I've been alerted to the situation on Amazon and am working on resolving the matter. Thank you to aroslav for publicizing the situation, and to all the individual SOL members who have contacted me. (Good to know that people still remember me even though I haven't published here in close to a decade!)
I received a feedback from someone on this site today. I thought I'd just share our dialogue.
Message from: [thisdude's@email.com] :
I've avoided correcting you so far, but this is a
major issue.
"No, that's not how it works," Jenny said, combing
hair from her eyes, that old familiar gesture.
"The Female Pill works by altering a woman's
hormonal balance right before ovulation so that
she doesn't release an egg. You know this, you had
Sex Ed class same as I did."
The female pill is not contraceptive.
It causes a ABORTION.
The uterus (womb) is not allowed to prepare for a
fertilized egg. The egg can be successfully
fertilized in the fallopian tube. Life begins with
cell division. However without the supportive
environment of the uterus, the zygote (fertilized
ovum) is aborted and sloughed off with the menses.
What's the difference, you may ask?
The difference is in propagating ignorance.
All ignorance can and does lead to bad choices.
[dude] - father of 5 and grandfather of 8
Mr. [dude],
I thank you for your feedback. However, I'm concerned for your confidence, as I'm fairly sure you have many of your facts wrong.
First off, you failed to provide sources for your claim that hormone-based contraception changes the conditions of the uterus. To be honest, it would not surprise me if your claim was true, as altering uterine conditions (essentially, encouraging menstruation on the spot) would indeed be an effective method of pregnancy prevention... But a quick check of Wikipedia suggests that this is not the action at all. Both the standard Pill (estrogen/progestogen) and its alternative (progestogen only) are listed as inhibiting ovulation. And yes, you could claim that Wikipedia is wrong... But if you plan to do this, I want to see your facts. Wikipedia prides itself on having citations so that you can track down why it claims the things it does. You need to do the same.
Secondly, I would like your facts on how life begins at cell division. The same is true of plants and animals, but we harvest them at our own whims. Obviously, it is believed that human beings have a soul... But where is it contained? When is it gifted to the body? The first thing that develops of a human embryo is actually its anus; am I to believe that my soul resides in my butt? Especially since electrical brain activity, the surest sign of developing sentience, only begins in the fifth or sixth week? Where are your rebuttals?
The answer lies in the tone of your message, which is in itself the third thing I need to address. You see, you are here to evangelize. You call upon the moral authority of your five children and eight grandchildren... even though you are aware (since you've read my stories) that I do not believe that parenthood is an automatic guarantor of wisdom. There's also your slogan, "Life begins at cell division" - a well-known and well-publicized catchphrase for the crowd who call themselves "pro-life". I am mistrustful of such people because, as you yourself have said, "All ignorance can and does lead to bad choices"... And the Pro-Life crowd seems insistent on maintaining ignorance, and thus bad choices, in their followers. The alternatives to abortion are things like easily-accessible contraception and sex education--things Pro-lifers oppose. The result is a world where everyone has no choice, except to bear whatever children they happen to conceive. And what of that child's fate?--A child (let's call him "Brandon Chambers") born to parents who don't want him and have little interest in raising him well. The Pro-Lifer says, "I don't care. But, as it happens, I mostly oppose welfare and the Dole and free public education - you know, the sort of things that might help him make a life for himself." When he is in the womb, Brandon is their responsibility, but for the sixty or eighty years after, he's on his own. And, as Sister Joan Chittister put it, "That's not pro-life. That's pro-birth." Like you, like any sane person, I want to see abortion relegated to the dustbin of history... But I believe the road to that happy future lies not in making it illegal, but in making it unnecessary. And to make it unnecessary we need birth control and sex education and children who can make wise choices because they know their options. The day a pro-lifer advocates those things, I will gladly join his cause... But I don't know if it will ever happen any time soon.
Finally, I would like you to be aware that I am blocking your e-mail address forthwith. I am always happy to discuss fiction as a craft with readers, or talk about my stories, and even - if you're feeling particularly brave - discuss politics. But you are not here for discussion. You are here to evangelize, with no intention of taking "No" for an answer. You are here to push your politics into my story. And sir, let me tell you a secret: Your politics do not belong in my story. Hell, my politics don't belong in my story. Nobody's do. And your attempt to twist my work to your own ends shows a gross lack of respect for me as a person, and for my work - whether you call it art, entertainment or even just a handy fantasy to jack off to.
Ignorance can and does lead to bad choices. So please, for your own sake, remember what a very wise man once said: take the plank of ignorance out of your own eye first, before trying to tackle that speck of sawdust in your brother's.
good-bye,
~CWatson
I'm not posting this to pat myself on the back. I'm posting this to make something clear: Don't try to tell me what to think. In the past I have resisted people attempting to shape my stories artistically, and this is me fending off the politicians too. I do ask for help with my work, and if I want it I will talk to you about it. (If you want to be part of that crowd, friending me on Facebook is a good bet.) Other than that, please - for the love of God - let me do my work in peace.
