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Category Archives: adult magazine business

The stories that please meet the legs that tease!

So tell me…are you drooling like I am?

What I mean is, how do you like this girl?

A sweet disorder in the tress/Kindles in a legman a wantonness (after R. Herrick)...

“A sweet disorder in the tress/Kindles in a legman a wantonness” (after R. Herrick)…

Nice, hmm? Her name is Katy Pearl, and she was photographed by Jana Krenova, proprietor of my newest freelance client, BestLegShow.com.

But we’ll get back to Katy and Jana in a moment…

If I don’t write as much you think I should on this blog, or as much as you might like to see me write, the main reason is money. As a freelance scribe of porn/erotica/whatever-you-wanna-call-it in a tight economy and with a greatly diminished number of sex magazines to contribute to, I have to spend most of my energy and time writing to pay my bills–and blogging doesn’t pay me anything. But if everybody who visited my blog daily bought just one of my ebooks, I could and would write here lots more! I would also do more ebooks. ;) So try one of my Kindle ebooks and you will get lots more interesting blog posts, pictures, and femdom erotica! :)

You can buy my ebooks in the United States and India; the United Kingdom; France; Germany; Italy; Spain; Japan; Canada; and Brazil.

I write primarily for porn sites now, doing copy for photos and newsletters about the sites. My main client is French photographer Denys DeFrancesco and his DDF Productions, one of the biggest European porn studios. Visit them at the DDF Network to get an idea of all their amazing sites.

I also write, under pen names, stories for the college girl sex magazines! You would be surprised, but I am very good at writing from the point-of-view of eighteen year old girls, as well as from the angle of the guys who fall under their erotic spells. I think there is a part of me that is still stuck in late adolescence. Maybe I also should have been a girl, I dunno. At any rate, they are fun assignments but I can’t tell you what they are without giving away the fact that they are not written by horny young coeds! (Fun assignment: go through magazines devoted to sexy young women and see if you can pick out what stories I wrote on the basis of my style. Every writer’s style is distinctive, like fingerprints, even when he or she hides it under disguises like slang or structure or bylines or details about bras and barrettes. But don’t ask me to confirm your guesses–I’m loyal to my clients and would not reveal that the juicy young things who write some of their stories are actually one bald but otherwise hairy Jewish lad from Chicago with an Irish nom de porn.)

But let’s get back to Best Leg Show. Its owner and photographer, Jana Krenova, is a skillful, artistic, and leggy lens lady originally from the Czech Republic who lives in New York and Prague, and who shot many pictorials and covers for me when I was the editor of Leg World…

Jana has many fans who are as awestruck over her very impressive pins...

Jana has many fans who are as awestruck over her very impressive pins…

...as they are by her photography of the lovely Naomi on a picnic.

…as they are by her photography of the lovely Naomi on a picnic.

In fact, Jana photographed the girl on the picnic blanket for me for Leg World, and the project was inspired by my admiration for a pinup painting by Gil Elvgren:

I bet the ants were smiling at this picnic!

I bet the ants were smiling at this picnic!

Now, starting on Friday 3/1/13–tomorrow–I am presenting an exciting archive of my stories each month on Best Leg Show. We’re starting off with “STARE AND ACHE!” a tease-and-denial story about a tough handsome executive who wants to be treated by a beautiful and voluptuous lady named Deborah exactly like the adulterous naughty bad boy he really is. Deborah makes him ache with her stocking feet and her dirty words and she tells him his penis doesn’t measure up to that of the coffee cart guy back in the office…it’s a goodie for fans of nylons, the foot fetish, and even has a little cuckold fantasy in the mix!

So go to BestLegShow.com and check out Jana’s blog section, and you’ll see a picture of me and read more about our upcoming plan for stories there. Check out her great lineup of photos and videos of all the beauties she’s captured with her cameras. And join her site–it’s very reasonable–and have fun! Let us know how you like “STARE AND ACHE!” by leaving a comment on the site, too! Or leave a comment on Twitter for Jana @BestLegShow or for me @irvoneil.

