Since returning from Reykjavik, my body’s been stuck in this thing where I wake up at 4:30 AM, can’t get back to sleep, haul myself out of bed, and then by 9 PM I’m crashing.
But hey, I did get some amazing photos, even if the trip wrecked my sleep schedule.
While I hate this with every fiber of my being—I am firmly of the opinion that if I’m up at 4:30 in the morning it should be because I’m still up, not because I’m getting up—I do have to admit it’s done wonders for my productivity.
This morning, before noon, I worked on a novel, updated my Patreon, finalized a new page on my BDSM site, wrote a blog post for More Than Two, put up a new essay on Xeromag, reset all the FTP passwords on my web server (thanks to a security issue at my webhosting provider…man, this has been a rough week in the infosec world), finished unpacking from Reykjavik, cleaned the tub, and did a load of laundry.
So, from the top:
A short while ago I got a rather snarky email from my BDSM for Nice Guys page.
Which, I mean, wow. “Barely any submissive males”? Oh, my sweet summer child.
Still, this person made a good point that there aren’t a ton of BDSM guides aimed at women out there. I didn’t write one because I’m not a woman; I’m not qualified to write such a thing.
Fortunately, I know people who are, and Dr. Jenny Hale graciously volunteered to step up and fill that space.
And so, the first new page on my BDSM site in quite a long while is now live:
I also added a new page to my Essays section on Xeromag. Most people think of themselves as basically good. Most people are wrong. People tend to get their ethics from the ambient morality around them, and abide by them so long as doing so doesn’t cost them anything, so in their local frame of reference they generally are pleased to consider themselves “good people.” However, step outside the local ethical frame and you see that ethics are more Einsteinian than Newtonian.
Over on the More Than Two blog (and its companion Substack), I published an essay about the skills and traits that make for vibrant, strong relationships:
And finally, I apparently now have a YouTube channel, upon which I just put a new video on the subject of how writers find the drive to finish writing books. (Spoiler: We don’t. The book gives us no peace until we finish it.)
I’ve had a Patreon for years, but have for most of that time done very little with it. I’m now making a point of updating it quite frequently, with behind-the-scenes peek at creative projects, original photography, and excerpts from books I’m working on. You can join for free, and see all my content for just a dollar a month!
While I was in Reykjavik, Iceland last week with the extended polycule, I am pleased to report that we were able to do a beta test of the Project Ladybug prototype…which succeeded beyond our most optimistic hopes.
Monster sex is a huge fetish, with dozens of companies producing endless variations on monster and mythological creature dildos, but my Talespinnrer and I have noticed a shocking, dare I say even dismaying, lack of monster-sex toys of the opposite sort: monsters they prey not on people with innies, but those with outies. Where are the toys that parasitize women, living within them, driving them into frenzies of need, forcing them to copulate endlessly with men, giving those men pleasure beyond imagining in order to steal their precious bodily fluids whilst denying the host any hope of satiation? This will not stand!
This is exactly the void Project Ladybug was designed to fill.
So it came to pass that after making an alginate cast of the inside of my Talespinner’s vagina, 3D scanning the cast, and bringing it into a 3D modeling program, as extensively documented in the links above (not safe for work, natch), I finally made the mold for the alien parasite, a super-soft silicone sleeve designed to fit precisely the exact shape of my Talespinner’s ladybits.
Fun fact: the project became known as Project Ladybug when my smartphone autocorrect keps changing “ladybits” to “ladybug.”
The Ladybug is a pouch of soft silicone, about a millimeter thick, that conforms to her insides and is ridged for his pleasure. It features two internal tentacles that caress the head of the man making use of the host, and as it completely covers her inner bits, it makes sure the host can feel nothing but a vague sense of pressure, but no pleasure.
Why? To keep the host in a state of extended need without relief, so as to make the host copulate fiercely with whatever male subjects happen to be nearby, of course, so that the parasite can feed.
I 3D printed the mold, which took over a day on my old and rather slow 3D printer.
The supports for the inner part of the mold ended up looking rather organic, like alien hands sprouting from the print bed to hold it warmly in a tender embrace.
Partly assembled (half the mold is not shown here), you can get a sense of how large it is and how thick it is.
Pouring the silicone turned out to be a huge hassle, because the inner clearances are so fine and there are so many undercuts that allow for bubbles to form that it actually took more than an hour to cast. I ended up doing the casting in two steps because the silicone started curing in the pot.
So it was with no small measure of nervousness, Gentle Reader, that I cracked the mold open, expecting to find a mess. Instead, the casting turned out flawless.
You can see the ridges inside the parasite, designed to offer greater stimulation for the male subject. When you look at it head on down the opening, you can also see the inner tentacles.
