ACW Episode 60 – Sometimes you need a little inspiration

March 16th, 2010

Sometimes, when writing, a gal needs a little inspiration. A little visual inspiration, if you know what I mean…

I will admit, I have searched the internet for porn and erotica, both for writing and art, and at times out of simple boredom. Occasionally, I’ve come across things that have surprised me, but these days I’m more often surprised by what comes out of my own fingertips when I type.

I’m not a huge fan of porn. There’s this age old argument amongst erotica writers about what the difference is between porn and erotica. Some say porn has no plot, no characterization, no point, where as erotica has all these things. Some folks say porn and erotica are the same thing, but porn is what other people watch while erotica is what the writer creates.

I say this. Erotica is a genre that looks at sex and its related issues and how these things affect people’s lives. Every day, we make choices with regards to sex. Should we have it or not today? With whom? And why? If we buy this toothpaste, will we really look as sexy as the girl in the commercial? If I sleep with this guy, will I finally be happy/fulfilled/not so damned bored with my life? And so on. These are the stories I enjoy writing, and the ones I most enjoy reading. And when it comes to more visual material, I kind of feel the same way, although being a visual creature, a picture of a naked man engaged in illicit pursuits of any kind is still going to jump start the sexual center of my brain.

Anyway, that’s my take on erotica vs. porn. Ask around. You’ll find that other people’s definitions will vary, and who’s to say who’s right and who’s wrong? Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to do some research for a story…

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Move It Mama Monday! Another New EA Sports Active?

March 15th, 2010

I found this article earlier in the week, discussing the newest version of EA Sports Active coming out this fall. It looks like the new version will incorporate a new leg strap as well as an arm strap and heart rate monitor. No more remotes required to do the workouts, and if that’s the case I’m hoping it may possible to use hand weights instead of resistance bands for the workouts. I’ve broken two resistance bands using EASA and have had a bit of a time finding replacement bands that are long enough and sturdy enough to use with the game.

Supposedly, the new EASA will also be able to download new content for the PSP version. No work yet on whether the Wii version will also be able to do so. I’m hoping so, otherwise Wii owners who play EASA will be up in arms.

Other improvements I’d like to see, but that weren’t mentioned in the article…

  • More stretching exercises. A lot more stretching exercises, in fact.
  • More warm up and cool down routines. The EASA More Workouts only has one routine for warm up and one for cool down, and doing those for six weeks straight got old real fast.
  • Yoga routines. With the new wireless leg and arm remotes, I think this would be the ideal time for EASA to incorporate yoga into it’s workout options.
  • Bring back some of the old games from the original version of EASA, including the baseball, basketball, tennis and volley ball games. I put together entire workouts that were nothing but those sports games and they gave me a real workout. I’d love to see them brought back.
  • An option to pre-program EASA for a certain number of workouts a week based on what the user wants. The 6-week challenge demands you do 4 workouts a week for six weeks straight, which can be a little tough to work in if you do other forms of exercise during the week. I would rather have done 2 regularly scheduled workouts in addition to my water aerobics classes, karate classes, and other Wii workouts. Granted, I can still do that by picking the 6-week challenge workouts on my own from the menu and going through them in order, but the pre-programmed function would have been nice to have.

Keeping that last comment above in mind, I’m thinking of working EASA back into my morning workouts, maybe twice a week, interspersed between Gold’s Gym Cardio, Wii Fit Plus and DDR or the new Just Dance game that I’ve ordered. I don’t like to get bored, obviously, and mixing things up like this will give me plenty of ways to keep active.

If anybody has comments on working out with any of the above games, or with any games I haven’t mentioned, post them below. I’m interested in hearing what others have to say about working out with the Wii.

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Sunday Contentments – Nostalgia

March 14th, 2010

Last Friday, I had one perfect moment of nostalgia.

I was in the pool at the YMCA, taking my regular water aerobics class, when I saw a woman and a small child come into the pool. The child was a perfect chubby little three-year-old girl, with pigtails and a fishy print bathing suit, and she toddled around on her perfect chubby little legs with her mother trotting after her. They got into the pool together and the mother held onto the little girl and carried her around in the water, hoisting her up into the air and bringing her down with a splash, or standing at the side of the pool and helping her child jump into the water.

