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(Bad?) Sex in Fiction goes Unrewarded

I write this post with a heavy heart.

The Literary Review reports that its would-be judges of the Bad Sex in Fiction Award 2020 have decided, after difficult deliberation, to cancel the prize for this year.

Their rationale: “The judges felt that the public had been subjected to too many bad things this year to justify exposing it to bad sex as well. They warned, however, that the cancellation of the 2020 awards should not be taken as a licence to write bad sex.”

While the intentions are merciful, I can say only–Alas! Crap! Come on, now! And other expressions of dismay.

The award is, after all, one of my best chances each year to sample some literary sex writing.

“But, T.C.,” you say, attempting to offer comfort, “isn’t that literary sex writing you’re now deprived of…bad?”

Well…sometimes.

And sometimes not.

Literature and sex are matters of highly personal taste. Put them together, and what one reader finds abysmal might leave another wondering where she can find the rest of the book.

So put me on the record: I’ve quite enjoyed some of the entries to the Bad Sex in Fiction Awards.

Not the Morrisey one with the barrel-rolling breasts, of course. But…well, here’s the entire 48-minute episode of Smutty Storytelling where my cohost Betina Cipher and I discovered many (not all!) of the samples actually worked for us.

[In the interests of full disclosure, I must confess: when I tracked down the full books the nominated entries came from, I often enjoyed the books…but not as much, or in the same way, as the sex snippets seemed to promise. In fact, some of the sex turned out disappointing or boring in context. I had imagined surrounding erotic scenes for the excerpts, but it turned out the authors’ imaginations were rather different from mine.]

And on the other hand, perhaps I should be glad to see this “Award” stymied for a year. Because I don’t share its goal–“to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it.”

That last, bolded part in particular.

Don’t get me wrong, I hate tasteless sex. But one person’s tasteless is, well, very much to another’s taste. I’ve read and rejected what must easily be over a hundred “crude” sex scenes for the New Smut Project’s anthologies. And yet I’m sure some people might find my own writing crude, what with its frank talk of nipples and cunts and asses and people moaning as things are done to any of the preceding.

While I’ve cringed at my share of Bad Sex nominees, having read some of the entire books I don’t know if those sex scenes could justly be called perfunctory, and whatever their problems are, I really don’t think they’re “redundant.” The problem is often too much originality rather than too little. I’m wary overall of the idea that sex is gratuitous to write about.

And is that even the goal of the Bad Sex in Fiction Awards? Confusion abounds–“honored” nominee Susan Choi wondered: “Is the award for bad sex writing? For good writing about bad sex? For making good people feel bad about sex? I can’t help but think it might widen my audience.”

Her interviewer continues: “She notes that the main difficulty of writing about sex ‘is the way people react to the fact that you’ve done so!’ “

Well said. For the record, without knowing it was nominated, I read Choi’s novel–My Education–and loved it. Especially the sex parts. Raven Leilani, author of the recent and widely acclaimed Luster and no slouch herself in the good writing department, agrees, considering it some of the best sex she’s ever read.

(It may not be tangential that Choi’s heroine is a bisexual woman, and her apparently controversial sex scenes involve raw, sticky, uninhibited expressions of lust with another woman. Uncomfortable to some? I’m certain. But not in a way that makes it bad.)

We can’t control people’s reactions to the sex we write, or to the fact that we write about sex at all. Though it’s probably predictable that “bulbous salutation”s, competitive vaginas, billiard-rack testes, and the word “cum” will cause cringing. For that matter, as the article linked in the previous sentence also observes, one of the reactions, post-cringe, may be to go out and write about sex better–the New Smut Project grew out of a series of conversations with my co-editor Alex Freeman that began with us reading and analyzing that year’s crop of Bad Sex nominees.

We observed two failure modes that might be instructive:

First, some of the sex involved treating one partner (usually the woman) like a blow-up doll, or at the very least as some obviously fictional construct. When Jonathan Grimwood wrote of how his narrator’s “fingers found both vineyards” and meditates on the respective vintages of the partner’s, ah, fore and aft passages, the fact that the lady’s reaction isn’t given (finding longer excerpts, I see she does eventually ‘shiver’ and ‘giggle with embarrassment’) create the bizarre mental image of her holding still for several sentences, patiently waiting out the analysis. It exacerbates the weirdness of the scene. And I mean, I’ve always found it surreal how women get forgotten in sex scenes. My partner observed how people will try to “Do sex at you” rather than “with you” and, yeah. Doing sex at someone is ridiculous. And the 2017 winner, which has a woman’s “face and vagina competing for my attention,” giving parts of her body more intention and autonomy than she has herself, is likewise–as the kids say–cringe.

On the flip side, some of the Bad Sex nominees–Susan Choi, as I mentioned, and I would argue Erri DeLuca as well–seemed to earn their “recognition” by writing a woman as too active in sex. To mainstream thinking, this is alien. DeLuca’s inexperienced young hero’s mindset is accurately depicted and, I’ll be frank, as a dominant woman I found his honest vulnerability and awe as his partner led the action to be quite, quite pleasant to read.

Given these patterns, maybe the ultimate lesson of these awards is what Julian Gough reports seeing on Twitter: “I’m never having sex with a straight man again.”

But no, that’s defeatist. I’d be the last to deny issues in many straight men’s sex game, but when DeLuca writes a (presumably straight?) man trying something different, he gets penalized too. And I don’t agree with the Tweeters that Gough needs to go on some kind of register. I find his case quite moving as he considers:

“So why do we write sex when we know it is risky? Because leaving sex out of fiction falsifies our picture of humanity. If fiction can’t address life’s most difficult, complex and interesting areas, then why write or read it?

“This is why I find the Bad sex award, at this point in its history, in bad faith. Its basic premise – that authors are adding unnecessary and lazy sex to increase sales – is not just wrong, it’s the reverse of the truth. The award very deliberately avoids shortlisting actual pornography or erotica and instead targets authors who are trying to be honest about desire and sex, however distasteful the results may be. It deliberately and successfully encourages the worst, and dumbest, misreading of fiction; the conflating of authors with their characters in order to publicly shame them.”

Again, well said! (It makes one wonder why these nominees of supposedly “bad sex” are so eloquent when they write about sex in fiction.) And I am an author of actual erotica, one who believes erotica is also a place to be honest about desire–while certainly not meaning all desires I depict are my own or that the characters are myself playing dress-up. Sexuality, sensuality, pleasure are part of our humanity (including ace people, whose capacity for intimacy and pleasure may be expressed in other ways–and who not infrequently, in my experience, enjoy reading erotic fiction). Erotica engages with and honors this fact.

And because these things called “sex” are so close to our humanity, it seems even more important to write sex well.

But to bring well-written sex into fiction, you must run the risk of receiving a Bad Sex in Fiction Award.