———–

I found the reproduction of the Elvgren pinup here. Photos of Katy Pearl and Naomi are © Jana Krenova and BestLegShow.com.

One thing I want to add: I don’t particularly enjoy hawking my wares like this, I’m actually kind of a reserved guy–the older I get, the more I admire Gary Cooper, let’s put it that way–and I don’t like to toot my own horn. I’m from the school of thought that it’s for others to toot the horn about me. But this is the new reality of writing for a living today, in a cyber-environment that makes books as numerous as grains of sand at the beach. You gotta speak out to be heard–for example, I’m going to be interviewed twice in the next few weeks about my porn career. Basically, to be read, to reach readers, unless you’re a super-duper brand name with the machinery of a vast publishing and distribution outfit behind you, you gotta promote yourself. Without that machinery, us scribblers gotta stand on a soapbox and wave our stuff around, trying to catch the eye of the customers. We’re not just scribes anymore, but pitchmen and pitchwomen. It’s the new world of creativity that the Internet has created.

 

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Remembering a sensuous nude by Andrew Loomis…

One of the reasons I write this blog is simply to give readers an idea of what one porn writer’s work has been like. I also do it to get readers interested in my erotica ebooks, which are available on Amazon here. I have basically been a hard-working and knowledgable writer/editor, with forays into nude photography, porn screenwriting, and even modeling and acting.

Of the various influences I’ve had on my work in porn/erotica/whatever-you-wanna-call-it, a strong one has always been the culture of illustration and pinups. When I was growing up, my family had various art instruction books in the house, two of which are highly regarded today–Andrew Loomis’ Fun With A Pencil and Figure Drawing For All It’s Worth. You can find the latter on Amazon here, and the former will be re-released soon. After many years Loomis’ books have come back back into print; before that they were hard to find collector’s items. I was recently lucky to find a battered old copy of Fun With A Pencil at the flea market, a late printing from the 1960s, and I picked it up. It got me thinking about him again.

In the numerous offices and cubicles I’ve had over the years while editing magazines, I always put up examples of art that inspire me. For example, in the 1980s I had a few pinups by the late Dave Stevens, who created The Rocketeer and was important in the revival of interest in Bettie Page. You can see his amazing work here.

And this picture by Andrew Loomis has always been one of my favorites since I was a teenager, and hung on the wall of my cubicle in the 1990s when I was editing Sex Acts, Cheeks, and Girls Over 40 magazines out at the publisher in New Jersey, as well as writing stories, interviews, and columns for Leg Action, Swank, and D-Cup for the same company.

Fun with a pencil, indeed, although this is from Figure Drawing For All It's Worth.

Fun with a pencil, indeed, although this is from Figure Drawing For All It’s Worth.

Although the magazines I edited were as hardcore as any on the newsstands, I’ve always loved the softer and more sensual kinds of images as well, as exemplified by the Loomis nude above. The magazines I edited from 1981-2009 were therefore a mix of the pinup and porn aesthetic.
 
 

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Porn scribe’s diary, 12/3/12: Essential smut fuel!

Monday through Friday, I often take a walk over to the local McDonald’s in the morning to get a large coffee. (It’s great that here, in NYC at least, any size McDonald’s coffee is only a buck.) I run this errand half for the coffee, and half to get out of my apartment and see other humans before settling in for my day’s XXX website and porn mag writing.

There is a very pretty girl at the nearby McDonald’s, on the fringe of Times Square, who is always so upbeat and friendly that it’s pleasure to see her working there, even if she doesn’t always wait on me. I wonder what her story is. I wouldn’t be surprised if she went onto much bigger things with her life. Maybe she’s attending college for some interesting degree, or striving to be some kind of entertainer, actress or singer? She does have a very good speaking voice.

Anyway, seeing her perks me up as much as the excellent McDonald’s coffee.

Java–my essential fuel for creating fine smut!

"Will you need more coffee, Mr. Neil?"

