Phone Sex

I read it in a magazine a while back. Survey reckoned sixty per cent of all women have had a phone conversation with someone during sex. Doesn’t mean sixty per cent of women do it every time, or that the women who do it have phone conversations for sixty per cent of the time they’re having sex. But Jessica’s way up there in percentage terms.
When her phone plays a bleepy version of some club dance anthem, Jessica scrabbles on the bedside table for it.
‘Hi!’ Voice pitched a little lower than normal, husky and breathless. There’s a reason for that. She’s feeling hot, wild and sheet-biting eager.
‘He did what? Ohhh…’ The Ohhh is because we’re having a doggy style moment and I’ve shifted position very slightly in a way that makes a big difference to depth of penetration.
I guess that she’s talking to Sharon. They’ve had several conversations recently about Sharon’s husband, who seems to have spent a lot of evenings working late, and weekends playing golf. Except the golf club, when Sharon phoned them, had no record of him being on the course and he wasn’t in the clubhouse.
It doesn’t matter to me who Jessica’s talking to. As long as it’s not her husband. And I’ve reached the point where my own need to climax is building in urgency. I’m pretty sure the sound of my thighs slapping against her ass cheeks will be audible over the phone.
As are her gasps, evidently. I can’t hear what Sharon’s saying, but after Jessica’s quiet moan, I get Sharon’s squeal even through the pinhead-sized speaker on the phone.
Jessica breathes heavily, chuckles, grunts into the phone.
‘I’m in a motel…’
The room’s bland. Brown carpet, magnolia walls, a long shelf with a TV, telephone and kettle none of which we need. A bed that’s quite sturdy and doesn’t rattle or creak, which we do need.
Her dress, a blue button-through in light fabric, is on the floor by the TV. She didn’t bother with underwear. I’d only have ripped it off her and she knows it. My trainers are on opposite corners of the room and my jeans, jacket and shirt are draped over the single tub-shaped armchair. I didn’t bother with socks or boxers. She’d only have ripped the boxers off me. And sex while wearing socks is definitely a style faux pas. She, on the other hand, is still wearing neon-blue heels that dig into my calves when she writhes, but definitely aren’t a faux pas.
She also has a gold anklet that winks in a thin shaft of sunlight that stabs through the closed curtains. Very eighties, but on her delicate ankle it’s utterly charming.
She wanted me to buy it for her a while back, wears it every time we meet up. Takes it off again when she goes back home. Calls it her slave anklet.
‘No!’ she shrieks, amused. ‘I’m with uhhhh, uhhhh…’
She hasn’t forgotten my name. It’s just that I’ve used my left hand to reach under her belly and pressed the nail of my middle finger into her clit. And I take the ‘No’ to be her answer to a question about who she’s with. As in No, she’s not with her husband.
And no, I don’t know who he is. All I can say is he’s some kind of corporate executive who spends a lot of time away from home and leaves Jessica terminally bored. I’m the cure for her boredom.
‘You’re joking!’
I’m not interested. There’s pressure in my balls, and the pump-and-pulse feeling that runs from the base of big vein on the underside of my dick all the way up to its head.
‘Are you serious?’ She sounds incredulous.
Jessica snakes a hand under her body – the hand holding the phone. I’m moving more deliberately, slow and long, building my own climax, but she’s twisting and pushing against me in a way that makes it difficult. And there’s a ker-klik of the photo app on her phone.
I slap her ass. The fleshy smack is followed by a high-pitched ringing echo from the walls, and then her gasp that isn’t just shock but excitement.
Yes, she likes it. It’s the thing that turns up the dial on her sexual amplifier to max.
‘You really want me to?’
Jessica withdraws her hand. Fingers flicker across the phone’s screen. She’s just sent Sharon a pic of my balls and my cock pushing into her.
She arches her back, which increases the friction for both of us. Starts to moan more urgently, mutters ‘Yes, yes’ either to me or to Sharon, I don’t exactly know, and then ‘Fuck, oh fuck!’ which I guess is her beginning to come.
I reach forward and grab Jessica’s hair, an unruly blonde mass that trails halfway down her spine. Pull back on it, forcing her head up. It’s a big trigger for her, in a good way. It triggers her orgasm.
And the room is flooded with Jessica’s breathless howl of coming, my grunt and growl of ejaculation, and a quieter tinny shriek that comes from her phone.

