Zoe E. Whitten's Blog, page 91

I got writing news out the wazoo!

So, here it is Thursday, and some of you readers may be like "Hey Zoe, what have you done for me lately?" Well it's funny you should mention it, because I just sent another print book to Lulu. Due to space requirements, I had to pair up Wake Up With the Kimellians with Haunting Sins. While one is a dark sci-fi alien invasion story and the other is a mild horror story about a haunting at an adult web hosting company, both are about ordinary men caught up in extraordinary events. The print book is $7.95, but if you prefer ebooks, you could already get Haunting Sins at Smashwords as of last week. Now you can also get Wake Up With the Kimellians as an ebook too. And, since I had to update Haunting Sins for the print edition, I fixed the same mistakes in the ebook. If you've already bought the ebook at Smashwords, just erase your old copy and download the file again. You'll have the update free of charge.

If you're not keeping count, my Smashwords store now has 22 books. This includes multiple complete trilogies and a number of standalone stories that have all received positive reviews. Yet they've garnered very little attention from anyone else. I get the feeling that if Stephenie Meyer released this many books all at once, there'd be a huge media storm. I think Stephen King probably already does write as much as me, so him releasing 8 books in one month isn't so newsworthy. (Heh) But, I did release 8 books in May, and I've raised my little promotion flags to say, "Hey, not many people could do this much on their own, you know." It remains to be seen if anyone else notices and starts mentioning "Holy shit, did you know that crazy bitch released eight books in one month?"

With all that work in May, I'm now up to 10 print books on my Lulu storefront. So now I think it's time to start pushing people who don't like ebooks toward Lulu using the http://stores.lulu.com/zoe_w address. If they also don't like Lulu or self-published writers, I'm still screwed. But at least I made print an option, and some folks claim that's what they want. So far though, no one besides Becka has chipped in for anything in print. Which is not to say there were no sales. I sold a few copies of Dead End: Omnibus already, and a few copies of the new vampire stories. Poor Sandy Morrison still hasn't moved any more units in print or ebook. If people don't respond to her, I've got little hope for how they'll respond to Peter's book coming out later this summer. And then there's this new book premise, which I'll get to in a mo'.

But so far, my performance at Lulu is like my performance on Mobipocket: both are FUBAR. As I said in a previous post, this is totally because nobody knows I have a Lulu store. I never used it, never promoted it, never linked to it. So if people didn't know about it, we know who to blame right?

That's right: you lazy fucking readers. I'm kidding! Come back!

Okay, changing topics to other writing news,two nights ago, the muse hit me with a time travel story. The working title is Red, Redefined, and the premise is, Charles Verne, descendant of the famous writer and inventor, invents a time bridge and goes back in time to steal the real Little Red Riding Hood to be his child bride. I'd love to tell you it isn't what you're thinking, but yeah, it totally is. So for like a whole day, I put my muse off. I was using the excuse that we are in the middle of writing Bran's book, but she insisted we can finish that later. (And anyway, the muse is still in a heated argument with Orrin about his pre-sex scene dialogue. Don't ask.[even if you do ask, I'm not answering!])

And so yesterday at 6 AM, the muse shoved me out of a deep sleep and sent me to the computer. By 10 AM when I had to stop and start working on my paid editing job, I had 5,000 words. So Charles starts off the book by molesting Little Red Riding Hood. *Whimper.* And yet, a few hours later, I went back and wrote another chapter to get Charles attacked by a pack of rabid wolves, and then send both of my battered protagonists to the future by walking to the moon, and then walking to the year 2525. Why that year? Because that's the year of Cleopatra 2525, which had the single worst opening them of all time. Ever. (Isn't it fascinating to learn how these stories are cobbled together from a thousand bits of useless information? No? Dang.)

Ahem, after that writing frenzy, my word count for one day was 11,707. No shit. Not surprisingly, I collapsed from a fatigue attack and woke up at midnight. I hadn't eaten all day, and the muse was already back on my tits. Well first, I got some glasses of milk and a few snacks down, and then I went back to be a slave at the grindstone. And I'm now demanding a rest break at 11:00 AM…to write a blog post. Why? Because I'm a fucking idiot, that's why. And now the word count is 16,421. What I've learned so far is, Charles is a bumbling wanker, and Greta (Red's real name) is just a little morbid. But to be fair, Charles told her that the pollution in his world could kill her if she was exposed to the open air suddenly, so now she's worried that everything in the modern world can kill her. After the point when my protagonists discuss killing kisses, it's turned into a running gag that I can't decide if it's idiotic or brilliant.

So, it looks like I know what the theme for 2011's writing schedule is: "How many sexual deviants can the muse come up with before someone gets offended and calls for a book ban to grant me some form of marketing infamy to parry into profits?"

…I should probably find a way to simplify that theme…and also maybe not make it so blatant.

Probably should have said this earlier…

Rather than rant and ramble today, I want to make a short post addressing my readers. By this, I mean those of you who have left comments on my blog, chatted at me on Twitter and Facebook, bought ebooks, pre-ordered The Life & Death of a Sex Doll, left reviews, or did any of those kinds of activities which modern peoples might define as fan-like…activity…riiiight. Anywho, I'm addressing you folks who took the time to show your support:

Thank you. You are the few, the proud, the elite. You are the folks who got what I was saying and decided to pitch in and help. I bitch a lot at the silent folks who are still just passing through and waiting for the next train wreck. (Due any minute now, I'm sure.) But I don't often take the time to say thanks to the people who heeded the call and pitched in their support.

I've mentioned Becka a lot because she's been supporting me the longest, going all the way back to my first Lulu book ever. But now of course there's new arrivals like Wendy and Widdershins, and Daymon, all of whom have bought books, left comments, left reviews and ratings. In short, they've done everything I asked, and then some. And that is awesomesauce.

Then there's the middle group of Jodi and Louise over at Belfire Press, who have done a LOT to promote my stuff, and not just the stuff I wrote for them. And then over on Twitter (and Facebook, actually) there's @Andrew_Wolter, who promoted a few of my ebooks with giveaways, and who lends emotional support on the days when I'm feeling like a total hack. Also on Twitter, there's @phalcomb, who's bought quite a few books and reviewed many of them. Those he didn't review, he still tweeted me to say, "Hey, I read this, and it was pretty good." There's @Magelly, who bought one book, and will be reading it until sometime in 2013 at his current pace. =^p I know because on Twitter he sends updates about his slow but steady progress, and I know he's slow because he hates ebooks, not me. =^) All of his tweet updates about the book itself have been positive so far. And yeah, it's cool to get feedback and know he's still reading, even if he's reading really slow. (And I'm not going to rush him when my own reading pace has dropped to a crawl due to guitar practice and gardening taking all my free time. [Isn't it funny how I never talk about TV shows I watch?Yeah, funny, that.])

There are others who do their parts by RTing messages, but that list gets a bit random and long, and I can't recall everyone who retweeted something at one time or another. With the fast stream nature of Twitter, it isn't possible to keep track of tweets, or to track who is retweeting them. (In theory you should still be able to, but New Twitter screwed up the RT system and now it's not entirely accurate. Okay, it's piss poor at keeping track of who retweeted what.)  There's a LOT of writers who have taken the time to write up a little something about me, bloggers who sent me email interviews, and others who wrote up reviews of my stuff for their site.

There's folks who wrote an email to me to let me know what they thought of my book, or to talk to me about a blog post in private. And finally, there are people that despite my embarrassing behavior, still display a link to my blog in their blog roll. Or they have a link to my Smashwords store listed. I'm sure one day I'll find links to my Lulu store too, but as I just got the print side of my catalog going, it's not surprising that no one knows the address yet. (It's http://stores.lulu.com/zoe_w if you want to post it for me and help spread awareness of my growing print library.)

All of these methods count as support, even if there's no financial support. Money's tight, and lots of you people do what you can in little doses. And so, one more time, to you people who made even the briefest effort to help me, thank you. You've been a great audience, and I hope my new stuff is not so crappy it sends you away. (And that my whining at the silent lurkers does not bore you to tears.)

So that's it for the sunshine and happiness. Tune in tomorrow, when I return to serving piss and vinegar.

Mother Nature, multiple releases, and more begging…

So, I was quiet this week on the blog because I've been busting my ass in spite of Mother Nature's dedicated efforts to kill me, my garden, and my print book with Belfire Press. No shit, I'm not joking on any count. The weather shifted rapidly from HOT to COLD very rapidly during three days of this week. The effect on my body was devastating, and I had to up my painkillers and other drug intake. So I was a leeeetle spacy.

I got an email from my kind and benevolent publisher that The Life & Death of a Sex Doll would have to be delayed until mind-June. The problem is, there was a lot of flooding, and the Belfire home offices lost their Internet connection due to the poor weather. So there were delay on all sorts of things, again because of the weather.

And then on Friday, Mother Nature dropped a freak hail storm with torrential and violent raindrops, killing 8 of my strawberry seedlings in seconds, as well as several other smaller herb seedlings that had just started to pop out of the ground. I ran out in a parka, making this hugely dramatic rescue of all my baby plants, and the weather shifted from hot to COLD while I was working. Well, my spine found that really funny. No, I mean it was just shaking with spasms of laughter. But, while my spine was amused, I was decidedly less enthusiastic about the pain. Me and Mr. Rum got together for a conference call with Mr. Bong, and then we all paid a visit to Mrs. Painkiller, and FINALLY, my back relaxed and made it possible to sit straight without huddling my shoulders.

Before we get into an episode of "Aaaaw Zoe," I'm not looking to host a pity party, really. In fact, allow me to tell you what I still did in spite of my pain. For starters, I busted out the news every day this week, and then I did my guitar practice. Then I sat down to do book layouts and proofing for some new Lulu titles. This week alone, I've released three print books, and I've updated two Smashwords ebooks with improved editions now that I've stripped yet more typos from the print proofs.

