Whitney Cummings, Porn Fans and a 14th Century Saint's Philosophy

   Is every step on the road to heaven really heaven?

I have long believed this to be the case. The phrase "All the way to heaven is heaven, for Jesus said 'I am the way'" is attributed to Saint Catherine of Siena, a 14th Century saint noted for her devout faith and her organizational skills. (She wasn't martyred, she just got sainted because she got the Catholic Church's act together organizationally at a time when counting chickens after they hatched was considered a feat of mathematical genius. There is also talk of magically uncorrupted loaves of bread. Wooooo!)

 Being a lifelong atheist, I have never taken St. Catherine's maxim literally and I skip over the Jesus part because who cares, but I still believe it holds great wisdom. The central idea is that if you have some goal or purpose you want to achieve, every step on the road to achieving that goal is the goal.  

Let's take an example. Suppose you want to be a famous pop singer. You've got a good voice, you like singing, you did well in music class at school, and you feel you've done some good covers of classics. But so do a million other people. You don't have any contacts in the music industry, haven't been engaged in musical activity since school because everybody told you it was stupid to go for a career in music. Impossible dream, yadda yadda yadda.

So what do you do? Anything you can, that's what. You form a band with other buddies from school who like music. You play in a garage. You look for gigs. You play for friends. You make demo tapes. You make Youtube vids. Probably you have to work a crappy job to keep a roof over your head while you do this because you're making no money at it. 

But you are singing. You are doing your thing. And whether or not the music industry likes it, you are part of the music industry, even if you are widely considered an awful part of it. You may not be where you want to be in the music industry... yet. But you're making progress. You are taking steps that will get you somewhere in the music industry that will make you happy, even if you can't be the famous rock singer you wanted to be when you started out. 

And that progress may bring you happiness, i.e., you may arrive in heaven. You have the hope of heaven, you believe it is there, and that IS heaven.

Think of it in another way. Heaven, or musical stardom or whatever is not a place or a job, it's a process. You start out as you at Point A and you move toward Point Z, your goal. And as is the norm in most worthy goals, you encounter a lot of obstacles and detours that make things difficult for you. 

And sometimes you discover that what you thought was a detour was actually your destination. Like, you discover that you aren't really interested in being a famous rocknroll singer, but that you really like doing jazz vocals as part of a group. Or that you like doing mixing on sound boards. Or you like promoting and helping other musicians find their place in the industry. Or whatever. The point is, heaven isn't always where you think it is when you are just starting out. You have to find it. But eventually you find it, or something like it, and you're happy, and you realize that you had fun at every stop along the way. Because every step on the way to heaven, is heaven.

Now let's get to the porn fans. I read a lot of stuff online about sex. I read the comments on pornsites, among other things. One of the things you quickly notice when you read the comments of fans on pornsites is that it's very clear that some porn fans have, in their minds, a personal relationship of some kind with the pornstars they follow. The dead giveaway for this, to my mind, is the sense of betrayal you get in the comments about pornstars who have changed their looks, most often by inflating the size of their breasts, followed closely by inflating the size of their lips.

I generally find that when pornstars do this sort of thing it rarely works out well for them in terms of improving their looks (though it sometimes does). But I never feel any sense of personal anger or betrayal about it, because I never feel that I have a personal relationship with any pornstars, probably because I DON'T have a personal relationship with any pornstars. I may like the way they perform in various porn videos, but I don't feel any sense of personal connection with them. They are performing for an audience, and that's not a personal relationship, gratifying as their performances may be in so many respects.

Some porn fans clearly do not get that. Their posts reflect a clear sense of hurt and betrayal when a porn star blows up her tits or lips or whatever. They vow never to watch her videos again. She has forever damaged something precious in their minds and very possibly, hearts. Also maybe other parts. It's a fairly common problem that's just not confined to porn fans. Lots of people mistake performances for the real thing in politics, in auto and real estates sales, in media and in the arts. They’ve mistaken the persona the performer projects in her performances for the real thing.

Which gets us to the comedian Whitney Cummings. Whitney is an actress and standup comedian who did a really clever thing in her standup special "Can I Touch It?" She paid a company called RealBotix to make a sex doll that looked exactly like her, and she included the Whitney sex doll in her standup. I was very interested, of course. I was hoping she would use the Whitney sex doll to play with the differences between her the person and her the media persona. She didn't do a lot of that unfortunately, she concentrated mostly on the differences between her as a human being and the robot as a construct that just happened to look very much like her.

Granted, it looked very much like her:

The joke is clearly on robot Whitney.

And it could speak and move its eyes and jaws a bit to make its speaking more lifelike, though its robotic voice was nothing like Whitney's. And as the photo illustrates, the doll looks very dead and doll-like next to a very lively and animated Whitney Cummings. And despite the fact that Cummings went for the obvious, basic material that was inherent in the Whitney sex doll, she did it in a smart, funny and hilarious way that sometimes did have elements of the routine I had envisioned.

