Getting Inspired The Fun Way

I never know where the inspiration for an erotic short will come from. But often, it's an evocative photo that pushes it well beyond just an image of a specific person, place or event.  It's a photo that somehow implies relationships between the people pictured, or a world beyond the scene pictured.

Many porn images and in particular kinky porn images do that to some extent or another, evoking another, sexier world than most of us live in. Here are a couple of examples. (Note: the images I am linking to are NSFW images that contain naked women. Do not click on them if such images offend you. I would say they are on the arty end of the scale rather than the porny end -- no sex acts are portrayed -- but whether or not you click on them is your choice.):

Inspiration 1 -- Warning NSFW

“She crouched on the bed, legs spread wide, naked, alert to the least signal from the one who held her leash. How odd that her gender studies degree from Bryn Mawr had led her exactly, precisely, to this moment, this situation. She was furious and ashamed that she was in this situation, but she couldn't stop it, couldn't say the safeword that would end it.”

It's mostly the expression on the woman's face that does it here. She has a wry, rueful expression, as if she is thinkng about how she got in that situation. So my mind easily generates a story about how it happened. Might be a good story idea, might not, but definitely worth considering.

Inspiration 2 -- Warning NSFW

This is a photo that has a great story in it. I don't know where it came from or who took it, but it's wonderful work. It shows two women, one standing, one kneeling. The standing woman is wearing a dress that goes down to her ankles. She's standing next to a trellis of some sort, hanging onto it with one hand as if for balance. One leg is slightly extended and she's wearing ballet slippers. Her foot is raised and resting on the tip of her toes, in the position ballet dancers call "en pointe." She's looking off to her left, outside the frame of the image. Her hair is swept up, her expression is calculating and thoughtful, perhaps a bit of lust or avarice in there, too -- some kind of desire, in any event. And definitely some apprehension, too.

Behind her some tree limbs partially obscure some lighted orange globes, along with some geometrical webbing of some sort. In front of one of the globes four butterflies are suspended in the air, wings fully extended, looking kind of artificial.

It's all very proper, the sort of thing that could hang in a ballet school hallway without raising an eyebrow -- except for the other woman, of course. She is stark naked except for a large string of beads around her neck. She kneels to the standing woman's right, and she's looking off to the left as well, probably at the same thing the standing woman is looking at. Her expression is a welcoming smile. And she's holding her hands behind her back as if bound, which in conjunction with the kneeling emphasizes her large breasts even more.

Furthermore, she has nice curvy hips and a nice round butt which is emphasized by the way her butt sticks out as she kneels, undoubtedly more than it needs to.

What are these two looking at? We don't know, but we can guess, and what we'd guess is, a man. A man they both find intriguing and attractive. And their bodies both express their attraction in different ways. The standing woman is calculating, apprehensive, yet that en pointe foot suggests she's ready to pivot to her left at any moment. Or to the right.

The kneeling woman is much more open in her response, the welcoming smile and outthrust butt say it all. She wants a piece of whatever or whoever she's looking at to the left, and she wants that piece inside her body.

Also of considerable interest is the relationship between the two women. Their physical closeness implies personal closeness as well. Mistress and slavegirl might be a good guess. Friends whose lives have diverged greatly, but who remain friends is another one. Also, they might both be one and the same woman, the kneeling woman a visual expression of her libido as she looks at the man, the standing woman an expression of her conscious mind with its calculation.

There are other interesting questions, too. Like, the background suggests a party of some sort. But at what sort of party do you bring a naked slavegirl? (Answer: a FUN party!) Or maybe it's a theatrical production and they're onstage. What sort of production? Well, one that involves nudity, that's for sure. Rules a lot of stuff right out, though as I recall the BBC did some nekkid Shakespeare.

There's also something a little racial going on. The kneeling woman has broad cheeks and a snub nose, she doesn't look all that Caucasian. The standing woman looks very Caucasian. Is this supposed to be the American South slavery, stylized? Or is it Slavery involving the Middle East or Asia? It's hard to say, once again, there's nothing that really spells it out for me.

I found this piece of artwork on the virtual wall of a virtual tavern in Second Life Gor, years ago. I have no idea where it originates. I did some research but it came up blank. There is a name underneath the image, ANGELa Blank, and there is a German photographer named Angela Blank, but I can't link the two.

There may be a prosaic answer to these questions, I don't know. But I do know that answering the questions leads to some interesting story ideas. What do you think? I'm not sure which story I want to write, if any. Could I write a story worthy of this image? I'm not sure.

Might be fun to try, though.

(I found this piece of artwork on the virtual wall of a virtual tavern in Second Life Gor, years ago. I have no idea where it originates. I did some research but it came up blank. There is a name underneath the image, ANGELa Blank, and there is a German photographer named Angela Blank, but I can't link the two. Doesn't matter – the mystery only makes the image more intriguing.)

Sex Slavery Fantasy Fuel: In Praise of John Norman

The difference between erotica and sexy non-erotica, I've discovered, is  this: erotica provides graphic descriptions of sex acts designed to get the reader off. Mainstream sexy fiction provides fantasy fuel only. No graphic descriptions of sex acts to get you off, but plenty of erotic events, briefly described and plenty of erotic situations that let the reader create their own graphic sexual fantasies, something we as yet don't have the technology to prevent, thank God.

