Month: September 2022

Dreams to Stories

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As I re-explore the blogosphere (in an attempt to rebuild a network of connections and, of course, to re-acquire an audience of readers), i’ve been using WP reader to discover active bloggers.

I’ve been reading a number of blogs with some very good erotic content – mainly poetic but some otherwise. Not classic ‘here’s a sexy story that sounds like penthouse forum’ erotic, but more heartfelt, personal content; at least, that’s what’s reaching me currently.

It’s been quite a lot of years since i’ve written any fiction, erotic or otherwise, but these people – some of whom i’m linking to in my side-bar (or bottom of hime page if you’re on mobile) – are inspiring me to create.

Almost all the writing i’ve done in the last three months has been in the form of life stories for my friend Liz, who only recently discovered that i’m a writer. She was the person who got me to pull Wanton back out and share, then to start working on a revision. I credit her with re-awakening my need to write (as I have re-awakened hers).

But now i’m getting a desire to revisit my erotica skills. I have old (some extremely old) work in an archive I need to revisit, but that will happen later; now, I need to start.

My best writing writing all began as dreams; the vividness of a sexual dream stays with me on waking, and if I can capture the atmosphere of dream, I know the writing will work, because atmosphere is what I do.

I had such a dream last night – a young woman I know vaguely in real life, on a couch next to me, at a large social gathering. She begins to fall asleep, all her masses of long blond hair spilling onto my shoulder as she slumps into me; and I pick her up to carry her to bed, almost the way you’d carry a sleeping child. But as soon as we’re out of sight of the social gathering, she rouses, begins kissing me. I carry her to her bedroom, and – well, as soon as my fingers find my way inside her clothing, I wake. Frustratingly, the scene ends too soon, before I get enough to become a story.

But it may be sculpted into something, later, as I’ve done in the past. I have a character now, and a beginning, but from there I may be able to invent.

Either way, hopefully, i’ll begin something. I’m feeling inspired, but need to find both an image strong enough to move me, but also (and this is the much, much harder part), the time to work.

 

 

Anniversaries, so to speak

Karl Elvis3 Comments

I was trying to find dates for something nearly 20 years back. 

Anniversaries, so to speak – when I met certain people, when certain social things happened. 

I like to commemorate things like that, or al least acknowledge them. We met X years ago, that sort of thing. 

There’s a cluster of those dates coming up. When I wrote Wanton, for example, which is very much the beginning of a period of life for me (I tend to list that as Nov ’03 but it was probably more like spring of that year; I have no record of the actual writing, though, only mention of it in email archives when I first shared it, fall of ’03, and when I first published it, Nov ’03, so that’s where I put that date). 

Things happen after that writing only partly connected. I definitely found a number of kindred souls, who responded to it with the same intensity with which I wrote it. But also the making of it produced something in me, in terms of wanting to reach out and communicate differently. 

When I started blogging (encouraged by people I shared my novella with like Jen & Circe). When I first connected to people I got to be close to after they read my work (Doxy, a number of others). 

And then orkut – there are probably a bunch of things in my archives about orkut, and I should write a whole piece about it now, near 20 years later. But it was, for a while, the best social network that has ever or will ever be, until it collapsed under the weight of expansion too fast. But it was founded in ’04 and I joined not long after. So I met a lot of people who impacted my life in positive ways, may of which i’d still consider friends, even if we rarely talk (Gregg C and Andie being the most important, with a half dozen others I retain on facebook as friends).

Nearly 20 years ago, which in terms of the internet, is a geologic age. 

But I was trying to fix specific days, because once I started wondering, it mattered to be exact. If one is trying to commemorate an anniversary, saying ‘fall of that year’ doesn’t do it. 

I thought all my email from that era had been purged when I transitioned from an old-style mbox based, command line email (elm, and then mutt, for those geeky enough to care what I mean), and started using apple Mail.app (I will always prefer Mutt, but getting it to play nicely with modern email just started to seem like too much work).

I found it all the other day, though, archived at work, compressed and saved as an archive ‘just in case’. 

It took some digging to find the conversations I needed, but I got specific dates for when we started talking, for various people.

Wow, what a trip it was, reading conversations 20 years old. Seeing evolutions of friendship, seeing how much effort I put into dialog. My own flirting style from 20 years back. Hell, I’d fall for me, I was good. 

In some ways it was painful; in 20 years there have been a lot of ups and downs in my life (in everyone’s), so some conversational branches remain uncomfortable to think about overmuch (I compartmentalize extremely well, but some compartments, I just do not want to look into, yet).

But in others, the warm glow of nostalgia for good times suffused me; truly excellent memories, brought back my snippets of conversation with a number of people.

I have not yet gone through all the archives; there are hundreds of separate conversations, grouped by email addresses I sometimes don’t even recall without opening up files. So there’s more treasure yet to find. But the dates I was specifically looking for, I found. I now know which days I met certain people, and when to mentally celebrate them, or us, or at least when we met. Which matters to me a great deal.

