Needing Inspiration

a Muse?
Muses are supposed to be inspirational. I’m suddenly inspired to eat someone.

Inspiration is a fickle friend. Which Muse do you appeal to when the story bogs down? There doesn’t seem to be a ready answer, for the Muses’ traditional realms were various sorts of poetry, not prose accounts of sexual activity. The current work is fiction, but the story is spread over seven millennia, and there’s a lot of history mixed in with the fucking, so do I appeal to Clio? Her realm is history, after all. Or Terpsichore? Well, she’s into dancing, but if you remember Xanadu, she apparently gets into art as well, and looks a lot like Olivia Newton John. Clio apparently looks like Kerry Butler, proving, if nothing else, that when someone adapts a cult film into a musical play sometimes they get their Muses confused, or repurposed, or something. Personally, I don’t imaging the Greeks were picturing beautiful blondes as Muses, but probably inspirational spirits who looked a bit more, well, Hellenic.

What does this have to do with inspiration? I’m trying to inspire myself to finish the book I’m working on. Money, however, seems to be more of an inspiration than art. People buy my books, but a lot more people probably read the absolute dreck I turn out trying to convince them to buy soap, or cars, or toasters, or what have you. The books and stories satisfy my artistic yearning, but writing advertising goes a lot farther when it comes to paying the rent on my apartment and buying groceries.

If I could claim to have an actual hobby, this would probably be it.

For most of the last year, I haven’t even had to go into the office to do that job. I could sit in front of my computer at home and come up with the same slogans I’d create in the office, but with the added advantage that I could write them with one hand on the keyboard and the other on my pussy.

Covid has undoubtedly helped to make masturbation even more popular than it has always been. Certainly sales have been up a little for my books and stories. Not as high as they were back in the days when Amazon had most of them on sale, but up a bit from their pre-Covid averages. I can only conclude that more people are staying home and need something to jerk their cocks or diddle their cunts to. Inspiration to do something sexual is much easier to come by than inspiration to write something sexy.

I do sometimes wonder if my books would sell better if they were illustrated. I’m not a very good artist, though. And good artists are expensive. Photos would be cheaper, but it isn’t easy to find a set that exactly fits the story. You can’t just grab pictures from the web; you have to pay for them and obtain a proper license to use them. That isn’t easy. It’s surprising how few of the photo agencies allow their products to be used as book covers or interior art. Most are only licensed for online use. And commissioning photos to fit the story isn’t in the budget.

You might ask, what’s in the upcoming work? As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, the current working title is Undying Lust, and the protagonist is an immortal originally called Zara, and renamed Sarah in more recent times. Roughly 6,600 years old, she’s seen a lot and done a lot. She’s been involved in a threesome with Robin Hood and Maid Marian, fucked an actual god (which is how she ended up immortal), given birth to a demigod, survived a disaster or two, once knew Shakespeare, and been involved in more than one marathon sixty-nine session with me. Her original religion involved a lot of sex and the frequent praise of a set of gods and goddesses who held to a general non-interference policy with the people who worshipped them, but did enjoy watching them have sex (well, who doesn’t, if you’re going to be honest?).

yummy
Not the characters in my story, but she looks to be having a good time.

Naturally, this being one of my books, there’s a good bit of consensual incest. Zara’s people, the Moronites, didn’t actually see anything wrong with the concept as long as all involved were old enough to know what they were doing, and their gods and goddesses were nearly all married to their siblings. The one exception was their creator god, Kolek, who was married to his daughter, Kanzeki. Kanzeki had no mother, but was created entirely by her father, who masturbated her into existence. He’d previously spent most of his spare time masturbating galaxies into existence, but eventually became lonely and created a daughter instead. Kolek was more of a Deist-type god, letting the galaxies he’d jerked into being evolve on their own while he was off  spewing out more. So if a widowed Zara felt comfortable fucking her grown son, the gods didn’t care and neither did her neighbors.

And, of course, there’s a certain amount of pee involved. Call it a personal fetish. One of the things I like about Sarah is her oversized bathtub, big enough for two to play around in. If you’re already in the tub, who cares if you get a little wet?

Plot v. Porn

There is always a question when you’re writing erotic stories. What is the proper ratio of plot to action? Is there a fixed percentage of the story that should be devoted to graphic descriptions of sexual action? How much description and exposition is enough, and how much is too much?

There doesn’t appear to be any hard and fast rule on this. Porn videos have obviously leaned in the direction of action over exposition. It used to be that porn movies needed to include a good bit of plot and non-sexual action in order to avoid being censored, just as porn magazines, while loaded with pictures of naked people having sex, also contained “scholarly” articles explaining why the things the models were doing was healthy and psychologically important to their mental health. These days, with porn more or less established as legal, there’s a lot less of that.

In 1980, a 70-minute porn feature might contain 30 minutes of people talking. Today, a same-length feature is likely to contain 60 minutes of fucking and just enough plot to get from one bed to the next.

I’m going through this calculation with my current work in progress, which will be called Memoirs of an Immortal. Because the story has to cover a span of over six millennia, there is obviously lots of space for both plot and sex. So far, there’s a good deal of both. My primary character, Zara, who also goes by Sarah, Elissa, Veronica, and a few other names between her birth in 4685 BCE and modern times, spends much of her time having sex. Being immortal, she’s also immune to the various plagues she lives through, and stopped aging at 36, remaining eternally a hot redhead (hence the pictures of hot redheads scattered through this essay).

The story naturally includes that standard “no resemblance” disclaimer, though some of the characters that appear are definitely real. They’ve just been dead long enough to be historical, so you get to mess around with them a bit more. So she gets to meet people such as Caligula, Bocaccio, Shakespeare, and others. What sort of interaction depends on the historical person, how they’re perceived, and what they’d be likely to do in a given situation.

Would she have sex with Caligula, for instance? I think she very well might, at least before he went completely nuts. With Shakespeare? Oh, no doubt, and he’d most likely write a sonnet or two about it, if not an actual erotic play. Fucking in blank verse. Not sure I’ll go there, but there is a certain temptation.

Honestly, you’re going to find plots in all of my stories. I find pure, mindless sex rather boring. Even if I’m watching some Japanese newsroom bukkake video I find that I need to come up with some sort of plot. Must there not be a reason why this ridiculous parade of men are wandering up to the anchor desk and cumming all over the newsreader? And she isn’t trying to kill them? Is it possible that aliens from Planet X have issued a threat to destroy Tokyo if this doesn’t happen? If you’ve ever watched old Japanese sci-fi movies this sort of thing might just make sense.

As for the original question, I can’t really make up my mind if there’s a magic formula for plot v. porn in an erotic story or novel. In Lust for Blood there were a number of chapters with no sex at all, and others where there wasn’t much else. Shorter works tend to have more sex as the encounters are more central to the plot.