LughIldanach: Blog

Article stats are interesting, but not definitive. Still, I'd rather have good than bad ones.

What does puzzle me is why a story gets all 8-10, except a couple of 1's. Some authors suggest this is due to a reader not liking the subject matter. Should the codes be more extensive? Should every story have a prologue that isn't limited to 500 characters?

I can understand why one story, which doesn't have explicit sex, is written as humor, and is absolutely true other than changing names, has fairly low ratings -- but the ratings are reasonably distributed across the range. I can understand why a long story, written while I was learning SOL formats or a cooperative universe, has problems. Again, the scores are spread.

Is it best to turn off voting until the story is complete? That might help with people that hate the concept in the first chapter.

"True" has some different usages here. Some of the disabilities are drawn from real people. Perhaps more to the point, the text in the "Notices" at the beginning of chapters is as accurate nonfiction as I can make it. Sexual rehabilitation medicine has been important to people close to me, or, perhaps more to the point, the lack of it has destroyed relationships.

I'm interested and pleased with the patterns of readers with this story, which logically follows "Green Berets" and "An Anthropologist Comes of Age". As I gain experience, there is more and more information available to authors in the statistics. In particular, I try to have a new chapter up as roughly 30% of original readers have read the previous chapter. That, I hope, gives me a sense of the rate at which people read it, and perhaps the level of interest.

The scores have been a little puzzling, as with a 1 after nothing but multiple 8's and 9's, and one 10. If, however, I really worried about the scores, and thought I understood the algorithm without seeing the code, I'd be crazier than I am.

I haven't yet figured out when scores start to display on the general story list, as opposed to the author alone. One guess is that there must be at least 1000 downloads.

Had some writer's block on this, odd, because it is based very significantly on my true experience on my honeymoon with wife #2. Both of the characters are trying to explore their own sexuality. This chapter deals more with Vanessa's inhibitions and how she uses mild BDSM to break through them. In a later chapter, it will be the groom's turn.

Their issues are a fascinating system of guilt, she getting Catholic guilt and he getting Jewish guilt.

"Aleister Crowley maintained that the task of his sexmagical organisation Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.) was "to restore Christianity to its real status as a solar-phallic religion." ... [a bit much for me]. He went on to say "Ultimately in the O.T.O's sexual magick everything came down to semen - more recently likened to a computer hard-disk pre-formatted to be loaded with software and used at will. Crowley: "The industrial use of Semen will revolutionize human society"; journal 8th August 1923."http://www.parareligion.ch/2009/secret/secrets.htm

I also cherish the opening line of John Varley's book, Steel Beach: "the penis will be obsolete in five years." That doesn't have anything to do with the immediate discussion, but I love the quote!

I'm aware that many male readers are squicked even by second-hand contact with semen, without any M-M contact. Indeed, even contact with their own can be upsetting. From real-world experience, though, I've found that women can find it incredibly erotic when their partner is willing to taste himself, even after a blowjob. It might be ideal to have a snowballing as well as a creampie code, but the latter will have to do.

You will find the above acts and warnings in many of my stories. Consider yourself warned, and then invited cheerfully to read.

The contact above is in the context of more or less vanilla sex. If I use the creampie <u>and</u> the magic code, don't be surprised to find Crowley-type magick (magick with a k meaning not sleight-of-hand, but something that changes reality to fit the will).

I don't see a need to have warnings if there are gay male characters that have sex not in the story, and even might provide semen for rituals such as above. Still, there are times when M-M sex has a role for the characters. I'll use the MM code in such cases, even if fairly mild.

Personally, I'm a pedophobe. Perhaps I could resist waterboarding, but toddlers could get me to confess to anything. So, you will never see sexual contact with children in anything I write.

In at least two of my current stories, however, I am exploring the idea of incest involving consenting adults. Even there, the characters are exploring the very idea in one case. In another, though, I find it difficult to assume that it's a horrible idea, between a 34-year-old child who is a high-level sex worker, and a 59-year-old disabled parent.

It occurred to me that Robert A. Heinlein wrote quite a bit about things that were technically incest among adults, as well as some cases where the sex acts were among people who weren't biologically related, but where one had been in loco parentis. I'd be very interested in getting comments not only on the stories themselves, but on the ethics involved.