So enough of that, how does it work?
That’s the question we set out to answer in Reykjavik. It turns out the answer is: Rather brilliantly!
Inserting and properly seating the Ladybug proved more difficult than we’d anticipated. It needs to be pressed completely into the host, and we ultimately ended up using a pair of chopsticks for that; fingers alone didn’t really do it.
For the final version, I’ll likely design a tool for the…um, insertion.
Once in place (a process that was, by all accounts, quite pleasant for the host), it stayed put nicely.
To create the best possible simulation of the parasite experience, one that most closely replicated the aphrodisiacs the parasite pumps into the host, we both took bremelanotide (PT-141), a potent aphrodisiac that works like gangbusters on both of us, before we began the experiment.
Sex with the host was…magnificent. The final version will need larger internal tentacles, but the ridges? *chef’s kiss* The parasite absolutely, without question, amplifies the pleasure experienced by male subjects. The ridges are quite soft, and absolutely delightful on the head of the subject’s penis. What’s more, I could remain still within her and each twitch and clench, however slight, felt like a massage on the most sensitive parts of my shaft. Truly delightful.
The host, on the other hand, reported an unbearably frustrating experience, often while on the verge of tears. The host feels nothing of the subject’s pleasure. Indeed, the host feels nothing but a slight sense of pressure, even while the subject is experiencing crashing waves of overwhelming ecstasy.
There are a few minor changes I plan to make for the version 1.0 parasite. The interior tentacles need to be larger, to better stimulate the subject to heights of ecstasy. The outside portion of the parasite will be bigger, to cover the host’s clit and prevent even accidental stimulation. I may make it slightly thicker, and I plan some changes to the mold to make casting easier.
But overall, the effect is exactly what my Talespinner and I had hoped for, and I hope it opens new avenues of mad science to explore.
Alas, this is unlikely to be a sex toy I can produce in any quantity. It turns out there’s enormous variability in the human vagina (there is, of course, a PubMed article on the subject), so making these literally requires 3D scanning a casting of every individual user’s bits. I’d hoped I could maybe make 3-4 standard sizes, but no.
A lot of folks who follow this blog know that I’m a writer, activist, photographer, amateur infosec researcher, traveller, and general all-around geek, among other things.
But did you know I have a YouTube channel?
Yeah, surprised me, too. Apparently I have a YouTube channel now. I talk about all sorts of stuff what bugs me, like this one, where I muse that male influencers are grifters who deliberately give terrible advice:
I didn’t set out to have a YouTube channel, it just sorta happened. Anyway, if this kind of thing interests you, check it out!
I have stories in a new erotica anthology coming out in August. If you’re a fan of weird, complex supernatural erotica way beyond the conventional ghosts/vampires.
This book contains thirteen stories ranging in size from short stories to full-on novellas, all of them very spicy, all of them touching in some way on the supernatural.
In these pages you’ll find fables that tell a new creation myth, stories of small and heartless gods, sentient storms, living shadows, an archaeologist possessed by a Hittite priestess, and so much more! I think this is one of the best, most varied, most diverse collections of erotica you’ll ever find.
Here’s a taste:
She dried with one of the fluffy towels. More shadows moved overhead, chasing each other down the wall. She froze, a slightly puzzled frown on her face. With the blinds all shut, the only light in the room came from the tiny indirect lights in the ceiling, so how could the shadows move? “Henry?” she called. “Did you light a fire or something?”
“What? No.” His voice filtered through the rice paper screen, oddly distant. “What are you talking about?”
“I saw…” Light glowed on eggshell white walls and unremarkable beige blinds, steady and unwavering. She shook her head. “Nothing.” She dressed again in the same clothes she’d worn before, except her bra: button-up satiny blouse in white, dark lace panties, dark tailored skirt. Dressed once more, she found Henry sprawled on his back in the middle of the bed, still fully clothed save for his shoes. She paused, self-conscious at his expression. “What?”
“Nothing. I’m…I guess I’m hoping this whatever-it-is works.” He cocked his head. “Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“I don’t know, like voices or something.”
“We’re in a hotel.” Exasperation tinged her voice.
“Yes, I know we’re in a hotel,” he said. His cadence and rhythm fell smoothly into the groove, just starting the long downhill slide into an argument. “I’m just saying—” He stopped. “There it is again.”
“What? I don’t hear—”
A soft, feminine chuckle came to her, right behind her. She spun, half-expecting to see some member of the hotel staff had somehow crept in while she wasn’t looking.
Nothing.
“Huh, that’s weird,” she said as she turned in slow motion back toward Henry. “I thought I heard…” Her body resisted her, like the air itself had turned to molasses around her. Shadows danced across the walls. “I could have sworn—”
She heard it again, the feminine laugh, low and throaty, right beside her. The spell shattered, She jumped and spun. Nothing but empty air behind her. “What’s going on?”
