Inside Mike Kimera

Time To Go

2011-03-31T02:10:00.002+02:00

Some of you will know that I stopped being Mike Kimera for a couple of years and then returned because I missed writing.

For personal reasons, I have once again decided not to be Mike Kimera.

If the urge to write still hits me, I will do it under my own name and it will not be erotica.

I'd like to thank all of you who have read my stuff over the years and especially those people who have written to me and shared their views.

Review of "Grave Sight" by Charlene Harris

2011-03-17T00:06:00.000+01:00

Grave Sight by Charlaine Harris

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Charlene Harris has a talent for writing about the different and the damaged; Harper Connelly is both.

Harris' smooth writing style makes this book an easy read but that is not to say that the book is without substance. Harper Connelly and her brother are both people I want to know more about: ethical, loyal, brave and broken.

Harris gives Connelly a distinctive and compelling voice. This is a woman who sees the world differently and is brave enough not to look away.

Of course, there is a plot, complex enough to be intriguing and transperent enough to let you smugly anticipate the ending, but the plot is much less important than the characterization and the back story.

Connelly can attribute her strangeness to neglectful, abusive parents and a bolt of lightening. The people she meets have no excuse for the monsterous things that they do or allow other people to do.

As she does in her Sookie Stackhouse books, Harris leaves me feeling that the taken-for-granted violence and hatred in America is far more frightening and repellent than anything supernatural.

I recommend that you buy not just this book, but the three that follow it, because I think that, like me, you will want to move from one book to the next in quick sucession.

View all my reviews

How not to spend $300 - say no to sterilization of addicts

2011-03-13T07:10:00.004+01:00

Here's a link that has been the source of much discussion on ERWA

http://people.howstuffworks.com/is-it-legal-to-sterilize-addicts.htm

This privately funded scheme offers $300 to support addicts who volunteer to be sterilized. The link was posted by someone who saw the logical appeal of the scheme but who said that they felt like a Nazi for wanting to do this.

I couldn't get the post out of my head.

My first response was to push against the eugenics arguement in general. I wrote:

Ask yourself this, what kind of person privately funds an organization
that is focussed not on helping any particular individual or group but
on eliminating them from the genepool?

What else would people like this fund?

What would you have to be or do to be on their list to be given
the opportunity to volunteer?

18 US states passed legisaltion in support of compulsory sterilization
as part of eugenics initiatives, believing that poverty and crime
could be sterilized out of society.

(See this Yale studyand this article on the Racial Integrity Act of 1924)

I believe that it was wrong then, it is wrong now and it will always be wrong.

I believe that the educated, wealthy people who fund these initiatives deserved to be compassionately reminded to join the human race as equals rather than as architects of genetic improvement.

The argument continued and cooler heads than mine said: what about the planned parenthood, what about the fact that this is voluntary and applies only to people who already have children, what about the fact that it is such a small amount of money and makes such a big difference.

It made me think about what we really bothering me about the idea. I'd like to share my response with you.

I don't think considering this proposal in a positive way makes anyone a Nazi. I think it puts you in that difficult position where a problem that makes your heart ache seems to have a solution that makes your conscience itch.

I know $300 goes nowhere. Yet $300 establishes the principal that this is an OK thing to offer. That seems like a marketing bargain to me. It is the inverse off the old joke (which was never anything but serious) where a man offers a woman $5 million to have sex with him.When she
agrees he offers her $5 instead. She asks what kind of woman he thinks she is. He replies,we've established what kind of woman you are, now we're just haggling about the price.

The heart of the problem is that many kids are born to parents who fuck them up.

The kids offer unconditional love and in return they get abuse, neglect, hatred, indifference, cheerful incompetence, exploitation, etc. Of course, not all these parents are addicts nor are they necessarily poor or uneducated. Lots of parents fuck up their kids one way or another. Yet there is no doubt that the chances of having a shit life increase when your parents are lost to addiction or ground down by poverty or twisted by ignorance or all three.

Of course, we want to protect the children and give them a better life. Yet things just keep getting in the way. I admire the courage and humanity of the social workers who try to protect children at risk but I know many of them would tell you that "Care" has become one of
those Orwellian Newspeak words.

Children in care often abuse each other or are abused by others, there is a high incidence of drug use, under-age sex, and violence. When the kids suddenly stop have the "child" label at 18 or 16 depending on the country, the "care" label is stripped away from them and they are dumped on the streets, often with no job, no education, and no expectation that life will get any better.

There is an endless flow of children. There is never enough money.There are never enough good parents. Most of all, there is neverenough love.

It is, literally, heartbreaking.

Logically, we should recognise the overwhelming odds we struggle with and stop the problem at source. If there was not such a flood of children being born to those incapable or unwilling to offer them love and the hope of happiness then the world as a whole would be a better place, wouldn't it? The sum total of unhappiness would be reduced. Over time the balance would shift as children where born to parents who loved them and cared for them?

All of this could be achieved if we just had the courage to act at the source of the problem, if we were just willing to accept that one small restriction on the lives of people who anyway don't give a shit, could save so much suffering. Surely any moral scruples that stand between us and this course of action should rightly be described as at best muddy thinking and at worst moral cowardice?

Who would not off $300 to help people volunteer to stem this flood of misery and break this cycle of abuse?

Its a powerful arguement isn't it?

Maybe I should stop there but I can't. I see a maggot at the core of this apple.

Perhaps I see the maggot because of my background.

My family is genetically weak. I was born with an extra finger, fucked up eyesight and a stubborn streak. Many of my family have small examples of poor genetic coding: club foot, wall-eye, emotional instabilty, a tendency towards addiction to alcohol or drugs or sex or
violence or all of them on a Saturday night.

My parents, I believe, did their best most of the time. Who could ask for more than that. When I was 12 and my sister was 7, she asked me: "If our parents weren't our parents, would we still like them?". Our childhood was not a nightmare but it wasn't idyllic. Few people's childhoods are.

We got through it. We made the best of what we had. We took love where we could find it and learned to live without it when we had to. In other words, we lived a normal life.

So what is the maggot at the centre of the apple? Life can't be made perfect, SHOULDN'T be made perfect. Perfect is for abstract math. Perfect is inhuman. Perfect is a standard that makes all of us failures.

I am glad I wasn't saved from the potential misery of an imperfect body, imperfect parents, unstable emotions and innate resistance to authority. Maybe I'd have been saved some unhappiness but it would have been at the price of missing the whole show.

So I'm a bit sensitive to a solution that brings into question my right to be born,

I accept that a woman should have the option of choosing not to have a child. I prefer adoption as a solution because it gives everyone a second chance. I understand sterilization because you can't run therisk of having any more children. That, in its way, is about choosing love.

I abhor the idea of choosing sterilization becuase it might avoid unhappiness

This is a hard idea to get across, so let me fall back on someone else's words.

I've quoted below, a poem from Philip Larkin. I think the first two verses are true. I think the third verse is a moral surrender. I always hope he meant us to see that and not to take him litterally.

Philip Larkin - This Be The Verse

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.

I think the $300 is a vote for that third verse.

I vote for putting more money into child care and less into foreign wars.

I vote for spending $300 on something that will show your love for a stranger, not deprive a stranger of their opportunity to live a life better than you expected.

I vote that Larkin was wrong and that this sterilization scheme is pernicious.

Made to be Broken - review

2011-03-08T11:53:00.001+01:00

Made to Be Broken by Kelley Armstrong

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

In "Made To Be Broken", the second of the Nadia Stafford series, we finally get inside the head of this hitwoman-with-principles. I found this book much more compelling that the first, which had that Series 1 Episode 1 fell to it.

This book reads alound much better than the first, the theme has more emotional impact and the backstory gets some real depth.

I hope that there will be a third in the series soon

View all my reviews

Back to normal and a story

2011-02-03T20:35:00.003+01:00

I'm pleased to say that I've been cleared of any cardiac problems. I feel like I've been given a reprieve, so I celebrated by taking the time to write a light humorous piece on clichés.

Enjoy

To Boldly Cliché

© Mike Kimera 2011

“Is that the Cliché Guy?” I asked Molly.

“Yeh. I told you he was hot. Wait 'til you hear the Brit accent. He could read my grocery list aloud and make it sound sexy. When he reads from his erotica stuff I turn into a puddle."

I'd let Molly drag me along to her Creative Writing class to see her latest lust object, partly so I could get her to shut up about him and partly because the title of the lecture intrigued me: “To Boldly Cliché – going where other writers fear to tread.” I'd heard a lot of clichéd lectures in my time, but I'd never known a lecturer who advertised that they were doing it on purpose.

“So,” Molly said, almost fizzing with excitement. “Waddaya think of him?”

She was right of course, he was hot. But I wasn't going to give that to her straight away. Besides, there was something off about the guy; something that wasn't what it seemed; something that was maddeningly familiar but which I couldn't name.

“Well, he certainly looks like a cliché. I'd say he's playing tall dark handsome stranger, pretending to be an academic.”

“You think the geek-glasses are fake?”

“Well, even if they're real, the tweed jacket with patches on the elbows is way too 'central casting' to be authentic, even for a Brit.”

Molly didn't look pleased at my description, so I threw in a rider: “The jacket does fit him rather well though doesn't it?”

Molly smiled, leaned towards me conspiratorially and said, “A body like that would look good in anything. Personally, I'm imagining a thong and a tan. ”

I laughed. People turned to look, including Cliché Guy.

When his eyes found us, Molly pretended to be looking for something in her bag. I met his gaze. Behind those ugly glasses, he had beautiful eyes. He raised one eyebrow, gave a hint of a smile, as if we shared a secret and then turned back to his notes.

Not here five minutes and already I was living a cliché; our gazes meeting across a crowded room creating a small bubble of intimacy between two strangers, followed by my heart going all pit-a-pat. And all for a strange guy in glasses.

Suddenly I knew who Cliché Guy was pretending to be; he was Clarke Kent all dressed up to give a lecture. Did that mean he was Superman underneath?

Sheash, it had been hard enough to concentrate when I had Molly's thong image in my head, now I was seeing the guy ripping his shirt open to show me his big S.

I was about to share this idea with Molly when Cliché Guy started to talk.

“Good evening, everyone. I'm Toby Lambert-Bryce and I'm here to tell you about the joy of clichés”

Toby Lambert-Bryce? He had to have made that up. What kind of a parent lands their child with a name like Toby? And was I the only one with traumatised flash-backs to those drawings of the creepy guy in the beard in my mother's dog-eared copy of 'The Joy of Sex'?

Apparently I was. Everyone else was listening to Toby.

“Cliché is actually onomatopoeic. Back in the days when moveable type was set by hand, it made sense to pre-set the most commonly used phrases into metal blocks of type that could be dropped into the metal matrix rather than build them letter by letter each time. French typesetters named these pre-set blocks after the noise they made as they slotted into the matrix – cliché .

"The typesetters literally knew how many clichés a writer dropped into their text. It's a talent many editors would benefit from today.”

He waited half a beat for laughter but none came. I figured he'd lost them at onomatopoeic – which sounded like the kind of volcanic island where Fay Wray gets up close and personal with King Kong. Still, I liked the way he said cliché – with the French accent and a lot of passion.

Addams Family flash: “Ah, Tish. You spoke French”. Now I knew why Gomez reacted like that. It was definitely sexy.

I shifted in my seat to catch Toby's attention, then I gave him my best 'You're doing great and I'm so supportive' smile.

“It's tempting to dismiss clichés as the sign of lazy thinking but I believe that would be a mistake. Clichés are the thread from which we weave our understanding of the world. As the much maligned Samuel Goldwyn once said, 'What we need is new clichés'.”

Again, no laughter. Not even when he used an accent for Samuel Goldwyn's words. I looked around to see why this was a such a tough house. Then I realised that the group was mainly female and mid-thirities and up and they weren't really listening to him because they were too busy eating him with their eyes. Poor old Toby had just been dropped into SPECTRE's piranha tank and hadn't even noticed yet.

“Clichés are the genes in the metaphorical DNA of our collective subconscious. They are short pieces of code that hold a meaning we all take for granted, so much so, that we have trouble seeing the cliché itself. Clichés evolve from the discourse we hold with ourselves as a society. I believe that clichés are best understood as organisms that have a life-cycle.”

At this point two things happened, Toby started to give his talk directly to me, as I seemed to be the only one reacting to his content (or because he'd fallen madly in love with me the moment our eyes met across a crowded room – yeah, right), and I began to be distracted by what he was saying. It was a bit too dressed-up for its own good but it made sense to me.

