The Prop Master Soars Into The Desert Air

Cover of The Propmaster. Cindy should be braless and Jack should be pantsless here, but Amazon is having NONE of that! Click on the pic and be whisked to Amazon links all over the world.

In my new book The Prop Master, now available on Amazon, Jack Davis and his girlfriend and love slave Cindy Sturges are an up-and-coming couple in the movie industry a few decades from now. Jack is a prop master for movies, a job that sometimes entails tying people up for scenes. Cindy is a stunt woman/actress who's trying to move into acting full time. Jack's bondage and dominance sexuality with Cindy pays off on the job because it has made him a strong advocate for safety in bondage scenes, even if that means objecting strongly enough to stop production at times, and also because Jack knows how to use bondage to ramp up the drama and sexiness of any bondage or damsel in distress scene to whatever degree the director desires.

This makes Jack appealing to both smart, ambitious actresses who want their scenes to work well, and insurers who want to minimize costs associated with injuries on the set and the resulting lawsuits.

Cindy is in demand because she has an instinct for getting the most out of any scene involving bondage or a power exchange, most especially scenes involving male dominance and female submission, because in their private life, Jack and Cindy play out these scenes in the bedroom and enjoy them immensely, within the context of their thoroughly egalitarian relationship outside the bedroom.

Jack and Cindy's skills lead them to sign with Desert Industry Dreams Incorporated,(DiD Inc.), a well-financed movie production company that plans to create movies that, when properly cut, can easily earn an R or even a PG rating and be shown in theaters and on cable television, a dying market in the future, but whose full versions will entertain viewers on the adult websites who are major backers of the company.

Can Jack and Cindy's relationship survive the attempts of hot female movie stars who, almost by reflex, attempt to seduce Jack, and the attempts of some men to use Cindy's sexual submissiveness to make her their sex slave? Will the dark forces that oppose DiD Inc. succeed in shutting down production? There's an easy way to find out .. read the book!

Now, as for the goodies, I wrote a huge, all-in, bang-up, balls to the walls and tits to the floor sexual bondage scene between the protagonists of The Prop Master. My goal was to write a sexual bondage scene so compelling that anyone reading the book who was vanilla would finish it, throw the book to the floor and yell, "I have GOT to try that!"

Not that I care if anyone gets "converted" from vanilla to kinky by the scene, I just wanted to write a scene that shows how very, very good maledom/femsub sexual bondage between two lovers can be. I don't know if I nailed it -- that'll be for my readers to say -- but by damn I sure tried.

Riverbeast Games (Book 4 of the Riverbeast Series) Now Available on Amazon

Riverbeast Book 4, now available on Amazon at this link.
Riverbeast Games is now available on Amazon. Constance Harlee, princess of the river town of Euharlee, Missouri, has been reduced to a human pet, lower than a slave, by keelboat captain Bart Fink, who had a grudge against her father. As they travel down the mighty Mississippi, the riverboatmen find all sorts of fun, sexy games to play with their pet. She learns her role in the games, and how to play them well. She intends to seduce the men, to fool them, to trick them into making them treat her better. She poses prettily as she begs for table scraps, she But she will slowly learn, to her chagrin, that sometimes you play the game, and sometimes, the game plays you.

"Riverbeast: Beneath Slavery" (Book 3 Of The Riverbeast Series) Available Free To Anyone Who Visits This Blog

You can obtain Riverbeast Book 3 in mobi form or read it in HTML format by clicking on the pic above.

Book 3 of the Riverbeast series will not be available on Amazon, although books 1, 2 and 4 are available. Amazon is under no compulsion to publish any of my books (or anyone else's for that matter) but I do appreciate that that is a problem for anyone who likes to read ALL the books in a series. So I've decided to offer Book 3 to readers for free. Just click on the book cover and it will send you to a page on my site where you can download the book in mobi format (there is also a link to instructions for getting the book into your Kindle from a PC) or read it in HTML format if that's too much hassle.

For a fuller and more frank discussion of "Riverbeast: Beneath Slavery" click on the "Politically Sexy Writeup" link for the book in the right hand column of this page.

Riverbeast: Awakening Now Live on Amazon

Here, the Riverbeast gets a ride ... but mostly, she IS a ride!

