Why I Had To Kneecap The Promo Video for My New Novelette "Butterfly" (Capitalism Is The Villain)

 OK, so I created a new promo video for my upcoming novelette (we're talking Labor Day!) "Butterfly." Here is the original video I shot, with the music I originally used:

Pretty cool, eh? I think so. Went beyond my expectations for such a simple video. There was just one problem: the music is owned by the band Swingrowers, and copyright issues being what they are, I couldn't use the video as is. I had to kneecap it, strictly for legal reasons. (Here's a link to the original Swingrowers song, it's great, definitely check it out.) I went through Microsoft's catalog of public domain music for videos on its video player, and it was a HORRIBLE experience. The Microsoft public  domain stuff  was the sort of thing you might hear in an elevator going to hell. I finally chose the least bad of the options because I didn't have weeks to spend looking for something good in the public domain. (And because there was a very good chance that there was nothing good for my purposes anywhere in the public domain.)

And I came up with this video:

It's not nearly the video that my original was. The public domain music is barely tolerable, and it was FAR better than the rest. And that cheeses me off. Because I feel that my video of the naked dancing fairy added value to the song. It created something different and new that people might enjoy.  I finally wound up having to link to the Swingrowers videos (same link seen earlier in this post) and  recommending that viewers play the video at no volume while listening to the Youtube video. Which works after a fashion, but jeeze, what a kludge.

Of course having created the song "Butterfly" Swingrowers has every right to profit from it. And I have no right to profit from it. And I'm not profiting from it. The most you can say is that the video might have eventually led people to my book site, but let's face it, nobody buys a book because of the music that accompanied a promotional video for it. Or to put it in financial terms, if there was a way to fairly compensate Swingrowers for every sale of my book that was based on the fact that people liked their song in my promo video, I might at the end of the year owe then a nickel. Or not.

Of course the Swingrowers could give permission for me to run my video with their music for free. But that isn't the way capitalism works, is it? Capitalism works to make it very difficult for people to get permission to use music, and very easy to pay royalties to companies to use music if you've got lots of money. In fact, capitalism creates enforcement arms to track down people who use music/art without permission (think RIAA). And those royalties are expensive! Here is a link showing what an expensive, pain in the ass process it is to license a song, particularly a popular song.

At the very least  you might think there could be an easy, cheap alternative way to get good music for videos, etc., that aren't making money. There is not. You can make a cover of a popular song if you're a musician, and you won't owe anybody a penny, so long as you clearly credit the originators of the song you are covering. But I am not a cover band. I am a self-published erotica writer, and the message we self-published erotica writers get from the music industry (as well as the publishing industry, a lot of other industries and the government, frankly) is a loud and enthusiastic "FUCK OFF!"

Contrast that with the art industry. There are all sorts of ways of obtaining  permission to use art for commercial use, some of them affordable even to low-lifes like me. As I've said, I use Depositphotos.com art for my book covers all the time. They have a huge selection of artwork and you can buy commercial rights to use them even when your sales are as low as mine. Frankly, you could afford to use Depositphotos.com stuff on a hobbyist's budget. And DepositPhotos.com is not the only organization out there that distributes art at reasonable prices. It has several competitors.

The reason Internet has affordable artwork for publishers is a matter of the way the industry works. Photographers take many photos in a commercial shoot but only a tiny fraction of them get bought by the customer. Most of the unsold images just go into the photographer's portfolio. When commercial sites started offering art to customers on a pay-per-use basis, it didn't take photographers and artists long to realize that if they dumped the contents of their portfolios on said sites, they might actually make money off some of those unused photos after all. Not nearly as much as they normally did, perhaps, but so what? They weren't making ANY money off the images before that. The photographer makes money off of the images he couldn't sell the client, the distributor gets a wide selection of photos to offer to customers (and takes a cut off each sale, I presume) and marginal publishers or self-publishers get a lot of great photos and artwork to use for their covers at reasonable prices. Win-win-win! 

(I assume that the exact same logic applies for commercial art as well, which is why DepositPhotos and others have so much good art in their inventories.)

