Feb 132023
 

Time management is key to working from home. I have to set aside time to work, eat, do chores and spend time with my family but I also have to schedule my fun time. If I don’t, I will never do the fun things because there is always one more story to write or one more chore to do. Eventually I burn out and then I spend an entire day doing nothing.

One way I combat this is setting aside a Moment of Bliss every day. This is a time when I do whatever the fuck I want. Some days it can be as simple as getting back to a book I am reading or something more substantial as cooking a recipe that has captured my imagination.

Lately it has been listening to erotic audio on OhCleo. I have always been a fan of audio erotica but rarely seem to find the time to just stop and listen without multitasking. The Moment of Bliss gives me that time and I am very grateful for it.

Another thing I have been doing is playing more journal games. I have already talked about Thousand Year Old Vampire, but I also love returning to Umbra by Anna Blackwell. It is amazing what writing purely for yourself can do for your creativity.

What about you? Where are you going to find your moment of bliss today?

Dec 242021
 

As part of my never ending quest to actually have time off, I will not be posting for the rest of the year. I promised myself that I wouldn’t worry about writing the final week of December. Knowing me though, that will be the week I insist on starting a new and overly ambitious idea. Oh well, at least I won’t worry about blogging.

It has been a weird semi-COVID year. The wife is still working from home, we’re still wearing masks but also eating out, and we no longer have three months supply of paper towels but thinking maybe we should? Omicron is lurking out there and now I’m scheduling a booster shot for the vaccine. It is all part of the new normal and yet I still struggle with it sometimes.

One thing I am happy for is 99% less news about the orange shitstain that took over our country for four years.

But what I am most happy for you is you, reader. You come by to read the sexy nonsense I keep putting out. You buy my ebooks. You continue to surprise me every month with your acceptance of my particular kind of weirdness. Thank you from the bottom of my heart and my libido reader. Without you, life would be so much harder.

Take care of yourself, reader. Drink water. Treat yourself kindly.

 my life  Comments Off on Happy Holidays and Goodbye to 2021
Apr 232021
 

Today is my birthday. I turn 48, which is a mind numbing number. That looks like the age of a Call of Cthulhu RPG character that I deliberately age to get more skill points in Ancient Egyptian and Library Use. Real people don’t have that age.

Last time this year, I was in month two of the lockdown, picking up carryout from restaurants and watching horror movies on my computer. That was in-between worrying about President Orange Shitstain and obsessively following election news with the prayers that Democrats get their shit together.

This year, I will be picking up carryout from restaurants, watching Mortal Kombat and playing Pandemic Legacy Season 3 with my wife. Orange Shitstain is just a bad memory and I already have my first dose of the COVID vaccine. Things are getting better and I just got to hold out a little longer.

Getting older is weird. You pick up a lot of information and wisdom. I can make a much better burger than I could a year ago. But you also forget shit too. I get halfway through some movies before realizing I have seen them. Experience feels like a zero sum sometimes and but hopefully more sticks than gets forgotten.

One thing you do retain is how special the things you love are. That could be people, music, fiction or whatever. If you love something, enjoy and appreciate the hell out of it. Nothing is guaranteed to be here tomorrow, so enjoy that shit now.

I’m looking forward to seeing what the next 48 years bring.

Jan 012021
 

Well, that was a hell of a year. Between the pandemic, the lockdowns and politics, I am spent most of the year oscillating between anxiety and despair. All of the normal routines I had for exercise, writing and dealing with depression flew out the window. It has been one hell of a fight.

But I have managed a few achievements. I put out two interactive erotica books this year and they both sold well. I put out one stand-alone, Mutant Marauders, and while it did not sell big numbers, it was nice to get it done and out into the world.

I also put out an erotic journal game, Your Demon Lover. It sold three copies. Ouch. It has been a while since I had something flop that badly, but it is more amusing than disheartening. I enjoy journal games and I am proud of what I did and how I did it. Still, it put a kibosh on the other game ideas I had.

Somehow, in the worse year ever, I managed to get out 11 Vaquel Di stories. They weren’t always on time, but I got them out. In addition, I put out two collections of her adventures on Amazon. In a weird way, this might be Vaquel’s best year.

Another plus is that I think I finally cracked my personal code on how to do “sketches” in written form. I have always been jealous of artists being able to evoke strong sexual feelings with a static image like a sketch and I wanted to be able to replicate that for my own work. Fiction Bites has been my attempt at that kind of work and I think I have been mostly successful with it. These tiny bits of erotica help me feel productive and I hope have created some nice sexual imagery for my readers.