“Will you need more coffee, Mr. Neil?”

 

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Fifty Shades of the Fiend!

With the approach of the holidays, and especially the first frenzied shopping day known as “Black Friday,” I cannot emphasize too strongly that there is ONE femdom ebook you MUST read this season!

Here is a tale that captures the kinky underside of the festive scene…as our submissive hero Brian takes his Chinese stripper girl friend Orchid shopping, and ends up buying presents not just for her and her family, but for a stud she picks up at the department store and takes home to screw in front of Brian…

Just click ahead to my Amazon page here to find SHE MADE ME A CUCKOLD ON BLACK FRIDAY and the other perverse volumes in my “Irv O. Neil Erotic Library”…with their covers illustrated in the wonderfully crude and sleazy style of the underground fetish booklets once sold in the sleazier porn shops around Times Square in the days before the area was “cleaned up” to become more “family-friendly.” (And do take with a grain of salt my pomposity in giving my books that “Erotic Library” label, because it is meant to a certain extent to be tongue-in-cheek. A sense of humor is an essential component of the skilled pornographer.)

On other fronts, I did the In Bed With Dr. Sue podcast last Tuesday and that was an interesting experience. I hope everybody out in podcast listening land enjoyed our chat…

Both Sue and her callers asked some stimulating questions, so if you want to get a little insight into the working process of four writers of erotica, check it out in the archives here. The first half concentrates on smut/porn/erotica scribes Angela St. Lawrence, Louis Friend, Ed Cantor, and myself. With the arrival of a surprise guest, a literary agent/editor named Lori Perkins who was promoting a book of musings and opinions about Fifty Shades of Grey, that mammoth erotic romance/BDSM bestseller, the second half of the podcast focuses more on the current workings of the publishing industry in the wake of that literary phenomenon.

Meanwhile, my own dedication to vintage publishing and its products remains as strong as ever. I went to a memorabilia show on Saturday and picked up these lovely paperbacks from the 50s and early 60s:

I also found this 1975 book about the “weird menace” pulps of the 1930s and early 1940s. Its 1975 cover by Mike Kaluta, which was probably done specifically for the volume, captures the feeling of how publishers conveyed images of women in bondage long, long before Fifty Shades of Grey.

Actually, the later 1978 paperback edition of The Shudder Pulps used a vintage illustration from one of the original magazines, instead of Kaluta’s modern interpretative painting of the weird menace style:

And a bit of history: much of pulp is interconnected with later magazine genre forms. Martin Goodman, the man who published these examples of damsels in distress–Fifty Shades of the Fiend, you might say–

…eventually published this in the early 1960s:

…which everybody knows about. And his son Charles aka “Chip” Goodman eventually published this in the late 1980s…

…which I created and edited as a true labor of assman’s love.

Anyway, you’ll forgive my nostalgic ramblings…it’s just that after doing the podcast I couldn’t help but reflect on how things have changed, cover-wise, from Uncanny Tales to Fifty Shades of Grey.

Ironically, the recent reprint of The Shudder Pulps goes the more subtle route cover-wise, judging by this image from the Amazon store:

Political correctness? Ah, thy minions are legion!

——–

I found the weird menace covers in the article “Pulp Horrors” by Don Hutchison here. I found the Amazing Fantasy cover here. And you can find back issues of my seminal ass journal CHEEKS at the great online store OldMags.com.

Finally, I found the vintage shot of radio listeners here.

 

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Fetish writers on the air!

Hello again. I know it’s been a few weeks since I last blogged. I didn’t have writer’s block–I can’t afford writer’s block since producing 6000-7000 words a week of porn/erotica for websites and magazines is how I pay my bills. But, among other things, when I wasn’t busy cranking my smut, I got very absorbed in reading the novel Nana, Emile Zola’s 1880 blockbuster about a nineteenth century French courtesan and the men she ruined on her way to the top of the theatrical and social worlds of Second Empire France.