On getting strong

Karl Elvis1 Comment

So let’s talk about something other than writing for a moment, just because i’m almost repeating myself in the last few entries  (plus i’m really distracted by a poet i’ve been reading and need to not think about eroticism for a bit).

For the maybe one of you reading who hasn’t known me for years, I have an uneven history with physical fitness.

I grew up your quintessential fat kid. That’s not to say I wasn’t strong – I was, I was more or less born strong. But I wasn’t particularly athletic by inclination; I was a book nerd and always preferred reading to most anything else (well, until I was a teenager and discovered rock music, drugs and sex, at which time I was a book, music, drugs, and sex nerd, and I sorted that in the wrong order so assume it should be in reverse).

When I participated in sports that required brute strength I did well, but fast and agile, I wasn’t. I stayed fit, though, because any time I could get away from class and hike, that’s what I was doing (I went to school in what we used to call a ‘free school’ in the 70’s and would probably be called child-led-learning now, ie, everyone thought if you let kids choose, they’d keep wanting to learn. In reality of you let them choose, they’d rather play, so we did a lot of play.)

When I got out of school and started to work, though (and started to drink beer), the tendency to stay fit ended, and (apart from periods where cocaine tended to make me skinnier), I started to loose some of the strength and fitness.

It took me a long time to get fed up with that; I was strong enough, fit enough, to do what I needed. It wasn’t until my 30’s when I had my first child that I started to feel like I wasn’t gonna be able to keep up with a child (a child who turned out to be the energizer bunny).

So for the first time I got fed up enough to join a gym.

An aside here, the single biggest motivation in my life has always been being fed up. Most engineering projects, home improvement projects, self improvement projects, surgeries, etc, all start with goddamnit, i’ve had enough of this shit.

Read more “On getting strong”

Finding like minds in the blogosphere

Karl Elvis8 Comments

As I resume this whole thing after a long hiatus (Really. Fucking. Long), i’m trying to figure out ways to find those individuals (like Bacchus at ErosBlog) who never stopped, or people who are new (ish) and have something to say that I like.

In the old days, the best way to promote one’s blog was to coment on others, which we collectively would all do to builds a circle of cross-links.

Thats’ not working as well now, I rather think, because people tend not to comment that much; they are, however, clicking like buttons, and finding other WP blogs via things like wordpress itself (wordpress reader seems to facilitate this rather well).

So i’ve installed a like button, and ask you to please give that motherfucker a poke if you could be so kind. It’s at the end of each post (but you gotta click post title to get to the comments/link/share buttons).

Meanwhile, the reason i’m posting this is because I just found a blog I really dig: journeychase.com.

There’s no about, no info about the author at all, but what there is, is some erotic poetry i’m finding inspirational (I suck at poetry, but reading journeychase just made write out a thought in a vague verse like form, which is more than i’ve done in probably 15 years; i’m not posting it, because it’s almost certainly crap, but, the person I was thinking about when I wrote it may get a look at it later.

In any case, props to the writer for being inspiring.

Anyone who’s known me more than about 15 minutes knows i’m utterly filthy and love anything erotic; my writing is mostly of the bent. Finding other writers who share that is one of the things i’m after.

An excerpt from Spread me open

I know if you
ran your hands
up my stockings
the world
would stop turning
for just one moment

Click links above to get more. That’s just a taste.

Something needs to explode

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I’ve had a lot of conversations lately about some complex emotions.

A friend whose marriage may be on the rocks, who thinks her husband is cheating on her.

A friend who’s dealing with an immense array of traumas from childhood, from adulthood, from disabilities and ailments.

A friend who’s commemorating two lost parents in the last five years.

A friend who recently suffered a devastating loss of a pet, who is struggling to deal with a pain unlike any she’s felt.

A couple of men my age who are dealing with mental illnesses, in ways none of us have typically felt able to discuss.

A young adult who’s trying to turn their life around, who’s been (so far) unable to take advantage of all the tools therapeutic practice has to offer.

It’s not news, I think, that mental illness is yet another side effect of pandemic, of trumpian fascist politics, of a world in which hate and ignorance has some our from under it’s pointy hood.

We’re not well, broadly speaking.

Yesterday at a small gathering, two separate (beautiful) friends hugged me with a sweet, desperate affection. Neither they, or I, wanted to let go, holding a platonic hug far, far longer than would have been the norm not long ago.

Ok,  I admit it, it’s never completely platonic with me. I’m aware of every inch of flesh that’s touching, and am damn pleased with it. Wait, i’m distracting myself now.

Maybe it’s the age group; maybe it’s that we’ve all had to confront things we’ve never dealt with in our white, middle aged, middle class, able lifestyles.  I do not recall any time where so many of my close and intimate friends seemed so desperate.

I find myself in a cycle of needing both to comfort, and to be comforted, in ways i’ve never experienced. Not that this is worse; it’s not. But there’s a constant, traumatic sense of need that feels like it’ll never end, as we go into another winter of surge, waiting for something, good or bad, but something.