Riverbeast: Awakening, the second in the "Riverbeast" series is now available on Amazon.

If you want to know the general background of the story, read the promo for "Riverbeast: Fink's Revenge" below.

"Awakening" deals with Constance's further reduction to riverbeasthood by Fink and his men and the whores Kind and Belle. She discovers long-repressed feelings surging into power in her mind as the rivermen and their whores use and abuse her. Being a properly brought up society woman and a virgin, Constance has no real understanding of her sexual feelings, in fact, the earthy riverboatmen, familiar with sex from whoring around in New Orleans, know her body better than she does. And the whores Kind and Belle can ring her chimes as if she were a carillon.

Can Constance deal with these new feelings and her new place in life as she descends even farther into the life of a Riverbeast? We'll never tell ... or rather, we will only tell in the pages of ... The Riverbeast!

Sick Games And Waking Up From History

Every so often, the human race makes a huge leap that makes human life immeasurably better for everyone.

I would say the single most dramatic example of that was the germ theory of disease and the public health efforts that wiped out many childhood illnesses and caused the infant mortality rate to plummet, and also made childbirth a lot less dangerously fatal for many women.

Prior to these events, most everybody born had lots of brothers and sisters whose major notable thing they did was not survive to adulthood. In fact, in medieval times it was a common practice not to give children formal names until they reached the age of six or so, a way for the parents to distance themselves from their own children so they would not suffer quite so horribly if the children died in infancy, as was very likely.

Of course, people, especially mothers, did suffer horribly (emotionally) anyway. The net result of the understanding that it was tiny animals invisible to the eye that were responsible for people wasting away and dying was a huge increase in human health, welfare and happiness, especially once we understood that they lived in our water supply.

And arguably, the people who made these great improvements in human life weren't public crusaders or politicians or generals or the usual suspects, but techie types who were redesigning municipal water systems to keep the outflows separate from the inflows. (I.e., keep the piss and crap out of the drinking water, not to put too fine a point on it.)

But the whole change in human conduct and improvement in human life came about because of reframing of the causes of disease: tiny animals did it, not evil spirits or bad humors or whatever. It arose out of a techie hobbie (microscopy) which reflected a new understanding of human existence, namely, that the universe is not built to human scale. The astronomers had discovered that initially, looking at the scale of things larger than ourselves and discovering whole new worlds, then the microscopists looked at things smaller than ourselves, and discovered whole new worlds.

And arguably, the recent advances in nanotech and genetic modification is further exploration of the small end of the universe's scale, reaching all the way to the Higg's Boson at present. Who knows what else we will discover?

It's my hope that the next big advance in human welfare and happiness will come about because of the efforts of a group of psychological hobbyists, i.e., the BDSM community, changing our understanding of what it is to be human once again.

BDSMers do something quite remarkable, I think. They deliberately play with some of the drives that cause a lot of human unhappiness: the drive to gain power over others, the drive to give up power to others, the drive to hurt others, the enjoyment of being hurt. Dominance, submission, bondage, slavery, mastery, pain, pleasure, it's all a fun game to us. And after we're through playing with those drives, we go back to living relatively normal lives.

We've learned that these drives can be exercised in a manner that is safe, sane and consensual. But looking at what goes on in the world, it's very obvious that others have not, that they are literally driven by their drives, acting out in real life what we play out in the bedroom.

We understand that we have these irrational aspects to our behavior, it's part of being human, and we have learned to control them and enjoy them as part of sexual play. But many people are deeply suspicious of us because they DON'T have that understanding of human nature, they think we are all inches away from being rapists and torturers, because they don't understand human nature as we do.

They think they don't HAVE these irrational drives ... and of course they do. Everyone has them, to greater and lesser degrees, but they have them. They think you can't safely indulge those impulses, because they don't have that framework of understanding of human nature that we do. In their view, your appetites define you, they can't be controlled and ... played with.

It's obvious, though that every last human being DEFINITELY has dominance/submission impulses. All of human society, everywhere, is hierarchical to some extent or another. Every country has leaders, every business has a boss, every household has a head. We could not conceive of it being any other way ... because we're human.

