No, no, no! Cats are vacuumed: weasels are waxed. Happily, both are appropriate to this very welcome post.

Writers' argot baffles me.

No, Smurfette's a good girl. She doesn't smuck.

Must be why she's so blue.

Maybe there is a G-d.

A book such as this might not be commercial, but the topic isn't some arcane craft secret. It's a topic that can be talked about.

I had no idea you were involved. That's neat.

Quentin Tarantino is "Brainy Smurf?" No wonder he writes himself into his movies when he can: his agent is clearly Not His Friend.

Ah, thank you for clearing that up; I was wondering about that point.

Let's go to an authority, shall we?

"Teresa Nielsen Hayden on 13 Sep 2006 at 3:00 pm

How did you get tape to stick to such a well-waxed cat?"

Knowledge of sex appears to be a significant hurdle to writing about it.

I remain concerned about the ailments Admiral Heinlein's lady-friends suffered from. Nipples which go Spung! may require safety precautions.

WordPerfect? Wow. Any particular reason for choosing WordPerfect over the competition? I'm genuinely curious... It's many years since I used WP and wasn't sure it was still available until I Googled it just now.

Curiously, the new 826 poster, "Are You Absolutely, Positively, and Wholeheartedly Ready to Publish Your Novel?", checks for the presence of dinosaurs as a plot element but omits sodomy altogether... Quite the oversight.

Word is great if what you're going to write is a two-page business letter. Anything longer, and it's a nightmare.

@Erik: I don't think direct experience at sex is any more necessary to writing good sex scenes than having direct experience in murder is necessary to writing a good murder scene. It requires imagination and insight, and a deep knowledge of your characters. Reading plenty of sex scenes so you have an idea of what works and what doesn't is a good idea too.

And to-morrow morning,
We shall have what to do after firing. But to-day,
To-day we have naming of parts.

Japonica
Glistens like coral in all of the neighboring gardens,
And to-day we have naming of parts.

(I think I've still got some 20-yr-old documents on a floppy somewhere, saved in Ami Pro and ChiWriter formats. Those were the days.)

IIRC, her gender was revealed when she was a little too specific in describing her recently-deceased mother. There was only one woman of that age and birthplace, with those accomplishments, who had also been a mother. And that woman had given birth to a girl. Busted.

I did most of the work using OpenOffice, but I had to swap out for Word to get the page numbers to work right. I had three separate sections paginated differently, which OpenOffice doesn't like to do. Not counting writing the actual text, it only took me an hour or two max to turn the raw manuscript into a finished book (or book-like object, as a friend of mine calls self-published books), and that included wrestling with those rackinfrackin page numbers.

> Quentin Tarantino is "Brainy Smurf?"

Maybe not. It says he is at IMDB but on Wikipedia it says negotiations broke down and he won't be playing that role.

Pity - I'd be half tempted to see Tarantino playing a smurf.

Or, what my father has half a dozen of, "trumpets", being a retired player, y'see.

We actually had them all out a few weeks ago, to see what kind of condition they might be in, to evaluate them for donation to various organizations with which Dad has been associated (Juilliard, the Chicago Symphony). He hasn't really played them in 20 years, since retiring from HS of Music and Art (now LaGuardia HS).

If there are also persons who amuse themselves by vacuuming their weasels - and most especially if they've shared the video of it with the world - then, please, everybody leave me with that one crumb of blissful ignorance!

Macdonald can speak for himself . . . but in my case, it's because they'll take away my Reveal Codes window when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.

Also, its word count function more nearly approaches reliability (which is not, of course, to say that it's as accurate as a good hand word-count) than Word's, which is notoriously way off target.

Writers tend to become deeply attached to their wp program of choice; I've known writers who have deliberately maintained antique hardware just for the purpose of running programs that haven't been supported since the heyday of MS-DOS 5.0.

Its good to see someone who watches his ps and qs.

Probably. Sex is an area where reality has to give way to literary convention frequently, for one thing. And the diversity of human sexual experience is so broad that personal experience is unlikely to get most people much of a sample of it, even.

It may hinge on just what your "much" means :-) .

ddb@41 is right that knowing literary convention is more important; people are insanely picky about their sex scenes.

