So Right Then…

I should probably start by explaining why I haven’t posted in about a year.

It’s actually nothing particularly exciting, really. I’m at a job that is more intensive in mental effort (my previous job, which I was laid off from in 2010, was high on physical effort but very low on mental, so I could write these posts in my head, along with my stories and anything else that came to mind.) I don’t have as much headspace for this as I used to. What I do have, I devote to my actual life of pleasing my Goddess, which is more important than writing even though there is overlap. This may change. It hopefully will change. But it’s why I haven’t been around here much.

Meanwhile, I will share an anecdote with you that should hope to illuminate that while I am silent, it is the happy kind of silence. The other day, I was driving Goddess home and I said to Her, “I think we should cut down the side roads. I think that the highway is about to get very congested.” She said, “I was just about to say the same thing.”

I said, “Isn’t it great that we think so much alike, even on the little things?” She replied, “It’s probably because I’m occupying so much of your brain.”

There’s definitely a happy there, and my readers will understand just what it is.

A Brief Apology/Reassurance

To anyone who might have been worried about me: No, I didn’t suffer some sort of terrible injury that left me incapable of posting a story last week, and no, this is not the beginning of the end for the Jukebox oeuvre on the EMCSA. I just got completely wrapped up in getting ‘Classic Jukebox’ ready for publication, and by the time I had it all done and Friday rolled around, I had utterly forgotten that I hadn’t sent a story off to Simon, because that’s what I always do! Except, obviously, that I didn’t. :)

I have already sent off this week’s story, so normal service is definitely resuming, and rest assured I’ve still got a nice long backlog ahead of me! And in the next couple of weeks, when I publish my next anthology (hint, hint…) I will try not to skip another week.

“Classic Jukebox” Now Available For Purchase!

At long last! The third chronological volume of my stories, long-delayed (I wanted to wait for the perfect cover, and wouldn’t you know it Sue-Chan obliged me perfectly!) is finally available for purchase! Finally, some of my strongest, sexiest, most classic stories (if, you know, you like them that is) are available in print or ebook form in a single collected volume! And what could make this better? That is to say, what could make this even better than twenty-one of my stories all wrapped up in a beautiful Sue-Chan cover? How about a foreword by the divine Goddess Herself, Lady Ru’etha? Because yes, it’s in there.

And which classic stories make up “Classic Jukebox”? Read on!

Tasty Little Fragments: Fangs of the Living Dead

You ever watch one of those movies (or TV shows, or read one of those books) where mind control is just enough of an element that you find yourself wishing that someone just a little bit kinkier had been writing and directing it? A scene that can’t even truly be called “erotic”, because it flashes past so fast that it doesn’t even have time to tantalize, but that you nonetheless find yourself returning to after the story is over? A little scene, a throwaway moment that only someone who shares your fetish would notice. But we do.

“Fangs of the Living Dead”, also known as “Malenka, the Vampire’s Niece” and “El Nipote del Vampiro” (in its original Italian) features Anita Ekberg as a naive young woman who inherits a castle in a tiny Eastern European country. Of course, it also turns out that there are legendary vampiric curses, secret treasures, madman’s schemes, and at least one twist within a twist that was added by the producers afterwards and renders the movie pretty much incoherent. But there is a very nice, albeit brief scene when Anita first arrives at the castle.

She’s left alone with a servant girl, who promptly menaces her with creepy talk about her uncle and her mother and the sinister secrets of the castle. Just when Anita is really starting to get irritated with the enigmatic hints, the servant girl leans in close (while wearing a low-cut dress that makes her astonishing cleavage impossible to ignore) and tells her, “We’ll talk of this later. For now, it is time to sleep.” And Anita practically sags onto the pillows, her face smoothing out into blank placidity as she says, “Yes…I am so sleepy…”

“Sleep,” the servant girl says. “Sleep, sleep…I will be here with you.” And as Anita flops out onto the pillows, the servant girl proceeds to kiss her shoulder. Anita stirs for a moment, but only for a moment…

And then the spoilsport uncle shows up. And of course, the servant girl was probably planning to bite her. (Except that as you find out later, she’s not a vampire. Okay, maybe this one isn’t so much “I wish someone kinkier was directing this” as “I wish this one was direct-to-video.”) Either way, it’s worth tracking down. And lucky you, it’s on YouTube!

Enjoy…

MST3K Vs. Hypnosis: Invasion USA

Technically, I’m giving away a huge spoiler for the movie “Invasion USA” by including it in this blog, but let’s face it–the fact that it popped up on “Mystery Science Theater 3000″ should tell you everything you need to know about whether this movie is the kind of tautly-plotted thriller that deserves to be watched without any details of its brilliant ending getting wrecked by people like me. Yes, this movie involves hypnosis. No, it’s probably not going to turn you on.