So what about next year? Vaquel Di continues of course. I need to decide what my next interactive erotica book will be about. Sales don’t really support non-interative erotica books but I would like to do at least two this year to stay in practice.

Most of all, I think I just want to be happier in 2021. Let’s see how we can make that happen.

Nov 082020
 

After four long years, President Orange Shit-stain is finally defeated. It has been a heck of a week.

Election night was scary as I realized that yep, half of the country is still racist as fuck. It is baffling to me that in the middle of a pandemic, so many people want to stay with the bleach-injector guy. I stayed up until midnight, taking small comfort that Georgia and North Carolina was competitive and Arizona was kicking ass.

My dreams that night were stressful.

Wednesday was a bit better and Thursday was more so. There was a scene in a Red Dwarf novel where Lister has to shoot a rocket into an asteroid that needed to bounce off another planetary body in order to save the ship. He fired the rocket, but because space is big, it took several days for the results to play out. His life was at stake, but all he could do was slowly watch things move at astronomical speeds. I thought about that scene a lot the last two days.

My intention was to write during this time but you know, the brain just didn’t want to cooperate. I have a story for Vaquel all plotted out and 1/3 done, but I just couldn’t make my brain work. The best I did was proofread my next interactive book and even that was slow going.

Friday was funny. I knew Biden was going to win, but I was just waiting for the final word. We all knew it. The Orange Shit-stain knew it. Articles were being written about White House staff drawing straws to figure out who was going to tell the Shit-stain to grow up. It was nice, but it was a muted joy.

Then came Saturday. I was about to head out to the store when Twitter started screaming with joy. I flipped on the news and there it was, Biden was the winner. People were dancing in the street. The Orange Shit-Stain’s lawyer was having a press conference at a landscaping place for the some reason. Joe Scarborough was solemnly congratulating Biden while hoping we forgot about how much free airtime he gave the Shit-Stain back in 2016. Gritty memes filled Twitter. Something bloomed in my heart and I realized it was joy.

Randomly, I was reminded of something a Bush official said way back before we invaded Iraq. “They will greet us as liberators.” That was bullshit, but it felt real now. We have been liberated. The petty tyrant and his twitter feed was on his way out. We have moved out of the abusive family home. We have packed our bags and moved out while the psycho spouse was at work. We are free.

Of course, I know he will be around for ten more weeks but there are already changes. Twitter has turned his feed into a long list of content warnings. Fox News is wondering if he will grow up and act like an adult. Biden spoke to the country like a man who owns a heart. It feels good.

There is also the Senate. Goddamn, 2020, you just don’t let up. The Georgia runoffs will need to be dealt with. It is time to work our asses off. We can’t afford to slack off, but we can still have room for a little joy.

Now hopefully I can get back to writing space porn.

 my life  Comments Off on Liberated
Oct 212020
 

Yesterday I finished the first draft on my next interactive erotica book. I should have finished it on Monday, but I decided that it needed one more choice before ending. These kinds of last minute changes can be annoying, but they are also impossible to plan for. There is a rhythm in an interactive story where you as the reader just feel like there is a choice coming. When that choice doesn’t appear, well you feel cheated.

With the first draft done, I won’t look at it again until next week when I begin my edits. That gives me five glorious days to myself where I can do anything. The sky is the limit! I don’t have to worry about writing and I can just chill.

So of course, my brain is thinking about what I want to write next. The brain is an asshole.

I have been reading a book about different famous chefs. Often, they got started by getting interested in cooking and enrolling in local classes. A lot of these classes were just one hour a day.

I got jealous reading this and wished I could go to cooking school as well. Then it hit me. I have YouTube. I have a ton of cookbooks. Why not make my own cooking school and teach my ass some things?

Since I will not be traveling this year thanks to COVID, I have decided to go to self-taught cooking school. There are a dozen things I have been too intimidated to try, or just flat out suck at that I want to improve on. This year I will make a roux on a reliable basis! This is the year I poach an egg! I am going to figure out how to make that crispy mojo half-chicken that I used to get all the time at that Caribbean place in Atlanta. My time is now!

Cooking is also a nice distraction from the election. I have voted and there is nothing left for me to do, but my anxiety feels different. Deep down, I feel like if I let my guard down then somehow that Orange Shit Stain of a President will get elected again. It is completely irrational but that is where I am. I doubt I will be able to relax until that motherfucker gets tossed out of the White House.

