"Louisiana Slay Ride" Now on Amazon and Smashwords

 Here's the Amazon Link

Here's the Smashwords Link

Here's the blurb:

“I know oligarchs can get away with almost anything, but setting off nukes under oil wells has to be the one thing not even an oligarch could get away with.”

Those were Honey Trapps’ words when she first heard abut Jacques Ledoux. Ledoux was Louisiana third generation oil wealth, a man who believed in himself but who probably should not have. He had already squandered a great deal of money on various unsuccessful schemes, so much that he was now only immensely wealthy instead of insanely wealthy. And Ledoux’s latest scheme looked like a desperate attempt to recoup his losses.

There were also rumors in the wealthy BDSM circles that Honey Trapp traveled in that some subs who scened with Ledoux never scened with anybody again. When the Initiative asks her to join Ledoux’s harem and get the goods on his nuke scheme in the most sexually submissive way possible, Honey doesn’t want to go. She has a rule about not subbing for even the most alpha male doms if they have bad reports from other subs, and subs who vanish is about as bad as the reports can get.

But Ledoux is rich and connected and hides his secrets well, if the rumors are even true. Only Honey’s unique skills at working her way into a dom’s heart via organs located elsewhere on his anatomy can worm the secrets out of him.

It’s Honey’s most dangerous assignment yet, filled with intrigue, danger and much sexually submissive hanky-panky in Ledoux’s harem. Sex, adventure and intrigue abound as Honey risks her person and her fortune to stop an oligarch from precipitating a nuclear disaster.

This novel is just over 43,000 words in length and is part of the Honey Trapp series.

And here's the Amazon cover:

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.

PMC Glasses Have Clouded Netflix’s Vision

A "shocking" steamy sexual bondage scene from the Netflix favorite, "365 Days."

This is about as wild as it gets on Netflix.

 In which I become the 4,263,769th writer to weigh in on "What's Wrong With Netflix"

There has been a lot of theorizing about what might have gone wrong with Netflix that has caused them to have the Earth-shattering minimal dip in subscriptions that they recently reported, causing them to have a 35 percent drop in market capitalization because investors are flighty idiots. (Not that I blame them, I’d be nervous too if I had two nickels to rub together in this ghoulish Late Stage Capitalism nightmare economy.)

Anyway, I want to get in on this whole theorizing thing myself, because I think I have a theory that is more all-encompassing than most other theories, which tend to run along the lines of “Netflix is failing because it isn’t making the kind of movies/shows I like any more.” My theory is more theoretical, more all-encompassing, explaining why Netflix fails to make or buy engaging content for its subscribers most of the time.

My theory is that the Netflix execs, the producers, the showrunners, the directors, set designers and decorators, costume designers and the writers are all members of the Professional Managerial Class (or PMC) or are at least PMC wannabes.

First of all, what do I mean by PMC glasses? I mean the people who make Netflix productions see the world from the viewpoint of one of the top 10 percent of American society, or world society. They are the affluent, the comfortable, the successful. They aren’t angry about anything. They aren’t upset about anything. They may have their causes and their viewpoints, but they’re comfortable causes and comfortable viewpoints.

And I’m not claiming that all these people being members of the PMC class or PMC wannabes is the result of any conspiracy. No one deliberately gave all those jobs to people just because they were PMC class members. Instead they gave people who are successful in film and television money, plenty of it, enough to propel them into the PMC class. By the time they got to the point where they were cutting deals with Netflix, they had been successful for a while. Members in good standing of the PMC class.

That’s why Netflix comedies aren’t funny. To be really funny, humor needs an edge provided by anger, by outsider outrage, which is generally in short supply among the very comfortable PMC class.

For example, one of the most successful, if not the most successful offerings on Netflix recently was “Don’t Look Up!” in which a planet-killer asteroid approaching Earth is an obvious stand-in for the climate crisis. It is edgy it is angry it is full of the sort of stuff that PMC types might find disturbing, looking at politics, politicians, the military and the media with a very hard, cynical eye. It has a downbeat ending and it portrays the mighty on Earth as a bunch of self-obsessed, greedy idiots who are too busy money grubbing and power grabbing to save themselves.

