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Some Thoughts on Irrevocable Consent

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There is a fetish I quite like. It’s not terribly common, but it’s also not uncommon as these things go, and it’s called somnophilia. It’s the fetish for either having sex with a sleeping partner, or having someone have sex with you in your sleep.

Now, if you don’t get the appeal, that’s totally okay. Fetishes kinda work that way: if they get you hot, they get you hot, and if they don’t, they’re complete mysteries. Take foot fetishes, for example. I don’t get them. They don’t make any sense to me. I struggle to imagine how someone might be aroused by feet. Like, of all things to get you hot, feet? Why feet?

And that’s okay. I don’t need to understand it to know there are people who are turned on by feet, even if I don’t understand why.

Somnophilia has been dipping in and out of the news lately, because of a rather horrifying case in France concerning a man, Dominique Pelicot, who is on trial for drugging his wife multiple times over a period of years and then recruiting strangers (about fifty or so have been identified and are being prosecuted, if I recall correctly) to rape her.

Court drawing of Dominique Pelicot (Europa Press)

This isn’t actually about the way whenever someone introduces fetishistic elements of a rape into his crimes, people who enjoy that fetish consensually sigh, roll their eyes, and brace for the onslaught from folks who don’t actually understand that the thing separating rape from sex is consent, though I could write that essay, and maybe eventually I will.

I get the taste for somnophilia. I love the idea of being half asleep, one of those really deep sucking sleeps you just can’t drag yourself from, partly aware that my body is being used for someone else’s pleasure but unable to do anything about it, and waking the next morning with the barest of hazy, fragmented memories of it. Whew! *fans self* I personally find that super-hot.

I also enjoy doing this with a lover who finds it as hot as I do.

Yum.

What I want to talk about today, though, isn’t somnophilia itself, nor even the way pop media conflates the fetish with the rapes that Dominique Pelicot staged, but I want to take a step back and ask: Is it even okay at all? Can we consent to sex in such a way that we cannot revoke that consent?

Sex and Commerce and War, Oh My

Sexual consent, according to a lot of folks in the kink community, is informed, freely given, and exists in the moment. Informed means you know what you’re getting into. Freely given means you’re not being coerced, blackmailed, wheedled, pressured, or forced into it. Exists in the moment means you can always tap out, even if you agreed up front.

A lot of folks are deeply uncomfortable about sex you consent to without a way to back out. That’s why they’ll tell you to have a safeword if you’re playing, say, with rape fantasy, where “no” and “stop” might not mean “no” and “stop.” That’s why they’ll tell you to have a nonverbal signal like a bell if your partner is gagged.

And I get that. It’s okay to be deeply uncomfortable about sex you can’t tap out of.

But, as I believe I’ve blogged about in the past, I personally like agreeing to things that I can’t tap out of. That gets me hot.

And here’s an interesting thing: If you take sex out of the picture, we as a society are quite comfortable indeed with agreeing to things you can’t back out of. Like contracts. Or mortgages. Or military service. Try getting three years into your four-year enlistment and saying “you know what? I changed my mind. I don’t want to do this any more.” Ha ha ha ha ha.

It’s really only with sex when we say “consent isn’t consent if it can’t be revoked.”

But…is that really true?

Unyielding Devotion

Last October, Eunice and I published a book. It’s the fourth novel in our Passionate Pantheon series of far-future, post-scarcity philosophical science fiction theological pornography, and pretty much the entire book is a deep dive into Eunice and I exploring the idea of whether you can give irrevocable consent to sex. (Spoiler: We think the answer is yes.)

It’s an even-numbered book, which means it’s erotic horror (the odd-numbered books in the series are Utopian, the even-numbered books are erotic horror). Here’s an example of what you’ll find:

Two doors in the far wall slid open to admit a tall, muscular man and an equally tall, strong-looking woman. He had bronze skin and brown hair that fell around his shoulders, and looked out at the world through piercing aquamarine eyes with cross-shaped pupils. She had shoulder-length hair of brilliant purple that matched her purple eyes, pale skin, and a warm face that smiled easily. They met in front of the cage. She offered her hand. “Hi! I’m Lanissae. I don’t think we’ve met.”

“Royat.” He shook her hand. “This is only my second party. I came here for the first time last month. I agreed to serve as entertainment at this party, so here I am.”

“Royat.” She inclined her head. “It’s lovely to meet you! This is my fifth time as a cage entertainer. Do you know what to do?”

“I think so. Jakalva explained it to me.”

“Good.” A door in the round cage folded upward. Lanissae stripped, then stepped nude into the cage. Royat undressed somewhat more awkwardly and followed her. A drone flitted down to whisk away their clothes. The cage door folded back down. The woman who had given Jakalva and Kaytin their vials approached the cage, moaning with each step. Her tray now held only four vials, two bright red and two deep turquoise.

“What’s happening?” Kaytin asked Chasoi, who stared at Lanissae and Royat with bright, hungry eyes.

“They’ll each take two Blessings,” Chasoi said. “The first one ensures their bodies will remain physically aroused no matter what happens to them. And the second, well, that’s the magic.”

“The magic? What does that mean?”

“One of them,” Jakalva said, “will become desperately horny beyond all reason. Are you familiar with the Blessing of Fire?”

“Yes,” Kaytin said.

“It’s like that, but more violent. It removes inhibition and obliterates self-control. The other does just the opposite, causing intense aversion, repulsion even, to the idea of sex. The cage makes sure neither of them can escape.”

“Oh.” Kaytin blinked. “So whoever gets the first vial will…”

“Yes. But that’s only half of it.”

“Half of it how?”

“That’s the beauty,” Chasoi breathed. “The moment either of them has an orgasm, they switch. Whoever was needy becomes averse. Whoever was averse becomes wild beyond control. They stay in the cage until they collapse from exhaustion.” Her eyes glittered.