Then from somewhere out of the whirling nebulousities of my subconscious mind came the question: “Well what if some guy were a total Whitney Cummings fan and his idea of heaven would be to be Whitney Cummings’ boyfriend/husband/whatever? And suppose that guy managed to buy a Whitney Cummings lookalike sex doll? Would he be closer to his heaven if he had a doll that looked just exactly Whitney Cummings, that he could fuck? I mean, he wouldn’t be THERE, not by a long shot, but wouldn’t be closer to being Whitney Cummings-adjacent?”

That’s a much tougher question than it looks like, because neither “no” nor “yes” are easy answers to arrive at honestly.

“No” is difficult because central to my idea about “all the way to heaven, is heaven” is that any move toward a goal is a good one in the sense that it gets you on the path of achieving that goal, even if it’s completely in the wrong direction. The important thing is to get moving. As you move toward your goal (or away from it, if you start out in the completely wrong direction) you’ll develop a clearer idea of what direction you need to move in, make the necessary adjustments, and eventually, bob’s your uncle or to be more precise, Whitney’s your girlfriend.

Let’s take the Whitney Cummings sex doll case, because it’s a tough one. (And to get back to the pornstar fans who feel a personal relationship with pornstars, an almost identical situation exists with pornstars. They even sell latex casts of their genitals for fans to fuck.)

The problem is, the world supply of Whitney Cummings is very limited. There’s only one of her. There’s a huge amount of Whitney Cummings media properties available that have created a media persona of Whitney Cummings, but there’s only one real, actual Whitney Cummings.

Now suppose you gather some money and buy yourself a Whitney Cummings-like sex doll. (While doing research for this essay I read an article that said there were many eager would-be buyers for Whitney lookalike sex dolls after her Neflix special came out, but that the company couldn’t make it because Whitney Cummings’ likeness and image are legally protected, as is normal for celebrities. I mean, can you imagine all the products and services celebrities would seem to be endorsing if their images didn’t have legal protection? But the demand certainly proves that a lot of people would certainly buy a Whitney sex doll if they could.)

And so that fan can have a sexual experience that is a lot more like fucking Whitney Cummings than just imagining it. He can fuck something that looks very much like Whitney Cummings, that kinda feels like Whitney Cummings (I understand that the vaginas on many sex dolls are very well done) and (if he’s the obsessive type who tracks down what kind of perfume Whitney wears and buys some) kinda smells like Whitney Cummings. He could also edit tapes of Whitney’s comments from the many, many hours of speech available from her podcasts and have the experience of hearing Whitney Cummings moan and cry out and so forth while he fucks the Whitney sex doll.

And my answer long-term would have to be “Yes” a man who has bought a Whitney sex doll is closer to Whitney heaven than one who has not. Because where does he go from there? He may not be all that close to marrying Whitney, but that was never a high probability event, given the scarcity of Whitney Cummings. (And the exact same thing is true of all the porn fans who buy latex casts of their genitals. Yes, that's a thing.) But it’s reasonable to suppose that the fan will have learned a few things about himself once he has slaked his lust on the Whitney Cummings sex doll.

He might for example realize that he’s not all that attracted to Whitney in particular, he just likes fit brunettes with merry smiles and so he eventually starts dating fit brunettes with merry smiles and eventually finds one who fits him to a T. Or that he was attracted to her for her humor, not her body, and so eventually he finds a short, chubby blonde who cracks him up for the rest of his life. Etc., etc. Or he could discover that he’s perfectly happy with the Whitney sex doll, so much so that he loses interest in the real Whitney and is very happy living alone with his doll.

There are a lot of ways the story can go, and so long as it leads to more happiness and personal fulfillment, it’s the way to heaven.

But the Whitney sex doll could lead to the fan realizing that the Whitney sex doll just doesn’t get it for him, that only the real thing will do, and so he concocts a plan to kidnap Whitney and botches it (because plans like that never work out well for anybody) and he spends the next 30 years in prison writing letters to Whitney which are read only by the prison psychiatrist. This is not the way to happiness or personal fulfillment. Not the way to heaven. That’s one way, an extreme way, that the answer might be “No.” It’s a very rare thing but famous people have been kidnapped or murdered by fans in the past.

The more common way the answer would be “no” would be that the sex doll experience alienates the fan from his own and others’ sexuality. That is, his sexual experience with the doll leads him to think of women as animated sex dolls to a certain extent. Even worse, women reject him because they sense that about him. He loses the ability to connect with women as human beings and becomes something like an incel, perhaps an incel, period, unable to form a relationship with a woman that involves give and take. He has gone far from heaven.

