We Shall Not Speak Of 2020

Suffice to say, I wrote nothing, accomplished nothing, and lost an unspeakably great deal.

I make no plans, promises, or even strong intentions regarding 2021.

2020 Update

Looks like I haven’t posted anything in my blog since last year!
Guess I’ll catch all my readers up on what’s been going on in my life lately. 😀

For the past 2-3 years, I’ve been suffering from some kind of declining energy levels. I don’t know what the cause is. It might be some kind of physical ailment, or it might be mental. I’ve had depression my entire life, and perhaps it’s just changed forms. Or perhaps there’s something wrong somewhere inside my body, and it’s sapping my energy that way.
I just don’t know, although I’m working with doctors to figure things out.
The problem does NOT seem to be sleep apnea, because I’ve been using a CPAP for months now, and while it’s definitely better than NOT having it, my energy levels have continued to decline.
I’ve gone from being somebody who had a relatively active life outside of work, to somebody who bit by bit lost all energy for anything outside of work,
to somebody who didn’t have enough energy to keep working.
On the bright side, I finally managed to quit my Fucking Day Job, but on the dark side I still haven’t done any real writing this year so far. I feel like I’m recovering from something, except that I’m not necessarily getting any better.
I was just starting to become physically active again, working out at the gym, and doing various projects around the house, when the pandemic hit and pretty well shut everything down.
So I can’t go to the gym, and it’s problematic going to the store for supplies for the projects I started. While I’m overall dealing just fine with the new quasi-quarantine lifestyle, I have been sleeping more lately, and I’ve been suffering from a bit of mental fog. I’ve heard that’s not unusual, given the circumstances.
Beyond that, I suffered some amazingly intense pain a couple months ago, and I thought it was probably kidney stones, but x-rays and a CT scan show that I’m all clear of stones.
Which is strange, because I’ve also started having significant difficulty urinating since shortly after the pain hit me. It didn’t bother me at first, because I was expecting kidney stones, but now it looks like it’s something else.
I have a doctor’s appointment in the near future to get some more tests done.

On top of all of THAT, an old friend of mine recently passed away, and I’m having trouble dealing with it. This was a person I knew from childhood, somebody younger than I am, and somebody who I never imagined–except in the most technical of ways–that I might lose some day.
So I’ve been crying often, along with screaming and cursing, and I’ve lost a lot of my joi de vivre.
In spite of this loss, I’ve avoided falling back into my usual habits of drinking my problems away. In fact, when I realized that I was going to have to be spending a lot of time at home due to the pandemic, I consciously chose NOT to stock up on booze. Instead, I figured it’d be a good time to dry out a bit, give my liver and the rest of my system a break.
In fact, the last alcoholic beverage I had was around the 23rd of January, and that was the only drink I had that day.
I haven’t missed the alcohol much, except now that my friend has died I want to drown my sorrows and brain in booze. But I haven’t, so far. I figure I might as well save that for some other time.
I haven’t QUIT alcohol. I’m not on the wagon, and I don’t have plans to never drink again or anything. I’m just choosing not to drink for a while. This might end tomorrow, or it might end a few months from now, or who knows.
Booze will still be there if/when I eventually need it.

Meanwhile, here it is the 5th of May, and like an absolute FOOL I made the decision to stick to my yearly May writing challenge, AND to try for the goal of 5k words per day (average) for this month.
So far, I’m about four and a half days (22,500 words) behind schedule. My motivation is mostly missing in action, and my low energy levels make it hard to focus.
But I haven’t given up yet. The month is young. Maybe I’ll still catch up!
And even if I don’t, at least I’ll try to get SOMETHING done.
Starting with this blog post.

May Challenge Results 2019

This year, I challenged myself once again to write every day in the month of May. I decided that I’d count the words from either blog posts or stories, and that my goal would be to have an average of 2,500 words per day.
I succeeded!

I have some new blog posts that I plan to put up when I get a chance, and I have a bunch of new stories that I plan to either self-publish or submit somewhere.

Not only that, but I’ve decided to get a goal for the rest of the year to keep up with a 500 words per day average. I’m already quite behind, because I’m pretty tired from my annual May Challenge, and because my Fucking Day Job keeps me pretty busy and tired.

But the nice thing about a word-per-day AVERAGE is that it’s easy to catch up when I miss some days. One good day of writing where I crank out 5-10k worth of words will catch me up on 10-20 days worth of meeting my goal!
This will hopefully mean that I’m much more active with this blog, in addition to increasing my stock of erotic stories on Amazon!

Beyond that, I’ve continued to generally plug away this past year, trying to self-promote, write, and so forth. I’ve got my short story “Rogering Nadine” published in Rachel Kramer Bussel’s “Erotic Teasers” anthology, which is nice, and some other stories accepted into other anthos as well.

I’ve decided to hire a professional artist to do cover art for my BDSM Superhero series “Bait & Switch,” which is about a pretty girl named Betty who gets repeatedly into trouble, only to be saved and sexed by a leather-clad mystery man who carries a kind of rod (or switch!) as a weapon.