There are also distributors of free public domain images out there. Most of the legit ones tend to have very small or very outdated selections of images. There are some with large selections of public domain images out there, but publisher beware: a couple of the public domain sites I've browsed have had images that clearly were NOT legally allowable for commercial use. For example, on one such site I found a very nice vector graphic of the Enterprise from Star Trek, very realistic right down to the NCC-1701 on the hull. I'm pretty sure nobody at Paramount Studios authorized that artwork for public domain use. And even if the artwork was created by an artist not associated with Paramount Studios, I'm pretty sure Paramount has the Enterprises' image trademarked.

So copyright works pretty well in the art world, but not at all well in the music world. It prevents creators from creating original works that people might enjoy.  And that's a damned shame. I'm glad there's no barriers like that in book publishing (there certainly used to be). It was a much sadder and sorrier profession when the big publishers were able to gatekeep all but a select few out of the industry.

Like the music business is now. 

Whitney Cummings, Porn Fans and a 14th Century Saint's Philosophy

  Is every step on the road to heaven really heaven?

I have long believed this to be the case. The phrase "All the way to heaven is heaven, for Jesus said 'I am the way'" is attributed to Saint Catherine of Siena, a 14th Century saint noted for her devout faith and her organizational skills. (She wasn't martyred, she just got sainted because she got the Catholic Church's act together organizationally at a time when counting chickens after they hatched was considered a feat of mathematical genius. There is also talk of magically uncorrupted loaves of bread. Wooooo!)

 Being a lifelong atheist, I have never taken St. Catherine's maxim literally and I skip over the Jesus part because who cares, but I still believe it holds great wisdom. The central idea is that if you have some goal or purpose you want to achieve, every step on the road to achieving that goal is the goal.  

Let's take an example. Suppose you want to be a famous pop singer. You've got a good voice, you like singing, you did well in music class at school, and you feel you've got some done some good covers of classics. But so do a million other people. You don't have any contacts in the music industry, haven't been engaged in musical activity since school because everybody told you it was stupid to go for a career in music. Impossible dream, yadda yadda yadda.

So what do you do? Anything you can, that's what. You form a band with other buddies from school who like music. You play in a garage. You look for gigs. You play for friends. You make demo tapes. You make Youtube vids. Probably you have to work a crappy job to keep a roof over your head while you do this because you're making no money at it. 

But you are singing. You are doing your thing. And whether or not the music industry likes it, you are part of the music industry, even if you are widely considered an awful part of it. You may not be where you want to be in the music industry... yet. But you're making progress. You are taking steps that will get you somewhere in the music industry that will make you happy, even if you can't be the famous rock singer you wanted to be when you started out. 

And that progress may bring you happiness, i.e., you may arrive in heaven. You have the hope of heaven, you believe it is there, and that IS heaven.

Think of it in another way. Heaven, or musical stardom or whatever is not a place or a job, it's a process. You start out as you at Point A and you move toward Point Z, your goal. And as is the norm in most worthy goals, you encounter a lot of obstacles and detours that make things difficult for you. 

And sometimes you discover that what you thought was a detour was actually your destination. Like, you discover that you aren't really interested in being a famous rocknroll singer, but that you really like doing jazz vocals as part of a group. Or that you like doing mixing on sound boards. Or you like promoting and helping other musicians find their place in the industry. Or whatever. The point is, heaven isn't always where you think it is when you are just starting out. You have to find it. But eventually you find it, or something like it, and you're happy, and you realize that you had fun at every stop along the way. Because every step on the way to heaven, is heaven.

Now let's get to the porn fans. I read a lot of stuff online about sex. I read the comments on pornsites, among other things. One of the things you quickly notice when you read the comments of fans on pornsites is that it's very clear that some porn fans have, in their minds, a personal relationship of some kind with the pornstars they follow. The dead giveaway for this, to my mind, is the sense of betrayal you get in the comments about pornstars who have changed their looks, most often by inflating the size of their breasts, followed closely by inflating the size of their lips.

Not always an improvement. At least she left her lips alone. Because, like many porn stars, Christie Stevens is freaking beautiful.

I generally find that when pornstars do this sort of thing it rarely works out well for them in terms of improving their looks (though it sometimes does). But I never feel any sense of personal anger or betrayal about it, because I never feel that I have a personal relationship with any pornstars, probably because I DON'T have a personal relationship with any pornstars. I may like the way they perform in various porn videos, but I don't feel any sense of personal connection with them. They are performing for an audience, and that's not a personal relationship, gratifying as their performances may be in so many respects.