“Clichés start life, in their larval state as it were, as insights. Ways of seeing that are at once so distinctive and so accurate that everyone goes 'ah ha, that's what I meant' or 'of course it is so'. “

Of course it is so? Who says that out loud? Toby desperately needed a translator if he was going to get his message across to Earthlings.

“It is the originality and accuracy of the cliché that results in its widespread use and takes it to the next stage of its life-cycle. The more the cliché is used, the less it is really seen. Its impact is blunted. Its meaning is not lost, but rather is taken for granted. The cliché becomes part of our collective gestalt. It sets our expectations about the truth a writer is describing. It is the establishing shot in the movie, the leitmotiv in the opera, the three basic chords in a Status Quo song. Without clichés, originality would have no place to live.”

I waited for the applause. Anyone who can build Status Quo into a creative writing lecture deserves applause. None came.

“Do you understand what he's saying?” I whispered to Molly.

“Not a word. But I love the way that he says it. Except, what was with the German accent. Is he faking the Brit thing or what.”

“Gestalt and leitmotiv are German words.”

“Well I knew they weren't English. You'd think he'd use English in a creative writing class, wouldn't ya?”

Molly always makes me smile. She puts the dumb act on of course. She thinks it makes her less threatening to men. I think it makes her so non-threatening that they wipe their fit on her as they walk out of her bedroom but I try not to say that out loud.

Toby was still talking but, like everyone else, I wasn't listening any more. I was watching him remove that horrible Tweed jacket. The shirt underneath fitted him even better than the jacket had. Broad shoulders, narrow waist, hips a teen model would kill for but best of all, when he turned around to hang up his jacket we all got a view of his tight, chino-clad butt. He even managedto make Dockers look good.

“The final stage of the cliché life-cycle comes when it is so over-used that it loses its authenticity, its meaning changes and it becomes either a parody of itself, a source of humour, a sort of Quixotic metaphor that once slew dragons and now tilts only at windmills or it becomes its own shadow and is used to undermine the truth it was once a token of.”

He smiled when he finished that sentence. He shouldn't have smiled. He's lost everyone in the room. He should have been feeling at least disappointed if not anxious. There was something else going on here.

I leaned forward to give him my full attention and tried to ignore Molly saying, “Are you starting to drool over him?”

I'd answer that question when I'd worked out the puzzle.

“I'm here today to ask you, as writers, to intervene in the cliché life-cycle. To do a bit of genetic engineering if you will. Don't bury clichés in the literary landfill; recycle them. Look into the heart of what made the cliché distinctive and insightful. Sharpen the blunt edges. Scrape off the cultural barnacles and find the metal underneath.”

Toby was looking at me now. That hint of a smile was back. I was sure that this was a clue to whatever was going on here.

“Sometimes all it takes is to update one small part of the cliché. Ripley in 'Alien' spawned a whole new trope of kick-ass female warriors. The part was originally written for a man. If it had been played by a man, would we have really seen, Ripley? Once the director cast Sigourney Weaver, the edges of the cliché became so sharp they cut themselves a niché in our collective imaginations.”

Ah, now things were getting clearer. I started to see what Toby was up to.

“Sometime a cliché can be used to bait-and-switch the audience towards a new truth. Start with the happy couple clichés: meeting, fighting, reconciling, marrying – but add in some serial-killer secret-identity clichés for one or both of the couple and you have yourself a 'Prittzi's Honor' or a 'Mr. and Mrs. Smith.'.”

That's when I finally understood what Toby was doing. Even without seeing him in a thong I knew for sure now that the guy had balls.

“In closing, I'd ask all of you to boldly cliché in your work. I assure you, you will be writing at the final frontier. I hope you enjoyed the show folks. Have a great evening.”

There was spatter of applause, then Toby put his jacket back on and people started to file out.

“Wait for me at the door,” I said to Molly, “I'd like a word with Toby.”

“I thought you would.”

Like I said, Molly only pretends to be dumb.

Toby waited for me. He looked relaxed and amused. He had every right to be.

“So, does the college know what you're doing?” I said,

“That I'm giving a Creative Writing Class on clichés? Sure.”

The Brit accent was gone now, but the smile was still there.

“But they don't know about your Performing Arts project?”

“No, Professor, they don't.”

“You recognised me?”

“As soon as you came in. I took your class on the need for a return to narrative at UCLA. You were the hottest prof I'd ever met.”

He took off the geek-glasses. His eyes were a startlingly deep blue.

“I don't remember you.”

“Tragic isn't it?”

I was thinking more that not noticing him might have saved me from a serious breach of professional ethics.

“And now you're doing a Masters in Performance Art?”

“Yes. This is part of my thesis work.”

“And what is your thesis?”

“I'm exploring the role of cliché in dissemblance. The creation of an unreliable narrator that everyone thinks is reliable at first because it's so clichéd they don't assess it.”

“The bait-and-switch?”

“Exactly. My contention is that people always believe the body language regardless of the words.”

For the first time he gave me a full wattage smile. My body was telling me that it wanted to speak his language. I ignored it and tried to stay on topic.

“And you have all this on film so that you can analyse the reaction of the audience to the different clichés you present them with?”

“Yes, with the college's permission of course.”

There was a pause in which a great deal was not said.

“Would it be too clichéd if I asked you to come and have coffee with me?” he said.

My heart did a back-flip and I had to struggle to prevent myself from grinning like an idiot.

“Well,” I said, “I'll agree on one condition.”

“What's that?”

“Open your shirt and show me what you're wearing underneath.”

“Hah, I didn't think you'd spot that.” he said as he unbuttoned his blue Oxford-weave button-down to reveal a Super Man T-shirt.

“There's a Starbucks around the corner,” I said, linking my arm through his.

As we walked towards the door, Molly gave me an evil grin, waived and left

Book Trailer: "Gotta Have It: 69 Stories of Sudden Sex"

2011-01-31T13:43:00.002+01:00

Gotta Have It: 69 Stories of Sudden Sex by Rachel Kramer Bussel

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a fun book about sex that you have to have right here and right now.

Take a look at the YouTube book trailer and see some of the authors read extracts from their stories.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_9VKTPBa...

I have a story in this anthology but wasn't brave enough to be on the trailer. I admire the people who did it and did it so well.

View all my reviews

Strange Day

2011-01-29T03:37:00.001+01:00

I spent today in a Swiss A&E where a very professional and caring set of women tried to diagnose the pains in my chest. They managed to rule out any immediately life threatening stuff but passed me on to a cardiologist as there appears to be an underlying problem.

It seems likely that I am going to have to find a way to shorten my hours and reduce or eliminate air travel, at least for a while.

Hopefully I will have more time to spend writing.

In the meantime I can't give enough praise to the women who calmly and caringly handed me back my life today when I had begun to think it might soon be done with.

Now I need to find a way to make the most of their gift.

2011-01-25T08:46:00.001+01:00

The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror by Christopher Moore

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a fun book from cover to cover. MY wife bought if for me for Christmas and it brought me a lot of twisted cheer.

The style and the way of thinking is kind of Carl Hiassen meets Tom Sharpe with a dash of Sam Raimi thrown in.

Moore manages to pull off writing a book in which we care what happens to the characters, laugh at fights with flesh-eating zombies, cheer when Santa gets what's coming to him, root for the psychotic warrior princess who is off her meds and believe in a talking fruit-bat.

The only "reality" based thing in the book is the love the people feel for each other and their irrepressible response to all the craziness around them.

That, combined with great comic timing, an imagination that refuses to accept any limits, and a love of genre fiction, is what makes this book a jox to read.

View all my reviews

Happiness

2011-01-18T23:23:00.002+01:00

I'm in need of a little happiness. Something to look forward to. Something that I know will make me smile.

As the years go by it seems to me that the list of things that make me truly happy have grown shorter. I am more selective in the food that I eat and the wine that I drink and the people I choose to spend time with. This means that when I am happy it is a high quality happiness that lingers in the memory. It also means that happiness isn't something that happens every day.

Last year was particularly empty of happiness; too much death and grief for happiness to do anything more that show its face in small moments of forgetfulness, like a ghost speaking to me when I dreamed.

The moment of happiness that I cherish from last year was given to me by my wife. We've been together for more than thirty years. After a while it becomes hard to know what to buy each other for Christmas. I'm particularly difficult as I tend to buy the books and films that I enjoy as the year goes along. This year, my wife was determined to find me something different. She hit upon the theme of the 12 days of Christmas. She bought me 12 gifts, each representing one of the items in the song. Most of them were sweats of various kinds. Each of them was wrapped and tagged with a hand made label.

It was a simple idea that I knew must have been fiendishly difficult to execute.

As I opened the presents one after another, I found myself delighted by the ingenuity and wit behind each item. By the 7th day of Christmas I was laughing; a deep loud, open-throated laugh of untempered pleasure. It had been a very long time since anything made me laugh like that.

The 12 days of Christmas came wrapped in love and attention and brought me the gift of release from the weight of the emotional debris I'd been dragging after me for the past few years.

This is a moment of happiness that I treasure.

It made me realise how rare happiness is and how hard the sources of it are to find.

I'd like to hear what makes you happy: what brought you pleasure last year, what you are looking forward to this year, what kind of thing do you associate with personal happiness.

2010-12-21T22:41:00.001+01:00

Curse of the Wolf Girl by Martin Millar

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is the book that gave me the most enjoyment this year.

It seems to be in a genre of its own: violent and whimsical, fantistical and grounded in reality, funny and soaked in sadness.

This is the second volume in the Kalix series and it is even better than the first. What more can you ask of a sequel?

It seems to me the title refers not just to Kalix but to all the femal werewolves. They are all cursed in one way or another.

This is a book bursting with memorable characters and with a plot that makes you want to keep turning the pages (which is just as well -it's a big book)

At the heart of this book is a deep understanding of dysfunctional families and the bonds and enemnities they harbour and a belief in the power of freely given friendship.

My personal favourite in this book is Vex, the fire elemental. At first she seems to be the airhead incarnate but it becomes clear that her optimism is a choice not a habit and that she is loyal and brave as well as being completely off the wall.

Kalix remains self-abusive and damaged but she is portrayed with an empathy and compassion that beats anything I've seen in mainstream fiction.

Do yourself a favour: buy this book and then buy a copy for your best friend - you'll need someone to talk to when you've finished this who will know what it is that you're so excited about.

View all my reviews

An absurd idea

2010-12-14T21:17:00.004+01:00

I'm in a hotel tonight (as usual). This chain has come up with a smart advertising idea that led my tired mind to absurd places.

The first piece of text to snag my eye reads:

"15 Minute Satisfaction Guarantee"

How many men can offer that 365 nights a year? I asked myself.

Then I saw what they meant was that they'd take care of any maintenance problem in the room (my specific problem is that the TV remote is now so remote it's no longer in the room).

But what they said was:

"Got a problem? We promise to take care of your problem within 15 minutes or you will be our guest."

So now I'm sitting here wondering if I get a free night's accommodation if I ring Reception and say "My problem is global warming. You have 14 minutes and 45 seconds remaining" or perhaps it needs to be more personal to be "my" problem so I should say, "My problem is that I'm bored, tired, too far away from home and I think that this is normal?"

Nah.

Because I know my problem is... my head runs off like a hound following the scent of a bitch in heat every time an extra meaning grafts itself on to some else's prose.

I've joined the crew at Oh Get A Grip

2010-12-02T11:53:00.003+01:00

I'm pleased to announce that I've joined the "Oh Get A Grip" blog. Six erotica writers post each week on a given theme. There is a guest writer on Saturdays.

I have the Thursday slot

This week's theme is Writer's Burn Out

If you want to take a look, go here

TSA rumoured to be ready to launch TRAP in the Spring

2010-11-25T00:16:00.004+01:00

Contractors to the DoJ have apparently leaked specifications for a new technology being prepared for use by the TSA.

T.R.A.P - the Tissue Recognition Anti-terrorism Protocol - is designed to track foreign nationals who may potentially pose a threat to national security.

TSA agents will be issued with custom designed biopsy kits that will be used to extract small tissue samples from foreign nationls at their point of entry into the United States. The samples will then be analysed, recorded and used to validate the identity of foreigners against fresh samples that will be taken each time that a foreigner travels by plane or train.

Homeland Security has made no official comment on this story but a senior TSA official is believed to have expressed the view that "T.R.A.P. may be a pain in the ass but it could save our butts."

