Obsessed

by Jean Roberta



Renaissance Publishing (Sizzler Editions) is planning my next single-author collection of erotic stories. My first collection with that publisher, Obsession, is a smorgasbord of characters, pairings, situations, and desires. Here is the blurb:

When a character with a kinky itch shows up in my own mind – I know I’m seeing the beginning of a story and I have to find out where it leads. The stories in this collection show where my characters have led me:

* What if a lesbian with a taste for older women goes looking for her birth-mother and is shocked to find out what King Oedipus knew? What if she only wants to impress a lesbian literature prof who knows the classics?

* What if a man dreams of finding a truly submissive woman, but when she appears like a gift from the heavens, he feels as if he is trapped in a nightmare?

* What if a person of any gender or sexual orientation wants to find the perfect companion, for a night or a lifetime, and finds one who is not exactly human?

* What if curiosity or compassion or a desperate need for cash leads a sensible-enough person to take unusual risks?

Be warned; not all of these stories end happily. The road to pleasure or love or admiration or material comfort is paved with danger. Some of these stories have old roots in myth and folklore, but none of them carries the old message that women’s sexuality is a source of evil, or that strong men are born to rule the world."

https://www.amazon/OBSESSION-Erotica-Those-Kinky-Itch-ebook/dp/B00IMVJLKO

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Excerpt from “Eros and Psyche” in Obsession:

The first letter was especially surprising because I wasn't expecting personal mail in the post office box, let alone an envelope featuring my name handwritten in green ink. That box had been used by various organizations that I was involved with over the years: the Women's Shelter, the Lavender Bookstore, a short-lived gothic journal named Dyke Demon. I had been the unofficial Keeper of the Key for years, so I had agreed to pick up the mail for the Women's Shelter during their fundraising drive.

The letter addressed to me had been mailed within the city, which didn't give me much information about the sender. My name and the box number were so elegantly inscribed that I decided not to rip into the envelope in my usual style, but keep it sealed until I could slit it neatly with a knife. That little decision was my first step on the path that led me to this point.

I was sitting over a cappuccino in Café Mocha when I opened the envelope, almost as though I had agreed to meet the sender for a leisurely chat. The letter read:

Dear Christina,

Do you know how you look when you think no one is watching? I think you should know.
I doubt if you have ever studied the dark depths of your own eyes, the wild grace of your bronze hair in the wind, the stubborn line of your chin, the fruitlike curve of your breasts, the sassy shape of your lower cheeks. You need me to describe these things to you because otherwise, you might never come to know yourself. I don't want you to stay self-ignorant.

Why don't I tell you these things in person? I think you can guess. You would feel threatened or pressured, and you would probably reject me. It's harder to stop reading a letter than to walk away or hang up the phone, isn't it?
Beautiful Christina, I've been watching you for a long time. I've been patient and I'm not planning any sudden moves. Watch for my next letter.

Sending you a kiss,

Your Admirer

My reaction to this message was alarming: it turned me on. I told myself in vain that a bullshit fan letter from a stalker with too much spare time and green ink should annoy or scare me, not excite me. All the same, I could almost feel two firm hands testing the weight of my breasts, squeezing my butt, stroking my face, running her (his?) hands through my hair. I decided to stop indulging in sick fantasies.

**************************

The Thin Line #madness #obsession #passion

By Lisabet Sarai

I have some acquaintance with madness.

In my late teens, I spent three months in a state psychiatric hospital, struggling with anorexia. Though I’d starved myself down to eighty five pounds while still perceiving myself as fat, I didn’t think I was crazy—which just goes to show how truly delusional I was—but my fellow patients sometimes acted that way. I became accustomed to people mumbling to themselves, shrieking in terror at invisible threats, or sitting for hours in one place, rocking back and forth. A few years after I was released, when I saw George Romero’s original “Night of the Living Dead”, I had nightmares for weeks. His mindless, shuffling zombies reminded me too much of my Thorazine-numbed fellow inmates.

Still, I’m in some sense attracted to insanity. In my early years, I devoured tales by Edgar Allen Poe and H.P. Lovecraft, two authors known for skirting the edge of madness. One of the books that influenced me most as a teen was Lilith by J.R. Salamanca, the story of a fascinating, creative young woman with acute schizophrenia who gradually draws an innocent hospital attendant into her world of glittering, terrible hallucinations. I fell in love with Lilith right along with Vincent. I couldn’t help myself. Indeed, madness and brilliance are closely linked in both fact and fiction. From Vincent Van Gogh to Sylvia Plath, we can all name crazy geniuses who produced great works of art despite—or perhaps due to—their disordered, tortured minds.

Madness is particularly relevant in erotica. There’s often a thin line between erotic obsession and insanity. Intensely focused desire can distort everything else in a character’s world, eclipsing rationality and silencing conscience. I’ve written a number of stories that explored the difficult distinction between normal lust and insane passion. Unfortunately, such tales rarely end happily. Also, they tend to make readers distinctly uncomfortable.

Consider, for instance, “Renfield’s Lament”, in my paranormal collection Fourth World:

Do I seem mad to you? If so, they are responsible. They've driven me mad with their beauty and indifference.

