Category: Writing

Kinky Victorian Servants

I’m still working on the first chapter of The Erotic Adventures of a Lady’s Maid, my version of the Victorian sex novel that Maureen O’Leary, Lady Anna’s lady’s maid in Lust for Blood, claims to have written. It’s been a few days, and I’m probably only about a third of the way through the chapter. Keep in mind, though, that these are Victorian chapters, the sort that start with a list of subtitles, so this first chapter covers: Birth and Childhood; The Allinghams confer; Early service; The journey to Elton; Arrival in Elton; Corningwood Manor; Meeting Mrs. Allen; Duties explained; Introduction to Lady Caroline; An impudent groom; Meeting Lord Corningwood; A gift from her mistress. In other words, in a modern novel, this one chapter would likely be the first ten or twelve.

There’s no sex in “Birth and Childhood,” obviously. I write very sexual characters, but they’re all of legal age before they get into anything. The Allinghams, the solicitor and his wife who employ Cecily’s parents, do their conferring in bed, however, so we get into it fairly quickly. It’s very kinky, in a Victorian sort of way. People in late Victorian times were very staid and proper, as long as they though anyone was looking, but they could be just as weird as modern people when they were alone. In “The journey to Elton” section, Cecily, on her way to her new position in rural Kent, has the train compartment to herself so, naturally, she takes advantage of the solitude to masturbate her way out of London. Things will, as they say, go on from there.

There are obvious differences in writing about Victorians and writing about contemporary people. Sexuality hasn’t changed that much, but the way it’s expressed has. Victorians were flowerier, for one thing, and somewhat less inclined to using some of the more popular modern vulgarisms. Mind you, they rarely wrote “penis,” or “vulva,” or any of the proper terms, either. They were more inclined to “his massive tower of pleasure,” or “the fragrant depths of her secret cave of passion.” I don’t know if they actually talked that way, but they certainly wrote that way.

Getting into that style takes a bit of adjustment. Since the story is set in England, there’s the additional adjustment of switching to British spelling and syntax. The date of the story, mostly 1894, dictates much of the context. People are getting around in carriages, and on horseback, or by bicycle. They wear a lot more clothing than we do now. One reason lady’s maids existed was because wealthy women often wore dresses that required a second person helping to get in and out of. A bodice fastened by twenty buttons, all in the centre of the back, for example, or a laced corset that was, again, operated from behind.

You also need to figure out the back stairs hierarchy in a place such as Corningwood Manor, seat of the Corningwood family for centuries. Who works under whom, that sort of thing. A lady’s maid was something of an odd girl out in that sort of household. She was often the only female staff member who, while definitely a servant, answered directly to the lady of the house, and not to the housekeeper. Governesses were in a similar position, except that a governess was not, technically, a servant, being usually a gentlewoman with a proper education, and not working class. A lady’s companion fell into a similar category, with the most important distinction being that, while she was obviously paid for her services, she was normally treated more as a family member, including, generally, eating with the family and not with the servants.

Victorians did, in fact, know all of the same sexual tricks we still employ.

A lady’s maid such as Cecily, who was literate, well-spoken, and properly educated, might be called upon to act as both maid and companion. She’d still eat with the servants, though, but she was presentable enough, and articulate enough, to be taken along on visits and trips.

Most Victorian lady’s maids did not, of course, provide quite the same level of intimate services Cecily provides for her employer, but Cecily is rather special, and Lady Caroline is quite beautiful and just happens to prefer other women to men. Cecily, to be honest, doesn’t discriminate.

It’s going to be an interesting book. I think I can safely say that much.

I’m wondering if I should simply shut off commenting. As it is, all comments have to be approved by me before they appear. You might notice that there aren’t any appearing here yet, which I think neatly categorizes the half dozen or so submitted daily. It’s not that I won’t approve comments, even some rather quirky ones, but I’m not going to do that if the comment has nothing whatever to do with the post, or is obviously written by a bot instead of a person. My personal favorite (I get two or three of these every day, usually on the same early post) is a long collection of paragraphs that are obviously intended as “select one” generic comments. These people don’t give a shit what they say, because the point of the comment isn’t the comment, it’s the half-dozen spam URLs included with it.

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Thanksgiving 2017

I decided to skip the parade this year. Usually I go, since it’s only a two block walk from here. This year, it just felt like it would be too much trouble. It used to be, you’d just call up a couple friends, say, “meet me at 45th and 6th,” and you’d show up on the corner, find your friends, and go stand on the sidewalk. You can still do that, but first you have to get through a lot of barriers, and have a cop searching your purse, and, well, it’s just more of a hassle than I cared to bother with. It’s just like New Year’s on Times Square. In the good old days, security meant there were cops wandering through the crowd, not security checkpoints to get in. There are nearly twice as many cops in New York than there are people in my home town, and the general impression today is that every one of them is somewhere along the parade route. Kind of a pity, since it seems to be a nice day outside.

So, with the parade a television event this year, I’m concentrating on the food. I’ve learned to be an efficient cook. My apartment is fairly large, one of the handful of two-bedroom units in this building, but the kitchen is tiny. Still, it has everything I need. Stove, microwave, oven, all that cooking stuff, and a full-size refrigerator, which isn’t always a given in a rental unit. There’s not much counter space. You learn to utilize whatever there is very efficiently.