And the person who did this better than ANYONE for the kink community is John Norman, whose Gor novels are, IMHO, works of genius, smoothly combining sex slavery fantasy fuel with science fantasy sword and sandal stories. He was the only one to see how smoothly and easily this could be done, and kind of still is, since nobody has really followed in his footsteps.

He clearly loved heroic fantasy and made solid heroic fantasy stories in his novels, but he also included sex slavery fantasy fuel like nobody else did, and that includes Filthy Philip Jose Farmer and Randy Andy Offutt!

(Norman does have a way of having his characters pause regularly to drone on and on and on about women's rightful place in natures as men's slaves, which has earned him a lot of enmity among feminists. My advice is, skip those parts when they start up, the books are much shorter and more fun to read without them. With them, they are almost unreadable. Makes all the difference in the world.)

When Norman's books debuted with Ballantine Books back in 1964, they were so heavily edited that no one really knew what he was up to. They got accepted as just the usual heroic fantasy Conan knock-offs, ho-hum. Norman got sick of this and moved to DAW books after publishing half a dozen or so books with Ballantine. Freed from the constraints of Ballantine Books, the books grew longer and more sex slavery fantasy fuel filled, and also a lot more popular. They're still going strong on Amazon with the most current book in the series being number 35, Quarry of Gor.

This was WAY before the explosion of erotic ebooks created kinky epics, it was before COMPUTERS, much less ebooks. It was practically prehistoric. Point is, Donald A. Wollheim, the head of DAW books, said that John Norman was outselling all is his other fantasy authors COMBINED sometime back in the 70s or 80s.

And there was a lot of evidence that Norman's readers were primarily female. It was really hard to get good numbers here, because of course, most books were being bought in bookstores, and the clerks had no incentive to keep track (though some DID report attempting to shame buyers of Gor novels).

Still, given what we know about the ebook market, it would make sense. Also, an insider at Linden Labs, the people who created the Second Life virtual world, where Gorean roleplay is and was a big thing, reported that about two thirds of Gorean roleplayers had female names on their credit cards.

So, there's that. And the reason I stress that so many Gor novel readers are female is to make the point that people who are trying to suppress books like the Gor novels and erotica in general are suppressing, not big nasty male proto-rapists, but women who like the submissive sex roleplay. (Some dom males like myself like them, too, but we're surprisingly sophisticated in our tastes, so there – neener-neener!)

Of the Gor novels, my favorite is Dancer of Gor. It is atypical, written from the POV of an Earth librarian captured by Goreans and trained to be a paga slut dancer. (Most Gor novels are written in omniscient POV, or first person, with a male protagonist.) It has a slave girl auction scene that is four chapters long and IMHO sets the standards for kinky slavegirl auction scenes, period. It also has a scene in which the protagonists' virginity is auctioned off by the paga tavern that owns her, to 17 lucky winners, who all get to fuck her that night while she's chained in an alcove and hooded so she can't see who fucks her first.

Fantasy fuel? You bet!

Get Witless On Lothar!

Get Witless or Be Witty ... It's YOUR Choice! Image source: Hottitude Press.

OK, fans of my adult website Bondagerotica (Google it, I'm not doing any direct links from my wholesome author blog) will remember that I did a series called "Witless on Lothar" way back when, and I realized that I could easily collect them and put them in book form for sale on Amazon, so i did. And when I finished, I realized, "This is not erotica, there's only two sex scenes and they're only a few paragraphs long."

What they were, actually, was political satire. It was all about the contrast between the protagonists (political pundit Anne Coaltar) highly politicized view of the world and the barbaric (and really dumb and unbelievable) reality of Gor. Then former presidential candidate Hilarity Clanton winds up being First Girl in the slave kennels where Anne winds up, because "Duh!"

It was so much fun to write. I'm hoping it will be as much fun for others to read.

Here's the blurb:

When political pundit Anne Coaltar wakes up on a strange new world naked and chained to a huge rock after what must have been a hell of a party, she naturally assumes it's a practical joke. Or perhaps that it's one of those dreams where you think you are awake but really are not. But when she's accosted by hard-looking alpha males who look like they stepped out of a Renfair and subjected to indignities that outstrip ANYTHING she had ever suffered at the hands of even the most rabid democrat, Anne realizes this MIGHT be more than a joke, or a dream. If it is a dream, it is a very NAUGHTY dream.

But this is just the BEGINNING for Anne, as she's drawn farther and farther into this dream, or world, or most likely, democratic plot to discredit her. Anne winds up in a slave kennel and discovers that her superior in the slave kennel hierarchy is none other than Hilarity Clanton, her greatest enemy and candidate for the US Presidency!

It it all a dream, a subconscious demon brew of repressed lust and desire that runs counter to Anne's every conservative desire? Is it a democratic plot to discredit Anne? Or is it a science fiction reality that has launched her across the stars only to be confronted with something out of a medieval fantasy?

Find out as you explore the world of the Witless On Lothar!