Some porn fans clearly do not get that. Their posts reflect a clear sense of hurt and betrayal when a porn star blows up her tits or lips or whatever. They vow never to watch her videos again. She has forever damaged something precious in their minds and very possibly, hearts. Also maybe other parts. It's a fairly common problem that's just not confined to porn fans. Lots of people mistake performances for the real thing in politics, in auto and real estates sales, in media and in the arts. They’ve mistaken the persona the performer projects in her performances for the real thing.

Which gets us to the comedian Whitney Cummings. Whitney is an actress and standup comedian who did a really clever thing in her standup special "Can I Touch It?" She paid a company called RealBotix to make a sex doll that looked exactly like her, and she included the Whitney sex doll in her standup. I was very interested, of course. I was hoping she would use the Whitney sex doll to play with the differences between her the person and her the media persona. She didn't do a lot of that unfortunately, she concentrated mostly on the differences between her as a human being and the robot as a construct that just happened to look very much like her.

Granted, it looked very much like her:

The joke is clearly on robot Whitney.

And it could speak and move its eyes and jaws a bit to make its speaking more lifelike, though its robotic voice was nothing like Whitney's. And as the photo illustrates, the doll looks very dead and doll-like next to a very lively and animated Whitney Cummings. And despite the fact that Cummings went for the obvious, basic material that was inherent in the Whitney sex doll, she did it in a smart, funny and hilarious way that sometimes did have elements of the routine I had envisioned.

Then from somewhere out of the whirling nebulousities of my subconscious mind came the question: “Well what if some guy were a total Whitney Cummings fan and his idea of heaven would be to be Whitney Cummings’ boyfriend/husband/whatever? And suppose that guy managed to buy a Whitney Cummings lookalike sex doll? Would he be closer to his heaven if he had a doll that looked just exactly Whitney Cummings, that he could fuck? I mean, he wouldn’t be THERE, not by a long shot, but wouldn’t be closer to being Whitney Cummings-adjacent?”

That’s a much tougher question than it looks like, because neither “no” nor “yes” are easy answers to arrive at honestly.

“No” is difficult because central to my idea about “all the way to heaven, is heaven” is that any move toward a goal is a good one in the sense that it gets you on the path of achieving that goal, even if it’s completely in the wrong direction. The important thing is to get moving. As you move toward your goal (or away from it, if you start out in the completely wrong direction) you’ll develop a clearer idea of what direction you need to move in, make the necessary adjustments, and eventually, bob’s your uncle or to be more precise, Whitney’s your girlfriend.

Let’s take the Whitney Cummings sex doll case, because it’s a tough one. (And to get back to the pornstar fans who feel a personal relationship with pornstars, an almost identical situation exists with pornstars. They even sell latex casts of their genitals for fans to fuck.)

Not kidding!

The problem is, the world supply of Whitney Cummings is very limited. There’s only one of her. There’s a huge amount of Whitney Cummings media properties available that have created a media persona of Whitney Cummings, but there’s only one real, actual Whitney Cummings.

Now suppose you gather some money and buy yourself a Whitney Cummings-like sex doll. (While doing research for this essay I read an article that said there were many eager would-be buyers for Whitney lookalike sex dolls after her Neflix special came out, but that the company couldn’t make it because Whitney Cummings’ likeness and image are legally protected, as is normal for celebrities. I mean, can you imagine all the products and services celebrities would seem to be endorsing if their images didn’t have legal protection? But the demand certainly proves that a lot of people would certainly buy a Whitney sex doll if they could.)

And so that fan can have a sexual experience that is a lot more like fucking Whitney Cummings than just imagining it. He can fuck something that looks very much like Whitney Cummings, that kinda feels like Whitney Cummings (I understand that the vaginas on many sex dolls are very well done) and (if he’s the obsessive type who tracks down what kind of perfume Whitney wears and buys some) kinda smells like Whitney Cummings. He could also edit tapes of Whitney’s comments from the many, many hours of speech available from her podcasts and have the experience of hearing Whitney Cummings moan and cry out and so forth while he fucks the Whitney sex doll.