‘Was she…?’
We’re both lying on the bed, limbs entangled. Post-coital.
Jessica nods. ‘Once she figured what we were doing, she started playing with herself. Then, when she had the pic I sent, and the audio of us, she brought herself off. You made two of us come at the same time.’
‘So what’s the deal with her husband?’
Jessica shrugs. ‘I dunno.’
She stops holding out on me when I take a nipple between my teeth. But only after I’ve taken her back to the point when she’s not quite sure if my bite is pleasure or pain.
‘Word is, he’s exploring his sexuality. Sharon’s tracked a credit card payment to a billing name that turns out to be a professional dominant.’
‘So is she doing more about it than talking with you?’
Jessica grins at me.
‘Not as such. Not yet. But it’s on her to-do list.’
I wonder about the idea of an affair as something you’d put on a to-do list. The kind of thing you’d do on principle and slot into your schedule as a lifestyle choice. I can imagine there are people like that. I can imagine Sharon’s one of them, scheduling what is essentially a revenge fuck.
Her phone rings again. It’s a long conversation and I zone out for a while.
Jessica nudges me awake.
‘Sharon says, would you be up for it if I left my phone camera on next time?’
‘Why?’
She smirks. ‘Because I can run streaming video to her.’
‘She wants to watch us fuck?’
There’s more conversation before she turns to me and says ‘It’s the next best thing to having an affair. But consider it an audition for when she does want to have one.’
‘We’d better make it interesting, then…’

And we do. Apparently Sharon’s very excited by the fact I’ve booked a ninth-floor room in a good-quality hotel, tied Jessica up and made her stand at the window. And by the use of a riding crop mark her ass. And even more so by the industrial-strength massager I’ve brought with me to bring Jessica to a screaming forced orgasm. Sharon’s even decided to get herself an ankle bracelet like Jessica’s.

***

Yes, it’s been a while since we posted. That’s life – sometimes we have to buckle down and write stuff for paying readers rather than spend time on the blog.
The story is, incidentally, inspired by a real survey that was published in June this year. You can read news articles on it in the Huffington Post, The Guardian and probably elsewhere – though apparently while 62% of women will check their phones during sex, only 34% actually admitted to answering a phone call while in the throes of ecstasy.

Sex, Art and Aromatherapy for free (until 9 June)

Xcite tell me Sex, Art, and Aromatherapy will be free on iTunes Bookstore between 27th May – 9th June.

It’s a short story – one of my gentler pieces of erotica, and about 6000 words – about a woman who’s already experienced in BDSM and fetish, but she falls into conversation with an older man in an art gallery, who also seems experienced in that world. He tells her stories about how, in his youth, BDSM was simply one part of a wider and more spiritual quest. She sets off on a journey with him to discover some enlightenment.

Quick sample:

The label says the picture is called ‘Untitled No. 41 (1989)’, by Joshua Cesario.

Ruby consults her mobile phone. The display should tell her the time, but it’s blank. The battery’s died.

A few other people are in the gallery. One is an older man, sitting on the leatherette bench in the middle of the space. He’s looking at the same picture.

‘Excuse me,’ she whispers. ‘What’s the time?’

He looks at his watch, casually. ‘A couple of minutes after three. Are you in a hurry?’

She’s not. Though she was planning on buying some shoes and chocolate on the way home.

‘You’ve been looking at the picture for a while,’ the man observes. ‘Do you know much about it?’

‘Why? Are you the artist?’

He chuckles. ‘Much as I’d like to, I don’t paint. I’m an aromatherapist.’ Figures: for the first time, Ruby notices a faint scent of rosewater in the air. ‘But I did know him, for a time. I first met him at a party. This was maybe twenty years ago.’

‘Oh?’ Ruby’s interested, but not yet hooked.

‘You’ve no doubt worked out that despite being abstract, the picture’s about sex. Specifically, about sex and bondage. It was… How shall I put this? It was that kind of party. Fetishistic. Orgiastic.’

Ruby does a mental doubletake, remembering that this fifty-something man with greying hair must have been young once. The kind of things she’s done, while fresh and interesting to her when she experienced them, have been done before…

‘I remember he’d tied up a young lady – she was a lady actually, though I don’t recall her exact title – and there was a certain amount of sex involved along with the painting. But that’s another story. This painting, I remember him explaining the details in a drunken conversation. It was a memorial to a particular woman he’d been having an affair with, to their idea of love.’

Of course the large canvas was about sex. Otherwise, why the pile of clothes in one corner and the shoes at the end of what, presumably, is a naked body? And what picture isn’t about sex, anyway, in some coded form? But the story coded into this picture suddenly captures her imagination and she wants to know more.