I went with a twelve-pound turkey. Back home, Mom would always buy the biggest turkey she could find, but back there you’d expect a couple dozen people cycling through on Thanksgiving and Christmas. Here, it’s just me, my brother Sam, and my friend Sarah. Sam’s bringing his new girl friend, who seems like a nice enough young lady. Sarah’s just bringing herself, like every year.

Why did I say “every year?” Strange. Seems like she’s been here a half dozen times for Thanksgiving, which is ridiculous, since I’ve only known her about six months. That’s just Sarah, though. I always feel that I’ve known her much longer than I have. Perhaps because she bears a strong resemblance to a neighbor we had when I was a kid. Both gorgeous redheads in their mid-30s. I have no idea what the neighbor tasted like, since I was a kid at the time and that sort of thing would have been inappropriate, to say the least, but Sarah is delicious.

What is a writer thankful for on Thanksgiving? Family, of course. At least, the ones like Sam, Aunt Becky, Uncle Ralph, Aunt Imogen, cousins Andrew and Eve. In other words, the ones that aren’t certifiable, and don’t think Pat Robertson is someone you should trust, or that our current President was put here by God to save us from the commie socialists. I’m thankful for Sarah, she of the perky boobs, flaming red hair, and talented tongue. I’m thankful for my faithful readers. Particularly the ones who’ve added themselves to the notification lists at the booksellers and buy each new book as soon as it comes out.

I’m thankful for Jim, my proficient, efficient, and really well-hung IT guy. I actually invited him, but he’s off in the suburbs with his daughter and grandkids. I can hardly blame him. I’d be doing the same, if I had either of those.

Of course, with guests over, I have to dress up a little. Well, I have to dress. If it was just Sam and Sarah, I think I’d be fine wandering around the apartment naked, but Sam’s girlfriend apparently isn’t into orgies. She’s not a religious nut, like our Mom, but she’s not a social nudist, either. Neither is Sarah, really, but we spend so much time together naked, and she has so little in the way of false physical modesty, that she’d be just fine with dropping her clothes the moment she walked through the door.

Anyway, have a happy Thanksgiving. It’s time to go baste the damned turkey.

Erotica Writing, Then and Now

Over the years, I’ve written some very strange stuff. Back in college I used to write 45,000-word “novels” on a fairly regular basis. The plots tended to be a bit standardized. The main requirement was that there was at least one sex scene per chapter. Who was getting fucked depended on what the publisher needed. Sometimes they wanted twins, sometimes they wanted incestuous siblings, sometimes they wanted a lot of peeing, sometimes they wanted orgies. They’d ask for it, I’d write it, a check would arrive with the contract, and that was the end of it. They’d slap a pen name on it, print a few thousand copies, and distribute them to smoke shops, news stands, and anywhere else that sold dirty paperback books. It was all work-for-hire, sell all rights, and who cares whether it sells or not type material.

Not a real book, but this is more or less what they looked like.

Okay, I did care whether it sold, obviously, but only to the extent that, if it didn’t, the publisher might stop buying from me and find someone else to write his raunchy little paperback stroke books.  When the emphasis is on action, it can be limiting after a while. There are only so many way you can say, “she sucked his cock.”

Sometimes I wonder if I should consider creating an erotica-writer’s thesaurus. Roget’s is decidedly lacking in that department. It doesn’t even list “penis,” much less supply any alternative forms. Wouldn’t it be nice to just open a book, look up “penis,” and find a synonym list with options such as: Cock, Schwantz, Dick, Schmuck, Member, Prong, Throbbing Manhood, Source of All Pleasure, Rod, Organ, Tower of Passion, Fountain of Life,  Pile Driver, or Sacred Source of Holy Anointing Oil (What Rev. Killjoy called his, more or less, when he was trying to fuck my high school self). Some of those are sort of Victorian, which probably reflects the work I was doing on Lust for Blood. If the story  supposedly consists of diary entries from 1895, you wouldn’t expect to find too many mid-to-late 20th century euphemisms. It did have a few “quims” and “cunts,” both of which were current slang even in Victorian times. Quim goes back to at least the early 18th century. Cunt has been around more or less forever, and the OED cites its use in the street name, Gropecunt Lane, around 1230.

I have a feeling that street name was long ago changed to something less interesting, and it’s a sad loss for linguistic expressiveness. If a street is called Gropecunt Lane, you can likely figure out what sort of businesses originally populated it without too much difficulty.  Even William Shakespeare liked to work a few “cunts” into his plays, sometimes in remarkably clever ways, such as getting Malvolio to spell it out in Twelfth Night. “There be her very Cs, her Us, and her Ts; And it is thus she makes her great Ps.” The “and” is usually elided so that it sounds like an “N,” and the piss joke is pretty obvious. Old Will always liked to give the groundlings something to giggle about.  There was also Hamlet’s “country matters,” with the emphasis on the first syllable of country, and the confusion between the English “gown” and the French “con” in Henry V. (For the last one, you have to remember that some old dialects pronounced “G” as “C,” turning “gown” into “cown.”)

What can I say? Sometimes I just feel the need to make use of that English Literature degree.

In any case, I like to be more creative with my writing these days. I haven’t done any “fuck ’em quick and often” books in years. I write like a 1970s porn film, where you get an actual story in between the sex scenes. Some have more, some have less. Lust for Blood is mostly plot, though I still tried to get in as much sex as I could manage. I’d originally planned to include some incest, then realized I was actually writing a book that might be capable of competing in the general trade book category, so I took out the incest and ended up with something just about everyone will carry.

