Just wanted to post a full rundown of where you can buy my latest ebook of never! before! published! straight(ish) guy stories.
Queer Young Cowboys – You can buy it in any format here: PDF, EPUB, or MOBI, and the profit goes to me and my friends rather than a corporate entity.
Thanks, yo.
Hi! Straight(ish) Vol 1 is available for purchase at the Queer Young Cowboys store in PDF, MOBI and EPUB versions. It features four new(ish) stories about straight guys-gone-curious by yours truly.
It should be up on Amazon, B&N, etc by the end of the day for those of you who prefer to operate within corporate channels.
If you buy it and like it, slap a review for it on Amazon, then let me know you did so I can send you a special gift.
Quickly: 1) Straight(ish) Vol 1 should be available to purchase if not tomorrow, then early next week. I will announce and I will be obnoxious about it, so don’t worry. 2) New York City was great as always. I sold out of Backwoods and kicked myself for not bringing more copies – when I get on a selling tear, watch the fuck out (I’m good at it).
I’m using the month of April to step away from writing as much as possible and work on some collages, which I’ve neglected for a while now. I forgot how much I enjoy it, and how much I love the final product. Above is just a warm-up, the cover of my current journal. Many more to come soon but in the meantime if you want to check out my collage work so far, check out my Flickr account.
I’ll be signing and selling copies of Backwoods this Saturday at the Rainbow Book Fair in NYC. Look for me at the Rebel Satori Press table. It’s a pretty great event if you’ve never been. Hope to see ya!
Hiyeeee. I just put up a new story and it’s a good one: My Best Friend’s Boyfriend. This one I wrote for my ebook Str8 but Curious, which is still available and contains other stories not on this website.
Speaking of ebooks and stories not on this website, in the next week or so I’m going to be releasing an e-volume of straight-guy stories that I’ve never put out before, Straight(ish) Vol. 1. It will be available in all ebook formats from the Queer Young Cowboys store, as well from all your favorite corporate, too-big-for-their-britches internet-based booksellers.
A little more about Straight(ish) Vol 1:
Four tales of straight guys gone curious from master(bating) erotic writer Natty Soltesz.
Playdate: Naptime. Two young dads on a Sunday afternoon, bored and horny, realize they have more in common than they knew. The women aren’t around, and the girls won’t be up for at least an hour…
Room for Cream: A gay barista and a straight barista find a way to pass a slow, rainy evening at the coffee shop. It involves honey.
Office Politics: When a young university employee starts getting it on with the hunky college work-study guy, it’s only natural that others want to get in on the fun – including, Bob, the office homophobe.
Normal Str8 Masc Jock Apocalypse: When the perfect clean-cut straight guy at the sports bar offers you a ride home, of course you say yes – even if you’re not sure what you’re getting yourself into.
I have a little file on my computer where I keep a list of stories I’ve written but haven’t released. The other day I decided to update this list. I started going through my hard drive, with an eye on stories that are complete, edited, but for whatever reason I didn’t think were “good enough” for public consumption. By the time I was done the list had doubled in size.
So in the next week or so I’m going to release the first of two self-published/produced ebooks of stories from the depths of my hard drive, Straight(ish) Vol 1 (followed by Straight(ish) Vol 2, of course). Reading through these old stories reminds me that, oftentimes, work that I initially discount winds up seeming pretty good in retrospect. At the very least, the stories in these two volumes are representative of my work and where I was when I wrote them. Here’s an excerpt from the first story in Vol 1, “Playdate.”
Naptime. The girls were asleep downstairs. Allen and I, in a lazy state from a feast of chicken nuggets and french fries (the girls’ choice), were sprawled out next to each other on the couch, yawning and gazing at the TV.
Just another rainy Sunday afternoon playdate. Allen and I had been doing this for the past two months, giving ourselves a chance at a moment of peace while the girls play with each other, on days when his wife and my girlfriend were scheduled to work.
We met through our women, in fact, though the two of us instantly hit it off. Allen, my age but looking as fine as I had in my early twenties, was into working out just like me, and we both liked to party but somehow all these other activities had taken a back seat to child rearing. Playdates were the only time we really got to hang out.
Allen, wearing nothing but a pair of nylon running shorts, his smooth and muscular body sinking back against the couch, flipped through the channels until he came to a documentary about the turn-of-the-21st-century rave scene in North America.
I’d been there, back when I was a senior in college, taking ecstasy and liquid acid and throwing myself into the sweaty throngs of young bodies dancing the night away without a care in the world. I missed those days, those wonder years of peace and prosperity. Mostly I missed the hot tattooed guy I’d made out when I was candyflipping one hallowed Halloween rave evening.
We’d carried on a pretty torrid and passionate affair, and I explored my burgeoning sexuality with him from top to bottom before I got the creeps about the whole thing and scurried into a relationship with a homely Social Sciences major from the local girls-only liberal arts college. One year later beget our bouncing baby girl, and my hunky tattooed trick (with the eight-inch dick – I know because we measured it once) fell into the deep, red, velvet-lined recesses of my memory. I still had some semblances of my youth – all of my hair and my macho, cut body – but I’d went from living on the edge to living in the suburbs of Chicago. It left something to be desired.
Allen adjusted his golden-haired legs, spreading his thighs until his knee rested against mine.
“I went to one of those once,” he said.
“I went to a lot of those.”
“Yeah? They were too expensive for my taste. I dug the scene though. Kinda freaky,” he said, his soft pink lips curling back, his eyebrows lowering in a scandalous smirk. It nearly gave me a hard-on, that look did. In the lazy Sunday afternoon air, though, pretty much anything gave me a hard-on.
Just then, the documentary started talking about the mutability of sexual desire that was present in the rave scene. They could’ve been talking about my life. Interspersed with the commentary was a few shots of boys kissing other boys. I waited with baited breath to see how Allen reacted.
He let out a low whistle.
“See what I mean?” he said, nudging my thigh with his. “Freaky.”
I’ve been pretty active on Twitter lately, I feel like I’m starting to “get it.” So follow me: https://twitter.com/nattysoltesz
Also, I’m back on Facebook so feel free to friend me if you enjoy interacting with people in that manner.
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.
