Even More HFDU!

Once again, I have made a writing deadline. Our handsome slave to the left is the one this time who has fainted in shock. Either that or he was overcome by the ceremonial activities in

Ariana's Scandal Part Four: The Ceremony

This time I'm really serious about the "standard warnings" re: before you go. Our romance novella has taken a brutal and kinky turn this chapter. (Yeah, I know, what kind of mind comes up with a story like this? I mean, who wants to write *romance novellas*?)

Anyway, please enjoy if it's your thing. Please stay away if it isn't.

And please, somebody get me some water for Brad? It looks as if I'm going to be up the rest of the night reviving him.

Do you like teh internet pr0n?

I have two links for you today, while you are breathlessly awaiting the next installment of HFDU.

Vague has started to post his short stories to a blog, Little Submissions. He's such a good writer, as in a good *writer*, I have a hard time throwing him "teh internet pr0n" category. Spend a few minutes, enjoy. Female domination themed.

Eileen posted "How to Write Porn for Me". I cheered.

Re next installment of HFDU: I'm working on it this holiday weekend. I have no idea how this is going to turn out, folks, (the mechanics not the story), so we shall see.

---------------------------
Edit: A third link!

Tom's 53 Days just put a big grin on my face. What a scamp he is.

My world and welcome to it

I thought this was hysterical. I laughed for 10 minutes.

I'm pretty sure my reaction says something scary about me, but don't tell me what it is. I don't want to know.




more graph

There were whips involved

There were also Twizzlers, and popcorn, and Cherry Coke!

Not as many whips as I'd like, or put to the exact use that would please me most, but, all in all, the new Indiana Jones Movie was a blast.

Played hookie from work half a day, we kept the kids home from school, and the whole family went to a morning showing.

Takeaway points 4 U:

1) Harrison Ford is still h-o-t-t. He's got that Paul Newman-esque quality to him where I think he'll get to keep his hotness until 80.

2) Shia Labeouf turned out a very good performance as Indy-in-training. (Can't think of Labeouf as h-o-t-t yet; watched him on Project Greenlight as a teen just the other day wasn't it?)

3) Karen Allen looked great. It was so much fun to see her back in the series, and to see Ford with an age appropriate female for a change. She was sharp and sassy and every bit up to being a match for Indy's toughness.

I suppose I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that Cate Blanchett plays a classic evil dominatrix type, complete with Russian accent and black gloves. That imagery doesn't do much for *me*, but if that's your thang, you'll love her.

Was it a great movie? It was a great time. Thoroughly enjoyable start to our American Memorial Day Weekend holiday extravaganza.

There are parts to pick in the movie but I don't wanna. I enjoyed myself and I hope you enjoy too!

ZOMG 11111!

The self proclaimed "word nerd", geek rocker David Cook, just won American Idol.

Well fuck me! (And please, if you don't mind.) Nobody thought there was a chance the Mormon kid could get beat.

We're still stunned at the E homestead. By 12 million votes he won over a 17 year old Mormon kid with an amazing voice and a posse' of teenybopper fans + their grandmothers.

While I collect myself, please enjoy David Cook performing Chris Cornell's version of Billy Jean.



From the finals. U2 "Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For"



And his final final song, which I loved to pieces but, you know, who knew it was winning song on American Idol? Pretty sure the Mormon kid sang The Star Spangled Banner for his last song.

Collective Soul "The World I Know"



P.S. I only watch AI to keep my kids company, swear. It's family time.

P.P.S. Cook's favorite quote, via the American Idol site:
"Pain don't hurt." - Patrick Swayze in "Roadhouse"

I told you there was "something" about him! Kinkdar never fails.

E Out

Losing to Win

My new honey David Cook was great tonight, final of American Idol. (Yes, I watch American Idol. At least it's not Dancing with teh Fucking Stars, shoot me if I ever watch that ;) )

God was Cook hot. And smooth. And deep. A serious talent.