Amazon is a goal. I love Lot’s Cave and Excitica, both of which are quite happy to carry books with incest, pissing, bondage, or whatever your kink may be in them. But Amazon sells a lot more books. One of my friends told me that, when his book was on Amazon, he sold a couple hundred copies every month, and now, with the more limited distribution, he sells maybe half a dozen a month on a good month. He’d have preferred to stay on Amazon, but somebody apparently complained, or one of their functionaries read the book and found the incest, and that was the end of it.

One Room is one that’s still there, and likely will remain so. There’s fucking, and some masturbation, but nobody is related to anybody else, so that’s all good. One Room is fairly short, and the only reason it’s priced at $2.99 is because that’s the minimum price to be included in Kindle Unlimited. It struck me as the sort of book people were more likely to stream than to buy, if only because it just isn’t very long. Anyway, sometime in December the KU enrollment will run out, and then I’ll drop the price to 99¢. Reading it Free with the KU subscription is still the cheapest way to go, of course, so feel free to take advantage of it while it’s available.

I expect to receive the proof of Lust for Blood in the next day or so. Once I’ve gone through that, publication will be approved and there will be a paperback edition on sale. It won’t start working until after I’ve approved the proof and the printer has sent to files to Amazon, but once that happens you’ll be able to order the paperback by clicking here. It’s also up for production bids as an audiobook. We’ll see if we get anything from that.

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Incest Out, Vampires In

I know some of you are going to be a little disappointed that there’s no incest in Lust for Blood. It started out that way, but I ended up cutting it once it became obvious that this one might just be capable of breaking out of that narrow specialist market. The cut didn’t involve that much. Just had to change where things were aimed in an early scene. Our pals at Amazon don’t seem to mind implication, but definitely frown on anything overt.

It’s fun writing from a late Victorian viewpoint. The setting is mostly a rural estate, which means things such as electricity and telephone service have yet to make it so far from town. Rich people–the first viewpoint character’s father was an Earl, as is her brother, now that their father has passed, and the new neighbour is a Marquess–still had servants in 1895, so perhaps they didn’t miss the conveniences. Not having electricity means using gas lights and paraffin lamps, both of which are certainly more evocative of the period. Not having telephones in the countryside means that, when Lord Muntglare desperately needs to get the doctor out to the estate to care for his sister, all he can do is send a servant with the dog cart to collect him. Something that may take up to three hours.

Dog carts, by the way, which were always popular conveyances in Victorian fiction, are obviously pulled by horses, not dogs. They were two-wheeled, open carriages. The name came about because the seat was built over a ventilated compartment intended for transporting hunting dogs. Holmes and Watson seemed to spend a lot of time being hauled about the countryside in dog carts. At one point in this book Lady Anna and Suzanne stow their picnic hamper in the dog box.

I get to write as several people in this. It’s mostly diary entries, and about the only major character who doesn’t write anything is the vampire. He’s in good company there. The Count was notably silent when it came to contributing his own thoughts in Dracula, too. Lady Anna’s lady’s maid, Maureen, comes up with some good stuff. It seems she has a second identity of sorts, writing Victorian stroke books under a pen name. She’s a pretty Irish girl, obviously better-educated than most servants (she can read French, too), and sees nothing at all problematic with having lesbian sex with her mistress and her friend. She just sees it as something nice she can do and, besides, she enjoys it.

Lady Anna and Suzanne both talk about marrying, but you can tell their hearts really aren’t into it. It was just one of those things women were expected to do in the 1890s.

You really do need to read this book. It was partly inspired by a single line from Dracula, when Lucy writes to Mina, “We have slept together…” Now, I’m sure the original readers, back in 1897, were supposed to interpret that as they were roommates and slept in the same room. Me, I have a dirty mind, so I always figured those two spent a lot of time at boarding school playing at being lesbians before being graduated and settling on boring old men. That was  a fairly common Victorian pornographic theme, after all. Boarding school lesbians is still a popular theme. I’m fairly sure that Lady Anna genuinely is a lesbian, knows it, and, if she ever marries at all, it will only be out of a sense of duty. Suzanne is, I suppose, sexually flexible (she fucks Lady Anna’s brother, too, after all), but seems to have a preference for women.

There’s no question at all about whether these two were getting it on in school. They roomed together, and on colds nights they slept in the same bed, naked, and obviously going at it every chance they could get. They make that quite clear. They also make it clear they started just after Suzanne’s eighteenth birthday. People in racy novels tend to wait longer than real people. And, naturally, when they get together three years after leaving school, it’s obvious that with a dozen empty bedroom in the big manor house, Suzanne will share Lady Anna’s bed. At least, until Lady Anna starts to decline and finds herself inclined to bite (there are vampires in this, remember).

Because Lust for Blood is set in 1895, and mostly consists of diary and journal entries, with a couple of newspaper clipping and letters, the language may be a bit more oblique than in my modern stories. Victorians tended to speak of “rampant masculinity,” or “that glistening pearl wherein a woman’s passion is centred,” or other slightly flowery things like that. The ladies do throw in a few “cunts” and “quims.” Hell, people, Shakespeare slipped a few “cunts” into his plays, usually as puns, so there’s precedent.

Do it yourself hysteria treatment?

This was also a time when doctors treated “hysteria” by reaching under their patients’ voluminous skirts and masturbating them to orgasm. It was even the time when the vibrator was invented, originally as a labor-saving device for gynecologists whose fingers were cramping up dealing with throngs of hysterical women.

