Offense – The New Second Hand Smoke
Recently, American Airlines refused to let a woman continue on her journey wearing a t-shirt that says ‘If I wanted the government in my womb, I’d fuck a senator.” You can read more about the incident here. It wasn’t in response to a passenger complaint. One of the flight attendants took offense to it and […]
Other Tides
The day I met you the moon abandoned me for other tides, I became a snake turned outside in, shedding skin at every curt word. At first I thought it coincidence Until I noticed: I only bleed when I cry and only you make me cry. Not Christ’s wounds, then but the Magdalen’s curse: the […]
Same Sex Marriage: Why Thumping Bibles at Bible Thumpers Doesn’t Work
I never really thought I needed to take a clear stance on this on my blog because I assumed that anyone reading my stories would intuitively know where I stood on the subject. It seems I was wrong. I received an email asking me to clearly state my position, so here it is: If you […]
Points of View: Gaijin and the Silence of Shindo
There is a very good, very fair review of my novella Gaijin, over on Dear Author. What marks it as a good review is not that it is wholly positive; there are some very pointed and legitimate criticisms of the story, both in the reviewer’s post and in the comments. One question posed in the […]
Gaijin Reviewed
There is a really excellent review of Gaijin up at Dear Author, by Janine Ballard. It isn’t a wholly positive review, as no thorough review should be. But it discusses the themes in the book in a way most reviews of erotica or erotic romance books never bother to do. And, for a writer, that’s […]
Sleeping Beauties of the 21st Century: Anastasia, Bella and the Rise of the Vapid Heroine
Some time ago, Laura Miller of Salon.com wrote a compelling critique of the Twilight series. She had a particularly insightful comment to make of Bella: Bella is not really the point of the Twilight series; she’s more of a place holder than a character. She is purposely made as featureless and ordinary as possible in […]
The Gaping Hole in the Suitcase
I flew into Luang Prabang, Laos, on a ATR prop plane in a violent thunderstorm. The plane wasn’t full, but a fair number of the passengers were being violently ill in the turbulence. The vomit didn’t stay neatly in the bags, but luckily there wasn’t all that much of it, because most people had wisely […]
Mine.
I don’t usually write this kind of straight-up erotica. But we’ve been discussing the shortcomings of D/s representations in 50 Shades of Grey, lamenting the fact that the author felt the need to make the protagonist so absurdly innocent, observing the fact that, for all the BDSM trappings, the sex was strangely vanillaish. Dangerous Sweets […]
The Challenge: Au Vanille et Chocolate
I decided to try my own challenge. It wasn’t easy! Especially the vanilla one. Take one: a la vanille I walked into the bedroom, pink from my evening shower, to find Robert naked and taking up most of the bed. He sat propped up against a wealth of pillows, reading a paperback. His long legs […]
Kinky States of Mind: An Erotica Writing Challenge
On my last post, Selena Kitt made a particularly insightful comment about the sex writing in Fifty Shades of Grey: “For me, the sex was incredibly vanilla for a BDSM novel.” I had to agree with her and then I went on to wonder why. It’s not that all the sex in the story was, […]