I will hand it to MS for their OneNote program. Not a word processor but a wonderful tool for research.

One wonders if Wang might have been particularly appropriate when writing erotic fiction. (Not me. I don't wonder that, but someone might.)

When I was at school, back when all homework was hand-written, I got so annoyed with the labour of drafting and re-drafting essays in longhand that I tried to teach myself shorthand (various methods, whatever the library happened to have a book on: Pitman, Gregg, Teeline, even the lunatic Dutton Speedwords). I never persevered long enough to get the benefit but it was a good drilling in the phonetics of English—the different flavours of vowels and the opposition between voiced and unvoiced consonants...

Hmm, I seem to have derailed an erotic-fiction-writing thread into a defunct-software one.

> people are insanely picky about their sex scenes.

People can be deliberately and obtusely unfair about sex scenes—the Literary Review's Bad Sex In Fiction Award usually selects at least some reasonably-well-written scenes. It's possible to get a laugh out of them but that's not the reaction an un-primed casual reader will deliver. Bad Sex sometimes leaves a bad taste in the mouth (fnarr fnarr giggle titter etc.)

Me, I write my APA submissions in LaTeX. And while I'm less sure about LaTeX-specific macros, I know the underlying TeX language IS Turing-complete.

As far as printing for LuLu, though, if you're having trouble with pagination and the like with OpenOffice, it works to just split the document into several and upload them all. LuLu will string them together, and if you're already trying to typeset your book, putting it into several separate files for the print-version isn't much trouble.

When people yell for "help" with MSWord pagination/line-numbering/etc etc.

When trying to work with .docx or any .***x files in nonhorrible software.

When MS templates mysteriously come and go.

I miss Reveal Codes.

ooooooh....aaaaaaaaaaaahhh....

kinda hot and bothered. know what i mean? like, you sure know how to press my function-keys! f1!

1) Role playing game books;
2) Other hobby books;
3) Web comic compilations;
4) Fiction by authors I became familiar with by finding their books in stores or libraries;
5) Curiosities.

It's actually come to quite a sum over last four and a half years.

That said, I bought iWork because a client needed me to have it and I'm getting my feet under me using it. I do not have an opinion of it as a writing tool though, I still use Word.

But being comfortable with whatever program you use to write is the best thing. It should be easy for you, because the rest of it sometimes so hard.

This is a lovely timely thread. I have books in my lulu basket, and for once I won't have sent my order off just before finding another book I wanted. Yay!

Is it okay to plug Tony Wolf's Lulu book "Edith Garrud: the Suffragette Who Knew Jujutsu" here?
-Barbara

Also Open Office ftw. ;)

No comments about sex scenes, sorry I just write them like by magic.

Sex scenes: it's more context than experience, I think. Some idea of how the intensity of events can warp perceptions. And a certain scepticism about porn-reality.

There are some disturbing asssumptions used to frame visual porn. Maybe they're shortcuts for all the rest of a book. You can't explain why, so you choose the easy, conventional, and often grossly anti-feminine, frame for the sex scene.

There are all sorts of conventions around visual porn having to do, for instance, with who comes where and on whom. I think some of them are historic, having originated in live sex shows like Superman of Havana, who was out to demonstrate how many ejaculations he could have in a day, and wanted to make them highly visible. Some of them may be intended to appeal to men trying to assert their sexual superiority over women (no, i don't know why this would be important to "content creators", but it seems to be). And some of them are just quirks from one performer or another, passed on from one to the next as part of the lore of the job.

I worked with the original designers of WordStar (before they developed it). I wouldn't trust it as far as I could throw the IBM PC (original model) it was running on.

Note to Lulu.com: I neither need nor want to hear about all your new releases and special offers. *I* decide what books I want to read, not you, and I will not do business with spammers.

On the Peter Crossman front: I went searching for more Stross to buy and discovered Forbidden Planet (Birmingham UK) had sold out of The Trade of Queens without my ever realising they'd had it in stock. Bah! While wandering (grumpily) around the store, I thought "I recognise that cover, surely it isn't....?" But it was: The Apocalypse Door, 1st edition hardcover and mint. I also fell foul of Scalzi's "Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded" and couldn't resist that either, nor "the Vorkosigan Companion". Fortunately the shop closed at that point before I needed to buy a wheelbarrow.

