I”ve been trying to figure out ho wbest to create a ‘favorite posts’ menu.

I’m relatively sure this will be easy when I focus on it for more than five minutes at a time, but, I thought i’d start with the idea of what favorites are.

Most popular? I don’t even know what that means anymore, since it’s been a decade at least since I last had a lot of readers. Most popular now is whatever I last posted that got likes.

No, it has to be the best of what i’ve written, according to me. But that means I have to dig through 1300 goddamn posts (and try to resist deleting all the ones that seem stupid, now), to try to figure out what i’m actually proud of.

I don’t quite know if I want to do that, but, I guess somebody has to.

But anyway, what i’d rather be writing about is sex.

One of the tricky parts for some of us is, inspiration. What gets us writing.

I used  to write colossal rants, which was easy to get into. I used to write reviews of things, or at least my impressions of them (books, movies, etc), which as often as not took the form of a rant.

I don’t enjoy ranting the way I used to; I can’t quite work up the energy to be that angry about things that don’t matter so much.

But sex will always drive me. I am there pretty much 24×7 (well, I don’t sex dream like I used to, alas, since those kinds of dreams tend to produce great fiction, so let’s say, every waking hour, and some of the sleeping ones).

I’ve made a few attempts at short stories and at novels that were not primarily erotic, all of which got going but stalled for one reason or another (which doesn’t mean they’re done with, it just means I need to find time where work ins’t always in the back of my head, to try to mail down what exactly i’m writing, when passion isn’t my primary driver.)

So for now, as i’m getting back into writing, i’m going to be working with what I know I can do.

Why am I not doing that here, now? That’s really what we call stalling.

I need to focus myself on what I do, which has always begin with characters. Every piece of fiction i’ve ever succeeded with began with a person; sometimes real, sometimes dreamed, sometimes invented, but always a person. Character-driven, is what a writer would call it, rather than plot-driven. So I need to gather my thoughts to try to find who i’m writing about, first, and who i’m writing as, second (because I tend to find first person infinitely easier, and today, easy is the name of the game).

I have a few places to start – it’s easy to begin with a person I actually know, as a model, at least if I can picture them well. Real life helps, because I can model how they move, how they sound. In some cases I have reference for how they smell (which matters a huge mount to me), or even how they come. Knowing these things means I can more easily build my model.

From there crafting erotica is a simple matter of setting, mood, tone. Something like Long Dark Car, it was easy because person and setting came from a dream, so mood and tone was easy from there, once I had a song in my head to define mood and give the story a beat.

So I need to know who, and then where. The who needs to come to me, which i’m hoping will occur in a few minutes when I can close my eyes and imagine.

I have good candidates; some I know well, either in real life or, in some cases, crushes I could pull out of a movie or tv. Others, who I have not yet gotten enough feel for, to write convincingly, but may do yet.

The trick though with real people is, you have to be able to remain authentic and accurate, even if you are fictionalizing them.

I’ll have let someone volunteer, so to speak.