The light dimmed. A tremulous wavering glow wreathed the walls. She raced for the door, barely aware as she did of the look of astonishment on Henry’s face. A fat spark jumped when her finger brushed the knob. She flung open the door into yawning, gaping blackness. No hallway outside the door, no floor beneath, just an unfathomable expanse of nothingness between her and thousands of distant stars glittering in the velvety black of interstellar space.
She slammed the door shut. “There’s…that isn’t possible!” she panted. “Did—you did see that, right?”
Henry stayed frozen like an insect in amber, jaw slack with surprise. “The champagne!” Lisa cried. “It must be—they must have put something in the champagne!”
“Something like what?” Henry’s voice, thin and reedy, coming to her across some endless distance.
“I don’t know! A drug! Like a hallucinogen, or ecstasy, something, how would I know?”
A woman’s giggle, behind her, very near. She could almost feel warm breath on her neck. A long slow wave of goosebumps ran shivering down her body. The hairs on the back of her neck stood up. Hello! the voice said again, not from behind her now but somewhere inside her, a second stream of consciousness competing with her own. Don’t fight me. Faint trace of an accent she couldn’t place.
“I don’t—what’s—” A sudden dizzying sense of vertigo swept over her, like she was falling without falling. She flung her arms in front of her. They moved in glacial slow motion, coasting to a stop halfway on their journey.
I won’t hurt you. The giggle came again. Though he might.
Her body froze, like one of those dreams where she lay trapped within herself in the middle of the night, mind swirling with nameless dread. She tried to scream, tried to flee. Her fingers twitched. Then with a sudden wrench, her body was torn away from her, leaving her tumbling into some still place within, a rider behind her own eyes.
Her body came to life, moving on its own toward the bed, her hips swaying, her gate strangely fluid, graceful but unfamiliar. “Hello, my love.” The words came from her but did not belong to her, colored by that faint, undefinable accent.
Henry sat up on the bed with a smile on his face, a smile she’d never seen there before. He raised his hands in front of his eyes, turning them this way and that, flexing his fingers. “Oh, I like this one.”
Lisa watched in powerless dread as she, or her body, knelt on the bed, piloted by someone else. The soft comforter yielded beneath her knees. A long, slow flush burned from her face down her body, setting her skin tingling in its wake. Her nipples hardened. She felt suddenly, intrusively aware of a trembling need that fluttered between her legs. “This one is surrendering already,” she heard herself say. “Come and see!”
He crawled across the bed toward her, her husband of all these years, wearing an expression she was certain had never before visited his face. She tried to flinch, tried to pull away, but her body no longer obeyed her commands. I must be dreaming! she thought.
You’re not dreaming, that other voice, that other thought, answered.
Henry seized her blouse. Fabric ripped as he tore it open, exposing her to his gaze, looking at her, really looking at her, in a way he hadn’t in years, his eyes intent and hungry. She arched her back. Her hands crept up her body on their own, cupping her breasts as though presenting them to him. “Come, my love,” she purred. “Make me yours once more.”
He leaned forward in aching slow motion, studying her with glittering eyes, wearing a grin nothing like Henry’s. Her breath caught. When was the last time Henry had looked at her so covetously, drinking in her form with such careful attention?
So it came to pass last month that I boarded a miraculous machine that can fly through the air, intending to spend a few weeks with my Talespinner working on the fifth draft of our novel Spin in seclusion.
Life, as they say, is what happens when you make other plans. Our plans did not account for hail, floods, and other disasters, more fule us.
It was a simple plan, I thought. A good plan. A plan that inspired confidence. I was to fly to Springfield, something I hadn’t done in almost exactly a year thanks to a certain orange buffoon’s ridiculous war of choice on Iran that led to airline prices hitting the stratosphere, but when a rare opportunity wandered by my Google alerts for a round-trip ticket for only $140, I lept upon it, and off I did go.
When the day arrived, I stumbled to the train station at an awkward hour—that $140 flight was truly horiffic, with brutal arrival and departure times and an extended layover in Texas. As I waited for the train, an inauspicious pigeon occupied the only available seat at the train stop and would not be moved.
That should’ve been a sign.
Inauspicious pigeon is inauspicious. And also had zero fucks to give.
Nevertheless I persisted on my way, eventually reaching Springfield at an ungodly hour of the morning more or less intact.
For a while, all was quiet. Too quiet.
Well, I don’t mean that literally. There was considerable noise, but of the good sort, mainly screaming and such. My Talespinner is a lot of fun in bed. Like I mean a lot. No, more than that. But I didn’t go out there for sex—okay, I mean, I did, ngl, but not just for sex. There was also the creativity! Namely, our novel Spin, which we’re currently shopping to agents.