A narrow escape, but my bank manager still hates you.

Well, many people who have worked in software development have a sense of how sausages are made, so to speak.

WordPerfect was tested by secretaries. Word was tested by engineers. Word kept an incorrect spelling in its dictionary through multiple versions. When I presented letters written using Word business templates to a teacher of business English, she marked them all over in red ink. The formats are hard on the eyes and the Help file does not help. I had to use it at work for years, and with every boss, I had to explain yet again that no, the program did not really do what it said it did, that using the program defaults and wizards would not make his business look good, and so on, and so on. I love how it will accept the commands to (random example, can't remember exactly what tripped this anymore) paginate, format in columns, and insert a text box on page such-and-such, but only in a certain order, and if you ask it to do columns first and then try to put in page numbers it'll belch formatting all over the pages, and there is no warning in the documentation, and you can't use Reveal Codes to figure out where your formatting starts and ends, and AGH.

I can't afford WordPerfect at home, so I use OpenOffice. It's not as good, but I don't have to deal with Word's endless infuriating shortcomings. Not to mention the bugs.

Cover art http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/ciu/4d/66/da9262e89da0e3555dd44110.L._SL500_AA300_.jpg

Just the title alone is worth it.

(In a nutshell: you can group regexps egrep-style, and substitute the matched text into the "replace" string by using &1, &2;, and so on (where the numerical subscript denotes the order of the regexp group in the search expression). Unfortunately, every second replacement is a literal &1 string rather than the matched expression.)

I'd go digging for this and bug-report it but ISTR the OO.o folks are due to replace the regexp module with a rewritten-from-scratch one in an upcoming release, but it makes it really hard to write a simple macro to turn OpenDoc files into ReStructured Text.

WordPerfect's "reveal codes" works very well, because WordPerfect internally represents the text as this single stream of data in which there are the letters you type, and mixed in with them are magic bits of data that tell it "start italics" or "stop italics" or whatever. It's really easy to display that to the user in a way that can be easily understood and even edited directly.

There are some reasons why it's not ideal for programming, though -- pick a random letter in the middle of the stream; quick, what format is it in? You have to pretty much look through the entire preceeding stream of text to figure out what format it's in.

So Word, by contrast, uses an entirely different way of internally representing text. IIRC, it represents things as nested chunks of text -- each chunk contains a stream of the text and links to other chunks embedded in it, and then there is associated data about the format that's applied to that entire chunk. All the text within a given chunk is the same format.

That means that, if you've got a paragraph of text and change a single word in the middle to italics, it will pull that word out into a separate chunk, set that chunk to be in italic font, and embed the new chunk in the paragraph chunk where the word was. (The rest of the formats on that chunk will say "whatever the parent chunk does" rather than repeating them, so if you later change the paragraph to bold, the italic word in the middle becomes bold, too.) Word is generally smart about recombining chunks if you do something like making the whole paragraph italics.

Anyway, that also explains one of the particular weirdnesses of Word. Suppose you make the whole document italics. Depending on how you do that, it might take the whole-document chunk and change its format to "italics". Or it might take the whole contents of the document and put them into a new chunk that's italics, and embed that in the document. Those both look the same -- but if you start typing at the end of the document, in the second case your typing will go outside that new chunk and won't be italics. Unless you went to the end of the document by a way that leaves you inside that chunk.

Anyway, that would be very difficult to show to the average user in a way that made any sense at all, so Word generally doesn't. With the latest versions of Word, you can save in a type of .docx file that's readable XML, and look at it. Just don't be expecting the angles to add up to 360 degrees, or to be retaining your sanity when you look at them.

If I have to format the resulting plain text file, either it gets sucked into OpenOffice, reStructured Text, groff, or LaTeX, depending. (It would get turned into XSL-FO if there was a free XSL-FO processor worth the powder to blow it to hell, which, unfortunately, there is not.)

One of the cool things about OpenDocument (which is the XML format OpenOffice uses as an internal content representation) is that the "files" are zipped directories containing XML files. You can unzip them, and edit the innards with any decent XML editor, XSLT processor, or XML library (use libXML2; starting with it saves ever so much pain and lamentation), and zip them back together, and open them with Open Office again, if you like.