If you go to my Lulu storefront, you will now find Blood Relations, A Collection of Vampire Shorts, and Dead End: Omnibus. Blood Relations is of course the sequel to Touched and Redemption Lost, following Vicky and Amber during the start of Amber's eighteen month pregnancy carrying a vampire/halfling hybrid. A Collection of Vampire Shorts can be considered the sequels to Blood Relations, and each of the three stories offers vastly different takes on life in the vampire coven. Finally, Dead End: Omnibus is a collection of the Dead End trilogy: Dead End, Dead End II: Cults Rising, and Dead End III: Mutation. I released an ebook version of Dead End: Omnibus for $4.99, which may seem high. But if I released the three ebooks separately, I would charge $1.99 each. So it's actually a little cheaper for this edition than for three units.

I didn't bother doing an ebook version of A Collection of Vampire Shorts for now because the ebook version of Stark Raving Bonkers is still free until August. So paying even $3.99 for it right now wouldn't make sense when it's cheaper to buy the separate ebooks. And if you haven't read A Phone Man Visits the Vampires or Job Interview With a Vampire as ebooks, you can either buy them separately at Smashwords or go with a lovely new print option for only $7.95. Once Stark Raving Bonkers gets raised from free to a regular price, I will put out the trio in a combined volume for $3.99, again to offer folks a slight discount for buying all three titles at the same time.

Despite all my progress in other areas, I did absolutely no language lessons and feel shitty about this. But frankly, I have hit my limits, and something had to give. So something gave. I still did a LOT of work this week, and now I'm tuckered out. I still need to get on the blog and update you about the new stuff.

And, just to maintain consistency, I have a lot of new books out. I need reviews, and I could use some sales. If you can't buy copies right now, please consider promoting one or two of my releases, or this link: http://stores.lulu.com/zoe_w

Add links to your MySapsce bulletins, or post an update on Facebook or on Twitter. Maybe Digg or Stumble my stores. Or add my storefronts to your blogroll. I'm open for email interviews if anyone with a blog wants to send me some questions. Or if an interview is too much work, how about a short review?

I hate to go on and on like this, but this month sales have been very low. While there were at least a few purchases of the new releases on Smashwords, I've only had one print volume sell on Lulu so far. And that print volume went to Becka, who is like my one long term resident Superfan, the kind who will try to buy just about everything I write. Other folks have made similar fan-like efforts, but nobody else fits the definition of superfan the way she does.

But, she's a writer too, and no one believes her when she gives me a good review. So yeah, I need more help, and I need it to come from people who aren't writers. I need my readers to get the word out that I have a Lulu store, and that new print releases are going up all the time. I can try to tell people that myself, but I'm just a lousy self-published so-and-so, and besides that, I'm bitter. No one believes me if I say my books are good. (And note how I never say great, only good.)

I'm not the only writer out there literally begging for help, but I HAVE already slipped through the cracks of the online writing world, dropping so far into obscurity that no new release can make it past 12 sales in the first month. (The level I got with my first print book on Lulu.) Or even 10 for that matter. Recently, I even had to give up hope of even making ONE sale on opening days. And yes, that was BEFORE the explosion.

I dropped to amateur status, so I don't have to think about marketing as often, nor do I need to think of it as a life or death situation. But I do still have to think about it, and I still can't escape the conclusion that without "buzz" from actual readers, I might as well take my dad's suggestion for a new slogan: I write the books that nobody reads.

I've proven time and again that I will bust my ass for y'all. So please, I'm just asking for you to do a little bit of work to help me out. Who knows? Maybe one day with your help, I might even release a new book and sell 10 copies in the first month.

My weird superpower…

So, I had to go to the store to buy dinner fixin's, right? Well I'm in the checkout line, and the lady behind me just starts talking to me about everything. No, I mean EVERYTHING. She's English, been here about twenty years, and divorced her Italian husband because he was hitting her for many years. Her son is a womanizer, but her daughter is a genius who speaks three languages and lives in Japan. I was told a lot more in the span of ten minutes, but you get the idea.

This is not an unusual occurrence for me. I've always had this weird kind of magnetism that makes complete strangers open up to me without prompting. It used to freak me out, like when I was 11 and a lady on a public bus told me that she was cheating on her husband. It's not something you'd normally tell a stranger, and certainly not a little kid. And yet, nobody every really stops mid-confession and looks at me and says, "Oh wait, telling you that was really inappropriate, wasn't it?"

I'm not sure how to sum up my super power, but in person, I generate a sense of trust. People feel like they can tell me anything, even though they don't even know my name. They often tell me they feel like they've known me forever, and that I'm instantly familiar. Obviously,  this power does not work online, but I'm not sure if that's a bad thing. For one thing, whenever people confess like this, I'm really not sure what to say. Mostly I nod a lot and let people get stuff out of their system. On the other hand, it does give me a LOT of new material to work with.

I sometimes think I should try to write a story about someone like me. But the concept sounds so incredible and illogical that I struggle with how to tone it down and make it more realistic for a story. Fiction demands a logic for everything, even if it's a twisted kind of logic. In the real world, lots of things occur "just because," but you can't get away with that kind of "weak excuse" in a story.

If there is an explanation for my "power," I will never know it. I can only accept that this is one of my quirks. But in a story, I would want to make up a reason for why it happens.

I know I'm rambling, but moments like the checkout confessional make me wonder if maybe I exude some kind of "writer vibe." It's like I'm subconsciously broadcasting, Please, tell me your story.

Now, if only I could figure out how to turn it off and on as needed…

Randomnessness…ness.

Just a multi-faceted update this time, so you know I didn't fall off the planet somehow. Editing work for the glass site is still pretty much the same. Yesterday wasn't fun, though, as it was a news day so slow, I literally had to search all day to come up with five new articles. Every other news source of our kind resorted to recycling news from last week. I made sure our peeps got new stuff. Cause that's how I roll.

Hope y'all remember that my duel sci-fi novella, The Life & Death of a Sex Doll, is coming very soon. If you haven't pre-ordered a print copy or an ebook from Belfire Press yet, please, consider picking one up now or on release day. (Should be any day now, I think.) For $11.99 for print or $2.99 for ebooks, it's a really good deal. You're getting Adopting a Sex Doll, my original web serial about an Internet stock broker who modifies a sophisticated sex toy to play house, and the all-new sequel, When a Sex Doll Dies, which continues the story from the perspective of the aforementioned adopted doll. Sometimes whimsical and funny, and sometimes a little sad and nostalgic, this is going to be my first book published by someone else. The editing is even more stringent than my already tough standards, so without boasting, I can tell you that this will be my best book ever in terms of editing quality.

In other writing news, I've completed another chapter of Bran of Greenwood and the Scary Fairy Princess. I don't write every day, or even all day on the days that I choose to indulge the muse, so my progress is much slower. I'm also committing the wicked sin of adding to the earlier scenes before I finish the book. *GASP!* Actually, I've done this many times over the last two years. I think that rule really only applies to noobs and people who let the new additions distract them from finishing the story.

But I am certain I will finish this book. It's only a matter of time before I can put the rough draft to bed. I'm thinking this is a novella of around 38K-45K. I've got most of the "inside jokes" (That's in quotes cause not all the jokes are funny if you don't understand the context…and some probably aren't funny even if you do) already locked in, and the current chapter featuring Bran's older half-brother Orrin lets me foreshadow a bit for Bran's immediate future.

The book has pretty much maintained its focus on sex and food, with occasional excursions into world building and character development. Allegedly, off camera, Bran and Lana are deadly killers who are becoming legends over the course of the book. In fact, in the pub they're dining at right now (focus on food, you see), everyone knows them as heroes (even though they're thieves) and the local minstrel hosts an impromptu lute concert performing songs about their many brave deeds.

No, don't worry, I didn't describe the songs…or the minstrel, or the pub, or anything or anyone except the food. And Lana. Because Lana is awesome and super-special. (Actually, Lana is a crossing of Katniss Everdeen and Drizzt Do'Urden. The big clue to her being a trannsexual, alternate universe version of Drizzt is when Bran mentions Lana "dancing with her daggers." Oh yeah, she's a proud Mary Sue.)

You people don't need to say it, even if you know it's true, cause I can say it in a mirror and even feel kinda sorta guilty about it. But man, sometimes I can be a serious bitch when something irritates me.

One of the lines in Bran's book is a dig at another Hunger Games scene where Katniss fires an arrow after a somersault. It's a total Mary Sue move and was almost a "throw the book moment" for me. In Bran's book, Bran comments on Lana's skill as an archer and says she might be able to shoot an apple out of a man's hand after turning a somersault. Lana says that only a self-centered idiot would attempt such a childish maneuver. And, ha! Take that, Katpiss Everdense.

Now I just have to figure out how to set Lana on fire. Oh, but not real fire. Mary Sue, non-burning fire, so she'll look really real-ultra-special. Like a sexual fire dessert, a flaming half-elf baked Alaska.

Yep, I B a total bitch. And just think…I LOVED Twilight. So it ain't like I've got great standards in literature, yo.

(BTW, yes I DID write a parody of Twilight. So I'm sure it looks like I was taking the piss out of the series, when in fact I was only taking the piss out of Rosalie. X^D But, I also laced Peter's books with themes and ideas taken from the series. So yes, if you didn't know it already, I am in fact one of those dreadful Twihards.)

Ahem, moving on to music news, guitar practice is going good. This weekend I got a book of rock songs to practice, and I started off with The Police's Every Breath You Take, composed by Sting, who I have a message for because of this song. But so anywho, reading the tabs, I said, "No way am I doing that in a single hand position, so I must need to move my fingers around." (Yes, out loud. Yes, I talk to myself. I find that unless I've gone off on a rant, I'm remarkably good company.) This didn't sound right to me even after a few attempts to speed up, so I went to YouTube and looked up a lesson.