I…would volunteer to be cage entertainment. I bet the number of people who would willingly do this is very small indeed, but I would absolutely do it.

Why?

The character Lanissae, who who has signed up to be cage entertainment many times, explains:

“Okay, let me try to explain,” Lanissae said. “It’s…” She paused, regarding Kaytin through hooded eyes. “I like…I like the tiny spaces. I like that little moment of clarity that happens when you switch, you see? There’s that one second when you know what’s going to happen. You see it in their eyes. You know that when that second is over, they will want you so badly that nothing you can do will stop them.” She shivered, eyes half-closed, and slipped one hand inside the plunging neckline of her shimmering, lacy dress. “Mmm. To be seen with such desire, to know that when the moment passes you will not want it and would do anything to make it stop, to know that it will happen anyway…there’s a delicious inevitability to it.” She cupped her breast. Her eyelids fluttered. “It’s such an exquisite surrender. You exist only to be ravished.” She exhaled in a soft moan. “You can’t get away. You lose yourself in how much you don’t want it, but it doesn’t matter. You stand on the brink and for one instant, you see it all so clearly, and you know what’s about to happen, and you also know that you chose to be here. You walked into the cage yourself, of your own free will…oh!” She leaned back on the couch and caressed her nipple beneath her thin dress.

Kaytin stared at her, desire and revulsion roiling within her. “And then,” Lanissae went on, “the violation is over, and the change happens, and you have that moment of clarity again. You feel the heat in your body. For that one delicious second, you know. When the heat reaches your head, the need will take you, and nothing in the world will matter except the person you are about to ravish. Everything stops. You balance on that edge. You recognize each other. You see the humanity there. In that instant, you share a connection that’s absolutely magical. For that one brief second, you see each other, really see each other—not as predator and prey, but as two people sharing an experience. You know that when the moment passes, you will not be able to stop yourself any more than you could stop what was coming when you were the object. You can feel your mind going…mmm.” She caressed her neck with her fingertips. “You embrace that moment of humanity, before it all slips away. It’s…uh! It’s so magnificent to stand on that cliff and feel yourself about to fall.” Lanissae arched languidly, running both hands down her arms. “When I’m in the cage, I live for those moments of connection between the moments of madness.”

Now, I don’t believe that you should explore irrevocable consent in your relationships, of course. If you find that idea repulsive, I 100% get that.

What I argue is that, in the spirit of agency and bodily autonomy, you have the right to explore irrevocable consent in your sexual relationships if you want to. And I have the right to do so as well.

I believe that, if I choose, I can tell a partner “I consent to you doing X to me, and I also consent to being placed in a situation where I can’t change my mind.” I don’t think I have to, or should, but I think I can if I choose to.

My body, my rules. If I want to give a lover permission to use me in my sleep, I have the right to do that.

You may or may not agree (and if you don’t, I’d love to hear your arguments in the comments). I do, though, find it interesting that society enshrines this right to irrevocable consent in basically every aspect of commercial and social life, except sex.

Isn’t that interesting? Sex, something whose connection to consent we’ve long been shockingly indifferent about, now gets an exception carved for irrevocable consent.

I think, honestly, this is at least in part a sign of the intrinsic distrust and fear our society has about sex.

An Unexpected Journey

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A couple weeks ago, I ended up on an unexpected last-minute trip to Dublin, Ireland (my client literally emailed me on Thursday evening to say “hey, can you be at the airport on Sunday?”). On the way back from Dublin, I spent a week or so in London visiting Eunice, my lovely co-author.

Our novel London Under Veil, about a young British infosec worker in Shoreditch who ends up drawn into a secret underground war between an ancient guild of spellcasting sex workers and a society of Tory rage mages, is (rather unexpectedly) turning out to be the most popular thing we’ve written so far.

Whilst I was in London, we spent a couple of days visiting some of the important places in the novel. All of the locations in the novel except the headquarters of the Guild are real; we wanted the novel to be as grounded as we possibly could.

We had a blast touring and taking photos of the key places in London where the story unfolds.

The first key location, where May takes refuge from the people trying to kidnap her, learns that magic is real, and finds herself drawn into the Guild of the Women of Saint Thais Under Royal Charter of Her Majesty Catherine Parr, Queen Consort of England and Ireland, founded in anno Domini nostri Jesu Christi 1544, is the Lalit, a tiny luxury hotel and restaurant:

We had high tea in the dining room, the very place where May meets Serene, the leader of the Guild and a powerful spellcaster.

The table on the right hand side of the photo, on the balcony, is where May has her first introduction to Serene.

“So, okay, just so we’re clear.” May folded her arms. “You’re telling me you can cast magic spells. Something like that.”

Serene smiled benevolently. “Something like that.”

“And the people who were after me? Can they…cast magic too?”

“They can, though they use a different system. A different way of seeing the world. A different programming language, if you like.”

“And you expect me to believe this, just by a sleight of hand trick with ID badges and some tea.” Even as she said it, May thought of the metal badge, hard and smooth beneath her fingers, a visceral memory that still lingered in her fingertips.

“What do you think?”

“I think you’re crazy. I think you’re trying to manipulate me. I think you’re trying to trick me for—for—for reasons of your own. I think you’ve arranged to drag me here so you can mess with my mind. You…you put something in the tea.”

“You haven’t had any of your tea.”

“Even so, this can’t be real!”

“All of those are sane, rational, and reasonable responses,” Serene said. “Offered a choice between accepting that which is by its very nature impossible, and accepting that someone is trying to fool you, the smart money is on someone trying to fool you every time. Normally I would suggest you go home and sleep on it, get adjusted to it a little, then come back with your questions, but this situation is not normal.”

“Because people are trying to grab me.”

“Because people are trying to grab you.” Serene sipped daintily at her tea.

“You seem quite blasé about all this.”

