Erotica, but not as you know it

I’ve just self-pubbed something you might or might not see as erotica: Filthy Money, and other stories of sex in the gutter.

The publishing process itself was a steep learning curve. First edition not sufficiently well proofread; second edition lost a bit of formatting in the Smashwords 'meatgrinder' (their term for the automatic conversion processes for e-publishing); third edition good, but failed Smashword’s premium catalogue submission due to not using markers (three or four asterisks) at section breaks, and having no first line indent at the beginning of each section – this part of the process isn’t automatic, but down to review by an actual human. Previous humans hadn’t seen these as problems, but never mind. The fourth version is ok and I wanted to get to that stage before promo-ing the collection.

Having got it on Smashwords and their premium catalogue - which distributes to Diesel, Ebooks-Eros, B&N and several other places - I don't have any enthusiasm for going through the same process with Amazon yet. Maybe some time in the future. 

What it is: eight quasi-erotic stories of desperate sex, sexual perversity and moral degeneracy from the margins of contemporary society. It’s set in a dystopia that actually exists – in social science literature it’s often called the underclass, though how the underclass is defined is a variable quantity. Political writers like Charles Murray turn up their noses at those who are ‘welfare dependent’, ‘feckless’, having kids outside marriage and so forth. Other more liberal writers point to the role of international capitalism and neoliberalism in reducing the life chances of the poorest, to the point that many are not only unemployed but excluded from much of what we might reasonably describe as civil society. They also, incidentally, point to the increasing dependence of the middle classes on welfare as 'professional' jobs become deskilled, and the prevalence of births outside marriage and 'reconstituted' families following separation and divorce in the middle classes; these trends don't just define the underclass any more. Or alternatively, more people with middle-class backgrounds are becoming members of it. If you want to know, I tend to side with the more sympathetic view of what 'underclass' means.

Over the years I’ve known a lot of people who qualify for the ‘underclass’ tag. I know their world and as the blurb for the book says, it’s an unstable world where anything can happen, reality is perverse and perversity is normal. People in that world find their pleasures any way they can, and it’s often a way that’s chaotic and wild. They often end up having desperate sex in ways that can sometimes lead to trouble and more chaos. I have, frankly, edited out parts of the chaos that involve alcoholism and serious violence, but left in – and, in fact, substantially toned down – the bits that involve drug use, the police, and psychological problems including self-harming. Much of what I’ve seen first-hand would frankly be more suitable to a horror collection rather than an erotic one.

And, yes, there’s a fair bit of BDSM in the stories. Not because it’s a major part of that world, though it does happen, but because that’s my particular bent. Even so, many of the scenarios in the book are based on stuff that I’ve either seen first-hand or been told about by those involved. It’s fiction, but there are factual threads running through it.

It doesn’t, by the way, include the story of what happened to someone who was kidnapped by a drug dealer because their boyfriend didn’t pay a debt. And it doesn’t go into any detail of the sexual dynamics of couples where both parties are self-destructive and manipulative. Maybe those are for an even darker collection.

I wrote most of the stories as a form of exorcism, because I'd had the ideas running around in my brain and didn't know what to do with them, other than share them with you. It hasn't completely exorcised them, but at least I feel better now...  I don't know whether the collection will be attractive to readers, if only in a tight lipped 'Eeew, that's really nasty' way. Possibly not. I'd be gratified if you did like it, but you may not want to encourage me. 

I published them myself because I wanted to get a sense of what that involves, and now I've done the learning curve I might selfpub some stuff that's a little more conventional eroticism. Or less unconventional eroticism, anyway. I have a few ideas I'm working on.

So what would be your motive for buying this collection? I’ve described it as quasi-erotica. It has a high urban grit content, plus a lot of sex. It has a lot of irresponsible and dangerous sex entered into by people who really, profoundly, don’t care about the problems it will bring because the world’s unpredictable anyway. It has sex between people whose fantasies are utterly against the norms of political correctness and polite society – though as we already know, many people’s fantasies from all walks of life are politically incorrect and brutally transgressive. It has sex that is chaotic, perverse, pleasurable, and pleasurable because it’s perverse.

And remember, in reading this, that morals are an affectation of those who have the financial resources to afford them. Read responsibly, and if any of what you read troubles you, just remember that it probably has really happened somewhere, sometime, pretty much the way the story tells it.

The link again: Filthy Money, and other stories of sex in the gutter.