Albeit not this year.

My final disappointment related to this award is that I’ve never been able to see its trophy, of which the Wikipedia description–“a ‘semi-abstract trophy representing sex in the 1950s’, depicting a naked woman draped over an open book”–tantalizes.

Oh, well. For now, I have some good sex to read and write about. I hope you have the same!

Why your story was rejected: Tales from the slush pile

Just over year ago, the New Smut Project opened to submissions for Erato. We had room to publish pieces from up to 50 authors. We received submissions from over 300.

Stories we accepted including science-fiction prose poetry about a polyamorous triad on a diplomatic mission, a kinky story written entirely in dialogue, hilarious historical fiction, sexy novel excerpts, and translations from Spanish. We found beautiful pieces that subverted expectations, played with tropes, and celebrated many variations of gender expression and sexual preferences.

But then we had to reject all the rest. Understandably, “We didn’t have enough room to fit this is” isn’t the most satisfying explanation for a writer whose story has been rejected. Why, you want to know, did we strive to make room for some, but not for others?

Here are some observations from my reading of the slushpile. While Erato is an erotic flash fiction anthology, I think many ideas hold across forms and genres. I hope they will prove useful for writers, for readers wondering what happens behind the scenes, and for other editors (especially newish ones like us) who might feel less alone.

The #1 thing you can do to improve your acceptance rate is to read the submission guidelines. The guidelines are there for a reason. (I have a future blog post in my drafts meditating on what we put in the guidelines, why, and how they worked out.) If your story doesn’t fit the call, send it to where it will fit instead.

If your story does fit the call, please use the file format the guidelines request, include the info in your cover letter that we ask for, and use the subject line we suggest so your email doesn’t get eaten by the spam filter.

This isn’t a matter of editors seeking docile authors to boss around. The authors I’ve been most grateful for as an NSP editor are the ones who ask questions, make suggestions, and call me out when I slip up. They help me improve, and they do that by being engaged and helping me achieve the goals we both share. Following the guidelines is a quick way to show you are engaged, that you care, that you’re vibing with the editors’ goals. Plus, seriously, the spam filter eats stuff, take the lifeline I throw you in the form of a recommended subject line.

The #2 tactic to improve your odds of acceptance is to proofread/self-edit, not just for the absence of typos, but for vividness, clarity, coherence, a sense of giving a damn and having something to say. Hunt down your pleonasms. Make sure each sentence is interesting. A typo won’t sink an otherwise great story, although I do calculate necessary copyediting time, and a story that requires a lot of effort to be made readable needs a lot of awesome to outweigh that. A story draft with widespread infelicity, whatever its promise, should be nurtured before it reaches my desk–by the author, a beta reader, fellow workshop participants, a hired copyeditor, someone.

Despite my love of well-written sentences, however, our initial rejection decisions mostly came about from content, not style.

• Failure one: The story wasn’t erotica or erotic. We specifically said “submissions should be arousing” to drive this idea home. Yet we received pieces that were excellent examples of other genres–including horror stories so accomplished that co-editors had to leave each other content warnings in our submission notes so nobody read one during lunch or before bed. I’ll just say that I didn’t expect serial killers to appear in response to my call for submissions for a “sex-positive” anthology with numerous pastel cover art mockups. I suppose the thought process here might have been “well, I won’t self-reject,” and I respect that. In theory. In practice, sometimes you have to self-reject to save yourself and the editors’ time, not to mention peace of mind and/or stomach.
• To say nothing of the serial rapist stories, by which I mean both stories about serial rapists and certain authors who sent multiple stories about rapists, and a few stories about underage characters, none of which we did, could, or wanted to accept. And our guidelines made this clear, even if the surrounding pastel covers of smiling adults didn’t (hint: they did).*

Yeah, nonconsensually receiving stories about nonconsensual sex is a trip. Moving on, more unsubtle failures to read or follow the guidelines:

• We had a few people send stories way over 2,000 words, or more than 3 stories–multiple authors sent four pieces “because they’re short.” Dude, this is a call for flash fiction, they’re meant to be. A surprising number of people failed to write the story’s title in the subject line as we asked, although they did write “Submission” as we asked. Go figure. And some sent PDFs or Pages files even though we offered a smorgasbord of options I can actually open on my non-Mac and edit (if I ever accept a story that’s only available in PDF, I can tell you I am not the person doing the work of getting it into a copyeditable format).
• We didn’t think our guidelines for a sex-positive erotica anthology would have to explicitly suggest “try writing sex between characters who actually like each other” and/or “try writing sex between characters who actually like having sex.” So another unexpectedly common reason we rejected stories was because they were about people having sex they didn’t enjoy with people they didn’t like–or one or the other; either on its own was enough to sink a story for our purposes. And I’m not talking about “enemies to lovers” jaunts; these lacked the passion (or the character growth, which to be fair is hard to achieve in <2,000 words, though not impossible). Instead, they just left me with a sort of grimy ennui. I felt less sexy for reading them. The opposite of the Erato experience.
  • So is it, as my girlfriend said when I complained to him, “so hard to write enthusiastically consenting adults doing sexy things?” I think the problem is people try to inject “conflict” because they believe a story needs to have it. And despising the person you’re with does create conflict. But what a story really needs is tension, which can arise from many sources**–such as the pull of desire. As a reader, I love to be moved by the thrill of discovery (something stories of people with Playboy’s idea of a perfect body having mechanically perfect PIV sex lack, for that matter). And effective suspense in erotica may come less from will they/won’t they and more from when and how will they? Overall, then, interpersonal conflict is not the only option, nor, for our purposes, the best. Especially when our guidelines suggested other sources of conflict, like “two lovers vs. one’s arousal nonconcordance”!
  • The other thing is, some “conflict” left us wondering if the characters wouldn’t have been better off if they hadn’t tried to have sex in the first place. NOT the best fit for a sex-positive anthology! (By “sex positive” we at NSP don’t mean sex is always positive, but that we are interested in exploring the ways and times when sex is a positive force in people’s lives. This can include stories where characters reclaim their sexuality after previous traumatic experiences, like Annabeth Leong’s “Return to Rope” in Between the Shores.) Some of the stories we received seemed to carry the message “sexual desire is bad and you’ll be punished for it.” Yeah, no thanks. Literary sex does not have to be bad. Enjoying yourself is not something only mindless plebes do.
• Numerous stories, despite our body-positive guidelines, were based on the idea that a huge cock on its own is sexy, and the absence of one is tragic. Similar if a little less strident were the representations of flat stomachs, washboard abs, and large breasts (but not too large, lest the woman they’re attached to also become large). Does any of this actually work for people? I mean, no shame; certainly the erotica I read and write has been known to revisit particular fantasies with only moderate variations. But Erato is for people who got bored of these particular fantasies of “perfect” bodies, or were never into or included in them in the first place.
• You’ll likely be rejected if you think it’s cool to send a feminist-identified erotica call a story where the male protagonist only identifies his female sex partners by their hair colors.
• Or if the writing is, as they say, “visually oriented” but you seem never to have actually looked at a flesh-and-blood woman in your life. Much less imagined what it’s like to be one. No, our bodies (cis or trans), minds, and/or social roles don’t work like that — however much you might wish they did.
• When writing erotica, remember you’re competing with visual porn: a story that’s a list of actions without sensory detail, characterization, or emotional stakes (not necessarily romantic), so that we could be watching just anyone have sex, isn’t an improvement on going to the many websites where we can literally watch just about anyone having sex.

