New Story! "iTime," At Redstone SF!
Ever wonder what happens when Macintosh develops the first personal time-travel device, and it lands in the hands of rich college kids? Well, wonder no more, for my story iTime has finally been published at Redstone SF – and you can read it for free!
An excerpt:
I’d say that my roommate Rochelle had to have the latest in technology, but that would be incorrect. Rochelle had to have the most expensive thing, and the trendiest thing, but it barely mattered what her accessories did so long as they didn’t clash with her cheerleader’s outfit. When she got a personal biometric scanner, I wanted to use the data to generate a customized probiotic treatment to optimize the bacteria in her lower intestine; she used it to send scans of her boobs to cute boys.
As assigned dorm mates, all we had in common was our love of hardware. That was why I was the first person who got to see her new iTime. It was made of white enameled metal, shaped like an old stopwatch, smooth as an egg except for the plug-timer on top and the recessed nav-wheel on the front.
“You got one?” I asked. “Isn’t there a waiting list?”
“Daddy paid four hundred thousand on eBay for an unbonded four-hour model,” she said, puffing out her chest. “He said it was worth it to get me something that was guaranteed to bring up my grades. I begged him for the eight-hour version, but he didn’t want to clean out my college savings.”
I reached out to touch it; it flickered away underneath my fingertips like a hologram.
“Oh, that’s the safety feature!” Rochelle squeed, clapping her hands in joy. “The salesman said it was bonded to my personal timeline; it doesn’t really exist for anyone but me. Otherwise, you could do all sorts of nasty things to me if you found it.”
“Like what?”
“I dunno. He tried to explain, and I got bored. But ask me that question tomorrow, and I can rewind time back four hours to before you asked me, and everything would happen again just the way it did before I rewound. Except that this time, I’d read all the instruction manuals and stuff before I got here – so when we finally re-met and you asked me what things the iTime could do, I’d know…..”
The full tale is over here – and if you like it (and only if you like it), do me a favor and post a link to it on Twitter or Facebook or, I dunno, I hear LiveJournal’s still kicking around. But hopefully you will like it. Enjoy.
Why FetLife?
A couple of people have complained about me moving my more sexual essays to FetLife. They don’t want to start a new account, they don’t like the ads, they don’t want to potentially get messages from skeevy people. All of which are valid complaints.
The answer is, “Then don’t read.” I’m not trying to advertise FetLife or anything, but the essays I’m writing there are of a different quality.
Let me explain: the essays I write for this blog here are polished for public consumption. I spend a bit of time on not just the content, but on how it’ll be perceived, making sure that they’re good enough that if a stranger who loathed me read it (which is pretty much a given) that my meaning would still be clear. I check them for clarity and correctness. When I fail to be clear (as I have with the Gay In YA post, which I’m still considering), it bothers me considerably.
There’s a lot of time and effort put into the posts here. Because I am, fundamentally, writing for an audience.
FetLife essays, however, are where I’m tracking an increasingly changing sexual landscape, where I’m not quite sure what I’m doing. I’m starting to experiment with dominance, with being more open about my sexuality (not just reciting what I’m doing in a humorous way, as I’ve always done, but actually acknowledging the turn-on). I’m opening up new territories.
That’s fucking difficult enough to do by itself, let alone without having a bunch of strangers walking in and going, “Hey, why don’t you stick to movie reviews?” or “That’s a sick thought, you shouldn’t have it” or “Me and my seventy friends over here have analyzed your desires and we’re all having a coffee klatch about what’s wrong with you.”
I’m not excusing myself from the idea of being politically correct, mind you – but as Poppy Brite said, “I’m still figuring it out for myself, and I’d like to be able to chronicle these things without feeling guilty about it.” It’s easier to write about such things in a place that’s specifically designed for exploring such areas.
And you don’t have to read it. I’ve been asked to remind the people who don’t read FetLife a whole lot when I’ve updated, so they can go look. This is not me taunting you, this is me reacting in response to some people’s requests. And I’m happy to put up breadcrumbs.
I’m not saying you can’t come view it. You can. Come get an account, friend me – I’m a friend-slut, I just want to know who you are – but what I’m doing over there is, at its core, very different from what I’m doing here. It’s a smaller stage for a different audience, and purchasing the tickets is cheap…
…But just realize it’s a different venue. I’m learning. I’m going to make more mistakes as I learn more lessons. And it’s my right not to want to broadcast those mistakes to an indifferent crowd.
Thoughts On Sybians
As with all my crazy-sexy essays, given that my sexuality’s in a bit of a state of flux (as chronicled here), I’ve posted this one on FetLife. The obligatory excerpt:
I was talking to LucidMoon the other day about Sybians, the Death Star of sex toys. Supposedly you mount the most frigid, repressed, born-again woman on one of these babies for ten minutes and she’ll stagger off of it with her hair down in tangles, shuddering with delight, having renounced Jesus for the joys of electricity and kinky goddamned science.
I’ve thought about getting one myself, and unfortunately I am in the middle-class financial value of “It’s not that you CAN’T afford it, it’s that you SHOULDN’T.” I mean, I could shell out $1400 for what looks like a gymnast’s horse designed by horny satyrs… But should I? Would we use it enough? Would my wife divorce me, figuring that the hobby horse of doom is a lot cheaper than I am and more satisfying to boot?
And really, where would we put it when the kids came by? It’s hard enough hiding the whips and chains in our closet in a box marked “YAHTZEE.” They’ve gone to play a board game before, and discovered what Mommy and Stepdaddy like to do, and been scarred.
But no. The real reason I want a Sybian is….
The Best Thing I've Written This Week….