And I'll make a brief pause to say, when it comes to education, YouTube is turning into a fantastic video tutorial library as people from every field of study grab cameras and try to make simple explanations for complex topics. Want to know how to play guitar? Look up guitar lessons. Want to learn Tai Chi? You can learn Yang and Cheng styles from your choices of multiple instructors. The other day, fantasy writer Becka Sutton even helped me sort out how to find a video on making wooden arrows in the brush with limited tools. (Not because I needed arrows, but because I needed research material. I have no future plans to make arrows…yet.)

So, if you're stuck on a topic and need a good video to break it down for you, check YouTube. Chances are good, someone wants to help you with this topic, for free. Can't beat that with a stick.

But so back to the Police song I wanted to learn, the first thing the instructor says is, "This song has a good stretchy chord…" Well, "good" is a relative term. It IS good that I now have a song to practice to help me stretch my fretting hand. BUT, (and this is an enormous but) THE PAIN is so…there are no words to describe what the opening bars of this song do to my poor little hand. I'm okay on the split of my pinky on the 9th fret fourth string, my middle finger on the 7th fret fifth string, and my index finger on the 5th fret sixth string. That's painful, but not so bad that I can't hold the notes with a clean sustain. I can even handle dropping my index finger to the 6th fret third string and go back up again without losing my pace or tone, but then I have to move up the neck and do a 2-4-6 spilt on the same strings. So I reach for it, and OW! The strain is reduced somewhat when I have to dip my index finger for the 2nd fret third string, but then my pinky and middle finger lose tone. And by the second pass through the pattern, I'm like, "GAH, WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS PAIN GOOD FOR BUT TEH HURTIES?! STING YOU SADISTIC BASTARD, DIE IN A FIRE!"

(Sting, I don't really want you to die in a fire. But damn, man, that stretch is a motherfucker.)

And finally, language lessons…are lagging. I try to read from my comics sometimes, but the gendered articles confuse me, and words constantly change radically depending on context…I may love the Italian people, but I'm growing to hate their language. I'd almost wish I could relearn Japanese instead. But I can imagine what a smashing success I would be if I migrated over thar. A loudmouth redneck like me in a place like that? Oh yeah, I can't see anything going wrong with that plan.

Aaaand so that the news. I'm gonna wander off to the store for foody type stuff and then come home and grab Lili for another round of Torture the Right Hand. Yay!

Peace, I'm outtie! (What does that mean? I don't know, but it makes me laugh when I say it out loud.)

More Lulu news, and some stuff you might have read before…

This weekend, I am feeling quite proud of myself. Why? Because this week, I put out four "new" print books on my Lulu storefront. Four. And I didn't just drop a Word file into the uploader. I did a great layout on each book with InDesign. If I'm able to keep up this kind of pace, I'll have all my archived stories out in ebook and print by early August. Taking a suggestion from hubby, my coverless releases from the web-serial archives will be gathered under the label the White-Faced Collection. This is a term for coverless books in Italy, though it's usually applied to classic titles in the public domain. I was iffy on the name, but it grew on me after a week or so, and now I really like it and think it's kinda cool.

I also decided to add Sandy Morrison & the Pack of Pussies to the list of early conversions for the White-Faced Collection because for new readers, my Mystical World Wars books are daunting. The number of volumes out intimidates folks no matter how many times I try to explain that they're individual episodes that don't require reading the whole series. So I need something short, fast, and fun. Well, that's Sandy. It also describes her book too! Ba-da-pish! Thanks, I'm here all week. Please, buy a book on your way out, and tip your waitress. She takes PayPal.

So…yeah, Peter, the Wolf is definitely going to be released soon, and then I'll drop NINJAWORLD next for the same reason. People want short stuff to get to know me without committing to a 20 book series. Totally understandable. Peter's book is a short novel, and NINJAWORLD is a novella so short, I'll either have to add B&W artwork to the layout or include a bonus story to pad the page count to an acceptable minimum count for Lulu. I detest sending any more than three blank pages in any book, and I long to fill up empty space to give people their money's worth. So one way or the other, those pages WILL get some ink sprayed on them…like printer shop bukkake. (Now go grab a book and sniff it while thinking, "printer sperm." Oh, page turns are going to be so much fun for you when you think, Every page is sticky with printer love juice. You're welcome.)

The thing is, I need you people to help me out with upcoming releases, and this includes my release for the fine folks at Belfire Press, who will any day now be shipping copies of The Life and Death of a Sex Doll. Now if you buy a copy, print or ebook, or you already made a pre-order, I bestow many blessing upon you. Long may the happiness fairies dance over you, or something.

BUT, that's really not going to help me move the other print copies still left in stock. And I won't kid myself, so I know there WILL be a lot of copies left over. The only way that I can move those other units will be if my readers talk about the books. And maybe not just a review, but even to make little announcements when you're reading the book. If a joke makes you laugh, feel free to quote it on your favorite social network. This kind of status update is not for me, although it would be nice to know that folks were getting a kick out of my story. But the main idea is, you're helping me out with some free advertising by telling the friends in your social network about my book.

Some of you are probably clutching your heads now. So unfair, me asking my readers to actually speak up over and over! Uffa! It's not like I'm totally dependent upon your reactions for my success, or anything like that.

Except, I am. All writers are dependent upon their readers for support, and not just financial support. Building a fan base requires vocal fans, and finding a vocal book fan these days is like finding a vestal virgin in a college fraternity house party after midnight. Sure, it sounds nice in theory, but it's highly unlikely.

And, I joke, but seriously, most of the vocal people who support me are actually writers or artists at many levels of financial success. They know what it's like to create in a vacuum, and they try to lend support with a few words here and there. (And a few sales here and there.) But I also think that's why I'm not breaking out yet, because the only people talking about me are all part of the same closed loop networks. I need readers to talk about me in places where I haven't had any exposure before, or I will always remain obscure.

With Twitter, there are online tools to measure the reach of a tweet, and over the last year, I've seen my tweets show a declining influence. The same people retweet my stuff, but nobody new picks up the messages and sends them on after the initial RT. This means my social reach is exceedingly limited.

The same is even more true on Facebook, but then it was always true on Facebook. I can share links from other people all I want. But no one I share for will share my links when I post them. While I can get "likes" on most status updates, replies on book links and purchases are both blue moon events. Compared to Twitter, Facebook is often silent as a tombstone during release days. If they're the most trafficked site in the world, that's great, but as a so-called social network, they suck. The biggest reason they suck for me is, all they ever do is hook me up with other authors. On my friends list, the only other people on my list who aren't authors are actual friends and family.

In fact, that's why I won't give up Facebook even if I hate the site. Because that's how I keep in touch with Ken and Tina, my old best friends from my days of stomping around San Antonio. It's how I keep in touch with one of my aunts, and one of my cousins.

I don't like sounding like a broken record, but my continuing results show that I still have the same number of buyers now as I did post-blow-up. I didn't lose anything by getting rid of my moochers, but I didn't gain anything from the exposure either. So I have to assume that all the other traffic coming to the blogs is either morbid onlookers or pissed off readers from the web site lurking on the blog in search of the post where I admit defeat and go back to posting free shit. (Here's a hint: Never happening.)

So…somehow, some way, I have to convince readers to make reviews. If not, I guess I can just be a broken record and stay on the same topic on my blog. At least then, I'll be really, really consistent: "I released another book this month, please review it. In other news, I'm still playing guitar, gardening, and writing. By the way, did you see that I have 23 books without reviews now? Yeah. So, how about a review?"

And I swear to God, if I die in obscurity because you people were too busy to speak up and offer a little support, I will make a list and haunt every single one of your asses…with ghost clones, or something. (¬_¬)

Just…if you buy a book and read it, review it. Even if you think it sucks. But especially if you didn't think it sucked. Please. You're truly killing me with your silence.

Okay, I'm off to enjoy my weekend. See you Monday, when I beg once again for orders of The Life and Death of a Sex Doll, and for reviews.

And in conclusion, did you see on Smashwords that 11 of my 20 ebook releases don't have reviews yet? So, how about a review?

An observation about making time…

Today, I'd like to talk about time, and motivation, and I'd like to start with a tangent. This last week or so, a number of people on Facebook and Twitter have noted, "For someone retired, you sure are busy!"

And, they had no idea. Like, yesterday? I did paid editing, chopping up news articles for a glass web site, and then I proofed When a Sex Doll Dies and sent the proof file back to the publisher. THEN I formatted Touched as a print book for Lulu and uploaded it. That book is a scant $6.95 for a 5.5"X8.5 paperback format. It also includes a bonus story, so it's a very good deal if you're in the US. If you're outside the US…you'll probably want to get the ebook version at Smashwords instead. Somehow around this, I also found time to practice my guitar for a few hours, and I planted some oregano and thyme.

That was yesterday. Today I had to do the same news editing job, and then I formatted a copy of Redemption Lost for Lulu and uploaded it. THEN I formatted and uploaded a print edition of Little Monsters. Both Redemption Lost and Little Monsters are $11.95, but Redemption Lost is a 6X9 book so it matches up with the other books in the set, while Little Monsters is in a new 5.5"X8.5" paperback format with "publisher grade" pages. What this means is, a 500 page book costs less to print, so I can charge y'all a price that isn't crazy and still make a buck and some change out of the deal.

I also did gardening and guitar practice today, and I'm sure some of you wonder, "What is it that's fired her up now?" Well I'll tell you my secret: it's steady pay. Yep, totally the regular pay coming in from the temp job. See, with cash coming in, I relax and get into my little workaholic zone, and nothing reaches me because there's work to be done. I suddenly find all sorts of extra time to get these projects done. Money motivates me to work faster, and therefore, I have yet more time to do other stuff and earn more money! Er, in theory, anyway.