And we play out our dominance and submission games, most of us, because we think those impulses toward dominance and submission ARE us, they define us ... because most of us can't see them in operation.

Not like BDSMers can see them as they play with them sexually. We have developed a different frame for understanding these fundamental human drives that allows us to exercise our impulses towards dominance and submission in ways and to an extent that is not possible outside the area of sex play, and to do so harmlessly. In fact, possibly healthfully, able to work with and understand dominance and submission behavior in others in very different ways. We see hierarchies and the dominance and submission impulses that are fundamental to them differently, because we have a different intellectual framework than others.

You know, like those guys with microscopes who eventually saw disease differently, because they could see the little animals living in the water, we can see the little animals living in our psyches diffeently, because we can take them out and play with them.

And eventually, perhaps, we can learn to undo the harm that those animals in our psyche do, undetected, because we can see them now. Perhaps instituting massive changes in the way people relate to one another in social hierarchies might just bring the human race to whole new levels of human health and happiness.

Gor Mentioned Without Horrified Shreiks On Mainstream Website

Well paint me purple and call me Barney! Things are really turning around. I've written how Fifty Shades of Grey has, at least temporarily, gotten some elements of mainstream media to stop putting all those "Eeeew" bookends up whenever they discuss BDSM or BDSM-related matters, though of course the real dinosaurs are still at it. It's gotten to where I expect a certain amount of civility in the mainstream discourse about BDSM, something very new to me.

Still, I was AMAZED to see the Gor movies mentioned in this article on I09 as the potential basis for a TV series along the lines of HBO's Game of Thrones and Starz's Spartacus series. This is of course, a brilliant idea, I know this because I had it myself. I just don't typically expect brilliance from writers on mainstream websites. And I don't expect it to be so matter of fact:

However, a Gor TV series would basically be a pay-cable network’s goldmine, seeing how sex and violence is what sells, and Gor has both in ridiculous amounts. A Gor series is tailor-made for the Starz executive who says, “Yes, our Spartacus TV series was good but what it really needed was more tits and violence.”

Wow. The author, Rob Bricken, is totally right of course. Seeing that much simple sanity in a mainstream site writing about the Gor movies is fricking STARTLING. Mostly when Gor is mentioned in mainstream sites, it's heavily bookended with "horrible sexist rapists who wish to enslave and degrade women wholesale and their deeply disturbed female followers!" crap. I'm not exaggerating ... much. Almost anything written about Gor, including the Gor movies, in mainstream sites will almost always include stuff of this nature, if not phrased EXACTLY as I have phrased it.

And that's what makes the simple recommendation of the Gor movies on I09 so startling. Of COURSE there have to be some caveats, but they're fairly mild by mainstream media standards:

John Norman’s long-running fantasy series had two terrible movies, which, depending on how you feel about the series premise that women are naturally subservient to men, and are much happier being dominated by them socially and sexually, is probably fine. ... And, if that executive were not fully on board with Norman’s gender politics, a decent showrunner could subvert the series’ core “values” much like Paul Verhoeven did to Starship Troopers.

These bookends make reference to Norman's "all women are natural slavegirls" philosophy as espoused in the novels (and that's how I know the writer, though referencing the movies for the sake of the article, which is about movies, is thinking about the books, because the movies were anti-slavery in theme and had precious little in the way of sex or violence to recommend them).

And I have to point out (and this is the point of my illustration at the top of the article and below) that Bricken's hypothetical showrunner won't have to expend a lot of creative energy on imagining a more egalitarian Gor, because that has already done -- that is what Gor Evolved IS. In Gor Evolved, women warriors run around with bows shooting male warriors up on an equal footing. To see how a more egalitarian Gor would work, one need only visit a few Gor Evolved sims and see how they work.

Ordinarily, I'd feel very comfortable in predicting that there will be no Gor TV series even on premium channels, given that the Gor novels still make gender feminists shriek in fury, but given how completely I failed to predict the success of Fifty Shades of Grey, I am a bit shy about doing so. And the premium cable channels cannot fail to have noticed the success of Game of Thrones and Spartacus with all their primitive sex, nudity and violence. As Bricken points out, Gor has that in spades.