What is Spin, you might say? I’m glad you asked. Imagine if Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children had a love child. When we pitch it, we call it a “far-future, post-Collapse magical realism literary novel,” which it is, but that doesn’t tell you what it’s about.
So imagine that thouands of years from now, human civilization has collapsed, the population is far smaller than it was, society is at a pre-industrial level even though they know about everything from atomic physics to metallurgy to genetics because it doesn’t do a whole lot of good to know how to build steam engines if all the surface deposits of iron and coal are gone, fertility has cratered so those few fertile women become Mothers in the care of the Church and have babies until they can’t anymore, and every so often someone comes along with the ability to reweave reality. Unreliable narrators are cool and all, but we wrote an unreliable reality story, where things that happen in chapter 6 can un-happen in chapter 7.
The nation is a quasi-Calvinist theocracy built on a foundation of reproductive slavery, yet most people are generally happy. That’s the thing about The Handmaid’s Tale: you get the sense that everyone in it, from the Handmaids to the aunts to the Commanders and their wives, is miserable. It’s hard to build a stable society if everyone including the leaders are miserable. But ah, if most people are generally happy, and if most people are able to look away from the ugliness at the core of the society, now things are different, right? Right?
The fourth draft weighed in at about 150,000 words, but we got feedback that most agents won’t take a new client with a work over 120,000 words, so that meant 30,000 words had to die.
To accomplish this massacre, we devised a Cunning Plan. We would print it out, go off to the woods, and spend some time going through the book with red pens, editing the old-fashioned way in a place near where the story’s action takes place. (We’d recently followed the path our protagonist takes through the Dominionate, so it seemed fitting.)
Ah HA ha ha ha, oh the things Nature does to the plans of puny humans.
To implement our Cunning Plan, we first needed a printout of the manuscript. That proved harder than we expected. The FedEx Office website is a mess, attempts to create a FedEx account to get a break on the price were for naught, and it turns out that the Fedex site gives you a 404 Not Found error when you click a link to enter business tax ID information. Seriously. It’s amazing these people can run a shipping empire, or even a hot dog stand.
So we ate the cost of doing it without a corporate account and ended up with…
You’ll note it’s in a binder. This was not the original plan. The original plan was a Big Box of Paper. This original plan was also a stupid plan, as my Talespinner’s other boyfriend pointed out. He insisted we get a binder, which, as it turns out, saved our collective asses…more on that in a bit.
We detoured for a time to spend a few days in a remote, secluded cabin where we had nothing but endless kinky sex interspersed with making art from EL wire and body paint, before we set off to rural Missouri for secluded camping and wordsmithing.
We chose our campsite in the rain (which should have been a warning)…
…before setting up camp in the rain (which should have been a warning).
Nevertheless, we soon had a camp…
…and by the next morning, the weather had cleared, and I thought all would be smooth sailing from then on.
Oh, how I was wrong.
The morning sun rose on clear, fair weather, perfect to go down into the word mines and massacre some words.
For a while, all was good. We worked on the book, massacring words with ruthless enthusiasm until red ink spilled down the page in a river of blood and tears.
And then, Gentle Reader…and then…
And then, my Talespinner’s other boyfriend and I went to the store for drinks and candy bars. And oh, the tragedy, the tale of woe that unfolded next, tribulations so ghastly as to make Job quail.
The rain started, large fat drops falling from a sky the color of television tuned to a dead channel, but, like, an old-fashioned CRT television, not a smart TV because kids these days have no understanding of what that means. And oh, did the heavens open, in a re-enactment of the Deluge, but, like, real.
And then we got The Text.
The Text came from my Talespinner, and, well…
Three simple words with an entire universe of badness behind them.
Let me pause a moment, Gentle Reader, to ask you a question. Did you know that gel pens use water-based ink? The reason will become clear in a moment, but let me say that I…did not.
So.
By the time we reach the campsite, it’s a wreck. The tents are flooded, along with all our bedding.
And so did the manuscript. Remember how I said gel pen ink is water-based? Yeah. The rain completely obliterated our edits on a handful of pages—fortunately not all (the manuscript printed this way is three hundred and eighty-something pages long!), but some of them.
We bailed to a hotel. I will spare you the trials of finding a hotel room in the middle of the night in the pouring rain, to hit only the highlights, like the fact that when we finally found one and were checking in, someone stole my Talespinner’s smartphone right off the reception desk, bold as you please.