“Don’t Look Up!” would seem prove me wrong, except it had some outsider outrage going from David Sirota who co-wrote the script with director Adam McKay. Sirota was a senior advisor to Bernie Sanders’ 2020 Presidential campaign, and prior to “Don’t Look Up” was primarily known as a leftie commentator. He wasn’t a Marxist-Leninist, but he could fairly be described as a Social Democrat like Bernie Sanders.

It was Sirota’s leftist outrage over climate change and his in-depth knowledge of the duplicity of the media and politics that made the barbs sharp and nasty. The instincts of most PMC types would be to moderate the anger and the rage, replacing it with merely clever wordplay and very broad satire, leaving “Don’t Look Up!” in the vicinity of funny. Sirota’s knowledge and anger kept it right on target.

This rarely happens on Netflix, and I think that’s what makes the service dull. Once Netflix started getting up to 100 million subscribers, its major preoccupation became finding entertainment that wouldn’t offend its enormous base, rather than entertainment that would make them glad they were subscribers.

This impulse, combined with the PMC goggles that want to make everything look comfortable and safe makes everything dull and uninteresting. The comedies aren’t funny (lookin’ at you, “Yes Day” “Bad Trip” and “Starsky and Hutch”) the romances aren’t all that romantic and definitely not sexy (lookin’ at you, all of Netflix’s recent romcoms) and the action/adventure stuff is vigorous and active but not at all compelling (lookin’ at you “Red Notice,” and “Eagle Eye”) and sometimes they’re just godawful (lookin’ at you “Spenser Confidential”).

The sexuality stuff is also indicative. They can’t even match softcore porn in their sex scenes. It’s all ladylike porn, if you know what I mean. There are a lot of articles on the Internet about movies and shows that have porny scenes and content, and I’ve watched some of them, and they’re a bunch of nothingburgers compared to actual porn. They’re not porny, they’re kinda sorta in a way pornish, at best.

Do an image search of such notably “porny” movies and shows as “365 Days,” “Bridgerton,” and “Sex Education” if you like, you’ll see what I mean if you’re familiar with actual porn. There’s not much of it, it’s underlit, and most of the good parts get blacked out. It’s PMC porn, in short, nothing to offend someone too much and yet give them the impression that they saw something sexy.

The problem is, the PMC vision doesn’t “see” the vast majority of Netflix subscribers, who are definitely not part of the PMC class. They don’t connect with their subscribers psychologically, intellectually or emotionally. Netflix’s PMC types may have some demographic data, but they have no idea who their subscribers are are or how they live, other than “not as well as me.”

So the PMC types turn out generic stuff that doesn’t really interest their subscribers. The bland, comfortable stuff that suits the PMC vision doesn’t work for the angry, increasingly impoverished bulk of Americans locked in alienating, dead-end jobs that bore them and which they hate, while also taking great pleasure in gaming and social media of various sorts that the PMC types typically do not understand well.

If Netflix and its content providers wanted to appeal to their actual audience, if they could actually SEE them, they’d have more characters who were out-of-touch seniors doing and saying stupid things. They’d have more characters who were horrible corporate bosses making their employees’ lives miserable. They’d have more characters who were lovable slackers outwitting their horrible bosses and having sex with all the pretty girls and making the lives of those around them more rewarding, though generally not in monetary ways.

Climate change would be a huge theme in a lot of stories. Housing would be a theme, mostly not being able to get it. The way the PMC and the oligarchs rip off middle class and poor people would be a steady background theme to the stories, and often the main theme.

Homeless people would be portrayed as people, not drugged-out zombies. And most people would be living in cramped apartments, often with roommates to make paying the rent possible. And the struggle to keep the rent paid would be a much bigger thing.

PMC types would say such stories are boring and distressing, not the sort of thing people want to watch to be entertained. But the real truth is that the “people” they’re describing are the PMC class, because they can’t see the rest of us, and don’t want to.