But it is present. The film starts with a group of people in a bar arguing about whether the government should have the right to commandeer civilian resources in peacetime, just in case we need to build up a huge army to keep the Commies good and intimidated. Only one person is in favor of it, and just as he’s being sort of vaguely mocked for his super-patriotism (which is odd, because he’s the only person in the movie with a foreign accent…it’s implied that he’s from the Eastern Bloc and escaped to the States…) The Commies attack!

The rest of the movie is a long, slow, joyless march to the death of all the main characters and the defeat of America, and all because we wouldn’t give up our freedoms to the United States Army! Don’t you see? If we don’t give up all our freedoms and turn America into a totalitarian state, the Russians will do it instead! Wouldn’t you much rather be oppressed by good old American men with guns instead of Russkies?

And in the end, of course, it turns out that Vaguely Foreign-Sounding Guy is a hypnotist, and the cast never actually left the bar. The whole thing was a hypnotically induced fantasy designed to shock them into understanding how serious the Communist threat could be, if they were imaginary hallucinations of a paranoid disordered mind and had no weaknesses. Therefore, um…profit?

It’s a lousy movie, but it’s well riffed and contains “A Date With Your Family”, one of the top three shorts MST3K ever produced. (“Father feigns eating, draws Junior out, then disowns him!”) Try some, won’t you?

Earworms Redux

I know it’s kind of silly, but it does pop into my head a lot, so without further ado…

(to the tune of “You Are My Sunshine”)

You are my Goddess
My only Goddess
My mind is empty
Thoughts fade away
I’ll never know how
Much you control me
Goddess speaks, and I must obey.

The God Complex: Almost Sexy

Did anyone else watch last week’s excellently horrifying Doctor Who episode, “The God Complex”, and think, “Ooh! That could almost have been one of the most erotic ‘Doctor Who’ episodes ever!”

For those who don’t care about spoilers…actually, I’ll put in a break just in case.

The Joke In Last Week’s Story

For those of you not paying attention (I know some of the people who read this blog also buy my books, and it’s distinctly possible that you lost track of when exactly the underprivileged get to read my stories) this week’s update was “Yesterday”. (I will resist the temptation to point out that it was actually Saturday.) The story is based on the Beatles song, and there is a reference to it in there…but probably not the one you think.

Back in the 80s, you see, there was a wonderful syndicated comic strip called “Bloom County”, a personal favorite of mine that also happened to perfectly capture the zeitgeist of the Reagan era. And as you may or may not recall, depending on your age, one of the big elements of the 80s zeitgeist was MTV.

“Bloom County” had an excellent strip about MTV; in it, one of the characters talks about how he used to love the song “Yesterday”. ‘It made me think of porpoises frolicking under Antarctic rainbows,’ he says. ‘Then I saw the video on MTV. It was full of explosions and half-naked women slinking around. You know what I think of now when I hear that song?’

And anyone who read last week’s story knows the answer… ‘Half-naked exploding porpoises!’

See? I told you there was a reference. :)

Top Five Comic-Book Mind Controllers

As I’ve mentioned on occasion, I’m a big fan of comic books and always have been. As I’ve also mentioned on occasion, I’m a firm believer in the notion that a big part of the reason I turned out with the specific fetish I did is because I’m a comic book fan and comics (and sci-fi in general) are absolutely steeped in mind control with sexual connotations. (The corollary to this, BTW, is that a lot more science fiction fans have this fetish than admit to it. This was at least somewhat borne out when my Lady gave a talk on the use of hypnosis to enhance your sex life at an ostensibly straightforward science fiction convention, and the room was absolutely packed.)

But the point is, comics have lotsa mind control. I love mind control. I love comic books. And comic books contain some particularly fine examples of evil mind controllers who do sinister things and plot evil plans…in a way that always seems to imply sex without showing it. So who are the best? Read on!

5. The Mad Hatter. Obviously, he has to make the list. He’s one of the better-known mind controllers, being a solid B-list Batman villain, and there’s something twistedly beautiful about watching someone slip a seemingly innocent hat on their heads and seeing their eyes go into a blank, obedient stare…even though the Mad Hatter never did anything particularly decadent with his victims (which is why he’s only number five; he’s too much a proper Victorian gentleman to ever take advantage of his thralls) he still gets mad props for inspiring that delightful thought, “What could I do with one of those hats?”