Nana was a long book, and I kept getting distracted from it by spending time browsing online; watching vintage movies on TCM (I particularly enjoyed two installments in the 1940s comedy-mystery series The Falcon, starring George Sanders); and leaving comments on favorite sites like FemdomArtists. But my dedication was well worth the time when I finally turned the last page of Nana and said, “Now THAT was a great book.” Sadly, I haven’t read enough of the classics in my life and I’m still playing catch-up. For more about my thoughts re Nana, check out my weekly column “Notes of a Rebel Subbie” at the femdom/financial domination website Domme Dose here.

Let’s see, what else have I been up to? I went to the yearly NYC vintage paperback collectors’ convention in mid-October, and that was fun. I came home with a few good books. In fact, one of the things I got was Nana’s Mother, a kind of prequel to Nana which tells the sordid story of her upbringing. Its original French title is L’Assommoir, which apparently is or was French slang for a dive bar where people basically knock themselves out drinking into a stupor. (I don’t speak French, and I got this information from the introduction to Nana.)

Here are some of the items I got at the paperback show:

The following week I went to another collector’s show and found this book:

Its original hardcover title was Loathsome Women, and it’s a curious volume wherein psychoanalyst Leopold Stein M.D. speculates on the idea that four of his female patients are not merely neurotic…but perhaps might actually be what were once considered witches! The kind of witches who would be tried and executed back in the Middle Ages and up to the Salem trials. He provides background on the history of witches which I found very informative, since I hadn’t read much about the subject before. And he makes a convincing case as to why people in the olden days might well have thought women were bewitching them. He also makes it understandable why, even though people don’t generally ascribe such supernatural or satanic powers to women today, that such notions still carry emotional weight on a gut level. Also, as Stein notes (and he wrote the book in 1959), nowadays the word “witch” is more often spelled with a “b” than a “w.”

I guess I have a kind of bookish existence lately…it’s partly a way to conserve money…but I really should get out and have some other types of fun one of these days. I keep telling myself I want to go to a professional dominatrix again…

It’s something I haven’t done in several years (although I’m always window-shopping online) but I can’t seem to work up the enthusiasm. Or the courage? Or, quite frankly, the money? (Because when I like a domme, I like to see her again and again, and that adds up in shekels. This is a problem when your erotic life costs money.)

On another front, next Tuesday 11/13/12, I’ll be one of the guests on “In Bed With Dr Sue,” an entertaining biweekly podcast at Blog Talk Radio here. Dr. Sue is a sex therapist who takes calls on the phone sex site Niteflirt. Her podcast is separate, and the show covers many provocative topics from foot worship to cuckolding to how to share your kinky desires with your partners. One particularly interesting show had the topic “What Do Dommes Really Think of Their Subs?” wherein she spoke with the beautiful and vivacious Queen Kitty from the Midwest.

The topic of the show I will be on is “Writers of Fetish Literature” and Dr Sue will be chatting with (in alphabetical order) Edward Cantor, author of the femdom novella Window Shopping and various femdom-themed pieces at his blog Writing for a Queen (his queen being the aforementioned Kitty); Louis Friend, the author of the short story collections Freedom Is Slavery and Life On My Knees, as well as the creator of the blog Prurient Interests; Angela St. Lawrence, specialist in sexy phone chat and a writer whose site Blistered Lips has many entertaining tales spanning a wide range of kinky behavior; and yours truly Irv O. Neil. (By the way, I don’t work for or with any of these folks, I’m just posting their links as a courtesy and to spread the word about good stuff to read. And of course if you want to check out any of my erotic ebooks, just click over here to the Kindle store.)

I’ve been reading some of my colleagues’ stories over the past week and they are very arousing and entertaining. I recommend you check them out, and listen to the show too. In fact, if you read some of the stories before the show, you might come up with some interesting questions to call in and ask us writers! Again, it will be on Tuesday 11/13/12  at 10:00 p.m. Eastern time right here; and if you miss it, you can always catch it afterward in Dr Sue’s archives here. We’ll be discussing many of the questions people have about erotica and fetish writers, so if you love porn/erotica/smut, tune in! You can also hang out in the Blog Talk Radio chatroom during the show.

