Keep Labor Day Socialist! And May Day As Well!

 

Woo-hoo! Labor Day is almost over but the party continues. Hope you all had a great one! And remember, there's still time to get a copy of "Shopping Park Slave" on sale on Amazon AND on Smashwords!

"Shopping Park Slave" Now Available on Amazon

Yes, this is the same story I wrote about yesterday when it was published on Smashwords, but now it's published on Amazon as well... just click on the pic or on this link if you'd prefer to buy it on Amazon

Image source: Me, with a little help from Second Life, Leonardo AI and GIMP.

So what better way to explain the story than to provide the blurb summary? None:

When slave Mandy awakens to find the sun shining in the sky, she’s happy indeed. She knows her Mistress Camilla will be up for a nice ride to her favorite shopping and drinking place, “Origins.” And Slave Mandy LOVES going to Origins, because Camilla leaves Mandy in the slave park, with all the other slavegirls who’ve been left there by their Mistresses while they shop and drink. Well, mostly while they drink and eat lunch and watch the goings-on in the slave part while they gossip. This is the story of a beautiful day in a sex slave park where everyone has a wonderful time, which includes having lots and lots of bondage and sex. It’s set in an alternate world where everybody gets around on ebikes with much more advanced battery tech than we have. And some of the ebikes have special modifications designed for slavegirls and their owners. Collars are also high tech, serving as communication devices as well as control devices. And the society Mandy and Camille live in is more advanced as well. Sexual pleasure is considered a universal good and most ways of obtaining it are considered good in and of themselves. But is everything as it seems on this wonderful day in this idyllic society? Well, yes and no. You’ll just have to read the story to find out what that means.

The Perils of Using Game Avatars Instead of Photos To Make Covers When You Are An Indie Author

Cover for the Smashwords version of "Louisiana Slay Ride"

Cover for the Amazon version of "Louisiana Slay Ride"

Raw art file of Second Life avatar for "Louisiana Slay Ride"

I like the cover art I got for “Louisiana Slay Ride" but getting there wasn’t easy. The big problem was the left leg, particularly the knee, though censorship issues posed their usual problems.

As you can see on the raw art file, the entire left leg is off. Compare it to the right leg, which is smooth and nicely modeled, connecting nicely to the hip, the left leg is very nearly two dimensional. The seam between the left thigh and the left calf is almost invisible and ends way too soon. (I double checked by looking at photos of kneeling models, the seam was always clearly visible.)

Even worse is the knee. The knee is a tricky thing to accurately represent. But that dark blob where the kneecap should be looks nothing like a knee should. And that bright Y-shaped highlight is in the wrong place and looks off.

It’s a problem with Second Life avatars, joints like the shoulders, elbows and knees tend to render unrealistically. But the whole left leg going out is a mystery. If you look at pretty much the same avatar used for the cover of “I, The Glider Gun” which is taken from straight-on, you’ll see that both legs are nicely modeled.

Why does the left leg go two dimensional in a ¾ view? No idea. But I had to deal with that stupid knee. So I created a new layer in GIMP and put a white area matching the dark area of the knee. And I copied skin tone from the left thigh and put it on another layer. Then I used the white layer to lighten the dark knee blob, playing with the opacity until I had it lightened to roughly the same value as the inner thigh. Finally, I made the inner thigh skin sample visible and played with its opacity until the dark blobby knee area looked like the inner thigh skin, only a little lighter.

The idea was to capture the underlying kneecap shape with the skin tones where they should be. But what I wound up was mostly flat skin tones like the inner thigh. So I did the artistic thing and covered up the damn knee with my byline. Now that’s artistry!

A decent artist could have solved the problem in five or ten minutes, I’m sure. Took me two hours to come up with my half-assed solution.

The censorship needed for the breasts on the Amazon cover was also an issue. I could have just had the avatar wear a bra. But nooooo, I decided that since the pasties I was using for the Smashwords cover were white, I could create a white bra layer and lay it on over the avatar’s breasts. Pasties hide the nipples, bra obscures the breasts, boob’s yer uncle. And since you can get a white overlay looking three dimensional by playing with the opacity of the white layer, and bras are easy to create by using portions of circles as your templates, it can be a quick, easy task.

But the pasties proved to be a bit time-consuming, because if the bra covered the pasties or the chain between them it would look wrong. So after I created the bra outline I had to go into the bra layer and carefully erase those portions of the bra that covered the pasties and chain. I also had to erase those portions of the bra that covered the curls of the avatars hair that would have covered her bra strap. It didn't require any artistic skill, but it was time consuming, painstaking work.

All that work with the knee and the bra on top of posing the avatar, finding the background art, obtaining and creating the chain art in Second Life, and doing some other little stuff like enlarging the size of the avatar’s thong cup to keep the censors happy, the job was time consuming.

So it took about a day and a half to come up with both cover versions. Maybe two days. OK, two days. I was happy with the cover art, and I enjoyed making it, but damn. The images based on photos are a lot easier. But it’s much harder to get a clip art photo posed properly and to make the photo as naked and bondage-y as I can get away with.