No, that's not the name of my next story, though I do have one in the works that hopefully will show up here. Not any time soon, though; I currently work for a small video-games company and we are amidst a major push to get our next product out the door. It's exciting: we're trying to make the first hardcore RTS for iPad. E-mail me for details if you so desire. But no, that's not what I came to talk about here.
If you're on this website, you probably have, you know, needs--or, as I like to call them, "manly urges," because 'manly' is an inherently funny word. Also, if you are at thi swebsite, you may have difficulty fulfilling your manly urges: for optimum fulfilment, one desires womanly co-operation, and womenfolk are sometimes uninterested in aiding a man in this quest. So, one turns to alternative, sometimes artificial, means.
All of which is simply a fancy way of saying, This is a post about sex toys.
Most sex toys designed for men are tacky, absurd, occasionally frightening, and--most importantly--some combination of "awkward", "unsatisfying" and "expensive". Since the seventeenth century man has struggled to make himself an artificial sex partner, generally succeeding in some ways but failing on others. The most basic ones for sale today are hand-held and typically made of rubber, silicone gel or some other semi-stretchy material. They range upward from there to full-blown silicone dolls, five feet or more in height and close to 100 pounds in weight, and costing thousands of dollars. All in the search of something to boink when you can't find someone to boink.
Almost all of these products have serious shortcomings. Smaller ones are portable but sacrifice almost all of the "simulation" parts of the toy; you move the thing up and down and it feels like you're jacking off. Additionally, unless you're using a Japanese "meiki" toy (see toydemon.com), the inside of the object might not bear any resemblance whatsoever to an actual vagina. For a more realistic feel, you have to scale up into larger and larger toys... which gets more expensive and more unwieldy. There's the Fleshlight, which is about as good as the handheld ones get; there are larger products designed to resemble the hips and rear end of a woman, typically a porn star; there are larger pieces like Pipedream Products' "Fuck Me Silly" line; and finally the sex dolls, which are full-body silicone instead of inflatable transparent vinyl. The RealDoll, generally accepted to be THE best sex doll around, may give you a full-size fake woman to actually fuck, but how easy is it to manipulate "her" (it) into the positions you want? And how do you clean it up when you're done? And how do you store it?, in an economy where roommates (or--gasp!--living with parents) have become the norm rather than the exception.
And let's not even talk about temperature. These things cool to room temperature--I mean, duh--and that's not necessarily fun to stick your dick in. You can warm them, sure, but the larger the object is, the harder it is to heat. Most toy manufacturers advocate submerging their products in warm water, but that can take ages depending on the size of the object (RealDoll anyone?), and it almost never works anyway: they float. Besides, the moment you take it out, it acts like any wet object does in open air and begins to cool down--especially on the inside, the one place you want it stay warm but also the one place you can't towel off.
All these problems apply, in greater or lesser amounts, to all the products listed. Simply put, the bigger a toy is, the more fun it is to do, but the harder it is to clean, hide and (in some cases) use.
And that's where we finally get round to the title of this post: the Soloflesh. It's the best of both worlds.
Most products are made with pure silicone rubber, but Soloflesh takes it in a different direction by being, essentially, a water balloon crossed with a double-walled drinking cup. The outside curves inwards to create the, well, vagina, creating a semi-hollow object which can be filled with water. It gets up to remarkably life-size proportions; if you use warm water, it also heats up to body temperature, without any of the mess described above. The resulting object does have a water balloon's fragile, unwieldy nature, and the instruction manual (it has an instruction manual) warns not to rest full body weight on it, but you don't have to fill it up to full capacity, and it's arguably easier to use if it isn't.
The water makes it heavy, but also lifelike--the object has pretty realistic physics (which is understandable when you consider that humans are about 60% water by weight) and is fun to spank, if you're into that. Additionally, water changes the sensation of the toy. Most fake pussies create stimulation either through tightness of diameter (some vaginal "openings" are too small to even stick a pinky finger into), really silly interior textures (see: Fleshlight) or by just giving up and providing you with something motorized, like a vacuum pump or a bullet vibrator. The Soloflesh, instead, does it with water: it pushes on the inside passageway, causing it to tighten but also allowing it to expand when penetrated. It's an excellent sensation.
Finally, because of the physics of water, you can lie on your back, stick the thing on facing whatever direction you like, set it rocking... and then go hands-free. There's no other toy on the market which can do this.