So after we checked in, my Talespinner and her other boyfriend dealt with the stolen phone, her by filing a police report (which involved trials of her own, because the process demanded that she do part of it by email, but she couldn’t log in to her email because it uses two-factor authentication with the code sent to—wait for it—her phone, because of course it did, because this part of the trip was a fractal series of unfortunate events) while he blew up the phone with texts and messages to make life for the thief as unpleasant as possible.
Meanwhile, I used the hotel hairdryer to painstakingly dry the manuscript.
The hotel itself turned out to be surprisingly nice, all things considered, except the part about “people steal your phone right in front of you.”
We slept (well, I slept; there were in which Shenanigans I was much too tired to participate), followed by the first stroke of good news in a while: my Talespinner’s other boyfriend called her stolen phone and, amazingly, someone answered. It seems the thief, having grown frustrated that he couldn’t unlock it (or perhaps that it kept ringing over and over and over—it turns out on Samsung smartphones you can’t turn off the ringer when you don’t know the passcode!) had stripped off the case and abandoned the phone on the side of the road, where it’d been found by someone who returned it.
So, that done, after a brief delay checking out owing to the fact that I got lost inside the hotel, it was back to the campsite.
The day, as if apologizing for its previous mischief, grew bright and sunny and wonderful, perfect editing weather, but for the fact that cleaning up our campsite took precedence…
…which is how we learned that a massive branch had fallen during the hailstorm and damn near flattened the tent with my Talespinner in it.
So that was a bit unnerving.
We also discovered that in our absence this furry little fucker had chewed his way into our supply tent and ransacked our supplies.
I can’t escape the feeling that we had it coming. In Spin, we put our protagonists through hell, a great deal of which involves being cold and sodden in rural Missouri, facing down miserable weather and wildlife.
I don’t know if there’s an equivalent of Method acting for novelists, but if there’s such a thing as “Method noveling,” we did it.
Okay, so sit back, and ima tell you a story. It’s a story of kink, and depravity, and surprise serendipity.
So. I’m in Florida, helping my wife Joreth get the RV ready for a cross-country trip, during which we plan to do a photo tour of the abandoned amusement parks that litter the American Midwest like so many broken dreams of a bygone era. (We’ll likely do a coffee table photo book sometime in the next couple of years.)
Anyway, the day after I arrived, the local dungeon hosted a party, so your humble scribe and his beautiful wife showed up, of course, for an evening of kink and Killer Klowns from Outer Space.
The dungeon had electronic consent forms to be filled out on an iPad. On the consent form there was a profile, and on the profile there was a place to pick one’s favorite kink from a dropdown list.
Me: “I guarantee my fvorite kink is not on this list.”
Cheerful Woman Behind the Desk: “It cannot possibly be any weirder than this kink I just learned about!”
Whereupon CWBTD pulled out her phone and showed us…
…The Picture.
You know the one. The Picture that broke the Internet. The Picture that, every now and then, undergoes a new wave of virality. The Picture that, I’m told, ended up briefly on the official Sigorney Weaver fan site until a moderator took it down.
There are two things to know about The Picture:
That’s a photo of Joreth;
Wearing a xenomorph hiphugger strapon designed and made by your humble scribe.
In other words, CWBTD was right. My kink isn’t weirder than the thing she’d just discovered, it’s exactly as weird as the thing she’d just discovered.
Anyway, she was thrilled, and asked us to come back in yesterday for a bit of show and tell.
Which we did. The Borg Queen xenomorph parasite has been in storage since Barcelona, but it required surprisingly little repair, and we were soon on our way.
It was marvelous. They let us use the dungeon for a photo shoot!
The bad: I didn’t have my real camera, and we couldn’t lay hands on the Borg mask, so we did the best we could.
The good: There’s a photo night coming up next week, for which we will be better prepared.
The better: We met a lovely couple who were all like “ooh, Borg Queen parasitized by an alien xenomorph? That’s exactly my kink![1] Victimize us, please?”
Innocent victim: Mittyrin (image by author, reproduced by permission)
Fantastic fun, if that’s the sort of thing you consider fun. (Tautalogical cat is tautalogical.)
We drove home beneath the symbol of God’s divine blessing, or, you know, non-traditional relationships, which is almost the same thing, so truly I feel like Divine Providence smailed upon a fantastic evening.
[1] When I first started working on the xenomorph hiphugger, I remember saying “I don’t know what the point is, there are only three people in the world with this taste and I’m dating two of them.”
It’s not necessarily her fault, mind you. And yet, and yet, the sex party blew out my knee, a fact for which Ms. Weaver bears some responsibility.
Lemme back up a bit.
