Still Alive

Let me reassure you all, I'm still alive. (I know, I know, you care only insofar as I continue The Adjusters -- I'm crushed!) It's just been a rather oddly busy month of May, and June looks like it will be along the same lines, so updates will be rather more infrequent than usual. I apologize in advance.

Of course, The Adjusters keeps being written. That's not going to change. Although I have to admit that the upcoming episode, the one I'm currently editing, is really kicking my ass. It's not coming together at all, fighting me at every turn, and I find myself needing to rewrite large swats of it. Which sucks because I know that the four episodes that follow are very good. It's just this one that I can't nail, and it's frustrating.

Meanwhile, to distract myself from that silly episodic impasse, I've been playing with Undum, "a client-side framework for hypertext interactive fiction games." It's pretty simple, in the sense that it can only be used to code up straightforward choose-your-own-adventure-style texts, but it's very well done, and the UI looks good. I've been coding up a simple story that's been kicking in my head for a while, and I've not gotten sick of it yet. Maybe I'll post the result when it's done, if it ever gets to that point.

Speaking of choose-your-own-adventure, there's a site, CHYOO, that lets writers collaborate on interactive sex stories. Now, to be honest, most of the results are rather awful, as you can imagine when a bunch of people start writing pretty much independently from each other, each free to take the current story and fork it off into some random direction. But some of the story ideas are interesting, and who knows, maybe that sort of setup will strike your imagination and you'll want to participate. In any event, have a look.

If you used to follow this blog back when it was a journal on ASSTR, you know that I have an interest in adult interactive fiction, or AIF. Not that I've done anything about it yet, but it's there, a dream that just won't die. I guess I'm waiting for the right idea to tickle my fancy. Here's part of the journal entry I wrote two years ago, to give you some background on what I'm talking about.

Writing projects still on hold because of the upcoming AIF minicomp deadline. I promised I would say something about AIF. Let's start with IF, or Interactive Fiction. Some of you might know those as text adventure games, in which you are basically thrown into a virtual world, where the description of the world is given as text descriptions. Your role is to supply instructions to the player character using short verb/noun sentences, and your actions can impact the world. The result of your actions, once again is given as text descriptions. A good starting point for discovering the world of interactive fiction is probably Brass Lantern, especially its Beginners section. Now, modern pieces of interactive fiction focus maybe a bit less on the "adventuring" part, and more on stories and interactions, with an attempt at narrative. Because this narrative is interactive, in the sense that the player can affect it, the result can be dubbed Interactive Fiction. There is a lot that has been said about the notion of narrative that arises in such a context, and if you're curious (and have a head for theoretical analyses of new media), go and check out the work of Nick Montfort.

Adult Interactive Fiction is basically the smut side of Interactive Fiction. It should not be surprising that this came about. The original pieces of AIF were, strangely enough, very Star Trek centric. Not so much anymore. Basically, AIF has the player interact with computer-controlled characters in sexual ways. Depending on the skill of the designer, and the extent to which the sex can be connected to a narrative that has some independent interest, the result can lead to a highly arousing experience. I suspect very much that there is some underlying theory of arousal and sexual release that could be brought to bear to the study of AIF and its effectiveness as, well, smut.

I strongly urge you to have look at the kind of things that are out there. Start with the IF Wiki page for AIF, and work from there. It's a little bit difficult to get started, simply because there are few centralized places were to get games and information how to run them. On the plus side, games tend to run on all platforms, partly because the game itself is just a data file, and to run the game you need an interpreter that can run the data file. There are a few systems out there that can produce games (TADS and Inform being the two big ones), and each of those systems come with interpreters for essentially all known computer platforms. Head to ... and have a look. If you're looking at good games to start, you may want to look up Moist, one of my all time favorites and a good starting point.

Some Serious Books

And we're back after a little unscheduled outage from Blogger. I don't think we've suffered any loss here, but if you run across anything that seems to be missing, please drop me a quick email.

Meanwhile, I've been working hard on a section in an upcoming episode of The Adjusters that explains a bit more about Cindy's backstory, and it looks like that episode is going to cap the 12K words, with no obvious place to split it in two. I'm just hoping I'll be able to whittle it down some during editing.

I've gotten a question or two by email about my process for writing. It's pretty simple, really. My goal is to put down 400 words a day -- usually first thing in the morning. Much less than that and nothing gets written, and much more than that and I burn out on the story. (Unless it's a one-shot short story.) I know, 400 sounds like a weird number. It just happens to be exactly two pages in my working notebook, given the size at which I write. Yes, I write The Adjusters longhand, in a notebook. It's the only way I can write smut, with a (good) pen. There's something physical about writing smut for me, and that requires contact of pen to paper, and the gentle flow of the pen moving along. Which does mean that at some point I need to type up what I've written into a word processor -- that's the long and boring bit. Of course, I do some editing on the fly while typing, so the time's not completely wasted, and it forces me to read every single word back. At least I've learned to edit my prose on the computer itself, as opposed to printing out reams of text. I'm thinking though that it might be time for me to try again to see if I can't write directly on the machine. Maybe I'll try to write the next episode that way, see what happens.

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At the end of last week I finished reading T. J. Parsell's book Fish: A Memoir of a Boy in a Man's Prison, wherein he recounts how, when he was seventeen, he was sent to state prison in Michigan for robbing a photomat and on the first day was raped and then given to one inmate as the result of a coin toss. An arresting memoir, and fairly well written at that, but most importantly a fascinating look into a completely different world for me.