And they would really HATE stories about how they economically oppress everyone else except their oligarch masters, and which detail how horribly managers treat employees as a group, because they instinctively dislike any story that reveals just how much better off their lives are than those of the middle class and poor people they systematically oppress.

So Netflix, its management and content creators consisting only of PMC types, don’t show these things or anything like them. They have shows about wealthy people, often members of the PMC class and oligarchs who lead “interesting” lives. Even when they portray members of the poor and middle class they do so through PMC lenses. The middle class and poor people on Netflix live in housing that is much nicer than real middle class and poor people could ever afford. They generally wear clothing and have possessions that are nicer than most middle class and poor people can afford. In fact, they tend to live like upper middle class and lower upper class people do – PMC types pretending to be poor and middle class, in short.

When Netflix does attempt a realistic or gritty depiction of poor or middle class people, they tend to go way too dark. For example “Hillbilly Elegy”is a gritty depiction of how tough people in Appalachian mountain country have it. It was presented in the PMC-controlled mainstream media as a sympathetic portrayal of Appalachian mountain people. But very quickly reviews came out saying that the movie was actually poverty porn, focusing only on the miseries of the Appalachian poor, creating a misleading view of who they were as people. Even when the PMC types are looking hard at the middle class and the poor, they cannot see them as they are.

Wouldn’t pay them to, you know.

I hope I haven’t given you the impression that the PMC are conspiring to exclude and misrepresent the poor and the middle class. It’s just a case of shared interests leading to a shared vision, one of those unwritten cultural things that’s invisible and would be denied by most members of the PMC.

But there are some members of the PMC who do intentionally lie and mislead about the economic oppression of the poor and middle class. Academics and media people often know enough to know that the wealth of the oligarchs comes from the economic oppression of the poor and middle class, but you’ll never hear it from their commentating and the media enterprises they work for.

And if PMC commentators do somehow attempt to tell a progressive message, especially on political or economic topics, they are very rapidly fired. For example, when MSNBC hired Dylan Rattigan, Krystal Ball, Ed Schultz and Cenk Uygar to give a progressive “edge” to their coverage, then fired them all when it turned out they had spines.

How does this all relate to Netflix’s woes? Netflix, with its hundreds of millions of subscribers and its PMC staff and oligarch management can’t see its subscribers, and by “see” I mean understand. What’s more, they don’t WANT to see their subscribers. What they really want to do is feed the subscribers bland, feel-good escapism and works that support the status quo, even when they claim to be edgy, challenging work.

(That’s why Netflix, and ALL the streaming media are so ecstatically happy with comic book movies. Movies about spandex-clad idiot good guys flying around and foiling the plans of spandex-clad idiot bad guys are just the pablum they want to serve to subscribers to keep them docile and unaware.)

This is why virtually all the entertianment options on Netflix rouse only half-hearted interest among subscribers, if they rouse any interest at all. Netflix and every streaming service and cable provider would LOVE to provide entertainment that will have audiences absolutely rapt over what they’re watching and eager for more. Many may actually believe they are doing just that. Some people do love a lot of Netflix productions. And some of them are good. (“Don’t Look Up!” “The Witcher” “Stranger Things” “Travelers” and some others.) But generally they’re a drop in the bucket compared to the huge swirling mass of mediocrity that is most of Netflix’s (and most other streaming services’) productions.

There’s a reason for that. Netflix’s content isn’t made for us. It’s made by PMC people, for PMC people, though many of them think they are making shows for us. They aren’t. That’s why they aren’t any good. They’re not supposed to be good. They’re supposed to be tranquilizers. Soma. And they are. Netflix’s collection of merely tolerable films isn’t a bug. It’s a feature.

See you at work tomorrow, bright and early!

Just for the record, this is actual steamy bondage sex.

Image source: Carissa Montgomery in Kink Shoot 35037, "Big Tit Milf in Extreme Bondage."

"Yard Sale Slut" Soon To Be a Major Netflix Film!

You can get the original novel here!