There was a time when hysteria was a common complaint, if only because, most of the time, the only one getting off in the marriage bed was the husband. The three ladies of Muntglare Manor are just a bit more progressive than some of their contemporaries. They’ll get each other off, and if that isn’t practical, why, they’ll take matters into their own hands, so to speak.

I suppose I should warn you, this is actually a legitimate, more or less mainstream novel with a lot of sex scenes, not a sex novel with a vampire or two. It’s not for kids, obviously, but neither is it so far out that a film producer might not be well-advised to snap it up now while the rights are still cheap.

The Kindle edition is on sale now at Amazon.com, or you can read it free if you’re a Kindle Unlimited subscriber, or want to use your monthly Prime borrow. A paperback edition is in the pipeline as well.

 

 

Is Incest Necessary?

I’m working on a new book. This one is a little different from the usual. It’s a period piece, set in the summer of 1895, on a country estate in England. It’s also a multi-viewpoint story, mostly told in the form of diary and journal entries, with the occasional letter, telegram, or newspaper clipping tossed in. It’s a style that was fairly common in the late 19th century, but isn’t encountered that often today. Or “to-day,” as they would have spelled it then.

Naturally, as this is one of my books, there’s a lot of sex. The terminology is a bit different than what I usually use. There are no pussies, cocks, dicks, pricks, or snatches, for instance. There are quims, some of them quivering, organs, manhoods (rampant and otherwise), secret depths, nether lips, and the occasional cunt (a surprisingly ancient word, as it happens, which can even found as an allusion and/or pun in Shakespeare). Setting a book in 1895 means adjusting vocabulary to fit the period, and even though the “quoted” writings are private, and purportedly set down in a secret cipher, the “naughtiness” quotient is somewhat dictated by the period and the social class of the writers. So is the spelling, so please don’t ding me about that. Victorians put hyphens in a lot of words we don’t: to-day, to-night, dark-room, cow-boy, and so forth. They also tended to abbreviate “et cetera” as “&c.” rather than “etc.”

What I’m wondering about is whether I should cut out the incest. Even though it takes a while to get there, the main “issue” is a vampire moving into the neighborhood. It takes a while to get there because, up to that point, I spend a lot of time establishing the relationship between Lady Anna and her visiting school chum, Susanne. In Dracula, Stoker obliquely implied that Mina and Lucy may have experimented with lesbianism while at school together.  With Lady Anna and Susanne, it’s not so much implied as overt. They were getting it on with each other on those cold nights at school, and they’re still getting it on now that they’re together again after Susanne takes a three-week holiday on Lady Anna’s estate.

It’s a rather “decadent” household. Lady Anna’s brother, Edwin, Earl of Muntglare, is a dedicated amateur photographer, whose favorite subjects are nude women, his sister included. When he organizes a photography session with his sister and Susanne, things just sort of happen between the two women, and he can’t help getting involved himself. The question I now have is whether I keep the sisterly blowjob, or have him get it on with Susanne instead.

The difference between those outcomes could easily be the difference between the book appearing in Kindle or being banned from Amazon, like most of my other books. Of the six books I currently have on sale, only one of them, One Room, can be found at Amazon. That one has its share of fucking, but no one is related, so it can be sold. The others are only at Lot’s Cave, and a few other outlets where they don’t worry so much about incestuous or other “kinky” content.  The new book might just be good enough to go more mainstream, rather than fetish, so I’m going to have to decide which it will be.

I also need to decide what I’m going to call it, but that’s another issue entirely.

 

International Blasphemy Day

Today is International Blasphemy Day, so be sure to get out there and insult the god of your choice.

This is going to be one of those serious posts, despite the lead. Because blasphemy is serious. Americans are free to speak against God, or make fun of him, or to simply ignore him. That’s not the case in many other countries. If the evangelicals have their way, it won’t be the case here, either.

In a number of Muslim countries, blasphemy can be punished by death. The same applied to Christian countries until fairly recently, a couple hundred years or so. A long time for individuals, but for humanity as a whole, not that long at all.

A couple posts back, I put up a story about Adam and Eve, after being expelled from the Garden of Eden, figuring out how sex worked, and the idea that this was why God created them in the first place, because he was bored and wanted to watch them having sex. “And on the eighth day, God created voyeur porn,” or something like that.

It’s been said, not always jokingly, that the major passtime for the dead in Heaven is watching their descendants fucking. I don’t personally believe that. I tend to feel that once you’re dead you’re simply dead, no longer exist in a conscious form, and consequently never actually realise you’ve died because you’re no longer there to notice.

In Saudi Arabia, posting that paragraph could get me executed, if I were Muslim. Which I’m not. What I am is, according to my mother, “a poor, lost sinner who’ll surely spend eternity burning in hell.” Christians are so fucking charitable about that sort of thing. What’s the best way to raise your children in your faith? Scare the living shit out them, obviously. Anyway, that would make me a lapsed Baptist, and a former member of the 2nd Baptist Faith in Jesus Tabernacle. Except, I’m not sure “lapsed” is the right word. Lapsed implies a temporary pause, like a lapsed driver’s license, which can be renewed. I find it very unlikely I’ll ever renew that membership, or even encounter any real evidence gods exist.

