The Honey Trapp Adventures Now Available on Amazon and Smashwords -- Both Novels and Both Novellas in A Single Volume!

  You can buy the Amazon version by clicking on this link.

You can buy the Smashwords version by clicking on this link. Add this coupon code when and if you purchase for 25 percent off the Smashwords version: VZ86G. Offer good through July 5.

I bundled my Honey Trapp stories together for July 4. They've been quite successful in the marketplace. I suspect everyone likes a good, uplifting story about a sex slave fighting climate change. Certainly, everyone should! It's what I call modern pulp erotica. It has the wonderful, freewheeling delicious cheesiness of the old pulp erotica, but without the embedded racism, sexism and generally backward viewpoints. (I mean, old time pulps weren't propaganda, they just had a lot of embedded social backwardness in them.)

As you'll note the covers vary in accord with the rules of Amazon and Smashwords. The original image is basically a tasteful nude, i.e., no naughty bits are showing. I combined it with a photo of the Earth surrounded by menacing clouds I found in the archives of my cover art provider. I put on the old white panties and bra layer on and scaled it back. Because even though there were no naughty bits showing in the original image, Amazon can get exercised over nudity even in a pose that hides all naughty bits.

The bondage gear was more difficult. With Second Life avatars drawn-in bondage gear works, since the avatars themselves are artworks. But not so much with photos, unless the image is quite small. (As in the "Greek Harem" cover where I drew in the bondage gear and it was OK because it was a tiny detail.) But in this image the face and hands are in the foreground. I drew in the collar on the image, and if you blow it up you can easily see it's drawn. But for the cuffs, I borrowed some cuffs from another image I had purchased, moved them around, erased this, pasted in that, and boob's your uncle.

For the gag I borrowed some highlights from a tape gag photo, and put them in a black outline of a tape gag I drew in. The borrowed highlights gave the flat black outline dimensionality and texture. Worked beautifully, better than the cuffs. The cuffs would have worked better if I had been able to dial the transparency back more: the cuffs were photographed under different lighting conditions than the nude and it shows. But when I went below 95 percent transparency things started showing through the cuffs, which is problematical in the case of black leather (as opposed to sheer underwear). So I left the transparency at 96 which didn't let the cuffs meld too well with the photo but it still looked OK.

I do like the artwork and the concept of the cover, I think it came out well overall. I guess we shall see if it attracts multitudes.

Here's da blurb, if you're interested:

Honey Trapp, born to wealth but orphaned at an early age by a tragic auto accident, finds solace in a wild partying lifestyle that fully expresses her submissive sexual desires. Convinced by her collegiate studies of atmospheric science that the end of human civilization is coming soon due to climate change, Honey parties like there’s no tomorrow. Intelligent, young, beautiful, wealthy and uninhibited, she has no problem being accepted by the upper echelons of the jet set as one of them.

But there’s more to Honey than meets the eye. Honey funnels some of her wealth to the Initiative, a secret organization devoted to fighting climate change by whatever means are necessary. Mostly this involves upsetting the plans of various fossil fuel oligarchs.

Some of those oligarchs and their minions are into BDSM and have harems. The women in such harems are sometimes local talent, but elite dominants also hire women from the Bascom Slave Kennels, a secret supplier of beautiful, discreet, trained and carefully vetted submissives who play at being slave girls for elite dominants, for a price.

Honey, eager to help bring the oily oligarchs down and save the planet, and also totally down with being a slave girl/harem girl for her own very kinky reasons, goes through the Bascom kennels’ sex slave training program. Then she travels the world, infiltrating the sex harems of oligarchs and ferreting out their secrets for the Initiative, because even as a naked, bound and gagged slave girl, Honey has ears..

Join Honey as she goes to the possibly mythical nation of Los Miserabils in South America in “The Naked Jungle,” to the semi-mythical nation of England in “England Goes Boom!” to the overtly mythical nation of Greece in “Greek Harem”, and to the mythically corrupt state of Louisiana in “Louisiana Slay Ride,” fighting fossil fuel oligarchs’ evil plans and slaking her slavegirl lust with one dominant alpha male after another all the way. It’s more than 115,000 words of danger, excitement and sexual bondage!

This collection includes all four of the Honey Trapp stories previously published on Smashwords.

Karg Now Available on Smashwords In Kindle and Other Formats

 

 Get a copy of Karg right now by clicking on this link!

I originally published Karg in serialized form on my Jolly Roper website before Amazon existed. This was also before censorship existed on the World Wide Web, for all practical purposes. It was just for nerds, who cared what they said or wrote? The only major no-no at that time was child porn, because that was illegal generally, and it was the only thing that was generally illegal.