:-)

This is all fiction of course.

But who knows, it could catch on.

"Gotta Have IT" 69 Quickies

2010-11-24T13:36:00.002+01:00

Hi folks,

my story, "Need Leash" is in Rachel Kramer Bussel's new anthology of 69 quickies (stories of 1,200 words or less that grab the attention immediately).

Check the table of contents below. You'll see plenty of name you know.

Introduction: Short, Sweet and Totally Sexy

Seven-Letter Word Heather Lin
No Blame, No Shame Jeremy Edwards
Wasn’t It Good? Andrea Dale
The Things a Woman Will Make a Man Do for Her Isabelle Gray
Special Collections Fiona Curtis
Wonderland Madeline Elayne
Red Light Angela Caperton
My Femme Evan Mora
Genesis Shanna Germain
Serious Moonlight Michael A. Gonzales
Too Wondrous to Measure Salome Wilde
Hors d’Oeuvre Stan Kent
Missed Connection Tigress Healy
Ties That Bind Daniel Burnell
Eat Me Marina Saint
Jarret Shane Allison
Lucky Number Fifty-One Jennifer Peters
Laissez Les Bons Temps Rouler Tara Young
Spunk Sylvia Lowry
Time Cecilia Tan
Dining in the Dark Elizabeth Daniels
Downpour Elle
Need-Leash Mike Kimera
Crushed Satin Organza Carmel Lockyer
Not on the Mouth Cole Riley
Hot Buns on a Sunday Afternoon Erica Rivera
Feel the Burn Thomas S. Roche
Trixie Jen Cross
Police Dogging Elizabeth Coldwell
Tip Me Kiki deLovely
Marxist Theory Elizabeth Hyder
The Dirty Things She Says Sinclair Sexsmith
Laughter in Hades Teresa Noelle Roberts
The Quick Stop Shashauna P. Thomas
Pain Surfer Cate Ellink
After Ten Years Christen Clifford
Over His Shoulder Maximillian Lagos
Manners Rachel Kramer Bussel
Veronica’s Ass Matt Conklin
Punishment Befitting the Crime D. L. King
Lies Kristina Wright
A Forced Witness Vampirique Dezire
Consensus Denise Hoffner
Don’t Struggle Valerie Alexander
Plotter Monocle
Intercept Burton Lawrence
Not a Bang, but a Whimper Jacqueline Applebee
Suggestion Emerald
Hands Free Effie Merryl
Remembering the Wrinkles Penelope Friday
Leaves Elise Hepner
The Copilot Mike Bruno
Pierced Kirsty Logan
Last-Time Lesbian Geneva King
Anal-yzed Donna George Storey
Independence Day Kate Pearce
Going Bald Craig J. Sorensen
Continuing Education Anya Levin
Meet Me in the Kitchen Giselle Renarde
Over the Line Helia Brookes
Not Just a Myth Heidi Champa
Hunger Maria See
The Tipping Point Lolita Lopez
The Advantage of Working from Home Kay Jaybee
For Dessert Jordana Winters
Good Neighbors Mercy Loomis
Laugh Sommer Marsden
A Good Stiff One Kathleen Bradean
Vacation Pictures Robert Peregrine

A small moment of pleasure

2010-11-12T09:38:00.007+01:00

I'd like to share a small moment of pleasure with you.

I'm reading Lorrie Moore's "A Gate At The Stairs". I first encountered her via her short story collection "Birds of America". I'm only a few pages into her novel and I've found myself sighing in admiration at her use of language.

It seems to me that there is a tendency in novels to have a lot of the text there simply to move things along. The text is mechanical,sometimes sleekly efficient and admirable in its own way, but not inherently beautiful.

Moore's novel is written with the same attention to language as her short stories. This is not to say that the novel lacks pace or structure but rather that the pace fueled by a strong sense of place and character and the structure has beauty etched through every strut and brace.

Here's an example:

Our narrator is a twenty year old college student, a country girl with little experience of life beyond her farm, who is interviewing for a part time job looking after children. She is meeting a prospective employer

"I'm Tassie Keltjin;" I said thrusting out my hand.

She took it and then studied my face. "Yes," she said slowly, absently unnervingly scrutinizing each of my eyes.Her gaze made a slow , observing circle around my nose and mouth. "I'm Sarah Brink," she said finally. I was not used to being looked at close up, not used to the thing I was looking at looking back. Certainly my own mother had never done such looking, and in general my face had the sort of smooth, round stupidity that did not prompt the world's study. I had always felt as hidden as the hull in a berry, as secret and as fetal as the curled fortune in a cookie, and such hiddenness was not without its advantages, its egotisms, its grief-fed grandiosities..

Text like this I can taste. I sip at it the way I would a good wine. Recalling it makes me smile. This is how I would like to be able to write.

2010-11-07T12:32:00.001+01:00

A Kiss Before the Apocalypse by Thomas E. Sniegoski

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a short novel, (less than 300 pages) dealing with big themes at a brisk pace that shows a discipline I wish more writers in this genre would share.

The plot line is pure graphic novel (a plus from my point of view; I’m a long time fan of the genre): The Angel of Death is missing, the apocalypse is coming and Remy Chandler, PI and former Seraphim has to find the Angel of Death to prevent the end of the world. The downside (apart from the blood and pain needed to achieve the task) is that success will mean the death of the woman he loves.

The book brims with new ideas that capture the imagination and old ideas artfully redrawn that give the book a context. The feel is as Film Noire as the characters name suggests and all the better for that.

Sniegoski handles the big issues here not by rambling discussions of ethics and philosophy but by bringing us to the basics of humanity: the overwhelming impact of being loved, the inevitability of death, the optimism it takes to keep going in the face of pain and suffering, and the acknowledgement that there are no short cuts when it comes to emotions; knowing grief is coming won’t protect you from its bite.

The linchpin of this book is Remy’s desire to put aside the angelic nature that he has become ashamed of and embrace the physically fragile but emotionally and spiritually rich existence of humans. This allows us both an insight into the inhumanity of Heaven and the things about our own lives that define us as human.

The various non-human entities here are described succinctly and with a clarity that enabled me to see the movie that this book would make.

The book truly comes to life in Remy’s relationship with his young Labrador dog, Marlowe. Anyone who has ever had a Labrador as part of their pack will recognise Marlowe. They will also be jealous of Remy’s ability actually to hear Marlowe’s voice rather than having to work out what is being said through gestures and body-language; few things are more humbling than realising that your dog is being patient with you, waiting for you finally to figure out what he has already told you three times.

The book would have been stronger in my view if there had been a little more visibility of the back-story between Remy and his wife, but this is a minor nit.

I look forward to the next in the series.

One last thing: don’t be put off by the title. It is definitely the worse thing about the book.

I suspect there’s an editor out there somewhere who should be blushing for having insisted on this title and the even worse cover art.

I imagine the editor saying: “It’s a wonderful title, honestly. We’ll maximise the appeal to the target demographic if we have the word Kiss and Apocalypse in the title and let’s make sure the dog gets on the cover, oh, and give him a sort of Harry Dresden grim-in-a-leather-duster look (yes I know it isn’t in the text – this is cover art, darling, you don’t have to be so literal) and remember to give him a big long sword, gotta love the symbolism in that.”

View all my reviews

Review of "Noah's Compass" by Anne Tyler

2010-11-01T19:48:00.001+01:00

Noah's Compass by Anne Tyler

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

On the surface this is a slight tale about a man in his sixties who is trying to simplify his life. The characters are ordinary people and nothing much happens except the everyday things that all of us live through.

But Anne Tyler's gift is to make us look again at all those things that we take for granted and see them differently. In this case, she shows us that passivity may not be a virtue, that life is what you remember and that memories are made and preserved by the people who you are connected to.

Liam Pennywell is 61 and adrift in his own life. Liam trained in philosophy, taught history, is once widowed, once divorced and has three daughters but he has somehow contrived barely to experience his own life.

He turns the loss of his job as an opportunity to downsize his life. He seems at peace with the passive path he has chosen. Then something is stolen from him: a few hours of his memory, the result of a concussion suffered in an attack he cannot recall.

Liam's efforts to retrieve his memory lead him into a situation in which he finally understands that the most important thing he has forgotten is the impact that his first wife's suicide had on. He is forced to confront that even he is connected to others and that his choices have consequencews and that he must choose how he will live.

The humanity and compassion in this most unromantic of books matches Tyler's earlier works and that alone would be enough to make this book memorable but what captured my heart was the quiet grace of Tyler's language and the subtle skill of her unobtrusive storytelling.

View all my reviews

New Story - "Ask Alice"

2010-10-25T11:27:00.001+02:00

It's been a while since I wrote a D/s story.

I hope that "Ask Alice" is one of those stories that does more than arouse.

I want it to get under your skin and itch afterwards

If you'd like to take a look, you'll find it here

Francophones, soldiers and a little humour

2010-10-22T16:04:00.005+02:00

I live not far from Montreux on Lake Geneva. Most weekends I go to use the swimming pool at one of the big hotels there. I won't be visiting this week because the town has been turned into a military stronghold.

I'm not allowed to drive in. I'm not allowed to walk along the quayside. I'm not allowed to get the ferry there.

Armed soldiers patrol the streets. Jets and helicopters criss cross the skies and
Swiss patrol boats roam the lake between Switzerland and France.

Why?

The francophones are in town.

Fourty heads of state, including my personal bête noire, Nicolas Sarkozy (the first example I can remember of a French president with no sense of culture and who brings to the office an energetic arrogance combined with the petulant but dangerous aggression of a minor warlord. To me, he is a stain on the French nation - but I
digress)

The aim of the conference is to re-assure French speakers that theirs is not a 19th Century language sliding into decline down a ramp created by their own inflexibility but rather an important international language.

The press is full of statements such as "French is and remains a universal language because alongside English, it is the only language spoken on all five continents," "French is now spoken by 220 million people in more than 70 countries" and so on.

I love the French language but I have never had sympathy for France's inflated view of its imperial heritage and its role in international politics.

I've been unable to verify the claimed 220 million francophones.

My understanding is that French is the first language of only about 77 million people (about 10 million less than the population of Germany for example).

French does not make it into the top 10 languages world wide even if you count all the Chinese languages as one language.

English has about 340 million native speakers and is the mostly widely spoken second language in the world, with another 165 million or so speakers. (see here for details)

The arrival of the French in Montreux was being discussed on World Radio Switzerland (the state sponsored English language radio -there's also one in German, French and Italian) and was the occaision for a little piece of humour that stuck with me:

Two Brits backpacking around Europe are in the train station at Montreux when an elderly man comes up to them and says, "Parlez vous Francais?"
They stare at him blankly so he tries again
"Sprachen sie Deutsches?"
More blank stares from the Brits
"Parlate Italiano?"
Still blank.
"¿usted habla español?"
Faced with more blank looks the old man departs to find someone else to ask whatever question he had in mind.
One Brit turns to the other and says, "You know, maybe we need to learn another language."
The other Brit replies, "Why bother? That bloke spoke four and it didn't do him any good, did it?"

And this is the problem the French speakers don't want to acknowledge.

Theirs may be a language of philosophy and poetry but is not and will not become a global lingua franca.

Normally this would not be a source of humour to me, but when I think of how much that much annoy the execrable Sarkozy, it makes me smile.

The French have a phrase for it: "Métro, boulot, dodo"

2010-10-22T10:59:00.004+02:00

Some weeks I have no life. This has been one of them. Each day I was up at 04.30, in work by 06.00 home by 20.00 in bed by 23.00. No matter how rewarding the work is, this is no way to live.

My current assignment is with a French speaking company. This morning one of the managers took one look at my haggard face and said, "You have had a week of Métro, boulot, dodo, unh?"

This is a piece of French slang that roughly means "Subway, Work, Sleep"

Like the rest of us, the French are being pushed into longer hours. It pleases me that they continue to see this as an abberation to be regretted rather than an achievement to be proud of.

There has to be more to life than "Métro, boulot, dodo".

So, this weekend I am reclaiming my life. My wife and I will stay in a good hotel on Lac Léman on Saturday and go to the Christophe Mae concert in Geneva.

Sunday morning will be leisurely, with someone else preparing breakfast and nothing on the agenda but spending time together.

The French have a phrase for that too: "Trouver votre bonheur" - to find your happiness.

Of course, it is easier to find something when you make the time to look for it.

Getting back into writing

2010-10-04T17:44:00.001+02:00

I’m back in the swing of writing now and starting to enjoy myself.

