Happy 2012!

I know I've been sparse with posts recently, so first and foremost, a special thank you to the few people who bother to read this blog!

It's been a very busy 2011, with quite a lot written (and a good proportion of it published) despite the amount of time I've been spending on other and often quite unerotic, if financially rewarding, forms of writing. And of course the latter part of the year was taken up by a house move. We are mostly (though not entirely) unpacked, and I've finally found the box with the bullwhips in it... Just as well because I had a phone call the other day from a friend who tells me there's a new whip-cracking club starting up locally in the new year (it's becoming a popular sport, with national championships in the UK as well as the US: if you don't believe me, see this report from the BBC, from 2009).

I have quite a long to-do list already for 2012; in fact V and I worked out yesterday that I'll be able to get through January's schedule provided there are 45 days in the month... and one of the priorities will be to get the second story in the 'moving house' series posted up here as soon as possible (the first one in the series was posted on my other blog DeliciouslyDeviant).

In previous years I've sat down between Christmas and New Year and written, if not a set of New Year resolutions, at least some aims. I didn't get to achieve all my 2011 aims but I don't feel bad about it because we did achieve a couple of the big ones, including the house move, and a third is now only a few days from completion.

So for 2012? Mindful of the fact I'm already hugely overcommitted for January alone, the general aims are: write more erotica, find more time to travel and be social, and have fun!

So, happy New Year for 2012 - and if you have any particularly deviant or sexy new year resolutions, please feel free to share...

New house, etc.

The lack of posts here recently has been due to, basically, a house move. It's a very cool house, about the same size as the previous one but differently laid out, much bigger garden and much more geared to our lifestyle. It wasn't an easy move, though, with a string of screw-ups that delayed us getting in and we still don't have proper internet access.

The upside is that the experiences have prompted a series of ideas for stories loosely based around the theme of moving house. The first of these, 'Memory Dump' is over on my other blog, Deliciously Deviant - so you'll have to go there to read it. It weaves together, as you might expect, some things that happened and some that strictly speaking didn't - or at least not quite the way the story sets them out. I'll leave you to work out how much of it is properly biographical.

I'll post the second one in the series here shortly. Now I just need to finish off that novel...

The Vampire Skye - now out

So this is the new novella I mentioned a week or so ago, The Vampire Skye. It came out yesterday, published by Xcite.

Blurb: Leah works for the Authority, a secretive Government department dedicated to managing the vampires who live in society and keeping their presence hidden from the human population. Her latest client, Skye, wants to flee the Authority’s restrictions and go off-programme – and if that means feeding from Leah in the process, so be it. As disorder sweeps the city and the ordinary rules of engagement no longer apply, how will Leah deal with all the problems Skye throws her way – not least the fact Skye is her dominant fantasy lover made undead flesh?

I'd been wanting to write another vampire story for a while, particularly since my last one - The Vampire's New Plaything - and the Lust Bites collection, which has one of my stories and one by my partner Velvet Tripp - have been doing rather well.

My take on vampires is perhaps a little sideways, since I've long regarded them as useful symbols/metaphors that can be used in two distinct ways - vampires as those who bleed others, which might make them comparable with capitalist and banking fat cats, and those who are outsiders in society, which might associate them with the socially excluded, those who are marginalised because of their creative vision, political views or other factors. In this novella, the vampires are the latter.

I've also been thinking about a bunch of perhaps slightly stranger stuff. For example there are cases of 'vampire burials' mainly in Eastern Europe but with recent findings in Ireland and elsewhere, in which bodies were mutilated in ways intended to stop them rising from the dead. There's a lot of speculation about stones placed in their mouths - to stop them biting, prevent the ingress of other spirits into the body, give them something to chew on... plenty of theories but we don't actually know.

I spent some time pondering how vampires would fit into contemporary society given our mania for forms of ID, and came up with the idea of a secret government agency that provides them with ID. Why would they do this? Well, maybe as a legacy of their having been involved in government work. That takes me back to more 'regular' science fiction/fantasy themes such as the Brian Lumley 'Necroscope' novels, and the mythos of vampires recruited by both sides in World War II and a German 'Vampire SS', which somewhat links and extends both weirdnesses that did happen in WWII and Hitler's apparent beliefs in the paranormal. How about fangs? Fangs only started to appear in vampire films in the 1950s - so maybe vampires don't automatically have fangs, and only those in secret military units were supplied with them - and when Hammer Horror came up with the idea the government programme of providing fangs was halted. So that would imply that fangs do not a vampire make, and you could have those with and those without fangs.

Then, of course, with the postmodern world of government agencies being hived off into non-departmental bodies or semi-privatised, maybe the body that made all the arrangements for vampires had suffered the same fate, and was facing cuts or closure.

A lot of this is fairly rapidly introduced as the context for the story along with the subtext of riots and disorder, as we saw in the UK recently. But don't let any of that stop you, because the novella is fiercely erotic, very lesbian, and has quite a bit of BDSM play in it.

Vampires? Vampires!

OK, so this afternoon I was reading the proofs of my new lesbian vampire novella - The Vampire Skye, which might possibly even be out in time for Halloween (I'll post an update when I have a definite date).

It's not particularly long - 15,000 words - but it took me a while to work out locations, history, and an explanation for vampires that's half-inspired by and extremely loosely based on some recent scientific stuff.

But just before I started I was struck by a BBC news article. Headline details: in the UK the latest consumer price inflation figure is 5.2%, average pay settlements in the private sector are 2.6%, and company directors' incomes (salary and bonuses) as reported by Incomes Data Services also increased in the last year - by 50%. Average pay increase for this group was 43% and average bonus payment increased by 23%.

I sat there joining the dots, making sure I'd read the decimal points correctly, and thinking I'd been writing about the wrong kind of vampires...

Seducing the Myth out in paperback

I know I'm being tardy getting posts up. Planning to move house tends to do that. Even though we're only going a few miles/kilometres down the road, it's still the same processes, hassling solicitors and packing things in boxes for the move...

Meanwhile:

I had a story recently in Seducing the Myth, the Lucy Felthouse collection of erotic fiction based on myth. 'Andi in Chains' re-imagined the Andromeda story in a kind of pulp fiction style. Both book and story have had some impressive reviews, and in addition to ebook format the book is now available as a paperback from The Book Depository, which is UK based but ships to something over 100 countries including the US and most if not all of Europe, and a lot of other places as well. Plus, shipping is free.

I also did a blog post on the background to the myth - the characters, who they were, the geography and how it relates to real places you can still visit today - and some background on the (re)writing of the story. It's on Lucy Felthouse's blog, the 'Myth Monday' entry for 24th Octobber 2011.

New things out!

Is it really a month since I've posted?

When I'm silent for a long period it usually means something is going on. In this case, several things. The 'day job' - which is freelance writing for various corporate entities - has been mad. I've had a whole bunch of projects that have run along the lines of 'We don't know what we want, but we want it now!' On the whole it seems that by the time a good idea has been run through half a dozen working groups and committees, everyone loses track of what's going on. So it's been my job to work it out, pull it together and suggest how it can actually happen. Apart from that we're moving house soon so things are disappearing into boxes ready for the move. Pervy stuff has largely been consigned to our lock-up for the time being (yes, that means the dungeon furniture).

And various bits of fiction have been published.

So... the fiction.

I announced a month or so ago I had a novella out, Addicted to Rope, available from Xcite and Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk (and a few other places).

Since then, Sizzling Hot Books reviewed it. The reviewer says: It sucked me in quickly and I wasn’t ready to let go at the end. Fulani is very good at giving Ruth and Leo a lot of depth in a short amount of time. The transformation that overcomes Ruth is quick, but detailed. You can get a good feel for how her mind is working as she accepts and challenges what Leo presents to her. Addicted to Rope is hot. The pages sizzle with anticipation, fantasy, and intimacy. I would recommend Addicted to Rope to anyone who likes reading a lot of the mindset of characters exploring being submissive and anyone who likes the psychological development of a character in their erotica. The whole review here.


I also had a story out in Lucy Felthouse's edited collection, Seducing the Myth. 'Andi in Chains', is a reworking of the Andromeda myth. The book's available on download from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Xcite's third-party Erotica and Romance Ebooks site and elsewhere.

The collection's had several stunningly good reviews. So far as my own story goes, NightOwl Reviews, who says: Andi in Chains by Fulani - Re-imagining of Perseus and Andromeda's meeting was certainly different! Andromeda--better known as Andi--was into bondage and kink, Perseus was a tough son of a gun mercenary and well virgin sacrifice took on a different twist. This story amused me and was possibly my favorite.

