Eleven pm on a rainy wednesday night, and it finally got to me: reading everyone else’s blogs to cull tomorrow’s Sex Blog Roundup made me want to make a post. However, my thoughts are all random, I haven’t had an orgasm in a few days (!), so I am unfocused as ever. I know, it’s just bad for anyone’s mental, physical and emotional health not to have at least had a wet dream. (Mmmm, my last wet dream: Rachel Kramer Bussel and a can of frosting…) But I’m seriously stressed and feeling overworked. Makes me want to do crazy things; I’m helping at a friend’s wedding this weekend and I keep having fantasies of eating the entire wedding cake without my hands, on the lawn on my hands and knees, when no one’s around. Weddings are strange and they make me feel strange. I don’t know a living person related to me by blood, so I totally understand how to make family out of thin air and wishes and trust, but family gathering things make me feel like a ghost. At least it’s an SRL wedding and lots of my “real” family will be there.
It’s mostly Best Women’s Erotica that’s stressing me; the manuscript is due June 1. Of course, I’m doing a big speaking gig on the same day — a presentation on Teledildonics (with live demonstration) for Dorkbot SF. But it’s the book that’s making me crazy. This may sound odd, but my dilemma is that I have about 25 final selections of really, really incredible, nasty, wicked, sublime erotica from women all over the world — and I need to cut it down to around 20. I keep thinking I need to walk away and come back, I have printouts arranged all over my floor (the cat rolls in them, sigh), I have excel spreadsheets with all the important features of each story (double penetration, gang-bang, exhibitionism, hardcore romance, bisexual hijinks, uniforms, goth girls menacing frat boys, older man office sex…). I want to petition my publisher to make the book longer, but I know they’ll make me make the hard (heh) decisions.
But overall, what’s been so interesting for me has been observing the common themes among the (hundreds of) submissions. For instance, I got an overwhelming amount of erotica whose central themes were sex with clergy (priests), and soldier/officer/wartime erotica. Almost all of them had sad or negative twists or endings. I got a lot of breakup erotica. I got erotica from men trying to pretend they were female writers (never underestimate an editor whose web search skills are worthy of a job at Fleshbot). I think the worst faker was one I read whose tip off was classic bad-porn metaphors for female body parts, such as “my perfect jugs” for breasts and “my greasy flaps” for labia. I am so not making this up. Flaps. Greasy. Amazing.
Well, I hope I make it to Dorkbot; in the meantime I’m also going to be on the Derek and Romaine show (Sirius) again on the 25th reviewing porn, and right now I’m quoted extensively in a very interesting Wired News article by former Reverse Cowgirl Susannah Breslin, Porn Valley Goes Blogging — read it, it’s got a lot of food for thought. I survived the Writers With Drinks, but only with support from two hot horn players and two cute boys I met that night: Diary of a Sex Addict and Stephen Elliott. One of my very favorite things is when I meet bloggers in person, and meeting both of them really made my night. And fuck, I’ve never been so nervous reading anything in my life: I was glad to find out afterward that no one could see my legs shaking! I read something I wrote, which I seldom do — I like to read other people’s writing that I *know* is good; a convenient foil for a girl who likes to dress sexy but hide near the snack table at parties. A girl who then leisurely takes the time to sniff her own panties when there’s a line for the bathroom.
