Anyone would think she wanted you too drunk to do anything, the way she kept filling your glass. Why d’ya think that might be, Uncle?”

That’s right. I didn’t fuck Mary last night. I got drunk. No. She got me drunk. Then she must have put me to bed. From the looks of things she must have stripped me naked before she tucked me in. Well I hope one of us enjoyed it.

“You’re a fine looking man. She’s not had a man like you these past five years or more. You’d think she’d want you sober and upright, not drunk and prone.”

I force myself to open my eyes. The light hurts but the view is worth it. At the foot of my bed is a girl of nineteen or so. She is wearing pyjamas that are tight across the arse and don’t have enough buttons fastened on the shirt. She’s looking at me like I’m her next meal and she’s really really hungry. I’ve seen that look before. Now I know exactly who she is.

“I’m not your uncle, Margaret O’Rourke, and if your mother knew you were in here she’d take a broom to you.”

“That’s right,” Margaret says, coming around the side of the bed, towards me. “You’re not really my uncle. She just wants me to call you that so everything will seem respectable.”

Margaret sits on the side of the bed, close enough for me to reach out and touch her. Her pyjamas are white with a little red cherry motif. It shows the girl has a sense of humour.

“She’s very respectable, these days, y’know. Right now she’s off at Mass. Can’t be missing Mass on a Sunday, can she? She’ll be there for an hour or more yet.”

Margaret stretches out on her side across the bed, just below my feet. She rests her head on one hand and holds the other behind her on her arse, placing the few shirt buttons she has fastened under a pressure they are unlikely to survive. Then she grins at me.

The pain in my head has started to recede. I can only think that this is the result of the blood in my body rushing south to give me the sturdiest of erections.

“Of course, she wasn’t so respectable when you and she were at it like rabbits on Viagra.”

With a flexibility that only the young would take for granted, Margaret sits up in a semi-lotus pose and leans forward. Her skin is creamy and smooth and her breasts are high and taut and God Damn It, I shouldn’t be looking at them at all.

“She’d have been my age when she was fucking you, wouldn’t she? Do y' remember what she was like then, at all?”

Oh I remember all right. It was remembering Mary O’Rourke that made me decide to stay the weekend in Dublin instead of going straight back to New York. Mary was my first lust. We burned for each other. She’d drag me into the backseat of her father’s car and straddle me like she was taking possession of her territory. Then she’d hold my mouth to her breast and fuck me, rocking slowly back and forth on my cock, muttering ‘fuck me y’ bastard,’ like she was saying the Rosary.

“She was beautiful. She still is. And you have a filthy mouth.”

“Oh, you’d be amazed how filthy this mouth can be,” Margaret says, looking me straight in the eye.

I swallow hard as I imagine her doing the same. God Almighty, how the hell did I end up here?

“They say I look like me mother”, Margaret says. “So does this remind you of anything?”

Margaret scoots onto all fours with her tightly clad arse pointing right at me, then, looking back at me; she works her hips in a slow but firm figure of eight.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Mary used to call that churning because if she did it long enough it produced cream and turned me to butter.

Mary was the best thing that ever happened to me. I’d realized that yesterday, after I’d finished my business and had let my mind wander to times past. She was fun and bright, and sexy as all get out. And I’d left her to find my fortune just when hers had taken a turn for the worse.

“Well, if that tent pole pushing up the sheet is anything to go by, you like what you see, Patrick.”

Margaret turns around and prowls slowly up the bed towards me as she speaks.

“I’ve a thing for older men, Patrick.”

Margaret’s arms are on either side of my legs now. She looks wonderful. I can positively smell the youth of her.

“Would you like me to do you, Patrick? For old time sake?”

My reaction isn’t planned. It is pure instinct. And it isn’t the kind of thing you brag about in the pub.

“Margaret O’Rourke, stop this at once!” I spit out these words as I shuffle backwards away from Margaret, like a drunk trying to get out of the path of a speeding car.

“Do y’not think I’m pretty, Patrick?” Margaret pretends to pout. Then her hands reach up to the buttons on her pyjama jacket and she says, “Would you like a closer look?”

It takes an effort but I look the other way and say, “I’m your father and you will stop this right now.”

Margaret doesn’t say anything. She just gets off the bed, walks to the door, opens it a little and shouts: “Ma, you were right. He knew all along.”

She looks back at my stricken face, grins and then adds, “Oh and he’s not a complete shit. I can even see why you fancied him… when he was younger.”

My head is in a whirl. What has just happened here? When Mary fell pregnant I’d was all set to go to New York and there was no way I wanted a kiddie to stop me. So I’d played the shit and said I’d no way of knowing that I was the father. Mary hadn’t argued. She’d planted her boot on my arse and told me not to come back, but she hadn’t argued.

“Margaret. What…?”

Margaret laughs. “The test was my idea. I knew all about you and Mam and how you walked out on us. When you showed up yesterday, I bet Mam that I could get you to admit who you are – Daddy. Now you’d better get dressed. Mam will want to speak to you in the parlour.”

“Margaret, I’m sorry.”

“No. You’re not. You’re surprised, embarrassed even, but you’re not sorry. And you’re not my father in any way that matters. Now get dressed and try to find where you left your dignity.”

I sit in bed for a moment, trying to take everything in. I realise two things. I have a daughter I am proud of and when push came to shove I wasn’t a complete shit. Which means that I shouldn’t keep acting like a complete shit. I dress slowly, take a deep breath and head downstairs to apologise to Mary.