That was a good thing for me because Karg was full of stuff that is a no-no in modern terms. Like bestiality and scat. And rape and nonconsensual sex slavery – so MUCH rape and nonconsensual sex slavery, the book was awash in it (and it still is, check out the keywords).

I was able to publish Karg on Amazon without making any changes to it. Rape, nonconsensual sex slavery, bestiality and incest (incest was inexplicably left out of Karg, though) were all fine on Amazon at that point in time. This was a mistake in one respect: Karg could have REALLY used another thorough proofreading. When I was publishing from my website, I was doing it for the sheer joy of writing. I didn’t proofread nearly as thoroughly as I should have – proofreading isn’t innately joyous.

Over time, and not a hell of a long time, Amazon grew markedly more censorious. I never got a complaint about Karg on Amazon, weirdly enough, because it was by FAR the most censorable thing I have ever written. But when several of my books got banned (“blocked” was Amazon’s term, but it was censorship just the same) by Amazon for rape (most notably the “Riverbeast” sereis and the “President Slavegirl” series) I unpublished Karg on Amazon along with several other books that were bound to be blocked sooner or later now that the censors were on my trail.

Republishng on Smashwords now, I gave Karg another thorough proofreading and found way too many errors. I can’t guarantee the text is now error-free, being only human and all, but I CAN say it’s much less errored -up than it was.

My original impetus in writing Karg was to highlight how unrealistic the female characters in the Gor novels are. One minute, they’re feminist teachers and librarians and students and whatnot, then they get one thorough dicking down from a Gorean Master and they’re in full submissive slavegirl mode. It doesn’t work like that at all in real human psychology. It’s a straight up male fantasy and not a particularly sophisticated one, and it works fine on that low level I guess, if that’s all you are looking for. But I think it’s more powerful when the woman involved is more self-aware and resists more.

That said, the Gor novels have done a LOT better than anything I have ever written has, so taking my words with a grain of salt here is probably a fair idea.

But my critique of Gorean female characterization is why I conceived of Karg as being about a woman from an advanced starfaring society who is captured and enslaved by primitives. Her mind is different from theirs. She experiences things differently and thinks about them differently. She doesn’t become part of their primitive society from a single slave rape, or even a LOT of slave rape.

I tried to make my story generally more realistic. I’d read a number of accounts of how captured and enslaved people are and were treated by primitives in real-world Earth, and it was definitely Not Good. That influenced the way I wrote my story. I tried to maintain accuracy, though of course I leaned in the direction of nudity, bondage and sex as the book is erotica, albeit SF erotica.

Hence, the protagonist, upon being captured and clearly not from Around Here, was enslaved, stripped and gang raped. None of these things is done to every attractive female captured by primitives, but they were done to some female captives by some primitives in real-world Earth. And my reasons for choosing those options was to create a believable and realistic story. It wasn’t hard, if you read actual history instead of the sanitized stuff in textbooks, you’ll find a lot of stuff that will leave you stunned.

So I did have the astronaut beaten and tormented by women and children while bound naked to an altar at the center of the village. Historically accurate. She wasn’t sexually assaulted by them, that was the men’s prerogative, a prerogative they take later.

But nowadays you can’t assume censors are people who give a shit about your story. They’re there to protect their corporations from legal liability, and they do not give a rat’s ass about the quality of the stories they publish, one way or the other. Therefore, any mention of children in the vicinity of a naked woman in a work of erotica, much less children hitting and physically abusing said naked woman is close enough for any such corporate censor to ban it. So that scene had to be removed.

It wasn’t a big deal, it wasn’t essential to the story so I had no problem removing the scene.

But there was also the bestiality. Nothing to keep me from publishing the bestiality on Smashwords, except that I had sullen teenage girls as the ones who had a reptiloid rape her. When I published the story on Amazon, bestiality was starting to get censored. Like, you could have erotic stories about werewolves but they could only have sex while in human form. Never in wolf form. There were still stories about women falling in love with dinosaurs and dragons and having sex with them for some reason, though. I think the justification was that so long as the animal didn’t exist in the real world it was fantasy. (Like your average male character in an erotic romance exists in the real world. I mean, biker billionaires? C’mon! Tell me another!)

I could see the writing on that wall. Plus, the teen girls were going to be an issue, I knew. So I rewrote that portion of the story so that it was young adult women and not teen girls who were planning on having the reptiloid fuck Susan. And in the rewrite of the story, the reptiloid refuses to fuck Susan ,who is of course still tied up and gagged and helpless, So the scene would have been described by a censor as underaged bestiality bondage rape, which is probably the most awful kind of porn that isn’t snuff. (Which probably helps explain why Karg was so darned popular in the serial version.)