But let's move along. I've seen a lot of people comment either that they whish they had enough time to read books, or to write them, and the other day, I saw three blog posts, two from readers and one from an author, all ranting about this very thing. If you have time to watch 5 television shows a day, then you have time to read simply by cutting one or more of your TV shows. You have to invest your time in something other than the boob tube on the intertoobs. And if you decide not to, that's fine. But you really can't lament to me that you don't have time. You do, and you choose to use it on other things.

Back when I worked at the theater, I would finish all of my work behind the counter after each rush, and then I would take out my spiral bound notebook and felt-tip pen to start scrawling more of my crazy stories down before the next rush started.

Inevitably, someone would come out for a refill, and they'd see me writing and ask, "Are you writing a book?"

"Yes," I'd say, "My third novel so far." (Or fourth or fifth.)

And they'd nod and say, "That's cool. I wish I could find time to write."

I'm standing there at work, in my work uniform, and clearly, I've managed to find time to write even at a wage slave concession job. But I shrug and give back their popcorn. There's no point in saying, "What you've said is an excuse, and you'd find plenty of time to do whatever you want if you'd just stop lying to yourself."

Right now, I am not reading any books. Nothing. I got burned out, and I need a break. I'm writing at a much slower rate, but since I have so much work in the back log, you won't notice my "laziness" until sometime next year. And that's assuming I stay at this rate of writing year round. Which isn't likely.

Some of you may want to say, "Ha! You can't make time to read either, biyatch!" Well, hold on. First, I read 36 book last year, plus about 9 WebLit serials. I've read 8 books this year and 2 WebLits. While I'm not reading fiction books right now, I am reading guitar tab books. (And a lot of web sites on the same topic. So I'm still reading, just not fiction.) Eventually, I'll get back in the mood to read some dark fantasy and make room for it in my juggling assortment of hobbies. I'll make time to read, just like I make time to write, to edit, to garden, and to learn guitar.

Before you formulate a "very good reason" why you can't make time for reading or writing, I want you to think about this: I have 20 books published on Smashwords in less than two years. I will very soon have my first published novellas released through the kind folks at Belfire Press, as well as a flood of print titles which will be coming soon from Lulu. Including completed trunk novels and projects in the queue, I've written over 40 books in 4 years. That doesn't even include all the projects I started and abandoned partway through because I wasn't feeling the story anymore.

This year, I picked up a guitar and started learning to play, just because I felt like it. For much the same reason, I walked into a wrestling federation and made myself a video producer. Which got me into place to be a referee, a play-by-play announcer, and a federation commissioner. I trained myself in how to use 3D Studio Max 3 to make a silly cartoon, and every few years, I try to dust off my skills by modeling some kind of funky animated puppets just for giggles. I once started a public access TV show, just because I was curious to learn how to produce a TV show. (Even if our show was poop with no budget.)

I'm honestly not bragging. I'm nothing special; a mediocre garden variety creative genius who has the same amount of spare time as the rest of you…okay, slightly more. But what I'm trying to do is show you that all you need is time to study, and you really can do anything you want. So instead of saying "I wish I had time," get up and make time. If you can't make time, all you'll make is excuses. Please don't. Because the world has plenty of those piled around already.

Post-ramble followup, and other updates…

First, for those of you who read all of my previous post without scrolling or leaving the blog and vowing never to return again, bless you. Rape or sexual assault are topics that upset me more than they make me mad, and that leads to a lot longer rambles, which usually means they have even less directness to their points. And hey, those of you who skipped it, I totally understand. Hell, I was ready to skip it after the third round of edits.

Today, I had another one of those weird moments that makes me feel broken. I was laughing with hubby on the subway, and this girl started staring. Okay, a lot of people stare at me, but she's got this wide-eyed, mouth partway open look, like I'm really, really interesting. I don't make eye contact, and I keep joking with hubby. But as he's talking, the girl gets up and moves right behind hubby, and then she really tried to get me to notice her.

How can I tell? Because she checked where my eyes where pointing, and then ducked down under hubby's arm to try and meet my gaze. So I looked elsewhere again, and she moved to get in my range. She finally caught me on her way out, and then she smiled. And…that's it. She just wanted to smile back, I think because my smile was so infectious. But of course being a broken freak, it wasn't until later that I realized why she'd made the effort to reach me. I couldn't make eye contact, because I had to assume something bad would happen. Yes, that's really how broken I am.

Sometimes I think the best description to fit me is an antique vase. I'm the vase, and when I look at my reflection, I see something old and broken. I see all my cracks and flaws, and I think, I'm so ugly. How can anyone want a broken ugly thing like me? But when others look at me, they say, "Look at this classic work of art! There are fine lines of age running through the shell, but the design is still great!" And while they gush, I think, Why don't they notice my flaws? It's all I can see, and it's rare that anyone else notices. So maybe it is just me.

[image error]I know a lot of people would prefer if every few months I didn't break down and do this spontaneous confession thing. But there's too many ways that I can be triggered to blabber, and lately in my former home state, there's a lot of reminders that things have not gotten better. I never thought they did, but whenever I've complained, people have told me I was wrong, and improvements were being made. So either those folks were in denial, or they were just trying to shut me up. I believe it's probably option B, but the optimist in me wants to go with A. Because with option A, there's a chance of convincing them to do something about the problem. If it's B, they are the problem. Makes it difficult to solve when "the problem" amounts to a bunch of uptight people who won't mind their own business, and who go out of their way to hurt other people. How do you solve a problem of a few hundred thousand douchebags who take joy in ruining other peoples' lives?

The thing is, I want to be able to speak out, even if it risks causing offense. I want to be able to say, "I did these things, and I still don't feel right about them" without fear of the men in white coats coming to take me away (haha). And I hope that at some point, it encourages someone else to come forward and talk about what they've been through.

And also, if and when the people from my past decide to step forward and say, "This happened, and I'm not comfortable with it," I don't want people to be shocked and talk about how I led a "double life." I used to live a double life, back when I was presenting as male. And that role is what society demanded of me. Which is sad, because the role I was being pushed into was "future pedo-prison bitch." But now that I'm out of the closet, unfortunately, I didn't shut the door, and my skeletons keep falling out.

But ultimately, when I start confessing, people feel like I should have a goal or a reason for doing this. I do, but it's always hard to articulate, even for someone who's put down two million words in the last four years. (No, really, I did the math, including all blog posts, books, and short stories. Two million, motherfuckers. Rawr.) I want for people to stop treating sex like a crime. I want to get rid of these stupid lifelong sex offenders lists, except for keeping the most violent and dangerous offenders on there. As it is now, the list even includes the names of minors who were engaged in consensual acts with other minors. Which makes no sense. Those lists were made so a dangerous child molester could be tracked legally and allow parents to know where those dangerous people lived. Now the list has names of people who never were a threat, but who may be after a few years of shame have built up. The list makes more problems than it solves.

The answer to these problems is not going to be found in tighter control of people. It won't be found in rules or moral hand-wringing either. I've ranted before about how people condemn infidelity, how we still try to hang scarlet letters on adulterers. I've talked about gays, and how a whole lot of straight people can't stop pushing gays away from normalcy with the use of popular referendums. (Hey, let's have a referendum and make blacks into slaves again! Oh, that won't fly? But making queers into second-class citizens will?) I've talked about how hard it is for a transitioning person to do so safely without someone in their personal or professional life stirring shit and making drama. Despite everything I've ranted and rambled on, I've barely scratched the surface of polite society's sick fascination with judging people based on their sex lives.

I don't care if people think I use divisive language on this topic either. If you spend all your time wondering what other people do in private, you're sick. Get help, you fucking control freak. And don't tell me to get help. I already tried to take a whack at therapy multiple times. You're the one who's never gone in for a consultation about your issues of paranoia and your superiority complex. And if you think you talk to God? You don't. You're hearing voices, in which case, you're just as nuts as me. Now, do you think that was divisive? No, that's just the truth. And the truth hurts. So if the truth is now regarded as "divisive language," society has an even bigger problem than who's fucking whom in the ass.

I don't even think I can make any progress in reversing this trend toward sexual paranoia. But I know that if I don't speak up for myself, some other asshole is going to speak and put words in my mouth anyway. So if I have to have an "insidious agenda," I want to make mine clear. My agenda is that one day, no person, man or woman, boy or girl (or someone in between like me), will feel ashamed to talk about sex, good or bad, in public. Furthermore, I want a society that encourages speaking out, instead of dropping a big bundle of shame on people for talking about "offensive topics."

Sex is a part of our nature, and it isn't just biological reproduction. It's an important act between two (or more; usually one is less interesting, although still good for a few hours of experimentation) people, and when it's good, there's no more important connection we can make. But when it's bad, it can be devastating for many reasons. And when it's bad and we need to talk about that, we shouldn't have to feel ashamed for saying "I don't want to do that again." (By the same token, we shouldn't be shamed for saying "That was great sex!")

And, I'd like for teens and kids to both be able to talk more openly about sex without somebody having a heart attack and screaming "early sexualization!" Some kids grow up faster and start sex sooner. They shouldn't have to feel like freaks just because they're maturing faster, and yet, even consensual sex between minors is a crime. Sex; a natural, consensual act, in which no parties are harmed, is a crime. In states where there's an offender's list, they will now be marked for life as a threat to kids. And that is bullshit. You cannot come up with even one good reason why kids should be punished just for exploration of their own bodies and feelings with each other.

So if it's insidious that I want to get more people talking about "dirty laundry," I accept my role as a provocateur in the battle of sex.