So that is my advice to you. Pick up some sort of hobby for the next month or two. It doesn’t have to be something grand. Write some porn. Study that weird subject you don’t have time for. Just give your brain something to do during this pandemic except worry and fret.

Sep 212020
 

This has been a shit year. Between COVID and the President’s constant malice towards his own country, it has been a real downer of a year. I needed a distraction and that meant writing another porn book. The success of “Be the Supervillain” showed that smaller interactive porn books sell just as well as the giant epics, so I decided to try my hand at another similar size book.

Funny enough, I have a rule against tackling big projects during September through December. That is holiday time when every one has parties and my wife might decide out of the blue that we need to fly down to Florida NEXT WEEK. This is traditionaly a time when I have the least control over my time, so trying to write a big project is an exercise in frustration.

But hey, COVID made sure I don’t have to worry about any of that.

For my 7th interactive erotica book, I am writing about working at a sexy hotel. In 2020, it feels incredibly decadent to be writing about meeting new people, seeing a luxurious hotel and not live under the threat of wildfires. Technically I am writing about the real world, but it almost feels as outlandish as a space station.

Progress has been great. I have halfway done with the first draft, which is Incredible considering I have been working on it for 3-4 weeks. It is easy to write when you are having fun and I am working very hard to make this fun for myself. So far, so good.

Then Ruth Ginsberg died on Friday. As I said on twitter, “Jesus H fucking Christ on a stick.” What was already a death march towards the election has turned into a new tsunami of high anxiety. Republicans are about to ratfuck the country some more and there ain’t a damn thing we can do about it other than scream and protest, which has pretty much become the core activity of 2020 already.

Fuck, I am emotionally wrung out. I think the country is worn out. We are goddamned exhausted, but, we got to keep fighting. We got to protect our vote. We got to keep protesting. We have got to fight every day.

And yet at the same time, we need to take care of ourselves. Much like I felt when this Cheeto shit-stain of a President got elected, there must be joy along with the fight. So I am going to keep writing. I am going to keep updating. I am going to tell you about cool music, movies and books that I like. I am going to finish this book about a sexy hotel and when you read it, hopefully it will provide you a respite from the raging whirlwind of doom that seems to surround us.

Fight. Take care of yourselves. Hydrate. Sleep. Repeat.

 my life  Comments Off on Dispatch from the Valley of Foxes
Feb 242020
 

There was a spell book in my elementary school library. I don’t recall it explaining a mythology or philosophy, but my vague memory of the spells suggest it was certainly Wiccan. That is pretty amazing considering that it was a small town school in the South. It was the early 80’s, so the Satanic Panic might not have been around. I highly doubt the book is still there, but I wonder.

The book had spells for money, health and of course, love. Even at nine years old, I had some insane crushes. I remember thinking the book could finally get a certain blonde girl to notice me. There was just one problem. The spell involved burning a note, and I was deathly afraid of fire. No love spells for me. Another spell involved burying something in the ground. My distaste for worms and dirt in general ruled that spell out.

The thing that I remember most was believing in the book. I had no doubt that the spells would work if I would just put the work in. I knew that David Copperfield was doing optical illusions, but for some reason, I thought magic spells in a book were as real as the book about rockets.

Later when I was a jaded teenager, I came across the Necronomicon in the Waldenbooks. I had started reading H.P. Lovecraft earlier that year and recognized the title. Now, I knew Lovecraft was fiction and I knew this alleged Necronomicon couldn’t possibly be the dread book of the Mad Arab. This was also a few years after my atheist epiphany so I didn’t believe in God, the Devil, spells or Cosmic Horrors.

I still bought the book. I was curious and liked Lovecraft enough to want to have even a fake facsimile of the famous dread book.

It was shit, of course.

But because the book was so serious about itself, I felt that tiny glimmer of belief that I hadn’t felt since I read that one spell book in elementary school. The force of conviction the book had convinced me for one tiny second that maybe this was real. That belief cracked and died when I recognized the Sumerian mythology it was trying to pass off as hidden truths. Other parts were poorly done as well and I remember finishing it with a monumental level of contempt.

Flash forward to today. I am working on a writing journal game where the player writes about their relationship with a demon lover they summoned. The game is written entirely in-character as if this is a real book of magic. There are dread warnings. There is a little bit of work involved in making your journal. The player is writing the Journal as a tool to hold onto their sanity as well as providing a sort of black box in case anything happens to the player.

In short, it is a bit full of shit, but I hope it also evokes a mood. I hope when people play it, they feel that delicious thrill of making something special happen. I hope when they write about their demon lover, it is with the same intense emotion that I felt when I cracked open the books of magic from my youth.