It’s a long time since I’ve been interviewed about my work on the radio; the last time was in the late 70s after I wrote an article called “The History of the Whorehouse” for the venerable men’s magazine Swank. I was nervous about that one because the radio host was known for being acerbic and attempting to bait his guests, but I managed to adopt a scholarly tone while still admitting I had actually been to brothels, so he wasn’t able to talk me into a corner. Anyway, I’m looking forward to this new experience in radio, this time of the podcast variety.

Actually in college around 1970 or 1971 I briefly had a radio show myself, on which I played ethnic music of various kinds and pretended I was interviewing experts on that week’s music (or, at least, persons of that week’s ethnicity). For example, when I played Greek music, I did both my own voice as the “host” and pretended I was interviewing someone like Zorba the Greek…people swore it sounded like I had two people in the studio.

My friends told me the show was entertaining–at least until it was cancelled by the station manager because I read aloud on the air, in a Transylvanian accent, men’s magazine ads for “rubber novelties.” (It was Romanian music night.) Alas, I didn’t have the foresight to have somebody record the shows for me. Too bad, because they would have been a fun artifact to have today. Ah, the carelessness of youth…

But there are always vintage paperbacks to enjoy!

 

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The divine beauty of Belinda Lee enraptures and captivates!

It’s been a couple of weeks since I last posted because in addition to my usual thousands of words produced weekly for websites and magazines, I spent a good chunk of time writing my longest femdom story yet, which I will be putting up on Amazon shortly as a Kindle ebook. I just want to make the final polish to the story, which would be about forty pages long in print, and is 12,000 words of delectable kink and perversity in my Erotic Realism style that puts you into the scene so vividly you think it’s happening to you! That’s the kind of writing I like to read, and that I always aspire to create myself.

Meanwhile…take a look at this:

Isn’t this an amazing image? I find it so freakin’ sexy, those legs…the sand underneath her toes…the indolence of her exquisite hands as she looks down at the bare-chested, unconscious male…

Yes, a girl long ago finds a guy who’s out cold on a beach. And when she’s not rescuing stray beefcake, she’s posing for a statue of the goddess Aphrodite! This is a poster for a 1960 movie called The Goddess of Love in English and La venere di Cheronea (The Venus of Cheronea) in Italian, the story of the ancient Greek sculptor Praxiteles and his creation of a statue of Venus (aka the goddess Aphrodite). The movie starred the late Belinda Lee (1935-1961) in the title role, and if anybody could embody such a character (or at least, embody a girl who perfectly qualified to model for such a statue), it was Miss Lee.

I believe this is a publicity shot from that movie, used on a postcard. I saw The Goddess of Love awhile back, and although it wasn’t a great movie, Belinda was wonderful to watch…

I recently wrote a magazine article about 1960s girlie magazines (it hasn’t come out yet, though, but I’ll let you know here when it does) and Belinda Lee’s pictures were in some of the issues, so I’ve got her on my brain…

She died young in a car accident in 1961. The driver survived, and when he died recently at age 91, he reportedly said that he wanted to be buried next to her.

Read more about Belinda on Wikipedia here.

I also recently saw Belinda in her lusty role in a pirate movie, Marie of the Isles. Here is a poster from it:

Even in the variable quality of video recordings made by fans and friends of these now-obscure movies, the hypnotic beauty of Miss Belinda Lee shines through brightly and lives forever!

These are the kinds of images that inspire me as I write, even though my erotic stories both for adult magazines or the Web are not about ancient Greeks or pirates–although I would like to write on such topics at some point. But my tales are always about alluring women who, like Belinda Lee, enrapture my heroes and give them through their beauty and vivacity a taste of the divine–and sometimes a taste of divine hell! ;) Belinda was great at playing femmes fatale too.