Of course, this technology will evolve. Whitney Cummings discussed that in an interview with Joe Rogan (she brought her sex doll along for the interview so it could truly be an pen discussion). Joe didn’t like the doll at all. He found it creepy. But Whitney pointed out, and Joe agreed, that the technology on the dolls would evolve. That one day sex dolls that look human and move like humans and talk like humans would exist.

Whitney said she and other human women will destroy the sex dolls at the point. “I will be a savage about it,” she said. “I will wait until you fall in love with it, and I will destroy it.”

But I don’t think Whitney and Joe thought this through. Why would you stop perfecting your sex dolls when they reached par for human women? Why not make sex dolls that were better in every respect than human women? Better conversationalists, able to move like the best dancer ever, smelling like she’s horny all the time, BEING horny whenever you want her to (because she’s programmed to) and looking like the most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen. Plus all the sexual skills you ever wanted and no inhibitions. And an innate desire to clean house when not having sex? Better yet, an innate desire to suck cock for hours.

The technical problems in creating such a doll are difficult and we’re a few years from surmounting them, maybe a couple of decades, maybe a century. But there’s no reason to suppose any of these hurdles are insurmountable. They all seem well within the scope of human achievement if climate change doesn’t kill us all off.

And I think the man who had a sex doll like that would be in a very happy place. Except, you know… no children.

I think at that point, the population problem for the human race might become maintaining a population of human beings. Those last few generations of human men would be very happy, though. Human women, much less so.

So there you have it. A Whitney Cummings sex doll might indeed lead some people to heaven, meaning St. Catherine’s saying still holds true. But a truly advanced Whitney Cummings sex doll might also portend the end of the human race. That’s what you call “problematical.”

"The Slave Girl Diet" Now Available On Smashwords

  You can buy “The Slave Girl Diet” here.

First off, let me give you the blurb for my new book, “The Slave Girl Diet.” Then I want to do some bragging. I came up with some neat ideas for this book, and I want to brag about them, and where better than my blog, and, well, all over social media?

“Earth business tycoon and renowned chef Chloe goes through a crosstime gate to take the slave girl diet in a Collar World kennel. Will the constant public nudity, bondage and sex turn her into just another submissive, mindless slave girl drooling for sexual bondage use? More importantly, will it get the weight off and keep it off? Read this 66,000 word erotic SF novel and find out!”

OK, you’ve got the picture. But what you don’t have is the fiendish plot hook I came up with to compel Chloe to go to Collar World to diet. I first proposed that in the future, Earth and Collar World come up with medical tech that allows people to de-age their bodies: that is, their 70 year old bodies can transform back into 20 year old bodies, leaving all the infirmaries and illnesses of old age behind. Wonderful!

But there is one fiendish catch. Any weight you may have picked up on your journey through life doesn’t go away. It stays with you. If you are overweight when you take the de-aging treatment, you are young, vital and... overweight. And since the de-aging tech can be used repeatedly, you face the prospect of hundreds, perhaps thousands of years of life being overweight.

This would, I believe, create some very, very motivated dieters. And is, if I may say so myself, is a deliciously imaginative use of SF tropes. Because the old de-aging tech has been used again and again, but never in this way. Bwahahahahahaha!

(Not giving away any spoilers here, you find all this out in the first chapter.)

And it just so happens that Collar World has developed a dieting technique that gets the weight off and keeps it off. For years… possibly forever. No one knows, as de-aging tech is as new to Collar World as it is to Earth. But every woman who’s gone through the diet has kept the weight off since returning to Earth.

And of course the diet involves lots and lots and lots of bondage and sex and maledom/femsub behavior. The slave girl diet kennels are full of fit Masters determined to help those slave girls reach those weight goals – like it or not! And hence there is a ton of erotica.

I wanted people to see Chloe as a person, not as an instance of “overweight” so I did two things. First, I wrote the story entirely in first person perspective… Chloe’s perspective. So the reader is not looking at Chloe from the outside, they are looking out at the world through her eyes. And Chloe, while she is aware that she is overweight, does not see herself as overweight. And so the reader hopefully will see her as a person and not just an instance of “overweight.”

Along those same lines, in Collar World obese people are rare. Collar World natives lead a much healthier lifestyle than Earth people do, and effective dieting techniques have been developed to help the relatively few obese people lose weight and keep it off. As a result, they don’t do fat shaming. The concept wouldn’t occur to them, it’s not part of their culture. They would feel that a person who is overweight has a health problem, like having the measles or psoriasis or whatever. They know an overweight person has a problem, but they don’t assume it’s because of a moral failure on the overweight person’s part.

It makes for an interesting story, combined with the other plot twists. At least that’s my hope. Buy the novel and find out for yourself.

How the Cover for "The Slave Girl Diet" Was Designed, or "Hire an ARTIST!"

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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.