As I watched them, I was suddenly taken back four years, to a time when it was just me and Princess, and once a week I would bring her royal chubbiness to the pool to splash around just like that. Looking back, things seemed a lot simpler then, even though I know they weren’t. But still, those memories have a golden haze to them as a perfect time in my life.

I haven’t taken Pixie to the pool as much, due to scheduling conflicts. You’d be amazed at how busy a three-year-old’s life can be, as well as my own. But I’ve made some changes recently to free up our Wednesday mornings, and I’m thinking that this Wednesday, I’ll bring my own perfectly chubby little three-year-old to the pool so that she and I can splash around and make a few nostalgic moments that I can enjoy years down the line.

Enjoy your Sunday, folks.

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The Science of Sex – a new topic for the blog

March 12th, 2010

For a long time now, I’ve been trying to come up with a regular blog post topic that really defined my thoughts on the erotica genre and was pretty descriptive of who I am as an erotica writer. I don’t do romance, no straight up sci-fi or fantasy. My erotica is not simply stories of sex scenes between two or more people. I write weird stuff to be honest; stories about plants having sex, and aliens discussing gender roles, etc. During a discussion with Nobilis Reed and Ann Regentin on our joint podcast The Good Parts, I realized that I get a lot of my best story ideas from scientific articles in newspapers and magazines, like National Geographic or Psychology Today. And this got me to thinking. If I were going to teach someone what I know about writing erotica, it would be to look at science for intriguing story ideas.

For instance, a couple of months ago, National Geographic ran an article on orchids, including one particular species familiarly called the “prostitute orchid?” This particular species of orchid cross dresses as a female bee in order to lure male bees in to mate with it. While the male bee is busy getting his insectile rocks off on the fake femme, the orchid gets busy securing pollen to the bee’s nether regions. By the time the bee finally figures out he’s been duped into humping a flower, he’s already been coated in pollen (or as I like to call it, orchid sperm). The poor bee flies off in search of a real female bee, only to run into another cross dressing flower where he ends up depositing the pollen from the first orchid, thus becoming an unwitting courier in the mating rituals of flowers.

Bizarre story, isn’t it? And yet fascinating too. Imagine being the flower, trying to lure the bee in so you could hose him down with your seed. Or better yet, imagine being the bee, looking for LUV in all the wrong places. What if there were a society of sentient beings where this sort of mating was carried out as a ritual? The males and females of the species would have to rely on a member of a separate species to carry out an important and very intimate transaction in order to breed. Would the courier species charge money for their services? And how would humans react to encountering an intelligent alien species in which this sort of activity was the sexual norm?

These are the sort of ideas I love to sink my teeth into and write about. And since I think this is something that makes me a bit unique among erotica writers, I’ve decided to work on a semi-regular post that I’ll put up on Fridays called The Science of Sex. Some weeks, I’ll post links to articles I’ve come across on the web about sex and scientific discoveries in the news. Other times, I’ll give my thoughts on what I’ve read or researched recently, and how I might spin a particular bit of science news into a story idea. And folks are free to run with any ideas I come up with. I don’t mind discussing my thoughts or inspiring people to write stories of their own.

For this week, here’s a link to the National Geographic article on orchids that I mentioned above, entitled Love and Lies – http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/09/orchids/pollan-text/1.

And if that isn’t enough for you, here’s an article from Web MD on the health benefits sof sex – http://www.webmd.com/sex-relationships/features/10-surprising-health-benefits-of-sex. Interesting stuff to know, and could be the basis of some intriguing story ideas. I know I’ve got one brewing in the back of my head even now!

Read it and enjoy and I’ll keep my eye out for more Science of Sex topics for future posts!

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Rats! Episode 09 – Good Morning Sunshine!

March 11th, 2010

Ah, first call to formation. How well I recall performing that lovely little duty. First call was essentially the wake up call freshman made to let everyone know that formation was coming up. Basically, all the rats met in one room in the company area to argue over who’s turn it was to perform first call. Then one poor rat was shoved out into the hall where he had to drag to one end, stand at attention, and shout as loud as he could…

“First call to formation, Sir!”

“First call to formation, Sir!”

“First call to formation, Sir!”