 

I've had to keep this under wraps for a while, but my agent, Pauline Perell, has called and I'm free to Tell All: my novel "Yard Sale Slut" will be made into a major motion picture to be aired on Netflix this fall. It's set in the near future, and is the story of Moira, once a promising student, who loses everything and is drugged, sold into slavery, stripped, bound, gagged, raped, lesbian gang raped, whipped, whored out and then suffered the most horrible humiliation of all: sold on the cheap at a yard sale to a sex slave tavern owner.

I don't think I'll be surprising anyone when I tell you that there was a huge bidding war on the story between Lifetime Channel and Netflix. The amount of pathos and bathos here is unbelievable. I didn't even believe it myself when I wrote it! So the seven figure check they're cutting me makes sense, Hollywood sense anyway.

Of course Neflix is asking for a few minor changes in the story to make it more acceptable to a mainstream audiences. Minor stuff, really. The rape and sex slavery themes, they feel, are a little much. Or as Netflix director Wilson Pluckett told me, "Look I get that 'Yard Sale Slut' is a dark, edgy, erotic, kinky satirical critique of capitalism gone zonkers, but we were thinking of taking it more in the direction of a lighthearted rom-com. And you can't have actual rape and sex slavery in lighthearted rom-com, it's just too heavy. So we were thinking of throwing out the slavers altogether. Instead we're thinking of having the female MC bought as a "slave" at one of those charity yard sales they have, by the male MC. Be a good vehicle for Freddie Prinze and Jessica Alba, you know."

"If you wanted a lighthearted rom-com, you could have optioned How My Slavegirl Found Me it's an actual lighthearted rom-com," I pointed out. 

"And we may just do that down the road," said Pluckett. "But for now everyone is sold on "Yard Sale Slut" except for the title. The working title is now "Yard Sale Bargain Romance" to give you some idea. But otherwise it's exactly the same story. The male MC is still a politico, only now he's a candidate for US Senator from New York. And there'll be all sorts of raised eyebrows and media interest in the Senatorial candidate buying a slavegirl, you know, even if it's only a pretendy slavegirl. Mucho boffo humor here."

"Oh, I could see that working very well with a sexual relationship where she's his sexy slavegirl and he's her dominating master, all very consensual of course," I said. "Plenty of chances for double entendre."

"Well, about that," said Pluckett. "We find our rom-coms work much better in foreign markets without any sex. Or nudity. Maybe a chaste kiss at the end, maybe a bared shoulder or two. But no sex at all, especially no kinky sex."

"I'm surprised you left in the romance and the comedy," I observed, catching the way the wind was blowing.

"Well there won't be much of either, to be honest," said Plunkett. "Actual romance and humor are difficult and dangerous. We're looking for a script that is only in the vicinity of funny, and which keeps the romance down to knowing looks and raised eyebrows. We just want to leave audiences with a general impression that nice people had fun after encountering some mild difficulties, which is really what your story is all about, when you think about it."

"Of course it is," I lied. "And of course there's all those checks I'll be getting based on net profits to help soothe my conscience."

"Exactly!" lied Pluckett. "I knew we could come to a meeting of the minds on this!"

NOTE: Post meeting, I've been informed that the story will now be set in Ukraine and will involve a giant time-traveling spider. Plot twist: the spider is the nicest character in the film!

P.S. "Yard Sale Slut" is one of the three stories included in my Three Tavern Sluts collection found here. And extra buck goes a long way on Smashwords.

Greek Harem: Honey Trapp #3 Now Available on Amazon and Smashwords

 

Cover of the Smashwords edition of Greek Harem. Here's the link!

Cover of the Amazon edition of Greek Harem. Here's the link!

In the third installment of the Honey Trapp Snappy Stories, Honey infiltrates a Greek shipping oligarch's harem of pay-for-play slavegirl beauties. Her goal: to help discover how the oligarch's shipping firm is sliding past regulations aimed at preventing the use of bunker oil as fuel. "Something funky in the bunky oil indeed!" (Bunker oil is basically what's left over when you refine crude oil into gasoline. It's very low-grade stuff, full of sulphur dioxide and particulate matter which is toxic to human beings and other living things, which is why there are regulations concerning its use, pathetically limited though those regulations are.)