And, he's gonna lose.

Cook picked all of the wrong songs to "win", on purpose, wink wink. He picked songs he wanted to sing, not songs The Great Public would goosh over. On purpose? For sure. Simon even winked at Cook, "I know what you're doing." If Cook wins AI, he's locked into being an American Idol and locked into their recording contract. If he loses, he's a free agent.

So, he sang sweet, and deep, grabbed my heart but ..... he's never going to win with those songs.

Cook needed to sing big and splashy and Vote For Me Huge. Dial, dial, dial you teenyboppers, dial. Nope.

Waxing too philosophical about a "reality" competition -- I find it poetic, losing in front of 30 million people in order to win something you really want.

I am also sleep deprived, overworked, and not in any shape to discuss poetry, so take that all for what it is worth.

This, tho, I am able to judge through my personal haze:

The dude is white hot geek, my favorite kind.

Yum.

I B Watchin' Da 'merican Gladiators

D-r-o-w-n-i-n-g in stoopid work. Sitting here on a Friday evening doing stoopid work. Looking at an entire weekend of stoopid work, not HFDU "writing".

The TV is on. Not paying attention, it's been running for hours, not paying attention. And then, out of the corner of my eye I see...



Oh baybee. I didn't even know American Gladiators was back.

There's somebody who shall be showing up in Hot Female Dominant Utopia shortly, I'll tell you that. He's dressed for the occasion!

Sigh.

Break over. Now back to teh stoopid work....but paying a wee bit of attention to the tee vee. ;)

Small Rumination on Family

I don't like mixing too much family in teh oh so sexay blog here, but as they are exactly everything to me, with teh sexay and even teh work being an aside, sometimes it all spills over here.

The oldest is sixteen today. Sixteen! How did that happen?

The husband I were talking earlier today (even earlier than 6AM, yes, that's how our house runs, 24/7) about how different our kids are from who we were at that age.

I was already "out" at 16. I didn't leave until the week after I turned 18, but I'd well checked out. The husband says he was pretty much out as well, using home to sleep and eat and wheedle his mother into laundry and not much else.

My kids seem to *like* us. Nobody's in a rush to go anywhere. They have friends but don't spend the giant chunks of time with them that I or the husband did at that age. They are as likely to text me something goofy or interesting as they are the kid they sit next to in math class. I text back. We laugh a lot.

The big birthday plans are, picked by the birthday boy, a family dinner at the local diner.

I'm a good mom. I'll push these kids out of the nest with both hands if I have to,when the time is right, but in the meantime....nesting rules.

[fluffs mama bird feathers]

Because...

... an opportunity to post a picture of Meloni with his arms over his head (only my favorite pose) and *this* look on his face should never be wasted. No matter how busy one is. (And one is!)

More HFDU!

I set myself a goal to put up the next chapter of Ariana's story within a week, and damned if I didn't get it up with two days to spare.

[faints]
[calls male slaves over to revive her]
[gets distracted temporarily by male slaves' efforts]
[returns to senses and resumes speaking]

I'm not used to my processes working like this, where the processes produce product. I even like what I posted, and that never happens. Wonder what is making the difference.

Part of anything is being in the zone. I'm so *fed* *up* with working all the time, it's been a great recreation to hang out in HFDU in spare minutes.

More than that, though, could it be that the 11,000th time I was told to just frickin' relax already and write, you aren't Tolstoy, that's okay .... I actually listened?

Go figure.

Speaking of going, I want to throw my standard disclaimers in here. Hot Female Dominant Utopia is s/m fiction and not the cup of tea of everybody who is kind enough to visit this blog. The latest episode would be hard pressed to even get an R rating (crap! I just lost half the audience!), but the next one is going to be intense (whew! look, they came back!).