And my answer long-term would have to be “Yes” a man who has bought a Whitney sex doll is closer to Whitney heaven than one who has not. Because where does he go from there? He may not be all that close to marrying Whitney, but that was never a high probability event, given the scarcity of Whitney Cummings. (And the exact same thing is true of all the porn fans who buy those latex casts.) But it’s reasonable to suppose that the fan will have learned a few things about himself once he has slaked his lust on the Whitney Cummings sex doll.

He might for example realize that he’s not all that attracted to Whitney in particular, he just likes fit brunettes with merry smiles and so he eventually starts dating fit brunettes with merry smiles and eventually finds one who fits him to a T. Or that he was attracted to her for her humor, not her body, and so eventually he finds a short, chubby blonde who cracks him up for the rest of his life. Etc., etc. Or he could discover that he’s perfectly happy with the Whitney sex doll, so much so that he loses interest in the real Whitney and is very happy living alone with his doll.

There are a lot of ways the story can go, and so long as it leads to more happiness and personal fulfillment, it’s the way to heaven.

But the Whitney sex doll could lead to the fan realizing that the Whitney sex doll just doesn’t get it for him, that only the real thing will do, and so he concocts a plan to kidnap Whitney and botches it (because plans like that never work out well for anybody) and he spends the next 30 years in prison writing letters to Whitney which are read only by the prison psychiatrist. This is not the way to happiness or personal fulfillment. Not the way to heaven. That’s one way, an extreme way, that the answer might be “No.” It’s a very rare thing but famous people have been kidnapped or murdered by fans in the past.

The more common way the answer would be “no” would be that the sex doll experience alienates the fan from his own and others’ sexuality. That is, his sexual experience with the doll leads him to think of women as animated sex dolls to a certain extent. Even worse, women reject him because they sense that about him. He loses the ability to connect with women as human beings and becomes something like an incel, perhaps an incel, period, unable to form a relationship with a woman that involves give and take. He has gone far from heaven.

Of course, this technology will evolve. Whitney Cummings discussed that in an interview with Joe Rogan (she brought her sex doll along for the interview so it could truly be an pen discussion). Joe didn’t like the doll at all. He found it creepy. But Whitney pointed out, and Joe agreed, that the technology on the dolls would evolve. That one day sex dolls that look human and move like humans and talk like humans would exist.

Whitney said she and other human women will destroy the sex dolls at the point. “I will be a savage about it,” she said. “I will wait until you fall in love with it, and I will destroy it.”

But I don’t think Whitney and Joe thought this through. Why would you stop perfecting your sex dolls when they reached par for human women? Why not make sex dolls that were better in every respect than human women? Better conversationalists, able to move like the best dancer ever, smelling like she’s horny all the time, BEING horny whenever you want her to (because she’s programmed to) and looking like the most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen. Plus all the sexual skills you ever wanted and no inhibitions. And an innate desire to clean house when not having sex? Better yet, an innate desire to suck cock for hours.

The technical problems in creating such a doll are difficult and we’re a few years from surmounting them, maybe a couple of decades, maybe a century. But there’s no reason to suppose any of these hurdles are insurmountable. They all seem well within the scope of human achievement if climate change doesn’t kill us all off.

And I think the man who had a sex doll like that would be in a very happy place. Except, you know… no children.

I think at that point, the population problem for the human race might become maintaining a population of human beings. Those last few generations of human men would be very happy, though. Human women, much less so.

So there you have it. A Whitney Cummings sex doll might indeed lead some people to heaven, meaning St. Catherine’s saying still holds true. But a truly advanced Whitney Cummings sex doll might also portend the end of the human race. That’s what you call “problematical.”

"The Slave Girl Diet" Now Available on Smashwords

   You can buy “The Slave Girl Diet” here.

First off, let me give you the blurb for my new book, “The Slave Girl Diet.” Then I want to do some bragging. I came up with some neat ideas for this book, and I want to brag about them, and where better than my blog, and, well, all over social media?

“Earth business tycoon and renowned chef Chloe goes through a crosstime gate to take the slave girl diet in a Collar World kennel. Will the constant public nudity, bondage and sex turn her into just another submissive, mindless slave girl drooling for sexual bondage use? More importantly, will it get the weight off and keep it off? Read this 66,000 word erotic SF novel and find out!”