This plotline gives me plenty of chances to indulge in some really fun orgy scenes and also some ultra-kinky public bondage sex action at the Art Institute for the Sexually Insane. It was great fun to write those scenes, which is probably why they constitute the bulk of the novella.  And it was fun to play with the personalities of the four slavegirls other then Honey, their perceptions of themselves and one another, and to contrast a pay-for-play harem where anyone can leave if they want to, and the issues of historical harems which were not consensual and which sometimes led to bad results, like people getting killed.

I also had some fun with nomenclature and myth. All of the local slavegirls have names from Greek mythology. One in particular stands out. Her name was initially Iris, but I decided for some reason, which was probably my subconscious at work/play, to base her on a the face of a remarkable woman I'd seen in some porn photo. (I've looked all over for it, I know it's somewhere in the huge folder I call my "Archives" but I can't find it.) She had a bull-like quality to her face, except that it was very feminine, not masculine at all. You might think cow-like, but we associate cowlike with being kind of placid and sleepy-looking, and that didn't match this woman's face at all -- she was very alert and aware-looking, just very confident-looking as well. Like a bull that absolutely owns its paddock. 

While writing the description, I remembered that there was a Greek myth about a woman mating with a bull, and sure enough, there was. A quick trip to Professor Google showed that a woman named Pasiphae offended the gods somehow, and she was cursed with lust for the Cretan bull, even though she was married to King Minos. She subsequently gave birth to the Minotaur, and also several human children, including a woman named Ariadne. I decided it would be fun to rename Iris the bull-faced woman Ariadne, thus ever-so-subtly implying that she is a distant descendant of the mythical Pasiphae, and the bull traits still show up in her children, however watered down. I didn't make Ariadne's descent part of the plot, but I did have some fun with the characterization. I'll say no more.

Also, check out the covers of my book. They are a good indication of the differences between Amazon and Smashwords censorship rules. There are two main differences between the two images. The Amazon image wears no gag, the Smashwords image wears a gag. And the Amazon has a thong strap and a but of cloth covering the portion of her butt that's visible from the side. The Amazon image does not.  

I very much wanted a gag on the Amazon cover, I thought it kicked up the sexiness and kinkiness of the image a lot, but I did some research and other Amazon books with the words "Gagged" right in the title (like "Bound and Gagged") did not have pictures of gagged women on them. I've gotten away with such imagery in the past, but after looking at all the boos with "Gagged" in the title and no gags on the cover art, I decided better safe than sorry. I also covered up the butt bits, negligible though they were, because Amazon does not like to acknowledge that women have butts. I wasn't so put off by that because I don't think it affected the image much.

I also put the collar, leash and wrist cuff on the woman, because those do show up on the covers of kinky titles on Amazon. Plus, the cuff is plausibly deniable, there's nothing to distinguish it from a bracelet.  And I also used the "Scale" tool to make the woman's body a bit thicker than in the original: she's one of those leggy fashion model whippet types, which is great, but I suspect erotica readers like a little more flesh on their models. That said, I absolutely love the strutting stride of the model, the way her head is thrown back, the general go-for-it attitude her whole body projects. Sales of this book are going VERY well, I suspect the cover might just have something to do with it.

What do you think? Leave your comments, oh, just anywhere.

England Goes Boom! -- Honey Trap #2 Now on Smashwords and Amazon

 He'res story number 2 in the Honey Trapp Snappy Stories  series, "England Goes Boom!" This time she's spying on English oil oligarchs who are definitely up to No Good, being oil oligarchs. As one of them says, "It’s the money that counts you know, and by that measure my true allegiance is to Panama, not England."