I saw Star Wars (the original, before it was “Episode 4: A New Hope”) at the tender age of 11, when it first came out, and oh. My. God. It blew me away. I’d say I was obsessed with it, but that would be, if anything, understating the single-mindedness with which I obsessed over that movie. I collected all the trading cards (which I no longer have, the awareness of which gives me the same feeling in the pit of my stomach that I get when I think about the fact that I could have bought Bitcoin at $2 a coin but thought, “what’s the point?”), I built a flying model X-Wing (and ended up in the ER when the XActo knife I was using slipped…I still have the scar)…that movie moved into my mind and took up residence like a meth addict in an abandoned single-wide.
This isn’t a post about Star Wars. It’s actually about a sex party. Hang on, I’m getting to that.
So. My parents, who wanted to feed and nourish my interests, heard about this movie called Alien. They, being generally reasonable people who didn’t know the genre of sci-fi horror existed, largely because Alien kinda invented the genre of sci-fi horror, decided, he likes space movies with spaceships and stuff, this is a space movie with spaceships and stuff, he’ll like this movie.”
And so, I trotted into the theater, expecting something like Star Wars and getting…something else.
That movie traumatized me. Like, I had nightmares about the alien in Alien. Literal, actual, wake-up-in-a-cold-sweat nightmares.
For the next thirty-five years.
That alien became the shape of all my fears for decades. And so it came to pass that my wife, who loves pushing my buttons, during the course of a casual, ordinary conversaion on a casual, ordinary day, wouldn’t it be intersting if, given that I was teaching myself to make sex toys, I made an alien facehugger strapon? A…hiphugger, to coin a phrase?
Now, the thing about me is that once I get hold of a project, I don’t let it go until I’ve figured it out. The alien hiphugger moved into the space in my brain hollowed out by the Star Wars prequels (which not only killed my love of the franchise stone dead, but squatted over the corpse and farted in its face), I fired up Blender, and, two years and seven design revisions later, I created…
…the Alien Hiphugger Strapon.
It took seven design revisions and years of work to get here, but this is my wife during the first test fit of the first completed, assembled, and usable hiphugger.
Which she had never, until two nights ago, actually used.
Okay, so.
I am currently in Orlando, helping her get the RV ready to move cross-country to the West Coast. (Well, more likely we’re replacing the RV with a new one, but anyway.)
There is, here in Orlando, a swinger’s club which my wife and her boyfriend frequently attend. Not for sex—well, not just for sex—but also because they have the cheapest pool and hot tub in Orlando, where she’s been doing physical therapy for an injury for quite some time. Yes, people can go to swing clubs for therapy, and read Playboy for the articles, shut up.
Anyway.
Since I got to Orlando, we’ve been going to the swing club regularly. My wife does her PT, while I sit and write porn (specifically, a porn novel that takes place in two parallel narrative threads, one in London in 1871 and one in Buffalo in 2025), while people have sex around me, because that is, apparently, the life I lead now.
Two days ago, we decided that we should maybe go to the swing club for sex, because, you know, sex, and so a Plan was hatched.
My wife couldn’t find the syringe that I included with her xenomorph hiphugger strapon, so I procured a replacement on Amazon, for free, as I belong to their “free stuff if you write a review” program…but only for certain products. The lineup changes daily. The good news: they had a syringe available. The bad news: It was ludicrously, comically large.
Problem solved, the next step was acquisition, at remarkable effort, of tiny tapioca pearls, as you cannot have an alien violation experience without alien eggs (obviously, duh).
So.
We packed the hiphugger, the Ludicrously Large Syringe, and the eggs, with a carrier fluid of milk because at this point why the hell not, in a Box™ with some other toys and set off, the three of us, to the swingers club. Along the way, I took a quarter of a cannabis edible, on account of the fact they make me suuuuuper suggetible.
Now, there’s a thing you have to understand about swingers.
Swingers are, generally speaking, extremely conservative. They’re basically, by and large and painting with a very broad brush, PTA members and homeowners’ association managers who happen to enjoy shagging other people.
The swingers club inspects incoming packages. My wife cheerfully presented The Box™ for inspection, with its horrifying dildo-tailed alien facehugger and its Ludicrously Large Syringe and mass of Far Too Many Alien Eggs, owing to making just a bit too much tapioca…
The people doing the inspection behaved the way one might if one were to be served a lightly grilled roadkill opossum on a plate with a side order of Klingon gagh.
The injury toward which I am slowly working my way happened in one of the swing club’s themed playrooms, each of which has a door and a large window, through which other people can watch the goings-on within.
Now, I am not a voyeur. I’ve watched people have sex countless times, which is occasionally interesting in a “huh, I didn’t know people could bend that way” sort of way. It’s a shame I can’t hand those experiences to someone who would appreciate them better, because I know if watching people shag is your thing then it is very much Your Thing, but for me, it’s like, eh.
