As a masochist, I’m a long ways off from the Princess and the Pea. My skin needs a lot more than a teeny vegetable to make an impact. I’m a horrible marker. If you thrash me with a knobkerrie all weekend, I’ll wake up on Monday morning looking as though I was bitten by an ant.
A lazy ant.
On a Sunday.
After it already put all its energy into its morning gym routine.
I always...
2025-01-05 11:31:25 +0000 UTC View PostWhen I first joined Fetlife, I would have defined the kink scene as “Literally the most terrifying thing I’ve ever encountered.” I’d seen Eyes Wide Shut, so I knew you all looked like Naomi Campbell and had black-tie orgies in super secret locations. If you wanted to attend one of those orgies, you’d have to befriend a grey man in a black suit hiding at the back of a random, smoky bar. You’d give him The Password, and if he thought you were sexy enough, he’d give you another pas...
2025-01-02 11:38:19 +0000 UTC View PostOne of the most common errors I see in this workshop is the use of sentence fragments. These are sentences that don’t have a subject or verb. Put simply, they are incomplete sentences. Here are some examples:
Ran to the bakery to buy a cupcake. (Who ran to the bakery? It must have been SpanishRed, obviously, so the sentence has omitted the subject. It should read, “SpanishRed ran to the bakery to buy a cupcake, but Woody should have bought her some, like, ages ago.)
My favouri...
2025-01-01 08:56:03 +0000 UTC View PostOne of poker players’ most damning conditions is known as “full tilt.” Either you’ve hit a massive winning streak and want to hold onto it so desperately that you make stupid decisions, or you’ve hit a massive losing streak that has the same effect. Your brain is spinning and anxiety has taken hold. Nothing can stop the feeling, but tilt demands you keep playing, so you do. This only makes your situation even worse. Cause becomes effect, and effect becomes cause. On and on it goes.<...
2024-12-30 09:22:32 +0000 UTC View PostYou don’t really spot lions in Kruger. Nobody can spot lions, so we spot stationery cars. Then you sidle up next to them and say, “WHATDIDYOUSEEEEEEEEE???” and then they say, “Lions over theeeeeere!!!” and then you say, “WHEEEERRREEE?” and they say, “BY THAT TREE!!.” And then you say, “OOOOH!! I SEEEE!” and then you sit and look until a car pulls up next to you and says, “WHATDIDYOUSEEEEEEEEE???” That’s it. That’s what safari is like.
When you first get to ...
2024-12-29 07:33:29 +0000 UTC View PostBobbalicious the Princely Hound once developed a case of kennel cough. Over 30 hours, he was jabbed with syringes, poked with vet fingers, and stuck on scales. Through it all, he sat quietly conjuring up stillness. He didn’t bark. He didn’t growl. He didn’t try to walk away. His doggo brain had no idea why we were hurting him, but somehow, he trusted me enough to wait out the nastiness.
I’ve been wondering why, and maybe I have an answer. When he was hungry, I fed h...
2024-12-29 06:03:26 +0000 UTC View PostEarlier in the week, I included an excerpt from the Bad Sex in Fiction Awards. It went like this:
> She did it again and again, holding me with force and moving me to the rhythm of the surf. She wiggled her breasts beneath my hands and intensified the pushing. I went in up to my groin and came out almost entirely. My body was her gearstick.
On the surface, it seems horrendous, but upon closer inspection, things might not be quite so clearcut. The prota...
2024-12-27 10:51:27 +0000 UTC View Post
Aquarius: You will almost certainly do a fair bit of walking from one place to another this year. A handsome stranger will spot you in a supermarket queue, but will probably not bother talking to you because that’s life. Sorry.
Aries: Your year will be an emotional one, with plenty of time spent above ground. If you’re single, you’ll spend even more time in 2019 being single, but if you’re in a relationship, you will enjoy the longevity of that romance ...
2024-12-26 07:52:23 +0000 UTC View PostEvery year the literature scene gives out The Bad Sex in Fiction Awards. Here's one of the top contenders:
and the pained frenzy of his bulbous salutation extenuating his excitement as it whacked and smacked its way into every muscle of Eliza’s body except for the otherwise central zone.
When I said “bad” I meant really, really bad. Here. Have another:
Her mouth was intensely ovoid, an almond mouth, of citrus crescents. And under th...
2024-12-23 08:35:02 +0000 UTC View Post
I'm floating elegantly around the kitchen in my oh-so-casual little black dress. I delicately fetch a spoon from the drawer because “dating me” puts her dishes away neatly. Am I wearing underwear? Hell no. This is “dating me”, and she’s too sexy for knickers.
I don’t swear. I don’t burn myself. Oh, no. “Dating me” knows the sauce is perfect because she measures ingredients instead of throwing them in while headbanging to Bohemian Rhapsody. Only “real me...
2024-12-22 07:56:29 +0000 UTC View Post
Jackson was with us for a year and a half. He had a yuuuge fan club, so the volunteers had a farewell party before he went off to his forever home.
2024-12-21 05:38:37 +0000 UTC View PostQueequeg was the only reason I read Moby Dick. Did I care about the whales? Nope. Did I care who Ishmael was? Nope again. I cared about reading as much Queequeg dialogue as humanly possible.
Queequeg: Ishmael, what is soul?
Ishmael: Soul? Well, that's a difficult question. Do you believe in God? Like a big chief over all men?
Queequeg: Like Ojo?
Ishmael: Well, I reckon so, but bigger than that, like a captain of the sun.
Melville pumped a lot of life into Queequeg. He was...
2024-12-20 11:02:03 +0000 UTC View PostI own a book called, “The Highly Selective Dictionary for the Extraordinarily Literate.” Here are some of the words it contains:
Epistolary
Sangfroid
Malefic
Detumescence.