I'm taking a pulp aesthetic into my Honey Trapp stories, and having fun with it. "Pulp" and "erotica" used to exist quite comfortably together, only it was called "porn" in those days and it was marketed primarily toward men. It would be really interesting to study whether or not the primary readership of those old porn novels was male or female. I strongly suspect there were a LOT more female readers than male readers. 

Now, I could definitely be wrong here. Back in the 50s and 60s, censorship was an overwhelming fact of life in America -- there just wasn't a lot of sexy stuff around for average folks to consume if they wanted to, and to judge from the demand for porn novels, they definitely wanted to.  So guys could have gone for written porn just because there was no visual porn for them to buy. I mean, this was a time when weak-ass European art porn like "I am Curious Yellow" was a success in America.

Unfortunately, a quick dig on Google turned up nothing useful in the way of data on sixties porn-buying demographics.  The hits included lots and lots of modern stuff, lots and lots of old-timey anti-porn censorship stuff and very little else. The best I could do is this excellent description of what it was like to be a porn writer in those days by Robert Silverberg, who wrote 150 of those old porn novels. Unfortunately, it contains little or nothing in the way of useful information about the market for porn novels in those days, other than that there was a strong demand for them.

The reason I think it COULD be that the 60s market wisdom was wrong about who was buying/reading the porn novels is the Gor novels. The publishers of the Gor novels related at one point that they were amazed to discover that the bulk of the readers of the Gor novels were primarily women. (The first Gor novel was published in 1964, so it's more or less a contemporary, though the Gor novels extended right into the present.)

The Gor novels were a brilliant concept (softcore bondage porn involving slavegirls could seamlessly mix with interplanetary sword and sandal adventures if you make the slavegirls major characters and focus on their relationship with the protagonist along with the sword and sandal adventures) that was badly executed (way too much to go into here) but not badly executed enough to keep Norman's work from being more popular than all the other DAW fantasy novelists combined.  

If you're familiar with what was going on in romance writing of the time, you know EXACTLY why Norman's Gor novels were popular. The modern prohibitions about storylines involving rape did not exist back in the 60s and 70s. The rapes were never graphic, because trad romance publishers of the time didn't allow graphic sex scenes, period, or in some cases, no sex scenes at all, just implied sex scenes. And since there was virtually no self-publishing and not much indie publishing, the gatekeepers had full control. But there were PLENTY of storylines in romances in which the heroines are captured and raped by the Usual Suspects (pirates, Arab slavers, pirates, robbers, pirates, wealthy lords and of course pirates). In fact they were a genre, called "bodice rippers." A very popular genre.

Meanwhile, the Gor novels were being sold as science fiction and fantasy. They featured what would be mild sex scenes by modern standards, but they were very clear on what went on in the sex scenes. For example, in "Dancer of Gor" the titular dancer's virginity is auctioned off by the tavern she is dancing in, and sold to 17 lucky winners. And all 17 have sex with her in succession over one long night where she's chained in a tavern alcove and hooded as well (so she won't fall for her virginity-taker(s).) They don't give any detailed descriptions of throbbing swords of lusting thrusting into honeyed chambers of love, though I do believe that it the position Our Heroine was initially chained up in and the fact that others chained her up in different ways was mentioned, and that she was exhausted by the end of the night, and also very relaxed.

That sort of thing is pure-D high-grade fantasy fuel for anybody who likes bodice-rippers, much more powerful than anything that was allowed in bodice-rippers of the time. Of COURSE bodice-ripper romance readers flocked to the Gor novels, so of COURSE Norman was DAW's top-selling fantasy author by far. He was getting fantasy readers who liked his kinky storylines AND romance readers who liked them.

And that is why I think there might have been a lot more female readership for pulp porn/erotica stories than we know of. But ... I could be wrong.

And it's worth noting that things have gone full circle over the last few years. Recently I discovered this fascinating discussion thread on Goodreads attempting to list bodice-ripper authors who have and have not neutered their rape scenes when publishing them as ebooks on Amazon. Because some bodice-ripper authors from the 1960s and 70s and god-knows-when are doing just that -- editing out the rapes that were part of the story, for fear that Amazon or maybe feminists or whomever will get on their case. Let that sink in -- written erotica from the 1960s is TOO RAUNCHY for Amazon nowadays, in a time when porn videos are FULL of rape scenarios.

