Home

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.

The first chapter of ’691 Suburban Dr’ is available on Nifty. I’m going to be publishing one chapter a week on Nifty and in a few months the whole book will be there. It’s like the opposite of what I usually do – taking the stuff I’ve previously published on Nifty and packaging it as an ebook. That’s worked well for me, and I’m hoping that this approach can increase sales for ’691.’ In the interest of balancing out my crass money-grubbing, I’m donating fifteen percent of what I make from ’691′ in the months of September and October to the Nifty Archive. You should donate to Nifty, too: http://donate.nifty.org/donate.html

Or buy ’691′ if you haven’t already: Queer Young Cowboys

What else is going on? I spend about half of my time working at my job. The other half is divided between social functions and writing, though it all ebbs and flows. I’m writing a novel, it’s going really well. I go swimming, I go dancing. I’m reading a lot. I have sex now and again. Watch movies. My cats love up on me when they’re not driving me nuts. Dats about it!

This is rather Pittsburgh-centric as it was originally published in the April 2013 issue of Queerburgher. Just know that Shadyside = Chelsea = West Hollywood = anyplace upper class and queer).

I went to the Jeff Mangum show in Oakland a few weeks back. It was real good. There were lots of dudes there, and 75% of them had beards. I joked to my friend that the evening’s must-have accessories were a beard and a girlfriend. I wondered if, in some cases, their girlfriends were their beards.

We have no way of knowing these things. But objectively speaking – and also speaking in an objectifying manner – many of them were utterly fuckable. Beards are sexy. I have a beard, because I think it makes me look sexy. But in these modern times when facial hair in the GLBT and hipster community is rampant, it’s important to appreciate the sexiness of the shorn man.

You will find many of these men in the Shadyside neighborhood of Pittsburgh. In fact, you might even say that in Shadyside, this type of man runs rampant, like a herd of hairless cattle in Nylon running shorts, charging down Walnut Street and smashing into the windows of the Apple store.

We’re generalizing here, a lot, so let’s continue with that and just say that there’s a Shadyside man, a metrosexual sort of fellow who actually does spend fifty dollars on a t-shirt, for some reason. This man, be he queer or unqueer, probably works out at a gym. He probably has Craigslist Missed Connections written about him being at the gym, by a guy who looks like a gayer version of him. He takes pride in his appearance. He spends a lot of money on it. He primps and preens. He’s sexy and he knows it.

And, he shaves. His face. His chest. His neck, his back – perhaps even his pussy and his crack. He takes on traditionally feminine characteristics. He emasculates. And god help me, there is something that is just so sexy about that.

I mean, I get the appeal of the overgrown man. The man who is self-assured, confident. Manly. The man who doesn’t care; who knows you’re going to be attracted to him and is going to do whatever he wants to you. He holds the cards. He holds a big, hairy dick. His chest is a carpet one can curl up upon, like a pussycat on a bearskin rug. But what of a slippery lady-man, with skin that is oh-so smooth, stroke-able and poke-able? What of two-day stubble, the ritual of shearing and regrowth, the lushness of rich creamy lather whisked away by the steely edge of a blade? What, I ask you, of Daniel Craig?

We may judge the men of Shadyside for their consumerist tendencies. For isn’t it easy to assume that, in a world where everyone is out for your money, people have been sold a look and a lifestyle that requires them to deny their primate heritage and purchase products (such as razors, Nair and anal bleaching treatments) so that they might conform to a certain look? Perhaps, but we all make choices and concessions in this life. We are all doing our best in our little slices of corporate hegemony.

And besides, passing judgement is for the birds. Let us merely raise our glass to the men of Shadyside for all that they do to make themselves beautiful, and remind them – and ourselves – that there is nothing quite like the sensation of a beard rubbing against a shorn taint.

UPDATE: As Rob G. notes in the comments, further chapters are available at Men on the Net.

If you read my stories, you’ve probably also read – and jacked off to – one or two of Sebastian Wallace’s stories. I’ve been a fan of his for quite some time and probably stole a few literary tricks from him in my early days as a writer – unwittingly, of course.

Sebastian hasn’t published anything new that I’ve been aware of in the past few years, so I’m more than pleased to announce that he’s back with a whole new series of stories called Butt Monkey, which he has written under the name Robert Furlong. I’ve read the first four chapters…and I’ve cum twice. Bravo, Mr. Furlong! As always, these stories are literary teases of the first order – a reading experience akin to a feather tickling your shaft, balls and taint for over an hour. For now the first two chapters are available on Screeve. Read and enjoy! I will alert you to further chapters.

Butt Monkey by Robert Furlong [Screeve.com]

I wrote the below for a faerie gathering I attended in February, but it might translate to real life.

You might have flinched when somebody touched you. You might have wondered, Do they want something from me? You might have looked at beautiful men and collapsed under the weight of your wanting.

You might have listened to a near-stranger share his pain and wanted to reach out, to teach, to save. You might have found that your reach exceeded your grasp. You might have forgotten to hold on to something yourself.

You might have breathed. You might take a breath right now. Another.

You might have been naked, watching the steam rise from the pool and into the pines, and realized you were no longer thinking of your body as something that was in need of improvement.

You might have been in a room with a hundred other people and looked each of them in the eye without fear. And they might have touched you, and you them; soft parts of bodies brushing and mixing until you couldn’t imagine looking at any person with difference or suspicion.

You might have wondered how it could be so easy, how you could ever forget that that the space between us is the space where we connect.