Category: Writing

I’m Expanding

No, not my waistline. I’m expanding my web presence. I put LaurenMilfinger.com on the web last week, started this blog, and now I’ve added Twitter to the mix. You can follow me at http://www.twitter.com/laurenmilfinger, or @laurenmilfinger. It’s so cool to discover I could use my own name and not have to add any qualifiers! How often does that happen these days?

So, why am I tweeting and blogging and starting my own website? It’s called publicity. I’m an author. I write books, screenplays, short stories, even completely legitimate, not remotely sexy articles, essays, and what have you. The last of those mostly under a different name. The thing is, none of that pays very well. It used to pay a lot better, but that was before every character with a computer and access to the Internet decided he was going to get rich by selling a novel on Amazon. The flood of poorly-written books not only reflects on all the good ones, it makes them a lot harder to find. An online presence outside Amazon helps with visibility. It’s even more helpful when you’re not on Amazon. My erotica is published and sold by Lot’s Cave, because Amazon won’t list it.

I’ve got plans for the website. It’s there to plug my books, obviously, but the older I get, the more concerned I become with eventually being able to retire. I love writing, yet I’m fairly sure I don’t want to be spending ten hours a day in front of a computer when I’m 84. So I’ll be including other features. Book reviews are an obvious addition. And there will be a member’s section, once the technical part is worked out. We have to get hooked up with a payment processor, and set up a gallery. We’ll have pictures in there, because I do appreciate beauty and I find naked women particularly beautiful. There will likely be story fragments. Those hot, sensual bits that for some reason or other either didn’t make it into a book, or were going to be a book but just didn’t come together. You don’t need a plot to write a sex scene, but you do need one to make it into a novel.

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Why Twins?

It’s surprising how often someone asks me, “Why do you have so many twins in your stories?” Well, why do so many others who write erotica fill their stories with twins? I write a lot of stories about people on farms, or in the country, but it’s the twins they ask about.

Freaky Farmers cover imageOne reason to have them is age. Twin siblings means they can both be as young as the rules allow. Anybody having sex in a contemporary erotic story has to be at least eighteen. That has nothing to do with law. There have been any number of court rulings holding that it’s legal for underage people to have sex in stories as long as they don’t actually exist. What applies to photographs of actual people does not apply to literary depictions of fictional ones. Not in the United States, at least. Canada may be another matter.

But, for the most part, no one will publish stories with underage participants, because so many people think it’s illegal. Publisher prefer to err on the side of caution. The smaller houses that publish most erotica, at least. The big trade publishers, of course, go right ahead and reprint Lolita and publish new books where Dad is getting it on with his junior high age daughter, but those are significant books, so apparently that’s okay. I happen to think what I write is significant.

Well, my stories all have plots, which isn’t always the case in this genre. My books are a bit like 1970s porn movies. You may have to go through some exposition between the screwing, but they’re really more entertaining as a result.

It's All Relative coverIn any case, if you write “family” erotica, a set of eighteen-year-old fraternal twins, a brother and sister, are perfect. The “big” sibling is only a few minutes older, just enough to throw in a little humor. Twin girls form one of the more enduring male fantasies. Not only does the lucky guy get to have sex with a beautiful woman, but he gets to do it with two of them, and they look just alike. Guys like stereo, it seems. Julie Will sends a set of gorgeous redhead twins on a sexual rampage through a nudist camp in “The Twins at Camp,” a novella in the collection It’s All Relative, a favorite of mine The book I’m working on now, They All Cum at Carlisle’s, has two sets of twins, brother-sister, and sister-sister.

Erotica deals in fantasy. In that aspect, it’s no different than reading Regency romance, or medieval fantasy. You wouldn’t really want to do those things, or live in those remarkably unhealthy times, but it’s a lot of fun to read about it.

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Getting Started

I’ve spent most of the last week working with a friend on getting LaurenMilfinger.com on line. I don’t claim to be tech savvy, but he can do that sort of thing without too much effort. He claims it used to be a lot harder, back in the “old days,” when he apparently used to put together websites on Notepad, instead of the specialized site-building software he uses now. From my point of view, it still looked pretty hard, but I guess in the old days you couldn’t even see what it was going to look like as you built it.

I need to thank my erotica publisher, Lot’s Cave, who were kind enough to let me have book cover images and other graphics from my books, and from a few others that I’ve read and enjoyed. If you’re into “forbidden” erotica, they’re a great place to find it. They don’t publish anything illegal, of course, though I suppose there are people who think differently. And you do need to be at least 18 to shop there. And no, that’s not me in the cover photo. I did look a little like that 30 years ago, though.

I thought I’d use this first post to plug my books. It looks as if the world isn’t going to let me do anything that mundane. Of course, I wasn’t expecting a Nazi rally in Virginia, or somebody driving his car into a crowd of counter-protesters and killing one of them, either. I also wasn’t expecting our President to comment on it by essentially saying, “this was terrible, but both sides are to blame, and wow, how about the employment figures! Aren’t they great!”

Some messages back and forth to my web designer brought some of it out. We were trying to figure out if there was any actual difference between alt-right and Nazi. We concluded that there was. One of them has a hyphen in it.

I’m obviously a white American. My family was here long before 1776. I had family fighting in the Revolution, in the War of 1812, on the northern side in the Civil War, in the Spanish American War, and in both World Wars and Korea. I think that lets me speak with a little authority about what being a “real” American means. To my way of thinking, it doesn’t mean anything that those idiots in Virginia were saying. The country is already great, and I hope people won’t stand still while fearless leader tries to bring that greatness to an end and force a business model in its place. You can’t run a country like a business. If you try, you end up with Germany in 1938. Businesses are dictatorships, every one of them. That’s the only way businessmen know how to do things, and it explains a lot about Trump.

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