So my wife started with her boyfriend, and they started Doing Stuff, and I guess I blanked out a bit thinking about a scene in the porn story I mentioned earlier and how it needed some rework, so she’s like “you okay?” and I’m like “I was thinking about the novel” and she’s like “of course you were.”
Because of course I was. Writers: we’re not like other people.
My writing setup in the RV. That’s my wife’s tea mug. Twice the size means half as many trips to make more tea!
Anyway, a short time later I was on my hands and knees for the Great Xenomorph Parasite Violation.
If it seems like I’m Using Caps a lot, it was that kind of night.
Now, my wife is a dancer. And the play rooms had music piped in. And my wife started swaying to the beat of the music, and at the risk of using more capital letters, Oh My God.
Remember that cannabis edible? Cannabis does two things to me: it makes me hyper-suggestible, which my partners love with the love of a benevolent Divinity to all creation; but it also puts me in touch with my body, in a way that I’m generally not.
So fast forward two hours, during which I’m either on my knees or flat on my back. I won’t disturb you with the details, because they would…err, disturb you, but let me just say, So Many Alien Eggs. The tapioca had congealed into a slippery mass and it was So Gooey that, could I adequately express it in text, your computer screen would start dripping.
There was this kind of back and forth between “ooh, that’s nice” and absolute horror: in one particular position, the alien ovipositor would encounter the mass of eggs and…again, I won’t disturb you with the disturbing details.
Anyway, after hours of this, we went home sated and happy and just a touch horrified. After a brief Denny’s stop, because low-quality food after kinky threesomes seems part of my life now, I wrote in the car on the way home, then tumbled into a deep sleep.
I took this self-portrait on the way out of the sex club.
The next morning, I woke with a knee that refused to bend without agonizing pain. As I write this, I’m wearing a brace.
I blame Sigorney Weaver.
Not that it’s her fauly, exactly, but she is the sexy part of a casual chain that led directly from the theater to nightmares to the hiphugger strapon (I think it’s safe to say my wife may have, with her simple suggestion, invented the entire genre of xenomorph play).
Some time ago, I found 45 meters of electroluminescent wire on Amazon. A few months after that, I found thin sheets of edible 24-carat gold foil on Amazon. When one finds EL wire and gold foil, one’s mind, of course, wanders to thoughts of old-school cyberpunk dystopias and the nude female form.
I’m writing this from Springfield, where I’m visiting my Talespinner, who is remarkable in many respects, not the least of which is the way she encourages my incorrigible nature. So naturally, when I expressed the inchoate thoughts brewing in my head re: EL wire and gold and lots of silicone lube, she not only agreed to become a work of art, but even helped make those inchoate thoughts choate.
So it came to pass that we three (me, my Talespinner, and her other boyfriend) gathered around her coffee table cutting thin (as in about 400 atoms thick) gold foil into geometric shapes and putting an entire case of AA batteries into EL wire battery packs, upon which we retired to her bedroom to cover her with silicone lube for that wet-n-shiny look.
Gold foil is, as it turns out, difficult to apply to skin without tearing, a process that requires patience and careful attention. That done, after a brief delay so that the model could have a spontaneous orgasm, we started wrapping her in wire.
At last, more than an hour after we started, all was ready. Ans the results were…well, I find them extraordinary.
That last one kinda makes me think cyberpunk yoga. “You do Downward Facing Dog. I do Ronin Steppin’ Razor. We are not the same.”
Cutting the thin gold foil turned out to be so problematic, I plan to try laser-cutting it to see if that works. (My 10-watt diode laser cutter isn’t generally up to metal, but hey, literally only 400 atoms thick, so who knows?) I’m picturing something like the Matrix waterfall cascading down her chest, but in gold.
We’re still finding teeny flecks of gold in unlikely places.
I have a number of…um, fairly ambitious projects I’m working on right now that I’ve hit roadblocks on. Since the Internet is a marvel of modern technological accomplishment that allows instantaneous access to not only the entirety of human knowledge but also domain experts in every conceivable field of human endeavor, I’m throwing out a request for ideas and suggestions here.
Project 1: The Alien Pod
I have, through a strange set of circumstances, come into possession of an old “bod pod,” a medical scanner designed, I’m told, to measure BMI. It doesn’t work—it’s just the pod without the computer software and such to drive it—and my goal is to turn it into a gigantic alien egg, like the kind in the Alien movies, but large enough to hold a person.
So the plan is to cover this thing with silicone, to make it look like one of the eggs from the Alien movie (which were basically garbage bags and chicken wire covered with silicone). The effect I’m looking for is something like this:
My thought is to cover the pod with silicone (probably condensation-cure rather than the medical-grade platinum-cure silicone I ise for sex toys, whcih is more than $200 a gallon).