This link to iTunes should take you to the US iTunes store directly. If you need another store, just search for author ‘Fulani’ and title ‘Sex, Art and Aromatherapy’.

Depending on which store you’re viewing you’ll either see the cover image at the head of this post or the one on the ‘Our Publications’ page (also see left) – when it first went onto iTunes they weren’t keen on covers depicting bondage.

So have fun. For free, until 9th June.

Sex, Art, Aromatherapy, Androids and iPhones

Every so often we check the stats for the blog, which among other things tell us where people are clicking out to. And occasionally, we find they’ve clicked on a link way back in the blog somewhere that’s been updated at some point over the past couple of years.

A case in point is Fulani’s novella Sex, Art and Aromatherapy. We can’t even find the broken link that someone clicked on (update – we have now, and fixed it) but for the avoidance of doubt, here’s the link for it at Xcite Books. It is of course also available in a bunch of other places including Amazon.com (picture also links there), Amazon.co.uk, and Kobobooks.

It’s a standalone short story, i.e. around 6000 words: Ruby is already experienced in BDSM and fetish, and she’s surprised to meet an older man in an art gallery, of all places, who also seems experienced in that world. He tells her stories about how, in his youth, BDSM was simply one part of a wider and more spiritual quest. Ruby sets off on a journey to discover some enlightenment of her own…

Meanwhile, in the process of checking the old links we discovered something we didn’t even know about. It’s also available now from Waterstones as an ebook – and you can also find it as as Android app and an iPhone app, and on iTunes (though quite why the top iTunes search result on Google shows it in the Kazakhstan iTunes store is something of a mystery).

[Edited to add: here’s a link to buy Sex, Art and Aromatherapy on Android, and here’s a link for the iPhone version. Plus, depending on where you’re buying from and what format you’re buying in, you might find it has the cover shown below, which was created for the iTunes version when they were being snippy about ‘sexual’ cover images. Actually it’s quite suggestive…]

Sometimes you can tell

This is a teaser. It’s the beginning of a story that will ultimately be quite a bit longer, though I hope it stands up on its own as a bit of flash fiction. However, if anyone has any desire to see it take off in any particular direction please feel free to make suggestions.

If I’m lucky it will be part of a story cycle based around the sexual adventures and misadventures of a bunch of deadbeat characters, small-time criminals, their friends and enemies.

***

Sometimes you can tell, can’t you?
I got this job, stacking shelves and working the till in a hardware store. It’s not part of a chain. It’s owned by my half-brother’s uncle’s boyfriend, which is how I got the gig I guess. He looked at me and says he don’t go for girls himself, but it’d be nice for the customers to see a pair of tits around the place. Plus, he says, we won’t need to close for lunch.
Arnie, that’s the owner, comes in each day about eleven. Smelling of aftershave. Wanders around a bit like he’s in charge, wafts his man-scent around the place. Goes to the tiny upstairs office and does a line of coke around midday, which I know because his dealer comes by the shop. Ten minutes after that, Gideon goes up there. Gideon’s same age as me, nineteen, fit guy with a sloppy grin and razorcut hair and a six-pack. What he says is he needs to go over the accounts with Arnie. Something like that. Different excuse for each day of the week. And I know what they’re doing because the shop’s part of a street of old terraced houses that’ve been converted, and the floorboards up there creak like fuck.
So: yeah, sometimes you can tell. You can tell what’s going on in the customers’ minds. Because for some people – and I’m not ashamed to say I’m one of them – a hardware store isn’t just a place that sells hardware. It’s a place that sells sex. It sells toys and possibilities and fantasies.
This guy comes to the till, and he’s buying:
– thirty metres of 7mm diameter polypropylene rope
– four mouse traps
– a pack of huge cable ties, the kind you’d use to hold plants to a garden trellis, or secure someone’s wrists and ankles
– some D-shackles and snaphooks
So where does your imagination go with that? The same place mine does?
The guy smiles at me as he hands me money. He’s maybe in his thirties. Not old enough to be my dad. No, wait, he probably is old enough because my dad was seventeen when I was born. And my mum was fifteen. From where I’ve come from, not having had a kid by the age I am now is more fucking miraculous than a virgin birth. My dad’s thirty-five this year, which is about what this guy is.
“Hope you have a good time with this stuff,” I say. My voice has got an I-know-what-you’re-doing kind of tone to it.
And he eyeballs me, long and slow, pupil to pupil. Maybe more like teacher to pupil. Hangs it out, like the fantasy he’s going to make with all this stuff is just hanging in the air between us in a little bubble and we’re both watching it. Hangs it out so I get the taste of sex in my mouth. And he says: “I’m planning on having a very good time with you.”
Hear that? That’s no Freudian slip, is it?
“With me?” My voice has gone all squeaky.
He looks at me, at my face. “I said I’m planning on having a very good time, thank you. But I could have it with you, if you like.”

