Um, sorry I’ve got slack about this.
I’ve had a cold or something, and not felt up to it, and alos been trying to concentrate on the fucking novel that I keep talking about and never actually doing between the short stories and this.
So I’m on sick leave, and avoiding-procrastination leave, and will be back soon.
Just in case anyone wondered.
There’s a new story up, this is a sequel to Sharing Melissa’s Mouth, set a couple of months later. The same kind of deeds and the same kind of complications all over again. So literary erotica, I guess. There’s more about emotional problems than there is dirty talk.
Yep, the title is confusing. Kind of. I couldn’t work out a way to fit it into the mouth-themed body-parts list, since it’s a bit more all over.
Yep, there is one obvious body-part, but that’s just rude.
It’s late here, and I just finished that, so that’s all, really.
It’s at Smashwords and ARe, and on Amazon soon.
Thank you for being interested!
So on the off-chance there’s actually someone who is reading this, and wants a copy of Erin, and doesn’t actually have one yet from the other places, it seems to have just turned free at Amazon.
In case you want a geniune shiny kindley copy. Or something.
So it’s been free at Smashwords and ARe for a while, long enough there’s also a sequel, and I’m really fucking sorry if you bought it for actual money, and didn’t realize it was free other places, and now it just went free at Amazon too. If that happened, please, please tell Amazon and they should give your money back. Apparently. I hope.
All of this is because the only way to get free stories onto Amazon seems to be put them up with a price, and tell Amazon it’s free everywhere else, and then wait a week while they check and make sure and change the price. I can’t set it to free myself, like I can other places.
I mean, I can if I’m Stephen King, but if I’m me, then nope, I’m not allowed.
So they don’t get swamped with newbie indie authors trying to freebie their way into people’s hearts, I assume.
You know, like me.
So fair enough to Amazon.
And this is why the other free stories aren’t on Amazon. I put Erin up there because people seem to like it, and I hoped this would happen. But I feel bad for the people who pay for it in the week it takes Amazon to organize the free-ness. And I don’t know how blatant I can be saying its free other places, without getting stomped on by Amazon. There’s rules about off-site advertising. Which is also fair enough.
So anyways. I don’t know I should do this with other stories, which is why I haven’t as yet.
But if there’s any that people desperately want something on Amazon for some reason, say so and I can. Like, if you get sick of Smashwords or ARe mobi files being ‘documents’ not ‘books’ or whatever.
Um. And sorry again if you paid.
And Edges of Empires is also free at Amazon, complete with a shitty review, but maybe read this first, just so you don’t get a shock. It’s not like the other stuff I write.
And thank you everyone for reading what I write. I’m really fucking grateful. So grateful I just through Amazon hoops just so you can.
I’m writing less now than I was a couple of months ago. This is because I’m an idiot, basically.
So right now I have two almost finished books I need to get done. Like actual books, novel length ones. One is smut, one is a Tessa thriller kind of thing. Both are three-quarters finished, so they have a start, and an end, and I know what happens in the rest. I’m not stuck trying to think up what goes next, I know what goes next. I just need to write it down. Then edit it. Then they’re done.
I like them both. I want them to be good.
I like both books so much I’m procrastinating so I don’t spoil them.
Does that make any sense at all? Like, at the moment I have this perfect but intangible thing in my head. Putting all of it down risks fucking it up, because it makes it real, and then maybe its shit, and no-one likes it.
This is why a lot short stories, by the way. I can get them out before I think about it too much.
Four Together fucked my head up for a week worrying I wouldn’t get it right. Ashley’s Deal was as bad, and apparently I didn’t get it right because people don’t like it. I have no idea when the prequel about Ashley gets done because of that.
Anyway, I need to fucking harden up and stop being a lazy whiney bitch and just get it done.
But instead I’m writing this down here.
Um.
So this week has turned into politics week. I had been going to stop. Then, unfortunately, I had another thought.
Oh fuck, everyone says.
So just to clarify something.
On the gun control stuff, don’t listen to me. Really. Like, fucking ever. The gun thing is flippant, to say the least. Watch Mythbusters and you might get why. Geekiness and explosives mixed together tends to lead to much enthusiasm but poorly thought-out political views.
I have a childish fascination with guns because I live in a country were we don’t get to play with them. I’m also a writer so I read about this shit now and then. Know what the difference is between a M16A1 and a M16A2? I do. And don’t use your flash suppressor as a tin opener, people. Bad shit happens.
At least if it’s 1968.
And we all know why its fragging, right?
I like knowing this shit. I think knowing it makes me interesting. I like being all redneck at suburban dinner parties, because I don’t actually look like I’d have these views.
This doesn’t mean I truly deeply madly believe them.
Um. If that makes no sense to you, it’s probably just because you take politics too seriously. Don’t worry, I still like you and probably everyone else does too. So just take it as there, and how I am, and don’t try to understand.
Anyways.
Here is a disclaimer. On gun control, and probably most other things, take my opinion not very seriously at all. I have no fucking idea what I’m talking about. I don’t have an opinion. I don’t even remember Australia without gun control.
But I shall say this. Given the enthusiasm TV Australians have found lately for lecturing the US about gun control.