No, what I am is an atheist. One of the classical ones. I don’t hate God. Sorry, very few atheists do, no matter how big a cliche that is in evangelical belief. We don’t hate Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, Jesus, Vishnu, or Odin, either. God’s just a fictional character, invoked to explain a lot of shit that science hadn’t yet caught up with. Where did the universe come from? What is life? Why am I here? These are questions today, and they were questions in the bronze age, too, but with fewer answers.

Science still hasn’t caught up with that last one, but I think philosophy has. The correct answer is probably, “No particular reason. You just are.” Just because you feel like there should be a reason for everything doesn’t mean there actually is one.

Saying that is blasphemy, too, by the way. Believers generally believe that God is actively guiding the world, ordering things, only putting people here with a special reason. When you confront a Stalin, or a Hitler, or a Mao, or a Pol Pot, you do find yourself wondering just what sort of purpose any of them could serve. Unless you’ve read the Old Testament, after which you might just be able to remember what a genocidal asshole God actually declared himself to be.

Saul lost his kingdom because he pissed off God by failing to slaughter the Amalekite king, Agag, and sparing some of the cattle to offer them as sacrifices in the Tabernacle. Notice he was going to kill the cattle in any case, so his crime was not wasting them, not not killing them. So Samuel declared that God had abandoned Saul, then took a sword and chopped up Agag.

Even when we were learning about this in high school, I found this story a little hard to buy. Did Saul piss off God? Or did he just piss off Samuel, who was, after all, the one actually issuing the orders? Just because the old “prophet” intoned, “Thus saith the Lord,” (we were pretty much a King James Bible type of school), that doesn’t mean the Lord actually said it. Maybe God wasn’t a genocidal asshole. Maybe Samuel was.

Or maybe Samuel was just making this stuff up as he went along. Maybe he was a control-freak psychopath who wanted to see just how far he could get the king to go. Because, if you look at that story, it seems fairly obvious that Samuel had the real power and merely used the king to exercise it. Just as the religious right today tries to manipulate any politician they can influence.

And, of course, it’s also possible that Samuel himself was invented by a later writer. The young George Washington never chopped down that cherry tree, or made that “I cannot tell a lie,” admission of his childish misdeed. That was just something Parson Weems made up and threw into his biography because he thought it would provide a good example for young children.

It’s the same with a lot of people in the Bible. There’s no evidence that Moses ever existed or, for that matter, that a huge mass of Hebrews spent forty-years camped in the Sinai. There’s no evidence that the Hebrews moved into Canaan and conquered it, displacing the native people, though there does seem to be a decent amount of evidence suggesting there were always there and simply expanded and took over their neighbors’ countries over the course of several hundred years.

There’s independent evidence that Saint Paul was a real person, as well as fairly conclusive textual evidence that he didn’t write several of the Epistles that bear his name. Paul’s own writings also suggest he was unfamiliar with a living Jesus, and regarded him not as a flesh and blood man, but as a purely spiritual manifestation of God. The Pauline Epistles, the genuine ones, are older than the gospels, and the Jesus of the gospels almost never says anything that isn’t a direct quote from the Old Testament or early proto-rabbinic sources. In other words, he appears exactly as you’d expect a fictional person to appear if the purpose was the “prove” that particular prophecies had been fulfilled.

There may be independent confirmation of Paul, but there is exactly zero non-biblical contemporary documentation of anything that Jesus was supposed to have done, or even that he existed at all.

Even Jesus’ answer to the “greatest commandment” question is a quote from scripture (not to mention the Jewish daily prayers). In Mark his answer is, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, is one Lord.” Matthew’s version starts after that line, probably because someone noticed that what Jesus supposedly said was a flat denial of trinitarian doctrine. It’s mildly embarrassing when a third of your divine trinity doesn’t actually believe there is such a thing and says so in your holy book.

Oh, by the way, Jesus was a Pharisee. His complaints about them were a call for improvement by a member of the group, sort of like the handful of remaining Republicans in the GOP calling for a return to basic principles and an ouster of the plutocrats, fascists, Dixiecrats, and religious lunatics who’ve managed to take over since the 1980s. A rabbi friend of mine tells me that Jesus’ opinion on divorce identifies him as a follower of Bais Shammai, the stricter of the two scholarly schools of the time. The other, Bais Hillel, which prevailed, was a lot more lenient. Hillel (yes, the guy the campus Jewish outreach program is named after) didn’t require the wife to commit adultery before he’d allow a divorce. Burning her husband’s dinner was sufficient grounds.

So, I guess that’s enough blasphemy for now. I don’t suppose you were expecting this from an erotica writer, but I did blackmail that idiot pervert of a preacher into paying for an Ivy League education. Maybe I was paying attention.

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How Dirty Do You Go?

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?

These two, and more, can be found in my members’ area.

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.

You can get on line with a cute gal while you wank if you go to Chaturbate.

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.

Obviously not Lot or his daughter, but it’s a pretty girl with a nice cock in her mouth, so I’ll settle for that. The full set is in the members’ area.

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.

 

That First Time

International Blasphemy Day isn’t until next Saturday, but there’s nothing like getting an early start when it comes to screwing around with imaginary overseers. I just found myself wondering what it was like for those two imaginary ancestors of humanity, after they finished eating and found themselves evicted. So this story, more or less, happens between Gen. 3:24 and 4:1.

Okay, not exactly the gates to the Garden of Eden guarded by an angel with a flaming sword, but doesn’t it look like a place you’d like to get into?