Susan doesn’t smell right to the reptiloid, or look right, so no go. The refusal is actually a pretty realistic depiction of how things might have gone. The Romans for example had to smear the vaginal fluids of female hyenas in heat on the genitals of virgins they had staked out in the arena to be raped by male hyenas for the amusement of the crowds. (Not making this up, the Romans really did that. As I said, real history is just full of stuff that will make your skin crawl.)

But by the time I was publishing on Smashwords I knew that scene would eventually get me in trouble from censors who do not give a shit about stories, so I nixed the entire scene. I actually came up with a neat way to resolve the scene so that it really highlighted the cultural differences between Susan and her captors, though it wasn’t nearly as dramatic as underaged sexual bondage bestiality rape. (But then, what is?)

But then there was the baby-smelling scene in the barn. Given what I have already told you about the scenes I have removed from Karg, your hair is probably standing on end right now. Calm down, this is mild stuff. Susan gets captured and put in a barn because her captors think she is a former hucow because her breasts are so large. She’s not lactating so they try to encourage that by tying her to a post so she can’t move then hanging a sling from her neck and putting a baby in it, forcing Susan to look at and smell the baby.

Afterwards, a couple of nursing toddler are brought in and encouraged to suckle at Susan’s empty breasts.

Susan doesn’t care for her breasts being gnawed on and orders her nanoset (you’ll just have to read the book to find out about the nanoset) to crank up milk production. It’s not an erotic scene.

But I knew damn well that censors would see it as as erotica, and hence the toddler sucking scene was going to be trouble. So I tossed the toddler scene out, instead having an adult male farmhand work her breasts. I also knew the baby-smelling would be trouble for the same reasons. So I tossed out the baby and instead had Susan forced to smell a big ball of baby swaddling that still had the smell of babies on it. (In hindsight, this represents a little more realism, since the farmhands regarded Susan as a wild hucow.)

I also tossed out a scene that involved forced piss-drinking, because urolagnia, i.e., scat, would be the call from censors, even though it was more attempts to induce lactation.

At this point I realized that any and all references to children were probably a mistaken, even if they were just standing around in the background, e.g.: “The women and children went off to gather fruits and nuts.” So I did a global search for the words “child” “boy” and “girl” and removed almost every occurrence. As a result, the primitives in Karg live in those erotica villages which are inhabited only by adult men and women over 18 years of age, thankyewverymuch.

You are probably thinking, “Pat … have you got any story LEFT after tossing all that stuff out?” And the answer is, “Yes, I do.” The manuscript was over 120,000 words before I started editing, it’s over 117,000 words now. All the stuff I tossed was just a drop in the bucket. Karg is epic.

And no individual scene that I dumped/altered was essential to the story. But here’s the thing: though none of the scenes were essential, they arguably made the story more real. They may have been part of the background scenery, but they were helpful parts. Most people who read or even watch movies “knows” that if you visit a primitive village there will be lots of children swarming around. It’s not like they have daycare or schools.

Furthermore, the crude, ignorant cruelty with which Susan is treated by the tribe she encounters, and by the “civilized” Kargians she encounters makes the raw, primitive story more real. We “know” at some level that this is the sort of nastiness you might encounter from primitives if you are captured by the wrong ones. We need look no farther than the experiences of settlers captured by indigenous people in America to know this is so.

Still, if you like sex slavery and slave rape, you’re going to like Karg, you’re going to like it a LOT. And there will be a lot to like: 117,000 words, and in most of them Susan is either a slave being raped or headed for her next experience of being a slave who is raped. (Her travels are very eventful!)

I’m not complaining about “whatever happened to my novel?” here. I’m trying to make a more global point about the effect censorship has on erotica. When I wrote the serialized version of “Karg” I wasn’t concerned at all about censorship. I crossed a lot of what would now be considered red lines, without a care in the world, just because I thought the scene would make the story more real, more believable based on what I knew about how primitives treated slaves. And I think overall it did.

In the censored version, by contrast, I’ve got primitive villagers living in villages where there are no children in evidence. I’ve got a woman in a barn full of lactating women being induced to lactate via dubious methods.

It’s subtle, and I doubt if most erotica readers would note it consciously, because of course every OTHER work of erotica has to operate by the same rules. It’s what you get when you censor.

Note: copies of the original serialized Karg are stored in the same vault with the original Necronomicon and you know who guards that vault.