Three times in a row, just like that. Then the rat took off dragging and escaped back into the room. About 5-10 minutes later, he came back out again to call “Last call to formation, Sir!” During first call, there might be a few upper classmen out in the hallway, waiting to be spoken up to. By last call, frikkin’ everybody was out there. As soon as last call was made, all the rats came pouring out to line up along one wall, where they were then chewed out for whatever god-forsaken reason the upper classmen came up with that morning. Sometimes the cadet first sergeant would just lay in with a very vigorous speech about how lousy we all were and how we’d better straighten up. Other times, it seemed like every upper classman in the company pounced on us, conducting on the spot inspections and drilling us for new cadet knowledge. New cadet knowledge, by the way, was trivia we all had to study about the VTCC and Virginia Tech. To this day I can still tell you which building on campus serves as a compass (Burruss Hall), and the names of all the Pylons on the Drill Field (Brotherhood, Ut Prosim, Loyalty, Leadership, Service, Sacrifice, Honor, Duty). I cannot recall though how many alumni went on to receive Medals of Honor for their military service, nor all the names of the university presidents. Some stuff was just bound to leak out my ears eventually, I suppose.

I was hardly a stranger to early mornings when I joined the VTCC. My high school had an early seventh period which I took advantage of to earn extra credits toward my diploma. In fact, being able to wake up and get moving early in the AM was probably the only advantage I had as a rat. I hated it, but I could do it, and I could get to where I needed to be on time, regardless of the hour of the morning. Many upper classmen did sleep in, so it was always kind of fun in a mean way to have to wake them up early on mornings when we knew they had planned to sleep late.

BTW, I’ve been getting emails and feedback on the “Rats!” cartoons from a lot of former and current cadets. Thank you all for visiting and reading these cartoons. Be forewarned though. You see the logo at the top of the web? The one that has this cartoon of a woman with horns and says “Cynical Woman: Stay-at-home Mom and Erotica Writer?” Yeah, I’m not kidding about that. That’s me as I am today. If you’re only here for the “Rats!” cartoons, be careful poking around the rest of the site. I am far from politically correct, and I take my smut writing very seriously. Well, as seriously as I can. I do cartoon about that too, and if you’re interested, you can see those cartoons here.

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ACW Episode 59 – Huzzah! It’s Monday!

March 9th, 2010

This happens to me all too often. I look forward to Mondays because Monday is my first opportunity to work without interruption after a weekend of screaming kids and Hubster (Hubster does not scream, but he does keep me busy on the weekends). I enjoy my time with my family, but I do need time to work, so by the time Monday comes around, I’m usually chomping at the bit to get started. Then wouldn’t you know it? One of the kids is sick, there’s a doctor’s appointment to go to, Hubster decides to work at home which always completely disrupts my routine…

The last couple of weeks’ worth have been totally eaten by sick kids, sick me, and doctor appointments. And yesterday, when I thought I’d finally have the house to myself to work, Pixie came down with a fever. It’s been frustrating, I tell ya. I do most of my writing in the evenings after the kids are asleep and while Hubster is busy up in the office, but I still need a couple hours during the day to handle email, finances, story critiques, website updates, blogging, etc. If I don’t get that time, those tasks start to build up fast, and pretty soon I find myself staying up all hours of the night just to keep up. I hate it!

I recently read an article on author Jodi Picoult, a woman who’s written 17 novels in 18 years (and no, I haven’t read a single one of her books). She gets up at the crack of dawn, goes for a three mile walk, and then works until 3PM when her kids get home. I started to think, “Man! Wouldn’t that be great, to just write for six or seven hours straight? Think how much writing I’d get done! I wish I had her schedule.” Then I read that she gets 200 fan emails a day and she personally responds to all of them, and suddenly I realized I pretty much do have her work schedule. Not with the 200 fan emails a day of course (though I wouldn’t complain about that). But Jodi Picoult is also handling those same minor tasks that eat up so much of a writer’s time, and if she has kids, I’m betting she also has days where she’s got to take care of a sick child or spend all day in the doctor’s office instead of at her desk writing. And yet she still gets stuff done.

And I get stuff done too. A short story a week, two web comics, commissions for my computer graphics business, etc. In spite of all the juggling, it does all somehow get done.

Huzzah, it’s Tuesday. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to get back to work!

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Move It Mama Monday! Combinations In Wii Fit Plus

March 8th, 2010

Last week was an interesting week, exercise-wise. If you recall, I made the decision to switch up my schedule, saving my writing time for the evenings after the girls were in bed and using my mornings before the girls got up to exercise on the Wii.

