The Bruno Gmunder anthologies I’ve contributed to keep coming fast and furious. Out now are Straight No More and Blowing Off Class. I’ve got stories in the can for three more books and I’m committed to two more.

I’m not sure if it seems egotistical to note that I literally laughed out loud while rereading my contribution to Blowing Off Class. It’s called “Hazed Memory” and it’s about frat hazing abuse  in the form of a letter to a college intrafraternity council written by a very deluded young man. I don’t care if it’s egotistical cause it’s true, and if I can’t get pleasure from the shit I write then that would be sad.

Quick update on the “My Sister’s Boyfriend Joey” novel – I’m almost through the second draft, in fact I’ll be finished this week. My first draft was 120k words, the second’s going to be around 70k. Clearly I enjoy creating excess work for myself. Anyway, the next step is to give it to a friend or two to get feedback, then do another revision, then figure out how I want to publish it.

Well, he’s going by Robert Furlong these days. Check this out: Like Father Like Son

  ”I know you’re there, Jake,” I’d called out, maintaining my pounding rhythm on my young friend’s rump regardless of my son’s sneaky voyeurism.

At first he’d tried to shrink back into the shadows, as if he hadn’t just been watching his father anally pleasuring another man, but I’d called out again, “Come on, there’s no use pretending, Jake.”

Then he’d appeared in the door of my bedroom, grinning at us and appearing cheerfully unconcerned that the loose grey shorts he was wearing for bed were being prominently lifted upwards by the thickened rod of his flagrant hard-on.

“I was just… er… heading downstairs for a drink,” he lied, as I noticed a wet patch on the material of his shorts up near the pocket; a large dark circle at the tip of his hugely excited organ.  It was obvious that he’d been rubbing himself as he’d watched us having sex: his precum must have been seeping from his erection as he’d massaged the swollen shaft of it through his shorts.

I was damned if I was going to let my son’s unwelcome appearance spoil the enjoyment I was having with Bradley.  Still holding onto his hips and without missing a beat as my crotch slapped back and forth against his arse, I said, “Of course you were, Jake,” who grinned back at us broadly.

I kept up my exertions, wondering what my son would do next, and he just kept smirking at the two of us, the patch of wetness on his shorts growing steadily larger.  He seemed especially interested in seeing Bradley as he bent forwards to be fucked, and my friend chuckled back at him with obvious amusement at having an unexpected audience.  Jake even peered forwards so he could better see the size of Bradley’s erection bobbing stiffly beneath his stomach as I maintained my constant rhythm in and out of his butt-cheeks.

“So, Jake, if there’s nothing else,” I said, feeling a touch self-conscious to have my son standing in front of me, gawping over as I buggered this younger man’s arse.  ”I’d appreciate a bit of privacy, please.”

He laughed to himself and licked his lips slowly: he was making it quite evident that he liked the look of Bradley’s large cock.

Today I was re-reading one of my favorite pieces of film criticism, Tim Kreider’s evaluation of Eyes Wide Shut Introducing Sociology. This essay blew my mind when I first read it a couple years back, casting a movie that I’d already enjoyed in an entirely new light. When I first saw Eyes Wide Shut back in 1999, it had affected me as a depiction of the sometimes-opposing forces of desire and fidelity and how they can shape a marriage. But Kreider’s read cast it as a cynical look at late-stage capitalism, where everything is commodified. It’s pretty astute, and convincingly argued, but in the back of my mind I guess I wondered where my own interpretation fit.

Today I came across an afterward by Kreider that I’d never read before where he says (in part):

…watching the film in middle age, I find myself (and imagine Kubrick being) less interested in condemning the Harfords than in simply observing them, and find myself admiring not the same old story he’d always told but the new one he was trying to tell for the first time in his career. He was attempting, late in life, something he’d never done before, something he didn’t know whether he’d be any good at: to make a film about intimate, domestic life, about a blindly complacent but basically happy marriage, testing its fault lines of temptation, jealousy and resentment and leaving it stronger and more truthful.

I found myself emotionally affected by this passage for a couple of reasons. One, it reminded me that personal interpretations are valid and important things and that great art allows for multiple meanings. Second, there is something beautiful about the idea of an accomplished artist like Kubrick – who had plenty of laurels to rest on – attempting something different, taking pet themes and weaving them in with something new.

So I put this out into the world: I want to be an artist, and not a hack. I want what I do to come from a personal place, to always be pushing forward, and if not inventing than at least refining.

p.s. – Another brilliant, mindbending piece of film criticism-as-conspiracy-theory that I read this week (for those interested in this sort of thing): Film Crit Hulk’s The Fallrise of David O. Russell. 

Last month I put out the most recent issue of my newsletter QueerBurgher. Read it here, and check out issues #1 and #2 as well.