They don't even bother to hunt anymore. They spend their days in their king-sized coffin, alabaster limbs entwined in a frozen tableau of passion. They devote their nights to surfing the Internet, listening to Bach or Dvořák, or lounging on their deck, the endless grid of the city sparkling below them.

Except, of course, for the nights when they feed.

Occasionally, on rainy days when there's no risk, I muster the courage to lift the polished rosewood lid of their communal casket and peek inside. I'm always startled by the scent that rises from their inert forms, orange blossoms and sun-warmed stone, no hint of dankness or decay. Their exquisite pallor complements the perfection of their naked bodies. They seem like statues modeled from translucent, milky glass.

He slumbers with one palm cupping her pert breast, the other arm wrapped around her waist. Her honey-brown hair fans over his chest, fine as spider silk. She curls her fist around his cock, which is rampant even as they sleep. The bold gesture contrasts with her innocent features. She has the smooth cheeks, pointed chin and plump lips of a teenage cheerleader.

My fingers twitch. The urge to trace the shape of that sweet, ripe mouth is almost irresistible. More times than I can count, I've seen those lips distorted by a fiendish grin and those girlish cheeks smeared with gore. It doesn't matter. She will always be my angel, my inspiration, my heart's desire, my doom. My beloved mistress.

My master is equally magnificent in his own way, with a dancer's subtly muscled arms and legs and a head of glorious ebony curls like some pale gypsy. He has a bookish look, with a high forehead rising above bushy black brows and a sensitive mouth that cries out for kisses.

I've never dared to lean close and take advantage of his immobility, much as I ache to feel the chill of his flesh against my own. If I gave way to temptation, would he know? I'm not certain that their death-like daytime sleep stills their minds the way it freezes their bodies. I doubt he'd punish me, if he discovered my transgression. He knows I'd welcome the mark of his bullwhip or the icy invasion of his knife. No, more likely he'd mock me, or simply ignore me, refusing to acknowledge my existence. I couldn't bear that.

The sight of them, locked together in eternal stasis, holds me captive. Blood pours into my cock, blood I know they'd savor if they'd only take it, until I'm hard as the concrete walls of the basement room where they sleep. My pulse pounds in my temples as my futile erection strains my trousers. I am their creature, their slave, stunned into helpless worship by their unearthly beauty.

I know they need me. That should satisfy me—the knowledge that without me they'd might fry or starve or succumb to some overly zealous reader of horror fiction. Month after month, year after year, I guard them and I procure them their victims. It's my privilege to serve them. That should be enough. But I want more from them, God help me, more than I can ever hope they'll give.

Renfield’s desire is so powerful that he offers himself to a sadist’s blade in order to trick his master and mistress into drinking his blood. Set against his awful need, death means nothing.

My recent story “Underground”, in the recently published ERWA anthology Unearthly Delights, has a somewhat similar theme.

So maybe it’s not totally sane. I’ve always been fascinated by madness.

As for safe, where’s the thrill in safety?

You can’t, however, deny that it’s consensual.

Ducking into a blank alley, one of thousands in this city, I make my way to the metal door near the end. The keypad gives off a faint green luminescence. I tap in the combination and the door swings open; my pulse is already climbing. My boot heels ring hollow as I descend the industrial steel steps, and the thump of the bass rises to meet me. Excitement wells up, flooding my cunt, even before I’ve buzzed the final door and been admitted to this most particular and perverse playground.

The techno soundtrack punches me in the solar plexus. My heart stutters like I've been shocked by a defibrillator. Delicious weakness sweeps over me, a premonition of what’s to come.

A few black clad figures shuffle to the hypnotic beat, clinging to one another as though drowning. Beyond the dance floor, naked bodies are draped over couches, shackled to walls or splayed wide on the bare concrete floor. Familiar scents reach me—pussy, cum and blood.

Some of those who frequent Underground are actual vampires, or so I’ve heard. I believe it. Others just like to play with knives.

Then there's me.

My heroine Elena is intelligent, well-educated, self-aware—and consumed with a craving for a perilous but intoxicating erotic experience no responsible or rational human will give her.

My nameless protagonist in “Fire” (in Rule 34: Weird and Wonderful Fetish Erotica) becomes an arsonist to satisfy his fire fetish, and almost ends up committing murder. He doesn’t think he’s crazy. After all, he plans his fiery escapades down to the smallest detail.

I’ve written a few characters who were literally insane. In Necessary Madness, my hero Kyle has uncontrolled prescient visions which have driven him into psychosis. Meanwhile, my unpublished lesbian story “Countertransference” features an exquisite teen-aged schizophrenic who tantalizes her therapist with her grace and creativity. There are echoes of Lilith in this tale, but the truly crazy character is Doctor Gardner, so obsessed with her patient Alisha that she risks everything to consummate her lust.

At one point, I planned to write a novel called Asylum, set in a psychiatric institution. I’ve dropped that idea for now, partly because I realized how similar my notions were to Lilith. The theme, however, continues to fascinate me—the fuzzy edge between sanity and insanity. What’s real? What’s a delusion? What is more important, passion or safety? Ecstasy or order?