That plan sort of worked. Last week I was still recovering from being sick with a sinus infection, and then Princess came down with some sort of stomach bug, and then we had a snow day so all my usual carefully laid plans went right out the window. I did manage to get on the Wii to exercise most mornings, but many days that was the only exercise I got, and I’m really striving for 2-3 periods of exercise each day. Those periods include: early morning Wii session before everyone else gets up; daytime fitness class at the Y or dojo; and half an hour or more outside working on the yard and garden. I only managed to get all three sessions in on one day, Friday. I must admit I felt tired when Friday evening hit, but I also felt good. Thanks to getting up early, the day’s schedule had gone well and I got in plenty of activity and even some fresh air. But that was the only day I accomplished all my physical activity. Most of the week I only got to workout on the Wii, and I was frustrated with that because those workouts were not as challenging as I would have liked.

Then I stumbled across a comment on the Wii Mommies forums about the “Combine” feature in Wii Fit Plus. One mom noted that when she combined the preset routines in Training Plus, she got a really good workout that burned 200 calories. That’s far more calories than I’ve usually been able to burn using Wii Fit Plus, so I decided to give this a try.

Sunday morning, I popped in Wii Fit Plus and went straight to Training Plus. I selected the Routines option and hit the “Combine” button where I picked six of the routines available and told Wii to let ‘er rip. Forty-two minutes later, I had actually worked up quite a sweat and burned 146 calories. Amazing! By combining the various routines, I was able to go through all areas of Wii Fit Plus – cardio, balance games, yoga and strength – and I even had fun in the process. The combined routines mixed everything up so I did a little of this, a little of that, and never got bored.

What I really liked is that I did all that exercise, burned plenty of calories, and still managed to take it easy on my knees. It’s that time of the month, folks, and with my hormones in full swing, my knees are really killing me. Wii Fit Plus is about the only home exercise I can do that won’t leave me crippled for life during this time. But compared to EASA and Gold’s Gym Cardio, Wii Fit Plus seemed seriously lacking in the calorie burning department.

Well, no longer. I’ll probably spend most of this week doing combined workouts so I can continue to take it easy on my knees. With luck, I’ll be able to work up a sweat every morning, and then go on to my next exercise period ready to rock and roll. We’ll see how this works out!

If anybody else is using Wii Fit Plus and has thoughts on the Combine function, let me know. Or if you have any tips on getting the most out of Wii Fit Plus, feel free to leave them here. I still think Wii Fit Plus is the most fun of all the fitness games I’ve tried, but I really want to sweat with it. If you can help me figure out how to do that, I’d be very grateful!

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Sunday Contentments – My New Love Affair

March 7th, 2010

My apologies for missing last Sunday’s blog post, but we were in DC to celebrate my mother-in-law’s/Princess’/my birthday that weekend, and Princess and I were sick on top of all that. Yes, we had a lot of fun on that trip ;)

But now we’re all home and I’m content to sit on the couch and contemplate what’s currently going on in my life. And what’s currently going on is my budding new love affair…

With my local hardware store.

You have no idea how giddy and excited I am right now. Yesterday, after taking the kids to swim class, I headed to the post office to mail a couple packages. Post office was closed, unfortunately, but rather than declare the trip a bust, I decided to visit the nearby hardware store. It’s a Taylor’s DIY store, far smaller than Lowe’s or HQ, and I wasn’t expecting much from it, but when I pulled into the parking lot, I felt the first blush of attraction.

You see, the girls and I just planted seeds last week, in preparation to start this year’s container garden, and I’d been thinking about buying compost instead of potting soil, but wasn’t sure where I could easily get some. Well, there in the parking lot of Taylor’s was several bags of the stuff, along with bags of peat moss and vermiculite and other garden goodies. “Yes!” I thought. “Here’s a place where I can get exactly what I need for this year’s herbs and veggies, and maybe this time we’ll have a shot at harvesting more than two tiny shriveled tomatoes!”

Then I walked inside the store, and that was when I really fell in love. The place was clean and well lit, and I could clearly see the signs for where everything was. This place was not a massive, monumental maze of confusion like Lowe’s or HQ. It was small, tidy, and well organized. And it had staff! Helpful friendly staff! The girls and I weren’t even in the store two minutes before someone asked if they could help up find anything. And as soon as someone noticed I was in the store with a couple of antsy kids, a clerk headed over to the old-fashioned popcorn cart and started heating up a batch of fresh popcorn! I got to spend 45 minutes wandering through the entire store while the girls happily munched on popcorn!! There was no whining, no fussing, no arguing; just the quite munch-munch of two little girls happily devouring large bags of free popcorn!