And Mitnik at Erotic Whispers says: Andi in Chains by Fulani was a tale of bondage and kink and certainly hit the mark with its very unique take on the meeting of Perseus and Andromeda. Full of fire and passion that is sure to get your imagination sparking and ready for the rest of this erotic ensemble.

JBP Reviews doesn't specifically mention my story but says of the collection as a whole that it's: filled with erotic intent with tons of mystical creatures this book is a great read! I found myself reading each story in earnest and wanting more and more.

Then, yesterday, I got a print copy of Hurts So Good in the mail. This is an edited collection of bdsm-based erotica edited by Alison Tyler and published by Cleis Press. Presumably it's also available through all the usual Amazon, Kindle and other channels as well - but time's tight and I'm sure you can use Google as well as I can.

The last story in the collection is my 'The Uniform and the Rope', which features Japanese bondage and some rather hot scenes, but along the way also manages to point out that much of what we in the US and Europe consider 'Japanese' in bondage terms has much less specifically Japanese history than we might think. Some of it was developed in the US, and some of what we consider Japanese now was actually picked up by practitioners in Japan when the work of a certain John Willie became available there. More information on this comes from the Bondage Project and DS-Arts.

I might also point out the first story in Hurts So Good is 'The Sound of One Hand Clapping' by Nikki Maginnis, to my mind one of the newest and freshest erotica writers on the scene today.

And finally... My latest novella, a mashup of lesbian vampire bdsm with a (fairly) unique take, I think, on vampirism and its implications, went to the publisher earlier today. Given the amount of other work I've been doing it mainly got written in short bursts at around three in the morning, but I think it's quite entertaining. I enjoyed writing it, anyway...

Steamlust

Nikki Maginnis has just done a short animated film to celebrate/promote a book collection, in which one of the stories is hers.

The collection is 'Steamlust: Steampunk Erotic Romance' edited by Kristina Wright. See the film on Vimeo, here. It's not quite out yet on Amazon but there's a link to it on the Vimeo page. And the video is very cool, which is what prompted me to post the link.

Steampunk - Victorian elegance and aesthetics meets futuristic invention and exploration. Think ray-guns made from brass and copper, Victorian fashion and giant mechanical lobsters for undersea exploration... Actually I don't know if ray-guns or mechanical lobsters made it in the book but it gives you an idea of what to expect. Cleis Press haven't formally announced which authors/stories are included but I gather it's a a roll-call of well-known erotica writers...

Look for it on 11 October.

Bondage performance as a genre?

This is a very quick update because I'm working quite hard on a bunch of stuff, all of it now on short deadlines - including finishing a novel, a novella and some shorter fiction. And I've got a bunch of different things that I've run into over the last week or so that will eventually, I hope, make it as blogs here.

However, something that's occurred to be in the last few months is that increasingly there seems to be a genre of 'bondage performance' that includes proper shows, rather than just demos, in fetish clubs - often highly stylised, with lighting, music, technical props and so forth. There seem to be more or less impromptu bondage 'happenings' in places like fantasy conventions, where you spot a crowd and in the middle of it, there's a bamboo tripod and someone being suspended from it. And there are increasingly 'guerilla bondage' goings-on in which people turn up at some pre-agreed location - which might be an abandoned factory but sometimes now might be just outside your local public library - and some bondage goes on there, pics are taken and then everyone disperses.

Apart from what seems to be a renewed interest in rope bondage within the fetish community as a whole, I'm not entirely sure where this enthusiasm for public bondage as art has come from, or why. A lot of it actually appears within the fetish community, on people's Fetlife profiles and such: some of it, however, is quite public.

I'm fairly sure I blogged a while back about performances at BoundCon in Munich, many of which appeared on Vimeo. But equally, examples of the genre can be found on YouTube: there's a shibari performance that took place at BioBurlesque back in 2007 and a performance with a model being tied by Hajime Kinoko, one of the well-known Japanese bondage artists, apparently at Torture Garden in London in late 2010. Check the right hand sidebars when you view and there's plenty more where they came from.

Examples of the 'bondage in an abandoned building' style come from all over, but among the best exponents, have a look at the Tumblr blog of the Baltimore Guerilla Suspension Crew.

There are plenty more examples that show bondage as a kind of artistic/aesthetic form that seems to be going increasingly mainstream and public performance orientated, but I'm not going to spend time producing dozens of links just to prove the point. You can use Google as well as I can, I'm sure. Alternatively, just trust me!

So does anyone have any interesting sociological explanations for the recent uptick of interest in bondage performance?

Addicted to Rope - now out

This is the cover for Addicted to Rope - written last month and just published as a novella by Xcite. As the title suggests there's a fair bit of bondage involved in the plot, including suspension. Oh, and some use of Magic Wands. And pegs. And other implements. But mainly it's about bondage.

Opening lines:

It felt weird. Exotic. Slightly dangerous. It felt like a challenge. It put a tight knot of anticipation in the pit of Ruth’s stomach, because the little demon inside her that automatically rose to a challenge was bouncing around in there.
Challenges were good, though. They made her feel real, alive, fulfilled.

Xcite gave me a publication date of 15th September but it's already showing on the Fulani section of the Xcite website (this links to the main site, just use the 'search' facility on the page to pull up all my titles).

Erotic Books Network - the new home for my novel

Remember the consternation caused recently when credit card companies in the US announced they would no longer do business with publishers of explicit adult fiction?

This just in from Pink Flamingo:

Erotic Book Network (EBN) www.eroticbooknetwork.com is now online! Featuring the entire Pink Flamingo Publications BDSM catalog

Lizbeth at Pink Flamingo has just announced: "On this site we’ll include all titles with BDSM content, including the nonconsensual titles that were removed due to bank/credit card restrictions. We’ll also include consensual BDSM titles that still appear on the main PF site.

"If you access EBN now, you’ll note that we still have some work to do uploading images and ebooks. However, ALL paperbacks are available for ordering now. We expect most of the ebooks removed from the Pink Flamingo site to be up and ready for download by early next week. All books released in 2011 are ready for download now. It’s great to see these books online again!

"And… We have secured a new credit card payment gateway for the EBN site so books can be purchased with credit card, paypal, check or money order."

My Secret Circus novel is now available on the new site (link opens in new window). I'll update links to it on this site and elsewhere shortly.

A couple of interesting links

I've found, fairly randomly through links on some other web pages, a couple of interesting things recently.

'I’m Gonna Need You to Fight Me On This: How Violent Sex Helped Ease My PTSD' - an article by a female journalist whose personal experiences, along with her experiences of interviewing many women who'd been raped, led to the onset of a stress disorder. Her way to deal with it was essentially a ritualistic baptism of fire: she asked an ex-lover to rape her, as realistically as possible. By going through the experience, and proving to herself that she could live through the experience, she cleared all the emotional blockages that had caused her stress.

It's hardly a textbook clinical approach to her problem but it worked for her. That's not to say it would work for everybody, but I''m certainly aware of others who have used bdsm play ritualistically in the same way, to the same ends, and with success. The enactment of the scene reinforces the intent to sort out emotional responses, perhaps. It's a private ritual that relies on much the same psychological mechanisms that religious (or magical) ceremonies employ. Not all such approaches might involve violent sex; not all bdsm is done for such purposes. But there does seem to be a link, and the author of the article was brave enough to describe and discuss her problem and how she dealt with it successfully.

'BDSM’s Dirty Secret – The Real Risk of Kinky Sex' by Midori is another equally interesting thinkpiece. Midori, if you haven't come across her, is one of the foremost bdsm gurus in the US. The article notes that bdsm is indeed potentially dangerous, though of course many everyday activities carry equally health-threatening risks - you can fall walking down stairs, burn yourself while cooking, and so forth.

The interesting risk, she argues, is intimacy. Often, bdsm scenes are relatively technical: a dominant does whatever they do to a submissive, who gets off on having it done rather than on who's doing it; the relationship is, ironically, almost a non-relationship in which each party gets off on the activity in a solitary way rather than relating to the other person in the scene. But it isn't always like that, and where there is communication and connection between people. it can be a massive emotional bond - the strong intimacy you get where people really give each other absolute trust and commitment.

Her argument is that the greater the level of technical skill involved in a scene, the more disconnect there is and the less such intimacy is built; conversely, simple non-technical scenes may enable much greater intimacy. Personally I can see where she's coming from, though as someone who does bondage suspensions and other 'technical' forms of play, I'd say that technical challenges aren't necessarily a bar to intimacy. Someone who's proficient enough to know exactly what they're doing and who keeps a good level of communication going with their sub before, during and after a scene is also able to build and experience the same intense level of connection.