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I haven’t posted on here in over a month. So here’s a post. Wheee! I have nothing to say. Okay, I’m sure I can think of some things. I wake up every morning at 6:30 a.m. Then I hit snooze until 7:30 a.m. I put on my bathrobe, feed my cats, pour a bowl of cereal, and make coffee in a little coffee maker that I bought at the thrift store for three dollars. Once I’m done with my cereal I pour my coffee then sit at my desk. I write in my journal until I’m done. Then I write one thousand words of my current project, which is a novel set in a beach town and is not, necessarily, a piece of erotica. But it is a genre piece. And I’m being deliberately obnoxious about teasing it for a couple reasons, one of which is that I’m a little embarrassed by the genre I’m working with. But I’m not embarrassed at all by what I’ve been writing because it’s just good, good to work on. When I’m finished with my thousand words I go into work – usually late, but I get there. And then I work. When I get home sometimes I work on writing more but usually I don’t. Sometimes I go to the gym. I get ideas at the gym. That was where I got my beach-town novel idea.

Last night I forced myself to sit down and read my first-draft manuscript for “My Sister’s Boyfriend Joey: The Novel” (tentative title), which has been sitting on my computer for the last forty-five days, unfuckedwith. You guys – it’s good. It’s just good. So I’m going to start revising it and hopefully start forcing some friends to read it. And then I’m going to start querying agents because I’ve never done that before and I figure it’s worth a shot.

I cancelled my internet service a couple months ago after coming back from a vacation in a rural setting where there was no internet and when I got back, the cable company had raised my bill by ten dollars, and I’d just spent a week with no internet so I was feeling very hippie-ish and I cancelled my internet. And when I got home that night I had a mild moment of panic. But that has passed and I think not having internet is a good thing. For now. I’m still deactivated on Facebook and I’m trying not to be obnoxious about that but it’s hard because I really fucking hate Facebook and it feels really good not to be checking it every fucking five minutes and reading what amazing things everybody (EVERYBODY) is doing and being unable to resist comparing myself and feeling worthless and pathetic as a result.

Maybe you’re reading this and it’s making you feel worthless. I’m sorry. You know that most advice is bullshit, right? You know that your life is your own, and the immense power and beauty that comes from all of us living according to our own rules, don’t you?

So I don’t have internet which has had the slightly-intended effect of making me much more productive when I do get online. So I’ve published a couple of my ebooks to markets where they were previously unavailable, so that’s good. And I’ve published one of my stories to a bunch of free story sites (like Nifty) which has increased my web traffic exponentially, so that’s good too.

Basically, it’s all good. Even though the days are so short and sometimes when I wake up and enact my little routine it feels like slow death. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn’t. I find more gray hair on my head every day, it seems, around my temples and in my facial hair. I’m lucky to have it.

I have a new story in this month’s Handjobs called “Game Night.” I wrote this one from a pure place of horniness and wanting to turn myself on, which I can’t say happens much when I write anymore. So it may be that it’s a good one. Here’s the description from HJ:

Game Night by Natty Soltesz

Every Friday night is game night at home, but one Friday when it’s just Dad and Son at home, Dad ups the ante by suggesting, “You’ve heard of strip poker, right? What about strip Monopoly?” His son says, “Really?” The boy feels his heart quickening. Dad says, “Why not? When one of us lands on the other’s property, we have to take off a piece of clothing. Whaddaya say?”

I’m still uploading the entirety of my recent book 691 Suburban Dr to the Nifty Archive – the seventh chapter should be up in a couple of days.

My abysmal ebook sales (see comments for clarification here) are starting to get me down. I still plan to become a full-time writer and hope to achieve this goal in the next year and a half. I know it’s going to happen because…I just do. But the question is how, and when I’m going to spend the time focusing on the business end of things.

Because at the moment I am fully focused on the creative end of things. I finished my FIRST NOVEL (Backwoods wasn’t really a novel) – the expansion of My Sister’s Boyfriend Joey – last month, and I’ve now started on another project that is looking good. I’m not sure if it’s another novel or not, but it’s certainly a longer piece of work.

Novels. I’ve been attempting them for years, but somehow this year I just figured it out. I don’t know how to explain it, but I have that same feeling I did when I first started writing stories – like I figured out how to write them and then it was effortless and I just had fun with it, doing different things and exploring styles and modes. I feel like I’m on the same path here with novels or longer stories – I just get it now. I love the thing I’m working on, currently, which is so ridiculous but so fun and I wish I could tell you more but I don’t want to jinx it.

Two new anthologies featuring my stories are out this month, Team Players and Daddy Knows Best, both published by Bruno Gmunder and edited by Winston Gieseke. I’m pretty proud of these books and my contributions to them. Especially Daddy Knows Best, which I just read through over the weekend and is a solid read. The story I contributed for Team Players is “Supplemental,” a.k.a the one where cum is used as a protein supplement for college gym bunnies.

Yes, videogames. Sometimes I get into them. Granted, this is a rare thing. I think the last videogame I actually completed was Myst. That was twenty fucking years ago.