You can also use standard zip utilities on Open Document files, which means that the "what awful thing has the subject matter expert done to the styles?" problem becomes a matter of pounding the (carefully saved by itself) canonical styles.xml file into the Open Document file with zip commands. Anything truly clever will show up as the default style, which, glory be, you can search for.

It's nothing like as good as a real form/content separation system, which even Word Perfect no more than marginally approximated, but it has its virtues.

Of course, it IS about 95% gay men, and one thing nearly everyone there has in common is that they either like or don't mind gay porn. So the "gay stories" forum is mostly gay porn, and by Sturgeon's Law mostly pretty bad even for porn.

But now and then there are some stories that are pretty good. There's even one going on now that I think could be rewritten slightly and published as a YA novel (there are VERY few sex scenes in it after a couple of dozen short chapters).

Anyway, I wrote a story. I intended to write some paranormal porn, but the viewpoint character got hold of me, and I wound up not putting in any sex until Chapter Four. By then the viewpoint character's voice (120-year-old vampire—yeah, I know, but remember it was supposed to be porn when I started) was insistent, and I wound up writing the sex scene in a sort of close-enough-for-porn pseudo-nineteenth-century voice, which I didn't research or anything, because hell, no one on that site will notice if it's wrong.

The result was a sex scene that's quite explicit (you know exactly what's happening at every moment), yet indirect. Never a word that would be bleeped in Primetime, but almost nothing described could be shown on (American broadcast) television at any hour (as a hint, the "sword" metaphor is extended, with the narrator speculating on how his old fencing master would disapprove).

I would love to know if the scene would pass as a sex scene in a paranormal romance. Are there fans of the genre here who'd be willing to read it and tell me?

Any other takers? (I briefly thought of posting it here in ROT13, but instantly realized that probably would NOT be appreciated!)

These days I use Word because a) it's a standard; b) files transfer well between Mac and PC; c) its .rtf conversions are much better-behaved than OpenOffice's non-Euclidean horrors. Notice I don't say I like Word, only that I use it.

Also, speaking of OpenOffice and MacOS, NeoOffice is a much nicer port of the same.

Then bug him to write more of it. It's good!

I'm halfway through Chapter Five.

The Wang Labs word processor was far ahead of its time. Too bad they couldn't figure out how to stay in business; it was years before I found anything even half as good for producing technical documents.

Have I successfully avoided being 12? I'll never tell.

Best option I've found is to cut the whole paragraph (sometimes more than one), paste into Notepad, paste back, then do the formatting I actually want. Works sometimes at least. In bad cases I've done this with the whole document and pasted it into a new, clean Word document, before adding any formatting I want in there.

Hmmmmm . . . is this a sign that Word was actually inspired by Azathoth and/or the rest of the Great Old Ones, or merely an indication of its particular suitability for invoking them?

I have read
the plum
Xopher sent
in my mailbox

and which
you will probably
happily
be reading

Believe me
it was so tasty
so sweet
and so hot

There are a number of epublishers that do GLBT m/m m/f/m etc. and expect the sex scenes to be explicit, if not demand it (e.g. Ellora's Cave, supposedly the largest X-rated commercial epublisher)

For that matter, there are mass market paperbacks out there from Berkeley Sensation or Heat by e.g. Emma Holly (e.g. Fairyville, and various other books, and there are other authors who have trade paperbacks from various publishers including Berekeley, with m/m explict scenes.... ) with explicit m/m scenes slotted in romance. It;s gotten to where people who don't want explicit scenes, have problems finding "sweet" romance novels to read!

From

http://www.jasminejade.com/docs/AuthorInfo.pdf

Ellora’s Cave Romantica® (erotic romances) must be both erotic and romantic.
~ The sexual relationship must be integral to and an important element of the storyline and the character development. Sex scenes should contribute to furthering the plot or affecting the development of the romantic relationship or the growth of the characters.
~ The story must include abundant and explicit sex and sexual tension, starting early and continuing throughout. Sex scenes must be described in graphic detail and explicit wording, not delicate euphemisms or purple prose.
~ The story must meet the definition of a romance novel: the primary focus must be on the development of a romantic relationship, and there must be an emotionally satisfying committed ending for the main characters.

http://changelingpress.com/submissions.php

Smash the Box!
With Changeling Press

Out of This World Erotic Love Stories Featuring Literary Erotic Novellas
Are your characters wild and wicked, your plots hot enough to require a fire-hazard warning? If the answer is yes, Changeling wants YOU.