Especially if the 'technical' form of play is actually part of a ritualistic scene, of the kind I described above...

My 2p or 2 cents' worth. Your opinions may vary.

Normal service resumed, sort of...

We're back from a brief road trip in the campervan. It gave me lots of ideas for stories but no actual words written.
While we were away, a novella I finished a couple of days before we went has been now accepted by Xcite and contracts signed - more details when I have an actual publication date, cover pic etc. Also they seem to like the idea for my next novella, though I can't begin writing it until I have the current novel finished (about 15K words left to do...).
Apart from that, it turns out an interview I did with Renaissance Sizzler for their blog came out while we were away - you can read it here (opens in new window). The interview includes a teaser for Hanging Around (link opens in a new window), the story collection of mine they published a couple of months ago.
When I'm a little more recovered I'll try to post some flash fiction based about the places we went and the things we saw...

Seducing the Myth

I'm conscious I haven't been updating much recently, but that's because I've been writing. And playing with new ropes. And stuff.

Meanwhile, a short story I did a while back is now out in Lucy Felthouse's edited collection Seducing the Myth (link to Amazon.co.uk, opens in new window).

If you're in the States, the Amazon.com link is this one.

The collection as a whole has 24 tales inspired by myths and legends of Greek, Roman, Arabian, Arthurian, Hindu, Jewish, Norse, Slavic, Sumerian and Welsh sources. There are fairies, mermaids and ancient fertility rituals and, in my story, a smattering of bondage (well, what else would you expect from me?).

The full list of contributors is: Louisa Bacio, Lexie Bay, Rebecca Bond, Shan Ellis, Justine Elyot, Lucy Felthouse, Lisa Fox, Fulani, K D Grace, Bronwyn Green, Hawthorn, Caz Jones, Burton Lawrence, Maxine Marsh, J. C. Martin, Jillian Murphy, Lydia Nyx, Rachel Randall, Kay Dee Royal, Toni Sands, Indigo Skye, Elizabeth Thorne, Saskia Walker.

My 'Andi in Chains', is a retelling of the Andromeda myth in a pulp fiction style (well, why not?). Teaser:

Forget the rumours. Here’s how it went down, for real. Andromeda – we always knew her as Andi – was one of those rare beauties, the kind who look like a porn star except none of it’s fake. Masses of wavy blonde hair, nice figure, long legs, lips the colour of pomegranate seeds. She knew it, too. Always in shorts or miniskirts and tops that showed a good bit of cleavage.The thing was, none of the guys would touch her. Word on the street was that she was still a virgin, which in this neighbourhood was nothing short of miraculous. Most of the girls here are well on their way to being mums or prostitutes, or both, by the time they’re fifteen.
There was a reason why she was off limits. The reason being her dad, Ceph, was the hardest, nastiest Class A dealer you could think of. You don’t get to be that way without putting a few people six feet under, and everyone knew he’d done it. One time he even nailed a guy’s dick to a telegraph pole just for “looking at Andi the wrong way.”

Enjoy!

Pyromaniac, again

Here's me playing with fire:





The top pic was done towards the end of a session flailing a long piece of kevlar rope around - towards the end, as the fire begin to die, there's a blue tinge to the flames. The bottom pics was a firewhip, and the blob in the centre of the picture was it cracking.

Both pics courtesy of a professional photographer who was there, Chris Cafferkey, who has some of our previous fire art available in much higher resolution in the fire gallery on her website.

Other pics of the same performance are on the DeliciouslyDeviant blog that I have with Velvet Tripp. So yes, you need to look there as well.

Fetish content? Well, nil. Unless you're a pyromaniac.

The Museum of Deviant Dreams (Part II)

We're back from a short break. More info and some pics, once the pics are Photoshopped... Meanwhile here's the second part of the story I started earlier. This section follows Dee's experiences when she goes through the second of the two doors, the one Jake didn't take.

***


Dee had slipped through the door marked “Enter at Your Own Risk”. What she found there was startling, certainly, but didn’t seem risky in any sense that she understood the word.

She was on a narrow walkway, fenced in on either side by wire mesh, lit from below by a chain of small lights. In the semi-darkness beyond the mesh, creatures surveyed her with interest. It wasn’t easy to tell what kinds of creatures they were supposed to be. Insectoid, she thought. Some appeared to be mannequins or, from the occasional movement of a head or arm, robots. A few, though, were human. They wore black latex bodysuits and hoods that might have started life as gas masks but now featured mandibles, antennae and strange balloon-like protuberances. And they had phallic members as well, though not all projected from crotches. They grew on chests, arms, in one case out of the top of a head and also from where she’d expect to see eyes. And how many phalluses end in a star, flower or fringe of small tentacles?

Hands and antennae reached through the mesh, stretched towards her. Dee dodged several before thinking it would be cool to give herself the experience. They stroked her gently. Dee giggled and turned, expecting Jake to be on the walkway behind her. Maybe with some insect appendage feeling between his legs.

Nope.

Dammit. He was always doing that. In a shop, she’d spot something she wanted to look at. In a bar, she’d bump into a friend and say hi. He wouldn’t even notice, steam on without looking back and they’d lose each other for a few minutes, maybe even an hour or two. But she was used to him, he was used to her, it was just something different about the ways their brains worked.

She couldn’t even see the door she’d come through now. Just looked like a blank wall, too dark to see details. Decided it didn’t matter anyway. He must’ve gone through the other door, the “Museum” one, but they must end up in the same place because there was only one beat, one track, coming from somewhere up ahead. So there’d just be the one dance floor and she’d see him there anyway.
Meanwhile, insect feelers rubbing against her legs, stomach and ass were disturbing and disturbingly arousing in equal measure.

The human insects kept pace with her as she moved along the walkway, capering on the other side of the mesh and setting up barriers of waving antennae and phallic-looking feelers for her to walk through.

They tickled.

At the end of the walkway there was a door. It opened as Dee reached it and she stepped through, expecting to find herself on a dance floor.

Nope.

She was in a small cage.

That moved.

As it rolled away from the door, one whole side shuttered down so she was completely trapped. She fell to her knees and clung to the bars as it rocked and bucked its way a short distance to a small podium. There was a crowd around her now, watching expectantly. Some were insect-like, some in zentai - head-to-toe spandex bodysuits that made them anonymous, humanoid rather than human. Some, conversely, all-too-human and wearing nothing but mud and streaks of body paint.

Dee would have wondered how this process worked if there were lots of people coming through the door. Did they roll another cage into position? Only use cages for punters coming through on their own?

She would have wondered this, except that many hands reached through the bars, fondling and stroking, with no way for her to avoid them. Dee’s first instinct was to draw back, push them away... But she couldn’t fight them and the switch had already flicked in her brain, back on the walkway. They were invasive, yet their gentle persistence was hypnotic.

Back of her brain, Dee wondered about the insects and zentai figures and mud-people. Was there a connection or was it just random? The insects she could figure, because there was a whole latex fetishist thing where people dressed in insect costumes. You could even see it on Youtube. The zentai thing reduced people to blank-faced anonymous figurines, though she’d tried a suit once and the feel of it against her skin was pretty fucking cool, clinging in all the right places, turning her on. As for the mud-people – she and Jake had been to Prague a while back. Encountered the story of the Golem, the artificial human made from mud. And at a festival, one thing there was plenty of was mud… Did they represent different types of sex? Metaphors for kinds of sexual experience?

The back of her brain didn’t process much after that, because the air was heavy and humid, layered with incense and noise, hot with unspoken and complex desires.

One of the chthonic, mud-covered beings – androgynous, she couldn’t even tell its sex – made her understand in mime, then by tugging at her skirt, that Dee should strip.

It wasn’t like she was enthusiastic. Just playing along with the whole scene, wondering where it led, how far it would go. But the weirdly exotic, almost non-human sexual ambience was compelling. And mud-covered T-shirts and skirts quickly get cold and slimy, while skin can be washed clean so much more easily. Then it wasn’t so much a case of stripping as relaxing into the moment, allowing her clothes to be removed, to dissolve away.

The beat was heavy and insistent. It drove into Dee’s spine, her pelvis, her thighs. It made her hot. It made her squirm.

It dawned on her that not all the figures surrounding the cage were performers. Many, especially the muddied ones, were an audience. And she was the entertainment.

