Why I’m addicted to feedback from readers

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"

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"

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Mike Kimera 2010

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

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

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?

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

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

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...

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

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

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

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

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

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.