Adam and Eve stood on the gravel path leading up to the gate and didn’t care for what they saw. An angel was blocking the gate. He wasn’t one of those nice, benevolent looking angels, either. He was one of the nasty ones, face all screwed up in an appropriately wrathful expression, glowing with righteous indignation. Partly, he was indignant because that was his job, and partly he was indignant because he was a angel. Angels were usually handsome and perfect, while he was wrathful and perfect, which might have been okay except for the being an angel part, since perfection apparently didn’t include having genitals. He was as sexless as a plastic boyfriend doll. He was also waving a flaming sword in front of them if they got too close, and that could get a little boring after a while.

“Well,” Adam said, after a while, “this really sucks.”

“You shouldn’t have eaten that fruit,” the angel commented. Scary as he looked, his voice was surprisingly high pitched. It was like Godzilla talking in the voice of Barney Fife, Adam would have thought, if he’d ever heard of either of them.

“It was her idea,” Adam reminded the angel. He was starting a precedent. If there’s blame for something, make sure you blame somebody else.

“No,” Eve said, “it was that damned snake.”

“You said ‘damned,'” the angel pointed out, shaking a finger at her.

“Well, God took away his legs and cursed him, so I think it fits.”

“She’s got a point,” Adam said.

“Okay, fine,” the angel conceded, “the snake is damned. You still can’t come back in. The boss said so.”

“But the snake,” Eve objected. “That sneaky bugger is still in there.”

“You two have free will,” the angel declared. “He was just doing his job and being a snake. So it’s your fault.”

“Yeah, but we didn’t know that until afterwards,” Adam complained. “Your boss can be a little cryptic, you know.”

“That’s just his mysterious ways. That’s how he works. Mysteriously. Because he’s mysterious in his mysterious ways.”

Adam shook his head. “Overtly would be better,” he said. “Then we’d at least know if we were fucking up or not. I mean, honestly, we screw up, so God is going to send our ten-thousandth-great-grandchild to hell for eternity because of that?”

“It does sound a little extreme,” Eve agreed.

“I don’t know,” the angel said. “Maybe. He won’t be sending anyone to hell for the next 4,000 years or so. The Christians need to invent it first. Mostly, I think he’ll just kill people and that’ll be the end of it.”

“I don’t much care for that, either,” Adam said.

“What’s a Christian?” Eve asked.

“I’m not entirely sure,” the angel admitted. “I found them mentioned in our library up in heaven, but the boss hasn’t quite decided how to  do them yet. To be honest, the bookmaker angels are already giving 9:1 odds that they’ll just be a lot trouble.”

“So, you’re definitely not letting us back in?” Adam asked.

“Not a chance. Anyway, once you two get on your way, I’m supposed to pack up the whole place and move it to Missouri.”

“Why?”

“I’m not sure. Some guy named Smith wanted it done.”

“Some guy?” Adam asked. “I thought there was only the two of us.”

The angel shrugged eloquently, his arms wide-spread. The flaming sword sliced off a large branch that overhung the wall.

“Oops,” the angel said. “Well, one less thing to pack, I suppose.” He looked at Adam and Eve and let just the slightest hint of compassion cross his wrathful face. “Look, I don’t know who the guy is. I think he’s somewhere way up in the future, but he needs the garden to be in Missouri for some reason. Now, go on, get out of here.”

The two humans shrugged. Hitching up his rabbit-skin loincloth, Adam headed off down the path, with Eve walking dejectedly by his side. They walked for hours, until they came to a pleasant brook under a cliff, with a convenient cave for shelter.

“Looks like a good place,” Adam said. “We’ve got water, and a place to sleep, and there should be fish in the brook.”

Eve was a little tired after their hike, but found herself remembering something else God had told them. “You know,” she said, “I’m noticing a desire for you. You think we should fuck?”

Adam considered. “I suppose it couldn’t hurt,” he said.

“Oh, good.” Eve quickly threw off the rabbit-skin bikini she was wearing.

“You know, ” Adam said, shucking his loincloth, “all that time we were running around naked, I never really noticed how hot you are.”

“Is that supposed to look like that?” Eve asked. “It always used to just hang there, didn’t it?”

“Sure. But I kind of like it this way. Feels good.”

“But if it stays that way for more than four hours, you should see a doctor,” a heavenly voice intoned.

They both looked around, but saw no one.

“What’s a doctor?” Eve asked.

Adam merely shrugged. “No idea. I’m not even sure what an hour is.”

“He never explains anything, does he?”

“No,” Adam agreed. “I guess we really are on our own.” He embraced his wife, trapping his magnificent member between them.

Eve suddenly pushed him away. “I just thought of something,” she said. “God made you out of clay, right?”

“Uh huh.”

“And then he made me out of one of your ribs, no?”

“Yeah, right.” He pointed down at his trembling timber. “Pay some attention to this, why don’t you?”

“Well, it’s just that, if I was made from one of your ribs, doesn’t that technically make me your twin sister?”

“I’m not sure. It might, I suppose. Or maybe it means you’re really me, but prettier.”

“So if we fuck, it’s either incest or you’re fucking yourself, and it’s a weird kind of  masturbation? Something like that?”

“I never really thought about it.”

“Oh, just fuck her,” the heavenly voice intoned. “There isn’t anybody else.”

“It’s a philosophical problem,” Adam said. “It needs answered.”