“Would you like to finish your tea before we go?”

“I’m fine.”

“I expect you’re not, but you are doing well considering. And you have a healthy degree of suspicion that will serve you in what is to come, I think. Still, time for us to be going.”

The Lalit is gorgeous, and we ended up staying there until well into the night.

Next up, the Barbican, that sprawling marvel of Brutalist architecture. Not many people know this, but the pools in the Barbican are part of a sophisticated magical warding system.

Toward the end of the novel, the Guild seeks shelter at the Barbican:

May finally broke the silence as they neared their destination, the sprawling Brutalist retro-dystopian complex of the Barbican, with its pools and gardens giving rise to slablike concrete buildings like strange plants. “I keep thinking nothing else can surprise me, and I keep being wrong. I suppose you’re going to tell me the Guild owns a flat here?”

“Several,” Janet said.

“Of course you do. We do. Whatever.”

“Why wouldn’t we? On hindsight, perhaps we shouldn’t have abandoned it for our new headquarters. It seemed a sound decision at the time, but this is a far more defensible position, magically and practically speaking. The pools—”

“Forget I asked,” May said.

She helped Janet slide the stretcher from the back of the van. Spencer’s tail whipped back and forth, back and forth. Serene’s expression didn’t change as the wheels hit the pavement. “Where are we taking her?”

“The flat to the left,” Janet said.

May guided the stretcher through the door into a posh, beautifully-furnished flat with large windows overlooking the reflecting pool in the plaza. “Nice digs,” she said.

“It’s maintained by a small corporation owned by a holding company that’s a subsidiary of a concern operated by the Crown,” Janet said.

“Seriously? I kinda thought, with the Tories being all Them—”

“The Adversary’s takeover of the Tories is a recent development, historically speaking. Our special relationship with the Crown has endured for longer than any of us have been alive. I see no reason that won’t continue for as long as the Guild exists.” She looked down at Serene’s placid face. “Which I fear might not be much longer. We need to prepare a response.”

The Shard doesn’t occur in the story directly, but there is a version of the Shard in the weird surreal magical alternate London, and it tears a hole in the sky.

Which, honestly, it kinda looks like it’s trying to do anyway.

When her stomach quit spinning, May walked to the edge of the roof and looked around. London spread out below her…not her London, but a bizarre, fantasy London, a storybook London from one of those stories spun of equal parts wonder and dread.

The buildings sprawled in classic London chaos, dark and forbidding, an urban canyon of twisting passages, all alike. A bit south of her, along the Thames, the grand clock tower rose hundreds of metres from the Tower of Westminster, its glossy obsidian sides black and brooding, tipped by a yellow crystalline spire that blazed with incandescence. Beyond it, the Shard thrust upward from the ground, transparent as glass, its peak piercing the heavens, creating a jagged rip in the bowl of the sky through which the stars gleamed like hard pinholes in the black velvet of night. She turned her gaze across the bridge, to where the London Eye spun madly, a glowing blur of red atop a tall monolith of grey steel and white concrete. What she had taken as boats floating along the river were actually scribbles, charcoal impressions of boats hastily sketched by the hand of an impatient artist, each identical, each with a gleaming lantern in its prow. Static fuzz rippled just beneath the water, as if the river itself were a television signal badly degraded.

The story’s climactic showdown takes place in the Guildhall, which is a stronghold of magic if ever there was one. The door they enter through is on the right, behind the group of people standing there.

“Ah. Right. Just so I’m clear, it’s us, the people in this room right now, breaking into the Guildhall, which is also not coincidentally the stronghold of a fantastically powerful band of, and I say this with some reservation, evil spellcasting wizards, without any idea what we’re walking into.”

“That’s about the long and short of it, yeah,” Claire said. “I might feel better if I knew exactly how you plan to keep the Adversary’s prying eyes off us.”

“No way,” Claire said. “That’s a terrible idea, from an opsec perspective. Compartmentalization of information. If you’re caught, you can’t compromise the rest of us.”

“You don’t know, do you?”

“There is a certain…improvisational element to the plan, I will grant.” She turned to Zoe. “All-Girl Nude Beach 2014?”

“Got it in my pocket,” Zoe said.

“I’m sorry, what?” Lillian said. Zoe pulled a small thumb drive from her pocket and handed it to Lillian. The thing, badly scuffed and scratched, had a strip of masking tape stuck to it with “All-Girl Nude Beach 2014” scribbled on it in felt-tip pen.

“I don’t get it,” Lillian said.

“Loaded with all the best malware money can buy,” Zoe said. “When it falls out of my pocket in front of some mark, I guarantee he’ll race to his office just as fast as he can to plug it into his computer.”

“And then?”

Claire grinned. “And then we root his system. Hasn’t failed yet.”

We also spent quite a lot of time at the British Library, in the member’s room since Eunice is a member (because of course she is).

Some libraries have rare books rooms. The British Library has four immense walls of rare books, visible through the charming round porthole by these cozy chairs.

The Pod

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It all started when I accidentally clicked on Facebook Marketplace.

I was trying to click on my notifications. On the iOS app, the Marketplace button is next to the Notifications button, and, well…

As God is my witness, I do not know why Facebook Marketplace thought I would be interested in a gigantic human-sized pod. I mean, it was absolutely 100% right, but how did it know?

And so it came to pass that I, after much back and forth with the seller (who owns a clinic that was moving, and didn’t have space for it any more) and some absolutely heroic efforts from my friend Stan to move the damn thing, came into possession of a Bod Pod, a medical scanner originally, I gather, designed to calculate body mass.

Of course, when I saw that listing on Facebook on that fateful day, my mind immediately, as it is wont to do, went to images of the alien eggs from the Alien movies.