Other problems showed up long before we even read the attached story:

• You don’t need to explain your story in the cover letter (except in rare cases where the call for submissions asks you to do that). It’s a 2,000-word story; we don’t need to pre-game by reading another 250 words of summary or explanation of your symbolism…or, awkwardly, autobiography where you explain the heroine isn’t precisely your ex-girlfriend but does share her initials and hair color and maybe a few more identifiable details… Editing erotica is a fraught area of pseudo-intimacy anyway, and some authorial background information is helpful (“This is an #OwnVoices piece because like the main character, I have fibromyalgia”; “When not writing bondage erotica, I’m a rigger for Cirque du Soleil”), but don’t make it weird with TMI. Especially TMI about a third party who doesn’t know you’re writing to us about her (yeah, it’s usually a her).
• Not a cause for rejection on its own, but a tip: You don’t need to include the copyright symbol in your cover letter or at the beginning or end of your story.
• A few people spelled the anthology’s title as Erota. I don’t blame them for a slip of the fingers, but I do wonder why they didn’t proofread before hitting “send,” or didn’t copy & paste our own spelling from the guidelines, my usual technique. I also recommend doing this for the editors’ names, which for Erato submitters who did this prevented the embarrassment of writing to “Mr” anyone (we have no Mr.s on our editorial team; meanwhile, “Sirs and Madams” doesn’t cover the full range of genders). “Dear Alex Mill and T.C. Mill” is perfectly fine, and more polite than “Dear Mr. T.C. Mill and Mr. Alex Freeman” actually!
• A weak story title can be redone, a bland title may become memorable if it’s attached to a fantastic story, and frankly we saw some amazing titles that went over terrible stories. But there were also some pieces I predicted I’d reject just from the title, and proved correct. And there were two or three pennames I just flat-out said NO to. You should sound like a writer and not a cartoon character. Not least for the sake of the people adjacent to you on the Table of Contents.
• You only need to list 2-3 previous publications in your cover letter–the most recent, the best, and/or those most similar to the place you’re submitting to now. Since this is flash fiction, it’s possible to send a list of publications longer than the actual submission. But it won’t do you any good.

Okay, past the cover letter, let’s talk about my own favorite aspect of stories: style…or lack thereof. Stories that were consistently nongrammatical worked as prose poetry. But we did read some pieces with issues like:

• Point of View, often using too distant or inconsistent a POV. Most readers expect one POV per scene, and especially in flash fiction most stories only need one POV (though we published some submissions that skillfully used multiple!). What you want to avoid is a jarring “head hop” effect where we can never tell whose perspective a given sentence is from, or a POV so distant we can’t really get a feel for the people or events. It’s difficult to make a pure omniscient narrator work in the 21st century–not impossible, but an uphill battle. And the lower slopes are littered with the fallen bodies of those who tried.
  • Yeah, as I often say as well as demonstrate, metaphors are a realm of potentially great reward and certainly great risk.
• Dialogue: if it’s wooden, hard to follow, tagged distractingly, tagged confusingly, or so poorly punctuated it’ll take your copyeditor an hour to fix your story, rejection becomes likely.
• Showing vs telling: especially finding a balance–too much of either can make a story boring, either vague or deathly slow-paced.
• Tone: lots of different tones can be erotic–humorous, bawdy, romantic, wistful, thoughtful, urgent, curious, even frustrated or bittersweet. But others just aren’t. Even when characters liked each other and enjoyed the sex they had, the author sometimes didn’t seem to feel that way. Their tone of arch smugness sneered at the characters for daring to be sexual (especially while old, or fat, or otherwise marginalized). Contemptuous =/= sexy. Neither do whiny, egotistical, or contagiously miserable.
• There were also stories where word choice was all over the place so that we couldn’t figure out what we were supposed to be feeling. Victorianisms alongside neologisms alongside “betwixt her buxom tatas.” Yes, laughter is sexy, but see also what I said above about being a writer and not a cartoon character.
• Speaking of probably unintentional hilarity, we spotted malapropisms suggesting a bad relationship with the Muse of Langauge or with one’s beta reader. Rye smiles, the peeks of her breasts, and so on in that vain (sic). Slip-ups happen to the best of us; I’ve been known to type “there” when I mean “their” because my brain knows better but my fingers don’t. Even so.
• One or two stories were so overwritten it took teamwork, and guesswork, to figure out what they were depicting. After answering “What’s this author on about?” the next question usually was “Why couldn’t they just say that?”
• Other stories were so underwritten that the proverbial Ikea manual was sexier.

• Again, a typo, even on the first page, won’t get you automatically rejected. But I observed many stories we rejected for other reasons had typos on the first page. Might not be a coincidence.

Length is an especially live issue with flash fiction, but these snarls also appear in short stories, novels, essays, even poems:

• Your story was too long, even if it was within the guidelines: too slow-paced, pleonastic, padded, or meandering to an unclear destination.
  • I’m not sure we accepted any story that began with a “how we met” summary.  Some include brief “how we met” flashbacks that I think work quite well, but they tend to open with immediate action, a strong image, a line of dialogue, something that connects with the reader.
  • With respect to Salinger, and those who enjoy starting with the David Copperfield crap (it certainly has its place in longer stories!)–skip it here.
  • One secret recipe–-and my not-so-platonic Platonic Ideal of submissions–is to start the story at the sex (or in the middle of the sex, or in a breather between sex). We can figure out who these people are and why they’re in bed together as we proceed.
    • Generally speaking, the reader who turns to erotic flash fiction is in search of friction-inducing hotness now. So opening with a meet cute 5 years before the lust blossoms doesn’t work for them. (Again, flashing back to one can work, though.)
    • Then again, I often start my stories in the midst of a sex scene and they *still* grow to 4,000 or 5,000 words long.  Flash fiction is, indeed, hard.
• On the flip side, your story was too short: it failed to expand on interesting events, to add characterization or feeling. Not evocative. You made a flash fiction by writing the synopsis of a longer story–and people don’t often read synopses for fun. In general, and in my humble opinion, flash is too short for much summary: what I love about it is its reliance on vivid scenes.
• OR you made a flash fiction by chopping off the first few thousand words of a longer story–I think opening in media res is rewarding when done well, but it’s also a challenge. For some stories we thought the writing was great and not overwritten, but we still scratched our heads at the context or lack thereof. One reason I like stories that open with characters in bed is because it’s pretty clear what they’re doing and how they got there (they liked each other and wanted to be–right?).