I’ve only got one story in the series published so far, because one of my biggest bottlenecks in production is Cover Art! I’m lousy at it, so the cover is crappy, so it doesn’t sell as well as it should. My plan is to invest heavy in a good, professional illustration to use as a cover not only for the first installment in the series, but for all future installments as well. I’d rather have each “issue” (I think of them as basically pictureless erotic comic books) get its own original art, but that’s well beyond my budget and skills at this time. Buying a single piece and re-using it seems like the best way to possibly recoup my investment in artwork.

I’m excited for this, and hopefully it’ll turn out well!

Beyond that, I’ve found a very affordable and talented digital cover-making professional who I’ve been using to make more covers. This past year, I’ve gotten new covers for the following stories:
Hard Cash
Points of Power
Multiple O
Gravesong
Ferrari SnowDay

Most of these are set in my “Serpent’s Gifts” universe, an erotic superhero setting, as is the previously mentioned “Bait & Switch.”

Anyway, it’s late, and I need to get back to bed.
Catch you all later!
😀

Challenge Completed!

At the start of this month, I challenged myself to write a new 800-1650 word blog post for every day in May, by the end of the month. It is now 9:11 PM on May 31, and this will be my 31st and final blog post for this month, completing my challenge!

 

1. May Challenges, Past and Present
2. Where Do I Get My Wonderful Ideas
3. So You Have An Idea
4. A Burgundy Evening
5. You Know The Tune
6. Being An Invisible Writer
7. The Nature and Nurture of Pain
8. Twitter, Huh, What Is It Good For?
9. Why I Don’t Write Reviews For My Fellow Erotica Authors
10. Why He Thinks You’re Pretty
11. Finding Words & Thoughts
12. Got Mentioned in the “Loving BDSM” Podcast!
13. NOT In A Single Word
14. Why I Don’t Use Trigger Warnings
15. In Which I Battle Myself To Write This
16. “This Has Never Happened To Me”
17. How To Suck Your Own Cock
18. Rejection Letters
19. Stop Kinkshaming Ammosexuals
20. Aaron Gold’s “Don’t Mind If I Don’t” Podcast
21. Myself As Well
22. Avatars & Objects
23. Is It Okay To Fantasize About Being Raped?
24. Hobbies, Skills, and Passions
25. Is It Okay To Fantasize About Raping People?
26. Is It Okay To Write Rape Fantasies?
27. How To Have An Orgasm (Solo)
28. How To Have Multiple Orgasms (Males)
29. How To Write An Orgasm
30. Where To Start The Story
31. Challenge Completed!

I started my Goodreads Blog (https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7514047.Richard_Bacula/blog)  

on April 16, 2014. Between that day and April 30, 2018, I had managed to write a whopping FIVE blog posts:

1. Jagermeister Night

2. How To Be As Sexy As A Dead Deer
3. The Nature of Storytelling
4. Size Is Everything
5. “Amazon.Com Has Rejected Your Product Review”

 

I’ve never been good at blogging, but it’s something that one needs to do in order to create a platform and to let the world know that you exist, and that you’re interesting. So this year–after utterly failing last year’s challenge–I got the idea of writing blog posts instead of erotic stories. As far as I’m concerned, it’s been a success.

I increased my total blog content by six fold, I got to say a lot of things that I apparently wanted to say, and I had fun. I mean, I’m tired, but it’s been fun doing this! I have more of a feel for writing blogs, and I have more practice now. This makes me more likely to write more in the future.

One of the other things that makes me more likely to write more blogs in the future is that I now have a WordPress blog set up in addition to my original GoodReads blog. It’s a better website, with lots of neat features that have helped me out, and that I think will help me out in the future.

One of the problems that I’ve had as a writer became painfully clear to me this past month: I’m not a tortoise–I’m a hare. I’m not slow and steady; I’m fast and furious. I can get a lot done in a limited amount of time, but then I tire out, and I turn to other things. Usually, the chaos of my life and my Fucking Day Job take hold, and lots of time passes before I get back to whatever writing project I was on last.

When it comes to attracting blog audiences, you need to produce regular content, and getting to the keyboard on a regular basis just isn’t my thing. I’m not capable of doing that until I can write full time, and don’t have all the distractions that I have now (like paying rent). But what I can do is to, next chance I get, write a bunch of new blog posts like I’ve done this month, and to have WordPress automatically post them at regular intervals. I can sprint, then I can rest while WordPress tortoises on for me.

That makes me a LOT more enthusiastic about blogging!

Also, I live for feedback. One of the things that has kept me motivated this past month is watching all the Notifications about people around the world Liking my posts, Following my blog, and generally noticing that I exist. This hasn’t translated to sales, but enthusiasm and morale is just as important in many ways. So I say this:
If you want me to keep writing this blog regularly, give me feedback!!

I can use the help to nudge me in this direction. It doesn’t have to be Comments on my posts (although those are ideal and awesome!). You can just send me a tweet @RichardBacula, or an email RichardBacula@Gmail.Com, letting me know that you read something I wrote here, and what you thought.