No toy is without flaws, and the Soloflesh is no exception. One big one is that it's hard to inflate--you have to create a seal on the faucet with your hand and "overcharge" the object with water to achieve intended functionality. It is fragile and heavy, limiting the ways it can be used, and if it pops you're going to have a disaster area. It's not discreet, since you have to take it to and from the bathroom both before and after use; it can be filled with air, or even used empty, but given that warm water is so much of the device's charm, I can't imagine it would be nearly as satisfying. It does not have an anal opening; I suppose they might create an alternate version which does, but an all-in-one-der is unlikely, given the interior engineering. The texture of the vaginal canal is... well, there isn't one; it's basically perfectly smooth. That isn't a downside per se, but a good interior texture can elevate a toy from "good" to "great" (the Cyberskin Intimates Virtual Sweetheart is nothing but interior texture, but is the most lifelike product I've found) and I feel like an opportunity was lost. And finally, it's rather realistic in visual design, down to the pussy lips, which can be a turn-on for some but a turn-off for others, depending on how you handle the uncanny valley.
I've gone through hundreds of dollars in the past on a quest to find something that works and works well. I think the search is over. The Soloflesh is unlike any other product available, achieving an excellent compromise between practicality and satisfaction. I hope this company goes far, and I'm doing my bit to help them. And for everyone out there who's looking for a different angle on a sex life that is rather more lonely and desperate than they'd like to admit; this is for you too. I've been there, and it sucks. But while we're stuck in this pity party, we might as well have some fun, right?
Yesterday, I got an e-mail from the talented and gracious evanslily, informing me that she'd found one of my stories plagiarized at fanfiction.net. She, I and the other authors whose works we'd discovered in ripped-off form, have been taking action and more-or-less got our works returned to us. That's not actually why I'm posting here.
I'm posting to mention a way to make it easy to detect this sort of thing in future.
The technique that's been suggested to me in the past, and seems to work, is for you to take just some random phrase from one of your stories, and Google it. Preferably you should either grab a sentence fragment that's out of context, or a particularly pernicious parcel of prose, one that uses a description which is (believed to be) relatively unique. Don't use any character names; those can very easily be changed (this is what our plagiarist did: she replaced all our characters with leads from "One Tree Hill"). For instance, just as an example, I am going to put the following, the stuff that's in brackets, into Google:
["remove any part of my clothing. But then one day, he'd bumped into his old flame"]
Note the quotation marks. If I just put
[remove any part of my clothing. But then one day, he'd bumped into his old flame]
then Google will find the most popular page that has a lot of these words. As it happens, the story itself is the 7th result. But if we put them in quotation marks, then Google searches for those exact words in that exact order, and we get, as our first result, our story--coincidentally by evanslily. Why yes, I did choose that quote on purpose, why do you ask? Some of the other results are simply mirrors of her work, but as our second result we get... Something on a Buffy the Vampire Slayer board? But with some other characters' names substituted for Lily's... Hold on a second!!
Don't worry, evanslily already put a stop to it, and the plagiarized snippets themselves have been struck from the mailing list's records. (Believe it or not, this is sheer coincidence; I just grabbed one of hers because she's the person who taught me this technique.) But this just proves that the technique works. Here's the further advance which evanslily mentioned to me, and which I am spreading the word on:
http://www.google.com/alerts
This lets you specify certain phrases that you want Googled and set up an automatic repeating search ON them. You don't even have to be a Google member: they will send the results to any e-mail address in the world. Now Google will protect your copyright FOR you, as long as you do a bit of gruntwork and provide words and phrases for them to try and find. This is where your own knowledge of your work becomes handy: if you give them something like, "Oh God oh God, I'm cumming I'm cumming", then you are not likely to get great results, because that could be in just about ANY story. Search instead for the stuff that could ONLY be in your story: "his divine ecstasy issued forth like jets of water from a fire hose" or something like that. (I just made that up. It's terrible. Please don't actually put it in a story.)
And hopefully, with the magic of Google, we can all protect our brands and our work a little more effectively. And all thanks to Lily Evans. Remember how she gave her life for Harry Potter's, making him immune to certain attacks? Now she's doing the same for the world of online erotica as a whole. Thanks, Lily! You're a saint!
I was one of nearly 4,000 people participating in Eric Whitacre's Virtual Choir this year. We're not allowed to embed, but you can see it on YouTube here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=V3rRaL-Czxw
The basic principle is simple: if you get a bunch of people to take video and audio if themselves singing to the same song, you can stitch it together in post-production and create a virtual choir. Anyone who does multitracks (Corey Vidal, FineyLeee, Peter Hollens) uses the same tactics.
What makes it special is Eric Whitacre. For those not following this stuff (and let's face it, no one is), he's one of the two star composers of the world of choral music right now, the other being Morten Lauridsen. Whitacre came out of nowhere in the early 90s and started making a name for himself, choosing exquisite poems and then crafting around them music of surpassing beauty, music that melts in your mouth without being impossibly high-brow. The piece he chose for this year's virtual choir, Water Night, is probably his signature work. It is spellbinding. Most choral pieces are written with a total of four notes at once, corresponding to the four basic voice parts (soprano: women who sing high; alto: women who sing low; tenor & bass: men who sing high / low). Water Night goes up to fourteen.
Enjoy.