As usual, work is keeping me busy, so I’m having to make a trade off between writing and sleeping but it seems a reasonable exchange to me.

This month, ERWA has chosen two of my stories for their galleries:

“Pentimenti” is a story about a man following his obsession with a portrait in the National Gallery to understand the workings of his own heart. If you enjoy this story then you might also enjoy “The Last Taboo” or “Photographic Memories”

“Box 127” is a bank heist story with a dash of humour, a splash of violence and a drop or two of hot spicy sex. If you enjoy this story then you might also enjoy “Till Death Do Us Part”

If you pop over to ERWA, take the time to look at the other stories in the story gallery this month. My favourites are “I Waited For You By The River Of Time” by Remittance Girl and “Julie’s Ankles” by Bob Buckley

Thoughts from Westminster Bridge

2010-09-20T22:59:00.003+02:00

Is it a bad sign when you feel like Michael Bublé is writing the lyrics of your life?

Tonight I feel as though I'm living someone else's life. If it was my life, surely I'd feel more at home in it?

I'm alone in a hotel room again. This time it's a posh hotel room, a small suite in the brand new, so-cool-I-feel-they-shouldn't-let-me-in Park Plaza at Westminster Bridge in London. I'm here for a conference, together with a few hundred other management consultants and technology managers. Can you feel the excitement?

I know how I should be feeling becuase I know how my colleagues would feel – pleased to be here.

The hotel is ultra modern: light boxed walls, bold art, dramatic colours and futuristic shapes carved in glass and chrome and marble. The carpets still smell new. From here on the 9th floor, I can look down the atrium, along Westminster Bridge and see the tower of Big Ben gilded by sunlight. I have a good story to tell. I'm amongst my peers. The food and drink is free and plentiful and I am surrounded by people I should be either selling to or hiring.

So why do I want to hide in my room and do email? Why did I skip the corporate lunch to walk to McDonald's on the river front. Why did I reject room service and bring back a takeaway pizza to my five star suite? Why does a room full of relatively happy, relatively friendly people, make me want to turn around and walk away?

I can see my own eccentricity in the faces of those around me. If they were a bit more working class at least one of them would have said: „Cheer up, mate. It might never happen.“ Instead I find that my body language is so negative that I never actually have to speak to anyone.

By this evening, I was feeling invisible and inadequate. I know that part of this is that I have a cold and I'm tired. Part of it is that I'm a grown man and yet I've never learnt how to do small talk or mix with a crowd. I now anticipate failure before it happens, wallow in the anger and disappointment that that brings and then beat myself up for still being stuck in this same pattern all these years later. It is, I know, pathetic.

I think it is made worse because I'm back in the UK and not at all sure whether I want to move back permanently or never visit again.

This weekend, I walked along the coast in the rain, near the town I grew up in. It was cold and grey and dauntingly beautiful. When the week sun hit them, the runnels of water on the mud flats looked like liquid lead. The sky was mist and melancholy, gilded with hope. I was passed by families on a sponsored walk for the dead and the wounded in Blair's wars. They wore T-shirts with pictures printed on them of the men they lost or who had come home broken.

In Switzerland I watch the politics the way a meercat scans the sky, looking for threats that might require flight.

In England I feel rage at the politicians at a level so deep it takes my breathe away: the Tory minister who believes that the poor are poor because they are stupid; the British National Party front men who exploit the fear and discontent of the powerless to promote hate and who have the gaul to dress themselves in symbols that the working men of this country died to bring meaning to; the pundit on the radio who uses half-truths and flawed to statistics to push the idea that the National Health Service is „probably“ not a good idea. I want to rail at them, to grab them by the neck and shake them like a dog with a rabbit.

And yet I choose not to live there.

Perhaps it is Dido, not Bublé who's script I'm following. Maybe the problem is that my life is for rent. I need to make a commitment to people and to a place.

If you can't imagine your future, your present starts to detach itself. Your identity fades. Your are neither 1 or 0 but on a journey towards something yet to be defined.

I can feel a storm coming.The air is heavy and tense. It is hard to see even to the horizon.

Still, I've always enjoyed storms. I hope this one arrives soon.

Voices in my head and an idea from Remittance Girl

2010-09-05T02:46:00.003+02:00

A few days ago, a voice in my head said, “I’d never had a knife against my throat before.”

I choose not to take this kind of occurance as a sign of the imminent onset of mental illness, but rather as and invitation from a character to writer his or her story.

Occaisionally the charater will tell me their story in one intense session and it feels like I am channeling them rather than writing fiction.

In most cases, the character provides hints and clues, almost is if he or she was letting me over hear parts of a conversation.

This latest voice was female, Canadian, educated and unafraid despite the knife at her neck.

Those were the only clues she gave me, the rest I had to work out for myself.

It turned out that this woman had not crawled inside my ear so that I would understand some aspect of her arousal. Instead, it turned out that she wanted me to tell the story of a bank robbery.

It starts:

I’d never had a knife against my throat before.

All my attention was on where the horribly sharp blade kissed my neck. If the guy with the ski-mask behind me pushed any harder, my flesh would part and blood would flow, then my new blouse would be ruined.

Damn, why did I pick today to wear something silk and hard to clean?

So now I knew that this was a self-possesed woman with a wry sense of humour. Now all I had to figure out was why she was there, what she wanted, and what she'd have to do to get it. That's pretty much the same for every character who talks to me.

The challenge this time was that this story needs a plot. It would have been easier, I suppose, to start with the plot and then create characters that will move it along, but I've never been able to do this. I had to think backwards from the character to the plot and then add just enough spice to both to keep me and the reader interested in what was going to happen next.

The story is called "Box 127" and you can find it here

Take a look and let me know what you think

Not every story get's written within a few days of a voice arriving in my head. Last year Remittance Girl, asked us to imagine what it would be like not to be able to be touched. The idea caught my imagination. “Untouched” is the result.

As you might expect, the man in this story has a unique "voice" - dry, urbane, and just a little bit scary - mainly because he cannot quite comprehend how strange he is.

Being a difficult character he actually gave me Part 1 of this story and Part 3 almost immediately. Part 2 is still in progress, so only Part 1 has seen the light of day so far. I believe there will be four parts in all.

Here's a sample of how our hero sees himself

It is fair to say that my sexual experience with other people has been limited. Very limited.

Arousal is not the issue. From puberty onwards my body became a lust-furnace, greedily demanding to be fuelled each day. Yet, although my mind flared with need and my eyes sucked in erotic images as if they were oxygen, it was always my own hand that stoked the flames.

I am, by preference, a wanker.

Yes, I know the politically correct response: wanking is a pejorative term, we all masturbate, it’s nothing to be ashamed of, it doesn’t define who we are, blah, blah, blah. Except, in my case, masturbation is not just the fast-food, self-service option on my sexual menu, it is my entire cuisine. It’s been more than twenty years since I last had any physical sexual contact with another person.

I'm pleased to have the voices in my head, even though it means I have to find the time to get them to the page before the noise becomes unbearable. I suppose this makes my writing a sort of metaphorical trepanning.

Fireflies

2010-08-25T20:38:00.004+02:00

I'm alone in a hotel room (again) after another day of stressful striving to achieve things that are not particularly important to me.

As usual, I found that the best way to deal with the tangle of emotions that were strangling my happiness was to write. This attempt at poetry was the result.

Fireflies
(c) Mike Kimera 2010

When the wounds of the day

And the sleep-debt of the week

Tap in to my bone-deep well of sadness,

Fierce anger ignites

Bringing momentary warmth and light

At the cost of a mouthful of ashes

Afterwards, in the cooling dark

Rocking slowly back and forth

I wrap myself in a thin blanket of regret,

Mourning the delight life once brought me

Finally, in the still quiet of my exhausted mind,

Words, unbidden but welcome, flicker into being

Little fireflies of hope dancing in the dark

Dispelling gloom with evocations of past happiness

and the promise that joy will rise with the sun.

Why I’m addicted to feedback from readers

2010-05-04T19:31:00.002+02:00

To me, a story without a reader is incomplete. I want my stories to be read. I want to *know* they are being read. I want to understand the impact of the stories on the reader. That is why I keep my stories on a website that allows comments and part of why I’m a member of the Erotic Readers and Writers Association forum.

Writing is a solitary occupation (not a lonely one - there are too many voices in my head for writing and loneliness to share a room -it's one of the reasons why I write - to keep those voices alive). It takes me weeks to get through a story unless it's one of those "channelled" stories that come from nowhere once in a while.

To keep at it, i need to fall in love with the story. I also need to be able to take the story apart and reassemble it: language, characterization, tense, point of view, plot, pace, tone, timeline etc etc. Both of these activities get me so close to the story that I am incapable of knowing how it will come across to a new reader.

Being in love with the story means I sometimes assume that more is on the page than I've actually put there (backstory that's still in my head, emotions behind the words that haven't made it to the surface, missing details of time and space that will trip the reader up). It also means I read my story with a generous heart and a knowledge of what it aspired to that I cannot expect the reader to share.

Taking the story apart sometimes means I can no longer see the whole. I can't judge the pace or the tension or the level of emotion. I believe that a story read for a second time is no longer the same story. The reader cannot "unknow" the story. Each subsequent reading changes the knowing. So taking the story apart over weeks denies me the experience that a new reader has.

Comments from readers put me in touch with the reader's experience.

No. Stop. That sounds way too academic for what I really mean.

Let me give you a very male analogy here: after the laughter of foreplay, after the fierce heat of the first deep penetration, after the slipping and sliding and groaning and biting, after the thighs tensed and the back arched and the rush of sperm stripped his mind of function for a second or two, at just the point where she is thinking of love or sleep or whether he can do it again, or how he can be done already, he has only one question that he wants to whisper in her ear: "Did you come? Did you come good?"

Stripped of the academic gloss which argues that interactive media enables a creative discourse between writer, written, read and reader, this is the egotistical question the writer-lizard wrapped around my hind-brain want to know the answer to - Did you come good?

I grew up in that "Joy of Sex" generation who poured over drawings that seemed to suggest that a man needed a beard to have good sex but which left me wondering if men washed their beards after oral sex or wore their woman's scent like a cologne - hey, I was sixteen with nothing but hormones, imagination, fear and excitement to guide me- so perhaps my second question is inevitable: "How do I make you come better?"

When I ask this question of readers I want the equivalent to "well that felt nice but if you moved your tongue up a little and used a little more pressure I'd be bouncing against your face".

When I ask this question of another writer I want the equivalent to "if you want to stay hard a little longer, put a finger, yours or hers at the base of the penis just here and press like that."

So what I want from comments ranges from: "this is how your story made me feel" through "this part of your story had my toes curling but around about here I started to compose my shopping list" through "You use language and imagery like whore with a long tongue and lots of practice but your characterization has the authenticity of a blow-up doll with a slow leak."

What comments mean to me is that someone read my stuff and took the time to tell me about what it meant to them. The generosity of that never ceases to amaze me. They help me take a fresh look at what I've written and they help me to improve my craft. Most of all, they keep me writing.

So, if you’re in a mood for commenting or even if you’re just wondering whether my writing would make you come good, pop over to Mike Kimera’s Erotic Fiction, browse the story categories and read something that brings you pleasure.

I'm guesting on "Oh Get A Grip"

2010-04-24T09:07:00.004+02:00

Hi Folks, Oh Get A Grip is a blog riun by six erotica writers who each post once a week about a common topic. I'm sure you'll recognise the names: Lisabet Sarai [Sunday], Devon Rhodes [Monday], Kathleen Bradean [Tuesday], C. Sanchez-Garcia [Weds.],Ashley Lister [Thursday],Michelle Houston [Friday]

This week's topic is "Why Does It Work" discussing examples of novels, fiction, film and stories and asking why it works or why it doesn't work. Chris Garcia invited offered me a guest slot. I've looked at my story “Photographic Memories” and talked about how I wrote it and why I think it works.