Museum: 5 paddles, 4 stings

I've just caught up with a review of my Museum of Deviant Desires, from BDSM Book Reviews. They liked it a lot. Comments included:

Fulani’s writing is nuanced but accessible and of great quality, and his grasp of both the submissive and dominant mindset is spot on and comes through in every story. There is BDSM content in every story ... Edgy, modern, industrial-flavored stories full of unlikely situations, grit, grease, and urban decay.  Some are very strange, some are very sexy, and all are quite memorable ... So: absolutely recommended if you are looking for something gritty, modern, playful, and strange.  

The reviewer calls me on one thing: the word 'trannies' in the title story. One character uses the term and another corrects him. Showing that the two principal characters have differing levels of sensitivity to gender identity descriptions was a quick way to help build the characters and has some relation to what follows, so if that's an issue for you, now you know.

Just to remind you, this is a collection of 11 short stories ranging from the lengthy down to flash fiction.

The book's currently languishing in the lower reaches of Amazon's rankings despite two five-star reviews there, so I'm guessing its problem is not too many people know about it yet. But now you do, so it should improve.

Museum is published by 1001 Nights Press and available at Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com, and also on Smashwords. It's $2.99 or £1.92 (I think).

But if, instead of parting with actual money, you'd rather get something for free you could always try Ridden, which is a completely different type of erotic writing with a vodou twist (though still driven by BDSM), and which is free on Amazon until Sunday 18 November - here's the Amazon US link and UK link.

Finally, whether you buy Museum or go for the temporarily free Ridden, please remember the one thing any book needs is an honest review - whether on Amazon, Smashwords, your own blog or wherever - that others can read make a choice about whether they should buy the book too. 

Corporate Slave now more available

Because it's just appeared on Amazon Kindle: http://www.amazon.com/Corporate-Slave-ebook/dp/B00A0VFJ32

See the posts below for an outline of the novel and an extract... 

> Edited 5 Nov to add: also now on Amazon UK - http://www.amazon.co.uk/Corporate-Slave-ebook/dp/B00A0VFJ32

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.

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...]

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!

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.

Of frogs and glue

I recently had cause to read the Wikipedia entry on sexual fetishism. As a definition, sexual fetishism is the condition of becoming aroused by particular physical objects or situations. I did note the article has warning labels all over it about being of disputed neutrality, and presumably there are judgements to be made there about what one might call the normal and conventional range of objects and situations that could cause arousal, and about the intensity of response and resultant behaviour. But I'll let that pass. Wikipedia notes that 'Many people embrace their fetish rather than attempting treatment to rid themselves of it' and on the whole I'd suggest that's probably a more positive outcome than anything a psychiatrist might attempt to 'treat' a fetish.

The terminology of fetish, of course, does throw one back to the older use of the term, which implies an object in which something sacred or supernatural resides, or perhaps which can be used to call up some sacred or supernatural part of oneself. But that's by the way.

There was one throwaway remark in the article that caught my attention:

The existential approach to mental disorders developed in the 1940s and influenced a view that fetishes had complex personal meanings beyond the general categories of psychoanalytical treatment. For instance, the Austrian neurologist and logotherapist Viktor Frankl once noted the case of a man with a sexual fetish involving, simultaneously, both frogs and glue.

Hmm... Well, real life can throw up situations wilder than any author might imagine, I guess. I'm not sure if I'd ever want to write a story that included such a fetish, though on past form even saying that is likely to mean some situation arises in which it becomes important that I do. I feel I want to know more, but also that I might not like what I find...

For the truly interested (or the truly perverse) the case is briefly mentioned in Frankl's book On the Theory and Therapy of Mental Disorders (2004) - in footnote 9 on page xxiii, which refers you another footnote and that in turn to an audiotape of one of his lectures. I guess I might not get to find out more details anytime soon... unless anyone out there would care to enlighten me?

Fetishism, shamanism?

I’ve seen and read a few things and had some conversations about fetish that sparked a line of thought.

There’s a sense of ‘fetish’ that refers to ‘the attribution of inherent value or powers to an object’. Interacting with the object, using it in some ritualistic way, enables you to communicate with a world beyond the immediate and everyday - the spirit world, a deeper level of consciousness, however you might like to model it. In that sense, do our fetishes enable us to communicate with or enter into a world that is not part of ordinary reality?

Notwithstanding the somewhat simplistic description of shamanism you'll find on Wikipedia, shamanism is similarly about communication with a world outside our normal experience - a world that is often entered through the use of powerful symbolic operators such as fetishes, objects attributed with the power I've destcribed above. OK, there's often ritual, physical exertion such as dance, and drugs too - but these are all means to a similar end. Are we all, in some small way, shamans now?