Cyborgs, vampires, werewolves, dragon shifters, cat shifters, aliens, genetically altered alien cyborg dragon shifters... Chances are, they belong at Changeling.

http://www.liquidsilverbooks.com/guidelines.htm

Molten:
Intense heat/sexual interaction
Descriptive/explicit sex
BDSM/Fetish/Kink
Violence
Multiple partners
HFN or HEA
M/F w/ kink
GLBT - any heat level

Sigh. He really wanted his book published. And I have my doubts that it is even readable. And mom wants me to call him and talk about it. He obviously ignored my advice on "if they want money to read it, run away. If they want more money to 'edit it', run away faster."

I'm going to put it off until tomorrow (Monday) when I'm a bit more numb because of work. I don't want to get into it, and he IS 10+ years older than I am.

Heavy sigh.

- an exchange between arry Morgan and James Garner about Joan Hackett in Support Your Local Sheriff

Paula, thanks. I think I might be into the realm of euphemisms, though the descriptions are still explicit.

Cally, I got an error at that address: "This account has been disabled or discontinued [#103]."

The thing about Word's file formats is that ... well, when Word was first created, computers were slow, and it made things a lot faster to just take the contents of internal memory and dump them onto disk, raw. And the modern XML versions are not that far off of still doing that, because the last thing you want to do with a program like this is start changing the fundamental core ideas of how it works. So a lot of the squamous insides are right there where you could ill-advisedly read them.

http://www.mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=10726

My bonny moorhen, my bonny moorhen,
Up in the gray hill, down in the glen;
It's when ye gang butt the house, when ye gang ben,
Aye drink a health to my bonny moorhen.
My bonny moorhen's gane over the main,
And it will be simmer or she come again;
But when she comes back again, some folk will ken:
Joy be wi' thee, my bonny moorhen!

My bonny moorhen has feathers enew,
She's a' fine colours, but nane o' them blue;
She's red, and she's white, and she's green, and she's gray.
My bonny moorhen, come hither away:
Come up by Glenduich, and down by Glendee,
And round by Kinclaven, and hither to me;
For Ronald and Donald are out on the fen,
To break the wing o' my bonnie moorhen

I didn't know what those stood for, and happily imagined several obscure paraphilias, until Google told me that stood for Happy For Now or Happily Ever After. Alas, still no market for my Hen (Bleep)ing, Nasty story.

...do ye shed a tear?

Paula @ 83: So at Liquid Silver, no matter the heat, if it's GLBT it goes to the head of the Kink Line.

I just... I don't... I can't even begin.

Oh, gowan! You know you want to. (I used to work with a guy who worked at Wang Labs for years. You can't possibly have come up with anything he and his colleagues hadn't already).

Yes, indeed.

Well done.

I was excerpting, to give examples to Xopher that there are commercial markets out there, paying rates typically that are royalty-based of around 35% of list download price, for m/m explicit erotica/romance with vampires and/or shapeshifters and/or elves and/or aliens etc. etc etc. The Liquid Silver designation of "molten" denotes non-"vanilla." Again, the run of the mill romance these days has sex scenes at a level of explicitness that would probably have gotten it bounced from the back corners of newstands where the porn was back in the 1960s....

Mainstream SF/F got away with a lot over the years, by using settings far away that weren't "real"--the same sort of thing involved in the Thousand Nights and One Night, written in Fustat (Old Cairo) but set in the location of faraway exotic Baghdad.... The misbehaviors and depravity of foreigners....

muttergrumblesnarl: "the Vorkosigan Companion" turns out to be misbound and contains a signature (or two) of something by Christopher Anvil.

(Rummage)

Yerse: two signatures, pages 25 through 56 of TVC have been replaced by pages 27 to 58 of what appears to be War Games (which I need to get as well).

Oh well, I have to go back to the shop on Saturday anyway - maybe they have a correctly assembled version....