Our Story Thus Far:
Fictional Foundation
And So It Begins
Ariana's Scandal Part One: The Guidance
Ariana's Scandal Part Two: The Meeting
Ariana's Scandal Part Three: The Preparations

For people following along: Part Four is going to be a bitch to write. Oh it will be fun, wink wink saynomore, but narrating physical action is exactly my least favorite thing to do. I am so non-spatial. My goal is *two weeks* for that one. We'll see what happens.

Enjoy! And if you do enjoy, let me know. It's encouraging. :)

Jail Bait

Not technically jail bait, he *is* 25.

Something about that boy, gets the motor humming in a very predatory fashion. (Is there another?)

David Cook. American Idol.

Oh shut up, you watch it too.

Hot Female Dominant Utopia Lives!

Long time vistors to E will remember Hot Female Dominant Utopia. It's a year now since that fun first started, can you believe it?

You can catch some history here, if you like.

I never had a good answer when folks asked me why I wasn't posting more stories, or when more stories would be forthcoming. Truthfully, I mostly ignored all of the emails I got on the subject. (Crappy avoidance tactic! 10 lashes for me!) Eventually the emails died down and HFDU was written off as yet another abandoned internet project.

But, you know, I never stopped writing HFDU stories. I've written them my whole life. Sweeping, cheesy dramas, set on the backdrop of fictional male slavery. I just don't *show* them to people!

One thing and another, this last week my brain just snapped from overwork. I had the urge to write up an HFDU story, in good enough shape to share it with other people, so I did. Surprisingly neurosis free.

A word on neurosis: All writers are neurotic, but my slant is this. I'm not a very good writer. I think I'm a good storyteller, but that's not the same as being a good writer. If I didn't have such an immense respect for writing as a craft, I'd probably not be half as locked up as I am about sharing my own scribblings.

And here we go:

Ariana's Scandal Part 2

Things you should know before you go:

1) The stories are S/M based. Everybody who stops by the E blog isn't S/M oriented. E is mild. These stories don't have boundries. People get hurt. It's not always consensual.

2) These are stories. Twisted love stories. Yeah, I don't know what kind of mind comes up with them either. But it's all fantasy.

3) For some reason, my stories come out like romance novellas, even though I don't read romance novels. I don't know why that happens, but I've given in. I currently fancy that the reader can see my tongue planted firmly in my cheek and that somehow gives me a pass to write this way.

Anybody left, enjoy. I don't think it will be another year between installments. I'm already working on part 3.

[enters room]

Damn. It sure is dusty in here. I hired a cleaning crew to keep up once a week while I was gone but, look at this mess. It's as if no one has even been here in months!

[waves hi]

Four month disappearing acts are not cool, with not so much as a "by your leave" and all. (I don't know what that means "without so much as a ..." but I love that phrase and I'm happy to have been able to use it.)

For any concerned, fear not. All has been fine. I have been consumed in and consumed *by* work, 24/7, but I'm starting to see a light at the end of the tunnel. Short version of the story is that some not good things happened and I had to work furiously to try to right the ship. I've got another few months that I need to work as hard as I've been working, ugh, but I just had to come up for some air and say "hi".

The family is fine. Meloni, he's another story. He's been impossibly lonely, except for the ministrations of the all female crew I've hired to tend to him once a week. (Hey, I'm generous.)

Not much of a post, this one, but I do have a treat for some long timers in a few minutes...if any one out there remembers Hot Female Dominant Utopia, that is.

Anyway, I've missed you all. I've missed blogging. I don't know what happens next. (The suspense!)

hugs, E

Multi-tasking & Creativity

Yeah, I don't know what this blog is about either. Proper sex bloggers stick around a general theme, perhaps maybe, um, sex, and I'm just all over the place. Still, you keep coming back. Thanks for that.

. . . . .

Reading my occasional work related posts here, you'd get the impression that I'm a "suit". That my job, what people pay me to do is to be a "suit", crunch numbers, hire and fire, review people, all those "suit-like" activities. You're getting that impression because it seems to be all I frickin' do lately but....that's not my job. If it was 1) I'd be miserable and 2) mediocre at best.