Though by the time she’d figured that, Dee no longer really cared. The music, the smells, the close-packed bodies and her own nakedness in the cage all merged into an intense, dreamlike and yet visceral state. A state similar, in fact, to taking a mild dose of acid. And Dee had stayed away from drugs that night in case the festival’s night city turned out to be too freaky to handle.

Something not dissimilar to a dildo came at her face through the bars of the cage. Well, not dissimilar, and similarly veined, even though the tip was in the form of three stubby bulbs. On a whim she took it into her mouth. After a few seconds she was surprised to feel some pulsing, vibration, in it - and the bulbs filled with air, or fluid, to the point that her jaw was stretched and she couldn’t release it from between her lips. It was, in effect, both a gag and a form of bondage, because Dee had to use her hands to support herself against the cage bars. Which meant she couldn’t prevent other stuff happening, like fingers or tentacles exploring her thighs and labia and pussy.

Whatever warm and greasy organ invaded her sex, Dee didn’t know and was now past caring. All she knew was the slide and slither of it felt good inside her, despite the strangeness of its dimensions.

Insectasex? Dee had the fleeting thought that when they were finished with her she might be eaten. Surely it was the other way round, though, big female spiders eating the smaller male ones, praying mantises eating the males?

Was the organ inside even identifiably male? Or weirdly alien, and fucking accomplished with sexual rites she wouldn’t understand?

Didn’t matter. Felt good. Better than good. Climactic.

Dee closed her eyes and allowed the feelings and weirdness to flow through her body, fire and ice playing through veins and doing the pleasure/pain thing with every nerve she possessed.

The thing in her mouth muffled her screams, seemed almost to block the sensations leaving her, bottled them in, amplified them. Orgasm was sudden, a ravenous feeding on every part of her, all-consuming. And it went on for much longer than she’d thought physically possible. A freaky, trippy climax that was more like a full-body erotic violation.

There was more, but Dee’s senses were overloaded and her perceptions skewed. She couldn’t explain, even to herself, exactly how she’d come to be splayed on top of the cage rather than inside it. How things like tentacles wrapped round her limbs and torso, holding her down. What liquids had been drizzled or spurted onto her body. How many hands had stroked and massaged her. What sexual or insectual or muddy golemic members had been placed in her mouth, vagina or anus. They merged into a single extended moment in time, something that could truthfully be called a clusterfuck. Nest-fuck, hive-fuck, slippery mudfuck? All these and more...

Somewhere in the space between dream and oblivion, Dee felt warm water sluicing her body, a cleansing that she somehow associated with death. Were dead bodies washed ritually before burial? Had someone whispered that into her ear as it was happening?

At any rate, she felt a lightness of being, a sense of not-being-there. Of having been, not just fucked but all the proteins sucked from her body and replaced with strange forms of DNA that made her more than human.
It was, in its own peculiar way, a rebirth. Coming to the surface of life, experiencing it as an ecstasy, a dream, a surreal trance that was more than everyday reality could ever be. A proof that her own desires and instincts, however surreal they might seem, were the structure of her world.

And that feeling stayed with as she walked back to the tent in the early light of a new day, feet barely touching the grass, all her clothes vanished.

Jake was there, snoring into his sleeping bag. She curled up against him, wondering what had happened through the door she hadn’t taken. Feeling, nonetheless, his erection through the sleeping bag, even though he was asleep. Knowing that whatever she’d done, whatever he’d done, whichever doors they’d gone through, their future would be different. Interesting. Driven by fantasy and desire, by and sex way beyond anything she’d previously imagined as human.

The Museum of Deviant Dreams (Part I)

OK, I'm aware I haven't posted here for a while. I've been writing other stuff. Sometimes I don't have enough mental bandwidth, if I can put it that way, to write blog posts when I'm midstream in another project.

However, here's a bit of friction fiction. It hadn't escaped me that the music festival season is upon us again, so that's the setting. What's here is Part I, which follows Jake's experiences in the Museum. Part II, which I'll write probably in the course of the next week, follows the experiences of Dee.

Happy reading...

***

Any big music festival, there’s the surreal, sleazy, sexy all-night area. The weird block. Like this one. Jake and Dee, both dressed for sweaty fun and looking for the surreal, weird and sexy. Picking their way along the makeshift mud street in wellies. Functional black ones for him, delicate flowery ones for her. Crowd’s out in force, out looking for fantasies, for inexplicable strangeness to tell each other later when they’re sober. Bodies rubbing up against each other, slipping, sliding.

Jake and Dee hang onto each other, looking at the freak parade, the trannies who these days it’s better to call T-girls, Dee admonishes him; the muddy plushies, the rubber-clad dominatrixes, the fairies, the anime cosplay characters and the people who look like they just came out of a LARPwarp.

It’s not sex. Not quite. But almost. Jake’s glad he’s not drunk, Dee’s glad she didn’t do that acid tab. Feels like acid anyway, just walking in the crowd.

And here’s a place, The Museum of Deviant Dreams. Interactive exhibits, it says underneath. Lots of people hanging around, because a couple of cute women wearing not much apart from body paint are hanging from a kind of trapeze structure over the door at the front of it, just beyond the reach of drunk and stoned hands. Well, maybe they’re women. Hard to tell. If they are, they’re wearing strap-ons. If they’re not, they’re transsexual and massively erect. What they are, beyond any doubt, though, is very gymnastic and very sexual.

Flashing lights around the entrance, music pulsing through it from the back of the venue. The music’s tribal and primitive and electronic with a lot of sub-bass matched with vocals that could come straight from a magic ritual. Maybe they do. Maybe that’s what’s actually happening, inside.

Jake notices Dee’s skinny T-shirt is damp with sweat, her nipples engorged. He notices his cock is engorged. He holds her arm, her biceps, a little more tightly.

“This one? This looks good.”

She laughs and nods, the mingled noises of the crowd and the music making real conversation impossible. They push through the gaggle of people, his grip on her arm turning to handholding, and make it to the entrance. He turns to her and she smiles, he kisses her, turns to walk down the short corridor, is confronted with two curtains. One says “Museum” and the other “Enter At Your Own Risk”. Jake plunges through the Museum curtain.

And he gets an instant hit of darkness and depravity. Because he’s standing in a passageway with big glass windows, like the windows of giant fish tanks. No fish, though. The first window has a woman behind it, naked, kneeling on hands and knees. In fact there are straps on her wrists and forearms, calves and ankles, holding her in that position. She has a ballgag in her mouth and she’s looking at him with big, pleading eyes. Behind her is a rod connected to a set of mechanical gears and eccentric cams, run from a giant electric motor. The end of the rod is connected to a dildo buried in her cunt. In front of the whole display is a big red button the size of a dinner plate, sign above it says push the button. He pushes the button.

Motor rotates, cams and cam-rods push and pull, the whole fucking machine – because that’s what it is – thrusts the dildo, pumps it in and out of the woman. The woman screams soundlessly and her eyes roll up in her head. It’s not clear to him if she’s experiencing pain or pleasure. Perhaps both. Jake watches, fascinated, unable to take his eyes off the spectacle.

When the motor stops, he sees her drooling through the gag, beads of perspiration on her body. A faint trembling in her breasts as they hang down, in her belly and thighs. Only then does he see a notice, a placard inside the tank, explaining something about how a university lecture on sex once demonstrated a fucking machine to students and everyone involved got disciplined. A loaded word, in that context, Jake thinks.

And then there’s the next window. Here there’s a naked woman strapped to a wooden chair, blindfolded, pads attached to different parts of her body, evil-looking clamps like the ones for charging car batteries attached to nipples and labia. Looks painful enough to start with. There’s some text about Stanley Milgram and some psycho experiment. Jake looks closer. Psycho experiment? No, psychological experiment.

Push the button. She jerks and writhes in her bonds. Faking it, or real pain? Push the button again. Jerk, writhe. He can’t tell.
Push the button. Jerk, writhe. It looks hot. He suddenly likes the effect. Push the button. Her toes are curling, sweat dribbles down her face.

In the interests of sex equality, or something like that, the third window is a nude guy, stretched out on a big wooden cross. He has an impressive erection. There’s a thin chain wrapped round his balls, one end of the chain running to a pulley on the opposite wall and then hanging, tension on the chain caused by a weight. It’s not clear what the button will do to him.

One way to find out. Press the button.

Some kind of vibrator attached to the chain, making it quiver and pulse. Jake saw it shimmering under the lights. At the same time, some glass tubes he hadn’t noticed between the guy’s legs are now glowing purple and throwing out sparks. And the guy seemed to actually like it, judging by the way his erection jutted out proudly. Jake wasn’t unused to seeing cock, because he’d played football, been involved in horseplay in the changing rooms. The things men do in changing rooms, sometimes… he’d always wondered how sucking another man in that setting can be cool and later, in the pub, the same guys become total homophobes. That said, he wasn’t particularly into cocks, wasn’t what you’d call a connoisseur. It didn’t do it for him, sexually. Not like seeing the women. But then Dee would be enjoying this tank, these visuals.