What if, thought I, I could cover this Bod Pod in silicone, making an alien egg large enough for a person? And what if, I continued as my brain inevitably rode this train to the last station, I could make a whole bunch of gigantic silicone tentacles—say, just for the sake of argument, nine and a hald feet long or so—that might explode from the pod, dripping with slime, trying to drag a Helpless Victim™ into the egg-thing? And what if, I continued on, having at this point reached the last station, crashed through the wall, and sailed on into the Beyond Space where anything is possible, I did a photo shoot, in which this poor Helpless Victim™ was molested by tentacles from this giant alien pod?

Now, of course, getting from pod to giant alien egg with tentacles is a Project, one I have only just barely embarked upon.

The first step to a pod with tentacles is, of course, the pod. The second step is the tentacles, and so it was, Gentle Reader, that I set about designing a Giant Tentacle in a 3D modeling program.

From this Giant Tentacle, I created a mold that could be printed in 15-inch segments, which is the maximum print size on my 3D printer, with an overall length of over 9 feet.

Of course, I didn’t really quite imagine how long a 9-foot mold is, so it turned out that once the mold was complete—something that took days of printing—I didn’t have enough space for it without rearranging furniture.

Seriously, nine-feet-plus of mold is more mold than you think it is.

It’s also a lot harder to cast silicone in an open-face mold this size than I expected it to be. Like, a lot harder. In this much space, silicone doesn’t behave the way you’d expect it to. It’s kind of like lava—it doesn’t flow to fill the entire mold. (It doesn’t help that my vacuum chamber also isn’t big enough to degas this much silicone all at once, either.)

So I had to make the pour in a bunch of steps, which created all sorts of weird problems. I’d planned to have the suckers lighter than the rest, with bands of color through the tentacles. That…didn’t work. The coloring pigment actually migrated up through the silicone, something it doesn’t do in a smaller mold.

The mold is just a liiiiitle teensy bit more than half the diameter of the tentacle, so it just barely starts to pinch inward at the top. This is so that I could cast half the tentacle, remove it from the mold, fill it with silicone again, then put the half I’d already cast on top, and that slight bit of pinch would grab the bit I’d already cast.

The result worked out pretty well, though it uses a lot of silicone—I made two tentacles, and together they’re about $100 worth of body-safe platinum-cure silicone alone, not including the cost of printing the mold.

When I flew to Springfield to see my Talespinner, I brought the tentacles (of course), which caused some degree of consternation at TSA (of course). We trialled the tentacles as a means of violation of Helpless Victims™, at which they excelled, but we (by which I mean she and her other lover, as I looked on) also gave them a try as an impact toy, at which they also excelled.

In fact, this may be the thuddiest impact toy ever conceived by man, more thuddy even than the Dread Koosh Flogger, a flogger made (as the name suggests) from Koosh balls.

I’m considering making an impact tentacle toy that’s basically a short length of this tentacle with a handle on the end.

When I returned from Springfield, armed with more information to allow the Great Tentacle Pod Project to move forward, I unpacked my suitcase and tossed the tentacles over the pod, lacking a better place to put them (and nine-foot tentacles are both heavier and take up more storage space than you may realize).

It struck me yesterday that visitors to my home, upon walking into my living room and seeing this, might be subject to some discomfiture.

Alien: Romulus: More Nightmare Fuel

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Okay, so.

Before I get into this, a bit of background is necessary. The Alien movie franchise holds a special place in my…um, heart? Psyche? Nightmare cellar? Something like that.

I was, you see, a huge fan of Star Wars. I saw the original in the theater on opening night when I was eleven, and it blew me away. For years after, I was absolutely obsessed with all things Star Wars.

So it came to pass that when Alien was released, my parents, thinking oh, it’s a science fiction movie about space, he likes science fiction movies about space,” took me to see it. I must’ve been…I don’t remember. Thirteen, maybe?

I had nightmares about the alien in Alien for the next thirty years. No exaggeration. This is, in fact, why my wife suggested that I make a xenomorph facehugger sex toy; she loves pushing my buttons so.

You can imagine, then, what a disappointment Prometheus and Alien: Covenant were. What all the movies after Aliens were, to be fair.

I went to see Alien: Romulus with my Talespinner, for I am not so foolish as to see an Alien movie by myself lest I have nightmares for another thirty years. My expectations were, to be polite, tempered by the catastrophes that were the prequels, but I came away generally favorably impressed.

So, without further ado:

I don’t recall this exact image in the movie, but my, it gives me ideas. Where is the tail, I wonder? I bet I can make something like this…

First, the spoiler-free overview:

Alien: Romulus is, thankfully, not Alien: Covenant.

Is it worth watching? Yes. Yes, it is. It a solid, if uninspired (more on that later), addition to the franchise. It’s flawed, and it’s unlikely to become a classic the way the first two movies did, but it is a good, entertaining movie.

This movie understands what an Alien movie is supposed to be. It gets right what the prequels and the movies after Aliens get wrong.

And it’s gorgeous. The cinematography is just…wow. You ever watch one of those movies where you can hit Pause on any frame and what you see on the screen looks like a work of art? That’s Alien: Romulus.

Acid blood in zero G is a big, big problem…

The casting is very well done. Special shout-out to David Jonsson as “Andy,” the scrapped-and-salvaged artificial person (not a spoiler, we learn that near the beginning of the movie):

He plays a challenging role part pitch-perfect, and holds his own against Lance Hendrickson’s Bishop in Aliens.

And before you ask, yes, it did give me nightmares, which Prometheus and Alien: Covenant did not. So mission accomplished, I suppose?

Now, the critique (and the spoilers).

Continue reading →

With every job when it’s complete, there is a sense of bitter-sweet

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After almost three years of effort, I finally had my last dental appointment yesterday. In honor of the journey, my dentist wore bunny ears during that last session.

It started with a failed crown. That in itself shouldn’t have turned into a three-year nightmare, but gather ’round, Gentle Readers, for a harrowing tale to send chills down the spines of the most manly of men.