OK, you’ve got the picture. But what you don’t have is the fiendish plot hook I came up with to compel Chloe to go to Collar World to diet. I first proposed that in the future, Earth and Collar World come up with medical tech that allows people to de-age their bodies: that is, their 70 year old bodies can transform back into 20 year old bodies, leaving all the infirmaries and illnesses of old age behind. Wonderful!

But there is one fiendish catch. Any weight you may have picked up on your journey through life doesn’t go away. It stays with you. If you are overweight when you take the de-aging treatment, you are young, vital and... overweight. And since the de-aging tech can be used repeatedly, you face the prospect of hundreds, perhaps thousands of years of life being overweight.

This would, I believe, create some very, very motivated dieters. And is, if I may say so myself, is a deliciously imaginative use of SF tropes. Because the old de-aging tech has been used again and again, but never in this way. Bwahahahahahaha!

(Not giving away any spoilers here, you find all this out in the first chapter.)

And it just so happens that Collar World has developed a dieting technique that gets the weight off and keeps it off. For years… possibly forever. No one knows, as de-aging tech is as new to Collar World as it is to Earth. But every woman who’s gone through the diet has kept the weight off since returning to Earth.

And of course the diet involves lots and lots and lots of bondage and sex and maledom/femsub behavior. The slave girl diet kennels are full of fit Masters determined to help those slave girls reach those weight goals – like it or not! And hence there is a ton of erotica.

I wanted people to see Chloe as a person, not as an instance of “overweight” so I did two things. First, I wrote the story entirely in first person perspective… Chloe’s perspective. So the reader is not looking at Chloe from the outside, they are looking out at the world through her eyes. And Chloe, while she is aware that she is overweight, does not see herself as overweight. And so the reader hopefully will see her as a person and not just an instance of “overweight.”

Along those same lines, in Collar World obese people are rare. Collar World natives lead a much healthier lifestyle than Earth people do, and effective dieting techniques have been developed to help the relatively few obese people lose weight and keep it off. As a result, they don’t do fat shaming. The concept wouldn’t occur to them, it’s not part of their culture. They would feel that a person who is overweight has a health problem, like having the measles or psoriasis or whatever. They know an overweight person has a problem, but they don’t assume it’s because of a moral failure on the overweight person’s part.

It makes for an interesting story, combined with the other plot twists. At least that’s my hope. Buy the novel and find out for yourself.

How the Cover for "The Slave Girl Diet" Was Designed, or "Hire an ARTIST!"

Do you live in a city, a county, or a state that has an official seal? You know, that bit of artwork set in a circle that serves as the official image of that community? Often you’ll find the seal on envelopes mailed out to you, the citizen, or on letterhead from said city or county informing of you such inviting events as Ogdenville Salutes Soybeans Days.

Have you ever looked at one of those suckers? I mean, really looked at it? Chances are if it’s a letterhead it’s nothing more than a series of black squiggles in a circle that you can barely make out as anything at all. That’s because the original design was printed out on 8 ½” x 11” pieces of paper and almost filled them. Nobody thought about what it would look like at ½ inches tall on a letterhead. Not that they would have cared if they had. The seal was probably designed by a committee, most of them political types who don’t know a thing about art and don’t care either.

All they know is, they want their art on the image. And by their art they mean whatever bee is in their bonnet. Commissioner A wants a sheaf of wheat to symbolize the heroic farmers who fed their community. And Commissioner B wants a freighter for the sailors, and Commissioner C wants a church, and Commissioner D wants a factory for the capitalists, and Commissioner E wants a pick and shovel for the miners, and commissioner F just wants great tracts of land and Commissioner G wants railroad cars and so they sit down and work their differences up and after much screaming, fighting and bloodshed, they come up with a compromise that includes every last thing that every Commissioner wants in a confused jumble which takes some looking to figure out at full-page printout size.

And what you get is something like the official seal of Allegany County, Maryland, as seen below in 5”x5” size or something like it (I have no control over what size screen you’re reading this piece on).

(I have no idea what the target circles next to the house are all about. Maybe bowhunting or something.)