But I will suggest that if he wants to look for markets, beyond the suggestions already made, he might check the author resources at the Erotica Readers and Writers Association

Sounds like the beginning of a book I know.

I have read a lot of vampire stuff, and as much horror as I could get my grubby little paws on. This is top-grade.

With little interest in the guy-guy porn (and therefore not much grounds for comparison), it was still Victorian-hilarious.

If anyone's interested in what Carol meant but doesn't want to read the porny parts, Chapters Five, Six, and Seven (Seven isn't written yet) a) could stand on their own and b) have no sex of any kind in them. There's one icky death, though.

I'm not your target audience for this one,alas. But it's not the sex scenes that make it so. Maybe next time.

So Stillwater runs deep, eh?

I've written dark paranormal erotica, too, and people have read it and liked it. One recommended shopping it to Circlet, but I'm not sure how to take several short stories and surround them with just enough backstory/front matter to give needed context ...

I'm working on Chapter Seven now. It's going to be a while before this is a complete story with a beginning, middle, and end, if it ever is. For some of the markets it apparently would need more sex, for others less. I'll see what it winds up being as I go on with it.

(I sometimes feel rather small and inexperienced, when hanging out around Making Light. I mean, my villanelles are dreadful, and my sonnets nearly as bad. But everyone is so nice, I do try to remember to speak up once in a while.)

I won't say that knowing quite a lot about sex in the technical sense doesn't come in damned handy if one wishes to write EXPLICIT sex and avoid howlers, because it does, but you can look that stuff up mostly, and handwave the stuff you can't.

At which point you'll realise that you were so busy calculating realistic ejaculate trajectory that you *forgot to count the hands*. ah-heh-heh-heh-oops-edit.

I suspect that writing good sex mostly requires you to know a lot about lust and desire. Your own, for sure, and other people's if you can find non-intrusive ways to find out.

I mean, plus general knowing how to write (and edit) stuff. And a reasonable willingness to let your id get all over the page to start with, and then as much as possible edit it back out again. If it never gets in there, you have a sex manual. If you LEAVE it all in there you have a highly specialist sex scene, at best. Possibly so specialist that it's of interest only to you. Plus, AWKWARD. :-)

And then you just accept that if 25 percent of your readers like that particular scene you did good, because really, aside from social stigma I suspect the main thing keeping smut from being truly mainstream is that I don't think most sexual squids exist in bestseller numbers.

I will note that focussing on internal processes rather than technical acts increases your possible audience, though. It's easier to find people who want to read about someone feeling like THAT and are happy to assume that THIS will get that character there than it is to find people who feel like THAT whenever they read about THIS. If that makes sense...

That sounds like a viable premise for a Titanic spoof, where there ends up being one hand after another (including a gorilla hand, a classic clown glove, and a We're Number One foam hand) on the steamy glass.

My characters embrace in hell
and whisper as they lie between
the sheets a truth they learned so well--

But here I stopped, my fingers fell
from keys, I fretted at the screen:
I cannot write a villanelle.

This demon needs a sharp farewell,
its words precise, the rhythm clean,
But no. I can't. I learned that well.

My characters are left in hell,
the cursor blinks on my machine.
I cannot write a villanelle.

It's not that I can't be obscene,
But this story won't be seen.
My demon wants a villanelle,
and I can't write the poems of hell.

Not a *damned* thing wrong with that!

(Is it gauche of me to wish that Making Light had "like" buttons?)

This suggests to me an lampshade for it... the viewpoint character¹ is center of a cluster, and at some point we see "... another hand began stroking across his shoulderblades -- wait a minute -- he opened his eyes and struggled to focus. Indeed, someone else had joined the group...." At which point the reader goes back to count, and sees, yep, that was the seventh hand (or whatever).

¹ Who should be previously noted as having natural numeric awareness -- perhaps even autistic-spectrum, though that viewpoint might be trickier than it sounds to write properly.

That was a perfectly good meta-villanelle. Nicely done.

Heh. Also, Zombies!

But actually it just happens insanely often, so I hardly even notice the comedic possibilities anymore. It's just "eh, extremity deployment error, lemme fix that".

LOL!

Also, Zombies! ...or androids!