Why silicone and not paper-mâché? The pod weighs more than 400 pounds, so it’s very difficult to transport, and the egg needs to be strong enough to survive handling and moving in a truck. My goal is to use it for a photo shoot, with a model halfway out of it, being dragged back in by tentacles.
The problem is that silicone won’t stick to the surface, like, at all. Not even a little bit.
The pod is a stainless steel shell overlaid with fiberglass and with some sort of textured polymer layer on top. Up close it looks like this:
My first thought is to epoxy a whole bunch of short pins to the pod, to give the silicone something to grip. Many years ago, I remember seeing a product that would be perfect for this: small steel pins, about a centimeter or less long, with a ball on one end and a flat base on the other, kind of like so:
They’re quite small, and a whole bunch of them sticking out of the pod like spines on a porcupine would give the silicone something to hang on to mechanically. Trouble is, I don’t know what they’re called or what they’re used for (I vaguely recall that they’re used in aviation, maybe?), so I don’t know how to search for them.
Alternately, any small, cheap, epoxy-able pin or whatever I can glue to the pod might work. I’m also open to other suggestions. Keep in mind it has to stand up to rough handling—this bloody thing is almost unimaginably heavy and hard to maneuver!
Project 2: Machining Molds
I’ve started making alien xenomorph hiphugger strapons and alien xenomorph facehugger gags for sale.
Right now, I’m 3D printing the molds, a 6-part mold for the hiphugger and a 7-part (yes, seriously) mold for the facehugger.
I’d hoped to get maybe ten castings from each mold. In fact, I’m getting 2-3 before the mold is ruined and I have to print a new one. The facehugger mold takes two weeks(!) to print on my 3D printer. Obviously this isn’t sustainable.
I’ve been planning for a while to move to machined wood or aluminum molds, and I have a 4-axis desktop CNC machine:
I’ve been teaching myself CNC milling, but the learning curve is a cliff; I’m getting reasonably good at 2D and 2.5D machining, but man, the molds are complex.
Here’s a 3D model of one part of the hiphugger mold. This is what I’m looking to machine, either in aluminum or even in wood:
As you can see, it’s a complex shape with aggressive undercuts.
I have not been able to make a CNC program to carve this. (One person online looked at this mold and was like “um, yeah, you’ll need four years of trade school plus at least four years of apprenticeship to even think about machining something like that.”)
So, hey, I have the machine but not the skill, why not hire someone to design the CNC program, right? I’ve talked to a few folks online who are like “yeah, pay me and I’ll do the program for you,” then when they see that part they’re like “oh hell no. Hell. No.”
If anyone reading this knows a skilled CNC machinist who can create a program to mill this part, and parts like it, on my machine (a Makera Carvera with a 4th-axis module), send them my way! This is a paying gig.
In the meantime, I’m also exploring ways to treat the 3D printed molds with resin or epoxy or something to make them more durable. Right now I’m only making one facehugger and one hiphugger per month, and even at that slow rate of production, the process I’m using is unsustainable.
So yeah. I have an eclectic set of friends out there with some highly unusual skills, so I’m hoping that some of you might have insights or ideas to offer.
Somehow, between a lot of other projects we’re working on and this last-minute trip to Europe, the fact that Eunice and I have released another book sort of fell through the cracks.
So hey, we released another book!
Presenting, the fourth novel in the Passionate Pantheon series, Unyielding Devotion. Sexy far-future post-scarcity science fiction theocratic body horror philosophical erotica, for your reading pleasure!
I’m particularly proud of this book. It’s probably the most philosophical of the Passionate Pantheon novels, but still has a ton of sex so kinky the kinks don’t even have names.
It follows a group of people who meet at a party hosted by Jakalva, a power broker in the City who worships none of the AI gods but nevertheless is still one of the City’s most influential citizens, and explores how their experiences at the party change the course of their lives.
You can read it as really really kinky porn, and it works, but it’s also sort of a sustained meditation on unconventional choices, growth, and relationships.
Sex! Zero-gravity gladiator matches! Skydiving from the tops of buildings! More sex!
Here’s an excerpt:
Jakalva leaned back. “My, my. A person comes to our City seeking to atone for her wrongdoing, and instead is selected to punish others for theirs. You have an interesting story indeed.”
Kaytin looked down. “I don’t feel interesting.”
The music stopped. A melodic chime filled the air. Jakalva touched Kaytin’s arm. “A moment, please.” She rose. “Friends, the entertainment is about to start. I invite those of you who wish to watch to be seated.” With the music gone, the drone above Kaytin flitted away.
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.
This is not a novel for the faint of heart. You’ll find some pretty radical kinks between its covers.
Check it out! It’s available on Amazon US, UK, and Canada.