“It’s not a philosophical problem,” the voice said. “Philosophy hasn’t been invented yet. Just get to it.”

“Are you planning to watch?” Eve asked. She was starting to feel shy again.

Not a sound was heard from the heavenly voice. It was not for the human to know that they’d been created mostly because God was bored, and wanted to watch porn, but there hadn’t been any people yet, so he’d made a couple, figuring they’d sooner or later start fucking and give him something to watch.

And He said, “Let there be oral,” and there was oral; and he saw that it was good.

Eve had an idea. She got down on her knees and started sucking Adam’s cock. She decided she didn’t care if he was genetically her brother. How could she? He was the only man there was and, besides, God had stopped them with the fruit only half-eaten, so they’d just got the notes, not the whole knowledge package, and she didn’t know what genes were.

“Praise me,” God said to himself. “The ingenious little buggers have invented oral!”

“Uh, wait a minute,” Adam said.

“For what?” Eve asked. “And what’s this white stuff you’re squirting all over my face?”

“Well,” Adam said, “I’m not sure, but it feels really good doing it. No, I was just thinking, if we’re going to be fucking, shouldn’t we be married first?”

Eve looked around, gesturing. “Do you see a priest anywhere?”

“No. But I’m fairly sure God wanted us married.”

God was a little frustrated. The blowjob was nice, but he wanted more. Guess I’ll have to handle this, he thought.

“Hey, you two. I now pronounce you husband and wife. Adam, you may now fuck the bride. In my name I pray. Now get to it.”

And so Adam knew his wife, who was genetically his sister and also himself, and before long Eve had popped out Cain and Abel, and she was already tired of the whole thing, which is why she named Abel “Abel.” Of course, she called him “Havel,” really, which is how the name is pronounced in Hebrew, and it means “futility.” She probably should have considered that more carefully.

Buy my books at Lot’s Cave.

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The Conscience of the Nation

That’s one of the things a President is supposed to be. That’s also one of the things our current “leader” isn’t. I frequently doubt that the man even knows what a conscience is.

I suppose I could give him the benefit of the doubt. When he says there are good people on both sides, I could allow that he’s just trying to be fair. I could, but I won’t. The problem with “fair and balanced,” to borrow a phrase from a network that rarely is, is that both terms are highly subjective. Fair to whom? What do you mean by “balanced?”

Conservatives are particularly disposed to argue in favor of presenting both sides of issues that have only one side. Evolution is about as thoroughly proven as anything can be without access to a TARDIS to hop back in time and actually observe it happening. Creationism, on the other hand, can provide no evidence at all in its favor. So the “other side” Conservatives want taught in school turns out not to be a side at all. True, they’re not pushing Creationism any more, since the courts have ruled it to be a religious doctrine, not a scientific one. Now they call it “Intelligent Design,” despite tons of evidence that if we were designed at all, it was done so poorly that it would seem intelligence had little to do with it. And, of course, it didn’t. Evolution puts the esophagus behind the trachea, which is a remarkably bad arrangement for a being who eats while upright, but works sensibly enough in four-legged creatures who eat with their heads relatively inverted.

There is a generally laudable tendency for Americans to side with the underdog. Usually that’s fine. But there are times when it’s stupid. Strictly speaking, both the Confederates and the Nazis were the underdog, since they both lost. But that breaks down when you consider what they were fighting for. The Confederates fought the war to insure they’d continue to be able to own other human beings (or, if they didn’t own slaves, to insure that others still could, because a free white man would still be better than a slave, even if he had nothing), and the Nazis fought to insure they’d be able to continue murdering other human beings. Their causes were lost, but they were lost because, morally, they were unjustifiable to begin with.

Fine, sure, God thinks slavery is just peachy. It says so all over the Bible, both testaments. Most Christian denominations didn’t condemn slavery until after the Civil War. Most of them also put it about that their condemnation came much earlier, and a ridiculous number of people today believe that antedated lie. If you think the mainstream Protestant churches were anti-slavery and pro-integration, ask yourself why there’s an African Methodist Episcopal Church. It isn’t because the Methodists were happily welcoming black people into the church from the beginning.

If you’re marching down the street waving a Nazi flag, don’t be shocked if I call you a Nazi. You’re thirty-years-old, so you obviously didn’t capture that flag while tramping through Germany in 1945 with the 82nd Airborne Division.  You bought the thing because it represents your political outlook, that blacks should know their place, and that Jews should be exterminated, or at least forced to move to Israel. You’re marching to “defend” statues that represent what you think of as your heritage, despite the annoying fact that most of them were put up in the 20th century and sited in front of the courthouse as a reminder to local blacks that the courthouse, and particularly the voter rolls found there, were for the benefit of whites. Older southern courtrooms, city halls and country commission meeting rooms nearly all have balconies. That’s not to accommodate an overflow crowd, but so that any blacks attending trials or meetings could be stuck upstairs where the white people wouldn’t have to see them. The last thing a black man in 1940 Georgia wanted was to be on the main floor in the courtroom, because 95% of the time that meant he was the defendant, and the other 5% probably a witness whose testimony would be accepted, or ignored, more or less in direct relation to whether it supported the prosecution or the defense.