"Louisiana Slay Ride" Now on Amazon and Smashwords

  Here's the Amazon Link

Here's the Smashwords Link

Here's the blurb:

“I know oligarchs can get away with almost anything, but setting off nukes under oil wells has to be the one thing not even an oligarch could get away with.”

Those were Honey Trapps’ words when she first heard abut Jacques Ledoux. Ledoux was Louisiana third generation oil wealth, a man who believed in himself but who probably should not have. He had already squandered a great deal of money on various unsuccessful schemes, so much that he was now only immensely wealthy instead of insanely wealthy. And Ledoux’s latest scheme looked like a desperate attempt to recoup his losses.

There were also rumors in the wealthy BDSM circles that Honey Trapp traveled in that some subs who scened with Ledoux never scened with anybody again. When the Initiative asks her to join Ledoux’s harem and get the goods on his nuke scheme in the most sexually submissive way possible, Honey doesn’t want to go. She has a rule about not subbing for even the most alpha male doms if they have bad reports from other subs, and subs who vanish is about as bad as the reports can get.

But Ledoux is rich and connected and hides his secrets well, if the rumors are even true. Only Honey’s unique skills at working her way into a dom’s heart via organs located elsewhere on his anatomy can worm the secrets out of him.

It’s Honey’s most dangerous assignment yet, filled with intrigue, danger and much sexually submissive hanky-panky in Ledoux’s harem. Sex, adventure and intrigue abound as Honey risks her person and her fortune to stop an oligarch from precipitating a nuclear disaster.

This novel is just over 43,000 words in length and is part of the Honey Trapp series.

And here's the Amazon cover:

The Perils of Using Game Avatars Instead of Photos To Make Covers When You Are An Indie Author

 Cover for the Smashwords version of "Louisiana Slay Ride"

Cover for the Amazon version of "Louisiana Slay Ride"

Raw art file of Second Life avatar for "Louisiana Slay Ride"

I like the cover art I got for “Louisiana Slay Ride" but getting there wasn’t easy. The big problem was the left leg, particularly the knee, though censorship issues posed their usual problems.

As you can see on the raw art file, the entire left leg is off. Compare it to the right leg, which is smooth and nicely modeled, connecting nicely to the hip, the left leg is very nearly two dimensional. The seam between the left thigh and the left calf is almost invisible and ends way too soon. (I double checked by looking at photos of kneeling models, the seam was always clearly visible.)

Even worse is the knee. The knee is a tricky thing to accurately represent. But that dark blob where the kneecap should be looks nothing like a knee should. And that bright Y-shaped highlight is in the wrong place and looks off.

It’s a problem with Second Life avatars, joints like the shoulders, elbows and knees tend to render unrealistically. But the whole left leg going out is a mystery. If you look at pretty much the same avatar used for the cover of “I, The Glider Gun” which is taken from straight-on, you’ll see that both legs are nicely modeled.

Why does the left leg go two dimensional in a ¾ view? No idea. But I had to deal with that stupid knee. So I created a new layer in GIMP and put a white area matching the dark area of the knee. And I copied skin tone from the left thigh and put it on another layer. Then I used the white layer to lighten the dark knee blob, playing with the opacity until I had it lightened to roughly the same value as the inner thigh. Finally, I made the inner thigh skin sample visible and played with its opacity until the dark blobby knee area looked like the inner thigh skin, only a little lighter.

The idea was to capture the underlying kneecap shape with the skin tones where they should be. But what I wound up was mostly flat skin tones like the inner thigh. So I did the artistic thing and covered up the damn knee with my byline. Now that’s artistry!

A decent artist could have solved the problem in five or ten minutes, I’m sure. Took me two hours to come up with my half-assed solution.

The censorship needed for the breasts on the Amazon cover was also an issue. I could have just had the avatar wear a bra. But nooooo, I decided that since the pasties I was using for the Smashwords cover were white, I could create a white bra layer and lay it on over the avatar’s breasts. Pasties hide the nipples, bra obscures the breasts, boob’s yer uncle. And since you can get a white overlay looking three dimensional by playing with the opacity of the white layer, and bras are easy to create by using portions of circles as your templates, it can be a quick, easy task.

But the pasties proved to be a bit time-consuming, because if the bra covered the pasties or the chain between them it would look wrong. So after I created the bra outline I had to go into the bra layer and carefully erase those portions of the bra that covered the pasties and chain. I also had to erase those portions of the bra that covered the curls of the avatars hair that would have covered her bra strap. It didn't require any artistic skill, but it was time consuming, painstaking work.