But anyway, I like to read about videogames more than I like to play them, and yesterday I read about a game called Gone Home and it sounded like something I’d dig (it’s pretty similar to Myst, actually). In fact, it sounded like a video game version of an idea I’d come up with myself a few years back, and wrote up in this story called The Secret House Idea which I published on my website back in 2009. Here’s a bit of it:

As you furnish [the house] you begin to create an imaginary family who lived there.  You designate rooms for certain people.  The parents would probably have the largest bedroom, and maybe there’s a room for a son and a daughter.  Or maybe a broken family lived there, like some deadbeat parent who never was around, and the kid just took over the place, inviting all of his friends to stay there and trashing the place.  Then again, maybe he cared for it, and made it into a private teenage paradise.

So now you’ve created a living space for these people.  The next step is understanding who they are.  You have to create an entire life for them – letters, diaries, old telephone bills, recipe books…everything.  You have to create this family out of thin air.

Once you had it all created, all laid out, you could invite people there.  Or, you could just leave the door unlocked and let people find it.

The house would be stuck in time, as if the occupants left one afternoon and never returned.

They could snoop through the detritus of this imagined life, pick and prod through these people’s things and get to know them, create this grand story that you’ve conceived only through what you’ve left behind, these certain clues, pieces to the puzzle.

It’s actually kind of insane how much Gone Home matches up with my idea, which I don’t say to pat myself on the back (well, not too much) but more to express to you how much this game appealed to me on a basic level. It’s not an intense game by any means – I met its objective within a couple of hours – but it’s pretty singular in the way that it creates a world and allows you to explore it. Highly recommended!

I am listening to the album ‘Cape Dory’ by Tennis and thinking that it’s right up my alley and would work great as background writing music.

I’ve been internetting for about the past hour, updating my Star Jones Quotes Twitter and my own Twitter. My Facebook profile is disabled.

I just submitted the fourth chapter of ’691 Suburban Dr’ to Nifty (the first three chapters are up already and of course if you want to read the whole story you can buy the ebook here). I didn’t write today (except for this) and I feel a little guilty about it.

I realized that I’ve been editing The Anonymous Sex-Confession Blog for almost three years. (Lately I find that time is catching up with me, and it’s a little scary but I know it’s normal). I started this Tumblr to solicit 1) True stories that are 2) Two paragraphs or less. I remember hoping for a larger response at first but over the years submissions have come kinda regularly, about one a month. Some of them seem fake, some of them seem fascinatingly real. There are cute and poignant ones. I often reject the ones that seem too fake, especially if they’re not well written.

This one turns me on more than any of the others:

Best Finish

This is less about sex and more about masturbation. A few weeks ago, I came across a Tumblr post that showed a woman giving a man a handjob. When the guy was close to orgasm, she made him roll back onto his shoulders so that his “member” was pointing towards his face. She kept jerking him off so that he eventually came into his mouth/on his face. Being bored one night, I decided to it out, albeit on my own. Well, I’m glad I did, because that’s the only way I masturbate now. There’s something so unbelievably dirty about it that turns me on more than any other way of doing. Plus there’s no clean-up to speak of. I even don’t mind swallowing my cum!

But I think this one is my favorite:

Mama Found Her Sex Drive After 20 Years

It came back suddenly. I lost my sex drive for 20 years – saw it as a chore, vaguely annoyed by any show of affection, told by my mom all of my life that sex was dirty and gross. One night, I had an amazingly sexual dream and woke up. I was so horny. I attacked my husband and it shocked him – the best sex ever! After that, I could not calm down – we had sex again and again. In between, I pleasured myself. I took him to an adult toy store, went to a racy lingerie store and meandered through the mall with the store bag, titillated a strange man by talking to a saleslady in an adult toy store about vibrators, and shaved my entire crotch. I discovered a few things. My husband loves a shaved crotch. I love oral sex. I am multi-orgasmic, I orgasm with nipple play, I love sex toys and most surprising of all, I like anal play. I love sexy underwear and am throwing out the ugly bras and panties. I love pleasing my husband. It has been a week – I have become more horny, not less. I look forward to lots more sex with my husband! I hope my sex drive never goes away!

I became so enamored of this scene tonight that I wrote a poem about it. Watch it first then read on if you dare.

They’ve Done This Before
by Natty Soltesz

They watch straight porn
(you can tell from the girl-moan sounds)
I prefer to imagine
they know each other -
friends, frat bros, roommates
They’ve done this before
only when they’re drunk
Black ball cap
demure in his towel
White ball cap
removes it
“I want to see your butt when I fuck it. Alright?”
“Uh huh.”
“Thanks. I just need uh…”
the only discernable dialogue
What else do they say?
(first line seems like a comment on the porn)
What does the flag represent?
tv / computer / dvd player? / red pillow brown sheets ashtray
What logo on the black ballcap?
Why are some sections slowed?
one or both know that the camera is there
no condom
Just spit?
rough and raw

(The House Bottom by Natty Soltesz
They’re drinking one night and Black cap says “I’ve always wondered what it would feel like” and White says “Fuck it I’m drunk, I’ll fuck your ass.”)

Black barely raises his head
never touches White who
barely touches Black
White flails arms outward to avoid hand/body contact
yet lays atop, bodies close, surely smelling and hearing Black
swivels his hips – what a stud
(eyeroll)
never removes his pants / underpants
huge cock
spits on the hole, close
considers licking it
but doesn’t.