Riverbeast: Fink's Revenge Now Available On Amazon

When rich girls get nasty, they get REALLY nasty!

"Riverbeast: Fink's Revenge," the first book of the Riverbeast series by yours truly has been published. You can buy it here. There's also a slightly more explicit excerpt over at my Politically Sexy blog, but frankly, the good stuff is what follows both excerpts ... still, check it out if you are interested.

"Riverbeast" is the story of Constance Harlee, the princess of Euharlee, Missouri, a small Mississippi riverfront town whose lifeblood is trading with the riverboatmen who carry goods up and down the Mississippi on their keelboats. Although born in Euharlee, Constance has spent most of her young life in finishing schools back east in Boston, consorting with the finest (and richest) people, learning the manners and making the connections to secure an advantageous marriage.

Constance's beauty and grace were also a great help to her in Boston. But they became a hindrance to her when she returned to Euharlee from boarding school, on the day she was kidnapped by the wild keelboaters of the Mississippi. These rivermen were among the toughest and most dangerous men in the Old West, men who braved the pirates and Indians who populated the river's wild shore to take their flatboats full of very stealable goods down to New Orleans.

Worse yet, Constance's captors have plans for her, plans for making her lower than the lowliest slave. The keelboaters plan to deny her humanity entirely and make her a Riverbeast, a naked slave, crawling before men, who must serve any man in any way that pleases him, on command.

Can Constance survive the torments of her captors as they teach her what it means to be the lowest kind of slave girl? Can she survive life on the mighty Mississippi in the days when it was wild and free? Can she manage to struggle back to the life she once knew, or something like it? Will she ever find love in her new and degraded state? Riverbeast is an historical erotic romance novella, a classic piece of Western erotica set in the Old West days of the Mississippi River.

An Excerpt From Riverbeast: Fink's Revenge:

I do not know for how long I lay in the back of that wagon, watching the leaves and branches of trees speed past above me, groaning and crying out as I was jounced about, watching the pathetic bobbing of my companions' hooded heads as they tried to somehow protect themselves, hearing their muffled cries, and making my own muffled cries. It seemed to have been forever, but it could not have been long, because the path we had ridden was not far from the river at any point, and the river was our destination.

I discovered this when my feet were freed from the chain and I was unceremoniously hauled from the wagon and dumped on the ground beside it. I was half-dragged to a wagon wheel and my bound wrists were secured to one of the spokes of the wheel. The spokes behind me were hard, as was the iron hub of the axle, but the ground beneath me was soft, for we were on a sandy spit of land that jutted out into a small tributary of the river. Behind us an embankment towered over us and the water, with trees growing right to its edge, casting us all in deep shade. The tributary made soft trickling sounds as it flowed past half-submerged rocks and fallen trees and branches, and the birds whistled and called in the trees above us.

My companions were also pulled from the wagon and laid on the sand before me.

Still unspeaking, one of the men turned to the one who seemed to be leading the group, and made a circle with the thumb and forefinger of one hand, then poked the forefinger of his other hand repeatedly through the circle, then pointed at my companions.

The leader shrugged, then nodded his approval. He singled out two members of the party by pointing at them, then pointed at the embankment. They nodded and climbed it. Guards, probably.

My blood froze in horror as the men drew their huge knives and approached my companions. I shrank as I prepared to see their throats slit.

Instead I saw the men use their knives to remove my companions' clothing without loosening their bonds in any way. They stripped off their skirts, petticoats, bodices, and panties until they all lay completely naked before their captors, save for their hoods and the ropes encircling their wrists and ankles. Muffled cries of protest came from beneath their hoods, and they struggled feebly, but bound as they were, to no avail.

International Links For My Books Now Available

People have emailed me in the past to tell me that they'd like to buy my books but can't find the links for their country's Amazon store. So I've made up a handy-dandy collection of links for all my books in all of the 13 countries that publish them. Now you can find them! Heaven forfend that there should be any difficulty with anyone buying my books! You'll find the link to the Pat Powers International Bookstore at the top of the right hand column on this page. And just to make things extra easy, here's that link again right here. You're welcome!

George Bernard Shaw And Other Secret Bondage Writers

George Bernard Shaw, pulling strings as he is wont to do.