And when this seal is printed on an envelope, say at two inch size, it’ll look much more confusing, I mean you have to work hard to figure out what you’re looking at is supposed to represent:

And when it’s reduced to one inch to go on an envelope or a letterhead, the size at which most people will arguably see it, it gets downright indecipherable:

(Disclaimer: the Allegany seal, while definitely a poorly done seal, is hardly unique, I could have pulled up hundreds that were just as bad or worse if I had wanted to. I have no animus toward Allegany County or its people. I just picked this one because it illustrated my point nicely.)

The way to avoid this kind of problem is to design a seal that has a simple, pleasing design that can be scaled to various sizes and still look great. A very nice example here, the seal of Pinellas County, Florida, at 4x5 inches:

And it scales to 1x1.5 very nicely:

It look good at any size and gives the city a unique visual image. That’s all that you need to ask of any seal. It also says “sunshine and water” pretty good too, which is definitely gravy, county identity-wise.

My point here isn’t to make fun of politicians in committees trying to be artists when they are not, rewarding though that is. My point is that politicians and writers and editors do not have the mental tools to create good art. They think entirely in terms of images of various persons/plants/buildings/whatever that to their minds symbolize the place they’re trying to create an image for. And they don’t care much about the image’s visual appeal, nor do they think about how it might scale. Nor do they think about other aspects the image might convey.

And that’s not how you do good design. Politicians, bureaucrats, writers and editors don’t have the mental toolkit to do a good job of creating a visual design.

You need artists for that, people whose visual cortex knows what it’s doing and who have been trained, through schooling or experience (mostly schooling) to understand how to create successful commercial images.

Now I’m a writer who creates his own covers, partly from vanity but mostly because I can’t afford to pay artists decent wages. But I have this much going for me: I know I’m not qualified here. So the first thing I do when I go about designing a cover is let my stupid writer brain come up with whatever it likes.

In the case of the cover for “The Slave Girl Diet” I had already come across just the image I wanted for the cover. It was this piece of art:

It’s a still from Device Bondage’s great video “Athletic MILF Fuck Toy Cherie Deville Punished in Bondage and Sybian!!” And it beautifully expresses the emotional intensity of a woman being fucked senseless while bound and gagged on a relentless sybian fucking machine, and dreaming of cakes and pies and whatnot and drooling all over herself for a variety of reasons as a result. It would have been PERFECT for the cover, except for a few minor considerations.

Mostly, for example, that Kink.com holds the copyright on the image and I’d have to make arrangements with Kink.com to get their permission to use the image commercially, which would probably have involved a transfer of funds from my bank account to theirs that would be greater than the likely sales the book will generate. Probably MUCH greater.

In addition, I would have to generate artwork to cover Cherie’s naughty bits, which are on glorious display here. And because it’s a photo the artwork would have to be photographic, too, which means difficult to do well, much more difficult than the usual white panties and bra I have done on several illustrated covers.

In further addition, the books main character is supposed to be very overweight, and a careful examination of Cherie’s body will show that she is a marvelously trim and fit physical specimen. Look at those abs! So I would have to artistically adjust Cherie’s contours to make her look in need of a diet, and that would pretty much entail drawing her from scratch. I wanted the image so bad I spent an hour or so playing with various GIMP filters to see if I could come up with outline art that I could use as the basis for a drawing that might somehow resemble Cherie and capture her expression and pose, but after that hour I was pretty sure that I was looking at days of work with no guarantee of success, so I very sensibly shelved that idea. (But it would have been such a great cover, if only…)

Next I went to Deposit Photos, my preferred source of legal photo images I can use for covers (because I pay for them.) I didn’t have any clear ideas, so I just typed “woman diet” into the search engine to see what I could find.

But at this point, I did do something smart. I realized that even if an image didn’t work for me as is, many of them might contain visual ideas I could borrow, or “steal” if you want to be accurate about it. So I kept my brain open as I looked at the images, which took major effort.

Interestingly, bondage images were present. There were images of (clothed) women with their wrists bound by measuring tape, and gagged by measuring tape. And I would have used them, if the images had said anything other than “diet” which is all they said. The book is erotica, after all.