Head over to Oh Get A Grip and take a look

Poem: "Spending"

2010-04-04T11:21:00.003+02:00

Spending

The kneeling whore holds her tongue still

Letting my yellow-tinged cum

Dribble across it

Like salad-dressing

Simultaneously pleasant and repellent

Not waiting to swallow, she engulfs me

The trained eagerness of her mouth

Neither reaching her eyes

Nor rousing my lust

Frictionless motion with no destination

She lets me pull back her painted face

By roughly-grasped hair

Forcing my softening sex

Desperately deep

Will and habit warring with reality

Tongue now stiffer than the flaccid flesh it works

Her nose held against my thrusting pelvis

She waits stoically for me to recognize

What she already knows

That I am spent to the point of bankruptcy

Robert Harris on being a "real" writer and me on the kind of writer I think I am

2010-04-02T01:00:00.005+02:00

I recently Robert Harris' latest thriller, "The Ghost”. The narrator in the novel is a ghost writer commissioned to write the autobiography of a British Prime Minister who bears a strong resemblance to Tony Blair. Like “Enigma” and “Fatherland” before it, "The Ghost" has been made into a movie. both of which were made into movies. "The Ghost" has also been made into a movie. The film is re-titled "Ghost Writer" and stars Ewan McGregor and Pierce Brosnan. It was the last movie Polanski made before the Swiss sold him out to the Americans and arrested him at the Zürich film festival.

The book was, on the whole, a disappointment (see my review on goodreads.com) but, Harris, who was once a prominent journalist, has some interesting things to say on the process of writing and what it means to be a “real writer”.

I’d like to share three quotes with you that resonated with me.

“Of all human activities, writing is the one for which it is easiest to find an excuse not to begin – the desk’s too big, the desk’s too small, there’s too much noise, there’s too much quiet, it’s too hot, too cold, too early, too late. I had learned over the years to ignore them all, and simply to start.”

This is something that I think all of us who try to write will identify with. There are times (usually when I have no time) when nothing will stop me writing, but give me deadline and suddenly all other forms of human activity are more easily engaged with than writing.

“A book unwritten is a delightful universe of infinite possibilities. Set down one word, however, and immediately it becomes earth bound. Set down one sentence and it’s halfway to becoming just like every other bloody book that’s ever been written. But the best must never be allowed to drive out the good. In the absence of genius there is always craftsmanship. One can at least try to write something which will arrest the reader’s attention – which will encourage them, after reading the first paragraph, to take a look at the second, and then the third.”

The goal of leading the reader from one paragraph to the next and keeping their attention, seems to me to be a worthy one and not always easy to achieve. I'm writing a longer piece of Victorian Erotica at the moment and my constant anxiety is "Is the reader still with me"

“I was still smarting at the crack about not being a proper writer. Perhaps I’m not. I’ve never composed poetry, it’s true. I don’t write sensitive explorations of my adolescent angst. I have no opinion on the human condition, except perhaps, that it’s best not examined too closely. I see myself as the literary equivalent of a skilled lathe-operator, or a basket weaver; a potter, maybe: I make mildly diverting objects that people want to buy.”

This frank and disarming statement made me think about how I would describe myself using the same metaphor.

I write little bits of erotica. I try to do it well. I try to pack some truth in there and make it memorable. I try to reach people's emotions and have my characters take up residence in their heads, at least for a little while.

I see myself as a cabinet-maker, working slowly by hand, to produce objects that people are initially attracted to because of what they do and which they come back to because they value the craftsmanship.

"Sex With Owen" is now up on Clean Sheets

2010-03-31T22:55:00.002+02:00

When I started this story, I was in too dark a mood to continue the story of Mrs Prendergast and her offer of enlightenment. I decided she would have to wait.

I was having one of those death-ridden days when I wished I was a theist, but the only spirits that moved me were the ones who came and whispered their stories in my ear.

This story began with the voice of a woman saying “He always starts by brushing my hair.”

She wouldn't go away, so I started to write.

I initially thought she would lead me into a story of dominance and submission. The working title was "The Bone Cage" and was meant to be about how she transcended the constraints of her mortal flesh.

As I wrote, the story started to change. Firstly the female narrator was a stronger, more up-beat person that I'd imagined. Secondly the man in the story demanded a name. "He" was no longer good enough, he wanted to be a character in his own right and not just a foil to make the woman more interesting. I christened him "Owen" and suddenly I had a tale about a couple. My mood lightened and instead of a gloomy doom-laden story, I produced a piece that is about a small woman and a large man who are fascinated with each other.

I put the piece through the writers' workshop at the Erotic Readers and Writers Association - (ERWA - a great list if you want to improve your writing - you can join here). The feedback on the list was that I'd written a love story. This was a first for me, so I was a little bit surprised, especially as the word "love" is never mentioned, but I read it again and discovered that they were right.

So, if you want to add a little love to your life, drop in at Clean Sheets and read "Sex With Owen".

Beware AMAZON CLOUD Widgets on Blogger Layout

2010-03-30T18:39:00.004+02:00

Technically competent idiots with too much time on their hands have set out to make our lives more difficult than necessary.

Do not select a gadget called "Amazon Cloud" as a widget in the gadget section of Blogger. Although it's available via the blogger site, it is actually malware that redirects your visitors to a different site (who knows what else it does)

This malware plays upon the fact that you can't delete a page element in Layout without going into Edit. Edit triggers the divert before you can delete the gadget.

The only way I found around this was to find the widget in the HTML and delete it there.

It's a know issue at Blogger but it still pisses me off. Here's the address of the webpage I got diverted to. If anyone out there knows a way to send these guys a server-killing virus, you'd be doing the blogsphere a favour.

http://freegadget2222.blogspot.com/

Mrs. Prendergast Part 2 is now up on my story site

2010-03-30T10:36:00.002+02:00

Hi folks,

The next part of this piece of Victorian-era erotic is now up on my story site. In this chapter, Tom Thornton discovers what it means to be "purified" before the ceremony that promises him enlightenment

You can find the story here

Flash Fiction: Unoriginal Sin

2010-03-27T13:18:00.004+01:00

My writing has been running long recently (over 3,000 words per story or part of story) so I used on of ERWA's writing tools - the 200 word flash fiction - to see if I could still hack story telling with brevity. The result risks committing (bad) poetry but I think manages to hang on to prose.

Ket me know what you think.

Flasher: Unoriginal Sin

There was a time

When my flesh saluted every young girl

Who smiled at me

Or absent-mindedly lifted her hair off her neck

Or rested a pencil on her plump lower lip

When all my blood raced for one woman

With dark, serious eyes

Who saw who I was and chose me anyway

Opening herself like a flower beneath a bee

When laughter was the soundtrack to our sex

Every bed, sofa, and table

Risked collapse under the weight of raucous ruts

That left us inextricably entwined

There came a time when

My lust-noose tightened for the forbidden

Flesh I had no right to knowledge of

Offered ripe and ready and without restraint

Swallowing me whole and leaving us broken

Months later

My heart held tight to forgiveness

Unspoken and undeserved

Dispensed with gentle touches and sad smiles

That left me drowning in her hurt-filled eyes

My mind marveled that my body could betray

All that made it sing

For some moments of intense release

That were not escape but panicked flight

Now

My atheist soul whispers a prayer of praise

For strong, tenacious, abused love

That held me when I let go of myself

And daily grants me redemption

My first new piece of fiction in 2010

2010-03-24T22:47:00.002+01:00

I've started to write again. I wanted to try something different so I've been writing a piece of Victoriana, called "Mrs. Prendergast's Gift".

It's about a young Colonial Administrator, on his last night of Home Leave in London, who is introduced to a woman with a mysterious gift.

It starts:

"Had it not been for a chance meeting with Carstairs on the steps of his club, I might have left London without incident and returned the Colonial Civil Service with a greater quietude of mind than that which I was subsequently able to achieve. But tranquillity is not all of life. Chance led me to Carstairs, who brought me to Mrs. Prendergast and her acolytes. She opened my eyes to a world that I had previously only brushed against blindly in half remembered dreams and I remain thankful to her for that."

I had intended this to be about 3,000 words or so but I hadn't reckoned with the pace of Victorian life. I think I've gotten inside the head of the narrator but in doing so I've discovered that he is not to be rushed. This means that the story is likely to be in three or four pieces and becomes almost a novella.

The first two pieces are written and the third is on its way.

You can find the first part on my story site here. I'll post the second part in the next few days.

I'd be delighted if you let me have your comments on the story on my site.

Chasing Words

2010-01-22T10:21:00.003+01:00

Where do the words come from?

Words come to me when I have no time, when I'm under pressure, when I'm tired, when I'm locked in a plane, or trapped in an airport. They race across my mind like bitches in heat, willing to be caught but determined to make me work for it.

Words do not come to me when I clear my desk and my mind and set aside time to write. Then I have to go to them. I seek them like a dog looking for rabbits in an empty field. I work at it, poking my nose into one empty rabbit hole after another. When I'm tired, and almost out of time the words will pop up out a hole I've already looked in, right on the edge of my vision, and make me chase them with what little energy if have left.

Sometimes, when I have left the chase behind and turned my mind to real life, words will come to me in dreams, pouring themselves across my consciousness like spilt ink. To catch them I must wake swiftly and work hard and at the end it seems to me that the best of them escape to haunt me another day.

I may never write a catch enough words to write a novel but I have learnt that I will always be chasing words

Is there Veritas in Vino?

2010-01-20T22:44:00.002+01:00

Write what you know, they say. But should you write what you know when you are drunk? Do you really find veritas if you consume enough vino?

Tonight I am more than a little drunk.

This is an unusual condition for me; my control needs are normally stronger than my desire for alcohol.

Tonight marks the end of several too-long days in the service of winning business through the display of words, finely tuned to bring a carefully balanced sense of warmth and opportunity, threat and courage, challenge and achievement to our clients. I have been spinning proposals the way a spider spins silken thread from her arse. I am tired, a little ill and in much need of energy and joy.

In a few days, I will be fifty three. I've been doing consultancy of one kind or another for sixteen years. On the whole it was a mistake – too many nights away from home – too much time spent spinning dreams others will live, too much commitment to something I do only because I'm good at it and it pays well.

If I could go back to my thirty seven year old self, yet to embark on a consulting career, what would I say?

The answer seems simple to me now: there is no business goal that merits missing a night in my wife's bed.

I do not normally drink. Does this mean that the truth is not normally mine to hold or does it mean that normally I lie to myself with enough skill to live with the compromises that have shaped my life?

Tonight I shirked my duty. I should have been at dinner with my team in the heart of Brussels, making them feel valued and special. Inspiring them to strive harder. Validating their belief that what they do matters. But I have been mildly ill since the beginning of the year, I have not had enough sleep, I'd just learnt that my father in law, who I have known for thirty four years and who is fading fast from cancer but suffering more from the dignity-robbing blight of dementia, has lost the top of his thumb courtesy of a slamming door in the facility we thought would grant him safety and care.

So, I shirked my duties as a leader and did what I always do under this kind of pressure, I took my self and my book (Jim Butcher's “High Lord's Fury”) to an Italian restaurant.

I love Italy. It is all the things I am not: friendly, expansive, family orientated, passionate, certain of its own endurance. It also has the best cuisine in the world.

The UN should declare Italian restaurants to be world heritage sites. Wherever I travel, I seek them out. I look for small places, where the tables are too close together, where Italian is the mother tongue, where the ping of the microwave is never heard and where peasant cookery is treated with the respect that so much haute cuisine does not deserve.

To me, Italian restaurants are refuge, a place where I am welcome, where being a vegetarian is not an issue, where the food fills the belly, refreshes the spirit, and stuffs the heart to bursting with a sense of being home.

Then there is the wine. Nothing, absolutely nothing, matches the intensity of Italian wine: Amaroni, Vino Noble, Brunello de Montepullciano, all are works of magic that prove that passion can be bottled.

Tonight I went to a small Italian restaurant in Waterloo, in the French speaking part of Belgium. I had a minestrone made from scratch from whatever vegetables where left over from yesterday and a penned al pesto where the spinach is fresh and the aroma is enough to make me sigh with pleasure.

I tried to order three decilitres of Montepullciano but they only had bottled wine available and I settled for a bottle of Tuscan wine. Two things were bad news about it: it told me only that it was bottled in Tuscany but not where in Tuscany. The Tuscan are fiercely and rightly proud of their wines. Normally I would know which vineyard the wine came from and whether or not it was worthy of being a reserva. To know only that it was Tuscan was to tell me it was strong, cheap and suitable only for foreigners. The second thing that was wrong with it was that it was a 2009 wine. This means that it was at least three years too young to be worth drinking.

I sampled it. Raw, intense, ragged around the edges and completely lacking in sophistication. It matched my mood so I drank the bottle. Alone. Even with a litre of water, this is more than I would ever consume on a normal day.

The harsh vibrance of the wine blended perfectly with plain, solid confidence of the food. I started to feel as if life was, on the whole, better than the alternative, and that tomorrow might prove interesting enough to be worth living through.