Just part of the fun of being an indie author, I guess.

Why You Need to Go To Smashwords Not Amazon if You Like Taboo Erotica

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Collaring on Collar World: How Censorship Imposes Itself on Art

I mentioned in an earlier post that I had to make some rules up for Collar World specifically so my stories could be marketable, not because they were logical extensions of my thoughts on a society that

The biggest whopper I had to tell about Collar World is that teens had to wait until they were 18 years old before they could get collared or collar someone else, and that they eschewed any dating or sexual activity prior to that.

I had to do that because Amazon and most other retailers are not about to sell or distribute (hi, Smashwords!) any erotica that has underage content. It's legally terra incognito for any erotica writer. I don't honestly believe teen characters as a group would hold back from sexual expression of any kind prior to reaching 18, but here we are. Being able to describe the romantic foibles and fumblings of kinky kids sounds like great fun, but not if you're going to get all erotic about it.

To make up for it, once my characters hit 18 and can start collaring one another, they go from 0 to 60, sex-wise. Once a girl reaches that age, she can be collared by any boy (or girl, if both are so inclined) and they both go nuts with the kinky sex. And instead of asking her out on a date, he gets to kidnap her, sneaking up on her, tying her up and taking her home after stopping off at a police kiosk to register it as a collaring rather than a kidnapping.

And that's also how I get around another requirement imposed by the market, the requirement for consensuality, since at the police kiosk the girl has to agree to the collaring for it to proceed. You can't do nonconsensual at all on Amazon, and a lot of other distributors are not gonna touch it, either.

So many legal and marketing choices are disguised as artistic choices. I think it would be a lot more exciting and suspenseful in a story to have the collaring be something more along the lines of a kidnapping, kind of like the old non-erotic romances, where a pirate would kidnap a comely lady, have sex with her without her consent, and then fall in love with her, generally with her consent since she also falls in love with him.

Well in this modern era that won't fly if you include graphic sex scenes, and no amount of falling in love afterward will make up for it!

So off to the police kiosk it is, where a cop records it as a collaring and sometimes a crowd of neighbors watch and “ooh!” and “aah!” at the young lovers. Sometimes even the girl's parents. (“My little girl is growing up -- her first collaring! Sob!”)

All kinds of sly fun to be had there, and I take full advantage of it in my first Collar World story, Stolen Collar, Stolen Heart which is about a girl's first collaring and was the impetus for much of my thought on the topic.

I also have girls subject to this temporary kidnap/collaring up to half a dozen times because they're temporary collars, kind of a dating thing but a LOT more intense since the slavegirl moves in with the guy and wears his collar. (I'm using maledom/femsub nomenclature here, but the same applies for whatever gender pairings comes up.)

After half a dozen tries, generally the girl gets a Temple Collar or an asexual collar, whatever works for her, really, and she has all the time she needs to figure out what she likes. But quite frequently, the first collaring or one soon afterward leads to Collar Climax and the collar becomes permanent. Collar Climax? Well, that's a science fiction psychological aspect of collaring on Collar World that I will be described in another post.

First experience of sex on Collar World: 0 to 60 indeed!

Fantasy Fuel

RAAAAAAAAAAPE! (Trigger Warning, you betcha!)

You've often heard me complain about the censorship on Amazon. They won't let you do rape fantasies.

But Amazon isn't the only distributor out there. Smashwords gives CONSIDERABLY more freedom to their writers. They still can't allow books that out and out proselytize about how great real life rape is – no one can, the credit card companies won't process payments for publishers who promote rape as a lifestyle.

Smashwords does allow rape fantasies, however. People have fantasies about rape all the time. As I endlessly delight in pointing out, a lot of the old-time romance novels (B.E. – Before Erotica) were chock full of rape fantasy fuel, with pirates abducting innocent women, Arabs abducting innocent women, gangsters abducting innocent women, and in the case of gay romances, women abducting innocent women. And raping them. It was always implied, sometimes alluded to, and sometimes even described, though generally in the least descriptive terms possible.

But we're not supposed to notice that women have rape fantasies, or even allude to it!

When I first started writing, I was writing sexual bondage fantasies, about women getting tied up and having sex. The logical narrative for that was that somebody grabs a girl and ties her up, probably a pirate or something.

And my first big hit as a writer was “Riverbeast” a novel about a river pirate who kidnaps the daughter of a merchant who does the river pirate wrong. And yes, the full Riverbeast saga is onSmashwords and you can buy it right now. Hell, you can read the first part of the story forfree which has a very nice bit of fantasy fuel when the pirates capture and rape the protagonist and four of her comely young female friends.

Even better, there's the President Slavegirl saga. One of the themes you see in a lot of the old romances was The Fall From Grace, wherein a highfalutin', high born lady is brought low by Fate, or Circumstances, generally in the form of some grubby low class guy who kidnaps her and teaches her The Meaning Of Life the hard, tied-up way.