Moving along to other things, my garden suffered a tragic loss with a sun shade was blown across my pot of marjoram and parsley. The pot flipped and all the seedlings were crushed to death. I started new pots today. This weekend, I planed a long box full of strawberry seeds, and two planters full of tomatoes. Also, my first batch of strawberries are still sprouting seedlings, which I've been transferring to other pots to spread them out. They seem to have survived the transplant procedure, and if this works, I'm going to have at least enough berries for one or two jars of preserves. Which would allow me the change to learn preserve-making, and jarring. (Probably hot water jarring, since I know a little how that works from watching mom do it.)

In writing news, I'm still doing Bran of Greenwood, but at a very slow pace. I don't feel a need to rush on the writing anymore, as I have the paid job to cover first, and then there's guitar practice and language studies. Writing has to take a back seat to make room for other things in my life, and it's not like the world is waiting with bated breath for this book.

In guitar news, I got Lili to the shop and told them about adding the third spring to lock the tail down. The asked if the guitar played okay with the third spring on, and I showed them by playing a couple chords. So they said that I'd done the right thing putting the spring on, and not two worry about taking it off. I tested the tremolo bar, and I can still use it if I needed. But as I'm still learning the basics, at this point I've only used the bar three times, and once was to demonstrate how it worked to my sister-in-law. (Who plays piano, but thinks guitars are "more artistic.")

I'm making some great progress now. I know because when I played a chord progression, both hubby and Mili were amazed. It's only been a few weeks, and I still can't get smooth transitions from chord to chord. But I can form almost all the chord shapes, and my scales are getting a little faster. I can alternate pick, although I have a tendency to reverse my intended pattern, going up down instead of down up. I'm just learning hammer on and pull offs, though I need to be careful with the hammer ons, as I think I'm using too much force and risking a finger injury just to get a faint "ting" out of the string.

Right, I guess that's it. Okay, not quite. Folks, I'm crazy. I never make excuses about that, and I never make apologies either. I probably put off a lot of people who might have read my stuff by rambling about "offensive topics." But I don't really mind if people leave because I offend or upset them. Because I write about similar things in my books, so if my blog posts offend, my books are really sure to have the same effect.

BUT, more an more of you appear to be reading and sticking around, even after my nuclear explosion. And for your patience and your presence, I want to thank you.

Oh, and one last, last thing: to the person who found my blog with the search results "zoe whitten is bitter," I just want to say thanks. Last night I was in a funk, but after reading that query, I laughed until my belly jiggled. Someone on Facebook reminded me of it today, and I laughed again. So thank you. I really needed that. ^_^

Okay, now I'm done. So get out of here, already.

A very long post on sexual violence and my personal history with it…

First, please go to http://www.helpthecheerleader.com/ and read it before you get into this overly long entry. This is TMI and a TL;DR ramble of ELEVEN pages, (No, really) so either way, you're going to be reading a while. Unless you're planning to skip this post for being too long-winded, (Totally fair if you do. And FYI, this is a ramble, not a rant.) I'll wait while you read the above link, and then the one below.

Finish the first? Right, now please read this: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/09/us/09assault.html

Before I discuss anything, let me say that when I talk about my past, it isn't to brag, or to get sympathy. I am speaking about my past not to offend anyone either, but rather to inform. I am writing as a former life-long resident of Texas, as a past victim of sexual assault, and as a perpetrator as a sexual predator. In fact, I probably would be in prison if I were in any other state besides Texas. The cops had many chances to arrest me, and I'm only going to talk about one of the chances they had. But each time the cops chose to look the other way and let me walk. Part of me is eternally grateful that I did not end up in prison.

But then I recall how those same cops took my reports of my mom's abuse and sent me right back to her. They filed a report, but that did me no good, and it didn't even matter until years later, when my mom tried to run an in-house daycare. She spanked a child and the parents complained. AND THEN my complaint came up in the system, and mom was banned from watching other kids.

Fat load of good that report did me. It's the cops who could have saved me, who SHOULD have saved me. After all, I reported the crime, just like I'd been taught in school. But instead they were just one of many factors that made me into the lovely little monster I am today. After running into too many other people in Texas who are somewhat like me, I know that my case is not unique, nor even rare.

So, if you've read those two links, you know why I'm upset. (If not going beyond the cut is probably going to offend you. Fair warning.) I avoided saying anything when those 18 men gang-raped a little girl because she was "dressed too sexy." I avoided saying anything while community members tut-tutted about how this would affect the lives of the men. And this is because on some level, I feel sick with guilt over my own crimes. I always feel like a hypocrite speaking out on these topics.

And yet, I see how the conversations about sexual crimes of all types are dictated by people who know nothing about the topic as victims or as perpetrators. The therapy for both groups is pathetic and results in hyper-sexual people who are at risk of becoming predators (like me) or sexually repressed people who cannot experience intimacy without feeling guilt. There aren't a whole lot of people who come out of "corrective therapy" and end up with healthy sexualities. That's lousy therapy, but it's SOP,  and its methods and goals are dictated entirely by ignorance. Every attempt to change this system results in cries of outrage from both the right and the left, and always from sheltered people who don't have a clue of what they're talking about. Which makes no sense because this behavior guarantees the cycle of abuse goes on indefinitely.

No one, and I mean NO ONE, will let the real experts come out and discuss sexual assault and rape. They call therapists and shrinks experts, but their track records should disqualify them from speaking on the topic. All they do is silence the victims and drug or imprison the worst perpetrators. When the past victims become the new generation of predators, whoops, we'll drug them and lock them up too.

This is how the cycle of violence goes on, and in Texas, it's almost a casual culture where you have to do something really fucked up to get arrested. I apparently wasn't one of those folks messing up enough to deserve arrest. I've had sexual or semi-sexual encounters with more relatives than I can count on one hand before puberty, and I was initiated into the world of gender at the age of 4 by a young uncle undressing an equally young aunt for the purpose of training me in oral sex. (Our great-grandmother walked into the room right after I'd got my head between my aunt's legs, and this is how I sorted out at 4, this is what girls are supposed to look like. That's how I learned I wasn't a girl, though I'd kind of assumed I was. Knowing this messed me up far worse than having my head between my aunt's legs, and what really traumatized me that day was my great-grandmother beating the living shit out of my aunt and uncle in front of me, making me think we'd just done the most evil thing in the world.

Years later, it still is the most evil thing in the world to me I suppose that's why it's in some many of my stories.  Over the years, I've messed around with several cousins. I never took the relationships seriously, and I doubt they did either. My little brother was spending time with some of the same cousins, but for one particular girl he tried to call me out to fight over her. I blew him off because, "Dude, she's a cousin. No matter how much you like what you're doing, this ain't endin' in marriage." Which was me admitting that I knew what we were doing was wrong, but I'd just reached the point where I no longer cared. What the hell, it's just something to do to pass the time, right?

Yes, I'm a messed up person. But I blame my history, and I think a lot people give me a pass precisely because my history makes some of my stories seem tame by comparison. So they know I'm messed up, but they also know it's not my fault and they forgive me. But I'm drifting early. Sorry about that.

The incident at four led to a long period of nightmares for me, but none of my other relatives played with me for a while. My sexual habits really started to develop at seven because there were two babysitting sisters who my mom hired. How we got together is a little convoluted. I was shoplifting porn to bribe the older boys not to beat me up. The boys tore out the pages of the "least attractive" women (Which is to say, those with little breasts) and gave those to me. I also asked for and got all the Penthouse Confessions letters. Even back then, text porn did more for me than pictures.

My babysitters found this material, and they initiated me into the world of mutual masturbation. Which makes them sound bad, but as I was already well read on the topic, hell yes, I wanted to play with them.

Later, it seemed weird to me now how I'd read stories in the Penthouse letters about 17-year-old guys having sex with 18-year-old babysitters. Here I was, seven, with TWO babysitters, and I couldn't send a letter to Penthouse to brag. I couldn't tell the guys in the projects that I was catching more play than they ever would, or tell anyone that my babysitters had started to molest my little brother, and he wasn't so cool with it. In fact, it kinda made him snap and turn evil.

But then, I was headed that way too.

I need to make a brief tangent from sex to talk about a violent event that happened near the end of our time living with our mom in the projects. I was in the kitchen, and it was summer. The window was open, and I could hear my little brother screaming for me to help. I looked up, and he was being chased down by six of the older black kids. They looked ready to kill him. My little brother was 6, and not one of those guys was under 14. That's all I thought about, and I got pissed. I grabbed my mother's kitchen knife, a wicked old black-bladed knife that I hoped would get my point across without me using it.

I went to the front of the apartment and went outside, and I'll be damned if my brother didn't run in and lock the door behind me, leaving me outside to sort out his mess. Most of the boys opted not to play with the knife when I held it out, but the oldest guy decided to call my bluff. So the others stuck around to see if the jump-in was still on. I knew if they took the knife away, it would end up stuck in me, so I decided to prove I wasn't bluffing.

When he tried to grab my wrist, I dipped my arm under his, stepped into him, and ran the blade along his chest. I sliced open his shirt, part of his chest, and I cut his nipple in half. The other guys took off right then and then, and then I went back to the front door to kick it with my heel and scream to be let inside. While I was kicking, the guy I cut got up and ran home clutching his chest.

After that, nobody beat me up because the older boys told everyone I was insane. I also found out from the boy I'd sliced that the reason they wanted my brother was because he'd walked up to them and said, "You're all just a bunch of stupid niggers." After that, I almost wanted to let them cream his little ass. But I told the guy I'd cut that even if bro was a gnat, he was my gnat, and they couldn't get him.

So that dude seduced my babysitter. Yes, just one. His best friend got the other sister. For only one day, though. It went down like this: my babysitters said they wanted to play hide and seek. My brother ran off to hide, but the game wasn't up to par with what we normally did, so I got suspicious. I pulled my brother from his hiding spot, and I gave him mom's flat griddle. I went to the closet, and I told him to swing the griddle to scare whoever was inside.