George Bernard Shaw must have cleverly included bondage porn in his plays and his prefaces to his plays, because right about the time I started having curiously satisfying dreams of women tied up and getting thoroughly fucked, I was reading a lot of Shaw.

And prior to Shaw there were those famous bondage fiends Max Shulman, Robert Benchley, H. Allen Smith, James Thurber and Jack Douglas, among others.

I had no, repeat no, access to bondage porn of any kind prior to reaching adulthood, which was why I made my own. Like a lot of young adults of my generation, I thought I was uniquely perverted, for I had never encountered any references to Betty Page, much less seen a picture of her tied up and wearing a ballgag. She was well before my time anyway, but was the only mainstream icon of bondage prior to The Story of O.

The only bondage image I can recall from those days was the cover of a cheap pulp crime novel called, "Tonight, She's Yours" showing a bound damsel in a negligee anxiously watching a bunch of criminal types playing cards. And we're not talking whist or Old Maid either, these were Serious Bad Guys.

My primary recreational outlet was the public library of the rural town in which I lived. It was well stocked for a rural public library, but that's not saying much, I'm afraid.

My first love as a reader was science fiction and fantasy, but it didn't take me long to read every last book under that category the library had, especially in summer when my reading habit was a book a day, and if I hadn't had that library card I'd have been reduced to knocking over convenience stores so I could go to bookstores and finance my reading jones.

After science fiction and fantasy, my favorite kind of reading was humor. The library had a good selection of humor for a rural library, but ... it was, shall we say, kinda stale. That's how I got hooked on your Robert Benchleys, your James Thurbers, your Max Shulmans. (I'm pretty sure Benchley and/or Shulman were blacklisted during the McCarthy era. I guess the local witch-hunters never got around to purging the library of their pre-Commie writings, probably because they figured nobody reads that stuff. They figured WRONG, baby!)

Eventually I ran out of outdated humor collections and got really desperate. I asked the librarian about where else in the library I might find some yuks. She said she had heard George Bernard Shaw was funny (I think she saw me coming and decided to edumacate me). So I checked out a collection of Shaw plays and prefaces (Shaw always writes a lengthy preface to his plays, often an almost gossipy essay touching on politics, religion, etc. He would have been really comfortable writing a blog. If you read several of his prefaces in succession, it's obvious he was using them as a serial blog.)

To tell the truth, Shaw wasn't really a humorist like Benchley and Shulman, but he had a razor sharp wit and a real taste for skewering Victorian hypocrisy and pretense, especially in relation to class. And if there had been any Victorian hypocrisy and pretense around at the time, I would have been SOOO ready to work it over. If there had been anyone around trying to oppress others for rolling their "r"s or dropping their "h"s, I would have been SOOO ready with a witty epigram, or perhaps a bon mot or a mot juste. But I was living in the Deep South at the time, and although there was plenty of class oppression and hypocrisy floating around, most of it had to do with skin color (though the Deep South WAS and IS rich in sexual hypocrisy).

Unfortunately, Shaw's awareness of sexual hypocrisy arose during the Victorian Era (he was born in 1858, which means he would have been in his 20s and 30s from 1878 to 1898). In my day, pure-D Victorian hypocrisy has been hard to come by -- even in the Deep South we have long passed the point where arms and legs were referred to as "limbs" so they'd be less sexy.

I was like a fabulously well trained athlete in a sport that no longer existed. "42-man squamish! Anybody up for a game of 42-man squamish? I'll spot you the first kronger and STILL take you to school!"

The thing about Shaw, though, was that his prose was unusually crisp for the late 1800s, probably due to his experience as a playwright. His sentences, although sometimes lengthy by modern standards, weren't the polysyllabic trainwrecks that SOME conterporaries of his (Bulwer-Llyton, anyone?) indulged in. With very little change Shaw could probably have written a modern blog, if he'd been able to back off from the grammatical reforms he was het up on. (Shaw didnt use apostrophes, he wrote "dont" for "don't" and "wont" for won't and "cant" for "can't" -- he was just lucky the proper elision for "could not" wasn't something closer to the elision for "cannot.") And Shaw also used fonetik speling, which kuld take sum getting used to as wel. Especially with words like "marij" -- you know, that whole getting hitched thing.)