LDR: perhaps as gauche as wishing for smilies.

(Although some of us secretly do.)

Lists of different sorts of phobia (like lists of different ways to do divination) are sort of fun until you realize that they're little more than lists of Ancient Greek vocabulary.

Ahem ... how is that less fun? I'll note that my high-school Latin drastically informed my English vocabulary, and Greek covers another 20% or so (to Latin's 60-70%).

I can agree with that. Everything of yours I read is informative and often very concretely useful to me; I wish you'd write more, but I probably would no matter how much you wrote!

...that said, I'd better get back to studying for my Latin exam this afternoon. Much as I'd rather write poetry in Latin than memorize lists of deponent verbs, I know which is more immediately useful.

Terry, Xopher, thank you both for the kind words. It makes me feel far brighter at the prospect of posting around here. I may still fumble my words now and then, but by golly, I'm not a stranger anymore.

( ... it would certainly solve the "forgot to count hands" problem. )

Also used in sentences like, "Um, (writer), your squids are showing again."

(Um, hi. I'm even less known here than Fade--hardly surprising, since I don't think I've posted a dozen times, even though I've been lurking irregularly since Electrolite was a separate blog--so I didn't even bother inquiring of Xopher if he'd let me read his piece. And anyway, after a comment like the above, I might be better off slinking back into the woodwork for another decade or so...)

Not a chance. Suitable penance, however, might take the form of poetry. About tentacles. heh.

I can't write villanelles, either, though I've experimented with sestina.

the viewer watches and doesn't shrink.
the victim writhes and tries to escape
Tentacle porn makes me furiously think

As porn, it's accepted with nudge and wink
tentacles circle and wrap like tape
yet many a viewer will not even blink.

Grabbed and held, and starting to sink
and just out sight is a maw agape
Tentacle porn makes me furiously think

Tumid and swirling right up to the brink,
the tentacles pull and poke and scrape,
yet many a viewer will not even blink.

And the tentacles wave in a cloud of ink
you can just make out the erotic shape
Tentacle porn makes me furiously think
yet many a viewer will not even blink.

Seriously(?), though, I bow to the masters. Puns and the odd bit of prose I can manage, but extemporaneous versification is beyond me.

(And I think this makes post number 12 for me here.)

Talking squids are not out of place
In the airless void, the celestial sphere.
Too clever by far to trick with a squid-sark,
But a Superconducting QUantum Interference Device just doesn't cut it for a romp at the water park...

A tentacle's caress may leave a mark
In the airless void. The celestial sphere?
More gentle still than the nibbling shark:
"Whisper sweet nothings, Witch. No one will hear."

In the airless void, the celestial sphere,
Talking squids in outer space
Whisper sweet nothings which no one will hear.
Certainly they are not out of place.

Talking squids in outer space:
"A whale hunts in the lowering murk!"
Certainly they are not out of place:
The cephalopod knows just where to lurk.

A whale hunts in the lowering murk,
More gentle still than the nibbling shark.
The cephalopod knows just where to lurk:
A tentacle's caress may leave a mark.

All your preconceptions are belong to us.

* Your award might take a little while to arrive, unless you're willing to accept a left-over Fickle Finger of Fate.

Craven horrors wait at visions edge, willing me to die
so that their tentacled young might have their fun
on squamous sands, where blackened buboes lie.

I crawl, remembering what it was to fly,
weak wings no longer yielding desperate thrum;
I rest, beneath a crimson bleeding sky.

Limbs fall-shattered, mouth wait-dry
I tremble with regret and wish my prideful spells undone
on squamous sands, where blackened buboes lie.

With other wrecks and remnants from on high,
half dreaming horrors faced and treasures won
I rest, beneath a crimson bleeding sky.

Although I fear and sense the beast draws nigh
and know that when it reaches me I'm done,
on squamous sands, where blackened buboes lie
I rest, beneath a crimson bleeding sky

Needs more tentacles and some humour, but it's my first ever attempt at a villanelle* so once I'd written it I figured I might as well post it ;)

*I think. If I've got the form wrong please do point it out!

Weird approach-avoid - I want to read the rest NOW but realize any writer doing great stuff needs to work it through and up.

So, (sob) take your time, Xopher.

very impressive!