The best thing I’ve written this week is not here, but in fact over at the literature site Fantasy Matters. They asked me to write an essay for banned books week, and what came out was an intensely personal piece on parenting, the danger of books, and the need to manage censorship properly.
A sample is thus:
One cannot help but think about censorship when you’re showing your sixteen-year-old daughter rape scenes.
Not that I set out to show her rape; we were simply playing our usual summer challenge of “What movie should I have seen by now?” Whenever my daughter Amy stayed for the summer, she would call me over to our voluminous library of DVDs so I would help further her cinematic education.
“Well, what are you in the mood for?” I’d ask, and choose a significant movie that she should have watched by now – from the bureaucratic nightmare of Brazil to the comfort watching of Princess Bride to the hard-edged romance-meets-reality of Casablanca. Then we’d discuss what was interesting about the movie — the approaches to character, plot choices, and of course the history of the production, with constant lookups on IMDB.
For the past week, we’d been on a Stanley Kubrick kick – she’d despised The Shining, liked Full Metal Jacket, and so I said that really, no showing of Kubrick could be complete without watching A Clockwork Orange.
…which I did not remember being quite so rapetastic. I remembered violence, certainly, and scenes of sexual assault, but I didn’t remember them as being this brutal and explicit and extended. This was far ahead of what I was comfortable showing her.
Should I stop the movie? Should I censor this, and move to another film?
Should I have ever let her see it at all?
Love and Time And Ferretts
I make an odd distinction in love that I’ve recently come to realize is not universal:
I love easily, passionately, and freely. And for me, love is defined as something that I wrote to Jenphalian (although this love I’m describing is more amorous in nature, while much of my love is platonic):
“Each love I have is a unique thing where I sigh a little differently. (Gini has ‘An S smile’ she gets when she’s texting with her boyfriend S, which amuses me.) For me, a core need is to know that I’m not some interchangeable widget in my lover’s personal factory, and that if I left it would leave a small, Ferrett-shaped hole – a tiny wound that could be worked around, perhaps even eventually heal over without much scarring, but a thing that still would cause a unique and wondrous ache in its absence.”
Anyone I love, I would be there for if they needed me. That’s a part of that love – that their happiness is, in some part, essential to my own, and I’ll work to fulfill their needs.
But there’s also a strange, flip side to it that I realize is not present for most people: the intensity of my love does not necessarily require a similarly-intense time component.
Which is to say that I love Nayad, who is a wonderful person and smart and witty and fun to hug, but I can go several weeks without hearing from her and not be particularly the worse off. Don’t get me wrong, I like to hear from her – my day is always much brightened by a Nayad text or an email – but despite my deep feelings for her and the way I’d drop nearly anything to help her if she was in trouble, there’s no obligation to spend my days in touch with her.
Likewise, I love JFargo, a wonderful man who I wish I had more time with, but though we exchange comments and Facebook posts and whatnot, there’s no need for me to plan all my time in New York to see more of him. I’m just happy when we intersect, and I don’t necessarily need to eke out more time. That’s the way it works for me.
Those are both platonic loves, of course, but it works for many of my more amorous loves as well. In many cases, we’ll exchange spates of flirty texts – but they’re busy, I’m busy, I barely have enough vacation days as it is. We’ll think about planning an intersection when I’m in their vicinity or vice-versa, or plan an annual get-together… But it’s not the burning need to spend every day with them. The fact that I don’t have a requirement to see them doesn’t mean that I love them less, it just means that my love’s a slightly different flavor.
Which is weird. I mean, I do have loves who I need to see (Gini, Bec, Angie being the main drives, which is why I suppose they’re my “main” partners) – but to me, that’s just one of many wondrous factors that goes into making those particular loves unique.
Yet I can have a torrid affair with someone who I see maybe once every two years, and keep that love going, and not necessarily have a burning urge to drive out to Albuquerque. I’m not sure how weird that makes me. Pretty very, probably.
Fuck Yeah, Little Girl
A seven-year-old girl speaks out on the new Starfire.
“I want her to be a hero, fighting things and be strong and helping people.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because she’s what inspires me to be good.”
David Willis’ Shortpacked! strip on the same topic is also very good. Dude, one can enjoy sex without being a joy-dead robot.
Severe Tire Damage, Track 1
This is the blistered horror of my left hand. Note the blood-blister just below my wedding ring, the regular blister on my middle finger, the open wound on my index.
It’s a good pain. It means I’m drumming again.
A very pretty girl was foolish enough to tell me that she liked men with nice arms, and I thought, “Well, I used to have great arms.” Plus, I needed to get into exercise again, having fallen off recently, and there was this full drum kit downstairs – so why not do that?
Vanity, thy name is Ferrett.
Drumming’s a little different than other instruments in that you can’t drum in silence – or, rather, you can if you have a) a very expensive electronic kit with headphones, or b) silencing pads. I don’t have a), and b) means I can’t actually hear what I’m playing, which means that when I practice, the whole neighborhood gets to hear me fucking up. And I am fucking up, because my style of drumming has always been “technically sloppy, but big on feel.” Which means that I play differently every time, going for these elaborate fills and winding up off-beat because once again, I bit off more than I could chew.
As I’ve been playing over the last ten days or so, though, I’ve felt those skills surging back – and there’s a strength in going for an elaborate set of triplet-to-kick-pedal fills in the middle of a song and nailing it. There’s that Babe Ruth feeling of the called shot, of going, “I fired here and dropped back into the pocket, fuck yeah.” Which is nice. It’s not so nice, only playing along with other people’s music, but the iPod makes that considerably easier than it was back when I played along with CDs or (gah!) tapes.
I’m too old to be in a band, alas. Don’t have the commitment or the social network. Would be nice, though.