At this point, 9:37 PM on May 31, everything is written. Some of it won’t get published on WordPress until tomorrow or later, and it’ll be later still before I get everything up on clunky old Goodreads. This might be my last blog post for a while, or it might not. Part of that depends on you, and part depends on me.

Thanks for your support this past month!

(I’m gonna go drink until I pass out.)

How To Write An Orgasm

The orgasm is one of the best parts of sex, and one of the most fascinating and intense human experiences. When I write about them, which is quite frankly a lot, I try to do them justice. Ideally, I go into as much detail as possible, because there are just so many ways to climax, and so many different details. Every orgasm is unique, and each orgasm in erotica should strive to also be unique. There’s a limit to what words can convey, and how many different metaphors and terms we can come up with for “pleasure,” but it’s important to try.

Here’s some advice that I’ve given to other erotica writers in the past:

Writing about an orgasm is kind of like writing a miniature story within a story. You can’t just jump to the climax without any build-up, not if you want to do it right. You lead up to it with rising action, describing first the desire and the light stirring of sensations—the way the body first feels faint physical foreshadowing of what lies ahead, then the pleasure starts to solidify into something more real as the body (and mind!) are teased into varying states of increasing arousal.

You show each of these levels of pleasure along the way, taking the reader on a journey up a path of pleasure that rises higher and higher, building their anticipation of that ultimate peak that they know lies ahead. Bring the reader closer and closer, but wind the path just enough that they can only catch glimpses of the destination—glimpses are the key to anticipation, which is a key to hunger, which is the key to gratification.

The journey itself is part of the destination .

Wend them along the path as they let you take them higher and higher, closer and closer to that ultimate peak, until they know that they’re so close—so damned close—that they can almost feel their arrival.

But only almost.

Then let them see it, right there ahead of them, let them know what they’re about to find, where they’re about to go, and let them have that perfect moment when they know they’ve almost arrived, that there’s no turning back, that any moment now they’re…

About…

To…

Then they’re there! They’ve rushed those last few running steps, and they’ve fully arrived, and they suddenly realize that the peak is even higher than they could have imagined, so high that it perhaps even scares them a bit because they realize that they’re so far gone now that they might not find their way back—they’re afraid they might die here, and part of them wants to because it’s just so perfect, so thrilling, so wondrous that it breaks them a little bit and they know that even when they somehow find their way back down again, they will never ever be the same.

 

As you can see, I like to use metaphors. They’re extremely handy things, metaphors, the multi-tool of communication. I’ve rarely metaphor I didn’t like.

This is important when it comes to orgasm, because most of what we feel when it comes to erotic sensation is pleasure, and there are only so many words for pleasure, each of which comes with its own connotations that may or may not convey the right mood for the scene you’re working on. When it comes to sexual sensations, from the tingling build-up to the climax itself, I often try to pick a single metaphor and stick with it throughout the scene.

Often I go with electricity. It’s handy, common, and accurate. Things can start off with electric tingles of pleasure, then later there can be shocks and jolts of sensation, all rising and building like a thunderstorm, and when it all comes to a peak, the orgasm can hit the character like a lightning bolt, arcing from their loins to their nipples, to other parts of them that are being aroused depending on the scene.

Fire is good too. Start with sparks, or even a warm smoldering feeling. The character feels warm, then hot. Things heat up. Their skin feels like it’s on fire, their body burning with the heat of their passion, searing them with sensation until it all builds up and… explodes like a volcano, or even like a fiery bomb. Fire works pretty well.

During one of my May Challenges, when I was writing 31 stories in 31 days, I remember running low on ways to write orgasms. I did electricity. I did fire. Then I worked through the other elements.

Air: started off like light fingers of wind, and ended up like a hurricane.

Water: pleasure flowed through the character, starting off as a mild trickle, but over time turning into a river that threatened to sweep them away, then it did carry them away, orgasm crashing over them like a tidal wave, threatening to drown them, promising to carry them out to sea forever, to never let them come back to shore.

Earth: Light tremors of sensation building into rumbles of pleasure, leading to an orgasm that hits them like an earthquake, making them buck, thrash, and shudder…

You get the idea.
You probably got the idea earlier, when I was just using the metaphor of a path and a destination.

Make good use of it! Not enough writers do.

How To Have Multiple Orgasms (Men)

First of all, it helps to be young and horny, so you generally have a fast recovery time in the first place. Second, you’ll have to learn to block your own ejaculation, before it leaves your body. That’s the key, because that’s what can eliminate your refractory period. When you ejaculate, that tells your body that sex has been accomplished, and you can rest. By blocking the ejaculation, your body doesn’t know that sex has been achieved, and it doesn’t tell your cock to take a nap. You stay hard, and pretty soon you can reach another climax. If you block that ejaculation too, you can repeat the trick quite a few times, with practice, having orgasm after orgasm.

The downside is that by blocking your ejaculation, the orgasm changes. It’s more intense, less outright pleasurable (though still quite pleasurable), and less comfortable. We’re designed to ejaculate when we come, and hacking our bodies this way goes against our design. There’s an urge to ejaculate when you climax, but if you resist it you can make up for any loss of quality with quantity.