Jan 242020
 

Recently I have been reading Cthulhu Apocalypse by Pelgrane Press. It is a role-playing game supplement about playing adventures after a terrible disaster has killed 99% of the human population. It has some clever ideas, like setting the campaign in 1936, and focusing more on the players still investigating things rather than have adventures to find food that day. I highly recommend it, even if you don’t play rpg’s, as it explores the apocalypse from some different angles.

One of those angles is the idea of maybe a natural disaster killing off humanity, and the monsters are slowly coming out to see what happened. It is a cool idea. The world is more of an empty graveyard with mysterious sights and sounds as opposed to a zombie world where hordes lurk everywhere. It is a lovely lonely idea.

It reminds me of one of the best all time apocalypse stories ever written. Called Footnotes on a Species Once Called Humanity, it was written by Derek Pegritz in 2006 and was posted in parts on his personal website. It takes place after Cthulhu has risen and his spawn are stomping around the earth. The narrator and his town has fled to a cave complex in the mountains. It protects them from being stepped on by giant monsters, but the psychic aura of the monsters reaches deep beneath the earth and drives most of them mad. Or maybe they went crazy because humanity was over and they were trapped in the dark. I don’t quite recall, but I do remember the narrator was alone and trying his best to keep his shit together. It was a stark nihilistic story and I loved it.

Isolation is something that appeals to me a lot but I have seen the negative effects it has on my psyche. My family was a hostile environment growing up, and even as an adult, I find myself avoiding sharing my feelings with others. It takes a lot for me to open up, it takes a lot for me to socialize and it takes a hell of a lot for me trust. My instinct is to avoid people, but when I am alone, I get depressed and fragile. Finding that balance is a struggle. I want to be that hermit in the lighthouse, but I know I need to be the friendly guy at the bar in order to stay sane.

So reading “Footnotes” was a weird mix of happy daydream and dreadful nightmare. Part of me envied the narrator’s ability to survive on his own wits and discretion while the other part of me agonized over the thought of being utterly alone without anyone to care whether you live or die. The character was in hopeless isolation, but hopeless isolation is sort of my natural habitat.

You can’t find the story online anymore. I have tried looking for other copies but there aren’t any. It almost feels appropriate. The story that has most imprinted my views on apocalypses and survivor stories has itself, not survived.

Jan 172020
 

Alpha Centauri is one of my favorite games of all time. Created in 1999, it is a spinoff of Sid Meir’s Civilization games. In Alpha, you play factions of colonists on a distant planet. Before the even land, the colonists have broken into different factions based on opposing ideologies. The game deals with themes of transhumanism, environmental responsibility and the ethics of exterminating that shithead who keeps invading your lands.

I had the itch to play it again but I held off. Like all Civilization games, Alpha Centauri can be really addictive. There is always something more to do. You can sit down and plan to play for only an hour, but then “one more turn” kicks in and the next thing you know, it is 3am.

So I decided to try something really stupid. I would play Alpha, but I would only play ONE turn a day. That’s it. One turn and shut it down. That way, I won’t get suckered into it.

The whole idea is stupid. I am not sure how many turns it takes to play an average game of Alpha, but I know it is in the hundreds. The early game especially goes by fast as it can take you six turns to build a single unit. That is six days of looking at a progress meter grown and doing nothing else.

So of course, I had to try it.

It has been twelve days and I have to say, it is delightful. As a porn writer, I know all about delaying gratification but this takes it to a new level. Every turn I play is the most thoughtful experience. I don’t want to rush my turn, so I think about everything. Is my resources properly placed? Do I still plan to explore west when I get a unit? What does this button do?

Now granted, things took a turn when I made a colony unit, sent it forth and had it destroyed by my first contact with another faction. The white hot rage I felt demanded instant revenge. In a normal game, I would have built a bunch of units and sent them out to crush my enemy, and I would not have stopped playing until revenge was satisfied or thwarted.

But this isn’t a regular game. I gave the order for a scout unit to pursue the attacker and then I logged off for the day. The next day, still pissy, I set up orders to make another scout. The first scout was still en route to the last known location of the enemy. The day after that, units are still in production while one unit is moving. My rage has dulled to a bitter calm. The day after that, my bitterness has turned to skepticism that I can really fight a war with just scouts. Now I am considering just setting up a border and resuming colonization. It all depends on how soon I meet the enemy.

If I ever do have the fight, win or lose, the feelings that accompany it are going to be intense.

I wonder what other recreational activities might benefit from a little slowing down?