And not that the US gives a shit, I imagine. Since they all think we’re Crocodile Dundee.
But anyway. The thought.
No Australian should ever tell anyone what to think about gun control, ever, except possibly John Howard, who passed the laws to regulate firearms here. Our big shooting massacre, at Port Arthur, is so fucking bad it tops worst-in-the-world lists, like here. It killed 35 people, which is more than any shooting in the US, or in England, or anywhere else outside of one in Africa and one in Korea. And per capita, which may or may not be relevant, this would be 875 people dead in one shooting in a country the size of the US. Roughly. [there's a footnote]
So I’m all for slapping down the stupid use of statistics, but I’m not sure that one is. Gun control arguments tend to make a big thing of comparative crime rates between countries.
Port Arthur is so fucking bad everyone in Australia should just shut the fuck up, I think. We’re not better or smarter or did anything well, we just happened to have something so fucking terrible happen it shocked us into action. And a prime minister who happened to be as shocked as everyone else.
And being realistic, disarming a mostly unarmed population, like happened here, is not nearly the same or as complicated a thing as what the US would face, if it did ever ban private guns. Australians talking about this shit is just ignorant.
And the only other thing I should need to say is meanwhile, on Underbelly… Or meanwhile, down at the Ned Kelly glorification museum. It’s not like we’re not all secretly sympathetic to this.
Anyways. That’s about as political as I’ll ever get. And I’m really going to stop this now.
Because it doesn’t actually matter what I think.
Because, seriously, I write fucking erotica. I’m pretty sure even people reading this blog are reading it because they like how I write smut, not because of my deep fucking political insights. So what I think doesn’t matter, not really, so just ignore this if you think I’m wrong or it annoys you.
And I really honest to fuck will stop with this from now on.
Footnotey thing: So these lists seem to seperate political violence from merely pointless violence. So Norway the other year was terrorism, and is somehow different to merely a mass shooting. At the risk of annoying more people, I’d tend to say that any time you kill lots of strangers, whether for reasons that are utterly crazy or only merely screwed up, that’s bad. And that being a douche-canoe for what you think is a good reason isn’t really any better than being a douche-canoe just because. But the world doesn’t agree, and seems to think politically-motivated killing is somehow less bad than other kinds, so I’ll go along with that here. But probably terrorists should be on these lists too.
So I need to shut up about all this. Because who really cares what I think. But obviously I’m not going to because there’s a whole lot more words underneath these ones.
So more about yesterday. Some political stuff might have slipped in there when I was trying to talk about writing and reviews.
I don’t think I said this as clearly as I could have then, so I will say it again, clearly. I am actually pro guns and pro military and pro a strong national defence. I am very pro all those things.
Well.
I’m actually pro military and defence. The guns thing, as has been said before, is slightly more tongue in cheek.
Like completely tongue in cheek, really.
But the first two, yes. In actual, real seriousness, I do think it’s inhumanly selfish not to be nice to military and emergency services people who risk their lives for you. I also think it’s hopelessly naive and shows you never watched the actual, you know, news, to think that bad shit doesn’t happen in the world and you don’t need them or the military.
So maybe some post-911 thing. If you become a grown-up during the War on Terror, you get all invested and feel some stake in this stuff. Maybe more invested than in welfare and schools and hospitals and other things the government pays for that I never use. Maybe.
No kids, remember? Not old yet? So the only thing the government buys me that I care about is roads. And the army.
Oh, and the ABC, actually. Come to think of it, that could be worth all the tax I don’t pay.
Um.
So what I was going to say was this. I was watching the news, for once, and I realized something odd.
But I need to digress to explain.
In Australia we’re in the middle of finding out that military institutions and religious institutions, like any institutions, can be attractive to damaged, predatory people, and that damaged people use their positions to take advantage of other people. Some bad shit has been quietly going on in the Australian military and in a fuck of a lot of churches. And in orphanages. And in the police and welfare organisations who ignored what was going on. And pretty much everywhere else, it seems like.
The military and churches are what has been in the news lately though. There, abuse seems to have been about what it has been found to be other places, which is to say very, very bad if you’re involved, but fortunately not universal.
But I don’t actually know. This is still being found out.
So this is terrible, obviously.
I realized something, though. Call my personal morality fucked sideways, but I expect better of the military than of religious churches.
I realize that probably isn’t right, and will cause all manner of upset and anger to people who believe in some quite wildly different things to each other, but I do.
I’m also not so fucked up I didn’t think it was odd. It is kind of weird, when you think about it. Its probably also a perception that religious believers should care a lot about, or at least their marketing departments should, and it might even be something that explains whatever interesting shit about me, and someone might even care. So there you go.
That was my thought.
And that’s as political as I ever get.
I really need to start talking about smut again. Sorry for all this.
So kind of another responding to reviews thing, there’s a new story out, this one is a sequel to Erin.
Responding to reviews because someone said they’d like more about Erin and Lauren. So, um, here you go.
I tried to keep it like Erin, so one night, kind of pivotal in their relationship, with an emotional connections as well as sex. And yes, obviously rimming each other.
This seemed to work as a very short story, so staying with that.
Erin’s Anniversary is on Smashwords and ARe, or its here to read if you’d rather.