And then we rejected some stories for failures of personal taste.

• Everybody’s id is different. Plus we were balancing the joys and dismays of 3 co-editors and the anticipated tastes of Erato’s readers. I’m so grateful to my co-editors for the balance they provided; if I picked every piece I liked, the tone of the anthology would have ended up more bittersweet with some candy-fluff whiplash.
• This is to say: a story can be quite good and still be rejected for subjective reasons.
• And everyone’s idea of a buzzkill is different.
• And yet…if you inject a paragraph about the protagonist’s mother or child in the midst of a sex scene and you’re getting lots of rejections, I’d suggest deleting that paragraph. It will only help.

Also, a story can never stand on its own in a slushpile full of hundreds of stories.

• Most painful were the wonderful stories that happened to cover the exact same topic in the same way as three other equally or more wonderful stories.
• And then at least ten people sent in versions of something we didn’t care for–what is up with sex robots? (We did publish a story about android sex, but it was about two characters connecting, not one character interacting with a flashy sex toy. And it’s not like we didn’t accept excellent stories about masturbation either! But authors who included sex robots got distracted by the shiny toy and generally failed to tell us anything new or interesting about sex. It didn’t help that the sex robots tended to step out from the pages of Playboy and enact bog-standard fantasies.)
• Meanwhile I discovered some pairings were unexpectedly rare–NB/NB I realized might be thinner on the ground, but we also had very, very few NB/M pairings compared to NB/F ones. Also some premises, settings, and kinks didn’t show up as anticipated. I don’t think this is something you could determine going by published works, because I believe some get published disproportionately–maybe because editors are so pleased to finally see some. And hey, I’ve been the token femdom writer before, so I kind of get it.

Here is probably the most controversial reason for rejection (or maybe it isn’t but it puts me in a spitfire mood): This story of yours is actually quite good and interesting. But the other piece(s) you submitted to our call were horrible, either in terms of craft failure or especially because they revealed a weird (mis)understanding of how to write sex–or write about women or gay or black or disabled people. And it made us not want to work with you.

Rejections aren’t personal. In Erato’s crowded field, I had to reject people I’m friendly with and authors whose stories I’ve read elsewhere and admired. No editor accepts your work just to be nice to you (and tell that to your imposter syndrome if it claims otherwise!). But if I have to say no to people I like, I’m very much not inclined to accept stories from people I don’t get the impression really like me. There’s some stuff it’s just rude to send a queer woman who asked for “sex positive, body positive” and consensual sex stories. Even here, though, it’s most importantly a matter of business: I try to include authors I can trust to promote the anthology without saying something flat-out against the spirit of it!

I don’t need to agree with authors on everything, and there are times I’ve benefitted from pushback or a new perspective. But that helpful pushback generally doesn’t come from the person who sent us one really good story and one story from the POV of a self-confessed rapist. Or sex killer. Or just a whiny misogynist.

(It’s not that I identify the author with these characters; I’m happy to trust they’re very different in person! But if the author thinks these stories fit the pastel-covered, sex-positive feminist-identified anthology, or doesn’t care…you see my problem.)

***

This blog post based on my experience co-editing Erato is far too long to itself be submitted to Erato–at least if I take the guidelines seriously. As I should. But these thoughts have been simmering the past year (in between other life stuff, and personal tragedy and transformation, plus the actual editing and construction of the anthology). I think it’s time to share them with curious readers and writers who they may help!

Also…I’m not saying a new call for submissions will be appearing from NSP soon, but…if you’re a champion breath-holder, you could give it a try.

Endnotes:

*Regarding noncon, I came across an interesting stat: Lonnie Barbach, editing The Erotic Edge in 1993, observed “Of the stories submitted by men, almost twenty percent dealt with [rape and forced sex]. The protagonists of these stories, usually male authority figures–judges, policemen, and teachers–use the power of their positions to get women to submit sexually. Only one woman wrote a story based on coercive sex. I included none of these stories because I believe without the consent of both parties, the sexual experience is really about coercion or violence, neither of which is compatible with eros.”

Barbach puts it well, though in my experience the gender breakdown is rather different. Women write nonconsent fantasies as well (which is perfectly fine), and sometimes even submit them to publications that have asked not to see them (less fine, and painfully ironic). I also remember receiving a story during our first calls for Heart, Body, Soul and Between the Shores, written by a man about, iirc, a policewoman using her authority to force sexual submission. A session or two of a gender studies course might fruitfully explore what’s going on there, and I like femdom, but what I don’t like is getting nonconsensual stories when I have explicitly expressed that I will not consider publishing them.

I wonder if Barbach’s guidelines included a message to the effect of “all characters must express their consent”–perhaps not, since it was almost 20 years ago, before I think “affirmative consent” became a catchphrase, and she might not have anticipated the particular responses she got. Even so, let’s just say you should probably take it as a given that no erotica market wants to publish stories about nonconsensual sex (maybe they can’t for legal/distribution-related reasons). Dubcon, edgy roleplay, and similar realms of fantasy are usually, in my experience, described explicitly as something the market is good with seeing if it’s something they’re able to publish.

**My intuition that “conflict” is not actually necessary to a story received unexpected backup in Henry Lein’s essay for SFWA, which observes “conflict” is a development of modern Western literary criticism. As a counterexample, Eastern storytelling makes use of a four-act structure based not on conflict or tension but on harmonizing elements and incorporating revelations.

Another counterexample is poetry, which holds the reader’s attention but not by using conflict or leaving you in suspense about the ending (at least not as suspense is generally considered). Flash fiction shades into prose poetry, so the techniques and structures likely work for both. At least they do for this one reader.

2020 is hindsight (a year-end review)

Okay, so it ended almost a month ago–can you blame me for taking several weeks to summon the necessary courage to anthologize last year?

Ultimately, the thing I wrote in 2020 that most encapsulates the year is probably my girlfriend’s eulogy.

At the same time, if you gave me the chance to relive 2020, I’d say yes–because in it I lived for about six months alongside (often metaphorically, through text message, but even so) one of the most incredible people I’ve ever known. And those six months were worth the six months that came after.

The final half of 2020 had one or two saving graces as well–the nationwide party on November 7th comes to mind, and on a slightly smaller scale, the October 24th release of the New Smut Project’s third book, Erato.