Jake turns, does a doubletake. Because it’s not Dee’s hand in his. Instead his paw is linked to that of a fairytale/nightmare creature, a woman – he thinks – whose diaphanous neon yellow outfit hides much less than the red and black stripes of body paint on her face, arms and ribs, and who sports small silver fairy wings and much larger black bats’ wings.

“The last tank is still empty,” she points out playfully. “You’d be the ideal specimen to place inside it.” Her free hand rests briefly against his chest, delivering what feels almost like an electric shock, before crawling spider-like across his stomach to feel his penis and balls. “Oh, yes. Very definitely an ideal specimen.”

Jake doesn’t take this at face value. He expects it to be a rite of passage, an experience he must undergo in order to access the venue. A lot of clubs do it these days, try to give you a headfuck before you can make it to the bar and dancefloor.

And where did Dee go…? She does this to him a lot. In shops, in clubs, he’ll walk three steps and turn round to find she’s disappeared. Distracted by a seeing friend, a special offer, something shiny, she’ll just take a different aisle or backtrack a few paces and he’ll spend the next twenty minutes looking for her, to discover her somewhere obvious but unexpected, and probably even annoyed he’s taken so long to get to her – because “I’ve been waiting here for ages”.

He figures that when he walked through the “Museum” curtain she must have been suddenly moved to take the other door, “Enter At Your Own Risk”, assuming they’d lead to the same place. Which might or might not be a reasonable assumption. She should really backtrack and…

…but the fairytale nightmare has him by the cock now, literally, having unzipped his Bermuda shorts and yanked it out, all ten erect inches of it, using it like a leash to pull him on through the display. Which is some kind of indication she might have meant what she said about him being a “specimen”.

There’s a hidden door, just a plasterboard partition on hinges next to the fourth, empty, tank. Behind it, to Jake’s surprise, is a room that already seems crowded with three women, or he thinks they are but the lighting isn’t that good and the costumes are confusing and trigger weird associations in his brain – a zebra-striped alien, a dancer wearing wellies and a corset and nothing else but who has a long whip coiled in one hand, a psycho nurse like the one who treated him in hospital when he was a kid – except that nurse didn’t, as far as he can remember, have a pair of handcuffs and some chains hanging from the kind of tool belt workmen sometimes wear. And they’re surrounding him, saying things like “My, he’s a big boy” and “He’s going to be fun!”
And what the fuck is going on with the naked, blindfolded woman in chains who’s sitting on a small chair in the corner?

So next thing he knows, his clothes seem to have disappeared and with four pairs of hands roving over his torso and thighs he’s pulled through a little door and playfully chained to a wooden frame like an upside-down Y and a crossbar he can rest his arms on. Somewhere back of his brain, some piece of random knowledge, says it’s the shape of a Chinese symbol for ‘Tai” – “big”. And they’re telling him how big he is and how it’ll all be a lot of sexy fun.

Playfully chained, but effectively chained all the same. Jake can’t move. And he’s not only big, but he’s going to stay that way because the head nurse character produces and applies a very industrial-looking, tight-fitting cockring.

After than, the purpose of the naked chained blindfolded woman becomes clear. She’s attached to a whole other piece of furniture in front of Jake, something that looks like a chair except it’s on a hinged base and had a close-fitting headrest. She’s positioned exactly so her lips close around the tip of his cock. Someone presses a switch, and unseen machinery tilts the whole chair, with her on it, so she’s being rocked back and forth. There’s some messing with the length of travel on the chair, the speed if it, and so on.

Then they’re alone. The two of them, Jake and a woman he’s never seen before, in a glass tank, with her poised to suck him any time someone looks through the glass window and presses the button to find out what will happen.

This is a situation so random and surreal Jake has no idea how he should react. Can he assume the women on the end of his cock agreed to this? Is a performer? Because Jake himself feels he’s been entranced, seduced, into a situation which while pleasant, isn’t exactly what he expected. Is it nonconsensual? Well… now he’s actually in this position, not exactly, because it’s unsurprisingly pleasurable. What exactly is he concerned about? That Dee will walk past and see him there? Throw a stroppy fit because he’s being “unfaithful”? And what’s she doing by now, presumably somewhere else in this venue?

He tries not to think, to relax and be in the moment, and then that becomes a whole lot easier because someone pushes the button.

Just not quite for long enough that he gets to come.

Over the next three or four hours people push the button a lot. The thing about coming stops being a problem, because the nameless woman gets to cough, gargle and swallow the same amount of protein she’d get from a four-course dinner. And after that it starts to be a problem, because he can’t stop coming, his erection’s been held by the cockring for so long it’s painful, and he feels dehydrated from the amount of spunk he’s ejaculated.

So he’s pathetically grateful when the head nurse and the demon angels come back to release him. Them. And the relief of having the cockring removed is tremendous.

They don’t give him his clothes back, though. Instead, he finds himself part of a tangle of naked bodies in the back room. He recognises the girl from the fucking machine, the woman who was being electro-tortured, the guy from the third tank. The blindfolded chained woman stays blindfolded and chained, toyed with by everyone, fucked by the third tank guy who surprisingly seems to have a huge erection despite the stuff he’s had done to his cock. Maybe because of it. Jake can’t work it out. The woman seems to get off on staying like a prisoner, slave, something like that. Fuck knows what’s in her head.

He gets a drink, a smoke, time to relax and talk, hands moving on skin. At some point he’s having his feet massaged, a demon-angel is straddling him, riding his cock which amazingly has recovered from its treatment, and he’s eating out the woman who’s been on the fucking machine. It’s all very debauched. More than an afterparty, more like the exclusive post-afterparty hardcore sexfests he’s read about in clubbing and music mags. The ones where any bizarre fantasy is not only accepted but expected, where sometimes bodies need to be disposed of at the end.

Except it’s not quite as unrestrained as that because the head nurse keeps a check on the fantasies being enacted, and sharp things get quietly removed. She doesn’t want to have to dispose of bodies, evidently.

Finally the nude chained woman gets her blindfold and chains taken off, and everyone congratulates her on lasting the full twenty-four hours of sex slavery. Seeing her face, Jake remembers he’s seen her before, playing bass in one of the bands early on the first day of the festival.

He thinks it would be cool to talk with her and maybe fuck her. She’s already drunk a pint or so of his come and he’s already had several rounds of sex with the others here, but still.... Jake reckons he’s on a roll here, going for the male universal fantasy of non-stop sex for hours with a harem of willing females. Willing females who have arcane techniques to ensure he’s fully and massively erect time after time.

It doesn’t happen because… well, other stuff happens instead. And maybe that’s how it’s meant to be for the woman, that he remains a completely anonymous cock?

The efforts he’s encouraged, required, and proud to make, though, take their toll. He loses track of time, and of whether he’s actually fucking or just dreaming it, sleep-fucking or fucknotised so he’s in a deep hypnotic trance.

He has no memory of getting back to the tent. He half-wakes, a shaft of sunlight angling in on the canvas, and shifts position. Feels his clothes under him, though he’s not wearing them. Reaches out and can’t feel Dee next to him. Fuck knows where she went.

All his muscles hurt and his dick’s lost several layers of skin, it feels like. He needs to rest.

Next time he wakes up it’s almost dark outside. Still physically tired but mentally refreshed, if unable to comprehend what’s happened. Not only does he not know what time it is, he doesn’t know what day it is. He can remember snapshot images, moments of sensation, odd phrases. Despite feeling tender, his dick is again perversely erect. As though that is now its natural state.

Gentle snoring beside him says Dee came back at some point. He reaches out to feel her naked beside him. She stirs, still asleep. Grasps his arm, folds it around her, won’t let it go. They stay like that. His arm loses sensation but he enjoys the gentleness of it.

[To be continued...]

Pink Flamingo website changes - important

If you've tried to purchase my 'Secret Circus of Pain and Degradation' from Pink Flamingo's website in the last couple of days you'll have found it shows as 'product not available'. You may have found similar problems with other ebooks from other publishers as well.

This is because major credit card companies have decided to withdraw services from 'adult' websites offering content that includes or depicts coercion and nonconsensual activity. Since the 'Secret Circus' book opens with a description of an abduction, it's one of the many products Pink Flamingo have had to remove from their site.