But I did find several other ideas that might be worth borrowing. There were a TON of diet images available. But in the end, I only chose one, and I didn’t steal it, either: I bought it fair and square. It was this one:

It’s very spot-on of course, and not at all erotic. But what if there was a naked woman in bondage looking at all this art? Much better! So I went to Second Life and got out one of my avvies and posed her a bit (you may recognize her from “Junie Jamieson, Captured By Gangsters” book) and got this image:

which was pretty much what I was thinking of. (The gray background is my equivalent of a green screen.) Now just combine that image with all those hands offering tempting treats and I’d have a great cover.

Well, not really. There was more ground to cover. But before I got on that ground, I took a little detour. They have very easy ways of customizing avatars using slider bars in Second Life, including controlling how thin or fat the avatar looks. I could make a fat version of my thin Chloe avvie. And after a little playing with the slider, I had exactly that:

And that’s when I had my great idea: if I superimposed the thin Chloe image over the fat Chloe image I could have a cover that said “dieting” and “nudity” both at the same time. So I gave it a shot: ta-da!

Unfortunately, it’s not a very attractive image. It’s visually confusing and hard to figure out. Looking at it, I realized I was once again making the classic non-artist mistake of trying to get a literal visual representation of an idea and thinking it will brilliantly illustrate the idea and look good as well. That just isn’t true, as any number of city and county and state seals convincingly demonstrate, but it’s just the way non-artists’ brains work.

So, back to the drawing board, or more accurately, back to the gray screen. I decided to once again borrow from the ideas of artists. So I bought a couple of sex toys on the Second Life market and started looking at the animations the sex toys put my avatar through. This was a long, arduous process, because Second Life is 3D and what you see in an animation depends on what angle you’re looking at the animation from, then taking a pic when you find something that is potentially interesting.

Fortunately, SL has excellent camera controls that let you look at things from a wide variety of angles very easily. Unfortunately, if you accidentally click on the wrong thing as you’re whizzing around with your camera, which is very easy to do, the whole set up can go to hell, with the camera out of position and/or the avatar out of position. And if you want to make a change in clothing or hair or avatar or anything, that can be time-consuming as well.

Most images you get are just kinda “meh” but you also get some very wrong ones:

But it can be worth it. Because in the process of just taking pics to see what looks good, I got this:

And this image was so much better than anything I could have come up by thinking about how visual images might represent the ideas of dieting and sex slave. It’s a still from an animation showing the avatar squirming in ecstasy atop the sybian. It’s one of several that would made an excellent image for the cover. Because the sight of the slightly thick body squirming in ecstasy also looks like a visualization of longing.

And if you just happened to have an image of a bunch of hands offering a visual treat surrounding that naked, writhing image of longing, you just might have a pretty good piece of cover art.

So I had two elements, but I knew from looking at the original diet art that I didn’t want a flat background. Something a little richer would be better. So it was back to Deposit Photos where I looked for a variety of backgrounds using simple search terms: green background, blue background, pink background, etc. And pink background turned out to be the winner. I found a series of images that involved pink paint dropped into water, photographed at high speed. They struck me as pure visual metaphors for orgasm. I’m confident about that because I wasn’t really looking for visual metaphors for orgasm, I just looked at these images and said “Oh… that’s it.” I won’t place the image that I picked out on this page because it’s quite large (see: background art) and it wouldn’t tell you a lot. I’ll just lay the finished cover down, I think you’ll see what I saw:

I think that’s a respectable cover. But here’s the thing: I’m pretty sure any pro artist could have come up with a cover that is just as good or better, and could have done it in less time and with a lot less effort because they wouldn’t have gone down all the dead ends I did. They would probably have come up with much better ideas than mine.

I could be wrong, but I don’t think I am. At the very least, a skilled artist could have created an original artwork based on the original Cherie Deville image from Kink and made her heavier and (just a teensy bit) more clothed and also not Kink’s intellectual property. And that would have been fine.

The only thing an artist can’t do, is do it cheaper. And I wouldn’t want an artist to do my covers for free. The whole point of this post is to say, “Artists are absolutely worth the money.” If and when I get the money to buy cover art, artists will be getting my money. I’ll pay it... gladly. It took me two days to create that cover art. I could use that time.