The crown was old; I got it in 1998 or 1999. Apparently these things don’t last forever (who knew?); they’re usually rated for fifteen years and this one lasted 25, so yay for that, I guess?

Anyway, I took the broken crown to my dentist, who looked at it, peered into my mouth, probed around a bit, said “hmm” a lot, then said something you never want to hear from a healthcare professional:

“We don’t deal with this kind of situation here. You’ll need to go somewhere else.”

Now, we’re talking about what ought to be, in the scheme of things, a rather simple and straightforward procedure (ha ha ha as if, just you wait), not the sort of medical condition where a doctor gets to name a new disease, so I found this…peculiar. But, referral in hand, I made an appointment with a new dentist.

They too looked at the broken crown, poked around for a bit, said “hmm” a lot, took a whole bunch of X-rays, said “hmm” some more, took a different kind of X-ray, said “hmm,” and then my dentist called another dentist over, who looked at all the X-rays, said “hmm,” then said “I’m going to call someone else to have a look at this.”

That is when I knew, Gentle Reader, that Something Was Up.

The new guy showed up, looked at the X-rays, said “hmm” several times, and then said “okay, so, Mr. Veaux, you see…”

The problem was not the crown that failed, but the one next to it. I’d had a root canal in…goodness. Um, 1996, maybe? Somewhere thereabouts.

In this world, there are people who take pride in their work, people for whom it’s not just the money but the satisfaction of a job well done. The guy who did that root canal…wasn’t that sort of person.

The X-ray showed a small void, a gap between the crown on that tooth and the tooth itself.

It also showed a large piece of a broken tool lodged inside the tooth.

And it showed that the dentist had, and as I type these words I did not know this was possible, missed one of the tooth roots completely, which had, of course, become infected.

They had a meeting, in which they discussed whether they wanted to re-do the root canal by taking off the existing crown, drilling through the existing crown, or (and yes, this actually came up as a possibility) drilling through the bottom of my jaw into the tooth, which is apparently a procedure that, God help them, some people actually undergo.

Then my mom was diagnosed with cancer, so both my sister and I started flying back and forth between home and Florida to help my dad care for her.Which pretty much scuttled most of my ability to plan multiple dental visits.

My mom died after a thirteen-month battle, the last few months of which were just awful beyond belief.

When I returned once more unto the breach of this dental misadventure, I had The Talk™ with my dentist, and with the dentist called in to re-do the root canal. The Talk™ looks like this:

Just so you know, I am highly resistant to local anesthetics. It’s a genetic trait, I inherited it from my mom. It is much harder than you think to get me numb, and it takes a long time, and it wears off quickly. So, be warned.

I always tell them. They never listen at first. “Oh, don’t worry, I can get you numb,” each new dentist says, “it won’t be a problem.”

Narrator: “It was a problem.”

The guy they called in to handle the root canal took nearly an hour, and seven ampules of lidocaine(!!), before he declared himself ready.

He went in through the existing crown, which was something of an ordeal involving several fascinating smells, including one I could almost swear smelled like smoke, and rather a lot more “hmm” and “that’s interesting” and “I wonder if…” than I am, generally speaking, entirely comfortable with from someone who is placing medical instruments in any part of my body.

Apparently, from what I gather, the tooth had an extra root, which I didn’t even know was a thing that could happen, and that explains why the previous guy back in the 90s missed it but doesn’t explain why he left a broken bit of tool inside the root canal (they didn’t give me a copy of the X-ray, more’s the pity, because it’s freaky and I’d love to horrify you, Gentle Reader, with it).

After rather a lot of work, he pronounced himself satisfied, and I was back on track, only this time with replacing two crowns rather than one.

I be-bopped off to Springfield to spend time with my Talespinner, then returned to tilt once more at the windmill, when my dentist took a whole new set of X-rays on account of, you know, I’d been away for thirteen months helping care for my mom, and decided that a third crown, also from the mid 90s or somewhere thereabout, was separating from the tooth and thus was well past its use-by date.

I will spare you the details of the last seven months, even though Fate did not spare me, because unlike Fate I have a conscience. Suffice to say that seven months, a detached temporary crown, and three thousand dollar in out-of-pocket expenses later, I have been given a clean bill of health, and my dentist sent me off from yesterday’s appointment with a celebratory pair of ears of his own.

Which I, and the entire rest of the office, found charming.

Now the days spread before me, my calendar has no dental appointments on it, and I breathe in and say to myself, “is this what normal feels like?”

A year ago today

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Hard to believe it’s been a year. These past twelve months have been a wild ride. Bits of it have been extremely good, bits (like the death of my mother) extremely bad, but there’s been nothing average anywhere in this year.

Today marks the one-year anniversary of something very, very good.

It began, as these things often do, more than a year ago. A beginning is a very delicate time, I hear, and so it was much more than a year ago that I first talked to her about beta testing some new prototype sex toys.

I don’t exactly remember how we first noticed each other. I know where—it was on Quora—and I vaguely remember seeing her around, thinking she struck me as a good writer and a generally positive person. She said something in passing about trsting sex toys, I had some prototypes, I was looking for beta testers, so I slid into her DMs with something like “I hope you’ll forgive the intrusion, but would you be interested in trying something out?”

We started talking after. She invited me to a pen and paper role-playing game. I grew to appreciate her skill at wordsmithing, of the pragmatic and erotic sort. She called me her Toymaker. I called her my Talespinner.

A friend of hers observed that the Talespinner and the Toymaker sounds like a YA novel. We were both like “You know…”

I said “Do you wanna?” She said “Sure!”

Time went on. I invited her to accompany me to Barcelona with the rest of the poly network. She said yes.

And so, a year ago, I got on a plane to Springfield.