I’d started Erato for two reasons: one, it seemed like a good idea to have something to sink my passion into in addition to my gorgeous boytoy–independence being part of a healthy relationship–and two, I simply found myself itching to put together a book. It was a project of pure desire. In hindsight, both those reasons hold up well. But let’s talk more about projects of desire–about the books and stories worked on in 2020.

So the year started, back in what my family now calls “precedented times,” with another putting-together-a-book project: I formatted easy-to-read PDF, ebook, and paperback editions of Teleny, OR The Reverse of the Medal, aka Oscar Wilde’s gay erotic novel. The PDF can be downloaded for free here, while the paperback and Kindle versions turned out to be my personal Amazon account’s bestsellers for 2020, if not for all time. I’m trying not to take that personally. After all, it’s Oscar Wilde. At least it may have been. Speculation abounds. Why not read it yourself so you have some firsthand data, as it were, from which to speculate? ;D

Another somewhat different project started in 2020, on this very blog, in the realm of nonfiction: I wrote several sex toy reviews. They were very fun and offered a chance to contemplate some important questions about what makes a sex toy, or sex more generally, enjoyable. Astroglide, the Sili Saddle, and the NJoy Pure Plug all made the year (and beyond) a bit brighter.

Around Valentine’s day, my Poe-inspired f/f erotic romance appeared in Mystique, an anthology of gay and lesbian fantasy. You can read my elevator-pitch summary of it and an excerpt here. The connection to plague and any other resemblances to reality are coincidental and/or blameable on Poe.

In April, Infernal Ink released its penultimate issue of erotic horror, which included my piece “Beyond Words.” It’s about a variation of lycanthropy, and young love, and moments stolen in the woods, and being left breathless… violent, bittersweet, and okay, I admit it, kinda hot.

My story “Route 34”, or any of the 9 other stories in the Rule 34: Volume 2 anthology, probably didn’t turn out to be as weird as this year was. And since it’s about the unexpected pleasures of being stuck in traffic, it might be more escapist or nostalgic than relatable. But one thing I hope a lot of us can relate to is the blushing, giddiness-inducing thrill of sharing a weird turn-on with your partner and watching them run to fulfill it, or vice versa, the fun of fulfilling your partner’s unique desires.

Since I was editing a flash fiction anthology at the time, it was fun to have some of my own literary erotic flash fiction appear on The Erotic Review–“Like That” is a kernel of what may someday become a much larger story, showing the moments where two ex-lovers suddenly catch a glimpse of what their dynamic might have been about.

Another story, “Annunciation” (on falling in love with the Virgin Mary) appeared in the Cliterature Journal. Unfortunately, it turns out Cliterature “sunset” in July 2020. This lights a fire under me to gather “Annunciation” and a few other pieces together into a short story collection. The collection’s working title is Bodies of Ghosts: Stories of Survival and Longing. Of course, as that title hints, one reason I’ve been holding off on putting together and query (or self-printing) the collection is the obvious–I might have one or two more pieces to write on that central theme before it’s complete.

“To Have and to Hold” entered wide distribution last year, so I’m going to count it as part of the 2020 review because heck, we deserve some romantic pegging.

An aside related to wider distribution: these days, Amazon is basically a necessity to writers who want their books bought. But they’re also a terrifying conglomerate whose power expands each time you blink. So one good thing to come out of 2020 was Bookshop.org, which supports independent bookstores while making online book purchases easy. All the titles I’m mentioning in this post, if they’re in booklike shapes, should be available there alongside previous publications and my own favorite reads.

The Sexy Librarian’s Dirty 30, Volume 3 audiobook came out last year to generally rave reviews. I especially admire the word-stringing panache of the reviewer who says, “I’m the consummate multitasker who thought I could listen in the background while doing other tasks. Not a chance! These tales stiffened my attention like a smack to the cheek.”

“Their Window,” a story of two wives claiming their space in their new home, went up for free on the MMURE website.

And the last piece of the year from me would be “Cold-Kissed,” a wintery but warming pegging story that appeared in BUST Issue #121. It also happens to be the last story of mine that my girlfriend read. “BUST has good taste,” he said.

I also have a story coming out in an anthology this summer that he inspired, and which is dedicated to him.

(A note on future releases: I have a Newsletter for updates in your inbox–it also has a list for anthologies I’ll be editing. And for complete lists of my published fiction, you can always check out my Stories tab, my Year in Review tag, or my author profiles on Amazon, Goodreads, BookBub, or Smashwords.)

And then, in October 2020, ERATO!! Honestly, there’s a point at which words fail to convey my enthusiasm. It contains 50 entries of literary erotic flash fiction that knocked my knee-high leather boots off (not to mention charmed my discerning co-editors), how’s that sound?

It’s been so much fun that I’m even looking forward to someday editing an Erato II–at least that’s my planned title, although my girlfriend did tell me “I admire your restraint in not titling it Era-two.”

In closing: the widow’s fog has started to lift. One thing that helped was moving to a new condo, which has given me a better environment (a view out onto green space, quiet neighbors, many more closets and shelves so I’m not constantly stepping on top of myself). But I haven’t written fiction since my partner died. I’ve drafted some ideas and jotted down notes and outlines. I’ve rewritten and submitted previously-completed stories. And I have many, many ideas for new anthologies to edit. The latter, I think, will be my big project for 2021, because I need to do something I have passion for. A work of desire.

The title of the first one on my to-do list was inspired by a punny love-text from that person I did not leave in 2020, any more than he left me–Cunning Linguists: Language, Literature, and Lechery.

It’s that time of year!

Namely, the end of it, which brings the Smashwords Year-End sale!

I’m experimenting with putting a bunch of my shorter stories out for free, and the two original New Smut Project anthologies are each 50% off. You can check them out at my Smashwords profile:

https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/tcmill

Happy reading!

Smart, seductive, short: Erato comes out tomorrow

The New Smut Project’s third anthology of literary erotica is released October 24, 2020.

Each individual story is short (6 pages or less), but with fifty of them, there’s quite a lot of erotic adventure within.

Explore Paleolithic caves and far-flung planets, seduced with magic, mythology, and dreams while wryly acknowledging the reality that sometimes sex requires stretching. Alongside old favorites like temperature play and strap-ons, have you considered the erotic potential of shaving or a handful of coins?

Characters who are cis, trans, and nonbinary explore their desires, whether gay, straight, lesbian, bi and pan, or ace! With flash fiction from experienced storytellers and hot new talent, there’s no need to “skip to the good parts” in this collection: every moment will caress the senses and linger in the mind, while being short enough to read over a cup of coffee or during a bus ride. 

