APRIL 2015

Howdy. Thanks for stopping by.

Say, what happened to all the male dominant smut? What happened to the long form story? What happened to character and plot? Sure, they are still out there, but they are rare as Mormon bookies. Like the roller skates of my youth, I guess they are dying out in favor of the "extreme;" The same way plotted porn movies have gone Ono. Just get to the money shot and rub one out, Ese! Soon plotted erotica will have gone the way of the Dodo and the Greenleaf Classics two-dollar novel.

Just in case you get wistful for the “good ol’ days,” there are hundreds of old Greenleafs and Greenleaf-esqe novels here: http://neatopotato.net/xnovel They are a definite time capsule. Lots of hippies girls mixing it up with horny boys home from Viet Nam. Lots of frustrated housewifes and lonely farm daughters. Classic.

I can’t help but wonder how many of those novels were actually written by writers with real names we’d recognize. As a teenager Stephen King sold one of his first stories to the defunct men’s magazine Adam. What the heck did pimplefaced, cokebottle-glasses L'il Stevie K. know about sex at the age of 16? Bah. At the heart of it, all us writers just write to be read. That's all we want. A couple of loyal readers who enjoy our stories. And perhaps four million dollars, that’d be nice too.

My writer buddies and I sometimes play the “X writes Y Game” when we’re six-beers drunk in a smoky bar.

The "X writes Y" Game goes like this: What if [insert author] was a [genre writer.]

Q: What if Vonnegut wrote Obituaries?

A: Every entry would be four words long: “And so it goes.”

Q: What if Salinger wrote OpEds?

A: Every third word would be emphasized with uber-condescending italics.

Q: What if Jonathan Franzen was a sports writer?

A: The first 27 column inches of the baseball game recap would be the life story of the guard who opened the door at the stadium press gate.

That one cracked me up. My buddy Josh is a quick wit.

As you may know, John Franzen is the Pulitzer Prize-Winning author of some amazing books that are over-the-top with character details. After you read a Jonathan Franzen opus, you catch yourself addressing Christmas cards to fictional characters you’ve never actually met.

I was retiling a bathroom shower surround when a particularly interesting “X writes Y” hit me out of the blue.

What if Jonathan Franzen wrote a Greenleaf Classic smut novel?

Hmmmmm. I’m not worthy to bring Jonathan Franzen take-out Chinese food, but it was an interesting question. What if somebody tried to put as much into the character backstory as we put into the parts about naughty-bits bumping together? What would that story look like? Or would it just piss off everybody looking for a quick rub-out?

I gave it a try. If you are a long-form reader and you care about character, you may enjoy my novel-length stories. If you don't like my stuff, I offer a money-back guarantee.

My stories are heavy on two things: A dominant alpha male who is both feared and revered within a family. And a microscopic focus on the tipping point where kids become sexually-aware young adults.

In the mid-90s there were a few websites where girls logged their true-confession stories of surviving incest abuse. It was a kind of journal therapy sponsored by some well-meaning ladies who were not real therapists.

One-third of the journal incest stories were exactly what you’d expect: Anger and recrimination; broken girls in search of sanity and a sense of safety in their late twenties and middle age.

But two-thirds of the girls were incredibly blasé about their memories of the abuse they endured. “It was what it was. It was embarrassing at the time, but I got over it. Dad wasn’t a bad guy. We worked it out. Also sometimes we still have sex, even though I’m twenty-seven now.”

It blew my mind that so many girls were indifferent to the abuse they’d known. To them, it merely “was what it was.”

I got no dog in this fight. I’m not a psychotherapist. But a lot of what I write was stolen from those true-survivor stories before they shut down. “What if an insanely screwed up home life was ‘just the way it was?’”

Hey, I'm not Dr. Phil. I'm just a hack wordmonkey looking for the place where conflict intersects with empathy. I'm more passionate about the Oxford comma.

Domming Daughter Dani started as a writing prompt.

