The Weirdly Miraculous 2011

Everyone is doing these end of the year-posts, so I decided to look back a little too. Yeah, I'm a regular sheep following the herd...

This time last year I was waiting anxiously to hear from Dreamspinner Press about my anthology submission. It was nervewrecking, mainly because I loved the story, Auld Lang Syne, and it was my first foray into what I knew I wanted to write: original M/M-fiction.

As some of you know by now, the story didn't make it into the anthology, instead Dreamspinner wanted it separately, and the novella is out there on it's own. I still remember the feeling of getting that email, by the way, early in 2011, saying they wanted it. It was all so worth it...

Incidentally my first published work was a M/M/F-short story for another publisher, Summerhouse Publishing. An online acquaintance had founded a publishing company and I had a story. It ended up published, and even though I've since fallen out with Summerhouse, I don't regret sending them The Double Ds.

At the end of the year 2011, I have met the goal I set myself way back in ancient history: I have had a novel published. By Any Other Name is a decent first try and I know many people have liked, even loved it. It's not my favorite thing of what I've written and I see faults in it, but it is a decent book with a LOT of things in it that I still managed to make mine. I wanted to write a different book about abuse and a menage-relationship, and I think those boys pulled it off just fine.

I'm also pretty happy with the other things I have out there by now, all of which you can see on my Goodreads page in case you're wondering. :)

All the while I've been writing, all through 2011, I've been also battling some personal issues, the main one has been depression, the "friend" that has been following me for most of my adult life.

During 2011 I've made a lot of new friends, resurrected some old friendships (to a point) and I've certainly erased some people from my life (some of them repeatedly, because I'm a sucker for punishment...). I've learned that your time is limited, you'll not life forever, and so you should try to surround yourself with people you actually like. If someone makes you feel bad or evokes negative feelings, they should go, no matter who they are. Nobody is worth making you feel bad.

All in all, 2011 has been a decent year. I feel like I can maybe learn from my mistakes and failures or things I perceive as either, like selling my beloved stallion who was stressing me out and going to waste being a yard ornament, or having a person I once considered a friend make me feel like crap all the time because of their social inaptitude and general obliviousness to other people's feelings. Oh and never mind the so called gay porn "star" and his antics, that was "fun" too.

Getting into those situations and letting them bother me as much as they did were failures and mistakes for sure. But I think I've learned from them. Now I'm tougher. Again.

The positive of 2011 is that I'm an author now. If I die tomorrow, the people left behind can call me an author. That's what matters to me. This is what I always wanted to be, This is what I didn't think would happen, or at least I needed a miracle. Well guess what. Miracles do happen. ;)

I think that my usual "I will not make New Year's resolutions!"-mantra will be effective this year too, but at least my first thought when the year is changing won't be "I will survive one more year." like it has been for so many years. I have some living to do, surviving won't cut it anymore.

Happy New Year and have a much better 2012, everyone!

(Oh and keep your eyes open, because there will be more stories out there from yours truly soon enough, starting from January 25th. I'm not going anywhere.)

Inspiration: Porn

I remember being curious about porn when I was maybe… nine years old. Someone had given my dad a hard core straight porn tape as a gag gift and I honestly don’t want to think if that was all it was… That tape, watched at a time when I was left alone for about half an hour kind of made me think ‘gross’, but it also made me more curious.

Now, that wasn’t the first time when I saw people ‘doing it’. I suppose I was about five years old when I found a stack of magazines with nude people on them from my uncle’s room at my grandparents house… 

See, corrupted at an early age and all by myself, mostly. 

I think the first time I saw anything outside the straight porn stereotypes was about my late teens. By then I knew I was a lesbian (I’ll get to this definition later…), so naturally it was lesbian porn I was looking for. Sadly I could immediately tell there wasn’t much at all I could get my hands on. There were no super fast internet connections or good computers yet, at least not in my house. 

The lesbian porn I could find in the next five years or so just made me annoyed, I mean if you don’t have money or means to go right to the source, it isn’t good. We all know the ‘lesbian porn’ one can find, right? The not very real looking fake women with false nails and… Mhmm… No, I don’t find those girls hot at all.

So eventually, because I do love anything ‘pretty’ and always have, I got curious about gay porn. After all the men are usually very good looking. Maybe I didn’t want them more than I wanted the ugly guys in straight porn, but I’m a woman, we generally want more than just the mechanical image of fucking and that was what I was after.

At that point, maybe six years or so ago, I didn’t really look at it like that. I hadn’t really bothered to look into what made me tick more than on the surface level. I just knew that gay porn turned me on, as soon as I saw the first clip ever. 

It took me a while to realize it was more about the dynamics and yes, the whole deal about it being forbidden that turned me on than the actual hard core fucking I saw. I also became more interested at the performers than what they were doing on film.

Now, I know some people are confused about someone who just called herself a lesbian being turned on by guys in the first place. In general, I don’t get turned on by men. I don’t want to fuck men (no, wait…pegging, hmm…), I don’t want to go anywhere near a cock in real life and I certainly can’t picture myself ever falling in love with a man. Not head over heels, not immediately, not like I’ve fallen in love with a few women, at least. Then again I’m a big believer on never say never so…

Anyway, I like to label myself queer, when labels are needed and they can be put in a bit more complex way, lesbian, if I need the simple explanation to who I might be.

Now, I’m trying to wind down with this, bear with me.

This whole rant came from a need to write down something about what porn means to me, so here goes: 

I want the escape. I want to watch something hot and “pretty”. I want inspiration for the stories I write. 

But once I get to know a little bit more about the performers, I begin to care too. It’s not just once I’ve received (or sent) an email from a friend about something that has happened in an adult entertainer’s life. Not because we like to gossip, but because these guys are people to us.

And it shocks me sometimes, to see how much the male fans treat these guys like robots. Men might be differently hardwired, but these guys put a lot on the line to do a job almost nobody respects, even in the glorious, liberal 21^st century.

Me? Today I’m bummed because I had technical difficulties and I didn’t get to see how much Samuel Colt and Chris Porter’s puppies Eggs and Bacon have grown in their live cam show early this morning (my time). Or how much more muscle mass Chris has now than the couple of months ago since the last show, because I know how hard he’s worked for that. No, I’m not saying the live sex doesn’t interest me, but it’s not the main point for me, not at all. 

I’m also hoping that one day I get to meet Kennedy Carter, who is one of the most genuinely nice guys I’ve ever “met”. Maybe we’ll be in the UK at the same time, eventually. 

There are a handful of other performers out there that I try to follow too, but lately, and because of Twitter, these are the guys that seem to mean the most. The more that I get to see glimpses into their lives, the more I want to support them (in more ways than buying the occasional website subscription I can afford). 

There’s nothing wrong with being interested in porn, for whatever reason you watch it, and there’s certainly nothing wrong of being the performer, or working in the industry in some other way. 

Humans are, luckily curious, sensual beings and that’s how it should be.