All that work with the knee and the bra on top of posing the avatar, finding the background art, obtaining and creating the chain art in Second Life, and doing some other little stuff like enlarging the size of the avatar’s thong cup to keep the censors happy, the job was time consuming.

So it took about a day and a half to come up with both cover versions. Maybe two days. OK, two days. I was happy with the cover art, and I enjoyed making it, but damn. The images based on photos are a lot easier. But it’s much harder to get a clip art photo posed properly and to make the photo as naked and bondage-y as I can get away with.

Just part of the fun of being an indie author, I guess.

PMC Glasses Have Clouded Netflix’s Vision

  In which I become the 4,263,769th writer to weigh in on "What's Wrong With Netflix"

There has been a lot of theorizing about what might have gone wrong with Netflix that has caused them to have the Earth-shattering minimal dip in subscriptions that they recently reported, causing them to have a 35 percent drop in market capitalization because investors are flighty idiots. (Not that I blame them, I’d be nervous too if I had two nickels to rub together in this ghoulish Late Stage Capitalism nightmare economy.)

Anyway, I want to get in on this whole theorizing thing myself, because I think I have a theory that is more all-encompassing than most other theories, which tend to run along the lines of “Netflix is failing because it isn’t making the kind of movies/shows I like any more.” My theory is more theoretical, more all-encompassing, explaining why Netflix fails to make or buy engaging content for its subscribers most of the time.

My theory is that the Netflix execs, the producers, the showrunners, the directors, set designers and decorators, costume designers and the writers are all members of the Professional Managerial Class (or PMC) or are at least PMC wannabes.

First of all, what do I mean by PMC glasses? I mean the people who make Netflix productions see the world from the viewpoint of one of the top 10 percent of American society, or world society. They are the affluent, the comfortable, the successful. They aren’t angry about anything. They aren’t upset about anything. They may have their causes and their viewpoints, but they’re comfortable causes and comfortable viewpoints.

And I’m not claiming that all these people being members of the PMC class or PMC wannabes is the result of any conspiracy. No one deliberately gave all those jobs to people just because they were PMC class members. Instead they gave people who are successful in film and television money, plenty of it, enough to propel them into the PMC class. By the time they got to the point where they were cutting deals with Netflix, they had been successful for a while. Members in good standing of the PMC class.

That’s why Netflix comedies aren’t funny. To be really funny, humor needs an edge provided by anger, by outsider outrage, which is generally in short supply among the very comfortable PMC class.

For example, one of the most successful, if not the most successful offerings on Netflix recently was “Don’t Look Up!” in which a planet-killer asteroid approaching Earth is an obvious stand-in for the climate crisis. It is edgy it is angry it is full of the sort of stuff that PMC types might find disturbing, looking at politics, politicians, the military and the media with a very hard, cynical eye. It has a downbeat ending and it portrays the mighty on Earth as a bunch of self-obsessed, greedy idiots who are too busy money grubbing and power grabbing to save themselves.

“Don’t Look Up!” would seem prove me wrong, except it had some outsider outrage going from David Sirota who co-wrote the script with director Adam McKay. Sirota was a senior advisor to Bernie Sanders’ 2020 Presidential campaign, and prior to “Don’t Look Up” was primarily known as a leftie commentator. He wasn’t a Marxist-Leninist, but he could fairly be described as a Social Democrat like Bernie Sanders.

It was Sirota’s leftist outrage over climate change and his in-depth knowledge of the duplicity of the media and politics that made the barbs sharp and nasty. “Don’t Look Up” succeeded by borrowing its outrage from a political outsider, Sirota. The instincts of most PMC types would be to moderate the anger and the rage, replacing it with merely clever wordplay and very broad satire, leaving “Don’t Look Up!” in the vicinity of funny. Sirota’s knowledge and anger kept it right on target.

This rarely happens on Netflix, and I think that’s what makes the service dull. Once Netflix started getting up to 100 million subscribers, its major preoccupation became finding entertainment that wouldn’t offend its enormous base, rather than entertainment that would make them glad they were subscribers.

This impulse, combined with the PMC goggles that want to make everything look comfortable and safe makes everything dull and interesting. The comedies aren’t funny (lookin’ at you, “Yes Day” “Bad Trip” and “Starsky and Hutch”) the romances aren’t all that romantic and definitely not sexy (lookin’ at you, all of Netflix’s recent romcoms) and the action/adventure stuff is vigorous and active but not at all compelling (lookin’ at you “Red Notice,” and “Eagle Eye”) and sometimes they’re just godawful (lookin’ at you “Spenser Confidential”).