People I know that have seen me read this book have asked me why I picked it up. A good question. I could not, for many of them that do not know of my alternate life, give them the real answer, which is that I wanted to make sure that I was still human. Let me explain that bit. I write smut as a way to wind down, and also to explore some of my more twisted fantasies. And a lot of that involves callous mind control of people, something that doesn't rate very high on the consent scale, especially in the cases where the victims are aware of what's going on but cannot do anything to help it (for instance, Trish in The Adjusters #9). That's all fantasy, of course. But I feel I need to check, once in a while, that real accounts of rape and sexual exploitation still touch me, move me, disturb me. I'm happy to report, they do.

What I find intriguing, though, from a purely psychological perspective, and up to a point literary perspective, is how a text such a Parsell's can be completely unarousing, while at the same time something like Property of Devil's Outlaws by Just2twisted or even better Madame Justine by Karel can be considered arousing. (I'm venturing on thin ice here -- I do like those stories, but I realize they are somewhat extreme, and definitely not to everyone's taste.)

There is something different between stories written to arouse and those that do not, even when they focus on the same idea -- the tone of voice, the details to which the writers decide to pay attention, the perspective. I'd love to see an analysis of what makes a piece of fiction arousing and what makes it not so. Certainly, the expectation that the reader brings to the piece has got to enter the picture somewhere, lending some credence to post-modernist analysis. The only thing I remember reading about this is an old essay by Umberto Eco on what differentiates pornography from more literary endeavors, and one of his comments was that pornography often focused on 'the instants between', the parts that are often skipped in normal stories such as moving from one scene to another. I should read it again. If any of you folks can point me to some discussion along those lines, feel free to post a link or a reference in the comments. Fascinating stuff.

The book that I started since finishing the one above is Sheherazade Goes West: Different Cultures, Different Harems by Fatima Mernissi. If you remember your classics, Sheherazade is of course the storyteller in One Thousand and One Nights, the wife of King Shahryar, who forestalls her execution by telling the king a tale every night that would end on a cliffhanger, forcing the king to let her live one more day to hear the end of the tale. Mernissi, who is a Moroccan feminist writer and sociologist, uses the astonishingly different perspective on Sheherazade that the East -- the arab world -- and the West share to give a highly personal and somewhat meandering discussion of the relationship between men and women in the Judeo-Christian tradition and the Muslim tradition. For all their differences, there is a similarity: men are afraid of women, in the sense that The Other is frightening, a fairly innocuous psychological statement. But the two traditions have approached the problem of how to deal with that fear differently. Haven't finished the book yet, and I'll need to digest it some before being able to talk about it further.

To end with a note of levity, any talk of Sheherazade on this blog will invariably lead to a pointer to the story Chicago Sheherazade by Pamela, in which protagonist Nina needs to prevent mob boss Dino Farelli from killing her by -- you guessed it -- telling him tales to satiate his need for rough and perverted sex. An extremely well-crafted story. (As you all know by now, I'm a big fan of Pamela.)

Wives and Girlfriends Stories

A couple of interesting stories that I bookmarked up on Delicious, with a general theme of wives and girlfriends (and sisters-in-law).

The Birthday Slave by RedJohnny: "She makes herself the birthday present." A nice little submission story in which... well, it's exactly as the blurb says, really. In 3 short parts.

Family Lessons by GeorgeTasker: "Howard uses his busty wife in son's sex education." A nice twisted little tale of a man that wants his wife to educate his son (her step-son) in all ways sexual, but things veer a little bit out of his control when the boy and his step-mom sorta fall for each other. Some cute scenes in there.

Young Bride Satisfies Brother-in-Law by Imagine13: "Wife finds her wild side while visiting brother." Completely straightforward but well-written tale of a man that enjoys sharing his wife with his brother. I love the girl, Katy. There's a follow-up story too, Young Bride Satisfies Best Friend, which is pretty much what you would expect -- gotta love those titles that explicitly tell you what's going on!

Finally, Sis-in-Law Incentives by Tx Tall Tales: "Jenny and Alex incentivize each other." A man and his sister-in-law strike an interesting deal. He wants to lose weight and get cut-up, she wants a bunch of things. She's a personal trainer. The deal is that she helps him lose the weight, and when he loses a given percentage of his target weightloss, he gets her one of the things that she wants. What's the catch? Well, she has to find ways to motive him. Can you guess what those ways are? Come on... A perfectly tongue-in-cheek and hot little tale, in a nicely satisfying twelve parts.

New Story: The Adjusters #16

Here is May's episode of The Adjusters, "Connections", wherein unforeseen plans are set in motion to distract Daniel, and we learn what makes policemen tick.

As usual, comments welcome. This episode has received less editing than I would have liked, so it is still a bit rough around the edges. Also, thanks to Mr. Scade and Shadebalan for their help.

I'll also remind you that we have a Speculation Thread available for discussion. (A thread which I read but do not comment on.)


16 - Connections

Two days. For two days now, Jackson had been racking his brain trying
to figure out what to do. "You want me to figure out a way to keep
Daniel distracted?" he had asked Kevin, hoping that the fraternity
president would reconsider and ask someone else, but no. "Heads will
roll," had added the president. And Jackson had no doubt that his
would be first on the chopping block.

Keep Daniel distracted. Easier said than done. He sighed. He had had
plenty of ideas in the past forty-eight hours, each more farfetched
than the precedent. And then there were the ideas that were just plain
cruel, and Jackson could not bring himself to even contemplate them in
any seriousness, like vandalizing his home, or messing with the
University Registrar's records, or wrecking his tuition payment
plan. He could not do that to Daniel, whatever the president might
unleash.

The president. Kevin had seemed utterly freaked out over the weekend,
rarely leaving his office, and looking over his shoulder like he was
expecting to be side-tackled by a homicidal linebacker when he
did. Jackson had an inkling that the fraternity president had some
troubles of his own, beyond those that Biff had brought on his head.

Continue reading...


Next month, episode 17: "Consolations".