Smut on my eReader

Writer's journal: Now that the A Day in the Life series of episodes for The Adjusters is over, time to start the last lap to the finish for Book II. I spent the last couple of days revising and nailing down the structure of the upcoming episodes—I almost, almost, had to resort to the good old index-cards technique to work out what that structure should look like—and I'm glad that the drafts for #21–23 that I have are essentially okay. Except that #23 becomes #25, and needs to have a couple of scenes rewritten in it. A pain, but not altogether surprising. Had I not written those drafts, I would have had no hope of figuring out what the right structure looks like. (In case you're wondering why I don't post episodes faster, there you have it: drafts need to ripen. And for those that think that I take my smut too seriously—what's your point exactly...? <grin>) The one worrying thing is that I need to come up with a sex scene in my new draft of #23, and to be honest, I have no idea who should get it on with whom. And I do want to have at least one sex scene by episode. That's one of the constraints that I've imposed on myself. Any suggestions?

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Earlier this year, I received a Kindle as a gift. I had been meaning to try out an ereader for a while now, and despite my initial get-off-my-lawn knee jerk reaction at anything new that threatens to kick my established habits in the balls, I have to admit that it's a nice little gadget, and physically an attractive and comfortable device.

After playing with it a bit, I decided to get serious. I did the first obvious thing one does with an ereader—I raided Project Gutenberg. After getting my fill of Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Rice Burroughs, and finally reading H. Beam Piper's Little Fuzzy, I did what everybody and their mother seems to do and downloaded a copy of Tolstoy's War and Peace. We'll see what happens. I like Dostoyevsky, but have never been able to wrap my head around Tolstoy. I'm curious whether I'll stick with it this time around.

Then I did the second obvious thing one does with an ereader—I investigated smut in the Kindle store!

I downloaded two ebooks that I had heard about, and that had caught my eye: J. W. McKenna's Office Slave, and N. T. Morley The Embezzler. McKenna is an unknown quantity for me, but I liked the sample chapter I read. Morley I know from his short stories that have appeared here and there, and I love how he writes. Both are just up my alley—in the absence of good mind control tales, a good blackmail story always satisfies. I'll let you know what I think of those books.

If you have any recommendations for smut I must check out in the Kindle store, please post it in a comment.

One thing I like about the site StoriesOnline is that they supply ePub version of their stories. So I've been re-reading some of my favorite classics hosted there, stories I hadn't read in a long time. Here are two, both by Al Steiner, a very gifted writer that many of you undoubtedly know. First off, A Correct Destiny: "Ken and Meghan are a happily married couple going about their lives. And then along came Josephine, an enigmatic, strangely alluring woman who is not quite what she seems to be." Second off, Doing it All Over: "Have you ever wished you could go back to your teens and re-live your life, knowing what you know now? Bill Stevens, a burned-out, 31 year old paramedic, made such a wish one night. Only his came true." Both very hot, both very romantic, and both stories you should read.

Now, the Kindle doesn't read ePub, but there are a few conversion tools. I use Calibre, which has a command-line tool that makes conversion between formats nearly trivial. (Actually, I just noticed, preparing this post, that Storiesonline now has support for a Kindle-compatible format. Ah. I'll have to try it.)

I'm really curious to see what I'll do with that device as time goes by. Right now, it still has a high gadget factor for me. But I've been using it less and less on a daily basis for the past month. At home, I still prefer the reading experience of an actual physical book (the font is usually much better, and I prefer my text black on white). I admit that the Kindle is remarkably convenient when I'm on the road, as it sure beats lugging around a pile of books.

I'll leave you with a recent article by Lev Grossman that appeared in the NY Times, From Scroll to Screen, which gives an interesting historical perspective on the tradeoffs between physical books and electronic books. Worth a read.