Third party sellers remain unaffected, so the book is available from Amazon Kindle and AdultEbookShop, and apparently also in Nook format from Barnes and Noble.

Meanwhile, Pink Flamingo have plans in motion for the continued marketing of titles they've had to remove; these include a separate web outlet outside the US, since this is a US domestic policy, and further third party sales through non-US sites such as BDSM-Books.com. Excerpts from books will be taken over to their free story site, which will be revamped for this purpose: http://www.freeeroticstoriessite.com.

Finally, the print version remains available - but contact Pink Flamingo directly and be prepared to pay with a check (or cheque), or money order.

Pink Flamingo comment: "This is obviously a significant change in our business. It’s not the first time that there has been a conservative backlash against this industry; we’ve weathered several in our 17 years ... While the credit card companies have every right to deny their services for purchasing certain products, we consider this a free speech issue and a form of censorship."

If you're a member of Fetlife you can see a more detailed discussion of the credit card changes and the way they're affecting the adult ebook market as a whole in "The Kinky Intellectual's Book Club" discussion group.

Lust Bites reviewed - and another quote

The Xcite 'Lust Bites' collection, with one of my stories, has been reviewed over at Coffeetime Romance.

My story is, 'Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know', of which the reviewer says:

Sasha is surprised when the stranger comes up to her and tells her he likes her poetry. Somehow she ends up following Byron home and gets to know the real man himself very intimately.

This is a sexy read. I did feel as if it were a little stranger than what I like, but it really seemed to add to the overall element of the story. Fulani makes vampirism seem elegant and wordy and bold and romantic.

Only a little stranger? I must have been slipping... I thought strange was my specialty.

Here's a direct link to the book at the Xcite website.

Meanwhile the reviewer had kind things to say about another story in the same collection by my partner, Velvet Tripp, and another review of another of her stories is also out elsewhere. Rather than copy/paste all the stuff, read what they said over at our joint blog, DeliciouslyDeviant.

Meanwhile, this may entertain you. We were at a fetish club the other evening. Overheard as we were leaving: 'Hey, I gave you my all in that scene! I've got scabs on my nipples and a sore pussy. This sub's broken. If you don't let the sub rest and heal you'll wear her out and have to get another one...'

Shopping list

I think the experience of doing a bondage demo recently has kick-started a certain area of my imagination. I keep feeling the need to experiment with different ideas... some of which will require new stuff I don't possess at the moment. Hence the shopping list.

- About 100 metres of hemp rope in assorted 10 and 5 metre lengths. I currently use braided polypropylene rope because it has a number of characteristics I like, but it's worth having a look at more 'traditional' alternatives. However, hemp is normally a little thinner than my usual rope (6mm as opposed to 7mm) so an extra turn or two of rope might be required here or there.

- A shibari suspension ring. Normally for suspensions I use climbing slings and carabiners as the anchor - but hey, why not have some options?

- Some lengths of sari fabric. Most saris use around 5 metres of fabric, but I'd prefer to have two or three 10 metre lengths for fabric bondage. It's a very light fabric and bunches easily because there's not a lot of bulk to it, but at the same time it can spread so it becomes almost like a garment as well as a bondage tie.

- A similar length, maybe about 30-40 metres, of ariel silk (alternatively called 'tissu' - which absolutely does not mean it's like tissue!) or similar - the kind of fabric used in ariel dance displays, etc. Actually for suspension bondage I could get away with something like a close-weave curtain fabric at half the cost and I may do that.

- a new and more powerful handheld massager. Yes, I have a Magic Wand - three, in fact. Typically they deliver multiple forced orgasms within seconds, using only about 10 watts of power. But did you now there are now massagers out there capable of delivering 30 watts?

[Edited to add - a folding massage chair. Yes, I know there are folding bondage/sex chairs available, specifically designed for lifting and separating legs. But I'd prefer something that works whether the sub's positioned on it with the back or front exposed, and with ropes it would be quite straightforward to tie them to it in any position... plus, it could actually be used for massage...]

Voiceover

Part of a work in progress. Imagine what follows as a voiceover, a female voice, closeup on blindfolded face, mouth, lips... maybe in the background there's some very blurred action going on, candlelit, in what appears to be a fetish club or dungeon. Maybe the voiceover is interrupted at various points by the sound of a flogger, or moans from an unseen third party...

At some point I may actually get around to filming this as a piece of Nu Fetish... I have a couple of other ongoing projects to finish first, though. Well, about six other projects to finish first...

***

Then he tied my hands behind my back and put a blindfold on me. If you want me to play with you, he said, you’ll have to say exactly what your fantasy is – what you want me to do with you. You’ll have to ask me to do those things. Beg me. And then my mind went blank. I don’t know what I was expecting.

I don’t even know if he’s still here. Is he recording me? Filming me, so he can play it back later for reference? For evidence? For entertainment? I’m on my knees. Being on my knees makes me think I should open my mouth. Receive his cock. Suck him off. I hope I’ll be sucking him off. I’ll have to ask if I want to suck him off. But do I want to suck him off before he beats me? Is it a privilege I should earn by taking a whipping?

***

How can I ask to be transported, taken to another world? The things I want him to do – they’re just the ways to get there, to get into a different headspace.

I guess I want him to squeeze my nipples, beat me, bite my neck… He’ll ask, beat me how, and where. Breasts? Back? Ass? Cunt? All of them. With what? I don’t know. I want it to hurt. I want bruises to keep me warm. I want him to make me silent. I want him to make me scream. I want choices taken away from me. I want a gag. I want him to crush ice against my tortured, red skin.

I want to know it’s real. I want to see the video. I want to see me saying these things, asking, begging, while he squeezes and bites and whips me. I want to be inside and outside my own skin at the same time, seeing everything, feeling everything, until wanting anything is insubstantial and the pain is a furious dark euphoria.

***

PS - see what Wordle made of this text in terms of word-image over at my DeliciouslyDeviant blog.

Interesting instructions

For the purposes of a scene I'm thinking about playing, I've been looking on Ebay for stage makeup pencils, suitable for writing on skin and washable (because something like eyeliner is probably a little too difficult to get off asfterwards).

And I came across a makeup pencil described as 'A soft, ultra creamy, colour concentrated formula used by professional make-up artists. Perfect for eyes, whiskers, freckles etc. Black.'

It was the next bit that got my attention.

'To get a sharp point, place the pencil in the freezer before sharpening.'

And then of course use it straight away... [evil grin]

Adult Ebook Shop now stocks my books

Adult Ebook Shop, a UK based site, has just let me know they have agreements with both Pink Flamingo and Renaissance to stock my books.

The link for both titles is www.adultebookshop.com/Fulani-all-titles.php.

This means it's now easier for people in the UK to order and pay in sterling rather than dollars.

Just published - 'Hanging Around' by Fulani

Yesterday it was Velvet Tripp's turn. Today it's mine.




Published late last night (UK time) - 'Hanging Around', a collection of 12 interlinked stories, out with Renaissance Sizzler Editions.

Book blurb:

It’s two in the morning, and Mariska is dangling from a rope and displaying a lot of flesh to her tormentors. And she giggles. She’s been looking for something new in her life, and being a film extra in a low-budget zombie horror movie is certainly new… Twelve stunning chapters follow Mariska’s journey from barista to member of a group of bohemian artists, actors and others. She’s inducted into their fetish-oriented lifestyle, and along the way she’s tied, whipped, fisted and more in situations ranging from a film set to a lesbian club to an art exhibition. Oh, and somehow she finds time to write a journal about it. Fulani’s erotic stories, often dark and with BDSM-based themes, have appeared in numerous anthologies and ‘zines.

There's more, including a table of contents and a couple of free short stories involving the same characters but aren't in the book (they were written later, including one to go with the cover which I only saw a day or two ago), over at my other blog DeliciouslyDeviant.

Enjoy!

Out now - Velvet Tripp's 'Go Find Yourself'

This blog isn't all about me. If you've read this blog for any length of time you'll have worked out I'm in a relationship with Velvet Tripp, who's also a writer of erotica (among many other thing).

I'm pleased to say her short story, 'Go Find Yourself,' has just been published in not one but two Xcite Books collections.







It's in Wanton Women, a 20-story collection of lesbian fiction.

It's also in the shorter, five-story collection Submission in Silk, which contains stories by Giselle Renarde,  Velvet Tripp, Olivia London, Helen Dring and Alyssa Turner.

'Go Find Yourself' is story about a divorced woman who re-evaluate her life and begins to explore long-held but unrealised fantasies about sex with another woman. She attends a gay and lesbian organisation's annual camp where she meets Ross, who captivates her and ultimately seduces her.