Wound’t it be easier if we could all drop acid and get in a naked, sweaty pile? God knows we’d all be better for it. Or taking turns with the whip, turns on the wall in cuffs.

I need to feel something stronger than boredom and dread, which describes most of my last three years. And I need to elicit responses.

I think that’s what made me go revisit my novella, because it reprensets both. It represents my own intensity of some 20 years ago. It represents a period in my life where everything I felt was dialed all the way up; when I felt everything, and engendered similarly strong responses in others.

I can’t be back there; it’s been an incredibly long 20 years. But I can visit that place, that time. Re-writing, and then sharing, are about that intensity of feeling in a way I can control. It’s about that sense of directed chaos. It’s the feeling of making someone else feel, in a profound and visceral way.

I’ve had a taste of it again; three or four friends who’ve read my work, in the last month, who’d gotten hard, or wet, who have reacted mentally, emotionally, physically, to my words, my voice.

It’s powerful, but it’s goddamn ephemeral. You can’t have a first time more than once, and so I find myself needing more first time feeling.

I want to extend that intensity to loved ones, friends, to the women I hugged yesterday.

I can make you feel, I want to say, I can touch you everywhere, without touching you, and you, then, can repay in kind just by letting me know how it felt.

Something needs to explode; I wish it could be all of us.

What she looks like

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When I wrote Wanton, the character was vividly imagined, created by my subconscious, in a dream.

I describe her in the text:

 

Blood-red hair cut just past her jaw line, brushing her long, slender neck. Big eyes some strange color I could never put a name to. Full lips in a perpetual sneer. Her teeth were a little bit crooked (most of these things I noticed only later). Early 20s, probably ten years my junior, but with something in the eyes that seemed much older. 

Later I add that she’s tall (half a head shorter than our narrator, who described himself as a big man so he’s something north of six foot.  Hey arms are sleeved with tattoos, as well tattooed flowering vines covering hips and sides. 

Several years after I wrote it, I bought a book called Naughty and Nice: The Good Girl Art of Bruce Timm (an incredible book by the way, by one of my favorite comic artists of all time; out of print now, but I’ve heard a re-release is coming — EDIT: here is the re-print

 

In any case, when I first opened said book, there was Wanton looking at me, straight out of my mind’s eye. 

the tattoos are not there, of course, and hair color; but imagine before she was heavily covered. Wanton’s blond, naturally, hair a honey color. But we know she dyes it, red in the story. So imagine this is a black hair phase, pre-tattoos. The pubic hair would be blond, of course, but again, easily imagined. 

I’ve actually tried to get my Timm to draw my version of this girl (it’s been impossible to reach him thus far). At some point I hope to find someone who can transform this for me, digitally, or even re-draw it in something like Timm’s style. 

Alas I no longer have the book, for some reason, so can’t get a higher resolution image. Until the book is reprinted, this will have to do. As best I can present it, this is her. 

 

 

 

Bruce Timm Naught and Nice page 87

Trying to Start

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I’m trying to start writing something. 

I’ve edited a lot over the last month, even re-wrote bits of things. 

It’s been cathartic to feel it coming back, to hear narration in my head again, to refresh memory of how to create. 

I’ve even got a friend asking me to write her something. 

How did I used to start a piece of fiction? I frankly can’t recall. I can’t recall how to get from blank page to — that thing that happens after a blank page. That thing where words go, with purpose and meaning and intent. 

I was good at this, a while ago, until I stopped being able to do it at all. 

I’m doing this instead of that, an avoidant technique. 

Stop stalling I say to myself. Type. 

In a minute. 

Meanwhile, I was successful in getting a number of friends interested in my novella,  Wanton. One or two via Facebook, but maybe 20 via a post on Instagram. 

The two on Facebook actually read, loved, responded. But the mass of people from Instagram, not one went beyond thanks after asking for the link. 

It’s the age old creator’s problem, isn’t it. Create something for yourself, first, because audiences don’t really want to venture forth to new things, even if they ask. 

Ah well. Three or four new readers is something, particularly after a decade of not having anything posted. It’s a start. 

But as a reminder to myself, go listen more to friends music. Go read their books. TELL THEM you’re reading, listening. Creators need it. 

 

Howling to the Void

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It’s funny, when I started this blog, which was mumble years ago, it was utterly free. Nobody read it, nobody knew it existed apart from my friend Jen who originally hosted it.

There is a pure and complete freedom to write without any audience. I could say anything, do anything, didn’t matter.

Social media changed that – orkut, in this case. People followed a link and I gradually picked up readers, first random strangers, then later real life friends and family.

Suddenly the externalization of inner voice might be read by the people I was talking about, and I started writing to an audience, or worse, not writing because of an audience. It changed

 

Now, it’s come full circle. Nobody is reading; in all likelihood, they never will. So I could do what I originally started this for, howling into the void, free, honest, unfiltered,

I dunno if I’m ready for that. Or if the internet is ready. Maybe I’ll find out, though.