Curious? Find excerpts and author interviews at the New Smut Project blog

You can order Erato through the following links:

Ebook at Gumroad with discount

Paperback at Gumroad with discount

Smashwords

Amazon

Many other retailers through Books2Read

I’ve also set up book Bundles at Gumroad:

Ebook Bundle Readers often buy both of our first anthologies together, which is no surprise, as we couldn’t pick between them ourselves! With the release of our latest publication, Erato, this bundle saves you $3 by ordering all three ebooks as one unit. Buy from Gumroad » Paperback Bundle Save $10 by ordering all 3 paperbacks from the New Smut Project together: Between the Shores; Heart, Body, Soul; and  Erato: Flash Fiction. Buy from Gumroad»

Table of Contents Erato: Flash Fiction

It’s exciting to announce the 50 authors included in the New Smut Project’s first volume of flash fiction, Erato:

Anything for the Mission by Gerri Leen

Eleven Buttons by Jaye Raymee

Touch by D. Fostalove

The Inherent Eroticism of Cave Painters by Tiana Talaria

Smooth Sailor by HD

Synchron by Evadare Volney

Snowblind by Jordan Castillo Price

Dressing Dana by D. F. Marazas

Make Them Shine by Sossity Chiricuzio

Contentment by Alain Bell

3 Flash Fictions by Lawrence Schimel, translated by Sandra Kingery 

The Current Catches You by Amy Parker

Different Kinds of Perfect by Elliot Sawyer

A Purr for Sir by K. Martin

Breathe Into Me by Kei Griot

My Barbarian Boyfriend by Rosalind Chase

The Glorious Prince by Intesar Toufic

Standing Quarter by Rachel Rackley

In Sync by Sprocket J. Rydyr

Irrumiato by Ryan DeVry

Sacred Things by Micah BlackLight

After the Flood by Harry Mercury

Queen of Hearts, Servant of Spades by Anatoly Bellivosky

Pairing Mode by Art Holland

Dinner, Served by Meiveen Tan

Spidersilk on Green by TS Porter

The Ingenuity of Our Forefathers by Rudy Keyes

Leather, Silk, Wood by Jo Green

Translations // A Triptych by Guinevere Chase

Crime and Punishment in Little Tokyo by Flint

The Honey Thieves by Zodian Grey

Blessing of Venus by Serena

The Observer Effect by Liz A. Vogel

Spark by Alex Freeman

His Right Hand by Lou Skelton

Art and Movies by Sharyn Ferns

Hot Coffee by Keeko-Anne Chrome

Shimmy by Allison Armstrong

When Someone Speaks Your Language by Derek Des Anges

Patience by Anna Sky

Breathe by Chloe Spencer

All in a Rush by Cecilia Tan

A Study in Circuits and Charcoal by Jem Zero

Two Kinky Dialogues: Gear Queer & Ones and Zeroes by John Theriac

Mogra by Vinay Kumar

Darkness, Heat, and Light by Athena Ryals

The Night Before the Morning After by Camille Devine

Going With the Flow by Kalinda Little

The Measure of a Man by A. Zimmerman

Two Queer Fairy Tales: Marigold and Emelia & Bitter Leaf Juice by W.D. Rose

Erato is available for preorder on Gumroad, Smashwords, and Amazon. Excerpts and cover art coming soon!

Widow’s Brain

It’s been a little over a month since my girlfriend/boytoy/submissive/beloved passed away in his sleep, shortly after swapping sappy and naughty texts with me about books we were reading. When I look back on this month, it is not a total blank. But time has blurred for me. And I am far less organized than usual. Dishes pile up in the sink for a few days before I remember to wash them (and I don’t have a certain visitor to order to wash them for me anymore).

I learned the term “Widow’s brain”–also called “widow’s fog”–in a bereaved partners support group online. I’m not sure the term “widow” applies to me–I had collared my submissive, we talked about being together for the rest of our lives, and we were together for the rest of his, but compared to many of the people on these forums we weren’t together for all that long. We never lived together, though we visited frequently (less frequently with quarantine, but as two freelancers who each lived alone we decided to count each other as a “household” for pandemic purposes, meeting face to face to offer emotional, moral, and physical support). Still, the fog doesn’t care about those technical distinctions. It has descended.

I spend a lot of time in bed, remembering him. They’re beautiful memories and comforting.

I’m also spending a lot of time writing. I started a journal about a month ago that now has 100,000 words of memories in it, plus many, many sheets of scrap paper covered with notes I haven’t yet typed up. Years from now this will give me something to look back on, perhaps. Right now, I just know the writing gives me something to do. It motivates me to get through each day and it’s helping me make sense of some things.

I have also been working on copyedits to Erato. My ability to spot stray commas seems to be about as sharp as ever, and authors have been awesome and proactive in revising their work to show it at its best. And its best is considerable. These stories are beautiful, though rereading some of them is bittersweet–more memories evoked. My girlfriend was so excited for this anthology and looked forward to reading it with me. Quite a few pieces were personally meaningful to him for their takes on kink and gender, though he knew them mostly by reputation from my texting him about the cool story I was reading. And, well, this may be slightly TMI but part of the point of NSP is that good sex is worth talking about, our last evening and afternoon together were made even better, gilded lilies, thanks to ideas I had from some of the stories I’d been editing. That on its own would be enough to make the work of putting the anthology together worth it.

My goal is still to get the anthology published this October. I think this goal will be doable, though again, widow’s brain has made some progress slower than I would like. For instance, I want to announce the Table of Contents soon. But I hit this weird barrier where my mind doesn’t seem to understand how to format a Table of Contents announcement. I’ll get through it.

I’ll be frank: I think Erato’s amazing authors deserve better than the fogginess. I think I deserve better than the fogginess. My girlfriend deserves to be alive. But it is what it is.

My last post shared some of my girlfriend’s writing (and he was also responsible for this silly and delightful sex toy review). His literary legacy will continue in a number of ways, which I’ll announce as they come up. But recently I received a contract for Rachel Kramer Bussell’s 2021 anthology Coming Soon–my story, about a three-way encounter between a bisexual waitress and a D/s couple, was inspired by a bit of brainstorming with my submissive, and I’m thrilled it’s found a home.

It doesn’t feel quite right to say I miss him because he doesn’t exactly feel gone. I’m thinking about him almost every moment of the day–not a big difference from when he was alive. Except I can’t send him a “Thinking of you” text and hear back “What a coincidence, Ma’am, I was having a delightful reverie of you myself.”

When it gets really hard, I remind myself of what my service submissive would do for me if he was here. Bring me food or coffee. Hug me or rub my feet. Tell me about Braveheart’s historical inaccuracies to take my mind off things. Simply kneel at my side while I cried and talked about my uncertainties or regrets or sadness. He can’t do this for me anymore, but I can feed myself and let myself cry for him.

A Love Story

On June 21, 8:24 am–almost exactly a week before I received the phone call from his father telling me he’d passed away–my girlfriend/boytoy sent me an email titled “I am a sappy little creature.”

