Month: September 2017

This is always a question for anyone writing erotica. Just how dirty do you make your book or story? Do you try to keep it tame enough to appear in the bigger markets? Or do you go into areas that a lot of people think of as perversions, limiting sales to the handful of outlets that sell that sort of thing?

I do both. Of my four currently-published books, three are in the specialist category, and one is more basic erotica. There are three more books at the publisher now, which should be on sale soon, again in the specialist area. By specialist, I mean there’s some adult incest involved. And there might be a brief mention of a horse somewhere.

Honestly, this is more a marketing decision than a literary one. Erotica sells, and for some reason the kinkier types sell better than the tamer variety. Back before Amazon started cracking down, if you published essentially identical books, but in one you made the characters unrelated, and in the other you made them siblings, the second one would sell in the hundreds of copies in the same time it took the other to sell a couple dozen.

That’s one of the dirty little secrets of the erotica genre. A very large proportion of incest erotica is simply non-incest stories with a relationship added. If you have a guy in a threesome with a pair of bisexual waitresses, you gain some extra sales if you make them sisters. That sort of thing. School friends become siblings, an older neighbor becomes an uncle or a father. It doesn’t take much.

Amazon, of course, doesn’t take any of it. Not if they notice it, which they eventually do. One anthology I was a part of, though not using this pen name, was a perennial favorite on Amazon for several years, until someone noticed that a lot of the characters were related to each other, and the rest were mostly in high school (but all over 18). How they managed to miss it for so long is a mystery, considering the title was Loving Families and Naughty Schooldays, which would seem to provide adequate clues about the contents. And, if the title didn’t, the blurb certainly did, in the usual, carefully implied but not quite stated way. You can still buy the book, but you have to get it from Lot’s Cave now.

I love the name, Lot’s Cave. I went to one of those ridiculous Christian schools back home in Atlanta. You know the ones, where the cheerleaders dress like it’s still the Truman administration, and biological diversity is staunchly asserted to be the result of Noah dropping off different animals in different places. We spent a lot of time reading the Bible. Parts of it, anyway. It’s surprising how much is essentially just ancient porn. The story of Lot and his two daughters is one of the better incest stories.

In case you don’t remember, after the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot and his two daughters took refuge in a cave near Zoar. Hiding there, they believed the entire world had been destroyed, not just those cities, and there’d be no one for them to marry. Since the two daughters, who were presumably the same two virgins their father had offered to the rape gang outside his house a few days earlier, wanted children, they decided to get him drunk and sleep with him.

I really don’t believe this for a minute. Leave aside that I think most of the Bible is just a collection of old myths, and has about as much to do with reality as Dracula, the situation just doesn’t work for me. Have you ever tried to have sex with a guy who’s so drunk he’s passed out? He needs to be reasonably sober, and conscious, if you expect him to get hard. So, just based on that, I’d say Lot knew what was going on. Given the anti-feminist stance of the Bible, it wouldn’t surprise me if the whole thing wasn’t his idea.

That’s the thing. If you use the Bible as a literary guide, you can reasonably include all sorts of perversions. Abraham was married to his half-sister, Lot fucked both of his daughters, all four of Jacob’s wives were sisters, two full, two half, Song of Songs spends a good deal of time rhapsodizing about breasts, love, and, if you’re paying attention, cunt  licking. Reading between the lines, it seems fairly obvious that Jesus was gay (never married, spent all his time hanging around with a dozen guys, and just before his death turned over responsibility for caring for his mother to the disciple he “loved”). You’ll never convince an evangelical of it, but it’s really kind of obvious he was more into guys than gals.

I don’t know if I’ve actually answered the original question. I tend to go pretty far in my writing, mostly involving incest and pee play. Others may not. It really does boil down to a question of where you want to sell. One Room, which you can find on Amazon, is about two completely unrelated lovers. Freaky Farmers, which is only available from Lot’s Cave, triplets having sex, a guy screwing his mother, a hot babe sucking off her brother by the pool, and two sets of siblings (and cousins) screwing around both separately and together.