***

I don’t have much out in this kind of style at the moment. There’s First Day at Work, which has a work-based theme (obviously) but doesn’t have such a grungy feel. It’s one of my earlier stories but it has the advantage of being sold as a long short story in its own right. Or there’s a free story, Transference, on my other blog. It does aim at a similar kind of feel. Or for something a little stranger albeit not in quite the same vein, try ‘Filthy White Dress’, in the Making Her Pay five-story collection and also the 20-story Tricks For Kicks collection, both published by Xcite.

-F

Government denies existence of mermaids

We thought Old Palfrey had finally lost it. Came into the bar that night calling for drink and raving about having seen a mermaid. I asked him how much he’d already had. “Half a bottle of rum,” he said. “Needed it to steady my nerves. Wouldn’t you, if a mermaid came up caught in one of your lines?”

The older guys, seasoned hands, just chuckled and shook their heads. The younger ones shrugged their shoulders. “Whatever you caught, just send it to the canning factory with the rest of the catch. No one’ll know the difference.”

But he wouldn’t have it. Half woman, half fish. Nice face. Tits on it. Long blonde hair. And the clincher was this: “She’s still in the hold. I tied her hands to a stanchion there.”

“You mean you haven’t offloaded your catch?” No one keeps their catch after they’ve docked, the factory wants it fresh. “Well, in that case,” I said, “there’s one way to settle it. Let’s go see what it was you did catch.”

So we went back down to the docks. Old Palfrey, me, Jack, Jules, Ty and Brad. With torches. Made him open up the hatch.

And right there, hands tied, was a mermaid. Resting on a pile of lobster pots.

She looked at us with venom in her eyes. Slapped away questing hands with her tail. But she was weak, and we got a rope around her just above the tailfin.

“See?” Old Palfrey said triumphantly. “Told you I got myself one. Came right up with the pots, unconscious. Like she was exhausted and fouled herself on a line.”

“You gonna call the coastguard?” I asked. “This is going to make the news.”

“What’cha do with a mermaid?” Jack asked. It was a rhetorical question. “Cos I don’t see a cunt. Gotta be in the mouth, then.”

And while the rest of us were standing around he’d got his cock out, grabbed her by the hair to pull her face up and started pumping between her lips. She made gkk-gkk sounds. Her eyes were big, round, startled. She might feel venom but wasn’t exactly in a position to express it.

“If you don’t want her,” Brad said slyly, “I’ll buy her off you. She can live in my bath and soap me down when I get in with her.” Yeah. Like he ever bothered to even take a bath.

Jules fucked her, then Ty.

By the end of it her face was a slimy mess. She didn’t even seem conscious.

“You should have her, too,” Jack told me.

“Nope. You don’t just fuck a strange new species. That’s asking for trouble. And you don’t, like, fuck the other stuff that comes up in your catch, do you?”

Brad just grinned. He’s a slimy bastard but I’d never have expected that of him. That’s so perverted it’s surreal.

“Listen, you don’t know anything about her. Germs, parasites, weird stuff. And you’re lucky her tongue doesn’t have fucking spikes on it.”

Then a little voice from the darkness. “Motherfuckers.”

What?

“Hey,” I called out. “Did you just speak English?”

Her breath came in irregular gulps. “Of course I… speak fucking English. Stop me… Drying out. Water.”

Old Palfrey sloshed a bucket of slop from the bilges over her. It seemed to help. Different strokes for different folks, I guess.

“What are you?” I asked.

“You don’t want to know.” Quiet voice. Dreamy. “But if you want to stay and keep me company…?”

Old Palfrey, too old and alcohol-soaked to contemplate a mermaid blowjob, had already fallen asleep. Jack, Jules, Ty and Brad were too young and alcohol-soaked to even think it was a strange idea. Or be put off by the bilge slops. For all I know Brad actually found it a turn-on. And I was too sober to know what the hell I thought. Or felt.

So I left them to it.

***

Around seven the next morning I went back to the docks to see what the score was. The dock gates were blocked, though, by a couple of black SUVs. No insignia on them. And there were plenty of guys in suits I didn’t recognize, plus a few marines in uniform. And armed.