She showed me around her town: a giant alien xenomorph made of scrap iron.

Chrome steel bunnies and a frog.

And a lovely little rum bar, where I confessed I would very much like to kiss her. “Hold that thought!” she said.

She took me to a rushing fountain, where we shared our first kiss, one year ago today.

We went to Barcelona, where she met the rest of the polyfam. Later, she would tell me she was amazed by how warm and welcoming they were—no hesitation, no reservation.

I am so deeply grateful to have surrounded myself with people I love who love me, who have no weirdness, no animosity toward one another. It’s deeply relaxing and wonderful.

The book still marches on. We meet over videoconference to work on it when we aren’t together. We are, as I write this, just over 93,000 words in, which in any other book would mean we’re nearly done, but this thing is a monster—the most complex novel I’ve ever been part of. We’re targeting 160,000 words.

We’re calling it Spin, and it’s grown into something that is definitely not a YA novel, something dark and brooding, something complex and ambitious. Fitting, I think, because our relationship is turning out to be something more than I expected as well.

And she still helps me beta-test new prototypes.

I am profoundly blessed.

Setting Math in Adobe Illustrator: The Impossible Dream

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A while back, I posted on social media:

I did not suspect, Gentle Reader, just how many people would have questions about this, nor how many of them there would be. Especially over on Quora, where it raised quite an interesting discussion.

So, in the interests of elaborating, so that I can refer people to this entry:

The equation is real. It’s the Higgs field Lagrangian, the equation that describes how the Higgs gives mass to massive particles. (On a side note, the Higgs field is only a small part of the inertial mass of everyday objects; more than 90% of the mass of things in our normal world comes not from the Higgs, but from the binding energy in the particles that make up those things).

I needed the Higgs Lagrangian for a porn novel Eunice and I are planning but haven’t yet started working on. Specifically, I’m noodling about with an image for that novel, and I needed the Higgs Lagrangian in Adobe Illustrator.

This is the image I’m noodling about with. Everything here, including the face, is vector, built entirely in Illustrator, not raster.

If you look at the largest gold band, that’s the Higgs Lagrangian.

I realize that Illustrator is not in fact an appropriate tool for typesetting math. The proper tool for this is LaTeX; indeed, it’s what LaTeX was created for. And I did in fact originally create the equation in LaTeX, and exported it to SVG to place in Illustrator.

Thereupon I found a problem.

I want to set the equation on a curve. And it is indeed possible to set an image like a PDF or SVG placed into Illustrator on a curve.

But Illustrator treats placed images as, well images, which means if you set them along a curve, it will distort them.

Here’s what I mean. On the top, the Higgs Lagrangian set as type in Illustrator, which did in fact take me about two hours to do; below that, exported from LaTeX; and below that, exported from LaTeX and placed on a curve.

And honestly that would simply not do.

So I set it as type in Illustrator. That required, among other things, installing a typesetting font on my computer to use in Illustrator (New Computer Modern, available here, just in case any other Illustrator users should run into a problem typesetting math equations in Illustrator and stumble across this post in the future), and frequent trips to the Wikipedia list of mathematical symbols here to copy-paste characters into Illustrator in New Computer Modern Math Regular).

I did all this because getting the equation set as type in Illustrator meant I could use Illustrator’s type on a path tool to curve the type while perfectly preserving the shape of each letter.

This also meant it would print smoothly as vectors. I could bend the type in a different graphics program, but any raster (pixel) program would break the letters up into pixels, meaning they look slightly fuzzy on press.

Illustrator’s math typesetting is, bluntly, nonexistent. Which honestly surprises me. I’ve used Illustrator since 1988 and the fact it doesn’t have any typesetting library for math still surprises me. They could, for instance, easily license, oh, I don’t know, something like LaTeX…but I digress.

You can do superscripts and subscripts, but it treats them as text in a line, like X2adoesn’t work correctly on superscripts and subscripts that have to be aligned one right under the other. For that, I had to type the superscript, type the subscript, and set the superscript’s tracking to -1000 to scoot it over the subscript. Big pain in the ass.

The whole equation took a ton of ugly hackery like that (and if you’re reading this because it’s six years after I wrote it and you’re searching for a way to set math in Illustrator, you’re welcome, and also, cry havoc, you mad bastard).

Anyway, I got it done, if not perfectly than at least acceptably, but my god, those are hours of my life I’ll never have back.

There and Around and Back Again

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I am not, it must be said, the sort of person who gets to the airport early.

I am the sort of person who rolls up to the gate just as they start boarding, then says “hmm, I’m in Boarding Group 8, that means I have time to dash down the hallway to grab a bite to eat.” (I’m serious. I’ve done this. My wife hates it.)

And so it came to pass that I woke on the morning of my recent trip to Springfield, started packing, and then saw a message from the airline: they’d canceled my flight and put me on another, scheduled to depart an hour and a half earlier.

Folks, if you ever see the distant gray not-a-moon shape of the Death Star in a clear blue sky over your home town, panic will not do to you what it did to me when I saw that text.

I grabbed whatever was close to hand and shoved it frantically into the suitcase: a couple pairs of pants, some shirts, maybe some socks I think? (I’d already packed the important stuff, the sex toy prototypes, the night before; I’m not a complete barbarian.)

I will spare you the harrowing and wildly improbable roller-coaster tale of what happened next—arriving just in time to discover that flight had also been canceled, flying standby on yet another—and skip ahead to the part where I arrive, exhausted but grateful, a couple hours earlier than I would have had things gone to plan. Suffice to say I eventually arrived in Springfield, through the magic of flight turned into something tawdry and uncomfortable.

I flew Airbus, so the flight was uneventful—nothing fell off, split open, or went “Sproing!”