Have a great Labor Day and I’ll be back next week with more info about my new ebook!

————

I found the image of the rare poster of La venere di Cheronea here.

 

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Porn scribe’s diary 8/10/12: Nude girl observed by handsome madman!

I burned myself out last week, I think, writing more than 14,000 words for websites, magazines, and a new femdom Kindle ebook. My eyes have felt strained all this weekend, so I’ve been writing in short bursts on Twitter just to keep my hand in, as writers are wont to do. Follow me there until I put a new lengthy post up here in a few days.

But hey, since I don’t believe any post here is complete without some nice eye candy, here’s something I stumbled on last week–a cover from the old sci-fi mag Amazing Stories.

I found it at a cool blog called Erotic Mad Science here. Check it out! It has a cool two-part essay starting here about the kinds of gals who submit to experiments in sci-fi stories, whom the author calls “Kitty Carrolls” after a character in the 40s movie The Invisible Woman.

By the way, the story The Girl Who Loved Death has been re-released in an Armchair Fiction paperback utilizing the cover image above. I haven’t read it, and I don’t have anything to do with the publication, but you can find it at Amazon here.

 

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Bosomy Manhattan Madam promotes her sex tips!

Occasionally I get out from behind the laptop and actually experience elements of the real world, and not just the compelling cosmos of erotica in my mind…so the other night I went to Headquarters NYC, a gentlemen’s club on West 38th Street near 11th Avenue, and attended a book party for The Manhattan Madam’s Secrets to Great Sex, which is published by a press called Quiver.

The book, which you can find here, was written by Kristin Davis, described on her Amazon page as “the woman behind one of the most successful prostitution rings in the history of the sex industry. Busted in 2008 for her affiliation with New York’s Governor Eliot Spitzer, she has accumulated the largest ‘little black book’ in the industry, with more than 10,000 names…prior to running an escort agency, she was Vice President of a Hedge Fund and holds a BA in Business and Master’s in Psychology. She took her finance background and applied it to the world’s oldest profession to build an empire that made over $5 million per year. Her business catered to the elite of the world, the A-list stars, athletes and politicians.”

Here’s a shot I snapped of Miss Kristin with her splendid decolletage…holding her book, of course, but wisely not obscuring her bosom!

The book was co-written with Lainie Speiser, publicist and columnist for Penthouse magazines and Adult Friend Finder, Inc., and somebody I’ve known for awhile in the erotica trade. Lainie has done a number of books like Confessions of the 100 Hottest Porn Stars and The Little Bit Naughty Book of Blow Jobs. 

I didn’t get a copy of the book yet but I hope to do so to peruse it for my regular review column “Stuff” in the men’s mag Swank. A book party in a strip club was unusual, to say the least, and there were plenty of guys, both press and fans, snapping pictures. There was also a videographer named Geoffrey Collymore from a YouTube Channel called FilmmakersFocus who took lots of footage of Kristin, Lainie, and the various Penthouse models in attendance. One celeb was the porn star Joanna Angel, famous for her heavily tattooed look and her alternative porn site Burning Angel. Check out the Filmmakers Focus footage here.

Of course, reading sex tips for women always comes in handy when I write fiction from the female point of view for “college girl” porn mags, which I do now and then–although usually the point-of-view is of eighteen year old girls, who aren’t supposed to know all that much! Well, maybe I’ll write a short story about a girl who gets Kristin and Lainie’s book for her eighteenth birthday! ;)

The staff of Headquarters (you can find the club’s website here) was quite friendly…I’ll have to go back there for another visit and sample one of their lapdance specialists soon… :)
 

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Her cruel beauty inspires Sardax again!