And if that wasn’t enough to seal the deal on my undying love, Taylor’s had a very nice selection of stuff I actually would use, like heirloom vegetable seeds and bird feeders and gardening tools and pots. Lots of nice pots at very reasonable prices for my small container garden. I drooled my way through the store, smiling happily at the clerks who showed up every ten minutes to ask if I needed help or more popcorn. I left with a bag of dried corn cobs and a squirrel feeder to put them in, but I made plans to come back soon, very soon, with a long list of must-have items for my garden.

It’s crazy, I know. I’m hopeless as a gardener, and an even worse do-it-yourselfer, but being in that store with all those helpful friendly clerks and actually being able to find stuff made me feel like I could do anything! Or at least made me feel like I could tackle a few simple home projects this Spring and Summer and come out with half-decent results.

Where is this crazy new love affair headed, you ask? What will the results be? Here are the results I’m hoping for:

  • A bigger, nicer container garden that produces plenty of herbs and even a few heirloom veggies!
  • Pixie’s clunky old cargo box bed disassembled, sanded down, and painted a lovely shade of girly pink with little blue flowers and dragonflies on it.
  • A small bookcase to fit in my master bathroom, so I finally have someplace nice to store all those books and magazines I like to read while I’m in the tub.
  • Maybe even re-finish a few pieces of the old cargo box furniture in our living room to give the whole room a new look!

And so on and so on. I’ve got a list of home improvement and redecorating projects as long as my arm, and I’m just dying to get to work on them. Now that I’ve discovered my local hardware store, I think I might actually have a shot. Though to be really successful, I may need to expand this relationship. You know, make it a threesome? I hear there’s a very attractive fabric store in our area…

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Rats! Episode 08 – What do you say to that?!

March 4th, 2010

And this week’s cartoon pretty much sums up everything in the previous seven episodes – uncomfortable uniforms, mandatory football game attendance, required show of spirit, and bad haircuts all around. Plus evil upper classmen having fun at the rats’ expense.

But it was all good. I recall the above incident actually happening, though I can’t say if I was a rat at the time or an upper classmen. I just know it happened, and it struck me as funny.

I do believe this is the last of the 2×2 format comics. I know I’ve said that before, and then continued uploading more 2×2 comics. I have no idea why I went with 2 panels across by 2 rows down. Where on earth did I get the idea for that format? It certainly looked like nothing I ever saw in a newspaper. I have no idea how the Collegiate Times worked around my idiotic formatting choice, but they did, and they never sent me any nasty-grams about it, so I am forever grateful to them for that. They were very patient with me, and mercifully criticism-free to a newbie comic artist.

What really puzzles me is the format and quality of the cartoons that follow. You’ll see what I mean next week. I know that the 2×2 cartoons were the first ones I drew and the first ones that ran in the CT. After that, I have a hard time establishing what order the cartoons ran in. I spent an evening or two sorting through all the strips I had, and was able to sort them into Year 01, Year 02, etc. But I can’t necessarily say I got them in the correct order beyond that. I do know that the artwork suddenly started to look a lot better, probably because I found a different pen to ink with and because I got better at erasing my pencil lines. But for some reason, I never seemed to stick with the same kind of pen or paper for too long. You’ll see examples of what I mean as we get further along.

In the meantime, I hope you enjoyed this week’s episode. Next week, we get more into the day-to-day details of life as a rat!

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Writing Wednesday – “Afternoon of a Faun” available at All Romance eBooks

March 3rd, 2010

Afternoon of a Faun, a m/m erotica short story I wrote for Coming Together: Al Fresco, is available as a single story at All Romance eBooks for just 69 cents! Coming Together has recently begun re-publishing the original anthologies as well as individual short stories and new material. The proceeds from these stories and books/ebooks go to various charities. Proceeds for Afternoon of a Faun will go to Conservation International.  Afternoon of a Faun is a “delightful tale (tail?) of empowerment and revenge featuring a mythical beast with an insatiable appetite.”  You can buy Afternoon of a Faun here.

Posted in Helen's Books, Published!, Writing, Writing Wednesday | 1 Comment »

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