Bro did what I asked, but lost his grip on the griddle. It landed on my toes, slicing off the two tips of my middle toes. I didn't scream then. I yelled really loud, and I limped to the couch to look at my toes. They had a line of blood beads around the outside, and when I tried to wipe off the blood, my toe tips hinged back on two thin flaps of skin. Then I screamed, and a lady living 14 buildings away called the paramedics. I went into shock after that, and I assaulted a doctor once at the hospital. I started swearing a lot, and the doctor told my mother I'd had a "Linda Blair episode."

I've already talked about all my later intimate encounters in another blog post, so I won't cover most of them again. But there is someone that I want to talk about in detail, which is why this post is so damned long. During my final years in Texas, I worked at a theater in Austin, first in concessions, then in the ticket booth, and then as a projectionist. I became homeless right after starting work there, and the original manager let me and my roommate live in an unused employee break room until we could afford to rent an apartment again.

I loved just about everyone there, and it was one of the few jobs where I didn't hide anything. No, I mean nothing. People even made jokes about my sexuality. Which is pretty scary because before I'd come out of the closet as a transsexual, I first tried to push everyone away by presenting as an out of the closet pedophile. What's shocking is, it didn't work to push anyone away. The people at work still thought I was cool, and they even made jokes when younger girls flirted with me. Which happened a lot before transition. I was like a young girl magnet, And at the same time, most of the adult women I considered attractive saw me as a scawny joke.

For the most part, I kept my hands to myself and just made conversation before sending the young ladies away to their movies. However, I once complained to a manager, "There's only two kinds of women here. There's the older women who look at me as a man-boy and the high school teens who keep flirting with me and I have to send away." So my manager said, "If you want my advice, shave and go play. You look like a teenager anyway, so what's the problem?" Double checking with other sources, this was agreed upon as sound advice given to a 26-year-old out of the closet pedophile: "Go play with the kids."

The original manager didn't work out when our theater was bought by a corporate chain, and my coworker, who was also the middle booth projectionist, was promoted to the top management post. This irritated other staff, and they left. And then others were promoted and couple others just wandered off…I'm wandering and I need to backtrack.

Tierney, then my coworker and not my boss, ame to the ticket booth to present me with a Glamour Shot-type photo of her daughter, and she asked, "How old do you think she is?" I went for 13, and she said, "No, she's 13 now. This was taken when she was 8." Willow came a few days later to visit, and she hung out at the theater a lot. She also hung out with me and my friend Bill.

At one point we got around to discussing the movie Spiceworld, and I said, "The acting in that is so awful, they need a different soundtrack." Willow laughed and said, "The sad thing is, I already know what kind of soundtrack you mean." I looked at her, and I realized that this was going to be potential trouble for me. So I excused myself and went outside on the excuse that I needed a smoke break. But, she followed me. She left a few days later, but she made a major impact on me, and I worried constantly about future visits. When she did arrive for another visit, she hung out with me again, but not nearly as much. I felt less apprehensive, and I worried that perhaps I was just letting the past haunt me and reopen old wounds. I hadn't jumped anybody since I was a teenager myself, so I was safe, in theory.

AND YET…no, still need to stay on the timeline. Tierney moved in with Bill and I, and we became a trio for a few months, all of us working at the same place and having similar tastes. We moved into a nicer place, and we really clicked together. We even did D&D campaigns, something I hadn't done in years. During one campaign, Tierney presented me with this situation: A young lady of elfish origins lies in magical slumber on a bed. Tierney said, "She looks about 12." So I said, "I have to roll for a moral check." I rolled a 2. And for the next three weeks, Tierney kept going, "I can't believe you really did that." Not that did it, but that I rolled for a morla check, and then role-played it out by telling another player, "Uh…go check the hall, or something. I'll…try to rouse the princess." And YET…no, still I need to stay focused.

So yeah, it felt like we were a perfect little dysfunctional family unit without anybody needing to sex up the others. It was a comfy arrangement…sedate, even. So Tierney at one point invites me to her room and tells me that Willow just had sex for the first time and called her to tell her about it. So now she's telling me, and how do I feel about it? I balked at this and told her I wasn't the best person to talk about with Willow. Then I told her about my past. Like everything. It took about an hour, and I'd no sooner finished when Tierney went right back to talking about Willow, wanting to know how I felt about her having sex. I squirmed a lot, and I told her that I started a lot younger, so maybe it was good that she'd waited? This went over well enough to end the discussion.

But then a few weeks later, Tierney told me that Willow's dad tried to choke her, and she'd had to run away from home. So what do I say? "Sure, she can move in with us." Which worked out about as well as you'd expect. It didn't get all the way to sex. One because I wasn't ready for it, and two because she wasn't either, even if she'd already had sex before. But shortly after the relationship became more intimate, I wrote an online confession in a blog, and it took all of two days before Tierney found it. (I expected this, as Willow read my journal entries on her mother's computer. It was in the browser history, and Tierney was no slouch in the brains department.)

Tierney was pissed enough to call the cops, and I pulled a trump card, that she could come with me for some of things she'd let go unchecked even though I'd said they were happening. Yes, it was an evil bastard move, and for me, that was completely "in character."

So the cops weren't called, and I continued to work at the theater. We even went to Six Flags together, though Willow earned us both a heaping helping of shit when she was asked who she wanted to ride a roller coaster with and picked me instead of her mom.

It was right after everyone moved out that I realized that I had no more friends to fake a role for, and even when I'd presented myself outwardly as a threat, people dismissed me as "mostly harmless." If I had no one to please, why couldn't I just be myself instead of pretending I was a worse monster than I really was? This is what led to me contacting a therapist. I began to transition at work, and while things were tense  with all my coworkers, only one person thought to ask, "What does this mean for you and Willow?" I said that I didn't know, but I didn't think she'd really want me anyway. I'm still sure that's true, because the offer I was making to her was a lie. I was offering stability when I was the least stable person she knew.

In the following months, I tried to avoid Willow, but she was hired on at the theater, and this made trips downstairs for snacks torture. Of course I still wanted to talk to her. But I had to stay away because it was what her mother wanted. In the long run, I'm sure it's better that I wasn't a part of her life. But at the time, all I could do was moon over making yet another mistake by reaching out to touch the wrong person. Again.

The end came because Tierney was tearing me a new asshole for everything even if I hadn't done anything wrong, and everyone noticed. Coworkers kept asking me "What's going on?" And I'd say, "I can't talk about it." We got a new guy in the booth, and he too wanted to talk. I finally collapsed and confessed, and he went to Willow to find out if I'd assaulted her. So Tierney found out from Willow, and the boss calls me after she gets off work and shouts, "I'm coming over! YOU STAY RIGHT THERE!" (She only moved across the parking lot, you see.)

She came over, and when she pounded on the door, I told my new roommate, John, "Don't let her in." He let her in, and then dove to hide in his room. Tierney got in my face, pissed off that I had talked about Willow at all. We started fighting, and then I stopped seeing her. Instead I was having a fight with my mother and I wanted her gone. I shoved Tierney back into the door, and she came up at me. I felt a fingernail nick my throat, and I stopped thinking. I grabbed her arm and slung her to the ground. She pulled at me, but also called for John. Good thing too, because I floated over her, all my years of training kicking in without me really in control. I pinned her arms, and I started to choke her. Maybe not in the same way that Willow's dad had choked her, but still…

John pulled me off and threw me across the room, and then I came back to my senses. I started to shake and fall apart, and when Tierney said to call the police, I nodded because I was agreeing with her. It was time to pack in my shit and call this whole black soap opera to a close. So this time the police were summoned, and I confessed everything. I took out my little stack of journals talking all about my sordid past, and I put them in my lap while I waited for the cops to arrest me. I figured, instead of rewriting a confession, I could just hand them my journals and let them sort out a sentence based on the details.

But the cops didn't arrest me. They asked me if I wanted to arrest Tierney for criminal trespass. I didn't want here there, so even if John opened the door, my rights as a "homeowner" still had to be respected. The nick on my throat made Tierney look bad because she told the cops she turned to leave and that I grabbed her. Even if that were true, as she was turning she slung her arm out far enough to reach for my neck. The cops saw that as an attack and decided that I'd responded appropriately to the threat level. So additionally, they felt sure they could add an assault charge, if I wanted.

No, really.

I asked about Willow, and they said that there was no crime there. I handled things badly, sure, but it wasn't a crime…but it was. Willow was 16, and her mother wanted to press charges. By the letter of the law, that's indecency with a minor and contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Yet the cops looked the other way. Well no, they wanted to book the other party. I didn't hate Tierney, and I didn't want her arrested. I just didn't want her to keep screaming at me all the time. I told the cops as much, and they told Tierney that maybe she ought to consider moving somewhere farther away if she really felt I was such a threat. They felt it was a bad move for her to hire her daughter at the theater too. They lecture her with me right on the other side of the open door, and I felt like human scum the whole time.

None of this changed my mind on my own guilt. I moved in with my dad in Denison, and I locked myself in my room for the most part. I was afraid of everyone, of everything. Nothing made sense anymore, and I had no clue how to deal with all the guilt and shame I was still carrying.

That was seven years ago. I think Willow is 22 now. I wonder if she hates me, or if she's just indifferent. I wonder if she thinks about me nearly as often as I still think about her. But then, I also think about Tierney. And about Audrey and Rachel. Once people are lodged in my heart as firmly as they are in my brain, there's no prying them out, even if they no longer want to be there.

I also think about Ben, and I still think, I probably had that coming.