Women and transvestites probably know more about this than men. Eyeliner, lipstick, blusher and well-cut fabric have an almost ceremonial purpose. Put on your makeup, change into a favourite dress and heels, and by changing your appearance you become almost literally a different person.

Pagans know about this. Go to a pagan camp and people you normally see in jeans and T-shirts are striding around in capes, carrying a staff and with an atheme on their belt. At one level it looks rather like medieval re-enactment, but whatever people are, or aren’t, wearing (there may be a certain amount of skyclad-ness) it’s meaningful to them as a symbol of identity and something that helps them connect with whatever energies or aspects of personality of belief they want to connect with.

Probably police officers, nurses and priests know about it as well – put the uniform on and you become the kind of person the uniform symbolises, not least because it influences how others interact with you.

Fetishists know about this. Don your leathers, your PVC and latex, and you can almost feel your personality changing as the second skin covers you. They are symbols, conduits connecting you to a sexual identity outside your everyday persona. Do you become more essential? More vital? Feel a link to something that empowers you? In its own way, fetishism can be a shamanic experience.

Announcement imminent!

Some of you may have come across this short story on my 'other' blog, which has been reposted here and here.

The fun thing, really, is this. I wrote the stories, then wrote the intro in which I put myself as a character, and then wrote essentially the same story as a kind of semi-promotional piece from a different point of view in which the first person narrative was by the book's main character, with me and the publisher's editor as the other characters in it. Maybe. It could be that the protagonist is real and I'm the fictional one... You'll have to decide. How very poststructuralist and pretentiously literary of 'me'. Or of someone, anyway.

I was going to wait until the thing's actually out before doing a big announcement. In fact I still will - so this is only a pre-announcement and I'll have more to say in a couple of days' time.

Emails have been flying back and forth today sorting out the cover...

Erotic Review - new story

It hasn't been quiet at Casa Fulani. It's been hectic, which is why I haven't done any blogging. I can report that I finished a collection of short stories, more news on which will probably take months to emerge but that how it is in the world of publishing. Some stuff made it onto Deliciously Deviant and you can see it there, I'm not going to repost it here.

I've at least started my next novel, with an SF feel to it since it's set maybe a year or two in the future though I have a nasty feeling that somewhere, the world is already pretty much as I'm describing it - so it could end up being more realistic than I anticipated. Fact is often stranger than fiction, etc.

And normal service will be resumed when I've dealt with some 'housekeeping' items and pressing commitments from what I laughingly call my 'day job', much of which seems to extend into the early hours...

Oh... but what I can tell you is that the January issue of Erotic Review (issue 117, the 'Free Love' issue) has a story of mine, 'Nostalgia, All over Again'. For some reason it appears on the cover under another name, but who cares, really? It's a kind of homage to a little bdsm scenario out of Oh, Calcutta!

Click the link, pay the subscription if you don't already have one, and enjoy. I mean it's not like it's just me in there. There are three other stories and a whole host of feature articles and provocative thinkpieces... plus you can tell it's classy because there's even an erotic crossword...

Do you really want to be 'Master'?

Go on many bdsm-related social networking sites and chatrooms, and you'll find guys there who call themselves 'Master' So-and-so. I've never been convinced that a dominant should give themselves that title: I've always seen it as something others give.

I don't think I'm alone in this.

I know a sub who's often online in chatrooms and chatted up by men whose online names are 'Master' something or other. Her usual line is to ask politely on what basis they call themselves 'Master'.

This can lead to quite long exchanges in which she establishes they have no MA or MSc qualification; are not a master in a vocational sense (e.g. master baker, which is a recognised title), and are not recognised within their bdsm community as being a 'bondage master' or whatever.

She then points out that the other use of the term 'master' is an honorific title for young boys who have not yet reached the age at which they can be called 'mister' - and asks whether, in that case, they'd still like her to call them 'master'...

Personally I've always preferred to hear 'Ouch!' and 'You bastard!' rather than 'Please Master!' but maybe that's just me.

(Sorry about the lack of posts, I've been away for a few days but normal service is now resumed.)

So what were the trends of 2010?

I've just been looking at Trendhunter's round-up of the top 100 naughty trends of 2010. They include:

- the 'Lady Gag Gag' blow-up doll. Elsewhere they also feature alien blow-up dolls
- Naughty pinup shoots by air stewardesses in the US, to protest about unpaid wages (that's a new twist - 'pay us the money or we'll take our clothes off...' but I guess respectable airlines wouldn't want that kind of publicity?)
- tattoos (of course)
- intergalactic fashion
- leotards for women, suits for men (I can see the attractions... they reference the Suit Supply company ads and various female singers' stage outfits)
- the 'Fleshlight', an aid to male masturbation
- body painting parties (why have I not been invited to one?)
- mass nudity (remember the Spencer Tunick 'artwork with 2,500 people nude outside the Sydney Opera House?)
- sex in libraries (memo to self, I was going to write a story about that...)
- a selection of redheads, transvestites, transsexuals and lesbians in a variety of photo shoots and ad campaigns. Why do redheads get billed the same way as transvestites, transsexuals and lesbians? I find that quite mysterious.