Lunchtime, the talk in the bar was about how Old Palfrey’s boat had been seized. No one know who by, or where it had been taken. Neither Old Palfrey nor the other guys were anywhere. I’d left them on the boat, screwing the mermaid. Far as anyone knew, they were still there when the SUVs pulled up a couple of hours later.

And there was a report on the TV in the corner of the bar. The government were strenuously denying the existence of mermaids. No evidence of aquatic humanoids has ever been found. That’s what they said.

We never saw Old Palfrey, or the other guys, again. Not ever.

***

This story’s inspired by a BBC report, ‘No evidence of mermaids, says US Government‘. Apparently there was  TV show on the Discovery Channel about mythical creatures that a lot of people thought was a documentary about real ones. The US government took the unusual step of making the statement that ‘no evidence of aquatic humanoids has ever been found’.

Related stories: Fulani has a story ‘Andi in Chains’, in the Lucy Felthouse collection ‘Seducing the Myth‘, a selection of retellings of old myths from various cultures. ‘Andi in Chains’ is an urban punk version of the Andromeda myth, one he especially likes since it involves a nude maiden chained to a rock waiting to be eaten by a monster – very damsel-in-distress style…

Sex code

QR code – where does it link to?

I’ve been in town, like I am every week, a regular meeting at the arts centre. At the end of the meeting at which we’ve decided nothing and changed the world even less, I head back to my car. I’ve parked two streets away and the most direct route is down a narrow one-way street, little more than an alley.

The centre isn’t in the bad part of town, exactly, but it’s on the edge of the city core, a location where some of the cheaper and more grimy nightclubs rub up against the second-hand musical instrument shop, the launderette-cum-internet café, and the high-priced flats constructed out of an old office building as part of the city regeneration programme.

I know the cheap and grimy nightclubs intimately, I’ve bought stuff at the music shop, washed clothes and surfed at the launderette.  But they’re not what attract my attention.

There’s a door recessed into a brick wall, like a fire exit from an old textiles factory of now-uncertain use. And stuck on and around the door are small pieces of paper, about the half the size of a business card. They have QR codes on them.

You know about QR codes, right? The small square black-and-white chequered patterns you see everywhere from nightclub posters to advertisements to airline boarding passes. They encode information, anything from just a name or stock number to a website address or, for all I know, a short story. Ironically the art centre had just done an exhibition based on a QR code theme.

So, there are lots of these things and that makes me curious.

One of the exhibits had been this: visitors pin a QR code on a big map of the city which is on a gallery wall. People photograph the code with the camera in their smartphone, which will usually have an app to unravel the information. The information is a link, the link takes you to a website, to a place on the website where the person posting the code has also written a blog entry about what happened to them or what they did at that place on the map.

The idea is to view the city through other people’s eyes.

Now, here we have the codes placed in an actual, physical location instead of on a map. So I snap a couple of dozen of them with my mobile phone’s camera.

Don’t check them until I get home.

And what’s there is… well, not shocking. I’m not easily shocked. But certainly adventurous. Every QR code links to a website page; every website page shows activity happening in exactly the spot where I snapped the codes. All the activity is, by someone’s definition, sexual.

There’s flashing and nudity. There are point-of-view shots of fellatio and cunnilingus, both straight and gay. There’s sex up against the wall (and presumably a third person taking the pic?). There’s more ambitious sex, a woman bent at the waist being fucked while sucking a guy off. There’s complicated bondage sex involving two women stripped naked and tied together, three guys playing with them. There’s a guy being, as best I can tell, either pegged by a woman or fucked by a T-girl. There’s a woman in full pony-play kit and one nude except for a hood. There’s a woman in a cat outfit, licking milk from a saucer; and in another shot, a guy wearing nothing but cheap angel-wings and heavy work boots, installed in the corner in a person-sized birdcage.

And then there are the videos.

Allowing for some of the people being in multiple shots, or taking turns at taking pics, this amounts to probably fifty people having used this one alley for sex in a timeframe of, according to the dates given on the website, a couple of weeks.

I’m jealous. I’ve been missing out. Not only that, but I’ve been caught unaware, because if you want to know what’s happening in the seamier and fetishistic side of this city I normally have my finger on the pulse, and this is something I only stumbled across by accident.

The following week, after the meeting, I choose that alley to walk down even though, this time, I’ve parked my car in the opposite direction.

Nothing. The area’s been cleared, cleansed, power washed.

I retrace my steps back to my car.