I do think I’m pretty sane these days, but when I write some of these stories, I start to wonder. What am I missing?

Being Dirty, Feeling Shame ( #ExtremeErotica )

by Annabeth Leong

For the last two weeks, we've been wrestling with the question of what "dirtiest" means. I'm not sure I know what it is either. What's dirtiest can be what's desperately hot, or what's desperately shameful, or both at once.

There was a time in my erotica writing career when I pushed into the deepest recesses of things with a sort of innocence, without knowing that I might find strange things in corners, or disturb myself, or bring up questions that I didn't know how to answer.

After a couple years of writing, I started getting emails from Joe at Sweetmeats Press, and he said he wanted my wildest stuff—the dirtiest and the most creative. I believe I delivered for Joe. I went into some of my deepest fantasies (he's the one who published my book, Untouched, which some of you have read).

For another story, "Safekeeping," I played with a fantasy that had been in my mind for a long time. I used to housesit, and at one point I got fascinated with the inhabitant of an apartment I visited often. We had a very intimate relationship, despite not knowing each other at all. From that was born a story of obsession where I went for it with all my heart. The narrator of the story is obsessed with the object of her affection's body—every trace of it that she can find.

One typical review said: "[This] story really pushed the raunchy-dirty envelope I actually cringed at some of the things that went on."

I know some erotica writers take this stuff in stride or wear it as a badge of honor. I think, though, that I used to believe in some sort of basic similarity between people. I thought my fantasies weren't really any weirder than anyone else's. The stuff I wrote for Sweetmeats proved me wrong. And it made me uncomfortable to feel different or somehow dirtier.

This was the beginning of a period of me learning about this, of finding out that even in our field there's a way you can wind up feeling unacceptably slutty or unacceptably perverse.

I'm here to write dirty stories, right? But there are times when a story can feel too dirty, as in too dirty to be generally acceptable.

So I really like the stuff I wrote for Sweetmeats. I think it's poetic and hot, and it comes from a really deep place in me. But I have trouble recommending it, and if people tell me they're going to read it, I feel scared. And maybe that's what makes this my dirtiest story.

Here's the part of "Safekeeping" that I think made people cringe, if you're curious.

***

But, like all good things I suppose, that blissful, innocent time had to come to an end eventually. For me, that moment came the night I peeked into the wastebasket beside the bed, having just arrived for another week with Sasha, and saw three used condoms coiled atop a bed of discarded tissues.

My heart stopped, reactions warring in my chest. First, this meant he had another woman, that someone else had lain in his bed and moaned for him. The thought crushed me. It destroyed me. I think I went a little mad from the picture of an unknown beauty with her legs spread, her hips curling up toward Michael’s fingers, her hands on her breasts perhaps, her bright pink tongue just visible through parted lips.

And he had fucked her. Three times! He’d fucked her until she ached. He’d fucked her so she’d feel it the next day, a little bruise at the base of her belly that would make her remember the head of his battering cock. I didn’t know whether to feel pride for my Michael’s prowess or chagrin that he could betray me so many times so easily.

Still, I loved him too much to focus on my resentment. The condoms in the wastebasket presented an opportunity I could not bear to miss. They offered me a chance to finally taste him. For once, I wouldn’t have to seek Michael out through layers of associations. I could place him straight on my tongue. A shiver passed through me, then settled in my cunt. My inner walls quivered for him. Almost, I could convince myself he’d left the condoms as a gift, that he’d understood what I needed from him.

I pulled the first one out of the wastebasket, then sat on the edge of the bed, cradling it in my lap. Would he think I was pathetic if he knew about this? Would she? I imagined the woman he’d been with, smirking at the extent of my desperation for the man I loved. She would pity me if she knew I went through the trash for him, that I treated any little thing that had come from his body as holy. She hadn’t wanted him the way that I did, hadn’t been with him skin to skin.

My heart convulsed with a virtuous ache. The goodness and sincerity of what I felt for him became as clear as my passion. I knew I could not doubt or hesitate. Michael needed to know how utterly I craved him.
I lifted the condom slowly but with purpose. Her scent leapt to my nose, and I had to choke down my jealousy. This bit of latex had been wrapped around Michael’s cock. I soothed myself with that knowledge. I stretched it out and stroked its length, as my cunt wept with desire. In the reservoir at the tip of the condom, I saw my prize, a milky pearl of pure Michael.

When I was ready, I raised the condom to my lips. With my tongue, I parted the rubber ring at the base and delved inside, feasting on stale salt and musk that gave me precious hints of how they would have been when fresh. A sob rose from my throat. I wanted him all to myself.

Soon, the condom sheathed my tongue. I coaxed it with my fingers to I could reach ever deeper inside, needing to taste that pearl. Finally, the point of my tongue made contact with Michael’s come. Before I could control myself, I recoiled at the bitter, thick, room-temperature substance I encountered. Then I reminded myself what it was, and the purity of my love turned the flavor into something sweet. The dried residue revived when it joined with my saliva, melting over my tongue as if it had spurted from his cock just moments before.