I think they missed a few. For example, burlesque became very big in 2010.

Predictions for 2011? Mine would be

- club crossover, so that it becomes impossible to distinguish between a regular nightclub, a lap-dancing club and a fetish event.
- LGBT pride events become huge tourist festival-like attractions for the places that hold them.

Any other offers, people?

BTW my 'other' blog, deliciouslydeviant, has just had two posts - a short story from me and a round-up of bdsm how-to and reference books from Velvet Tripp.

New story out from 17th Dec at Oysters and Chocolate

Just a quick announcement that Fulani's short story "Relieving the Stress" will go live on Oysters and Chocolate online magazine this Friday, December 17th. So it's a free read, probably in their "Liquorice Whips" story category (aka sensual BDSM).

Enjoy!

At a gay club...

So on Sunday night I was at a gay club, walking down the stairs, on my way to the van with a couple of long metal poles - because you did know I have a lock-up full of kit that occasionally gets used at fetish events, right? And the club had been using it over the weekend - and two gay guys were walking up the stairs.

I stop to let them pass, and quick as a flash one of the guys turns to the other and says 'Look out, man coming with a big load!'

I thought it was funny, anyway.

Random musing: I just did a mental check, and despite identifying as a straight male, I can only think of a couple of friends of mine who are also straight males. They're virtually all gay men and lesbian or bisexual women. So despite being part of the straight 'majority', I seem to be moving almost exclusively in queer circles, in which I'm clearly a minority!

Oh, and as far as kit goes: among other things I have a small cage, a St Andrews Cross, a scaffolding cube with multiple attachment points and many uses, a whipping post, a spanking bench, a cargo net on a large frame, a bondage bed and some other stuff. Happy to hire it out, though obviously it's kinda big stuff that takes up a lot of room, so we're talking events more than private parties... The pic at the head of the post is the 'cube', in use at a fetish performance at a goth event a couple of years ago.

JG Ballard

JG (James Graham) Ballard (1930-2009) remains one of the most prominent and transgressive authors of the 20th century. He wrote primarily in the genre of science fiction, but almost always with an eye for the psycho-sexual foibles of individuals and how they might be formed by, or inform, society - and he didn't shrink at dealing with matters considered too bizarre or too controversial for others to write about. The most cited, though by no means the only, example is his 'Crash' (1973) which deals with the sexual fetishism of car crashes. It was later made into a film - which is still banned in a number of places, including the Borough of Westminster in London, apparently. His later book, 'The Atrocity Exhibition', was at one point prosecuted as obscene in the UK.

He is the source of a number of quotable quotes about sex, fetish, and pornography, including those below:

"A widespread taste for pornography means that nature is alerting us to some threat of extinction."

"Science is the ultimate pornography, analytic activity whose main aim is to isolate objects from their contexts in time and space. This obsession with the specific activity of quantified functions is what science shares with pornography."

"All over the world major museums have bowed to the influence of Disney and become theme parks in their own right. The past, whether Renaissance Italy or Ancient Egypt, is re-assimilated and homogenized into its most digestible form. Desperate for the new, but disappointed with anything but the familiar, we recolonize past and future. The same trend can be seen in personal relationships, in the way people are expected to package themselves, their emotions and sexuality, in attractive and instantly appealing forms." (The Atrocity Exhibition)

"A car crash harnesses elements of eroticism, aggression, desire, speed, drama, kinesthetic factors, the stylizing of motion, consumer goods, status - all these in one event. I myself see the car crash as a tremendous sexual event really: a liberation of human and machine libido (if there is such a thing)."

“Do we see, in the car-crash, the portents of a nightmare marriage between technology, and our own sexuality? … Is there some deviant logic unfolding here, more powerful than that provided by reason?”

"Fiction is a branch of neurology: the scenarios of nerve and blood vessels are the written mythologies of memory and desire."