I'm paid to be creative. Outside of the box. Amazing. Dazzling. I'm paid to be the kind of person who wakes up in the middle of the night with a kick ass idea, approach, product that's not occurred to anyone else previously, execute, and turn same idea into cash.

I used to be very good at this.

The last two years, notsomuch.

I'm coming to the conclusion that multi-tasking is the enemy. It's a hard conclusion for me to come to, because I'm quite good at multi-tasking, thank you very much. I have multiple computer screens at work, splayed across my desk, many windows open. I can crunch numbers in Excel with my left hand, answer email rapid fire with my right, negotiate contracts on the phone, order lunch and wipe employee tears nearly all at the same time.

I get a lot done, every single day, but where is the brilliance?

I've tried unplugging, recharging. I've tried concentrating on being brilliant and I've tried not thinking about being brilliant at all. I've tried a lot of things....but I haven't tried, in a long time, just saying no to the constantly mounting, piling everything that cries out to be multi-tasked...unrelentingly.

If any of the kind readers of E have thoughts on multi-tasking & creativity, I'd love to hear them. I've started saying "no", just started the last month, and I'm turning some creative that's a bit better than the crap that's been coming out in recent years.

Also pissing people off, I am, with a perceived selfishness that I value my time ahead of theirs. I hate that, but I really don't know what else to do.

Do you?

In the mood for an argument

I rarely waste time feeling bad about myself. It's a pointless waste of energy. If I wanted to feel bad about myself, it would be easy to do. There's no area of my life that I don't come up short by some objective measure. But, you know, so do you, and so does everybody else....they just all look more together than I feel most of the time. Feeling bad is self indulgent; make yourself better, I say (to myself, not to you, I'm too busy fixing myself to get in your shit).

Still, it was a crap day yesterday. I made a simple mistake, albeit one with a lot of zeros at the end, awhile back, that had a huge domino effect. I didn't even know the dominos were falling until they hit me right smack on the head yesterday morning.

These were large dominos. They hurt. I suck.

No, I don't. Yes, I do. No, I don't. Yes, I do. No, I don't.

I'm in the mood for an argument.

The Mr's Python:

No frontal on this blog ever

It's just a tree, people.

via Sexoteric

Temporary Service Interruption

Now that's lovely.

A man who can save the planet (in 23 hours and 59 minutes!) hanging out in my basement with his hands behind his head and an "I dare you....but please do" look in his eyes. Really. Pretty much as good as it gets. (The picture gets bigger if you click it.)

* * * *

We're experiencing a temporary service interruption on teh blog. Service may continue to be interrupted for the remainder of the month, although I'm going to do my best to get some posts up here. It's not that I don't have anything to say. :) I had no idea it had been so many days since I posted....what a whirlwind life has been.

Family, family, family.

I find it inappropriate to blog much about family within the context of this oh so sexay blog, but I'm too lazy to start another blog, so I slip in bits here and there. Slipped bits directly ahead.

Education for the kids is like to kill me the last couple of months. They are at such a crucial age -- first year of high school for the oldest, last year of middle school for the younger and really, this is not working out well.

Teachers and I are a disaster in a room together so the husband does the interfacing. I have *such* trouble with conformist bullshit. (The husband does too, but fakes it better, got the whole smooth "wink" thing going on, you know? He's charming. I go for the jugular.) Lots of interfacing the last few months, building in crescendo.

Schools are set up to serve the norm efficiently and my kids, here's a shock, both fall outside of the norm. The oldest is special needs. Generally, he's been served well, but the transition to high school has been rough. He's failing the first two "non special needs" classes he's ever had, which means that *we* are *failing* him. He was not set up to succeed, we're working to fix that before his self esteem implodes for life.

