Observations

SO... Fly Away Home was cooking along pretty good, but it seems to have slowed to a crawl again. At least I know where it's going now. In the meantime...

I had a few minutes to kill, while waiting for inspiration to strike, so I started looking at some of the features MySpace offers. Did you know that the "Browse" menu is really a database search tool, that lets you find people based on a set of user-specified criteria? The criteria are limited, of course, to a subset that are included in the html form... you can't just create a query on your own.

Anyway, I decided to check it out, so I started looking for profiles of ladies (I'm a guy, right?) with different combinations of attributes. Since the available criteria don't include any kind of self-assessment of sex-slave potential, there's no way this excercise could be considered a serious effort, at least for me (SO DON'T GET YOUR PANTIES IN A WAD, BABY!).

One thing I did find, was that there are some seriously sick people out there.. and I don't just mean that they are kinky. Kinky isn't sick, it's just different. What I mean is that there are folks out there who are mentally or emotionally damaged.

Some think they're into BDSM, but they really just want to hurt, or be hurt by, people; physically or emotionally, and NOBODY gets any real pleasure out of it. And they don't seem to ascribe to the "safe, sane, and consensual" credo. That's just mean and/or stupid.

There are others who seem to think that people in general have nothing better to do than stalk them, and that every curious glance in their direction is some sort of threat. One in particular comes to mind. The profile is probably a fake, because the profile pic is of a beautiful model (just the kind of thing to make a guy like me look twice). On the other hand, even if the real outside is as pretty as the pic, it wouldn't matter, because the blogs exposed an inside that is seething with self-absorbed rot. I can't even see the exterior beauty now, it's been permanently obscured by the ugliness within.

Another thing I found is, that there are a lot of very unhappy people. Many, probably most, have a very poor self-image. Judging from the "About Me" blurbs and/or blogs, lot of these are wreckage from failed relationships. Some are "lost souls" who never developed a real relationship with another human being, and don't know how, or are afraid, to start.

Finally, I also noticed that a lot of women who have profiles stating that they are married, or in a relationship, also indicate that they are interested in dating! When I see something like that, it makes me want to know why... not to condemn, but to understand; so I look to see what they say about themselves and their reasons. Often there is no answer... so it's probably most often something that happens by accident, when a lady creates her profile, or maybe something forgotten when her relationship status changed.

BUT sometimes, it's pretty clear that is isn't an accident...

Often, someone isn't getting the attention she wants or needs, and has decided to do something about it. She has too much invested in her current life to just walk away, but dammit, she's tired of being ignored!

Sometimes, it's revenge-motivated. Her erstwhile partner has been getting a little on the side, himself. She figures why should he/she have all the fun?

Rarely, it's a couple, and they're seeking new, mutual playmates. Interesting, if dangerous, territory.

Even more rarely, the woman's partner is a willing cuckold. As a reader of erotic prose, I see the topic come up often, in print, but the context doesn't permit a real presentation or evaluation of any rationale.

The man who can't give his partner what she needs, for physiological reasons, seems undertandable enough. Under those circumstances, if he really cares for her, he might want her to be able to enjoy occasional penetration by something warm and living. At the other extreme are those men who are perfectly healthy, perfectly capable of engaging in full sexual intercourse, but who might need to see their own ladies in passionate embrace with another man, on a regular basis. It might seem farfetched, but if MySpace profiles are to be believed, both extremes, as well as some cases that fall in between them, actually occur.

Well, this blog has now taken longer to compose than my "research" did to execute, so, even though there's more that could be said, I'm going to close it for now, and hopefully get back to writing fiction. Maybe I'll post more later.

QM

All done!

I've just finished correcting and updating the last of my old web pages, including all stories already posted, index files, and ancilliary files. Now I can get back to writing. The next chapter of SC (Chapter 5) will be subtitled Fly Away Home.

When Chapter 5 is done and ready for posting, I'll post all of the other page updates at the same time.

My erotic personality

I was reading the blog site of one of my favorite on-line authors, Jack C. Lipton, and followed his recommendation to take an online survey. This is the result:

I took Sage Vivant's Erotic Personality Quiz and discovered I'm a Top!

What is your Erotic Personality? Find out now.

Of course, the drawing looks nothing like me...

Site rework

Well, as I mentioned in my last blog, in rereading the stories on my ASSTR website, I found numerous spelling and grammatical errors so now I have a major overhaul underway. In addition to correcting those errors, I'm reorganizing the filesystem, to hopefully improve and standardize file access, and in the process I'm making all of the pages what I hope is XHTML-compliant.

Don't expect a major change in the "look and feel" of the site, though; most of the changes are below that level.

I've finished the reworks for Breakdown and Whither Away?, but I'm going to wait until the whole site is finished before re-posting anything. This is necessary because the changes in the filesystem structure will affect the URL used to get to any particular story. I may even wait to do a mass update until the next chapter of Schroedinger's Cat is ready for posting. The reason being, to avoid creating an "invisible update".

Incidentally, I have been guilty of "invisible updates" to my site before; you know the kind, it's where an author makes some minimal change in one or more pages, and his handle shows up on the "New Author's" list at ASSTR, but there is no actual new material. My favorite authors do "due diligence" in trying to avoid that, but everyone does it inadvertently at times. Considering how much it irritates me, I will also attempt "due diligence," but I'll probably slip up sometimes.

Ciao.

QM