I had to park about ten minutes walk away, in an area that was once a huddle of small factories. When they moved out, one of the old factories became a pool hall; another, until it burned down, was a swingers’ club. And yes, I went there a few times. Now most of the buildings are vacant, boarded up, waiting for redevelopment.

My car’s on a street that’s a dead end, though there are alleyways off to either side. Two woman stand on a corner. They’re not prostitutes; they don’t have the whore pose or the strut, they don’t look like they’re looking for johns. But one of them gives a sharp whistle and beckons me over.

“Can you take a pic of me and my friend?” she asks. “I’ve set it to auto.” Hands me her phone, points to the button.

By the time I’ve taken three steps back and let autofocus do its work, they’ve both removed their coats to display ropes around their bodies, a style known as the karada. And they’re kissing each other. Well, consuming rather than kissing.

Click, click.

“All done.” They’re so into what they’re doing it’s actually difficult to give them back the phone.

“You know what a QR code is?” one asks. “Look for a small sticker right on this corner, maybe tomorrow.”

“Nice ropework,” I say casually. “Did you do it yourselves?”

I get a smile and a laugh, but no answer.

But the pic’s good, when I go back the next day to find the QR code. Along with a dozen others within a few yards of the spot.

I find myself seeing the city from another point of view. Charting the flux and crackle of dangerous sex. Charting its variance, its standard deviation, its significance.

I’m reminded of Thomas Pynchon’s novel, Gravity’s Rainbow. One of the characters, Tyrone Slothrop, is an American soldier in wartime London. He has many sexual encounters, each one taking place at a location that is the subsequent target of a V2 rocket hit. Do his sexual exploits somehow, clairvoyantly, predict the rocket strikes or actually direct them?

I walk the streets, find the traces of sexual energy. I chart their distribution. I wonder what kind of detonation is encoded there.

 ***

An arts centre near me did host an exhibition similar to the one described in the story above (yeah, it’s fiction, though it would have been cool if it wasn’t). In the exhibition, though, the codes linked to a website that displayed paintings and drawings of different parts of the city. As far as I know, no one has used QR codes in exactly the way the story describes – yet. But I wouldn’t be surprised to discover it’s been done.

However, QR codes have been printed on condom packets as part of a safe sex promotion, with the users encouraged to follow a link embedded in the codes to post the location at which the condom was used. It’s been done in Sweden  (Simplyzesty.com), and in the US, in and around Seattle (see the Time magazine article about it). The Time article links to a map and the code shown at the top of this post also links to the map, which is searchable by gender, type of location, outcome etc.

The Museum of Deviant Desires – out now

Cover image, The Museum of Deviant Desires

We’re delighted to announce that Fulani’s collection of short stories, The Museum of Deviant Desires, is out today. It’s published by 1001 Nights Press, the brainchild of erotica author Sharazade (who you’ll see sometimes as a commenter on previous posts here) and in the course of barely a couple of months it’s become established as one of the most innovative and successful small e-publishers around.

The blurb for the book is as follows:

Eleven erotic stories to excite, entertain, enthrall, and overstimulate the imagination. In no particular order, they cover the attractions of men’s adventure magazines with their sleazy sexploitation and politically incorrect pictures of tortured women; sex and bondage in an abandoned building and a burned-out car wreck; and sex, photography, and the internet. They investigate the sense of anticipation just before a corporal punishment scene, and what characters in bdsm stories think about the painful pleasures the author inflicts on them. They explore internet piracy and how royalties may be collected in the future. And they expose you to the late-night weirdness of sex, perversion, and fetish at a music festival. And then there’s the question of vacuum cleaners. Vacuum cleaners can be erotic in a technosexual kind of way.

Fulani is a master of erotic writing and a prolific author whose recent publications include the lesbian vampire novella “The Vampire Skye,” and stories of sex, fetish, and bondage in the bohemian world of “Hanging Around.” Rich with insights into the passion that attracts and binds, his distinctive dark erotica blends bdsm, fetish, and futuristic themes with imagination and humor.

In other words, expect a lot of bondage and bdsm, and a certain amount of strangeness involving vacuum cleaners. The title story is ‘The Museum of Deviant Desires’ but in its own way, the whole collection functions as exactly that kind of ‘museum’, presenting and exploring a bunch of different ideas related to bdsm and desire.

If you follow this blog, some of the stories will be a little familiar. Several have previously been published here (in fact, those versions are still here – we haven’t pulled them) or Fulani’s other blog (ditto) though there’s new content as well, and the previously-published stories have been re-edited, re-worked, extended, and in all but a couple of cases are now rather different from the originals.