I had just finished writing a terrible 120K word erotic vampire opus, and the erotica aspect of the novel was even more lame than the vampires. (And that, Dear Reader, is saying something). I committed to cranking out a full-on sexy short story for ASSTR before I went back to rewrite my awful sex scenes. I need to practice my craft a bit. Like I said, Dani was supposed to be a short story.  I got a little carried away.

I knew I was going to write an mdom story. I printed out the list of story codes and cut them into strips of paper that I folded and dropped into a coffee cup. I pulled out four slips. True (yikes), incest (meh), robot (what?), and gay.

I sighed. I considered gay. Really. I just didn't think I could write gay with any conviction. I couldn't do it justice.

So I tossed gay and robot. I pulled out two more. Pedo and extreme. Yowsa.

I tried to write pedo. It was weak cheese. I had a couple polite emails assuring me that it wasn't doing anything for the pervs. I pretended DDD was pedo, but it was more about grooming than pedo. I’ve stopped tagging the story code as pedo. It’s not. There’s a scene where an eight year old comes on to her dad, but past that, the kids have transitioned to their early teens before things get out-of-hand. In four years since I first published DDD, I've only had one [make that two] soul[s] write a nasty note, and they took the story literally and thought it was some kind of aforementioned true confession. This happens every so often, as you might imagine from the first person true-ish nature of the story. After all, I mimicked the tone of the incest survivor forums. But one person was very, very angry. Even though that person was confused... Hey, they were moved enough by the prose that I must have done something right in order to elicit a strong emotion.

Skip is a bad guy. The worst. Even more creepy, he's the unreliable narrator who knows how unreliable he is.

The story is what it is. If the dark plot fills a couple hours you would have otherwise spent watching Thirty Rock reruns, you are welcome. If it makes your brain spit naughty chemistry into your arteries, then you are welcome. If not... Perhaps you'll like the next story better.

NOTE! For some, super-frustrating reason the ASSTR server does not like the long chapters in DDD. It keeps cutting the end off chapters. I'm not sure if this is the result of somebody loading an old server backup and "unfixing" the patches I keep fixing. It keeps putting versions of the stories that have typos back when I can clearly see from my source files that I fixed those typos. Typos are bad but dropping big chunks of the story off the end of chapters is scream-worthy. It's driving me nuts. If you see that part of a story is missing, PLEASE, email me so I can fix it. Again. And again. (And again.) Sheesh.

My latest and not greatest.

It runs six parts.

I'm not in love with this story (so far). Every third sentence I stopped writing and said, "Didn't I already use that turn-of-phrase in Dani?" But, I needed more ass-in-chair time writing female POV. Lemmeknow what you think.

Stuff Other Perverts Wrote

This is a list that will grow with time. My memory isn't what it used to be.

There's a dusty unfinished mdom story from Washington Irving (who was, himself, aping the master of dialogue-only narrative, V.P. Viddler) called Keeping the Womenfolk in Line. I learned so much about erotic writing technique and letting dialogue drive the action from this silly old story. It's a gem.

I'll always have a soft spot in my heart and a hard spot in my pants for Vulgus' A New Life for Sara.

Thanks to Reader R who helped me finally track down a story called The Arrangement. I stole so much of Skip's voice in Domming Daughter Dani from this story, I almost feel I owe writer Prester John a story credit. (Sorry the version at this link is formatted poorly. Testament to the era in which it was archived.)

And, of course it's not strictly male dom, but Fabula Salaxacis is writing on a whole other level. Rat Bastard is the best thing on ASSTR.

A special thanks to everybody who wrote a nice email to me over the past couple of years since Dani posted. I've been reading smut on ASSM since it was an actual newsgroup. Twenty plus years. I've never emailed an author, even though I've loved some of their work. Y'all who took five minutes (some of you five hours) to write a nice email (or ten), thank you so much. It means the world. Really.

Dutch