Here are some of the words it does not contain:
Red
Moist
Bloom
Creak.
Did you get as much of a sense of “sangfroid” as you did “red”? Well, no.
Did you feel moist as well as you did malefic? No.
Did you hear “creak”? Probably.
Did you hear “...
Abstractions are the most useless words in fiction and poetry. Readers don’t feel or see words like “happy” or “beautiful”. They don’t have a visual component, so your reader must think extra hard to grasp what you’re saying. This is terrible terrain for writing. Bald emoting rarely works, so we must invent new ways to describe emotions. There is only one way to achieve that: By paying attention to your own internal world. What does happiness feel like? Where does sadness live i...
2024-12-18 09:01:28 +0000 UTC View PostIn any game of poker, there’s that one asshole at the table who bets every chip he has on every hand, even the losing ones. To most players, this is good news--if you play carefully, you can win a huge pot without even trying. Not me, though. I get my revenge with the ingenious strategy of losing every practical thought in my brain and betting all my chips on my own losing hands.
“Take that mother fucker!”
2024-12-18 06:18:08 +0000 UTC View Post
Ideas are the ink of the writing endeavor. Without them, we can bring nothing to the page, but every pen has a limited supply of ink. If ideas arrived in vast quantities, Hemingway would have written 50 books, not seven. J.D Salinger would never have needed to move into seclusion to overcome writer’s block, and I would have finished my second poetry collection a decade ago.
Ideas are in short supply, but they’ll be in even shorter supply if you’re not waiting for them. To be a wri...
2024-12-17 08:41:35 +0000 UTC View PostI wasn’t always a writer. Before I found poetry, I made visual art. To evolve, I had to learn to look at what was there, not what I thought was there. If I didn’t look properly, my art would fail. I learned the world is infinitely more complex than I’d imagined, and that’s how I learned to create realistic images. We must use the same discipline to plagiarise our own lives. We must look at what is really there, not what we think is there.
You don’t always 2024-12-17 08:40:16 +0000 UTC View Post
If you want to be a submissive, you must cultivate deference with these seven yoga exercises, this obedience class, and this daily writing task. Do them, and the movements of your body and pen will enhance the compliance of your mind. You will learn to tolerate all the things you despise about D/s. So says a particular niche of knink, anyway, but I’m allergic to piousness in all its forms. I won't be training myself to be one iota more subly than I am already. I don't want to invite moralit...
2024-12-15 17:14:27 +0000 UTC View PostOne of the volunteers sent this clip of her and Bosco.
2024-12-14 11:15:00 +0000 UTC View Post
Alfie knows his ears are his biggest asset, so he makes sure they're in a new position every time you take a photo. Heckin' sexy.
2024-12-14 09:02:28 +0000 UTC View PostEvil is inherent in the world. It might even be inherent in your characters, but a writer is a storyteller, not a moralist. Your job is to tell the audience what happened, and not what you, as a writer, think about what happened. Your reader will judge the difference between good and evil without your help. It’s not your job to define that for them. Every time you assume your readers can’t make those judgements on their own, you push them away a little more.
... 2024-12-14 08:55:41 +0000 UTC View Post
IF YOU REALLY WANT TO HEAR about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them.
2024-12-13 07:21:35 +0000 UTC View Post
As you can see, she's the favouritist favourite at Tears right now. On the way to an outing. Heckin excellent.
2024-12-13 06:00:00 +0000 UTC View PostLet’s say you just opened a restaurant, and someone walks in asking for a free meal. You’re a nice guy, so you offer your best dish. The next day, two more freeloaders come in. You politely decline, but every day, more arrive in ever increasing and noisier numbers, which affects your paying guests. You’re losing brand power and money. How politely do you decline your freeloaders now? What about after six months? A year? How long until you start getting annoyed?
It took me two year...
2024-12-13 05:32:34 +0000 UTC View PostThe memoir is probably every new writer’s favourite genre. I’ve met a host of accountants and mathematicians who’ve decided they are writers purely on the basis of their “interesting lives”. The story, after all, has already been “written” and the author knows everything there is to know about it. That’s two shortcuts wrapped up in a single book. Surely that’s a good thing?
Well, no.
Most memoirs operate on the presumption that if it is true, it is also artistica...
2024-12-11 09:39:44 +0000 UTC View Post“Today I’m five. I was four last night going to sleep in Wardrobe, but when I wake up in Bed in the dark I’m changed to five, abracadabra. Before that I was three, then two, then one, then zero. “Was I minus numbers?” “Hmm?” Ma does a big stretch. “Up in Heaven. Was I minus one, minus two, minus three — ?” “Nah, the numbers didn’t start till you zoomed down.” “Through Skylight. You were all sad till I happened in your tummy.” “You said it.” Ma lea...
2024-12-10 07:50:30 +0000 UTC View Post
Despair is a liar. There is always hope, and you will find it in love.
Isolation breeds suicidal ideation. Secrets breed isolation. Sharing secrets brings healing.
Shame will kill you sooner than grief will.
A good medical team is worth its weight in antidepressants.
When you know you have no strength left, look deeper. It’s right there waiting for you to finally acknowledge that you’re a hero. <...
2024-12-10 03:58:45 +0000 UTC View PostHave you ever gotten so absorbed in a book you forgot that reality even existed? You transmute your entire soul into the story and lose awareness that you were even reading. You barely even knew time was passing. This is one of fiction’s highest goals, and you can only achieve it by becoming invisible to your readers. The story must exist in the reader’s mind. The writer must not. This week, we’re going to learn how to become invisible. You’ll be familiar with some of the strategies w...
2024-12-09 06:23:34 +0000 UTC View Post