Ben was the only person in my past to figure me out. We played role play games, and he noticed how I always played females. The day he outed me, he sat me in his lap and listed all kinds of behaviors of mine that pegged me as a girl. As the capper for his proof, he kissed me, and I really, really liked it. My weak denials that he was wrong weren't helped when, while kissing me, he slipped his hand in my pants and found me wearing shiny red bikini briefs. (Which are basically panties for guys, which is why I wore them.) After that, he could keep his hands off me, and I stupidly encouraged him.

No matter how often he tried to push for sex, I couldn't because I "wasn't right." Ben found out from my brother about my young lovers, and he decided to blackmail me to get what he wanted. Well no, that was his trump card if charm alone couldn't work. He invited me to stay the night on New Year's Eve. He and his mom took me downtown in San Antonio, and Ben talked his mom into buying me a beer. While we drank and watched fireworks, he put his arm around me.

So when we got back to his room, yeah, I was kind of tipsy and giddy at having a cute boy paying the right kind of attention to me. He talked me out of my clothes and into trying a few things before I balked at sex. He was considerably larger than me, and I was worried he would hurt me. But after I balked, he said he'd go to the police about my young lovers, and my constant trips to the mall to shoplift.

He got me in bed, and he attempted to have sex with me. It didn't work and he made me bleed. I told him that now that he'd tried to rape me, he couldn't go to the police, or he would be coming with me. Which also ended our relationship, no surprise. I was 13, and after years of casual sexual encounters, someone turned the tables on me and showed me what it felt like to be used.

The experience scarred me and made it impossible for me to deal with my sexual attraction to males for almost 20 years. Every time I had a thought about kissing guys, I quelled it, and for almost ten years, I successfully repressed the memory of Ben being my first boyfriend.

It also made me mistreat both Audrey and Rachel. I was trying to push them away, and yeah, that worked. I worry now that both of them probably hate me for how I treated them. Ben ruined my relationships with the girls even before my brother turned them against me. Ben made me realize how I never really wanted to be with either sister, and this was still an ongoing disaster set in motion by bro. That made me resent them, even though none of what was happening was their fault.

And yet…yet I still look back at my early time with Ben, and he's still stuck in my heart. He was supposed to be my knight in shining armor after he'd protected me from the bullies. I think about how he made me feel when he kissed me, and I knew that when I moved against him, I was turning him on. So…so maybe I had it coming? Maybe after years of being the evil "chameleon," I needed to be taken down a few pegs. Maybe I deserved someone who broke my heart.

What came after…I need to clarify that what I'm about to explain is not 100% verifiable as fact. I had been bleeding for a week after Ben's attempt to have anal sex. Every trip to the bathroom was painful, so I tried to talk to my mother about it. I was being way to dodgy about my real topic, and she'd been drinking. Mom was derogatory and snide about my requests to hear me out. So I called her a stupid bitch, and I turned around to walk away.

I remember that, but nothing else for a period of several months. I remember later that my little brother told me that mom had hit me with a beer bottle in the back of my head, and he'd come home to find her crying and scrubbing blood out of the carpet. (Mom said I'd had a brain fever.) But since my brother had also just helped to orchestrate one of the worst gang beatings I'd had in my whole life, and since he'd only months before taken to calling me a fag, I was not in the mood to believe his sudden newfound concern for me. But years later, when we sat down to talk and come to terms with each other, bro started talking about the many times that he had seen me go down to a thrown mug, bottle, or ashtray.

And in later years, I noticed how when I was upset, I would pick up things and throw them too. I don't do that anymore. I pick stuff up, but as I go to throw, I think, Don't be like Mom. And then I stop.

When I was 23, I finally had it out with my mother, and I told her about Audrey and Rachel. She said she'd known all along. I really want to believe she was lying, because if she knew, then all of that guilt trip shit I went through was even more meaningless. Also, if she knew, and she helped to orchestrate my relationship to two little girls for two years, that's the most fucked up thing, ever. But my mother does have a tendency to say things that aren't true just because they "sound true" at the time. So I never know how to feel about this revelation. I know I want it to be a lie, but I often wonder, What if it is the truth?

It makes me think of Devine, when we all lived together in one room because of the really cold winter. Rachel got into bed with me, and our parents laughed and said, "Isn't that the cutest thing?" I lay there with my eyes closed, thinking, I'm sleeping with my six-year-old wife of almost two years, and they think it's cute? Would they think it was cute if they knew what we were doing? So if they did know…I really don't know how to feel about that. I think it's the reason why I talk to my mother less and less. Because as I get older, I long even more to be someone else, someone not like her.

I long to be normal. And by normal, I mean able to function in society without feeling like a broken animal on its last good nerve and about to snap.

Which is why it sometimes upsets me that I see so much of my mother in me. When other women think I'm becoming my mother, it's a rite of passage, and it's supposed to be a good thing. When I think it, it terrifies me that I will never be a fit parent, or even a good person.

That same year, I confronted mom about throwing things, and she denied ever once throwing anything…except for tossing me into a cabinet door when I was 18 months old because I wouldn't stop crying. Now THAT, I do believe.

This post has gotten way too long, and my therapist would say I've made myself too vulnerable. But I need to talk about these things, because I need to shed light on a major problem that Texas has. There's a lot of good folks who raise their kids right, and there's a lot of people who have no clue what they're doing and shouldn't be allowed to have kids. And in Texas, that's a very high population of people who ought to have their breeding licenses revoked. There's also a  lot of people who consider themselves good that let their boys bully queers and sexually harass girls. Because "boys will be boys." Any girls or queers who speak out on this are "just making trouble." When even good people make excuses like this for violent behavior as the actions of "good boys," the problem remains enshrined as a "rite of passage" or some other traditional sounding bullshit.

What does one topic have to do with the other? Every few years while living in Texas, I have tried desperately to see help for my problems, even as they grew larger and more complicated. But everyone I talked to belittled me and made light of my problems. I'd always thought that when I finally became an adult, I'd be taken more seriously. But when I open up on this topic, I'm still ignored. And I see that people in my home state still have decided that queers and homos are a bigger problem to focus on. Or praying for rain.

The problems in Texas permeate the culture, and writing laws is meaningless because the local cops won't enforce them. The cops will look away in as many cases as they possibly can. I know this from multiple cases and direct experience with the system, both as a victim and as a perpetrator. I know you won't believe me if I just say I know these things, so now I have shown you explicitly what I know. And if I offended you, it was not my intent.

I feel that the only way Texas can deal with these problems is not with more useless laws that no one will enforce. We Texans need to talk about sex more openly and honestly, about the good and the bad. We need to be able to admit when something sexual has happened and we aren't comfortable or happy with it. (We should also feel okay with admitting when something happened and we liked it.) We need to be able to talk about sex honestly no matter what age we are. We need to be able to talk without fear of being judged or abused in worst ways by the system supposedly set up to help us.

And we can't. I'm not just talking about Texans now either. No one can talk about sex openly, in any society, without being diminished or dismissed. Because all sex, even consensual sex between married people, is dirty, and we don't talk about "dirty things" in public. It's unprofessional. It's uncouth, or socially awkward. It's…it's whatever word you need to feel shame and just not talk about it okay? Just shut up and go away with all those troubling things that should be best hidden…where they can continue unchecked.

It's our repressive polite societies demanding that people not talk about sex that makes the problems of sexual natures into white elephants no one can discuss. Do you think I can tell a therapist, "I was sexually awakened at 4, and sometimes I have trouble not objectifying children," he isn't going to drug me or call in the authorities about a potential predator? Do you think any victim or perpetrator is getting adequate care when SOP for treatment is to make everyone stop talking and "just get over it?"

I find it endlessly depressing and at the same time infuriating that the people who determine the needs of the victims end up creating the next generation of predators. I find it sad that the most ignorant people who know nothing about these things are the guiding voices in how society should deal with these issues. And I find the categorical denial of this issue as a problem to be utterly confounding. How do we as a society stop a major problem when no one but ignorant "experts" are allowed to discuss it?

Despite all this guilt I carry, I still am a hyper-sexual. I'm just really limited physically by MS, so I can't have sex very often. (Very disappointing for hubby, and any future female lovers I meet will probably be unhappy to learn I can't have sex all night long.) But I think about sex a lot, making me potentially yhe close thing to a true nymphomaniac. I can look at anyone and be in a mental porn four seconds later. Old lady with a walker? Check. Middle-aged chubby dad? Check. Hottie teen barely covering herself in a quarter yard of denim? Triple check, and I'm likely to write her into a story scene too.

But I don't feel guilt for those, thought because I'm never going to jump those people. I won't even strike up a conversation since we don't speak the same language. (don't think that hasn't been a motivating factor in not learning Italian. Because for a while, yes, it was.) When I feel really guilty is when some little girl goes skipping past me, and instead of seeing how cute she is, my brain kicks on something less appropriate. I shut it down a second later, but there's still the guilt because I had the thought at all. There's the shame of knowing that even if I weren't sterile, I could never be a good parent. I'm just too fucked up to be a good person. On the days when my head is good and I don't see something sexual, I instead see a happy child and know I'm never going to be a good parent who makes a kid happy in that way.

And on other days, I see those kids, and I wish, Why wasn't I good enough to have a happy childhood like them? And the answer is, Because I was dumb enough to be born queer in Texas. You people talk about the hell it must be to grow up queer in Africa or the Middle East. Well I'm telling you, America is not much better, and Texas is trying to lead the pack for the worst offenders. And it's not just queers now. They're going for the women and children too.

I live with the anger of knowing the same torture I endured is still going on with other queer kids. But now I also feel anger knowing that even straight girls can't grow up in Texas without someone forcing sex on them.

But because of Willow, I feel like a hypocrite talking about this stuff. I've made clear, I wasn't corrupting her or robbing the cradle. But that doesn't change my guilt any less. She's another facet of the shame I bear, knowing that I will never be free of my past. It's always there, always reminding me that I'm a monster, and that I have the potential to be an even worse monster if I don't keep myself in check. And you people, bless your hearts. You always tell me, "Zoe, you aren't a bad person." But I am, and the only thing that keeps me good is the constant admission to myself that I'm not.