My Talespinner and another of her lovers I hadn’t met yet greeted me at the airport. He turned out to be a lovely chap, and we immediately got on like two people who have a lover in common and are both dedicated to making her life as fun and interesting as possible. We got back to her place, yadda yadda yadda, a few days later we were off to the future city of Kanzit to do some sanity checking for a novel.

We are, you see, my Talespinner and I, spinning a tale. It’s a far-future, post-Collapse, magical realism novel about a young spinner named Aiyah and a brilliant but eccentric master tinker named Lazlo who specializes in making windup toys, who live not far apart from each other in the future Dominionate, a neo-Calvinist theocratic empire erected upon a horrifying slave society that has built their entire social foundation atop a legal and moral edifice of systemic subjugation of women.

In the novel, Aiyah takes a journey from her small snug cottage in the tiny village Half-Circle Cothold to the big, bustling city of Kanzit, the capital of the Dominionate. Along the way, she has many adventures, she meets all kinds of people, she makes new friends, she flees cross-country from the Inquisition without food or supplies, and she is forced to confront some uncomfortable moral truths about the horror that sits at the base of her society. Whee!

There’s a particular part of her flight that has some complicated timing and a lot of moving pieces, and even with Google Maps we weren’t certain about how the timing would work, so when my Talespinner was just like “fukkit, I’m gonna trace Aiyah’s path and see” I was like “you son of a bitch, I’m in” and that, rather than kinky group sex, was actually the purpose of the trip.

We rose and bundled into the car, my Talespinner, her lover, and I, to follow a path that does not yet exist through towns that aren’t there in the path of a woman who isn’t real, fleeing from an inquisitor who is both a proxy for the society we’re holding up as a mirror to our own and also far more complex than he lets on at first, to the complaints of her cats, who seemed to know something was up.

I’d say we traveled over hill and through vale, but that would be a lie. Much of that part of Missouri is as flat as workers’ real earnings since Ronald Reagan and as interesting as soggy gerbil bedding, so I will jump ahead once more to our arrival in Half-Circle Cothold, from which our protagonist set forth.

It’s not much now, but in two thousand years, it will still be…not much.

Fortified by convenience-store pizza and candy bars after a drive that would’ve been rather boring if not for the conversation and the company, we set out on foot across what will, in two thousand years and the deaths of billions of people, become a sleepy village on the water’s edge. (Neither geologic upheaval nor global change in temperature are likely to erase the spot; it’s safe against even six meters of sea level rise, which is beyond the most pessimistic projections.)

Onward we went, traveling not through the realm of the real but the realm of what Terry Pratchett calls ‘L-space,’ that place where untold stories await the person who will write them, discussing as we did everything from glassblowing to the economics of guild systems, observing how even today towns in rural America tend to be spaced about the distance a person on horseback can ride in a day.

Accommodations that night were to be in an America’s Best [sic] Value Inn. That failed to work out as planned, because it seems that while America’s Best [sic] Value Inns are fairly solid on the concept of taking a reservation, they are a bit less clear on what it means to keep a reservation.

Considerably frustrated with no room at the end, we at last located another hotel thirty minutes away, which turned out to be, Gentle Reader, the third worst hotel I’ve ever stayed in, and given that rodents and bullet holes figure prominently in the story of the first and second, believe me when I say that’s saying something.

After dinner, we settled in for more kinky group sex. Yadda yadda yadda, the next day found us at the seat of the Dominionate, or what will be in thousands of years. Right now, it’s home to a genuine Caravaggio, which truly was extraordinary, though I didn’t realize St. John the Baptist was quite so…buff.

All good things must end, and so we tore ourselves from the contemplative glower of Buff John the Baptist to follow the path of a different character, our villain rather than our protagonist, back to Springfield.

More group sex, followed by testing of xenomorph facehugger sex toys…

…somewhat interrupted by certain cats who insisted on photobombing the shenanigans…

…and yadda yadda, yadda, the next thing you know, we’re at a FedEx Office printing out pics from the trip for our very first Murder Wall™. (At least my very first Murder Wall™, I don’t actually know that my Talespinner has never made one).

I thought there would be more cackling involved in making a Murder Wall. I didn’t realize it’s so…prosaic. Hollywood never shows the obsessive conspiracy nutter dropping pins, or cutting the yarn too short.

Eventually, as time must do, the moment to leave came. It came inconveniently, at 3:30AM, since this entire adventure had been predicated on the cheapest airline tickets possible and that meant flying out at 5AM, but we do what we must because we can.

When my Talespinner’s cat figured out I was leaving, he became inconsolable in that way kittens who have taken a shine to you sometimes do.

So I hardened my heart, said my goodbyes, and disappeared into the night, leaving, or so I am told, rather a lot of my clothes scattered about her bedroom, because who can really pack at that hour of the morning?

Now, days later, we are still girding our loins for The Rewritening.

A Trip to the Dominionate

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I’m typing this in Springfield, Missouri, where I’ve just returned from visiting several places that do not yet exist, and won’t exist for nearly two thousand years.

Lemme back up a bit.

My Talespinner and I are writing a novel. Specifically, we’re writing a rather chonky (~160,000 word) far-future, post-Collapse magical realism literary novel called Spin, set in the Dominionate, a sort of quasi-Catholic/Calvinist theocracy that extends through much of the center of what is now the United States.

We are, as I write this, about 90,000 words in, and we were having difficulty nailing down a crucial bit of timing, when our protagonist is forced by an encounter with the Inquisition to head off-road through what is now rural Missouri, trying to reach the city of Kanzit, the capital of the Dominionate and home to a character she hopes can save her.

We’ve looked at maps and Google Earth, measured distances, made calculations, and finally my Talespinner was like “You know what? Fuggit. Ima follow her path and see how long it would take.”

About this time, I received a letter from Oregon Revenue, informing me I’d made an error in my 2022 state income tax (cue heart attack)…and that I’d overpaid by $208 (whew!). So I found a plane ticket for $206, and said “You know what, Ima go with you.”