It's very hard to figure out where Shaw slipped in the bondage stuff that corrupted me, given that he was a notably asexual person and his writings tended to reflect it. As one critic put it, "Reading Shaw can teach you everything there is to know about human beings -- except that they have two different sexes." Although Shaw took on issues like romance, marriage, cuckoldry and prostitution in plays such as "Man and Superman," "Candide" and "Mrs. Warren's Professsion" he invariably did so in such a dry and philosophical manner that it really took some attention-paying to note that the plays had anything to do with sex.

Shulman, Benchley, Douglas and Ring Lardner, Jr., were more willing to deal with sexual subjects, but almost always in that 50s "take my wife ... please!" manner. Harbingers of the sexual revolution they were not. They might hint about some of the things that beatniks and jazz musicians got up to, but never all that explicitly. If you didn't already know what beatniks and jazz musicians were up to, you wouldn't learn it from them.

And I did not know what beatniks and jazz musicians were up to. They were too far before my time. They might as well have been flappers and stage-door Johnnies.

(Of course, there were all sorts of movies that make it perfectly clear that stage-door Johnnies hung around backstage at theaters and made goo-goo eyes at showgirls, but I never watched such movies -- they were all in black and white, and nobody watched those!)

Lest you think I am exaggerating about my ignorance, let me tell you how protective parents in the Deep South are of their kiddies. I was once in the Boy Scouts. I am not ashamed of it, I just didn't know any better. Anyway, this was one of those troops that did lots of camping and hiking instead of sitting around in a room talking about how virtuous they were, so they were several notches above many Scout troops. And we went on a long hike once. 50 miles, spread over a couple of days. In midsummer. In the Deep South. Nowadays, that would be considered tantamount to torture. We were under the impression that we were having fun. (Except for the kid who got prickly rash -- I believe he would have voted for the torture scenario.)

We were promised a treat at the end of the hike, a chance to see a movie for free at a theater. We figured that since it had been a long hike, it had to be something special. We were hoping it would be a recently released Bond film. That would be really cool. Explosions, shootings, car chases ... we were THERE for it.

What we got was ... and I am not making this up ... "Tammy Tell Me True." Somebody must have fished out of a closet somewhere, I mean, it had been a long while since it was a first-run movie. And what's more, not a movie to show to the sort of red-blooded Boy Scouts who go on 50-mile hikes! "Tammy Tell Me True" was a fricking GIRL SCOUT movie! Who did they think we were? We were furious! We had wanted ... we DESERVED ... a fricking Bond movie!

Many of us left the theater in disgust, after we'd scored our drinks and popcorn of course. We weren't crazy. But the Scout leaders and many parents clearly did not understand what an insult showing that movie to us was. They were that far out of it. Think a whole community of Flanderses. You won't be far off.

I never even saw a Playboy except as a cover on a magazine rack I could only look longingly at and never purchase. I knew that any attempt to purchase Playboy by a kid would result in finger-pointing, shocked expressions, fire alarms going off, SWAT team deployments, and possibly pursuit by crowds carrying torches and pitchforks.

And yet, I was creating drawings that looked very much like something you'd see on Sex and Submission or other adult bondage websites of the current era, except that it was very badly drawn, of course. (Let's say I was capable of creating something more than a diagram, but not anything anyone would confuse with art, fine or otherwise.) Where we these images coming from? My sex fantasies of course, but at the time I wouldn't admit that even to myself.

And the thing is, it couldn't be me or who I was that had anything to do with these dreams and drawings. It had to be the media, because as we all know everything that anyone does is a direct result of something they've seen on TV or the movies, or in the rare instances of readers such as myself, read in a book.

OK, I did watch TV but I just couldn't relate to it. In TV land, women walked around dressed in revealing clothing in venues other than a swimming pool, and sometimes deliberately acted sexy. This was completely contrary to my experience. I learned early on that TV was entertaining, but had nothing to do with the real world.