Congratulations, Velvet!

Nu Fetish and things

As you may have seen on my other blog, DeliciouslyDeviant, a couple of days ago I randomly discovered a new(ish) thing called Nu Fetish. I won't repost the stuff from my other blog since you can go there and read it, but it suffices to say it got some of my creative muscles working overtime, because I've intermittently been thinking about doing some video projects myself (though not by myself, obviously; Velvet Tripp is a professional photographer with a camera that will take HD video as well as images). This line of thought started because I had to have a go at some video editing recently in a completely different context.

A lot of the Nu Fetish stuff turns up on Vimeo.com, so some poking about there revealed more interesting stuff that isn't Nu Fetish but is erotic, in a 'thinking' kind of a way. I'm suddenly finding myself very inspired by some of the things I found on Vimeo, in particular Fabrice Noir's 'Naked Walk' and Alfil Barcelona's 'Black Dreams' as well as videos of bondage performances at the recent Boundcon VIII that I posted about recently.

What I've been up to recently

Haven't done a lot of updating here - life's been happening instead.

Did the suspension demo on Thursday - worked out fine, and thanks to the two bondage bunnies apart from V on whom I demo'd other kinds of quick ties as well.

Afterwards I had a go at my 'signature' tie of suspending someone from a dance pole. This is technically easy if you know the right knot. However, prusik knots basically tighten up more with increased pressure so trying it (a) with someone who was light and (b) deciding to use a second climbing sling around the pole both for safety and so I had an additional space to use carabiners, didn't work out all that well. Live and learn, I guess. We did it instead on an upright pole of the 'cube', the piece of kit we took with us.

Note to self - could usefully do with a shibari suspension ring. This would mean I could tie multiple ropes into a single ring hung on a single climbing sling. Ones with welds seem to be about £25 and the high-grade ones cut from a block of steel with no welds on them are about £60, so it won't break the bank. Something to think about in the next week or so.

Meanwhile someone sent me this link to some bondage performances that took place a week or so ago at Boundcon VIII in Munich [NB: link updated 24 May, the original link was to a search rather than to Vimeo content - click the bit that says 'See all 9 videos' from the user profile to get the most recent Boundcon footage listed].

Went to a 'Bi Fun Day' yesterday with V - I'm not, she is, I was showing a bit of solidarity. The interesting thing was, a good proportion of the people there are people I've known on the fetish scene for a long while, many of whom I'd previously met at the suspension bondage demo we did on Thursday. And many of whom are also regulars at one or several of the local munches. I don't imagine everyone who's bi is also into bdsm, any more than everyone who's gay or lesbian is. I suspect it's just a function of how the local networks work. On the other hand, I'd also suspect identifying as, broadly, non-straight is a process/journey that tends to open one's mind to a range of 'alternative' sexual practices and gives one 'permission' to explore them. Would be interested in hearing from anyone who knows more than me about this kind of stuff.

Other bits of daily life have intruded, but they're pretty boring. Things are due to be published in the next week or so but there's no point telling you about them until I have a proper URL to direct you to. And I'm girding myself up to write the last 15000 or so words of the novel, though am likely to be distracted by a couple of (probably) short projects that will hopefully only take a day or so to put together, assuming I can find a day to do them in.

Now this is fascinating...

I've blogged before about how the adult entertainment industry isn't quite the seedy operation you might think, because big chunks of it are owned, usually at several careful arm's lengths, by well-known corporations. (Parts of it are seedy in other ways, of course, but that's a different story.) And I've mentioned that because of the popularity of adult entertainment, it's one of the industries that tends to move quickly into new technologies and exploit them.

News has come to me, though, that the relationship between the adult industry and new computer products and technologies is actually a planned process, because major players in the computer industry use the adult industry, albeit in secret, to develop and beta test their new technologies and products. Despite the well-known public position of some of these companies on adult content, they are all to aware how their products will be used and some have missed out big time in the past by trying to "adult content proof" their new products.

This is from a reputable source - the BBC. The piece is "Superbrands' success fuelled by sex, religion and gossip", published 17 May on the BBC website. It relates to a programme 'Secrets of the Superbrands' broadcast on BBC Three at 2100 BST on Tuesday, 17 May. For those in the UK, it will be available on iPlayer for a while. For those outside the UK, it will no doubt make its way onto Youtube sometime soon via the BBC's Youtube channel.

Impromptu bondage, planned demo!

Just had to repost this as Blogger lost it in a service outage, but never mind...

I may be a writer but it may entertain you to know I actually do the kind of stuff I write about. Sometimes in unexpected circumstances.

On Wednesday I went to one of the local munches. A ‘munch’, as you no doubt know, is a regular meeting that takes place in a public location where no-one dresses up (much) and there's no overt BDSM play. They're places where people new to BDSM, the area, etc. can feel welcomed. This particular munch uses the upstairs room of a pub, so is to that extent private.

I walked in and was immediately asked to do an impromptu bondage workshop. Someone who’d agreed to do one hadn’t turned up. I had no ropes with me but a few other people did. I borrowed them, did some basic stuff, got people to practice on each other and talked about safety issues as well.

The stuff I did wasn't highly technical - one useful knot and a style known as a 'karada' plus some of safety issues. But it was entertaining and hope other people found it so as well...

While I’m on the topic, Velvet and I will also be doing a suspension bondage demo at After Dusk next Thurs, 19 May in the UK midlands area. I'm not going to repost all the contact details here because they're already on my other joint blog with Velvet, DeliciouslyDeviant (see the post there on 'Writing bondage, doing bondage'). Or mail me. We haven’t done any demos for a while, so this weekend will have to involve some time to run through the stuff.

Well, now you know, if it wasn't obvious before, I don't just write about stuff.

In other news, there are some plans for erotic story readings and such. More to come when I’ve sorted details.

Have fun!

Impromptu demo!

Went to one of my local munches last night.

I'm assuming you know (a) a munch is a meeting of like-minded people, usually monthly, in a public space to discuss matters of mutual interest and they're a common feature of the kink world, and (b) as I've mentioned before there are currently five, and likely soon to be six or seven, BDSM munches local to me despite the paucity of actual BDSM events in the area.

This particular munch has the upstairs room of a pub, so is to that extent private.

I walked in and was immediately asked to do an impromptu bondage workshop! Apparently someone who'd agreed to do one hadn't turned up. I had no ropes with me - though some others did and I borrowed them, did some basic stuff and got people to practice on each other, talked about safety issues as well. It was fun, and the first time it's happened to me outside of a club.

While I'm on the topic, lest you think I write about stuff I don't practice, Velvet and I will be doing a suspension bondage demo at After Dusk next Thurs, 19 May - the link covers two connected events, After Dark and After Dusk, and if you have a Fetlife account you can see more details here. If not - Fetlife registration is quick and free.

Other stuff bubbling under - plans for erotic story readings and such... more to come when I've sorted details.

The local sex shop has closed

Actually this may be misleading, because what you think of as a sex shop and what I consider to be one could be rather different.

Yes, the two 'adult' shops in town selling clothing, DVDs and sex toys are still very much around. However, we used to have a local ropeworks. They made some of their own and bought in other stock, and you could get anything from garden twine to the rigging for a tall ship or foot-diameter hawsers. They also did a huge range of snaplocks, clips and other fastenings, canvases for trucks and marquees for events.

Since I tend to buy rope in industrial quantities, if only a couple of times a year, that was where I bought it. And not just for bondage, I might add (for that I mostly bought 7mm diameter polyprop braided, in different colours). For example I used them to source stuff to set-dress a stage for a goth band and similar things as well.

I rolled up there this afternoon and found the sign had gone. The factory next door told me they'd closed two months back. The recession had done for them.

It's a shame the recession is hitting the small businesses so hard. In future I'm evidently going to have to order online if I want stuff in quantity and at a good price - though I admit to having a yen for some rope laid from fibreoptic filaments I saw a while back from a specialist supplier... think how good that would look in a club...

SlutWalk in the news

It's a movement not just to relaim the word, but as Boston organiser Siobhan Connors says, "is in protest of a culture that we think is too permissive when it comes to rape and sexual assault. It's to bring awareness to the shame and degradation women still face for expressing their sexuality... essentially for behaving in a healthy and sexual way."

It came about as a result of a senior police officer in Toronto advising female students to "avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimised." (Yes, he's since been disciplined).

I'll hold off on a long moral rant about how something like SlutWalk shouldn't even be necessary in today's society, because evidently it still is.