I was also completely and passionately convinced that the book I was reading was profound and that crying while reading it was a sign of my own humanity.

The older, well only slightly older than me, couple who had carefully not commented on the fact that I was drinking a whole bottle of not very good wine by myself, left the too-close-to-me table next to mine and were replaced by two women in their twenties They were French Belgians: thick dark hair, long symmetrical faces, broad shoulders, narrow waisted and relatively short. They ignored me completely, which showed good judgement, and engaged one another in a conversation that spoke of strength and confidence and long familiarity.

I like watching women together. I don't mean in the porno girl-on-girl action to get the men hot kind of way (although it is impossible to resist -,let's face it, men ruin porn). To have two women doing everything a man could do only with more grace and a lot more sex appeal, what could be better?

I like watching women because it seems to me, in my present drunken state, that I understand more of how women interact, what they expect of each other and what they are willing to offer each other than I do men.

Men have always puzzled me. I rarely know what they want or why and how they want it.

I think I have some form of guy-dyslexia. Men look at me in a way that clearly has some meaning for them but which leaves me baffled. When I was young, high cheekbones and slim, a proportion of those looks were offers to have have sex. Now that I'm older, wider and look more like a thug, those kinds of looks have dropped away and I'm left only with those “you know what I'm talking about” looks that I have no frame of reference for.

So what veritas did I get from my vino? Firstly I need a job where I can go home at night; secondly, that I would prefer to sit silently among women than be in the company of men; and finally, that 2009 Tuscan wines are much stronger than you might expect and cause you to spew words at your keyboard that you have no ability to evaluate.

Mike Kimera is back

2010-01-01T18:53:00.005+01:00

Hello everyone,

Have you ever seen the dry stone walls that divide the fields in the North of England? There's an art to building them. Each stone is a diffent size and shape. No mortor is used and the stones are not cut or reworked. The trick is to lay the stones in such a way that they fit together in a patterb that allows their weight to add strength to the wall.

Although the walls are sturdy, sometimes they will start to sag either because of the slow but inexorable action of the rain and the wind or because some external event puts them under pressure. When this happens, the wall can't just be patched up, it has to be completely rebuilt. The stones have to be rearranged. The strength-giving pattern has to be re-established taking into account the changes in the stones over time.

It seems to me that my life is like a dry stone wall. I've built it with the materials that I had to hand and I've tried to make it as strong as I can.

In 2008 I realized that the pattern of my life had shifted. Stones that who's weight had once added strength had slipped so that all they brought was a pressure that put the wall at risk.

So I've been rebuilding. As part of this process, I put my writing and my Mike Kimera persona to one side.

Now I find myself with the "Mike Kimera's Erotic Fiction" stone in my hand and needing to decide what to do with it.

I realized that I couldn't discard it. It's not just that I need to write, it's that I value what I've already written (at least some of it) so, with help from a friend who's good at this stuff, I've set up a site on WordPress.com to hold Mike Kimera's stories. I thought this might be enough but it turned out I was wrong. I have stories in my head, some new, some that have been around for a while, that won't leave my imagination alone.

It seems that writing erotic fiction is still going to be a sizeable stone in my wall. I just have to put it in the right place.

I've bought myself a little netbook that I will use only for writing. I've put time aside to be Mike Kimera. I've rejoined ERWA. I've started to write again.

I'm aware that this is a stone with sharp edges. I will still write under a nom de plume. I will still not share what I write with those who know me, not even those who love me. But I will not let this be a source of shame. I'll just accept it as part of the shape of this stone.

On the other hand, I am keen to here from those of you who read my stories. I want to know what you think of them and how they affect you. That's why I selected WordPress rather than continuing to post stories here. Please take a look at the site "Mike Kmera's Erotic Fiction" and feel free to leave comments on any of the stories.

I will continue to use this blog and I will place the links to new stories here.

Happy New Year to all of you.

Christmas Cheer

2008-12-01T19:22:00.002+01:00

I've been busy not being Mike Kimera for a while. I've been focusing on putting the important things back in the centre of my life while still earning a living as an itinerant peddler of advice and best practice for a management consultancy.

It seems though that stories have a life of their own, whether Mike Kimera is around to nuture them or not.

ERWA have a Christmas Story feature in which Adrienne has posted some of her favourite pieces of festive erotica. I'm happy to say that a couple of my more whimsical pieces made the cut: "Christmas at Lake Woebecum" a tongue-in-cheek D/s version of the kind of thing more usually found on the Prairie Home Companion, and "Santa Claws" about a demon santa and mischievous woman who is both naughty and nice.

If you'd like a smile this Christmas take a look here. Enjoy.

With a bit of luck I'll see you next year.

One last thing...

2008-10-07T22:56:00.002+02:00

My thanks to all of you who left comments on my last post. They mean a lot to me.

I'm still working through the problems that I have to fix. I hope that I can find my way back by next year. I will if I can.

In the meantime, I have one last story on ERWA that you might enjoy (although the content is a little grim).

If you're interested, you can find "Paying For It" here during October.

Goodbye to Mike Kimera

2008-09-18T12:34:00.002+02:00

I've been Mike Kimera for nine years now. I've learned a lot in the process. I've even written a few things that I think were worth writing.

I need to stop being Mike Kimera for a while and just be me.

Mike Kimera has become someone that is more comfortable with himself than I should be at the moment.

I've made a mess of my life and I should be using all my energies to make things better.

Thank you to all of you have read my pieces over the years, especially those of you who took the time to comment on my stories.

I wish well

When your erotic imagination takes you somewhere you're ashamed to visit

2008-08-13T13:35:00.007+02:00

I recently went to see the 100th Anniversary exhibition of the work of Balthus at Fondation Pierre Gianadda in Martigny in Switzerland. I always find that paintings have much more impact when you see the real thing than when you see the catalogue reproduction. This exhibition was beautifully mounted. It was possible to walk through a broad selection of Balthus' work at leisure. Even though the exhibition was very well attended there was time and space to take in the emotional impact of the paintings.

Two things were immediately apparent: Balthus was enormously talented and he was fascinated by images of young girls that convey a deep and passionate eroticism.

Although none of these images show anything as graphic as actual sex, they show clearly the sexual nature of these young (sometimes very young) girls.

It left me startled. I couldn't make up my mind whether I should be outraged, whether I should be ashamed of myself for feeling the power of these paintings or whether I was imagining things as everyone else seemed to be browsing the exhibition as if it was another viewing Monet's Water Lilies.

I think that their power shows them to be art. I feel like a Victorian wanting to add a fig leaf to the Michelangelo's David but I can't get over how disturbing I found the images and how easily those around me accepted them.

I finally realised that what disturbed me about these paintings is that Balthus makes me see little girls the way a child molester does. He does it subtly and with skill and his vision has a certain type of truth to it. The verb that comes to mind to describe this is corruption.

I know, I know, I'm reacting on a purely moral basis here.

I'm sure there are gay artists who could make me see men the way they see them. I would be fascinated but I wouldn't feel corrupted.

What makes Balthus different is that I think that what he sees (and what he makes me see) is not the truth about these girls but a projected fantasy of what he would like them to be.

Silver Linings –good news in getting stories published

2008-08-10T21:21:00.004+02:00

It’s been a quiet year with my writing so far. I have a lot of stories part way through so I’m hoping for a burst of posts in the autumn. The good news is that the stories I have written are finding their way on to websites and anthologies.

One of this years stories, “Toying with Lily” has made it into Alison Tyler’s “Hurts So Good”

I’m pleased to see this story in print. I’m also proud to be in the company of the other authors in this collection:

The Sound of One Hand Clapping Nikki Magennis

Sting Jessica Lennox

No Substitute for Experience James Walton Langolf

Panty Lines Sommer Marsden

Lucky N. T. Morley

Testing the Water Teresa Noelle Roberts

Never a Rookie Craig J. Sorensen

Provocation Jay Lawrence

I Promise to Do My Best Teresa Joseph

Party Manners Morgan Aine

Trophy Buckle Rakelle Valencia

Toying with Lily Mike Kimera

Turnaround A. D. R. Forte

Flick Chicks Allison Wonderland

Equilibrium Anna Black

First Time Since Xan West

Omega to Alpha Diana St. John

Crossed Rachel Kramer Bussel

My Mainstream Girlfriend Stephen Elliott

Rock Paper Scissors Shanna Germain

All in the Wrist Alison Tyler

I also have a story in another anthology edited by Alison Tyler this year, “Open for Business – Tales of Office Sex”. Here’s a link to Gwen Masters’ Cleansheets Review of the anthology which says nice things about my story “Have A Nice Day”.

I know this all sounds terribly self-congratulatory and narcissistic. There’s certainly an element of that, but the excuse I make to myself is that while writing is a solitary pursuit that is really a struggle in which the writer tries to land the story that his imagination has hooked but which may still get away, publishing is a social activity where the writer gets to find out if the outcome of the struggle is enjoyed by other people.

This is a long winded way of saying that reading reviews of stuff that I put forward for publication helps maintain my motivation to write.

One of the questions I had in my mind was what motivates an editor to go through all the hassle needed to produce an anthology that all the rest of us benefit from but in which they get a maximum of one story of their own.

I found a good answer on Alison’s website Alison must be one of the most prolific erotica editor's around and I've often wondered where she gets the energy.

Take a look at her post on her latest book - a guide for couples illustrated with autobiography and favourite pieces of erotica called “Never Have The Same Sex Twice” – and you'll be infected by her passion for keeping that first time heat in (at least) the sex you write about.

Read her post entitled “Riven with Need” and you'll see how her fascination with passion is linked to an ability to feel the power of words the way most of us feel that it-always-makes-me-cry song.

I came away from her site thinking that my writing needs a shake up – I first started writing hot scenes I thought were stories. I want to find a way to use the technique I now have available to me to express the hot, sticky, risky but worth it, oh my god who'd have thought this was possible excitement I used to be able to produce.

Here’s the excerpt from “Toying with Lily”

Toying with Lily

The jeans are a deliberate act of provocation. Lily, my allegedly submissive “You can do anything to me. Anything at all. I’ll even call you, Daddy while you do it” mistress, likes to test my limits by defying me. She wants to see what I will put up with and what I will do to keep her in her place. She likes to be kept in her place.

At the moment, her place is standing in front of my chair with her hands behind her back and her head held high, waiting for me to flog, pinch, spank and fuck her to orgasm. We both know that by now she should be naked. Instead, she has chosen to present herself wearing tight-fitting jeans and a sly smile.

True, Lily is impressively naked above the waist. She is a fully fleshed woman, short without being in any way small. Her breasts are large and heavy, and when, as now, she holds her hands behind her back, they push out almost aggressively. Her stomach is soft and flows over the cruelly tight fastening of her spray-on jeans. At any other time, I might have relaxed back into my chair and considered whether to start by using the soft calf-leather hand-lash on her belly or by suspending weighted clamps from her nipples.

But now my focus is on her jeans and the smile that accompanies them.

I could just tell her to take them off.

Or I could throw her onto the bed, wrestle them from her, maybe even cut them off her, and then raise welts on her substantial buttocks with the crop.

But then I would be doing the obvious, which means I would lose the initiative and, if that were to happen often enough, I would lose Lily.

I don’t want to lose Lily. She makes me feel alive in a way that no one else does.

Death Grief Guilt and Getting Over It

2008-08-09T14:55:00.002+02:00

My dog died. He was a yellow Labrador who had been part of my life for fourteen and a half years. I loved him more deeply than most of the people in my life and this month grief has had me in its grip.

I’ve been through grief before; my father, my mother, my mother in law, my nephew. It never gets any better.

If you live long enough, everyone and everything you love will die and every time grief will ride you, wrenching bone deep sobs from you that strip you of all dignity. Letting you recover and then doing it again and again; triggering a renewed sense of loss each time you come across some small reminder of the life you shared. Grief multiplies death. It takes away everything that makes life bearable and leaves only pain.

My dog didn’t die in his sleep. He ate some wood that obstructed his bowels. It took a week of probing and x-rays and ultrasounds and eventually an operation before we finally had to have him put down. That week is etched into my memory. Why is it that the nasty, gut-wrenching things in life are so easy to recall while happiness fades like an old photograph?