The most direct way to block your ejaculation is to reach down with your hand, and use a finger or two to trace your penis down past your balls, to where it starts to go into your body. Find the root, the part that’s almost at your anus. That’s where you’ll need to press. You’ll need to press hard.

This will require practice, but the practice is fun.

When you have time to play around with this, oil up your cock with something appropriate, something that won’t dry out. You want to stroke slowly, taking your time. You can edge yourself, getting close to orgasm but backing off. You want to be as horny as possible. Then, when you feel yourself about to orgasm, you have to reach down with your fingers and push on that spot, to physically block the semen from going up your urethra and exiting your body.

Then hang the fuck ON, because it will feel weird and intense.

When your climax recedes, if you successfully retained your semen, you should be able to keep stroking and reach orgasm again.

Practice that as often as you like, maybe daily. Get better at it. It might not work right the first time, but practice will make you better.

The other component is kegel exercises. If you’re not familiar with them, look them up. If you’re not doing them, then start, because it’s pretty awkward in most sexual positions to reach down and push on that spot when you’re about to come, but if you strengthen your PC muscle then you can stop the ejaculation there, hands-free, using just that muscle.

You’re going to want to practice kegels until you can hold your PC muscles for 20-30 seconds without much problem, because that’s about how long it takes for your body to quit trying to blast your semen out of you. Sometimes after you block ejaculation the semen leaks out later, but other times it gets re-routed to your bladder (which is harmless).

I read about this trick when I was a teen or preteen, and I got hold of some gay men’s magazines. I’m not gay, but like most boys my age I was heavily into masturbation at the time, and gay men sure as hell know a lot about how a penis works, and I learned a lot from studying what they had to say, including how to successfully have multiple orgasms.

The next step after multiple orgasms is extended orgasms. That’s the tantric stuff where you can apparently climax indefinitely. I never got that far into things; multiple orgasms were enough, and even then it’s not something that I wanted to do every time I had sex. As I said, it’s less comfortable than being able to ejaculate.

On the other hand, it IS really nice to be able to keep having sex for as long as you and your partner desire, with multiple orgasms for everybody.

If you want more information on any of this, just do a web search for “male multiple orgasm,” “tantric sex,” “Kegels,” and “Non-Ejaculatory Multiple Orgasms.” For something that I learned about back in the 1980s, and with information that’s pretty easy to find online these days, it’s kind of surprising that most guys don’t seem to know that this even exists, much less practice it. It’s not in porn, not in erotica (outside of my story “The Sneaky Snowplow,” where I included it in a scene specifically because I’d never seen it mentioned in erotica before), and not something that people seem to talk a lot about even among experts in human sexuality.

But now you know about it, and if you’re willing to put in the time, practice, and research, you can learn a new skill that’s entertaining alone, with a friend, or with multiple friends.

Enjoy!

Where to Start the Story

One of the trickiest parts of a story is knowing which slice of an infinite series of interrelated events (i.e., the Universe) to look at. You can’t start at the beginning (i.e., The Big Bang), unless the nature of your story is tied to the beginning. Similar case with starting at the other end of things. Most likely whatever story you want to tell can be narrowed down to somewhere within the tiny slice of time that encompasses a single person’s life.

The length of the work you’re trying to create matters here, because IF you’re trying to create a work that spans an entire person’s life, then you really don’t have any more decisions in this regard. Start with their birth, end with their death. Fini.

On the other hand, if you’re trying for a specific word count, that will narrow your search for the start of the story considerably. Even the best writers can only convey so much information in a certain word count, and the lower your word count needs to be, the more precise you’ll have to be when picking your beginning.

Let us say in this case, that you’re writing for submission, and you’re trying for a story that is 3,000 Words or less. That’s pretty limited, depending on what kind of story you’re trying to tell, and what kind of characters you plan to use.

One mistake that many authors make is trying to start their story on a perfectly average day, to let the readers know how things normally are, then to move on to more interesting things from there. Don’t do that. Your readers already know what an average day is–they’ve had quite a few of them themselves.

Start where things get interesting. That way, you’ll have your reader’s interest right off the bat. With a limited word count, you need to get through things quickly, which means rushing through parts of the overall story, while zooming in closely on others. You want to rush through the boring bits, and zoom in on the good bits.

With erotica, that typically means glossing over the character’s entire life and background, and focusing on a single encounter. With horror, it’s basically the same deal. None of the details of the character’s life are worth focusing on, unless they make the story move forward.

It doesn’t matter that your main character’s name is George S. Klein. It doesn’t really matter where he lives, unless the setting is unique enough to warrant a significant fraction of your tiny (3k is succinct, in my  view) word count. If it’s necessary to mention that he was born and raised in El Paso, Texas, then mention it, like I just did. Then move on, as I’m doing.

Most writing advice is telling you to “Show, Don’t Tell,” and that’s good advice except when it isn’t. Sometimes, especially when constrained by word count, it’s better to just tell the readers some stuff, to sum up.