Hello love,
This began life as an attempt to write a pegging short story, but quickly dissolved into a transparently fictional love letter to my favorite dom. I don’t know that it could ever have a life in any publication, but it helped me to get back into the habit of writing in my free time instead of taking long sunburny walks and moping, so it has a special place in my heart.
Not unlike my dom.
Love,
J

It’s indeed the kind of story that might be tricky to publish–not enough full-frontal-sex to be erotica; a bit too much sexual honesty for the mainstream (to say nothing of the kink and gender discussion)–but it is, and I don’t think it’s just my bias that makes me say this, worth reading, not least for people who are like us or who wonder what it’s like to be people like us. Which is part of why I’m sharing it now.

And because I’d like to share what our love was like and I’m not sure I could say it any better than my boytoy/girlfriend himself.

He’d recently moved back to his parents’ place for a rent-free, centrally located (as he’d say, “Indiana: Gateway to everywhere else”) base of operations while he applied to graduate schools, got set up for a freelance career in audio narration, and wrote. I was planning to visit him there soon and we texted every day. The tone of those texts can be predicted from the tone of his email. My girlfriend and I were That Couple. That Couple who also happened to be into some kinky shit.

He’d talked to me about drafting a story about pegging–possibly inspired by my own thoughts about a pegging anthology, and oh yes, he would have been one happy volunteer submissions reader. According to his submission notes (story submission notes, that is) he’d originally planned to title the piece “So Long Ago, So Clear.” The file name on the attachment he emailed to me was “out on the inside.”

I’d told him, pretty early on, that part of why I was so into the idea of penetrating him was because “It’s a way for me to love you from the inside out.”

This story is, so far as I can tell, almost entirely nonfictional. Everything in it really happened, though sometimes in slightly different ways or at different times (for instance, much of the dialogue was actually written between us as text messages or conversations on the dating website where we met). I’ve done very minimal editing for grammar. He’d expect that–I am after all a copyeditor.

And yes, it’s a love story.

OUT ON THE INSIDE

Everyone is a committee, a stir of voices and half-remembered sound bytes. We have our intentions and opinions, but those voices still speak, sometimes drowning out what we know or believe. It doesn’t matter if we give creedence to them, if they’re even reasonable; these persistent ghosts linger within us, repeating their slogans like clockwork automata.

        I have neither love nor respect for the people I encountered in high school. Being raised male, I spent more than my fair share of time around, for want of a better word, guys. This, I hasten to add, in an era that viewed itself as enlightened – don’t they all? – compared to its predecessors. To be gay would have been no big deal, or so they said. But the idea that someone, some ‘guy’, would enjoy being penetrated by ‘his’ girlfriend. That was just, like, weird, man.

        Why do we give these voices such power?

        Growing up, the internet was no help. Femdom scenes portrayed pegging as a punishment, something degrading and humiliating.

        Degrading. Humiliating.

        These words have power.

        I tell you this, my love, not to indulge in some kind of pity-party for my own self-consciousness, but to explain. A sheltered, bookish, gender-uncertain young person like myself would log on to the internet, search for something, anything, in the realm of femdom that seemed loving, and enjoyable, and meaningful, and find the most tasteless garbage imaginable.

        I knew, back then, that I must really be a submissive, if that wasn’t enough to put me off.

        I knew, back then, that I must really be interested in being penetrated, if that wasn’t enough to put me off.

        But oh, the voices it left in my head. Look too long at something, and it will imprint itself on your mind like an exposed Polaroid. You can paint over those grim images, those sketches of pain or uncertainty, but it takes time. It takes work.

        It takes someone like you, my love.

        I met you online, first. In between my coursework, I’d got in the habit of scrolling through profiles, not out of any intent to pursue or hope to be pursued, but simply to enjoy what people did with language, and how they thought of themselves. Everyone is a universe, a shape built out of the myriad experiences, thoughts, ideas, and desires that swirl around inside the sphere of their sensation. I said this, or something like it, to my college roommate once.

        His response: “No wonder you don’t go on any dates.”

        At the risk of being pedantic, I wonder what exactly he meant. That I didn’t go on dates because I was too busy gleaming the cube in our grotty little dorm to be bothered? Or that I didn’t go on dates because no one in their right mind would stand still for such nonsense?

        I never thought to ask him if he went on dates.

        So there I was, reading what other people had to say for themselves instead of finishing my paper on Liutprand of Cremona, bathed in the monitor’s pale radiation. I read a profile. I clicked on the next suggestion. I read a profile. I clicked on the next suggestion.

        Intelligence and forthrightness looked back at me from the screen. A reader, a philosophy graduate, a- oh, a voracious reader, consuming upwards of two hundred books a year. A writer, both of SF and erotica. A lucid thinker, able to explain her perspective and describe her approach to life with both economy and wit.

        For the first time in a long while, I shifted out of read-only mode and thought: It might be interesting to have a conversation with this person.

        I was already keen to know you, even before I reached the part of your profile where you described yourself as Very Dominant and Very Kinky.

        A short digression, if I may, to swat a hornet’s nest by making a sweeping and unfounded claim. It’s been said that there is no difference between so-called “natural-born, instinctive” Doms and subs and everyone else who explore power exchange, that to assert a difference is to imply a kind of elitism, a created heirarchy.

        And yet, there is a difference.

        You’re the first one I ever encountered. The first natural. I could tell before ever I met you. I could tell just from the way you wrote.

        So I reached out. I said hello.

        Not about any of the dreams that danced behind my eyes at the idea of submitting to you. I messaged you about books, about writing and creativity. I knew that no matter what happened, I wanted to know you. I wanted to be your friend.

        I went on with my life.

        A week later, I opened the app, and my breath caught in my throat.

        You answered me.

        We wrote back and forth. We wrote about SF, about creativity and stories. And I didn’t dare ask, but you did it for me. You asked if I’d like to meet.

        “When you mention submission,” you wrote. “My breath catches in my throat.”

        Kismet.

        We met in the library, which I suppose says everything about the kind of people we are. You were small, neat, magnetising. We sat and talked of Roko’s Basilisk, Radu the Beautiful, the Byzantine Empire, everything. I was mesmerised by the intelligence behind your eyes. There really is a difference. Take it from a natural-born submissive.

        “Would you like to come back to my apartment and talk for a bit?” you asked me.

        Yes.

        Your apartment was as neat and orderly as you, though short on space.

        “I’m afraid I only have the one loveseat,” you said. You smiled. “I don’t suppose you’d mind kneeling on the floor?”

        “I’d love to kneel,” I said, and paused. I didn’t dare.

        And once again, all my dreams came true.

        “I’d like you to try that sentence again,” you said, smiling.

        “I’d love to kneel on the floor…Ma’am.”

        “Much better. Take a seat.” You sat down on the loveseat, and I knelt before you.