The other is a goof ball, brilliant dare I say eclectic, voracious learner who does not thrive in conformist situations. (Yeah, I know. Mini Me.) I struggle between telling him that he has to at least pretend to conform so he can get what he needs and telling him to ignore small thinkers and just learn.

The struggle is nearly over. I think we are pulling him from school and plugging him into an independent study program at home. It's time for him to thrive.

Work, work, work.

This working for a living thing puts a crimp in blogging time.

Calendar year transition comes with a butt load of work. While a good chunk of my job is big picture strategy, this is the time of year that the devil is in the details. Tons of details. Lots and lots and lots of details. If I do sub par work or miss or slip deadlines there's a chain reaction to a whole bunch of other people's jobs. I slipped a deadline by nearly a full week this week, leaving my group to have to scramble faster to make up for *my* being late. I hate that.

Of course, this came the exact same week that my bosses (shadowy sorts of background people) gave me the feedback that I'm not spending enough time on big picture strategy which displeases them. Forget the details, they say, we need to know that you are planning and executing growth for the years ahead.

This was a face-to-face conversation. My group needs me to focus on delivering my work. The people who write my paycheck need me to focus on the big picture. My kids need me to focus on them. I wanted to just put my head in my hands and say really, what do *all* of you people *want from me*? I'm peddling as fast as I can here. [pout, upper lip tremble] But, since head-in-hands whining doesn't inspire confidence from shadowy sorts of background people, I responded instead with a combination of eye contact, thoughtful concern and pledges to do better.

But really, what do all of you people want from me???

Speaking of all you people . . .

It would be nice to have an actual basement full of actual studly male slaves who could save the world (or me) in 23 hours and 59 minutes, wouldn't it?

As long as the studly male slaves didn't want something from me, otherwise they'd need to just get to the back of the line that has formed to the left. Flex the pecs all you like but still, back of the line.

(Nothing, FWIW, is actually bad. I'm doing fine, just busy. If I can figure out how to get out of a week long business trip next week, gah, I'll be golden.)

See you as much as I can get here and be around!

Got milk.

Pretty sure I'm not the intended market for this erotically styled picture but I gotta say, it works for me.

Yep.

Click to embiggen.

Sometimes, the bigger the better.

New Years Round Up

Everybody's doing it, the New Years Round Up. If I were a Serious Blogger, I 'spose I would direct your attention to my Best Posts of 2007, but nobody ever called me a Serious Blogger (with a straight face, at least).

Instead, I'll give you a short list of the friends I've made this year, friends I am so thankful for. The leap from "fellow blogger" to "friend" has something to do with an emotional connection or bond made, even if we've not shared too much off blog communication or are the holders of each other's Sekrit Identity. I've cared about you and you've cared about me, thank you.

Tom, Kate, Eileen, May, Destiny, chance, Dev, Richard, Dw3t-Hthr (say that one three times fast, hell, just try to *write* it), Nigel, Julia (get well! soon!) , Ms160, Z...... thank you. Thanks for a great 2007 and I'm looking forward to spending 2008 hanging out with you guys, too.

Anybody missing from that list?

Oh, almost forgot, two other people....what are their names again?

Beej & Karl Elvis.

Finer friends a woman doesn't get, the two of you. Thanks for putting up with me, the real and whole me. It's been quite a year. Love you both straight to pieces. Now get out of here.

Here's to 2008!

Like my new rug?

I've been so busy with first work and then the holidays, I've barely had time to visit my basement. Meloni was lonely and needed something to keep him warm.

Mmmmmm, white bearskin. (Faux, of course. No need for PETA to show up for a surprise basement inspection.)

God, that man is so fine. So fine. SO fine.

God.

I truly, unabashedly, with no reservations and with great fervor, love men. Just fucking love them. From the tips of their toes to the tops of their possibly receding hairlined heads.

God.

I'll buy him a blanket too, if he asks. I love men.