I closed my eyes and groaned my ecstasy. Imagining he could see me, I dropped to my knees beside the bed. If his cock were in my mouth, he would want me there on the floor like that.

Growing bolder, I turned the condom inside out into my mouth, slurping and sucking. If not for the other woman, I would have put one of the condoms inside my cunt. Instead, I contented myself with slipping my hand into the waistband of my skirt and down inside my panties. Too impatient to bother with finesse, I forced a thick mass of fingers into the entrance of my cunt, the material and the awkward angle preventing me from getting as deep as I would have liked, but the blunt stimulation doing the job nonetheless.

I frigged myself, grunting harshly around my precious mouthful. As my orgasm neared, I cared less and less about whoever he’d fucked. I just needed more of him. My teeth ground into the little wad of latex in my mouth, but I wanted more.

Frantic with impending pleasure, I scrabbled for the wastebasket with my free hand. In the other room, the dog’s trimmed claws tapped against the wooden floor, probably in response to the way I was crashing around the bedroom. I paid no mind to anything but my prizes. Two other condoms, filled with Michael. He’d tied these at the base. I popped them into my mouth, wincing at the sour taste of the other woman.

Somehow, I had to make him want only me. My cunt spread wider at the thought, admitting a little more of my hand. I bit down into the condoms and they burst inside my mouth, releasing a gush of Michael.

I swallowed for him, the liquid heating inside me as it traveled down my throat and into my stomach. With the palm of my hand, I cupped my belly, treasuring it for holding him.

Then I redoubled my efforts, fucking myself so hard I collapsed to the floor face-first, panting. When the orgasm came, it almost hurt. Pleasure stabbed my brain like a migraine. I lay dazed, chewing latex. Now that my need had been sated, I could taste spermicide, too, and bitter clarity filled me.

The parts of Michael that I’d just swallowed had lain inert for days, like every other bit of him I’d managed to claim. It didn’t matter how intimately I knew his home and his life. It didn’t matter that he trusted me to care for his dog. The truth was, he’d given much more to that other woman. He’d given his vibrant, living self. He’d given her the heat of his hand, his breath in her ear, his hot come surging straight from his balls.

I had to have that, too. I’d thought I could be content with what I was getting, but because of her I now knew that wasn’t enough. Somehow, I had to find a way to let Michael know I needed more.

***

If you're into this, the story was published in Made for Hire, which is for sale here.

Writing on the Edge (#risk #darkness #amwriting)

By Lisabet Sarai

“Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable” ~ Cesar A. Cruz

I saw the above quotation on a bag at the Strand Bookstore last week. To be honest, I’m not sure my writing deserves the label “art”. For the most part, I write to explore my own fantasies and to entertain my readers (and myself), not to either comfort or to disturb.

The majority of my stories reflect the fact that I’m a sex-positive optimist and an incurable romantic. My characters tend to enjoy themselves and each other. In my tales, erotic pleasure often morphs into love. Even when it does not, sexual experience rarely leaves a bitter aftertaste. I don’t always write unambiguously happy endings, but my protagonists usually learn something valuable about themselves and the world.

Every so often, though, I get the urge to write something darker—a story fueled by the disruptive power of intense desire. I’ll create a scenario full of risks, with characters who have unacceptable but irresistible needs. In these stories, sexual obsession leads to blind desperation. The raw force of the libido overwhelms rationality and morality.

These occasional dark stories that emerge from my unconscious definitely do disturb readers—to the point that the tales are almost impossible to publish. A case in point is my short piece Unforgivable, originally written for the Grip on the theme of “Confession”. I included this dark story, which features rape and worse, in the manuscript for my lesbian collection Her Own Devices. The publisher politely asked me to remove it.

Then there’s “Renfield’s Lament”, about a henchman so overcome with desire for his vampiric master and mistress that he arranges for his own murder in order to attract their attention. I eventually self-published this bloody tale, as part of my paranormal collection Fourth World. Nobody else would touch it.

“Fleshpot” also fits into this mold. That horrific story of sexual addiction did make it into an anthology—a collection of tentacle porn! I guarantee it will make you squirm.

Now I’m sitting on a new piece that seems too edgy to be publishable. “Countertransference”, a story about a psychiatrist who’s erotically obsessed with her teenage patient, has so far been rejected three times.

Here’s a snippet from this unpopular work:

Watching Alisha Al-Maghribi is not part of my job.

True, her chart reads “Under observation; potentially dangerous to herself and to others”, an appropriate notation given that she slashed her father’s (thankfully empty) mattress to ribbons with a butcher knife, then set fire to his multi-million dollar beach house. However, the orderlies and shift nurses are responsible for monitoring her, not I. It’s assumed the clinical director of a prestigious psychiatric facility like The Elms will have more important tasks than keeping an eye on one particular “guest”.

As indeed I do. I should be reviewing my notes for this afternoon’s therapy sessions, tackling the endless paperwork my job entails, or perusing the clinical journals stacked neatly on the corner of my desk. Instead I spend my time riveted to the computer screen, unable to resist my fascination with my exquisite and disturbed patient.