The sexuality stuff is also indicative. They can’t even match softcore porn in their sex scenes. It’s all ladylike porn, if you know what I mean. There are a lot of articles on the Internet about movies and shows that have porny scenes and content, and I’ve watched some of them, and they’re a bunch of nothingburgers compared to actual porn. They’re not porny, they’re kinda sorta in a way pornish, at best.

Do an image search of such notably “porny” movies and shows as “365 Days,” “Bridgerton,” and “Sex Education” if you like, you’ll see what I mean if you’re familiar with actual porn. There’s not much of it, it’s underlit, and most of the good parts get blacked out. It’s PMC porn, in short, nothing to offend someone too much and yet give them the impression that they saw something sexy.

The problem is, the PMC vision doesn’t “see” the vast majority of Netflix subscribers, who are definitely not part of the PMC class. They don’t connect with their subscribers psychologically, intellectually or emotionally. Netflix’s PMC types may have some demographic data, but they have no idea who their subscribers are are or how they live, other than “not as well as me.”

So the PMC types turn out generic stuff that doesn’t really interest their subscribers. The bland, comfortable stuff that suites the PMC vision doesn’t work for the angry, increasingly impoverished bulk of Americans locked in alienating, dead-end jobs that bore them and which they hate, while also taking great pleasure in gaming and social media of various sorts that the PMC types typically do not understand well.

If Netflix and its content providers wanted to appeal to their actual audience, if they could actually SEE them, they’d have more characters who were out-of-touch seniors doing and saying stupid things. They’d have more characters who were horrible corporate bosses making their employees’ lives miserable. They’d have more characters who were lovable slackers outwitting their horrible bosses and having sex with all the pretty girls and making the lives of those around them more rewarding, though generally not in monetary ways.

Climate change would be a huge theme in a lot of stories. Housing would be a theme, mostly not being able to get it. The way the PMC and the oligarchs rip off middle class and poor people would be a steady background theme to the stories, and often the main theme.

Homeless people would be portrayed as people, not drugged-out zombies. And most people would be living in cramped apartments, often with roommates to make paying the rent possible. And the struggle to keep the rent paid would be a much bigger thing.

PMC types would say such stories are boring and distressing, not the sort of thing people want to watch to be entertained. But the real truth is that the “people” they’re describing are the PMC class, because they can’t see the rest of us, and don’t want to.

And they would really HATE stories about how they economically oppress everyone else except their oligarch masters, and which detail how horribly managers treat employees as a group, because they instinctively dislike any story that reveals just how much better off their lives are than those of the middle class and poor people they systematically oppress.

So Netflix, its management and content creators consisting only of PMC types, don’t show these things or anything like them. They have shows about wealthy people, often members of the PMC class and oligarchs who lead “interesting” lives. Even when they portray members of the poor and middle class they do so through PMC lenses. The middle class and poor people on Netflix live in housing that is much nicer than real middle class and poor people could ever afford. They generally wear clothing and have possessions that are nicer than most middle class and poor people can afford. In fact, they tend to live like upper middle class and lower upper class people do – PMC types pretending to be poor and middle class, in short.

When Netflix does attempt a realistic or gritty depiction of poor or middle class people, they tend to go way too dark. For example “Hillbilly Elegy”is a gritty depiction of how tough people in Appalachian mountain country have it. It was presented in the PMC-controlled mainstream media as a sympathetic portrayal of Appalachian mountain people. But very quickly reviews came out saying that the movie was actually poverty porn, focusing only on the miseries of the Appalachian poor, creating a misleading view of who they were as people. Even when the PMC types are looking hard at the middle class and the poor, they cannot see them as they are.

Wouldn’t pay them to, you know.

I hope I haven’t given you the impression that the PMC are conspiring to exclude and misrepresent the poor and the middle class. It’s just a case of shared interests leading to a shared vision, one of those unwritten cultural things that’s invisible and would be denied by most members of the PMC.

But there are some members of the PMC who do intentionally lie and mislead about the economic oppression of the poor and middle class. Academics and media people often know enough to know that the wealth of the oligarchs comes from the economic oppression of the poor and middle class, but you’ll never hear it from their commentating and the media enterprises they work for.

And if PMC commentators do somehow attempt to tell a progressive message, especially on political or economic topics, they are very rapidly fired. For example, when MSNBC hired Dylan Rattigan, Krystal Ball, Ed Schultz and Cenk Uygar to give a progressive “edge” to their coverage, then fired them all when it turned out they had spines.