Here’s the start of my story “Past The Bullshit”:

“If we could just cut through all the usual bullshit, and you’d just let me put this in you,” he indicated the thick bulge in his pants. “Well, then you’d know.”

“I’d know what?” She was mildly amused by the man so far, and she sipped her drink to facilitate that feeling.

He shook his head. “There’s only one way to find out.”

It was the wrong line, to the wrong girl, on the wrong crappy night, but somehow, less than an hour later, she was in his hotel room, on his bed, her skirt pushed up to her hips as she let him lick her into readiness.

I could have introduced both characters, and I could have written a dozen pages or an entire book on how and why they ran into each other in that bar, but none of that mattered for the story. All that matters for the story is that this strange man gives this woman a strange and crude line, and against her better judgment it works. Then the action takes place, then the resolution of both the introduction and the action.

All in <775 words, in this case.

Here’s the start of my 2500+ word story The Octopunishment:
Bridget Walsh brushed aside tentacle after sagging tentacle. They were dormant for a time, and this was her only chance to escape. She’d had such chances before, but needless to say, she was still here. Naked and dripping, she climbed up onto the thick layer of rubbery flesh, escaping the sea for a time. She was on the skirt of Kýrios Chtapódi, the Lord Octopus. In order to escape, she had to climb all the way up its enormous body, all the way to the head, which rose like a mountain into the sky.

It isn’t fair. The thought nagged at her once again, but as before, it never did her any good. Yes, it wasn’t fair. Why should it be? Everybody knew that life wasn’t fair; why should afterlife be any different?

I could have started the story chronologically, and taken my time. Under different circumstances, if I needed to pad the word count or flesh out the story more, I would have. I could have started off at the point her life took a fatal turn, the day that Zeus showed up in disguise to the game show she was hosting. I’d have had the opening bit be about her thinking that this one of her guests was weird. I’d have had her insult him (part of her routine), and I’d have shown the man transforming into an angry Greek god who kills her with a thunderbolt. I’d have shown her arrival in the particular Underworld that the king of gods condemned her to.

But the project didn’t call for all that–I wasn’t trying to write a novel. I could have, with this story, and that’s the problem. You have to know what story to tell, which moments are important. In this story, the important moment is a decision that Bridget makes when she reaches the summit of Kýrios Chtapódi, and she has a chance to escape. The character is on a specific journey in this story, a specific challenge, and I started the story where the challenge begins.

Everything else that the readers needed to know, how Bridget ended up where she was, the details of her kinky torture at the hands of the Lord Octopus, and everything else that was necessary for the story, I told in flashbacks here or there as she climbs up the side of this mountainous creature.

Start where things get interesting. You can always backfill details later.

How To Have An Orgasm (Solo)

Odd as it may seem to some of us, there are many people in the world who haven’t had an orgasm, but who would like one. They just don’t quite know how to get one. I’ve talked to any number of women who have told me stories about frustrating early experiences trying fruitlessly to masturbate to orgasm as a teenager, as well as women who have had an active sex life for years without ever finding that level of satisfaction. One of these women was a professional sex worker, who’d had at least three digits worth of partners over her life, performing an astounding variety of sexual acts, and she’d never once had an orgasm.

When this woman asked me for advice on how she could take care of things (she was not asking for my assistance; we never had that kind of relationship), it was the most surprising thing I’d heard about anybody’s sex life in some time. I gave her the best advice that I could, which was a less-detailed, less thorough version of what follows.

Start By Being Sexually Aroused

I’m not going to make a blanket claim that orgasms can never happen without a person first being aroused, because that would be false. There are some people who can–and do–spontaneously orgasm from a balloon popping, or from sneezing, or other stimuli that hits that individual in a specific way. It can happen, but if it was the kind of thing that was likely to happen to you, you wouldn’t need to read this post.

For the rest of us, the more aroused we are, the easier it is to climax. If you’re unaroused, or actively turned off, then orgasm will be effectively impossible. If, on the other hand, you’re aroused enough, then anything slightly sexual will set you off. Don’t focus on “having an orgasm,” not to start. Focus on “becoming increasingly aroused.”

If you’re not particularly horny, either wait until you become horny, or try to find some kind of stimulation that will arouse you. Watch porn, think arousing thoughts, or buy and read any or all of my line of erotic stories available on Amazon.com. 😉

Physical sensation is important. As you consume your erotic entertainment, or entertain your own erotic thoughts and fantasies, you should feel yourself becoming more aroused. You should feel tingles in key places of your body. Feel free to touch those places, to remove clothing from them.

I feel that I should make it clear that if you’re reading this in a public place, do NOT actually do these things at this time!
Touch yourself lightly. One mistake that people sometimes make is trying too hard, using too much pressure, and rubbing themselves raw. You don’t want to do that–you want to caress yourself gently, to tease your skin lightly.

