First of all, have you noticed how poorly this site has been operating lately? I called my hosting service today and they were like, “Oh yeah, we’ve been having trouble with that server for the past month,” and I was like, “Okay, so move it to another server,” so that’s what they’re going to do. So hopefully it should work better.

I don’t even know what to say on this website lately. There’s too much going on. I had to euthanize my cat a little while back. The vet came to my house to do it, which helped. I took his body to my hometown and buried him in the woods.

I sold my first collage at an event in Pittsburgh called Art All Night, really a fantastic thing. It was the first time I’d sold a piece of visual art on its own merit, so that feels pretty great.

I started writing again, I submitted something to Best Gay Erotica 2012 just the other day, so that feels good too.

I guess that’s it.

I know this blog is shit lately, and I apologize.  I don’t have any fucking time in my life these days.  I’m working two jobs (one is at the porn store, which should provide for some good stories on down the line) and I just moved to a new apartment.  Bear with me.

Repost from old blog, 2/7/2009

Rising sea levels could swamp sections of the Eastern Shore, eat away islands in the Chesapeake Bay and submerge long stretches of Atlantic Ocean beaches by 2100…[more]

Ocean City, Maryland is but a sliver of sand – the place already feels like it’s hanging on by a thread. Being there recently, in the dead of winter, I couldn’t get it out of my head that it is doomed. I was imagining it as a lost, submerged world when I took these pictures.

A bit dramatic, I know…

Detail from Backwoods cover illustration by Michael Kirwan

Here I am!

My novel-in-stories of erotic fiction, Backwoods, is done done done and coming out this summer from Rebel Satori Press.  Michael has completed the illustrations, the cover is GLORIOUS, and in the next couple of days I’m going to be putting up a rudimentary promotional page on here, just to have something I can link to.  More info as I get it!

I haven’t written a word besides journal entries in the past three months.  It’s getting old!  I need to get back into writing, but haven’t been able to concentrate.  The big change in my life is that I’m single now, and though I don’t really care to talk about that on the internet, it feels way too significant to gloss over.  Know that I’m doing okay and working through things day to day.  I know that people out there care, and it means a lot to me, but please don’t offer me sympathy.  I’ll be fine.

I hope to start posting more on here in the coming weeks, including resuming your Friday Nifty experiences.  As always, thanks for reading!

Repost from old blog, 3/14/2009
Here are pictures from a recent trip a friend and I made to the old Torrance State Hospital in Torrance, PA. I grew up around this place and it is the source of much legend and speculation. It seems that this building is not the actual hospital, but rather the staff quarters. Yes, apparently the staff lived on the hospital grounds 24 hours a day, which makes you wonder if you could tell them apart from the patients after awhile. Still, staff building or not, the place is suitably creepy and just an all-around great abandoned building.

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Repost from old blog, 8/15/2009I was having a crappy day on Wednesday; an outcome of the extreme financial stress we’ve been having lately. I’d been so overcome by my problems, so paralyzed by the future, that I knew I needed to do something to escape.

I took a walk through a field near my house. I was picking wildflowers when I saw a family of deer: three does, three fawns. They spotted me almost instantly but kept walking toward me. They would stop, look around, look back at me, then continue toward me. They got about five yards away from me before one of them made a snirfing sound and they bounded off – all except for one adult, whose body was pointed toward where the rest was running but whose neck was craned back to look at me, as if too curious to run away. Finally I clapped to scare her and she ran.

But I was thinking about how the deer have to be constantly alert to danger. They kept looking up, looking around, then going back to what they were doing. All animals have to be like that, to varying extents. It’s important to be aware of danger, but equally important to go on with your life when no immediate threat is present.

Repost from old blog, 2/23/2008

Around fifteen I realized that I could use the internet to order porn films. This had the advantage of bypassing the usual age verification at a store as well as saving myself the embarrassment of trying to purchase it face-to-face with an actual person.

I ordered a tape to my house and spent many queasy afternoons waiting to see if I could pluck it from the mailbox before my parents did. The anxiety was heady, but the tape came unlabeled, unremarkable – nobody took the slightest notice. However, the fear had been too intense, and I knew I couldn’t go through it again. I was ready to order more porn, and I needed a different plan.

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I was in elementary school – fourth grade?  Fifth?  Right on the cusp of those years when all insecurities manifest themselves, when we glom upon the perceived weaknesses of others to deflect attention from our own, when we’re at our worst.  Or maybe I’m just trying to justify what I did.