How does this all relate to Netflix’s woes? Netflix, with its hundreds of millions of subscribers and its PMC staff and oligarch management can’t see its subscribers, and by “see” I mean understand. What’s more, they don’t WANT to see their subscribers. What they really want to do is feed the subscribers bland, feel-good escapism and works that support the status quo, even when they claim to be edgy, challenging work.

(That’s why Netflix, and ALL the streaming media are so ecstatically happy with comic book movies. Movies about spandex-clad idiot good guys flying around and foiling the plans of spandex-clad idiot bad guys are just the pablum they want to serve to subscribers to keep them docile and unaware.)

This is why virtually all the entertianment options on Netflix rouse only half-hearted interest among subscribers, if they rouse any interest at all. Netflix and every streaming service and cable provider would LOVE to provide entertainment that will have audiences absolutely rapt over what they’re watching and eager for more. Many may actually believe they are doing just that. Some people do love a lot of Netflix productions. And some of them are good. (“Don’t Look Up!” “The Witcher” “Stranger Things” “Travelers” and some others.) But generally they’re a drop in the bucket compared to the huge swirling mass of mediocrity that is most of Netflix’s (and most other streaming services’) productions.

There’s a reason for that. Netflix’s content isn’t made for us. It’s made by PMC people, for PMC people, though many of them think they are making shows for us. They aren’t. That’s why they aren’t any good. They’re not supposed to be good. They’re supposed to be tranquilizers. Soma. And they are. Netflix’s collection of merely tolerable films isn’t a bug. It’s a feature.

See you at work tomorrow, bright and early!

"Yard Sale Slut" Soon To Be a Major Netflix Film!

 

You can get the original novel here!

 

I've had to keep this under wraps for a while, but my agent, Pauline Perell, has called and I'm free to Tell All: my novel "Yard Sale Slut" will be made into a major motion picture to be aired on Netflix this fall. It's set in the near future, and is the story of Moira, once a promising student, who loses everything and is drugged, sold into slavery, stripped, bound, gagged, raped, lesbian gang raped, whipped, whored out and then suffered the most horrible humiliation of all: sold on the cheap at a yard sale to a sex slave tavern owner.

I don't think I'll be surprising anyone when I tell you that there was a huge bidding war on the story between Lifetime Channel and Netflix. The amount of pathos and bathos here is unbelievable. I didn't even believe it myself when I wrote it! So the seven figure check they're cutting me makes sense, Hollywood sense anyway.

Of course Neflix is asking for a few minor changes in the story to make it more acceptable to a mainstream audiences. Minor stuff, really. The rape and sex slavery themes, they feel, are a little much. Or as Netflix director Wilson Pluckett told me, "Look I get that 'Yard Sale Slut' is a dark, edgy, erotic, kinky satirical critique of capitalism gone zonkers, but we were thinking of taking it more in the direction of a lighthearted rom-com. And you can't have actual rape and sex slavery in lighthearted rom-com, it's just too heavy. So we were thinking of throwing out the slavers altogether. Instead we're thinking of having the female MC bought as a "slave" at one of those charity yard sales they have, by the male MC. Be a good vehicle for Freddie Prinze and Jessica Alba, you know."

"If you wanted a lighthearted rom-com, you could have optioned How My Slavegirl Found Me it's an actual lighthearted rom-com," I pointed out. 

"And we may just do that down the road," said Pluckett. "But for now everyone is sold on "Yard Sale Slut" except for the title. The working title is now "Yard Sale Bargain Romance" to give you some idea. But otherwise it's exactly the same story. The male MC is still a politico, only now he's a candidate for US Senator from New York. And there'll be all sorts of raised eyebrows and media interest in the Senatorial candidate buying a slavegirl, you know, even if it's only a pretendy slavegirl. Mucho boffo humor here."

"Oh, I could see that working very well with a sexual relationship where she's his sexy slavegirl and he's her dominating master, all very consensual of course," I said. "Plenty of chances for double entendre."

"Well, about that," said Pluckett. "We find our rom-coms work much better in foreign markets without any sex. Or nudity. Maybe a chaste kiss at the end, maybe a bared shoulder or two. But no sex at all, especially no kinky sex."

"I'm surprised you left in the romance and the comedy," I observed, catching the way the wind was blowing.

"Well there won't be much of either, to be honest," said Plunkett. "Actual romance and humor are difficult and dangerous. We're looking for a script that is only in the vicinity of funny, and which keeps the romance down to knowing looks and raised eyebrows. We just want to leave audiences with a general impression that nice people had fun after encountering some mild difficulties, which is really what your story is all about, when you think about it."