I attended a private Christian high school, which, to protect the guilty, I’ll continue to refer to as the Jesus Loves America Christian High School, or “JLA,” as I did in the first volume of my memoirs, The Life of Lauren. That’s not the school’s real name, of course, but the real one was just as silly.  The place was more or less what you’d expect. Lot’s of moralizing, cheerleader uniforms that would have been right at home in 1940 (worn over tap pants, just in case), and a lot of illicit sex that everyone pretended wasn’t happening. Like the time my friend, Rhonda, caught the boys’ gym teacher and Miss Simmons, our English Lit teacher, sixty-nining under the gym bleachers.

It was also the school where I was awarded five swats across my bare ass with the principal’s paddle for blasphemy, of all things. I made the mistake of saying that Darwin made sense, which in that school was considered the same as saying that God wasn’t real. The people who ran the school were young-earth creationists. From what I gather, they still are.  Old Mr. Fartface (his real name was Farthingale) was a bit of a perv, if you ask me.  When he swatted me, he had me bent over his desk, and he was the one who flipped my skirt up over my back and pulled my panties down to my knees so that he could swat my bare rump. He kept me that way for quite a while after he was done with the paddling, too.

Did I mention there was no one else in the office. I always figured he was squatting back there, studying my pussy, and maybe even jerking off. At least this was before digital cameras, which can be set to take pictures without making a sound, so I know he wasn’t doing that.

I was a cheerleader. When we were seniors, past our eighteenth birthdays, we used to gather after football games for what we always told our parents were Bible study sessions. They approved of that sort of thing. Sometimes, we even got out our Bibles and did some studying. Mostly, we just had our little cheerleader lesbian orgies. But I’m not going to get into that here. If you want to read about what happened at those, and at a reunion a few years later, you should buy the book.

No, here I’m going to look at some of the stuff we got into when we actually did open up our Bibles and do some studying. If you’re someone who’s interested in kinky sex, there’s no better place to start looking.

The first thing we came up with was that Adam and Eve were siblings. I know, that sounds a bit out there, but think about it. Eve was made from one of Adam’s ribs (Gen. 2:22), which means that she was genetically almost identical. Obviously, God was the first GMO creator, since he’d have had to modify Eve by eliminating Adam’s “Y” chromosome and making her a double-“X”, or he really would have created Adam and Steve. But, despite that, they would have had the same genetic affinity as any brother and sister. So, in that sense, Adam married his sister (or maybe himself?), and the entire human race is descended from an initial incestuous coupling.

Then there’s the question of just who Adam and Eve’s sons married. Genesis says that they had sons and daughters, but since there was, presumably, no one else around except those sons and daughters, they obviously had to marry each other, so the incest carried on through the second generation of humanity. Even in the third generation, you couldn’t get further apart than a first cousin, and there were probably still a lot of brother-sister unions. No real rules on that yet, remember. And you would have run into a similar bottleneck with inbreeding after the Flood, when all you had was Noah, his wife, his three sons, and their wives. At best, it was back to nothing but first cousins again, and likely a few sibling unions until the population could build itself up again.

Okay, it probably wasn’t like that in reality, since Adam and Eve, and Noah and his family, weren’t real people anyway. Nor was there ever a “first” human being. At some point in the evolutionary chain an ancestor became what we’d call a human today, but it was an incremental step, not a leap from one species to another. There would have been hundreds, or perhaps even thousands of generations between the “pre-human” and the “human” before they were so different they could no longer mate with each other and produce viable offspring. For a very long time they’d be like horses and donkeys, still closely related enough to mate and produce a hybrid mule, but far enough apart that the mule is sterile. It would take a lot longer until you had humans and apes, who still could presumably mate, but the mating could never result in a pregnancy (except, maybe, in a few conspiracy nuts’ imaginations).

But, back to the Bible, the Dirty Parts. The three major western religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, all trace their origin back to Abraham, and the first two to Abraham and Sarah (Islam, or Arabs, at least, trace their line back to Abraham and Hagar). This is interesting, because the Bible states very clearly that Sarah was Abraham’s half-sister, which is incest no matter how you look at it. Even in the weird, the child is really only the father’s product, the mother just provides a place for the seed to grow, biological fallacy espoused by the biblical writers. Abraham states, “She is the daughter of my father, but not the daughter of my mother; and she became my wife.” (Gen. 20:12)  I guess things were a little different back in Ur, before Abram became Abraham.