I cried over my dog’s death. Cried. That doesn’t describe it. Crying sounds polite and controlled. I would stand with my eyes closed, my mouth stretched open obscenely wide, my hands by my side, my head thrown back, as great gouts of sobs forced their way out of me, taking my breath, shaking my whole body, filling my mind with nothing more or less that a howl of anger and pain and loss that, if it had words, would fire them like bullets, like grenades, like napalm at a universe that has this death in it.

You’re body won’t let you cry like that for long. It makes you rest and go through the motions of eating in between bouts of soul-crushing grief. And in those gaps when the parasite grief lets its host recover,guilt wormed its way into my mind. It became crystal clear that my selfishness, my unwillingness to accept that some things can’t be fixed, my endless ability to make facts fit my aspirations, had led to my dog spending the last days of his life in a cage in the ICU of animal hospital, in the company of strangers, combating pain until his heart could not stand it.

Guilt curled around my pain and squeezed until my previous sobs seemed mild.

My wife and I come from Irish families and so we did what we always do when grief rides us, we held a wake, just the two of us, a cluster of photo albums and bottle of Rijoa. With each sip of wine we took turns telling stories of our dog and why we loved him and what made him special. We laughed and we cried – just tears not sobs – and we let the memory of him fill us for a while.

It is a month since he died. I was scheduled for leave so I didn’t have to try and work in the immediate life-sucking period after his death. I got support, wonderful, heart-warming support, from the folks on ERWA. The periods of doing other things than grieve are getting longer. Life will return to normal soon.

Except that it won’t. The grief will visit less often. But each bout of grief leaves a scar on the heart. Our dog, who has been with us almost every day since 1993 will never be with us again. There is nothing normal about that.

Enough of sorrow. Let me spend a moment on love. Why should this dog mean so much to me?

Every morning he would wake and face the day as if it was going to be the best day he’d had so far. He was wilful and stubborn and persistent but never mean spirited or violent. He would respond to complex verbal commands but never admitted to knowing the meaning of “Bad Dog”. When my wife and I hugged he would wag his tail. If one of us was ill or sad he would lay beside us until we felt better. He loved unconditionally but was never obsequious or needy. He had a cartoon dog look that made strangers smile. He would walk into a room and expect everyone to admire him. He was everything a Labrador should be. He made me more human than I would otherwise have been. You can’t bullshit a dog. You have to be yourself and deal with what that means.

I miss him so much it hurts. It will always hurt. That seems to be the price the world extracts for letting yourself love deeply.

It may sound morbid but one impact of his death is to remind me of the reality of my own. He was with us fourteen years and yet, in retrospect, it seems like almost no time at all. In fourteen years I will be sixty five. Few of the people in my family have made it to seventy. Perhaps my dog’s last gift to me is to make me raise my head from the ruts habit and convenience and compromise have worn into my life and ask myself how I will make the next fourteen years worth living.

I don’t have the answer yet. I’m still at the point were getting through the day feels like an achievement. But I know it’s the most important question in front of me and I know that writing will be part of the solution. I’ll keep you posted.

My kind of video

2008-06-09T22:15:00.003+02:00

Most internet porn is a subtle as an ice ax between the eyes. It's rare to find something that engages the imagination in the same way that good erotic should. The piece below is remarkably restrained in this show-it-all-in-high-def world but I find it all the more erotic for that. Let me know if you agree.

Finding the magic ingredient in writing

2008-04-23T19:43:00.002+02:00

2007 was my worst year in terms of writing output, since I began writing in 1999. At one point I began to wonder if I’d simply lost whatever the magic ingredient is that causes the dough of plot and character to rise into bread.

I know it sounds immodest, but writing comes easily to me. At least the first blush of it does. The story mostly comes out in a rush of plot or emotion or character and then I work on it to tune the language, the images, the pace, just trying to get rid of all the stuff that isn't the story and when I've done that I hit it like a freshly cast bell and I listen for any cracks.

Last year I was tired, ill, depressed and way too busy and writing didn't come easily anymore. Time was an issue as usual but that wasn't really the thing. I had lots of stories in the WIP file and I tinkered with many of them, making them better but not getting them done.

It took me a while to realise that the magic ingredient that was missing was my own belief in the story. I didn't have the optimism or joy left over to envision the story as it was going to be. I kept seeing the weaknesses. Or I saw only a polished veneer that I didn't care for. And the more I tinkered, driven only by an urge to get the technical parts right, the less ability I had to generate any belief.

This year I’ve managed to get back to writing. It took two things to get me back in harness: I had to fix up my life - as Springsteen said, you have to learn to live with what you can't rise above - and I read everything I could find.

The first filled in some of the energy pits that were draining me. The second restored my sense of the boundless possibilities of writing.

There are so many wonderful writers out there. Reading them breeds stories in my head. Not plots but a sense of style or a willingness to confront or to throw back my head and laugh.

And I know that all these people sat before their computers alone and wove this stuff from their passion, their skill and their belief in themselves. Writers create by force of will and strength of belief. What could be more human or more magical than that?

Erotica: selling the sizzle not the steak and doing it with a smile

2008-04-10T01:07:00.005+02:00

Porn is about fast, unsubtle, sating of appetites - once the short strokes are over, porn loses its appeal faster than cum can dry. As someone on ERWA pointed out, erotica is about yearning not sating - erotica creates desires that linger even when arousal fades.

There's a saying in marketing, you sell the sizzle, not the steak. I think erotica is like that. It focuses on the cues that make the mouth water, that make you tingle with anticipation.

If this is true, then you don't actually need the steak. Erotica doesn't need the money shot. Porn without the money shot is a rip-off.

It also seems to me that erotica can use humour to sell the sizzle whereas humour is porn is just a reason to press the fast forward button.

Let me illustrate what I mean with a story: "Moira and the Babysitter". I think this story is both erotic and funny. You can judge for yourself what it's selling and how,

Im interested to know what you think

Moira and the babysitter

reproduce without written permission from mikekimera@yahoo.co.uk

There are things that you know you shouldn’t do but you go ahead and do them anyway. It’s like sitting paralysed at the wheel while you drive into an on-coming truck, it’s scary as hell and you know it’s gonna hurt but GOD do you feel alive while it’s happening.

My on-coming truck was called Lisa and she made me break one of the primary rules of suburbia: never, EVER, kiss the babysitter.

It was a Saturday night I was home early from unsuccessful date, again! Another boyfriend running scared of a woman with a kid. He’d been looking for some action and I’d been looking for… hell I don’t know, maybe just to meet a man who didn’t turn out to be a complete shit whose every move was not determined by a desire to get laid without having to spend too much money to do it.

Do I sound harsh? Yeah? Well walk a mile in my shoes and see if you feel any different.

I got in and shouted to Lisa to let her know I was home. Lisa and I go way back. When she was 10 years old I was often the babysitter for her and her younger sister. She’s great with Sam, my little boy, and she’s always willing to baby-sit at short notice.

Maybe if I’d been less pissed at Jack, hereinafter to be referred to as JackAss, I might have paid attention to how Lisa was dressed and how hyped she seemed.

“Nice dress Mrs D,” she said as I walked into the family room.

“Not Mrs, Ms. Anyway, you should call me Moira, you’re old enough now.”

“Didn’t the date go well?”

“It went the way my dates always go. My maybe-Mr-Right turned out to definitely-Mr-Wrong. All dick and no spine. Shit, sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.”

Lisa laughed. “It’s ok, Moira. Like you said, I am old enough now.”

I should have heard the sirens going off and seen the lights flashing at the tone of voice she used but I was too busy extracting my feet from the toe-killing stilettos JackAss liked so much.

“But you like men don’t you?” Lisa said. “I mean you like sleeping with them?”

That got my attention. Especially the ‘them’ part. I wondered what she’d heard and from whom and how much of it was true. I looked at Lisa properly for the first time. She was pretty but tense. Which I guess made her pretty tense. Groan. This stuff happens in my head when I get nervous and I’d suddenly realised that I was nervous. I decided the best thing was to give Lisa as honest an answer as I could.

“Well, let me check my memory,” I said, pretending to think back “Yeah I like it. With the right guy doing the right things.”

“I guess I’ve never found the right guy,” Lisa said.

She sounded sad. I assumed some young shithead had taken her cherry and broken her heart. I hoped she hadn’t gotten pregnant by whomever it was. Nineteen was too young to be a single mother. I know, that was how old I was when “Mr. I’m a quarter-back, you’re a cheerleader, we should do it in the back of my SUV,” unleashed his two million sperm in a race to my womb through a hole in a broken rubber. The lucky winner produced Sam.

I put my arm around her and said, “You ok, Lisa?”

She leant against me and nodded her head. Then she said, “Can I ask you something? Can you like guys and like girls too?”

Woah, I could see where this was going. This is an uptight State. We don’t teach the joys of lesbian love in our High Schools. I was suddenly very aware of my arm around Lisa’s shoulder. If I took it away now, she’d think I was freaked out. I decided to lift her head so I could see her eyes clearly and then just slide my arm off her like it was no big deal.

“What do you mean, like?” I asked.

“You know. Like. Like to watch. Like to be with. Like to touch.”

Jesus. Suddenly I’m back in senior year, smoking dope at the back of the bleachers with Judy Sorrenson. We were practising kissing. Only so we could do it better with boys later you understand. Except it went further than that. We practised biting each other’s nipples and riding each other’s fingers. But Judy said it didn’t count because we were stoned and anyway we didn’t take our clothes off. Damn, I wish we had taken them off. Judy was hot.

“Moria?” Lisa is looking at me anxiously. She thinks I’m avoiding answering her. I am not going to let her think I disapprove.

“Listen Lisa,” I say, “it’s ok to like girls and boys but you have to be real careful who you tell. Do you like girls that way Lisa?”

There. That was smooth. That was professional and caring. This was going well.

“Not girls,” Lisa said. “I like you.”

Then she kissed me. A desperate, needy, snatched kiss, that seemed to anticipate rejection but went ahead anyway.

I just sat there like a piece of stone. I’d been kissed by my nineteen-year-old babysitter. What the hell was I supposed to do now?

Lisa started to cry. “I’m sorry,” she said, through her tears. “Please don’t tell Dad. Please. I won’t do it again. I won’t. I promise. I’ll get a boyfriend and everything. It’s just that you look so nice and I‘ve watched you for so long and I wanted to… please don’t tell please.”

That’s when the carwreck started. I should have reassured her and sent her home. What I actually did was kiss her.

Initially I just wanted to stop her crying, you know. I liked Lisa. She was a good kid and she didn’t deserve to be traumatized because the woman she had a crush on freaked out. I meant to show her that everything was ok. A sort of hug, only with the mouth.

The first couple of seconds were on plan. She stopped crying and just let her lips touch mine. She had very soft lips. And she smelled good. And the touch of her long hair against my hand felt comforting.

I think I must have closed my eyes, because I never saw her hands move. She held my head gently and pushed her tongue into my mouth. It wasn’t the “hey babe, feel this? Well wait till you feel Big-Boy inside you, moving the same way” sort of kiss that so many men use. It had a sense of wonder to it. An exploration of something that wasn’t you but that wasn’t entirely alien either. I stopped breathing. My nipples were telling me that I’d at last found a good kisser.

Then she dropped her hands, sat back and looked at me. I must have looked like a guppy, with my mouth hanging open and my eyes almost crossed. For a split second I was worried that she might not have liked it.

Lisa stroked my face and said, “That was just how I had imagined it. Thank you.”

I started to smile but I froze when Lisa started to push off the spaghetti straps to the little dress she was wearing.

“Do you like my breasts?” she said, looking down at them and pushing them up for my approval. She ran a thumb over her right nipple. It looked like the eraser on the end of a HB pencil. “Do you think my nipples are too long?”

Now I don’t go around checking out other women’s breasts or anything. I mean Lisa’s looked nice but they wouldn’t normally have turned me on. It was just that she was so close to me and I could still taste her in my mouth and it probably didn’t help that I hadn’t been laid properly in almost a month, Mr JackAss and I not having gotten past the blow-job stage. I couldn't look away from her nipple.

“Lisa,” I said, “we shouldn’t…”

She lifted my hand and placed it on her breast. I was only aware of two things, the heat of her skin against me and the little anticipatory spasm between my legs.

I stood up.

“Lisa, this has to stop. We are not lovers. I’m too old for you. And besides, your dad would kill me.”

Well that was better. Apart from the last sentence, I’d sounded like a sensible, caring adult. And we weren’t touching any more. I began to think I’d find a way out of this that didn’t involve pleading insanity.