The advantage of the book format, apart from the new content, is its appeal to a wider audience. And it’s a small enough amount of money ($3.99 if you’re buying in the US) for the convenience of having the stories collected in one easily-readable place rather than navigating back through 250-odd posts spread across two blogs.

As of a couple of hours ago it was only available on Smashwords but in the course of the next day or two expect to see it on Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and a bunch of other places. We’ll post up the additional links as they come through.

*** Update: also now at 1eroticaebooks (pdf, prc, lit and epub formats) and Barnes & Noble (for Nook users), Amazon.com  and Amazon.co.uk. A couple more options to follow! ***

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Something to read and somewhere to go

Making her pay – front cover

A quick roundup of stuff here.

Firstly, Fulani’s short story ‘Filthy White Dress’ is just out in the Xcite collection Making Her Pay, a five-story ebook with works by (in order of appearance)  Veronica Wilde (her story title is also the collection title), Mary Borsellino, Fulani, Victoria Blisse and Maxim Jakubowski.

You may find it interesting because it’s the first time outside of this blog and Fulani’s other blog that he’s had any of his Nu Fetish-inspired work commercially published. If you want to know more about Nu Fetish, just check back a couple of posts on this blog and you’ll find more description and discussion of it.

Here’s how ‘Filthy White Dress’ begins:

Chloe sits in the Aztec Bar, sipping a mocha coffee. The bar is nowhere near Mexico – it’s on the third floor of a city centre hotel – and the name was probably chosen to reflect the gaudy décor in maroon and gold.

The men in suits who populate this bar, most of them networking, negotiating, buying or selling, look in Chloe’s direction occasionally. Their eyes register curiosity or, sometimes, lust. She knows what they’re thinking. They’re trying to work out if she’s someone’s mistress or lover, a professional escort waiting for a client, or a prostitute. They’re thinking this because she’s half their age, has out-of-the-bottle chestnut hair almost long enough to sit on, and wears a little black dress that shows a lot of leg and ankle boots with four-inch heels.

The fact is, she’s reading a book called Drama/Theatre/Performance and getting her head around the theories of action, alienation, catharsis, character and representation. She’s reading it on her Kindle, though, so for all anyone else in the room knows she could be reading some hot erotica.

She’s reading the book because she’s waiting for someone to come down from the fifth floor. 

And the blurb: Chloe doesn’t get the job. What she does get, by way of compensation, is dinner with the mysterious but attractive Dr. Vogel. He’s insistent she should wear a white dress, but it’s what he wants her to do while wearing it that’s kinky and slightly surreal. Their unlikely relationship flowers, though, and Chloe finds herself drawn into his colour-coded world.

The five-story collection is abstracted from a longer 20-story collection, Tricks for Kicks, which will be out in May – so look out for that as well.

Secondly: there’s a Festival of Erotic Arts in Edinburgh, Scotland, 22-24 June 2012: it’s ‘dedicated to the multi-disciplinary art forms which make up the Erotic Arts’. So there’s art, performance, cabaret, seminars, workshops, readings, short films, a workshop and a club night or two. Not sure yet if we’re going to be there ourselves (and we’re not involved in any of the events) but it’s a possibility because we’ve been planning a break in Scotland sometime in the summer anyway…

Reviews!

We’ve been pretty lax about updating recently. The reason is we have a pet hedgehog.

Well, not really. But one’s taken up residence in our garden and we give it a bit of dog food each evening. Apparently they do eat the occasional vegetable but their main diet is slugs and snails, which makes them a gardener’s friend. And since their digestion is designed to cope with primarily meat, the ‘traditional’ offerings of bread and milk that people used to give them actually makes them very ill.

Apart from that we found another house we really like, and (just as importantly) can afford. We’re not completely impoverished writers but neither are we unimaginably wealthy… The place we’re after has a large garden, big enough for a dedicated summerhouse/playspace at the end of it, and backs onto fields.

Our current house is now on the market, and getting to that point meant de-perving it. ‘De-perving’ usually means putting the whips under the bed – which we have done, along with the canes, a mile or so of rope, chains, a leather sling and a bunch of other stuff. But in our case it also meant disassembling the dungeon equipment and trucking it back to the lockup. It was a whole big deal and took a while.

Anyway… oh yeah, reviews. Fulani commented a post or two ago that often, reviews seem to take forever to come out. But in this case, apparently not.