We started following the footsteps of our protagonist from modern-day Stockton State Park, a park on a small peninsula jutting into Stockton Lake.

In two thousand years, after the Great Collapse, sea level rise, and two smaller collapses, this will become the small village of Half-Circle Cothold, where our protagonist Aiyah Spinner was born and raised.

On this spot, right here, will be a church and Mother’s Cloister two millennia from now. From this very spot, Aiyah will begin her journey toward Kanzit, built on what was once Kansas City, a journey that will absolutely not go as she expects.

From here, her plan will be to cross the bridge into Bridgegate, heading toward Brightchurch and from there, Kanzit itself, following the ancient roads still maintained and used after all these years.

Ah, Brightchurch.

If Kanzit is the head of the Dominionate, Brightchurch is its heart, a walled city that hosts Brightchurch Cathedral, the Temple of a Thousand Lights, one of the wonders of the future world, destination of an endless river of pilgrims. Brightchurch Cathedral, its windows shining like God’s grace itself every moment of every day and night, thanks to thousands of oil lamps fed from a cunning engineering marvel that distributes oil through a vast system of tubes and pipes, driven by pumps powered by human and animal muscle, tended by an army of novices, awe-inspiring beyond imagination. (The idea for Brightchurch Cathedral came from a pen and paper role-playing game I ran for a time a few years back, expanded and incorporated into the world of the Dominionate.)

Brightchurch Cathedral will one day stand on this spot, right here, in present-day Nevada, Missouri.

(Honestly, I would never for a moment want to live in the Dominionate, but I nevertheless wish I could see Brightchurch Cathedral. It’s truly a magnificent, incomprehensibly beautiful place.)

Aiyah, for various reasons, never reaches Brightchurch, but instead is forced to flee overland, through what is now farmland but will be, in the age of the Dominionate, forest. We followed her path, and I’m so glad we did, because we found all kinds of treasures along the way.

Like this tiny graveyard, which isn’t on any map or on Google Maps, but lies directly in her path and some remnant of which may still exist in the time the novel is set.

As for Kanzit, while it’s much reduced and sees countless changes, some of its buildings still exist, lovingly maintained over countless years.

The administrative center of the Church and, by extension of all the Dominionate lives in what is now the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art, suited by both design and location to be repurposed to the head of the theocratic government. All the various aspects of the Church except the Inquisition are administered from here.

So let’s talk about the Dominionate.

When this novel publishes, I think people will compare it to The Handmaid’s Tale. The two stories have some superficial resemblances: social collapse, a theocracy carved out of what was once the United States, falling fertility that leads to sexual subjugation of women.

But that’s where the similarities end.

Margaret Atwood has said she explicitly modeled the government and culture of Gilead on the Islamic Revolution, a cautionary tale about what might happen in a society where reactionary religious zealotry comes to power.

But when I read The Handmaid’s Tale, I came away from the story with a sense that Gilead is fundamentally unstable. On a very deep level, the society doesn’t really work for anyone. Everyone is miserable—even the people on the top of the hierarchy. Offred, certainly, and all the other Handmaids…but even the Commander comes across as fundamentally unhappy. You really can’t point to anyone in Atwood’s story and say “yeah, those folks have a pretty good life, they seem happy and self-actualized.”

Which is, I think, part of the point she’s making.

The thing that makes Spin so horrifying, so deeply disturbing, is that the Dominionate works. The society of the Dominionate has long-term stability, peace, and prosperity. Many people—most people, really—are happy. Or if not happy, at least content. There’s little violence or crime. That sets Spin in sharp contrast to The Handmaid’s Tale (well, that and the fact Spin incorporates elements of magic, and a vastly different story).

Technology in the Dominionate is limited—the thing about the modern world is that we’ve largely stripped the earth of natural resources available to anyone without a post-industrial level of technology (there are no more surface deposits of iron, copper, tin, or coal, no oil available without modern drilling techniques, and without vast and available fuel, you might be able to “mine” landfills or junkyards for metals but you will have a very difficult time indeed smelting modern steels into things you can use)—but our knowledge remains. Even without modern levels of technology, most people still have a reasonably high standard of living.

But all of it—their standard of living, their society, their peace and prosperity—rests on a foundation of subjugation of (some) women. There’s no escaping it. They hide it away, in Mother’s Cloisters administered by the Church, and it’s been normalized for so long that everyone, even the people most oppressed, accept it as natural and necessary.

That is, I believe, way more horrifying than the society of Gilead, a society that does not have peace and prosperity, a society that seems unlikely to endure for two hundred years, or honestly even for twenty.

And more horrifying still, you can make a strong argument that the oppression and subjugation of the Dominionate is necessary. Without it, humanity will likely cease to be. Squaring that circle—trying to reconcile the idea that humanity has value with the horrific bedrock strata of sexual slavery on which not just this particular society but humanity’s future rests—is the core of the novel.

Spin is by far the most challenging, most ambitious writing project I’ve ever been part of. My Talespinner and I didn’t set out to write it this way. We’d originally imagined an 80,000-word young adult novel, something far more lighthearted. About 25,000 words in, we realized that story didn’t actually worked, tore it up, sat down, re-thought the story we wanted to tell, and came up with a detailed 27-page outline for something much, much different…and much, much darker.

I am absolutely thrilled my Talespinner and I took the opportunity to make this trip, following a character’s journey two thousand years from now. Everything we saw along the way will inform the novel. We have quite a lot of rewriting to do, particularly in the first third of the book, which will be far richer and more vibrant because we did this crazy thing.

I’m also profoundly grateful that one of my Talespinner’s other lovers was able to accompany us. His presence made the trip better, but even more, as we took copious notes—I still haven’t transcribed them into the outline yet—he offered ideas and suggestions that will make the novel so much better.