Links: BBC website report and SlutWalk Toronto Blog Page.

One other thing...

I forgot to mention I'm very pleased to see a friend of ours, Jon Wilson, has some of his pics being used on the covers of recent Renaissance Sizzler books - not my books, but never mind, and congratulations to him. You can see the images here and here. He's a very talented erotica/fetish photographer - and works over a broad range of other subjects as well.

He doesn't have a proper website at the moment but some of his images are accessible as lo-res pics via his Myspace page.

Thursday fun

Seems I don't have the capacity to blog here more than twice a week or so, because we've been going supporting various family members though their illnesses and issues, and working quite long hours (yes, the second bdsm novel is nearly done).

But we did find time to go to the Birmingham Bizarre Bazaar a couple of weeks ago and buy some new toys, and then get to After Dark on Thursday for the first time in about two years and use said kit. If you don't know where/what these places are and really feel a burning desire to know (or indeed if you have other burning desires I or we might be able to help with...?) you'll have to mail me.

After Dark was, as it always has been, a friendly and relaxed place in which we met up with some long-lost friends on the fetish scene. And played extensively with chains, ropes, various floggers, canes (no, you don't get to see pics of V's arse afterwards) and forced orgasm via a massager I bought well over a decade ago that sounds like it has a turbo-boost V8 engine and is of around that kind of power.

Anyway - it's the last push on getting the novel done, though other work is now also in the pipeline; always happens, you think you'll get a clear run at something and then the emails for stuff on short deadlines start arriving... As often happens I got 3/4 of the way through and then decided to add some earlier scenes and change others to conform to how I want the later stuff to pan out.

Oh - apart from that I wrote a short story that could well become a scene-setter for a novella, and didn't put it out on the DeliciouslyDeviant blog, and by way of compensation started a piece of flash fiction to post that ended up as 2400 words. Go to DeliciouslyDeviant to read it, though... It has, if indirectly, a pulp fiction/men's adventure mag kind of vibe about it - a subject I'm hoping to post more about at some time in the near(ish) future.

You probably already know this...

... but it's only grabbed my attention that that there's a whole Star Wars Slave Leia metal bikini thing going on. I only found out due to extended poking about looking at pulp fiction and SF for a project I want to start in the next few days.

We're talking about the outfit Princess Leia wears in Star Wars VI: Return of the Jedi, when she's been held captive by Jabba the Hutt and placed in his harem.

As Wikipedia describes it, the iconic slave girl costume comprises 'a copper brassiere fastened over the neck and behind the back with string,] copper plates at the groin in front and back, a red silk loincloth, and leather boots. There were other various adornments, including a hair fastener, a snake arm-wrap and two bracelets. Last, there was the chain and collar that bound her to Jabba which, ironically, she uses to strangle him.'

The outfit was apparently inspired by the work of fantasy/SF illustrator Frank Frazetta, much of it done in the 60s and 70s - the era of pulp, which is how I followed my nose to discover more. There are both official and unofficial websites devoted to his work.

While the Leia slave outfit, in terms of Frazetta's artwork at least, is actually rather conservative it became a cult sex symbol, 'burned into the sweaty subconscious of a generation of fanboys hitting puberty in the spring of 1983' as a Wired editor put it.

What intrigues me is that it seems also to have been burned into the consciousness of several generations of women. Some SF and Star Wars conventions have dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of women wearing this outfit. Don't believe me? there's a website devoted specifically to the costume, leiasmetalbikiniLcom. Alternatively, Google 'slave leia' and/or 'metal bikini' and look at the images section, or the G4 segment on Youtube of the Princess Leia Bikini Contest at ComicCon. And it's by no means the only convention that hosts such an event.

So... I can certainly understand the male perspective on this costume. And I can see that for a women who's confident about herself, it's a great outfit to wear that will show off your physical charms and assets, either in private or at a public event such as a SF convention where it's now accepted as normal female attire. You'd need to have a certain amount of courage to wear it, but at the same time it does make me wonder whether the Slave Leia thing is treated as irrelevant, or whether there's just a little bit of submissive fantasy going on in their heads...

Now this is the kind of action I could be interested in. I'm clearly going to have to turn myself into a morbidly obese sluglike crime lord...

Thursday starts with a laugh...

In the mail this morning: a bank transfer statement from a company for whom I freelance occasionally, developing training courses. Mundane bread and butter stuff, nothing fanciful.

The company puts its own internal budgeting codes on statements, and for whatever reason this payment has been tagged as: SEX TUTOR.

If only...!

Men 'worried' about heavy internet porn use?

I haven't posted much here recently because I've been busy hunting and gathering words, and then training them to go in the right order on some pages.

However, this attracted my attention the other day: a BBC report 'Men 'worried' about heavy internet porn use'. Apparently 'A quarter of men aged 18-24 are worried about the amount of porn they are watching on the internet, new research suggests. Heavy users in the study were much more likely to report problems with their jobs, relationships and sex lives.' The research was conducted jointly by the BBC and the Portman Clinic for the report.

The issue of 'being worried' by the amount of porn they're consuming was based on self-reports of worrying about this, though the actual amount of porn these people watched was presumably variable.

The BBC quotes Jason Dean, a counsellor who runs a website for online sex addicts, as saying of his clients: "It used to be mainly middle-aged single guys but now I get more contact from women, teenagers and people in their 20s."

This report is interesting at a number of levels, mostly to do with questions the news report doesn't address (and the full study, incidentally, doesn't seem to have appeared on the Portman Clinic's website).

How and why, exactly, are people (okay, men) coming to use pornography at a level they consider worrying? I can imagine several dynamics at work. For example, the stress involved in everyday life and worrying about a job can make someone more withdrawn, less able to cope with others, more likely to use porn as a substitute for social interaction, and the visual stimulation becoming more 'real' than any actual relationship. But then I was brought up on a mixed diet of Frankfurt School philosophy and poststructuralist thought that would make that sound a reasonable explanation of what's going on.

A more pithy view, expressed by the late science fiction writer J G Ballard, might also be applicable: 'A widespread taste for pornography means that nature is alerting us to some threat of extinction.' Well, possibly not so much extinction as a radical change in social relationships that make porn itself more intimate, more desirable, than sex-for-real?

Ballard also said (in his book The Atrocity Exhibition): "Sex is now a conceptual act, it's probably only in terms of the perversions that we can make contact with each other at all." And this, too, seems to me to speak to the situation. Porn as a common language? Porn as the shared set of social expectations by which people relate to each other?

I'm not quite sure how to read Ballard's comments but they seem somehow prescient and significant.Maybe that's just me, because I used similar ideas in a story collection that should (I hope) be out in the next week or two. And I'll run off now because I feel I should make notes on this theme for later recycling in a story... But any thoughts or responses are welcome!

Some erotic art links

In the wake of the 'Holly' thing (previous blog post) it struck Velvet that people might be interested in a bunch of fairly eclectic books on erotic art. The ones she particularly likes, all of which are below as Amazon.co.uk links, are:

Erotic Fantasy Art. Published 2008. A variety of styles including painting and digital artwork with some 'how-to' information. Nothing very explicit, but many of the images are certainly suggestive and draw on a wide range of influences. There's a 'look inside' function on Amazon.


The Mammoth Book of Erotic Women in Photographs. From 2005: 480 pages and 78 photographers featured, including the well-renowned Eric Kroll and Emma Delves-Broughton (there's a collection of hers also listed below) along with half a dozen other extremely well known others. This is 'erotic' rather than 'kinky', as you'll see from the Amazon 'look inside' function.

The Mammoth Book of New Erotic Photographs. Published 2010. It is mammoth (480 pages, 500 images from 70 photographers). The editor is crime columnist for the Guardian newspaper and Literary Director of London's Crime Scene Festival, though how much this affects the choice of pics is something I wouldn't want to judge...


The Worlds Greatest Erotic Photographs of Today. Published 2009. Sorry, I don't know a whole lot about this one but Velvet likes it...


Kinky Nature Dark Erotic Fashion Photography. Photography by Emma Delves-Broughton, with tasteful takes on various fetishes and fetish clothing styles. Published 2010. I remember this making quite a big splash when it was published. Oh, and 'dark erotic' can sometimes mean 'sexy horror'.


Artcore: v. 1 (Erotic Art). Includes paintings, digital art and comic/manga style images and is described in the blurb as 'depraved', 'deplorable' and 'delightful'. Vol 1 goes back to 2004 and there are several subsequent volumes if you like this one.

So there you go. Quite a few different takes on eroticism among this lot. Have fun!