She’s calm today. Her back to the me, she hums to herself as she bends over her drawing. Her honey-colored curls are clipped into a casual knot atop her skull, exposing her slender neck. The high resolution surveillance camera—best on the market, like everything at The Elms—reveal tiny blond hairs that dust the tawny skin of her nape. An undeniable heaviness settles in my pelvis as I gaze at that graceful, vulnerable curve. I swallow the saliva pooling in my mouth. It’s easy to imagine stepping up behind her, clasping those smooth, bare shoulders in my palms and running my tongue up her spine. I can taste the salt I’d lick from her downy flesh, sense the shiver that runs through her at my touch. She’s taut, fragile, ready to bolt like a frightened fawn, but there’s a melting in her, too, a tiny core of trust in me, her doctor.

Gradual, gentle, careful not to startle her, I trail my fingers down her sides and across her rib cage, then reach forward to cup her girlish tits. Alisha sighs and lets her head fall back against my more ample breasts. I fill my lungs with her scent of cinnamon and roses. A slick tightness coils between my legs, urging me to move faster, to take her before I lose my nerve. I bury that urgency, willing myself to a slow but inexorable advance, like an incoming tide claiming the beach.

A knock on my office door drags me back to the present. “Dr. Gardner? Are you there?”

I stab the off button on my monitor, shaking my head to dispel my lustful fantasies. The images scatter, but the shame and the wetness remain.

~ ~ ~

I’m not really surprised this tale has been so difficult to place. I knew when the premise occurred to me that it would be a hard sell. It violates all sorts of taboos, including the trust inherent in the doctor-patient relationship. Technically Alisha is of age, but any reader can tell how much of the attraction lies in her youth. Finally, the ending is anything but happy. Perhaps there are lessons learned, but there is also irremediable damage done.

Despite the knowledge that this story might be unpublishable, I couldn’t stop myself from creating it. When I feel the temptation to write along the edges of what’s acceptable, I almost always give in, partly as an antidote to the sunny perspective in most of my work. Everyone needs a change, right?

Sometimes I feel that these shadow-drenched tales are better written than my more popular fiction, if only because they explore more intense emotions. I guess that in some sense, they are closer to being art.

Anonymous. Obsession.

by Giselle Renarde

In 2010 or thereabouts, I wrote a book called Anonymous. It could just as easily be called Obsession.

It's about Hannah, a woman who lost her executive finance job when the market crashed. She's looking for work, but there's nothing available at her level. Being unemployed is getting to her, and it's having a definite impact on her marriage to Nathaniel.

The first thing we find out about this couple is that Nathaniel wants to get with another man and Hannah wants to watch. It's a fantasy they revisit again and again. The first scene takes place during a power outage. When they've got no TV to entertain themselves, they escape into their fantasy life together.

You get the sense that they've been replaying this scene for years: imagining what it would be like. Asking, "What would you do if we had a guy right here right now?" Getting ridiculously turned on by the answer.

You also get the sense that, if Hannah had a job to occupy her mind and her time, their fantasy life might never have spilled over into reality.

Hannah and Nathaniel have one caveat to their shared desire: they don't want to invite a guy they know into the bedroom. Could get really complicated if they brought in a friend or one of Nathaniel's coworkers and things went wrong. Hannah's convinced they're looking for a stranger.

In fact, she wants someone totally anonymous.

Anonymous is a "careful what you wish for" book, in a lot of ways. Hannah's got too much time on her hands, and she uses it to set up some no-strings-attached stranger sex.

One night only.

No names.

Total anonymity.

Except the big event doesn't go exactly as planned, which puts pressure on Nathaniel and Hannah's marriage. This is a book in three parts (not a trilogy, just a story that's divided into three sections). Everything I've mentioned so far takes place in Part One.

To me, it's what comes AFTER the "getting what you want" bit that's most interesting. Hannah can't handle not knowing. She becomes obsessed with finding out the true identity of Mr. Anonymous. The power of that obsession drives almost every decision she makes. Her obsession takes over. So much other stuff happens in the second two parts of this book, but Hannah's never the same after that one night.

Obsession drives Hannah to take a job she normally wouldn't have. I wonder if it's detrimental to her life or not. I remember one reviewer saying she didn't feel that Hannah's obsession took away from her relationship with Nathaniel. She didn't find the obsession unhealthy.

I'm not so sure. But what do I know? The writer is the last person you should ask about a book. We have a very skewed perspective.

Anonymous was briefly off the market when its original publisher closed down, but it's BACK as of today and if you click real quick you might just find it at Amazon.

As an introductory price for the re-release, it's only $0.99 or free if you're a Kindle Unlimited subscriber. Here's the link: 

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01G4GBSD6?tag=dondes-20 

Enjoy!

"I Am Providence"

by Annabeth Leong



The object of my fascination would likely not have thought much of me. H. P. Lovecraft does not seem to have liked women much. He was anti-immigrant and deeply racist. He hated mentions of sexual matters.

Some people avoid these depressing facts by focusing on the writing rather than the man. My fascination, however, is most definitely focused on the man, and specifically his relationship to his city, where I live now.