4. The Purple Man. For a long time, he could have been much higher on the list. He had mind control powers left, right and center; he appeared in a lot of good stories where blank-eyed people did blank-eyed things at his command; and eventually, he fathered a daughter who became one of the few mind-controlling good guys (the Purple Girl, natch.) But the Brian Michael Bendis decided to write the character’s sexual subtext as actual text, and turned him into a sadistic mind-rapist who deliberately let his victims (such as young superheroine Jessica Jones) know they were being controlled just so that he could enjoy their fear and panic at being helpless. There is a certain strain of MC fetishist who enjoys a controller who’s that sociopathic, but it’s not me. So he’s only Number Four.

3. Poison Ivy. Sure, she’s sexy. Sure, she’s seductive. Sure, she has pheromones that make her irresistible to men (and how come we never see women falling victim to the seductive spell of other women? After all, Everything’s Better With Lesbians!) But there’s this little thing about how everyone she so much as kisses keels over dead. It’s hard to really work up a truly exciting sexual fantasy about a character when all your kinky dreams start with, “And just before I die…” A lot of the mind controllers who didn’t make the list have that same problem (and all the mind controlling vampires, too, although there’s a strong vampkink contingent out there who would no doubt disagree.)

2. Mandrill. On the one hand, he can’t place at the absolute top on this list because I’m a submissive and tend to put myself in the victim’s place in mind control scenarios, and it’s really hard to get interested in the thought of losing my will to a big hairy guy with a blue nose. On the other hand, he’s clearly one of the most overtly sexual mind controllers out there; he always has a harem of beautiful women hanging off his arm, they all talk about how much they love him and want to obey him and are utterly devoted to him, and in recent years it’s been made pretty obvious that his whole “multiple attempts to conquer the world” thing is what he does when he runs out of lube and condoms and needs to kill a little time until he can get to the Walgreen’s. For this alone, he ranks very high on the list, and if I was a hetero top instead of a hetero bottom, he’d rank #1.

1. Enchantress. But I’m a hetero bottom. And the Enchantress is unquestionably the best of the comic book mind controllers. She uses mind control almost exclusively. She enthralls men with her seductive powers and makes them her thralls. And her end goal? Pretty much just to fuck Thor. Sure, she wouldn’t mind unbelievable mystic power and wealth and control of all that which she sees, but that would all be kind of secondary to getting Thor under her power so that she can have as much kinky sex with him as she wants. (Really, when you put it that way, why exactly is Thor working so hard to fight her? These are the kinds of questions that led me to a lifetime of writing mind control fetish porn.)

Why I Like What I Do

I write a lot of smut, in case you haven’t noticed. If I were to be slightly cruel to Simon and dump my entire backlog of stories onto him to post, I would wind up with a whopping 246 stories at the EMCSA. Now, that’s not an entirely fair measurement of quantity–some writers have spent years working on a single 77-chapter magnum opus, whereas the majority of my stuff clocks in at six or seven pages–but I think it’s clear at this point that I’m pretty prolific. I must have some reason for that. And despite all of the lovely readers who have shelled out for my ebooks out there, it’s not financial. :) So why?

In the end, I think it’s because I’m good at it. Not just writing smut in particular, but writing in general. I am, not to toot my own horn overmuch, a pretty talented author…and I have chosen to write smut because nobody does. Sex is a huge part of the human experience; it’s where we all start, it’s a major part of our adult experience, it’s a driver of politics and economics and relationships and the human condition. But somehow, when it comes time to actually talk about it, we have been trained to draw a genteel curtain over the event and say, “No, no. These things should not be spoken of. They are acts to be ashamed of.”

The same thing does not happen in war stories. We never have people detail the entire training process, explain how they get shipped out to the battlefield, and then have the soldier say, “And then, Gentle Reader, I must leave the rest to your imagination.” Horror movies don’t cut away from the gore; in fact, they’re frequently adored in direct relation to the amount of gore they have. But romances always skip the sex. Even the thought of showing the sex is anathema; “respectable” actresses don’t work in the nude. Violence is okay. Sex is not.

I don’t think about that very often when I’m writing these stories; any truly honest writer will admit that the process is a lot more mechanistic and less driven by the wellsprings of inspiration than we want to pretend. (“So and so has to do this at this time in order to make this moment later on seem plausible. And it’ll be a cool scene, too.”) But when I do think about it, I think that it’s important to redress that balance just a little. It’s important to have something that is well-written, says things about life and the people who live it…and is also full of hot sex. Because people have hot sex every day, and it’d be nice if they didn’t think they were the only ones.