President Slavegirl is the ultimate Fall from Grace, with a former President of the United States who has stretched the powers of the Presidency so far it would make Donald Trump boggle stripped of her civil rights by the courts and then kidnapped and enslaved by her enemies. She gets tied up and has sex a lot, and she's a freaking prude and a half (that's how she made so many enemies, she put everybody who likes sex in jail, or tried to.) Another novel of mine on sale on Smashwords. And yes, there is a free sample of the first book in the series, “The Homouth” and yes, the former President of the United States of America gets tied up and used thoroughly in it.

That ought to be enough for today, I have a lot to say on this topic, but a blog gives me the latitude to take my time. In my next post, I'll tell you about a popular fantasy author whose books are incredible slave rape fantasy fuel.

I wonder what the fantasy is here?

Amazon Censorship At Work: What Fun It is!

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The Homouth Part 1: First Book In New Series By Pat Powers

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The Punishing of Jendri Reviewed

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Censorship Is Springing Up All Over

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The Amazon Gets Explored

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Why Sky Kanga Bothers Me

And you thought Wonder Woman's invisible plane was dorky!

Wonder Woman's invisible plane is one of the dorkiest props if not THE dorkiest prop used by any superhero (and the object of well-deserved ribbing on Seanbaby's Superfriends Page). But it is only the second dorkiest mode of transportation employed by Wonder Woman. Golden Age Wonder Woman also rode Sky Kanga, a giant kangaroo that carried Wonder Woman through outer space by jumping from asteroid to asteroid.

Sky Kanga bothers me. Sky Kanga bothers me because I can't imagine any adult mind maintaining the needed suspension of disbelief to read about Sky Kanga without laughing or throwing away the comic in disgust.

I figure you would probably have to be about eight or ten years old to read about Sky Kanga and go, "OK, I can buy that for the moment. On with the story!"

I had always known that Golden Age Wonder Woman comics were sold to kids, but I never really took cognizance of that fact until I started thinking about Sky Kanga.

And the reason that Sky Kanga bothers me is that Wonder Woman was sending messages like this to kids of that age:


"All right kids! What time is it? It's lesbian bondage time!"

What the heck was Charles Marston up to? What did he think he was doing earnestly pimping the joys and benefits of bondage and dominance and submission relationships to ten year olds? Come to think of it, lesbian bondage! Because my suspicion is, they wouldn't notice or care about such stuff. For them it was all about Sky Kanga and Wonder Woman's powers.

The more I understand about Golden Age Wonder Woman, the less I know.

The Irony, It Burns!

One of many sexy bondage lingerie items sold on Amazon.com. I'd link to it, but they won't let me. ... 
Well, Amazon has turned my bondagerotica site down for its associates program because I have "explicit sexual images" on my site. (I do not in fact have explicit sexual images on my site, I even put little dealies on the ads to keep them from being explicit. Jeebus.)

Now, let me make it clear what Amazon has refused to do here: Amazon won't give me a cut of any of the sales they make of THEIR products that I link to from my site. Since I write about a lot of mainstream movies and TV shows, there's frequently an appropriate link to a video or DVD sold on Amazon, something I used to do regularly on my old Jolly Roper site. But my site is so redolent with sex that they won't let me link from it at all.

And the funny thing is, Amazon sells a LOT of sexual bondage-related content. It's not like they're virgins or anything like that. Most especially, they sell the lingerie pictured above.

And I find it EXTREMELY hypocritical that they won't enter into any kind of deal with ME because of the sexual nature of my site, when their site, the products THEY sell, includes plenty of pics of practically naked women in bondage.

It would be different if I wanted to advertise my site on Amazon, but I'm not doing that. Just sending them business. Freaking hypocrites. This is the sort of shit you wind up doing when you get into censorship.

I don't see any point in bringing this up to Amazon. They'd just dump that Associate, too. They're big, they don't have to care.

Tina Louise And the 40-Year Bitgag Gap

Over on my website, I've got an article about the first-ever -- and just about ONLY bit gag to appear in mainstream US TV. (The article includes vidcaps, of course.) It was worn by Tina Louise on an episode of Bonanza back in 1968. Yes, THAT Tina Louise. She was doing a guest shot as an abducted frontier hottie, probably in preparation for her later role as a castaway on "Gilligan's Island."

The weird thing is, there were no bit gags seen on American TV until Fabiano Udenio wore one on the "Amazon" TV series in 1999. Practically another century -- certainly, another half century.

I'm not sure if there's any historical verisimilitude to the whole Indians/bit gag thing, especially since the tribe on Bonanza was clearly Hollywood Indians ... I mean, they can hear a squirrel coughing in the woods three miles away, but they don't NOTICE a bunch of burly white settlers sneaking up on them? Riiiiiight. Plus, being Hollywood Indians, they were probably mostly Jewish -- very characteristic of that tribe.

In any event, I doubt the historical use of bit gags by actual Indians on logical grounds. Either they needed to silence their captives or they didn't. And the thing is, bit gags won't silence a captive. They do almost nothing to control screaming. So I don't think they would have been used. The only reason I can think the director of whomever thought a bit gag would be right would be that it had that Western look so prized by pioneers and Indians in the old days. I mean, wood, leather straps -- it's practically a farm implement as it is.

Pity that line of thinking never caught on.