The Feist family lived across the alley from us.  They were pariahs, the perfect “others.”   The dad was qualifiably insane.  He had two sons, one a year older than me.  Both were low, trash in my eyes.  Bad kids.  Poor kids.  But they never did anything to me.

I can’t remember why we decided to do it.  It was me and my friend Timmy.  We were walking home from school, and the younger Feist boy was walking ahead of us, and one of us (I think it was Timmy) suggested we get him.  We walked up to him.  I had an umbrella.  We hit him with it.  I remember him trying to get away, and I was whacking him with this folded-up umbrella.

I’m glad I remember this.  It’s good to know I can be as awful as the rest of humanity.

I never started writing erotica for the money.  Pursuing any type of writing for the money would be, amongst many other attributes, hilarious.  I started writing erotica because it was what I was meant to do, and I started publishing it on Nifty (and eventually on this website) because I felt it was good, and that people might like it.  Then and now, that has been my chief motivation for writing erotica:  because I like it and hope others will like it too.

However, the market for erotica was once robust compared to the market for other fiction, and I came right on the tail end of a golden age.  When I was selling stories to Men and Freshmen I was making an astounding – but, at the time, pretty standard – $300 a story.  What’s more is that magazines were contacting me – me! – to write other things for them, and offering me money to do so.

I almost cried writing that last paragraph.  Those checks were a godsend.  Now – NEWS FLASH! – the writing/publishing industry is in the toilet.  About the only game left in town are the anthologies (like Best Gay Erotica) and let’s just say that while I appreciate the money they offer per story, it don’t even add up to a week’s worth of groceries.

I work a full-time job.  It’s a good job and I’m incredibly grateful for it.  The schedule is flexible, which gives me free time to work on my writing and my website.  The trade off for this flexibility is the fact that I don’t get paid a whole lot.

It’s never been easy for me to ask for money.  But it’s becoming clearer to me that if an artist (or even a porno writer) feels that their work is worth something, they need to ascribe a monetary value to it and encourage their audience to do the same.  That doesn’t mean I expect every reader of this site to donate something – I read and watch and listen to plenty of free things.  Nor do I knock writers who want to give their work away – I think finding and developing an audience is paramount.  But money is pretty necessary, too.

Consider this:  my web hosting costs come out to about six bucks a month. The yearly fee for my domain is around twenty bucks.  That’s small potatoes, but if you donated six bucks you’d be keeping my site alive for a month. For twenty you’d be sustaining it for a year. Either way you’d be supporting my writing (habit/disorder) in a tangible way.  That’s pretty cool, right?

Think about it and get back to me!

Not Me

It was Halloween of 2001 and I needed a costume.  I’d been growing out my hair for over a year and it was as big as it ever had been (and ever would be).  It was a total white-boy afro.

So I got an idea.  I brushed my hair out really big and sprayed it red.  I found this amazing yellow jumpsuit at the thrift store and some red and white striped tights.  Some pancake makeup and – poof! – I was Ronald McDonald.

The night before Halloween my friend had a party.  I passed out lollipops and everyone was impressed with my level of creepiness.

I got incredibly drunk.  I ended up wandering around campus with a non-costumed friend, getting attention from everyone we passed.  We stumbled into a random house party.  Nobody was wearing a costume except me.  They were having a fight club.  The living room was full of people crammed against the walls and along the staircase, all egging on two tough-looking girls who were boxing in the middle of the room.

There was a lull in the action and people started asking who was going to go next.  Somebody said, “Ronald McDonald!” and then others took up the chant.  Fifty people were demanding my presence in the ring – there was no getting out of it.  Fortunately I was trashed enough to put on my game face instead of running for my life.  I slipped on the boxing gloves and got in the middle with a tall, vaguely scary-looking dude.

I know that I threw at least two punches, and if memory serves, one of them actually landed.  As it was, though, I was mainly on the receiving end, and after a particularly potent hit right in the middle of my face, I went down.  Everyone cheered.

I stumbled home.  There was blood on my white clown gloves.  My friend said I’d done better he’d thought I would.  ”I thought it was going to end really badly,” he said.  ”That guy wanted to fuck you up.”

Once my hangover wore off I too could appreciate the fact that I’d gotten out of there alive.  And I figured I’d given the party a little extra jolt of fun and excitement.  I mean, who doesn’t want to see Ronald McDonald get his ass knocked to the floor?