Category: Discussions
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Selfish Flesh
I just read a most interesting set of blog posts over on Molly and Michael’s blog – on reactions to partners masturbating. I’d ask you to read both posts first. Molly’s is “How I feel When I Am Not Used” and Michael’s is “It’s My Penis and I’ll Wank If I Want To.” The discussion…
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IWD: A Tribute to the Women Who Made Me Who I Am
[View the story “IWD: The Women Who Made Me Who I Am” on Storify]
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Private Lives and the Digital Panopticon
In a recent essay on Britain’s “Snooper’s Charter” and the state’s right to intrude in the name of keeping us safe, Simon Jenkins wrote this: “Confidentiality in human relations is integral to personal freedom.” It’s just sitting there, at the end of a paragraph, like a throwaway sentence, but there’s nothing throwaway about it. It’s…
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The Last Cigarette
I thought long and hard about where to put this post. Normally I’d put any post that wasn’t either a piece of creative writing, or a blog post on some subject aligned with writing practice on my Order of Turbulence blog, but it doesn’t get nearly as much traffic as this one gets. And this,…
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The Prison of the Photographed Self
I’m a rabid user of social media – both text and photography and, more recently, I’ve experimented with Periscope which streams video live. Travelling quite a bit – sometimes for work, sometimes for pleasure – I have an unholy fear of being without a 3G connection to feed the social media beast wherever I go.…
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A Brief History of Erotica and What it Has Become
I’m a member of a very vibrant private group on Facebook called The Erotic Literature Appreciation Society. A fair number of its members are some of the writers I most admire. However, what is clear is that, beneath the surface, there is a pretty massive schism as to what we are calling ‘erotica’. Historically, erotica,…
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Why Publishing Doesn’t Matter To Me Anymore
If you’ve hit my website before, you might be wondering why I have most of my short stories and even long series online, instead of in published anthologies. If you take a look at my short works in print page, you will probably notice that in the last year, I’ve submitted almost nothing to editors.…
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All The Sex I Didn’t Have: The Complexity of Consent
There is a pitched battle going on over what counts as consent when it comes to sex. There are feminists who insist that sex following anything that isn’t a wholehearted, absolutely sober ‘yes’ is rape. And behind it, whether intentional or not, this has had the effect of heaping sex with more complexity and misery…
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On Dominance in Erotic Fiction: A few Questions
One of my readers, Sally, left me some questions that I felt required a little more thought and more space than was available in a comments reply, so I’ve answered them here. Her questions were: 1.) As an author of erotic fiction, what assets or personality traits do you believe make the male lead in…