"Of course it is," I lied. "And of course there's all those checks I'll be getting based on net profits to help soothe my conscience."

"Exactly!" lied Pluckett. "I knew we could come to a meeting of the minds on this!"

NOTE: Post meeting, I've been informed that the story will now be set in Ukraine and will involve a giant time-traveling spider. Plot twist: the spider is the nicest character in the film!

P.S. "Yard Sale Slut" is one of the three stories included in my Three Tavern Sluts collection found here. And extra buck goes a long way on Smashwords.

Greek Harem: Honey Trapp #3 Now Available on Amazon and Smashwords

  

Cover of the Smashwords edition of Greek Harem. Here's the link!

Cover of the Amazon edition of Greek Harem. Here's the link!

In the third installment of the Honey Trapp Snappy Stories, Honey infiltrates a Greek shipping oligarch's harem of pay-for-play slavegirl beauties. Her goal: to help discover how the oligarch's shipping firm is sliding past regulations aimed at preventing the use of bunker oil as fuel. "Something funky in the bunky oil indeed!" (Bunker oil is basically what's left over when you refine crude oil into gasoline. It's very low-grade stuff, full of sulphur dioxide and particulate matter which is toxic to human beings and other living things, which is why there are regulations concerning its use, pathetically limited though those regulations are.)

This plotline gives me plenty of chances to indulge in some really fun orgy scenes and also some ultra-kinky public bondage sex action at the Art Institute for the Sexually Insane. It was great fun to write those scenes, which is probably why they constitute the bulk of the novella.  And it was fun to play with the personalities of the four slavegirls other then Honey, their perceptions of themselves and one another, and to contrast a pay-for-play harem where anyone can leave if they want to, and the issues of historical harems which were not consensual and which sometimes led to bad results, like people getting killed.

I also had some fun with nomenclature and myth. All of the local slavegirls have names from Greek mythology. One in particular stands out. Her name was initially Iris, but I decided for some reason, which was probably my subconscious at work/play, to base her on a the face of a remarkable woman I'd seen in some porn photo. (I've looked all over for it, I know it's somewhere in the huge folder I call my "Archives" but I can't find it.) She had a bull-like quality to her face, except that it was very feminine, not masculine at all. You might think cow-like, but we associate cowlike with being kind of placid and sleepy-looking, and that didn't match this woman's face at all -- she was very alert and aware-looking, just very confident-looking as well. Like a bull that absolutely owns its paddock. 

While writing the description, I remembered that there was a Greek myth about a woman mating with a bull, and sure enough, there was. A quick trip to Professor Google showed that a woman named Pasiphae offended the gods somehow, and she was cursed with lust for the Cretan bull, even though she was married to King Minos. She subsequently gave birth to the Minotaur, and also several human children, including a woman named Ariadne. I decided it would be fun to rename Iris the bull-faced woman Ariadne, thus ever-so-subtly implying that she is a distant descendant of the mythical Pasiphae, and the bull traits still show up in her children, however watered down. I didn't make Ariadne's descent part of the plot, but I did have some fun with the characterization. I'll say no more.

Also, check out the covers of my book. They are a good indication of the differences between Amazon and Smashwords censorship rules. There are two main differences between the two images. The Amazon image wears no gag, the Smashwords image wears a gag. And the Amazon has a thong strap and a but of cloth covering the portion of her butt that's visible from the side. The Amazon image does not.  

I very much wanted a gag on the Amazon cover, I thought it kicked up the sexiness and kinkiness of the image a lot, but I did some research and other Amazon books with the words "Gagged" right in the title (like "Bound and Gagged") did not have pictures of gagged women on them. I've gotten away with such imagery in the past, but after looking at all the boos with "Gagged" in the title and no gags on the cover art, I decided better safe than sorry. I also covered up the butt bits, negligible though they were, because Amazon does not like to acknowledge that women have butts. I wasn't so put off by that because I don't think it affected the image much.

I also put the collar, leash and wrist cuff on the woman, because those do show up on the covers of kinky titles on Amazon. Plus, the cuff is plausibly deniable, there's nothing to distinguish it from a bracelet.  And I also used the "Scale" tool to make the woman's body a bit thicker than in the original: she's one of those leggy fashion model whippet types, which is great, but I suspect erotica readers like a little more flesh on their models. That said, I absolutely love the strutting stride of the model, the way her head is thrown back, the general go-for-it attitude her whole body projects. Sales of this book are going VERY well, I suspect the cover might just have something to do with it.

What do you think? Leave your comments, oh, just anywhere.