When people come to visit me, I nearly always say, "Welcome to Providence, the home of H.P. Lovecraft." The first time I stepped out of the Providence train station and began walking up steep roads toward the East Side, I recognized the shapes of the buildings from Lovecraft's stories. The sky was exactly as he had described it, low and gray. I knew I was walking where he had walked, breathing the air that he had breathed.

***



At the Necronomicon convention in Providence last year, an event devoted to H.P. Lovecraft, I attended a panel of modern Lovecraftian writers. "I am obsessed with H.P. Lovecraft," said Wilum H. Pugmire, lingering on every syllable. When asked about recent reading, Pugmire cited Lovecraft, over and over again.

I don't have that kind of obsession, though. I've read Lovecraft. I am intrigued by his central themes—forbidden knowledge, secrets with the power to break the mind, the ultimate irrelevance of humanity, and the hopelessness of any battle against large, cosmic evil.

But I'll confess that I prefer Lovecraft as narrated by the brilliant Wayne June. I'm not frightened by what frightened Lovecraft—I am only interested in it. I smile at his purple prose, and it sets me free, but I don't exactly admire it. It is June who brings his tangled sentences to life for me, who makes me see the true worth of his descriptions.

I wonder, then, why I think so much about his footsteps. I wonder what Lovecraft did to earn my devotion. I visit the house where he wrote Call of Cthulhu all the time. I go there as if venerating a saint, standing awkwardly across the street, looking at the window that I know was once his, searching for a relic.

***



I once paid a healthy sum to tour the city alongside S.T. Joshi, Lovecraft's foremost biographer.

I already knew some of the sites he showed our small group. Over the years I've lived in Providence, I've collected locations relevant to Lovecraft. Every time I walk up Doyle Street, I recall that Lovecraft liked to wheel his bicycle up that very hill on his way to the observatory. When I am stuck in my writing, I go to Prospect Park, where Lovecraft liked to sit and write.

Joshi, however, far surpasses any obsession to which I could pretend. He turns out to have been part of the group that raised the money for a bust of Lovecraft I like to visit. He was the one who corrected a misidentified photograph of Lovecraft on a bench—rather than the New York location where it was thought to have been taken, Joshi recognized the gates outside of Brown University.

Lovecraft's relationship with Providence ran to breathtaking depths. He went through the entire archives of the Providence Journal and read every issue of the paper that had ever been published. He had a love of old Colonial homes (the Victorians were too vulgar, he thought), and he immortalized them in his stories.

Joshi knows where those houses are. At his side, I learned the location of the real-life Shunned House and the home of Charles Dexter Ward (a few houses down from the address given in the story).

I don't think I'm this kind of writer, but I wish I was. Perhaps it's because my life has been so impermanent. I ground myself by clinging to a writer whose roots ran deep, a man who seemed unable to truly exist away from his city.

***



It is painful to think that, were I to meet Lovecraft, he would likely respond to me with disgust—he was wonderfully generous with his white male writer friends, and I'd like to hope for the same. I don't fool myself, though. Lovecraft opened his Mythos for others to play in, but he would not appreciate what I do with it.

I'm not sure what made it into the final book, but Bobby Derie's draft manuscript for Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos mentioned my work. It pointed to "The Artist's Retreat," a story that appears in J. Blackmore's Whispers in Darkness: Lovecraftian Erotica anthology, as a rare example of lesbian Mythos erotica. I've also been in an anthology alongside the aforementioned Pugmire—we both had stories in Martian Migraine Press's Conqueror Womb: Lusty Tales of Shub-Niggurath.

To me, there is a way that sex is dark and vast and unknowable, liable to disturb, able to break the mind if it is fully grasped. That's why I like to put sex into the Mythos. That's why to me sex has always been in it.

Still, I know that's not a popular opinion in certain Lovecraftian circles. At that panel I mentioned earlier, a writer I won't name went on a diatribe against what he saw as a disgusting tendency to contaminate the Mythos with sex. His comments essentially amounted to, "Why do you have to go there?" His face was contorted with disgust as he spoke, and others agreed.

My body went hot and my heart began to pound. I am very proud of my Lovecraftian work, and yet his disapproval made me feel the stigma that erotica all too often has. I'm not a real writer. I'm perverted, and I'm perverting something sacred to so many.

Sex belongs in the Mythos, but maybe I also put it in to fuck with people. I can sometimes be a rebel like that. Lovecraft is dead. I visit his grave with devotion, and then I raise a middle finger and write about what it would be like to fuck an Elder God. I use words that would make Lovecraft squirm. I talk about how it would hurt, and how it would feel incredible, and how normal life would be impossible ever after. Desire is, after all, a type of forbidden knowledge. Sex can be inexorable, inevitable. It can reveal selves and realities we don't actually want to meet.

It's too bad the title "Booty Call of Cthulhu" is taken, or I would write that story to fuck with Lovecraft even more.

***



"He's stuck with me," I tell my sister. We are on the lawn in front of the observatory. I go there almost every day.

If I studied his every word like Pugmire, this would make more sense to me. Instead, I read enough to be credible, and then I walk and walk the streets he liked to walk. I am in his city, and I want to make it mine, too.