It was also around this time that Lot was screwing both of his daughters in a cave somewhere around Zoar. Genesis gives the excuse that they thought the world had ended, and there was no one else left, so the two girls got their father drunk and had sex with him when he wouldn’t realize what had happened. Personally, I’m not buying it. I’ve been around a few guys who were so smashed they didn’t know what they were doing, and memory isn’t the only thing alcohol takes away. By the time you’re that drunk, nothing will be rising until you’ve sobered up again. The “he perceived not when she lay down” thing is just a whitewash. He knew who it was, and he knew what he was doing. The whole thing has always struck me as a lot of making excuses for what is, after all, probably nothing more than a myth.

Of course, if you’re really looking for the dirty parts, read Song of Solomon, or Song of Songs, whichever you prefer to call it. Rev. Killjoy always claimed this was a beautiful allegory about Christ’s love for his flock, but, I have to be honest with you, it’s mostly about fucking. Rev. Killjoy, you may recall if you’ve read the book, also believed in sharing the “tower of blessing” with the prettier high school seniors, so they could receive the “divine anointing” after they’d paid proper homage to it.

You don’t recall that? Buy the bloody book.

Return to LaurenMilfinger.com

I always have these strange, confused feelings when I finish a book. I wonder if I’ve put in everything that should be there. I wonder if I’ve put in too many things that shouldn’t. It’s a strange craft, writing.

A few minutes ago I finished the last words of They All Cum at Carlisle’s, which will be the latest installment in my “autobiography.” I put that in quotes for obvious reasons. I may be exaggerating a bit here and there. Okay, a lot. I’m not saying I didn’t spend the summer teaching a writing class at a nudist camp, and I’m not saying there wasn’t some sex going on. It’s just that, being a fiction writer, I might not be entirely accurate about who was having it with whom.  (No, that’s not me in the picture, and it’s not me in the other one, either. They’re models.)

This can become an issue when you write stories about “loving families” and other kinky stuff. People wonder if you really did that. And I really can’t help feeding the fantasy, making the stories about myself, suggesting that it’s all real. If you want to think it is, well, I can’t stop you. But if anyone decided to investigate very thoroughly, I’m afraid they’d be disappointed. There are certain things that literary Lauren did, and can do, that real Lauren didn’t and can’t.

For this book, the next step is to email the manuscript to my editor. If you’re thinking of writing anything, erotica, or a guidebook to raising tulips, have it edited before you send it to the publisher. If you’re one of those people who are busily adding to the pile of self-published books at Amazon, definitely send it to an editor. You have to pay them, but it’s worth it if you get back a manuscript with the spelling errors fixed, punctuation where it belongs, and all the characters keeping the same name all the way through the book.

Inattention to details like that is how Bruce Banner found himself transformed into David Banner in an old comic book, and eventually compromising on being David Bruce Banner a few issues later. One of my uncles has all of those old comics. He pointed that out as something to be careful about, once he was convinced I was serious about writing for a living.

I’m not sure what I’m going to do next. Take a couple days off, I suppose, though that’s a questionable tactic for the self-employed. I don’t get paid for taking a vacation. If people don’t buy books, I don’t get paid for anything, which is why I’m on Twitter all the time plugging away.

If you’re considering writing the Great American Novel, or the next piece of Great American Erotica, and you need a good editor, drop me an email at the address on the website and I’ll hook you up with mine. He prefers to remain anonymous here, and since he lives several states away, I can’t bribe him with blowjobs the way I can my IT guy, but he’s fast, and he’s good, and more I really couldn’t hope for. If you want him to edit your book, obviously, he’ll tell you who he is, if only when he sends the bill. Editors get paid. How much depends on how long the book is, since he charges by the word.

What’s next? After the brief vacation, I mean. I remember when I was a teenager, hanging around with the other cheerleaders, diligently studying our Bibles. It was a Christian high school, so we were expected to do that sort of thing. Of course, being the teenaged heathens that we were, we spent most of our time looking for the dirty parts, and discussing it in between the naked daisy chains (after we were 18, obviously). The Old Testament is loaded with sex, mixed in with the incest, murder, genocide, and general silliness. Maybe I’ll write something biblical. Adam and Eve, perhaps? If she was made from his rib, that would make her genetically identical to him, apart from not having the “Y” chromosome, which would technically make her his sister, so it appears the whole basis of religion starts with incest.

As for now. I’ve got that email to send with the manuscript, though I suspect the old geezer is probably asleep by now. Then I think I’ll just go masturbate myself into a stupor.

Return to LaurenMilfinger.com