The terrific British femdom artist Sardax just finished a new illustration, inspired by the character of the beautiful and cunning Miss Meirong in my top-selling ebook Learning to be Cruel. He imagines something that Meirong might do if I write a sequel. Usually I don’t write sequels to my stories, I tend to “shoot my wad” on the tale and move onto the next. But I might make an exception to this by doing a new installment of Learning to be Cruel as soon as I can make the time. I know that phrase “as soon as I can make the time” might sound lazy, but in order to pay my rent, health insurance, and so forth, as a freelance porn writer, I already do thousands upon thousands of words for adult websites and magazines each week, and lately I just want to relax afterward, watch old movies, and shoot the breeze with my pals!

Sometimes I wonder if working on a laptop, as I have for the last two years, makes my eyes more tired than when I wrote on a desktop, which I did for almost fourteen years. I find myself more swallowed up in the writing on the laptop, but it could come at the cost of more energy and more weary orbs. Well, I’m just thinking out loud…

Anyway, here’s the small version of Sardax’s new illo, with Meirong dazzlingly potent in a blood-red dress and hemoglobin-red femme fatale heels! You can see the full size version on his site here.

She is tearing up a book belonging to Lester, the guy kneeling in front of her. Lester, who is dominated by Meirong in the first story with humiliating food play in a crowded diner, is an inveterate reader…not unlike myself.

I have some ideas for a sequel, and I hope I’ll do the story. It’s funny, the idea I have will go into even more intense realms of erotic emotional cruelty, and I’m almost scared to travel there. When I write a story, I feel like I’m living it in the hours that I spend in front of my laptop. And sometimes I feel I should spend more time living life in the real world rather than in my fictional one.

Meaning…maybe I should find a beautiful Asian woman to worship in real life.

This emotion is unpleasant because it makes me feel that writing fiction is somehow a “second-rate” version of existence. It comes from something that my father unfortunately said to me when I was in high school, just an offhand comment no doubt, while making my first attempts at fiction writing. It took place in 1968. I’d left my desk to go to the kitchen, and when I came back I saw that my father had wandered into my room and seen some pages of the story I was working on. It was, like the stories I write today, about a guy getting involved with a gal, and my father said to me, “Instead of writing a story about getting a girlfriend, why don’t you get one in real life?” From that moment on I have felt in a ridiculously immature yet resilient way that writing fiction is a second-rate way to live. Intellectually, I know it’s isn’t; to write well is one of the things I aspire to, and admire in others. Yet the wound from my father’s words has never healed.

It was particularly galling because unlike a lot of somewhat shy, bookish adolescents, I actually did date girls in high school–a lot of them. I might not have had a steady girl until I was senior, but my father was unfair in his implication that I wasn’t trying! I started dating when I was a sophomore, and I was always in there pitching.

His casual comment has haunted me ever since, even though I tried to expunge its power through therapy and introspection.

A feeling of guilt–of unworthiness–haunts the characters in my stories too. Especially Lester in Learning To Be Cruel.

If you’re interested in checking out the original story, you can find it on Amazon here.

 

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Femdom Sunday at the New York Post!

The New York Post is a pretty interesting tabloid on Sunday, with lots of well-written reviews and editorials. And this Sunday the paper has a real BDSM, femdom slant. The cover story in the Pulse section is about Anne Hathaway as Catwoman in the new Batman flick, and runs this photo (among several):

On page 3 we learn that women are smarter than men…science proves it:

Batman kneels in front of Catwoman in a comic strip panel reproduced on page 38:

A column about the media fallout from the “mommy porn” bestselling smut sensation Fifty Shades of Grey also runs a leggy shot of Ashley Greene, and talks about the new mainstream interest in BDSM from soccer moms. (And think about it: the triumph of a porn novel written by a woman is a femdom kind of triumph, even though the book is about female sexual submissiveness. As far as I know, no penis-bearing writer has ever hit the top of the bestseller lists with an outright erotic novel.)

And top it all, the Post presents on page 23 the photographic piece de resistance for lovers of giantesses, always a popular femdom sub-fetish: a Getty Images pic of a man crossing his hands near his crotch and standing in a test tube held by an enormous, steely-eyed, analytical woman!

And to think we New Yorkers used to have to go to fetish bookstores to glimpse stuff like this! ;)

 

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