Think of what it’s like standing close to somebody who has just the right scent, the right perfume or the right cologne, or even the right natural fragrance. If the scent is too strong, you’ll back away from it. If it’s too faint, you won’t notice it. If it’s just right, then it will be in the middle, just strong enough to make you want to lean in, toward that person, to get more of it.

You want your own touch on your own flesh to be like that. You want it to entice you, to stimulate your senses but to leave them wanting more, not less. Vary your touch, try different locations on your body and see what feels good. Try to arouse, if possible, every inch of your skin.

As you’re working on your physical arousal, work on your mental arousal as well. It helps to be relaxed to start, to be comfortable. You want as few distractions as possible from any thoughts and sensations that would try to steal your attention away from the pleasure you feel. Try to still your thoughts, and to focus only on what you’re experiencing.

Soft music can help, by drowning out background noise.

Pot or alcohol can help, but only in light amounts. You want just enough to help you relax, to calm your mind, and to maybe to heighten things a slight bit. Too much of either, and you’ll sabotage your own orgasm. With pot, there are highs where everything will feel fabulous, but you just won’t be able to come. With alcohol, you want to numb only your inhibitions, not your sensations.

Mood lighting might help as well, enough to calm you and help you feel sexy, but not enough to make you sleepy.

Slowly Increase Your Pleasure

Don’t rush things. Take your time. Romance yourself. Tease yourself until your body is moving toward your own touch, pushing back, eager for more. Stroke the places where it feels best, rewarding your body for its hunger.

But don’t try to sate it yet. Keep giving it just enough that it’s eager for more.

Keep your mind in a state where it’s only excited sexually, not anxiously or impatiently. Increase pressure in slight increments. Do the same with tempo. If you have a sex toy, such as a vibrator or a masturbation sleeve, you should be using it.

Expand Your Sensations

This may not be necessary. If you feel at this point like you might be able to come, work in that direction, but be patient. If you’re turned on, but you don’t feel like things are going to come to a climax, consider options to increase the number and kinds of sensations that you’re feeling. Remember, orgasm is about being overwhelmed in just the right way.

This is why many people get kinky: they’re trying to expand their sensations in order for their mind to be overwhelmed. Different things work for different people, but anal play works for most. Having a finger or an object teasing or penetrating your backdoor adds another layer of sensation in addition to anything you’re doing to your genitals and nipples. Again, don’t rush things.

Temperature play can be good as well. Some people like hot wax, some people like ice. Some people like both, alternatingly or concurrently. Temperature is another level of sensation, and a potential tool to increase arousal. Ice chills the body, condenses the flesh a bit as everything tightens up. Ice demands attention, putting nerve endings on full alert. Heat is warm, simulating the warmth of another person’s body or bodily fluids. Heat is relaxing. Heat can cause pain, at certain levels, and that can heighten awareness the same way that ice can.

Other things might help as well. You’ll have to experiment. Put something in your mouth, perhaps a dildo, and fantasize about it being something else. Or just put something in your mouth and bite down, like a bit-gag. Play with nipple clamps or clothespins (read up on what you’re doing first!), maybe do some light self-bondage.

The idea is to have multiple pleasurable sensations and thoughts occurring at the same time, too many for your mind to absorb all at once, so that your awareness will have to move from one sensation to the next to the next, or back and forth. You want your thoughts to pinball around between the things you’re experiencing, until you can’t take it any more.

Then you explode.

You don’t necessarily have to seek out this explosion; just keep seeking pleasure. When you get enough of it, your brain and your body will let you know.

It might take repeated attempts. Don’t get discouraged, don’t get down on yourself. You don’t have to climax this session, or even next session, and if you don’t, it doesn’t mean you’re any kind of failure. You’ll get there. It just sometimes takes practice.

Is It Okay To Write Fantasies About Rape?

The short answer is “Yes.” But there are some important details to consider.

There’s a general distaste for rape fantasy because there is a very reasonable general distaste for rape. Rape is one of the most horrible things that a person can experience, so it’s only natural that there’s a strong social condemnation of not only rape, but of anything that is seen to encourage rape. This is all perfectly reasonable, except that we don’t always agree as a society on what kinds of things–stories in particular–encourage rape.

Rape fantasy as a rule does not, because people in general can tell the difference between fantasy and reality. Also because most rape fantasy stories I’ve seen, read, heard, had, or written, have as a context that the rapist is a Bad Guy, and that rape is a Bad Thing.

When dealing with people who cannot tell the difference between fantasy and reality, almost anything can be used as some sort of justification for almost anything. John Hinckley Jr. used the movie “Taxi Driver” to justify shooting the President of the United States, for example. Mark David Chapman used “The Catcher In The Rye” to justify assassinating John Lennon. Neither of these crimes, nor many like them, were reasonably or logically inspired by the original source material–the crimes were the products of deranged minds, and the source material could have been anything.

On the other hand, the movie “Clockwork Orange” may have inspired several rapes. In one case, a 17 year-old girl was gang-raped by a group of perps who were (as in the film) singing “Singing In The Rain.” I tend to think that that group of perps would have been rapists in any case, and the movie only directed slightly how their crime manifested–they’d have still been rapists, but they might not have been singing rapists. Normal people who watched that film were not inspired to go out and commit crimes based on it. Still, there’s an important difference between this crime and the above crimes by other works: glorification.