        You took a good look at my eyes, then gently lowered your feet onto my thighs. You didn’t say anything, but I looked into your eyes, and I knew.

        I took your boots off, with great care, and set them beside the loveseat. I rubbed your feet, feeling a rush of gratitude as you made pleased noises of relaxation. You placed your feet back on my thighs.

        “Let’s talk,” you said.

        “I don’t like protocol,” you said. “Titles and formal dialogue and all that.”

        “Me neither,” I said. “It doesn’t feel like any fun.”

        But it was more than that, and we both knew it. Protocol was a way of saying “We are being in power exchange mode now.”

        We didn’t need that, you and I. We knew who we were, and I like to imagine we knew who we were for each other, even then.

        “I want to say something inappropriate,” I said. “And I’m probably out of line for doing it. But I have to say something, because I’ve never met anyone like you before.”

        “With a preamble like that,” you said, warming my heart with your casual use of the word ‘preamble,’ “I think I have to insist that you say it.”

        “I’m not supposed to bring this up,” I said. “But…” And here I took the plunge. “I would be honored to wear your collar.”

        The submissive is never supposed to ask to be collared. It is presumptuous in the extreme, bad form, crass. If I were inclined to split hairs, I could have argued that I had not asked to be collared, only expressed my feelings about wearing yours. Actually, I had not done even that. I wanted so badly to be yours, a feeling that arose from the very center of me, from deep in the heart where the mysteries emerge. But I wasn’t going to say that, because come on.

        You paused. It probably wasn’t a long pause. It felt like an eternity.

        I thought: Oh no. I’ve fucked it up. It’s all over.

        You said: “Okay.”

        Later, much later, I apologized for my presumption.

        You said: “I appreciated it. It was good to know you wanted it as much as I did.”

        We talked about sex and sexuality. “I’m not much interested in PIV,” you said. “It never held much attraction to me.”

        Deep breath again. The moment of truth.

        A thousand voices, mocking voices from my past, arose inside me. Would this be the moment where it all fell apart, as you realized what a weirdo you had allowed to sidle into your life?

        And I leapt into the dark.

        “The truth is,” I said. I cleared my throat. “The truth is, when it comes down to it, I’d rather be penetrated than do the penetrating. I’m…I’m not much interested in PIV either.”

        I waited for the world to end.

        You paused, considering.

        The future hesitated, waiting its cue to happen.

        “That sounds all right by me,” you said.

        And then we spent the evening talking about Stephen King novels (disappointing) and Samuel Delaney (awesome).

        A few weeks later, you tied me up. Yes, I know this was me talking about pegging, but that’s the point, really: Everything is interconnected.

        I thought I was always dreaming about someone who would take me with their strap-on. Turns out, I was dreaming of somebody, a person I could connect with, and share thoughts and feelings and dreams with, and feel comfortable with, and give myself to, in every way.

        So that when we picked out a strap-on together, and did our homework about how best to go about it, it felt natural and comfortable.

        We gazed into each others’ eyes.

        “How are you feeling right now?” you asked me.

        “Good,” I said. “How are you feeling?”

        “Good,” you said. “Turn over.”

        “Yes, Ma’am.”

        And I got to grow closer with you.

        And suddenly I wasn’t thinking of what anyone had ever said, or my own fears about whether my interests were valid, or real, or just some masturbatory fantasy.

        I wasn’t thinking about anything.

        I was being. I was present in the moment, together with you.

        And don’t get me wrong, it was hot as shit.

        It was hot as shit for precisely all of those reasons.

        Honesty and trust and communication and comfort and understanding and love.

        All the rest is just applied mechanics.

        You were inside me before ever we broke out the Astroglide, grew closer to one another, and discovered how much we both liked it this way.

        Would you like to go again, my love?

Loss

Now that it’s sinking in a bit more, I can write this, albeit in a state of shock.

My girlfriend/boytoy passed away last night or early this morning.

Our last texts to each other were about how thrilled we were to know each other and be so compatible. (His exact last text was, “Do you have any idea how over the moon I am to have someone who wants to?”)

It might be presumptuous, but I feel widowed. He wore my collar; we planned to move in together someday. I might even identify him as my fiance to explain how this feels to other people.  (He used he/him pronouns but “Every time you call me a girlfriend another cell of my body turns to light.” Actually he was pleased/amused to see “my girlfriend, he” in juxtaposition in my posts.)

I think I made the last year of his life much happier than it might have been. He made this past year for me unforgettably rich. 

I’m taking it one day at a time. I’ll be seeing my therapist ASAP. I am okay. Not good, and I’ll never be the same, but this is a crisis I can live through. My life will not be what I thought it was yesterday. But I will have a life.

I think I would like to dedicate Erato to him.

I have one of his finished fantasy novels sitting on my pile of books–I was reading it and marking it up for editing suggestions. I’m talking with his parents and may become his literary executor, getting the novel and some short stories published. Two of his stories are going to be in Erato.

The last thing he’d written which he’d sent me had started off as a kinky story and, in his words, “turned into a love note.”

I have and will love and be loved by many people in my life, but never quite like him.

He was a treasure in my life, and the one grace is that I know he knew it. And he made me feel like a treasure in his.

A flash update

But first: have you donated to a bail fund yet? Here’s a list of places to choose from. Read up on a particular fund before donating to make sure you understand where your funds are going or if there’s another place that might need the money more. Although it’s never the wrong time to pay somebody’s bail.

Understandably, we’re not all flush with cash right now, and this list includes options for ways to donate without money, such as by listening to YouTube playlists to generate ad revenue.

Also, news happens fast, but Buzzfeed has a post where they’ve fact-checked some of the claims and videos appearing on social media.

Black lives matter.

***

In my personal life, a wonderful relationship is transitioning to long-distance. Thank god for text messages, emails, and toys. Thank god that we met during a time when we were in the same state. And thank god I have I flash fiction anthology to occupy my time when I’m feeling lonely.

***

On my desk, this weekend I’m hoping to finalize the TOC of Erato. There’s still room for 2 more stories for the editorial team to select from the longlist. Then it’ll be time to send out the last round of acceptance emails, and some personalized, encouraging rejections. 

Frankly, given we started with 500+ stories, I’m proud of us, but you talented bastards sure didn’t make it easy. 

And speaking of flash fiction…

My cool wintery pegging story, “Cold-Kissed”, appears in BUST Issue #121. Alongside it, read about the biggest women in music, the women of Sesame Street, an interview with Roxane Gay, and the story of America’s only homegrown all-woman domestic terrorist cell. Now that’s range!

My erotic flash fiction previously appeared in Bust’s August/September 2016 issue. You can order an issue or subscription online, or check the magazine racks in your local stores (I was pretty psyched to realize I’m on the shelves of Woodman’s. Hey, we all have our dreams.)