So, I keep myself in check. I stay in my room most of the time. I have never tried to find work at Toy-R-US or some other place to get me closer to the kids, and when a coworker's really young kid started getting too close to me before the theater incident, I quit work and faced 8 months of unemployment rather than risk ruining some kid's life like mine was ruined.

That's why I want to be allowed to talk about my past openly, and without feeling like I should shut up for the sake of others. Quite the opposite, I feel I need to speak out, so that maybe someday, there won't have to be a new generation of people like me.

People often say I'm a good person because I work so hard to be good. But I'm not motivated by the right reasons to accept that praise. I'm not being good because I want to be good. I'm being good because I'm afraid of messing up other people as badly as I'm messed up. I'm afraid that one day, I'll be looked upon as the monster I see myself as, and that someone will decide to press charges.

And that fear of prison is so powerful, it's what's kept me lying and hiding all my life. Because bad things happen to skinny pale trannies in prison. And even though they get raped and tortured daily, polite society doesn't care. In my case, I'm certain many people would even say I had it coming for all these things that I've done.

Which gets me back to "acceptable rapes," and to the close of this TL;DR ramble. Society is in a state of flux where the most oppressive sub-cultures are once again making gains in repressing any minorities that they deem "too liberated." Which is fucking sad, because it's like pointing to a slave with a chain on their ankle and saying, "Why don't they have a chain on the other ankle too? They have way too much freedom now!"

But whether the government du jour is right or left, no one ever wants to address the core problems that cause more people to slip between the cracks. The only people allowed to talk on the topic are those who categorically condemn sex, or those who have no clue what they're talking about. Like my mother, they just say what "feels true" at the time they say it. Everyone else who tries to join the discussion is either derided, diminished, or derailed.

The problem is our continued silence over an issue we all know exists. But any attempt to talk openly is taken as "an attempt to steer the topic toward an agenda." But that's rhetorical bullshit because NOT talking is also steering the topic toward one agenda. And that agenda keeps pumping out more predators and victims on a daily basis.

We need to talk about sex, about sexual violence, and about rape. We need to talk about this stuff if we ever want to deal with it, because clearly it is not going away just because polite society chooses to ignore it.

What does this porn have to do with YA? Or: The strange ways that writers find inspiration

So today, I have nothing else to talk about, and I'm going to ramble on the topic of Bran of Greenwood and the Scary Fairy Princess and the convoluted creative process that goes into making a story.

First, I have for a long, long, long time tried to write a straight porn story, something with loads of sex and little else. Problem is, I never can make it through writing any porno without getting distracted by the plot. No, really. You'd think someone like me, who can write a sex scene with anyone or anything, could manage to finish at least one porn. But my trunk novel folder has a number of pornos that didn't get past chapter five.

Second, I've mentioned randomly before that I have a burning desire to write transsexual romantic comedies, but with sex in them. And I've attempted this a few times, usually ending somewhere in the middle because I've run out of idea for a mundane yet funny plot. (Or because I stopped and went "Wait, this isn't funny. Not even hmmm, funny.")

So, about nine months ago, the muse hits me with a potential fantasy premise for a transsexual half-elf sorceress and a half-orc barbarian. But not as a comedy. No she pitched it as a straight fantasy with occasional sex. And I kinda liked the idea, but it had problems. For one thing, I really didn't want the "gender issue" to be the focus of the story. (Even if the goal of the story was finding a cursed belt to transform the heroine's lower bits magically.)

[image error]And now, a tangent. I tried to read The Hunger Games and hated it. The author always tells and never shows. But where she rubbed me the wrong way first was making her main character so shallow and self-centered that Katniss never noticed her mother had a severe chronic illness. That's not just a little lost in one's self. That's the shallow end of the gene pool. So telling me, a chronically ill person, that your heroine didn't notice her mother's VERY VISIBLE illness for years is going to make me despise her. And that's before you factor in the lack of research, The shoddy science (why would people who can make force fields not invent a tiny robot fly instead of wasting billions and years genetically engineering a talking bird to spy on people?) the lack of details to almost every scene and character, or the constant boring focus on food during the first half of the book.

*Deep breath.* And so, gnashing my teeth and growling obscenities worse than Linda Blair in the first Exorcist (the directors cut, I mean) I quit reading right after the game officially started because I just couldn't generate enough give a fuck to make it to the end of the series where Katpiss Everdense leads the revolution to take down Teh Man. (I wiki'd the story and read the synopsis, which is actually more well written than the book itself.) But, during the time that I was reading those first 12 chapters, I was also live tweeting my scorching criticism. Another writer, Evelyn Lafont, noticed my comments and started to tease me about my loathing of the book.

When talking about rabbit snares, I complained, "But she didn't actually look at the knot or describe it." So Evelyn told me that in my books, she BETTER see knots described accurately. Then, and I don't recall the exact order of events (I was drunk at the time), but somehow we got around to suggesting that Katniss collected rabbit tears from the bunnies she killed.

Now, another tangent. I write with strange influences like this, where my ideas get cobbled together from different people and places at vastly different times. For instance, the Zombie Era books were inspired by hubby's desire for me to write another zombie book after I finished Dating in the Post-Zombie World. Then I read Brian Keene's Dead Sea, and then about six months later, I saw horror writer and certified beefcake Wrath James White say that while he felt the story was good, there was nothing about the main character's sexual orientation shown besides the occasional lecture about tolerance. And that's kinda what I felt too, but Wrath put it more succinctly than I could have. I started thinking about how I wanted to do a zombie story like this, but with a gay character who had to address their sexuality in a more meaningful way as a subplot.

Then a few months later, I had this idea that I wanted to do a zombie story with two best friends who had grown up reading zombie comics and watching the movies. Initially, this was going to be a comedy with the two guys abusing zombies in random insane and brutal "experiments" before they fucked up and got killed by their abused undead victims. But as I thought on the idea of two best friends, I recalled the other story idea, and I kinda smooshed them together. So the experiments were used as a MacGuffin, leading me into the real point of the story…human rights.

I could give you a similar long story about how my "kinda YA" book Peter, the Wolf is the cumulative effect of me reading New Moon, Marked, and Shiver, mixed with my very old desire to write a werewolf story about the older style of lycanthropes who needed a wolf pelt to transform. And then Peter's personality emerged and he revealed that he was a former child porn star, now living as a foster teen with his fourth family. I ran with that for three books in two months. The idea excited me so much, I could not stop to rest between books.

But let my get back to Bran. The muse came back to me last week and said, "I know how to eliminate the "gender issue." We just do the story POV pure from the barbarian's perspective." Now this sounded to me like a bad idea, mainly because this kind of story from the guy's perspective is likely to get a bit too vulgar. But my muse countered with, "The thing is, we're not doing a proper fantasy, and we're not trying to make a book to educate the public about gender issues. It's just porn. So no battles will be depicted, and no long lectures on tolerance allowed. The only thing we'll focus on is the sex…and the bunnies."

And then I remembered the rabbit tears, and this whole elaborate joke exploded in my head. Yes! My transsexual half-elf heroine will trap female dire rabbits and collect their tears to make a "hormone elixir" to transform herself, and she kills them by whispering something in their ears. Then the rabbits cry themselves to death. Fuck, YES.

Which is how I got so stoked to write the story. AND, once I got started and I was fully admitting that I was taking the piss out of HG, I wanted to expand on that. So very little in the book would be clearly described. It's not a mistake; it's a design feature. The hero WOULD think a lot about the rabbit snare that the heroine uses, but he never actually sees the knot she uses. Also the trap is able to specifically target female rabbits, but HOW this is possible will never be made clear.

AND both Bran and Lana become fascinated with cooking with wild herbs. So I sorted out how the heroine makes a roast dire rabbit using leaves and a pit in the ground. And then with each "foodie scene," I would make up new wild herb combinations for them to try, just to make random chapters about food that are intentionally boring. Just like the food scenes in The Hunger Games.

I did two chapters, and then for a little while, like three days or so, I stopped writing because I felt bad. I was like, I'm taking the piss out of a book I hated, and that's the only reason I'm writing this. And okay, that's mostly true. But, I had to admit that one, it was just a porn premise. And two, while it might not be a great fantasy premise, as a porn, it's turning into something pretty…different. How different? In today's installment, the heroine tames a nightmare by giving it a hand job, marking my first, and hopefully the last, sex  scene between a biped and a quadruped. That different. Incidentally, today's scene was related to a guest post I wrote for Kait Nolan, which included a joke about an elf maiden and a unicorn. I swapped out the unicorn for a black stallion, and I made the horse a bit character instead of the romantic lead. But as I said earlier, this is really how my brain works to assemble all of these assorted puzzle pieces into a composite picture. And now you see that no story comes from just one source or "eureka moment." I have to let every idea simmer for months before I feel ready to tackle the final task of passing the words through the brain/hand barrier.

By most literary standards, this new story is shite. But, if I go by penny porn standards, it's not so bad. My grammar is better, and I know my jokes are funnier. (Of course, you have to be a fairly morbid person to laugh at some of this.) Although, I don't want to bill this as a comedy, or even as a parody. There's nothing else about the plot of this book that resembles anything in The Hunger Games to make it a proper parody like with my Twilight parody. (Still free until August, and still picking up new glowing reviews from both fans and haters of teh sparkles.) I just riffed on my problems with HG, which defined many of the "rules" that my narrator had to play by. And so far, playing by the rules has been…interesting. Maybe not exciting or entertaining, but still…

I digress. If and when Bran of Greenwood and the Scary Fairy Princess is released, I'll link y'all back to this page. So this way you can understand what the hell any of this porn has to do with a YA fantasy series.