The movie “Taxi Driver” doesn’t glorify the main character’s attempted assassination of a politician. The main character is clearly intended to be lonely, pathetic, and misguided. “Taxi Driver” wasn’t filmed in such a way that viewers would or should come out of the theater thinking that the assassination would have been a good deed. “Catcher In The Rye” does not–to the best of my knowledge–even have murder or assassination as a plot point, let alone glorify it in any way.

“Clockwork Orange,” on the other hand… well, the main character is not clearly the villain of the story. He’s charming, charismatic, and sympathetic in places. He’s the kind of character that people might want to identify with on many levels, and the rape scene itself was a mixture that contained more comedy than horror, downplaying the effects of the rape, up-playing the coolness factors of the perpetrator. I don’t think it’s necessarily true that the movie created rapists where none would have otherwise existed, but I do think that it’s treading along an edge that makes me uncomfortable, because rape shouldn’t be glorified.

You may be asking yourself why writing ANY kind of rape fantasy is okay, and the answer is that writing fantasy is by default okay and natural, including fantasies about crime and violence. If reading or watching a story about murder, rape, robbery, theft, and so forth, was truly harmful to society, then every society would be constantly harmed by the vast majority of the stories we tell. But that doesn’t seem to be the case.

We can watch horror movies without committing murder, usually because we know the difference between fantasy and reality, and also because the stories are usually told in such a way that it’s clear who the villains are, and that their deeds are vile. Even in cases where there is some sympathy for the monster/killer/villain, the stories aren’t a glorification of them or their deeds. In cases where they are, those stories are again treading on ground that I’d rather they avoided.
Same with crime stories, for that matter, although for some reason bank robbers, kidnappers, and so forth are much more likely to be glorified than movie monsters/murderers.

The only other times/ways I can think of (other than rape glorification fantasies) where it is NOT okay to write rape fantasy are:

When You Don’t Know You’re Doing It

Unfortunately, many authors–even or especially famous authors–have written rape scenes that are seemingly intended to be something else. One example that comes to mind is the sex scene in Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead, where the protagonist Howard Roark sneaks into Dominique’s bedroom at night, pins her wrists, physically overpowers her in spite of her fighting back, and has rough sex with her. It’s all meant to be okay, because a) Roark could tell just by looking at her that she really wanted him to do it, b) even though she said No, she meant Yes, and he could just tell, c) she enjoyed it, d) she entered into a romantic relationship with him afterward, and e) all the usual things that rapists think or say to justify their actions. As a rape fantasy scene it’s not bad… but it does glorify the act of rape, and justifies it, and the author seems to be oblivious that this wasn’t just rough, hot sex.
There are also countless other novels where the author seems to be trying to write a passionate love scene, but instead depicts a rape, sometimes a quite brutal one. Writers can mistake “lack of consent” for “passion,” but they’re not the same thing. When you write a sex scene, check it for consent. Consent doesn’t have to be verbal; it just has to be clear enough that the characters involved, along with any witnesses, would be able to tell that everybody was having fun. If/When you write a rape scene, make sure that not only do YOU know what you’re writing, but that the reader knows that you know it as well.

 

When It Comes Without Warning:
The sex (rape) scene in The Fountainhead also kind of comes out of the blue. This is supposed to be a philosophical novel about an architect, not a bodice-ripper. There’s nothing really in the book before that point that indicates to the reader what’s going to happen, and that kind of thing can put a lot of readers off. Especially if the reader has been the victim of sexual violence in the past.

Think of it a bit like killing a dog. It’s not something that you want to spring on readers without warning, if only because you’ll lose a lot of readers that way. If you’re writing rape fantasy, the idea will usually be to arouse your readers. That takes a certain kind of audience, and they usually like to know what they’re getting into. If you write in genres where sexual violence is common enough that it won’t shock your audience, something like Beast Porn, Bodice-Rippers, Splatterpunk, or fantasy BDSM stuff like Rice’s Sleeping Beauty Quartet, then you (and your readers) are probably safe.
If you’re writing conventional Romance, Erotica, realistic BDSM stories, and so forth, then you might consider including a Trigger Warning at the start of the work, or telegraphing to the reader PLENTY of advance warning.

Is It Okay To Fantasize About Raping Somebody?

The short answer is “Yes,” but there are some important details to consider.

The only caveats I’d place on that answer is that it’s probably not a good idea to use masturbation fantasies to condition yourself toward certain actions, especially if you’re the kind of person who ever has trouble telling fantasy from reality, and I’d discourage anybody from indulging in rape fantasies that glorify the act of rape. Otherwise, go at it. Fantasize away.

Just keep a strong wall inside your mind dividing this part of your fantasy life from anything that you’d ever consider doing in real life.