OK, I did occasionally see women bound and gagged on TV, but it never occurred to me that such images had anything to do with my bondage dreams and fantasies. For one thing, they were fully clothed. For another, they weren't having sex with anyone, especially me. For another, they appeared not to be having a good time. And for yet anotherer thing, the bondage was generally badly done, brief, badly lit and incidental, even when the whole plot of the show was, say, a kidnapping.

I must admit, the time I saw Emma Peel tied to a chair while wearing a leather catsuit with waist cutouts in a rerun of the Avengers, I was quite struck. But I didn't think it was the bondage. I thought it was the sexy leather suit, and the sexy Diana Rigg inside of it. And to a large extent, I was probably right, especially about the sexy Diana Rigg.

Y'know, thinking about it, I do have a theory about why Shaw, Benchley, Shulman, Douglas and the guys slipped sexual bondage corruption stuff into their writings. (Though I still have no idea HOW they did it, due to the near-total absence of sexual bondage content in their writings.) There IS a thread that unites them all, for you see, George Bernard Shaw was a Fabian socialist. Now, why and how Victorian socialists were influenced by Fabian is the topic of another essay, one that makes even less sense than this one. But the fact that Shaw was a socialist and Benchley, Douglas and Shulman were accused Communists points to one and only one conclusion: it's all part of a dirty Commie plot to destroy the youth of America. The scheming bastards.

I rest my case. George Bernard Shaw was a secret bondage pornographer. It's only logical.

President Slavegirl: Billionaire's Toy Is Published

President Slavegirl: Billionaire's Toy, part two of The Homouth Series was published on Amazon yesterday. I have an unexpurgated review of it plus a tasty excerpt from the story here at my Politically Sexy blog. You can also go to the Amazon page for President Slavegirl for more samples from the story and a chance to buy it.

I really think I hit it out of the park on this one. In the Politically Sexy comments I explain exactly what sort of scenes I as able to write, in a way I couldn't here or on Amazon's promotional pages. (Amazon has all sorts of insane rules about what you can and can't say about your books to promote them. Amazon LURVEs the money they make from erotica writers but feel they have to mess with erotica writers to keep the prudes at bay.)

Anyway, read the Politically Sexy blog to get the straight stuff, but there is one aspect of the book, a very important one, that I can talk about here, and that's the world-building I did to add richness and depth to my stories. I know that for many erotica readers plot and background are a hindrance to the raunchy stuff they read for, and nothing more. But I think plot and background can add a LOT to a raunchy story and not get in the way of the good stuff, if it's handled right. And world-building helps a lot in that respect.

I've posited a future in which automation and robots take over the job market worldwide at an ever-increasing rate, following on the ideas of Marshall Brain. This leads ultimately to a worldwide global depression because the unemployed are no longer able to buy things and the consumer economies collapse. The One Percent, who have been to say the least, disinterested in the plight of the unemployed, are suddenly up in arms when their corporate profits start plummeting. Corporate oligarchs by this time pretty much control the US government as well as most other Third World nations. The oligarchs turn to Basic Income, an allowance given to every citizen of a country just for being a citizen, no qualifying beyond that as the solution to their problem.

The idea, from the oligarch's point of view, is to make consumers of the unemployed, which they have by now realized will ultimately be 90 percent of the population. Basic Income will give the 90 percent money to spend on nicer clothes, boats, guns, toys, computers, all the products that make corporations rich, and which poor people can't afford. Basic Income has to be generous enough to let everyone live a comfortable middle class lifestyle, not because the oligarchs have the slightest interest in whether or not the 90 percent are comfortable, but because they want the peasantry (i.e., the 90 percent) to be spending that Basic Income on the products and services their corporations provide, keeping them profitable and themselves rich.

(How does it all get paid for? Basically, it's a tax on the automation and robotics that have replaced human laborers. Productivity has gone nowhere but up thanks to automation, even with all the unemployment. In fact, this represents the arrival of the post-scarcity society, which in my opinion, we are already on the outer fringes of.)