Maybe I am like a would-be lover studying the behavior of the beloved's ex. From the moment I laid eyes on Providence, I wanted her. Her name rings with fate and destiny. Her streets drip with history. She is rundown in the ways I love. The best bands come to play here, and they do it just before they get famous.

I want to know what Lovecraft did to win this city, to tie her to him so powerfully. How did he and this city seduce each other so thoroughly?

Maybe I am like a lover who wants to leave a hickey. I want to walk up Doyle and leave grooves in the sidewalk in the wake of my passing. I want to learn to write settings better so that someday, a generation from now, someone finds the remnants of the labyrinth in the churchyard of the Redeemer (which is already crumbling, already half-hidden by an improbable willow tree), and they feel they've already seen it because they read about it in something I wrote.

I don't have the blood of this city in my veins. My parents did not both go mad and get committed to Butler Hospital. I haven't even been inside the Historical Society, and the Providence Journal is dying now, and I'm not sure what sort of feat it would be to read its every issue. And yet I have a sticker on my laptop that arrogantly proclaims, "I am Providence," and one day I would like that to be true.

Worries and Fetishes

Worries are like fetishes. The ones that do it for me really do it. They work every time. They have distinctive language and imagery that roll through my brain on a predictable and effective path, making me weak in the knees, getting me wound up. I can recognize the people who share them because they use certain key words or phrases. We can spot each other across a crowded room. It takes only a shiver at the right moment or a certain knowing look in the eye.

The ones that aren't really for me, on the other hand, seem odd and mystifying. I can buy that they keep other people up at night, but they leave me cold. When someone else tries to explain why they're so compelling, I listen with fascination and a raised eyebrow. "Oh?" My voice lifts. I am trying to play it cool, but my skepticism sneaks in. "That really hits you? I see."

I have major and minor fetishes, and I have major and minor worries. The minor ones can still get me rolling—for example, I can certainly work myself up worrying about money if I put a little back into it—but they're not the things that spring constantly to mind.

For me, the major, gold-standard worry is about what other people are going to think of me. At this point, any worry that takes me down this track leads to a geological formation of well-connected thoughts and associations that are worn smooth as a river rock from constant handling. The things that come up along these lines seem self-referential, self-evident, and inescapable.

An ordinary worry can be cooled with a little rational thinking:

Worry: "What if I don't have the right paperwork when I get to the DMV?"

Response: "Oh, no problem. I'll just go home, get it, and come back later."

The major worry only feeds on itself and grows:

Worry: "What if the woman behind the counter at the DMV thinks I'm stupid when I don't have my paperwork?"

Response: "It doesn't matter if she thinks so. I'll just go home and get it."

New Worry: "Then when I come back, I'll stammer because I'm nervous and she'll think I'm even stupider."

Response: (thrilling shiver) "It'll be over quickly. It doesn't matter."

New Worry: "Right, but she's not the only person I'll have to talk to. I'll have to get a number and sit and wait. I'll be sitting next to someone in the waiting room. They'll smell that I'm sweating or see my hands shaking and think I'm weird."

Response: (more shivering, sense of helplessness) "I'll try to smile."

And so on.

If someone asks me, "So what? So what if she thinks you're stupid or someone else thinks you're weird?" my response is a blank stare. A person who can't understand the horror of that just doesn't get what this worry is about.

Perhaps because I'm connecting worries to fetishes, when I wrote that imaginary thing about the DMV, I turned myself on. But that's another way that worries are like fetishes, I think. Both a worry and a fetish are about a certain sort of obsessive attention. And I happen to have major fetishes that have to do with feeling helpless and embarrassed. Sometimes, my obsessive attention turns erotic, and sometimes it paralyzes me with worry. (And in a made-up scenario like the one above, it's more likely to head toward the erotic).

I don't think there's a one-to-one connection, though. I'm very into feet, for example, but I don't see an easy way to connect that fetish to a major worry of mine.

I do think both worries and fetishes have a sort of circularity, a buildup of personal history that makes each new event or thought take on greater significance than it would to a person who isn't touched by that particular thing.

They also have to come at the right angle to strike. I love spanking stories, for example, but I can tell that people write and read them with an eye toward different key phrases. I've just read Greta Christina's "Bending: Dirty Kinky Stories About Pain, Power, Religion, Unicorns, & More" (thanks for the recommendation, Lisabet!), and in every single one of the spanking stories in that collection, Christina mentions pulling the skirt up and the panties down. This is clearly a very important part of the imagery for her, but not so important for me (I don't mind it, it just doesn't give me that special thrill). On the other hand, when she mentions crying, I'm there. The same scene might stand or fall for me on whether or not there's crying.

Similarly, I'm not particularly inclined to worry about my health. I don't think much about medical records or whether or not I'll catch whatever strain of flu is going around. I don't care about touching dirty subway poles or being sneezed on or whatnot. On the other hand, if I'm sick and I start to worry that people will think I'm dirty or disgusting—bang! Now it's about my gold-standard worry, and the cycle can engage.