The first place that I encountered the idea of rape fantasy, the naming of it, was when I was reading sex manuals along the lines of “The Joy of Sex,” or “Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid To Ask).” One or more of these tomes had passages on rape fantasy, mostly explaining what it was, and that it was okay. I seem to remember them focusing more on women having fantasies about rape than about men (or women) having fantasies about committing the act of rape, but it’s been a long while since I read those books.

I don’t remember how old I was when I first encountered the idea, but I do know that I first read those books years before I hit puberty. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I’d already had at least one rape fantasy that I remember. I’d attended a circus at one point, Barnum & Bailey’s, and I was among a handful of children who were picked to go down to the show floor. There was some kind of undersea theme, and they gave us special hats to wear, telling us that we were colonels in the undersea navy or something like that.

The rank was important because I remember thinking that it would give me some kind of authority to order the undersea soldiers around. I remember thinking that I’d like to order my minions (I didn’t use that word, just the concept) to take some of the lovely ladies of the circus that I’d seen performing earlier, and to strip off their clothing. I wanted to see what they looked like naked, the ladies that is.

Not technically a rape, but certainly a violation that demonstrates one of many reasons why it would be bad to grant young children any level of military command. Fortunately for the ladies, the soldiers, and myself, my special rank only allowed me to be paraded around for a bit, then returned to my seat. Or something. It’s so long ago that I’ve forgotten much of the incident. I do remember the moment of the fantasy, and I probably returned to that scene when I grew old enough to start masturbating, changing the memory of the fantasy into a new fantasy.

I can’t say if that was my first rape fantasy, and I can’t say how many I’ve had since. I can tell you that a very, very large percentage of the jokes that bounced around the playground of the grade school I attended were, in hindsight, bizarre rape-fantasy instructionals for blackmailing girls into nudity or various sex acts.

The standard joke would be something along the lines of:
A boy catches a girl in the act of peeing, and he sees her privates. She’s embarrassed. The boy tells her that he won’t tell anybody that he saw her peeing, IF she promises to give him a closer look at her private parts. She agrees. He then tells her that he won’t tell anybody that she showed him her private parts, IF she takes off her clothes entirely…

And so on, and so forth. There was rarely if ever any kind of punchline to these “jokes,” but they weren’t exactly porn either. Although that basic plot IS used in plenty of porn and erotica today. Anyway, these jokes were extremely common. They weren’t about overt rape-by-direct-force, but rape-by-blackmail was extremely common, as was rape-by-deception, and various other forms of sexual coercion.

I’m not going to say that any of it was healthy for society, but I can say that the vast majority of the kids telling that kind of joke did not turn out to be rapists that I’m aware of. I certainly didn’t turn out to be one.

The harm from those jokes would come not from the plot, but from the execution of of the story. They didn’t normalize the sexual assaults, but they did make them seem clever. They perpetuated the ongoing social narrative that it’s a boy’s job (or at least natural and reasonable inclination) to try to trick or trap girls into nudity/sex, and that it’s a girl’s job to protect herself. If the boy succeeds, then the only problem (in this narrative) is that the girl was foolish.
The stories glorified the predatory acts.

While it’s arguable that none of these stories directly caused anybody to ever commit a rape, I would say that such stories did (and likely do, if they still exist on the playgrounds today) perpetuate and reinforce rape culture. That is a bad thing. That kind of story can be harmful.

Do not indulge in rape fantasies that in any way glorify the act of rape.

Other rape fantasies that I encountered growing up were in the form of Damsel In Distress form, and were quite common in television, movies, and books. A woman would often be vaguely threatened by a man, she’d be breathless, her clothing might get torn. In the more family-friendly mediums, things would stop there, with the unspoken threat of rape. Sometimes the act might occur, but happen off-scene.

These scenes were generally crafted for the Male Gaze, to titillate the audiences. They could be problematic in a number of ways, but they did make the point that the attacker or potential attacker was a Bad Guy, not somebody that anybody should emulate.

The same kind of thing happened a lot in horror films, only more graphically. Same with certain action movies, like “Death Wish.” The stories were crafted for the viewers to be turned on by the nudity and the forced sex, but to avoid condoning rape. This is why “Rape and Revenge” movies (and books, and everything) are a thing: they allow the audience to experience the thrills of a fantasy that they know is wrong, and they allow the audience to experience the satisfaction of seeing justice be eventually served to the perpetrator that they were earlier vicariously thrilled by.
Most people aren’t likely to go out and commit rape based on “Last House On The Left,” “I Saw The Devil,” or “I Spit On Your Grave,” where the rapists are shown as despicable beings not to be emulated, and the rape is morally condemned instead of glorified.

I don’t think that the vengeance/justice aspect need be a part of personal masturbatory fantasies, but I do think that the moral condemnation should be clear. It’s okay to fantasize about rape, just as it’s okay to fantasize about murder, robbery, zombie apocalypses, and all sorts of other things that would be horrible in real life.

It’s okay for a man or woman to fantasize about raping.
It’s just not okay for them to fantasize about rape being in any way good, noble, or justified.

Once in a while, it’s fun in our fantasies to play the role of the Bad Guy. The only danger is if we end up playing him/her in real life.