Fulani’s novella, Addicted to Rope, is available from Xcite, and on Kindle from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk (and a few other places). And it’s been reviewed by Sizzling Hot Books. The reviewer says:

It sucked me in quickly and I wasn’t ready to let go at the end. Fulani is very good at giving Ruth and Leo a lot of depth in a short amount of time. The transformation that overcomes Ruth is quick, but detailed. You can get a good feel for how her mind is working as she accepts and challenges what Leo presents to her.

Addicted to Rope is hot. The pages sizzle with anticipation, fantasy, and intimacy. I would recommend Addicted to Rope to anyone who likes reading a lot of the mindset of characters exploring being submissive and anyone who likes the psychological development of a character in their erotica.

Read the whole review here.

Meanwhile another piece just out is ‘Andi in Chains’, a short story in Lucy Felthouse’s edited collection Seducing the Myth – available on download from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and elsewhere.

This has reviews by NightOwl Reviews, who says of Fulani’s story:

Andi in Chains by Fulani – Re-imagining of Perseus and Andromeda’s meeting was certainly different! Andromeda–better known as Andi–was into bondage and kink, Perseus was a tough son of a gun mercenary and well virgin sacrifice took on a different twist. This story amused me and was possibly my favorite.

and of the collection as a whole:

Overall I have to say I was pretty pleased with this anthology. The stories were on the fairly short side, but were by in large really hot.

It’s also reviewed by Mitnik at Erotic Whispers, who says:

Andi in Chains by Fulani was a tale of bondage and kink and certainly hit the mark with its very unique take on the meeting of Perseus and Andromeda. Full of fire and passion that is sure to get your imagination sparking and ready for the rest of this erotic ensemble.

and of the whole collection,

Overall this is an interesting and varied collection with a variety of tales, a true cornucopia of endings, beginnings and middles with lots of lusty passion, tantalizing intrigue and witty charm to keep you coming back time and time again to dip into this treasure trove and pull out a fresh gem.

Finally, JBP Reviews says of the book,

A collection of short stories filled with erotic intent with tons of mystical creatures this book is a great read! I found myself reading each story in earnest and wanting more and more.

So all in all, it’s good feedback on the novella, the story, and the collection the story is in.

And now back to the mundane world of buying and selling houses… and finishing another novella and the next novel, both promised to publishers by next week…

Getting on with things

We haven’t been posting as much as usual on here over the last few weeks. We’ve been getting on with other things that have turned out to be a little time-consuming.

Fulani wrote a novella. Currently being considered by a publisher, we’ll see how that goes.

He also, bearing in mind we’re at a pagan camp for the next few days, got round to making a firewhip. Pagan camps is where we do bits of fireplay and we wanted something new this time. Frankly, we were going to buy a firewhip but the companies we tend to use for fire performance equipment were out of stock.

It looks crude, because it is, but it does crack. Loudly.

Hone-made firewhip

Apart from that we have things we’re used before: the fire flogger and the fire rope. If you want to see older pics of these things in use, they’re on a post ‘Playing with Fire’ we did back in January (opens in a new window). We should have some new pics in a couple of weeks…

The flogger is the only one of these things that can be used on actual humans, of course. And while it’s scary for the person being flogged, the logic of it is that the flames brush across the skin so quickly, because it has to spin fast, that the heat is much less significant than the sound of flames roaring as it travels through the air and the whole headspace of having it done. Once the thing is alight, you have to keep it spinning otherwise anyone holding it will get their hand burned off. For the person being flogged, hair, obviously, does need to be wetted down (on fact we usually damp down the skin as well) and long hair kept well out of the way…

The rope is far to large and unwieldy to be used in play, though it does make for pretty pictures. And the whip should, in theory, not just crack but send a small ball of fire off the tip when it cracks. Again it’s for performance rather than play. Probably.

Home-made fire flogger

Fire rope

Safety stuff. We don’t use these things without a good space (usually around 10 metres) between ‘performer’ and anyone watching, and we do have a safety spotter and fire extinguishers to hand. If necessary we wet down the ground where the things are being used as well. These are not toys for playing with anywhere other than outdoors with a lot of space around.

Apart from that, we’ve been out and about doing fun things at clubs, and playing at home since Velvet decided we no longer need a separate guest bedroom (she kept cracking her shins on the corner of the bed, so it’s been replaced with a fold-out sofabed) and cleared room in there so it could come back into use as a private playspace.

Oh, and Fulani did write at least the first part of a story based on the fact it’s now the music festival season. But you’ll have to go to his other blog to read it – called ‘The Museum of Deviant Dreams, on the Fulanismut blog (opens in new window). Maybe the second part will get written while we’re away…