I worry a lot, and it causes me a fair bit of misery, so I had mixed feelings about this topic. I've been interested to read other people's thoughts on this, but I was reluctant to wallow in the minutiae of my own geological formations, so to speak. But now for my last comparison of worries to fetishes: as with fetishes, it has helped me to accept my worries and give them a bit of their own time and space. I can indulge them at certain times, but also keep just enough distance and sense of humor about them. And that makes them much more okay for me than when I'm trying to fight them all the time.

I'll take three please ...

: )

I have been trying to figure out all week long just what I am going to write about.

I don't really have any kinky obsessions.

Lately though, I have gotten hooked on M/M/F or M/M/M/F romances. There is just something about 2 or 3 hot guys who are willing to share the woman they love, knowing that she loves them both, and feeling no jealousy of each other but definitely of any other man who might look at their woman, and even enjoy each other.

Oh la la!

It's just so hard to find a nice menage that actually ENDS as a menage. So many times it starts out with a good threesome, and then in the last few chapters, they "drift apart" leaving just a woman and a man.

Grrrr! What a load of crap. If you are going to write it as a standard het in the end, then start it out that way and just add in an extra character for spice, letting it be known throughout that they will not all end up together.

I started with Be With Me by Maya Banks. Holy hell! I can't recommend this book enough. : )

Then I moved on to Laid Bare by Lauren Dane. Yeah baby!

I also enjoyed Deanna Lee threesome in her Games Girl Play collection, and Maya Bank's contribution to Four Play.

Anyone got any good suggestions for me? I am definitely obsessed with reading my hot happily ever after menages. : )

Coming Out

by Jean Roberta

(We're delighted to welcome our first guest author at the re-invented Oh Get A Grip, the erudite and eloquent Jean Roberta. See the end of her post for her links.)

Doing anything for the first time tends to inspire nostalgia later on (oh, how innocent I was/we were then), but at the time, it’s usually embarrassing.

I “came out” as a lesbian in the winter of 1982 by going to the local gay bar (in a town of under 200,000 on the Canadian prairie) after thinking about this for years. I went alone. I had ascertained the existence and location of this dark and smoky place by calling a telephone number I had discovered, trying to lower my voice to a mutter so I would sound like a Real Dyke, newly arrived from a more worldly city.

At the bar, I was delighted to meet friendly strangers, both men and women. At one point, I was sitting at a table where everyone was telling their “coming out” stories. “Gay” life at that time and place was parallel to the life of a debutante in a narrow circle of “good families” circa 1870 or so – everyone in the lady’s community could guess her age, social status and availability from when, where and how she had “come out” into “society.”

That night in 1982, I would rather have died than admit that I was “coming out” at that moment. I had no juicy stories of sweet or tragic love affairs with other women to tell, no stories of conservative parents throwing me out of the family home. I could imagine myself in a debutante’s white gown, exposed as a blank slate to the knowing eyes around me. I pretended to be too buttoned-up to discuss my private past. The woman sitting next to me asked: “Are you straight?”

There it was, the question I dreaded. I hadn’t been able to answer it conclusively for myself.

I gulped and said, “No.” That answer seemed good enough to gain me entrée into the bar crowd. Within weeks, I had enough lesbian experience to realize that you can only enter a small, gossipy community once – after that, you have a role in it, for better or worse.

There are many ways to “come out,” and most people do this several times during their lives. Each time you start a new job, you are taking on a new role in a new milieu.

“Coming out” as a writer is parallel to other debuts. I was thrilled at age ten when a teacher showed me my poem in the teachers’ magazine to which she had submitted it. I was published! But the world didn’t care for long, and I was never asked to join a secret club. Since then, I’ve learned that the secret writers’ club (publication guaranteed) is largely a myth.

It’s true enough that writers, editors and publishers of a certain genre tend to know each other, and it’s true enough that being known in the biz can be helpful. But being known and being accepted without reservation are two different things.

After a year of submitting my erotic stories to editors who didn’t reply, I began getting thrilling messages telling me that my work was accepted and would be published somewhere. I still can’t predict reliably whether a certain story submission will appeal to a certain editor. I’ve been amazed to get glowing praise for writing of mine that I no longer like very much, and (rarely) to get wildly contemptuous rants from editors about stories of mine that I still secretly love. As they say, there is no explaining taste.

Stories posted to writers loops such as the Erotic Readers and Writers Association by writers who confess to being unpublished amateurs are sometimes so polished that I doubt whether the authors will stay unpublished for long, except possibly by choice. I’m tempted to point out that if you don’t want others to know that you have no publication history, you don’t have to tell them; readers (and ethical editors) will judge you by what they read.

Writers who want to satisfy themselves as well as others are always trying to grow and change, and this means always beginning again, always “coming out.” I no longer think that a blank page or screen is less intimidating to a much-publisher author than to a novice. Every new work-in-progress is another first-chance to make an impression, for better or worse.

---

Obsession - Erotic short stories by Jean Roberta

Jean's links:

• Primary website: www.JeanRoberta.com


• Regular column - "Sex is All Metaphor": Erotica Readers and Writers Association


• Staff reviewer:
  
  
  
  • Erotica Revealed
  
  
  • The Dominant's View
  
  
  • Rainbow Reviews