"The endless newsreel clips of nuclear explosions that we saw on TV in the 1960s (were) a powerful incitement to the psychotic imagination, sanctioning everything." (The Atrocity Exhibition)

"At the logic of fashion, such once-popular perversions as pedophilia and sodomy will become derided cliches, as amusing as pottery ducks on suburban walls." (The Atrocity Exhibition)

"Their violence (the jungle wars of the '70s), and all violence for that matter, reflects the neutral exploration of sensation that is taking place, within sex as elsewhere and the sense that the perversions are valuable precisely because they provide a readily accessible anthology of exploratory techniques." (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." (The Atrocity Exhibition)

"The marriage of reason and nightmare that dominated the 20th century has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world. Across the communications landscape move the spectres of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy. Thermo-nuclear weapons systems and soft-drink commercials coexist in an overlit realm ruled by advertising and pseudo-events, science and pornography. Over our lives preside the great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century – sex and paranoia…In a sense, pornography is the most political form of fiction, dealing with how we use and exploit each other, in the most urgent and ruthless way."

"I love the smell of male urine and the reek of his groin on my bath towels after he’d had a shower" (character in th enovel Super-Cannes)

"She had originally agreed to appear naked, but on seeing the cars informed me that she would only appear topless—an interesting logic was at work there." (think this comes from Crash)

"Trying to exhaust himself, Vaughan devised an endless almanac of terrifying wounds and insane collisions: The lungs of elderly men punctured by door-handles; the chests of young women impaled on steering-columns; the cheek of handsome youths torn on the chromium latches of quarter-lights. To Vaughan, these wounds formed the key to a new sexuality, born from a perverse technology. The images of these wounds hung in the gallery of his mind, like exhibits in the museum of a slaughterhouse." (Crash)

"One looks forward to the day when the General Theory of Relativity and the Principia will outsell the Kama Sutra in back-street bookshops."

Bicycle Infrastructure Fetish?

I know it's only October but I've been looking for a 2011 wall calendar for my study. The strangest so far, by far, is the The 2010 Copenhagenize Bicycle Infrastructure Fetish Calendar on Lulu.com.

Now that's what I call a proper fetish... Never mind leather, latex, chains and whips - bicycle infrastructure can be a truly fetishistic experience! Unfortunately they don't seem to have a 2011 version (yet).

When having a pulse is a problem...

This isn't my story, but it's a good one. Velvet was out today doing a photoshoot of fetish gear - we have some friends who sell it and they want pics for their website. One of the items was a nipple clamp, which was being modelled on an actual nipple. And she gets the macro lens for a really good closeup shot and keeps having a problem with the focus.

'What's wrong?' asks the model.

'Well,' says Velvet, 'you've got a pulse.'

Everyone there laughs. I'm sure you get the joke, too... But there is a serious point, because the depth of field with a macro lens can be only a millimetre or two and the even with a flash, the model's pulse was enough to keep throwing the image out of focus.

So when you next look at any fetish photography, stop and think how technically difficult some of the shots might have been to take with a live model...

No, I can't show you the eventual successful pic. Not yet anyway. But the idea of this exchange is cool enough that you shouldn't be surprised to find it in one of my stories at some point in the future.

New stuff

Two new things to report.

First: story out in a new Xcite anthology. The Cocktales e-book series, book is Kiss in the Dark and my story is 'Zen and the Art of Bondage'.

Blurb - When is an orgasm a work of art? When it’s the result of Japanese bondage, of course! Miranda works in a bookshop and when one of her customers keeps buying books on Japanese culture, she quizzes him about his interest. This takes her on a journey from ikebana, Japanese flower arranging, all the way to shibari, Japanese bondage. She discovers the best sex toy you can have is a length of rope...

Obviously I kind of prefer my story but seriously, I'd recommend them all.

As always, using the affiliate link at the side of this page (and buying stuff, whether it's mine or not) puts some fractions of a penny in my bank account.

Second: my first NOVEL is out, published by Pink Flamingoin the US. Title is The Secret Circus of Pain and Degradation - print and ebook versions.

Blurb - “The Secret Circus of Pain and Degradation, an entertainment for those with enquiring minds”… Amy and Paula, living in a small and small-minded town, are too curious to stay away. But when the ringmaster displays his talent for hypnotism, they discover that what they’d always wanted to do was run away and join a circus.
They are inducted as professional, performing submissives into the S&M world of the circus folk, including being made available for discreet private functions. They experience the depths, and ecstacies, of decadence and depravity.
Ultimately Paula is captured by a mad private client; Amy mobilizes the circus to save her.
Meanwhile, the traveling circus is planning an offshoot—a circus-like fetish club. Amy and Paula, now fully inducted into a fetish lifestyle, become its managers as well as star performers.

Have fun! I'm just about to start the next novel...