Lisa got off the sofa and knelt in front of me. She rested her head against my belly just above my pubis and wrapped her arms around my legs. Short of hitting her, I was trapped.

She kissed my belly. “Oh God, I wish my belly was flatter,” I thought. Then she looked up at me and said. “You’re not too old. You’re only six years older than me. I know you don’t love me yet, but I want you to be my first. I’ve wanted that for a long time.”

She looked cute kneeling in front of me like that, her dress almost around her waist, her hair falling down her back, and a wide, hopeful smile on her face. Part of me was saying, “Go with it. Do the kid and yourself a favor.” The part of me that I LIKED was saying “Did you here the ‘don’t love me YET’ statement? This is way out of control. DO SOMETHING.”

And I would have listened. Really I would. If Lisa hadn’t slid her hands under my skirt and rolled my panties down. Damn, I should have worn pantyhose. A Victoria’s Secret thong is just way too easy to remove.

I reached down to stop her. I was going to push her away. This was wrong. I wasn’t going to play. I was very firm on that. Then her tongue touched me and my hands just rested on her head. I don’t remember parting my legs but suddenly there was room down there for her to lick in all the right places. “Why the hell can’t men ever learn to do it like that?” I thought.

I was twisting Lisa’s hair now and leaning my head back and… the phone rang.

I felt like I’d been released from some kind of fairytale spell. I stepped away from Lisa and picked up the phone. She was playfully crawling towards me. I didn’t know what I’d do when she got there.

“Is that you Moira?” a voice said as soon as I picked up. It was Lisa’s mother.

“Hi Mrs. Flannigan,” I said desperately pulling up my panties and straightening my clothes. Lisa scrambled to her feet and started to tuck herself back into her dress. She looked anxiously at the door as if it was about to be forced open by the sex police. I knew how she felt.

“I thought I saw your car.” Mrs Flannigan said, “Terrible thing to be home so early on a Saturday night. I’m sorry to bother you, but if you’ve finished with Lisa, I could use her at home to help me hang these new curtains.”

“Sure thing, Mrs Flannigan, I’ll send her right over.”

There was silence after I put the phone down.

“That was your mother,” I said.

OK, so I state the obvious when I’m under stress. I had no idea what to do next.

Lisa laughed. “Guess we almost got busted,” she said. Then she kissed me quickly on the lips and said, “That was great. I knew it would be. I better go before Mom starts asking questions.”

“What happened to Miss Vulnerable Teenage Lesbian Virgin?” I thought. One minute it’s all intimacy and passion, next minute it’s like we’re discussing cheating on a term paper.

I was in a mess. My libido was shouting, “Hey, who switched the power off? I’m not done yet?” My nice side was going “Phew that was close, let’s pretend nothing ever happened here tonight.” But mostly I was thinking, “She can’t just up and leave!”

Some of all that must have shown on my face because, Lisa slowed down and gave me a real affectionate look. She put her hand on my forearm and said, “That was special. Thank you. And don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone what we did.”

What WE did? I didn’t do anything. Yeah right. And that was exactly the problem.

When she got to the door she hesitated and said, “Mom will be out on Wednesday. I could come over. Call me. Bye Moira.”

Wednesday night. Four whole days away.

Ever thought about doing something you shouldn’t and known you were going to end up doing it anyway?

"Toying With Lily" a new story up on ERWA

2008-04-04T12:36:00.003+02:00

ERWA has a BDSM: Powerplay theme this month with an array of high quality stories:

Authority 102
by Oxartes

Girls Gone Wild
by Helen E. H. Madden

Plans for the Weekend
by SMOTP

Savitri, The Devoted Wife
by Seneca Mayfair

The Preparation
by felicia Mansur

and my own

Toying with Lily
by Mike Kimera

I've posted an extract from "Lily" below, to give you a flavour of the thing.

If BDSM doesn't press your buttons, you might enjoy some of the other stories on the ERWA site this month

Babylon Nights
by Oxartes

Gravity
by Helen E. H. Madden

Extract from "Toying with Lily" (C) Mike Kimera 2008

The jeans are a deliberate act of provocation. Lily, my allegedly submissive, "You can do anything to me. Anything at all. I'll even call you, Daddy while you do it." mistress, likes to test my limits by defying me. She wants to see what I will put up with and what I will do to keep her in her place. She likes to be kept in her place.

,,,,,,,,

"It was thoughtful of you to keep your jeans on," I say, closing my hand around Lily's collared throat and forcing her back against me. I have large hands and I have often used them to deprive Lily of air at crucial moments. "I'm sure it's a polite way of letting me know that you don't need to be fucked today."

"No!"

The word escapes before Lily can stop it. Remaining unfucked is one of the few punishments that would really make Lily suffer. To paraphrase Rhett Butler, Lily is the kind of woman who needs to be fucked often and by someone who knows how. That's one of the reasons she is here with me instead of with her loving husband: I know how.

I also control when.

"How many days has it been now, Lily?"

"Four."

I'm impressed. According to the rules, Lily is not allowed to have an orgasm for two days before we meet. It gives our meetings an edge. Four days of restraint will have honed Lily's hunger to a razor's edge. And yet she couldn't resist defying me by keeping her jeans on. Still, if Lily could move in a straight line from need to satisfaction she wouldn't be dependent on someone like me to bind and beat her along the path to release.

Erotica, sin, shame and secrecy

2008-03-29T18:44:00.002+01:00

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

2008-03-27T00:41:00.006+01:00

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

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"

2008-03-19T21:43:00.003+01:00

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

2008-03-06T10:22:00.002+01:00

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.

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

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.

A curious thing about writing erotica...

2008-03-02T20:08:00.003+01:00

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

“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.

Toblerone and Exotic Dancers

2008-02-05T10:59:00.000+01:00

I live in Switzerland so I can’t ignore the 100^h Birthday of the most famous and most innovative of Swiss Chocolates: Toblerone.

When I was growing up in the UK there was a memorable, slightly psychedelic, animated ad for Toblerone which had the surreal feel of the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine”. It was accompanied by a “New Seekers” type song that went

Toblerone
out on its own
Triangular chocolate
that's toblerone
Made from triangular honey by triangular bees
from triangular flowers in triangular trees
a-and *O-O-OH* Mr Confectioner pleease!!
GIVE ME TOBLERONE

Now that’s effective advertising – I remember the words more than twenty years later. At the time it seemed to make Toblerone out to be a kind of LSD. But then, English ads often carry a second meaning – the copywriters must have been grinning when the got Cadburys to go with

A finger of fudge

is just enough

to give the kids a treat

Anyway, Toblerone (in England we call it Toe – blur – own. In Switzerland they call it Toe- bluh – roh – nay because it links Tobler’s name to torrone – the Italian word for nougat) is still out on it’s own after 100 years.

It’s been owned by Kraft foods since 2000 and currently is ranked 17^th amongst global confectionary foods brands – impressive given it has had limited distribution in the US for the past thirty years or so (hey, I’m a consultant; I get paid to know this stuff). The current marketing tagline is: "Lose yourself in the Toblerone triangle." – Further hints at the hallucinogenic power of chocolate, honey and nougat – or is it just the triangular shape that makes the difference?

The triangular shape, which allows you to snap off one triangle at a time and pretend that you’ll leave the rest to later, is the link to the exotic dancers in the headline of this blog entry

It’s often stated that Tobler gave the chocolate its triangular shape because he was inspired by the Matterhorn but Theodor Tobler was in his twenties when he came up with the idea and he was the king of marketing cool of his day so I wasn’t surprised to learn that Matterhorn (booooooring) had nothing to do with it.

According to Tobler’s grandson, Andreas, the idea actually was inspired when Theodore went to the Folies Bergeres in Paris (a very naughty place to visit at the time) and saw the dancers forming human triangles as part of their act.

You have to admire a man who sees pretty, athletic women form a triangle and goes “Mmm, I’d like to pop those in my mouth one at a time.”

The print market for erotica is dead? Not with editors like Alison Tyler and Rache Kramer Bussel around

2008-02-04T00:54:00.000+01:00

2007 saw a further contraction of the print market for erotica. The long-running Blue Moon / Avalon imprint was killed off. Orion and Neon both cut back on their plans, including cancelling commissioned novels.

The publishers that remain have narrowed their calls for submission so that you they can hit a particular niche, preferably with a sure-fire formula – for example erotic romance must have a happy ending. Apparently that and not the passion that people feel and express, is the defining characteristic of romance.

In this context it is particularly pleasing to see some editors having significant success in pitching short story collections to the publishing houses. Rachel Kramer Bussel has done well with the “He’s On top” and “She’s On Top” pair of D/s books and has more on the way.

Alison Tyler has managed to pitch an Erotic Alphabet series (now don’t you with you’d thought of that?) to Cleis. Putting something like this together is a lot of work. You have to handle the publishers and their lawyers. You have to push out calls for submission and deal with authors like me (Alison wanted one of my stories for "H is for Hardcore" but I was ill and didn’t get the contract to her in time) and you have continuously to publicise the books in the press and on the internet.

Alison was kind enough to give me a second chance to contribute to her series and I now have “Have a Nice Day” (one of the raunchiest things I’ve ever written) in her appropriately name “I is for Indecent” and “Other Bonds Than Leather* (my favourite this-is-what–it’s really-like BDSM story) in “L is for Leather”. The covers are cute. The authors cover a wide range of styles and content but all pack a punch.

So when I hear “e-books killed the print erotica market, aint it awful” line in writers’ formums I remind people of Rachel and Alison and point out that if you have the energy and the talent and the persistence you can make print work.

I wish them continuing success.

Flash Fiction: Super Bowl XLII

2008-02-03T18:50:00.000+01:00

Flash Fiction, stories of 200 words or less, is as much fun to write as it is to read. I use them to test my ability to put a bigger punch in a smaller package.

I've put this little piece together as an exercise in writing outside my own culture - for me football is played by fast fit lads who kick the ball around without a break for two fortyfive minute sessions, not by steroid-enhanced gorillas in armour who jump on each other in rehearsed ballet moves and take a rest every few minutes so the promoters can sell more advertising.

Anyway, here's a little offering from me to keep you amused on Super Bowl Sunday - even if you think NFL means Non-Fat Latte.

“You’re sure you want this?”

“Don’t I look sure?”

"You look wonderful. Wearing nothing but a Patriots shirt is a nice touch. But what about Matt?"

"Your brother, my husband, the one we’re about to cheat on - again? I’m wearing this shirt in his honor. He’s sure the Patriots will get the first touchdown."

"Where is he?"

"Downstairs, in front of the plasma, grazing on chips and guacamole. I offered to put an X in Superbowl XLII and he said he’d prefer pizza. That’s why you got the booty call draft. Hell, even I told him I was ovulating and that we could call the baby Brady. Made no difference."

"You’re ovulating?"

"Of course not. Does stupid run in your family? Anyway, even if I was, there’d be no way of proving which of you was the father."

"Yeah but if the babies mine I want it called Moss"

"That’s what I like about you. You understand the value of a good catch. With Matt only the touchdown counts. Now bend me over and show me how deep you can go in the end-zone."

"You gonna be my wide receiver?"

"Honey I’m lubed up to be your tight end"

Back to writing: “Blind Faith” – my first story for 2008 – is up on the ERWA website

2008-02-02T01:02:00.001+01:00

Hi folks,

I’m glad to have 2007 behind me. On the whole it was not a fun year. It was my least productive writing year since I started in 1999. I’m determined not to let history repeat itself. 2008 is going to be a GREAT writing year.

So far, things are going well. The folks over at the rolling writer’s workshop that is the Erotic Readers and Writers Association helped me to kick start the year with their theme of the month.

January’s theme was fetish. I wanted to do something that avoided the whips/leather/latex stuff and straddled the line between vanilla and something more. I came up with “Blind Faith” a gentle piece about blindfold public sex. The story revolves around the transformational nature of a fetish – in this case a blindfold. The sex is hot, the setting is real, but the focus is the experience of Faith and how it is affected by her fetish.

Here’s a small sample

Faith shivered at the thought of being on public display, but she did not leave. Instead she touched the strip of heavy white cotton that was tied around her wrist. It was her magic amulet. It had the power to transform her from her day to day self into someone to whom amazing things happened. After all, how many recently divorced, thirty-five year old Englishwomen found themselves standing on a harbour wall, looking out at the Alps and waiting for their lover to arrive?

If you’d like to see the whole story, please go here. http://www.erotica-readers.com/GD/S/Blind_Faith.htm

I’d love to hear what you think of it.