Never fear, Honey Trapp #2 contains no rape, noncon or dubcon, just enthusiastic happy sexual bondage fucking. If it did contain rape, I'd just publish on Smashwords alone, as I have with many other stories. Although THAT may be ending soon as well, which I'll save for another post.

And speaking of censorship, I've had to create two separate covers for this book. Amazon has ridiculous censorship standards, Smashwords is much more generous. I'll post the two covers here. See if you can guess what Amazon rules make the Amazon version acceptable, and the Smashwords version acceptable.

Amazon cover:

Smashwords cover:

Ok, here are the Amazon rules that are violated by the Smashwords cover:

1) There shall be no visible butt crack!

2) There shall be no bondage, even crappy totally mild bondage!

There are a LOT of other rules for Amazon erotica covers (other genres are not subject to the same stringent rules). But we won't go into that here. You may be wondering what sort of cover I might have come up with if I had the freedom to make any kind of cover I like. I gotcha covered: (sorry, couldn't resist)

(Image Credit: "Athletic MILF Fuck Toy Cherie Deville Punished in Bondage and Sybian!!" for Kink.com.)

You may be thinking this image is powerful just because it's hard core porn, but it's also powerful because it's a very dramatic image in its own right. It would definitely attract readers. But for now, the game is what it is, as they say, and this cover shall not grace my story, dammit.

Finally, here's the blurb for the story:

After the successful conclusion of her assignment in Las Miserabils (see: “The Naked Jungle”) Honey turns down an assignment with the Saudis (even the Bascom Agency won’t send her there). Honey winds up on another Bascom job in England. The oily English oligarchs are up to their usual no good and it’s up to Honey to eavesdrop the hell out of them for the Initiative, the secret organization trying to save Earth from climate change. She’ll eavesdrop on them no matter what she’s suspended from or tied to, and no matter how tied up she is and no matter what kind of kinky sexual position she’s in. She’s just that kind of spy.

And the results for the oligarchs just might be explosive!

This novelette is over 10,000 words long and is number 2 in the Honey Trapp Adventures series.

Here's the Amazon link for the novelette.

Here's the Smashwords link for the novelette.

 Now what are you waiting for? Get buying and get reading! You know you want to.

"The Naked Jungle" Now Available on Smashwords

 

Click here to get the novel on Smashwords in Kindle, Nook and other formats!

Honey Trapp is a natural born submissive, a beautiful party girl who loves doing every kinky, sexy thing that sexy dominant men, including the world’s richest and most powerful men, want her to do. She’s also an agent of the Initiative, a shadowy worldwide secret organization devoted to forcing the world’s governments to combat climate change before it destroys human civilization.

The Initiative offers Honey a long-term assignment that involves three months’ training in the slave kennels of the Bascom Agency, the world’s finest supplier of slavegirls-for-hire to the wealthy and powerful. Honey jumps at the chance to be trained in the closest thing there is to a real slave training school, because it’s sexy fun and great cover for any female spy.

But Bascom’s training regimen is rigorous. The lessons are long and hard and thrust deep into Honey’s psyche and elsewhere The bondage is strict and the sex is raunchy. Can Honey survive and enjoy the many and varied, often arousing training sessions she endures in the Bascom slave training pens? And will Honey survive her first assignment as the personal love slave of the Generalissimo, the dictator of the tiny nation of Las Miserabil in South America? The mighty fossil energy giant Globoil, Inc., is the major source of income for Las Miserabil, and hence, the major source of power for the Generalissimo. And when Globoil’s drill rig wastes pollute the water source of the Arapunga tribe that lives in Las Miserabil’s interior, leaving them sick and dying, no one in power cares – but the Initiative cares.

As an agent of the Initiative Honey will do every sexy submissive thing she can do to help put an end to Globoil’s pollution -- but will it be enough?

This novel is over 40,000 words long.