It often seems to me that Conservatives are binary people. They don’t think more than two options can ever exist. Everything is zero sum. If black people gain a right, that means white people lose one. If you let gay people marry each other, straight people’s marriages will become meaningless. If a computer projection on climate change isn’t 100% accurate, then climate change is a myth. If a clerk in a store says “happy holidays” instead of “merry Christmas,” it’s because there’s a liberal war on Christmas, and not because the clerk couldn’t reliably identify your religion just by looking at you. If the Bible says the world is only around 6,000-years-old, and science says it’s more like 4.3-billion, science has to be wrong, because it’s obvious a bronze age shepherd who could talk directly to God would know more about it than a modern scientist. (Strange that God stopped talking to people about the same time they started to understand a little about how the world actually worked, isn’t it?)

There are people in this country who would love to bring back blasphemy laws, so that atheists could be punished for their disbelief. Fundamentalist Christians think atheists hate God, which is ridiculous. It’s hard to hate something you don’t believe exists. Most atheists really don’t care about God at all. If they object to Ten Commandment monuments on courthouse lawns, invocations at high school football games, or changing the proper motto of the United States (E pluribus Unum; out of many, one) to the obviously sectarian “In God We Trust,” they’re in good company. James Madison, who wrote the first amendment they claim to be defending, would have happily told them they’re wrong. Madison stated quite clearly that even having congressional and military chaplains was unconstitutional if they were being paid with government funds. He also admitted he probably couldn’t do anything about it, but he still made the original intent of the law clear.

It should be fairly obvious by now that Trump isn’t really competent to be President. Whether or not he’s actually a racist himself, he won’t condemn them, which is just as bad. He doesn’t seem to understand that he isn’t running a real estate company any more, and can’t just tell people what to do and expect them to do it. This is someone who has actually tried to threaten members of Congress who didn’t do what he told them to.

And yet, bad as he is, what’s the solution? The House could vote to impeach him, and if the Senate voted to convict, he could be ousted. But if that were to happen, Vice President Pence would assume the office. Do we really want to go from someone who is merely incompetent and venial to someone who is competent and actually evil?

As Yul Brynner would say in The King and I, “It’s a puzzlement.”

Return to LaurenMilfinger.com

Moronite Mythology

The Gods Are Horny is based on Moronite mythology. The Moronites were an ancient Middle Eastern culture, mostly confined to the mountainous areas of what is now Lebanon. They existed earlier than the more familiar cultures found in the Bible, and had their own distinct mythology.

That’s the story, at least. It’s also possible I just made the whole thing up, just like most religions, except the only way I want to profit from it is by selling a few books to my horny fans. As religions go, the one followed by the Moronites has some distinct advantages over most of the others.

Unused illustration for The Gods Are Horny. It proved to be less trouble to leave the drawings out.

For one thing, it’s relentlessly peaceful. If the Moronites could be said to have a motto, it would probably be, “Fuck, don’t fight.” These are people whose temple rituals include the high priestess fucking a sacred phallic idol on the main altar, followed by the high priest cumming on an idol of their principal goddess, with a little help from the priestess, who’d give him a blow job to get him going properly. This is all in front of the congregation, who presumably watched in reverential awe.

If you were thankful for something, you’d go to the temple and seek the blessing of one of the attendant priestesses, who would consecrate your good fortune by sucking your cock and swallowing your cum. If you were a woman, of course, she’d eat your pussy instead. Being a priestess was a highly honored calling, and significantly raised a young woman’s status as a potential marriage partner once her term was concluded. One of them even married a demigod, Naloro, who was sort of the Moronite Heracles. His mother was a young woman named Zara, who’d been noticed by Oroyna, the chief (earthly) god. He popped down from his mountaintop, got her pregnant, and while he was at it, granted her eternal life and youth.

Kolek creating the universe.

The Moronite gods and goddesses bore a certain resemblance to the Olympian deities, though that was mostly when it came to hooking up. The earliest god was Kolek, who was the original god who created everything. He was undoubtedly the oldest of the gods, but even he wasn’t sure how old, since he’d spent a great deal of time before there was time, so there was no way to know how long he’d lived before there was a way to measure it. He created by universe mostly out of boredom. Every so often he’d get bored, start masturbating, and ejaculate a galaxy.

After a few million years, he even got tired of that, so he ejaculated a daughter to keep him company. Naturally, being a god, he married her once she was grown (which wasn’t very long, since she was born full grown), but he still waited a few hundred years before he started screwing her. Just to be safe, you see. Even someone who’s born as an adult still needs to hang around for at least 18 years before they start fucking. It’s just a rule.

A priestess participating in the thanksgiving ritual with a Moronite worshipper.

Getting his daughter, whose name was Kanzeki, knocked up, which he’d quickly decided would be a lot less painful than ejaculating any more fully grown gods or goddesses out of his giant prick, he became the father of Oroyna and Nalima, the fraternal twin deities who were immediately given dominion over the earth.

There were already people there. Kolek hadn’t bothered to create them, it just took him so long to get back to the place after he first ejaculated the Milky Way into existence that they’d evolved on their own. He was more of a Deist sort of god. “There, I’ve made you, do whatever, I’ve got other stuff to do, so maybe I’ll pop in again in a few million years and see how you’re getting on, but, mostly, you’re on your on, so don’t fuck it up.”

Being gods and twins, Oroyna and Nalima naturally married each other, and quickly started popping out a few more sets of twin deities, who also married each other. If this sound sort of incestuous, well, that seems to be how gods work. They were always marrying their sisters or their daughters.

If you want the full story, your best option is to read the book. It’s on sale now at Lot’s Cave.

Return to LaurenMilfinger.com