The implementation of Basic Income is not an easy or painless process, there is much human suffering that occurs in the process. “Doin' Time In The Blue Shadows” shows an example. As the economy collapses, more people are forced into illegal and semi-illegal trades: robbery, kidnapping, drugs, smuggling and prostitution all go through the roof as people desperately try to support themselves in a collapsing economy The protagonist is a woman who was once a pharmaceutical salesperson who got automated out of a job while her husband got out of his middle-management job at the same time, and turned her good looks from peddling pills to prostitution, about the only job prospect for her as she is basically a peaceful person and not inclined to kidnap or rob people. She winds up in jail, ironically now prostituted by the goverment to pay for her upkeep as a prisoner. Only she gets no money for her "service."

The criminals and kidnappers at work are seen in “The Wrangler,” with Savannah, Georgia, cited as a relative safe haven for the rich from kidnapping, which has become a huge problem in the US in the story, as it now is in some Third World nations.

MacCammon's time comes near the end of the social ills, as the conservatives and libertarians who hate the whole Basic Income concept come up with a trick to delay its implementation: they convince people that the Great Recession is a product of all the moral decadence that has led to so much prostitution and porn. In other words, they convince people to confuse cause with effect. MacCammon is the figurehead of the movement, working with social conservatives and feminists to stamp out prostitution and porn which they see as victimizing women. The old and stupid, the biggest voting block, went for it wholesale, hence The Houmouth Series.

And of course, the United States is not the only country in the world. There are people in Europe and some Third World countries who adopt Basic Income easily and live in a post-scarcity society while Americans still struggle and suffer. There are people starving and dying in some Third World countries who only adopt Basic Income when they are literally forced into it by their neighbors, who are sick of massive immigration from the countries that don't have it.

Of course all this is a huge block of exposition that would slow a plot to a crawl, not to mention your average sexual interlude, if you tried to introduce it all at once. But if you build the world in advance and slip it in as the story progresses, it hardly makes a ripple as it makes the story richer and deeper, and suggests all sorts of nice details and scenes that drive the plot. Corporations grown powerful enough to control governments plus legalized slavery or de facto slavery as people become desperate enough to do anything for money equals corporate slave kennels, as seen in Slave Girl President, Billionaire's Toy. Easy as pie.

Do I think this IS the future? No. Do I think it COULD be the future? Yes. Do I think it's LIKELY to be the future? God, I hope not. But the advances in automation and robotics that could lead to widespread unemployment are happening now, and nothing is more predictable than that they will cause more and more unemployment as they improve. How that will play out, and how far it goes, and how fast it happens are slippery things to predict, but plenty scary enough for the needs of mere erotica writers, and slipperiness helps as well … gives me a flexible base for my stories, as well as a strong one.

World-building … it's not just for interstellar science fiction any more! Now in Erotica!

Music to Read Erotica By

Cover art for the "Streets of Fire" CD. Fun movie! When I wrote "Doing Time In The Blue Shadows" I knew from the first word what the title would be. It was inspired by a little ditty by that name by The Blasters, which was in the Streets of Fire movie soundtrack. Nice film. Universal Studios is being a scumbag of a corporation on the issue of allowing clips from the movie to be shown, but you can hear the song here at this safe for work link. Great music to write the story by, bet it works for reading it too.

Greetings and What's All This, Then?

A wholesome image to start things off. Note grazing cows! It don't get no more peaceful, bucolic and wholesome than that! This is not a painting, by the way, it's an image of the now-defunct Second Life sim Tyr's Fist Stronghold, which unlike a painting, is also a place you can move around in and visit. Take that, bucolic paintings!

I have a lot of places on public spaces that offer me opportunities to link to a blog. But my actual blog, Politically Sexy, is full of adult content. And I'm contented with that adult content, in a very adult sort of way! But ever since Google squashed my Google+ account (and my Youtube account along with it) like a bug because I linked my Google+ page to my Politically Sexy blog, I've been leery of linking to it. So, no adult content here, nosiree, but I'll have LINKS to all my adult content here, which I hope will keep my accounts from being blasted to the Phantom Zone by the Corporate Gods of Cyberspace. I will however be posting about writing, the non-adult parts of writing, in order to give you, my semi-adoring fans, some insight into what makes a great writer tick, and me as well. And I'll probably be posting about other stuff as well, because as my Politically Sexy blog indicates, staying on topic is not easy for me. If my train of thought had a track layout it would look like a ball of yarn an energetic kitten has been playing with for several hours. That said, let's get on with it!