Friday, January 31, 2014

"What's the Plan?"

"So what's the plan, anyways?"







by Dusty Miller



My new story, Throwing Chocolate, is now live on Smashwords, soon to be followed by Kindle and OmniLit, all in various formats.

Love is all about making the connection. How Mommy and Daddy actually met, all those years ago, really is a cute little story. 'Throwing Chocolate' has a romantic Valentine's Day theme. A short story.

***

So I write, big deal.

What is the plan?

Until you’ve actually written something, you don’t need a plan. However, my first really good story, Project: Passion, clearly led somewhere, and thus it spawned Rendezvous and Escape from Bondage. That’s still only three novellas.

However, a few sales showed that there is some potential here for someone interested in writing or any home-based business. With the internet and the rise of digital publishing for everywoman, the potential to at least make some money, maybe not big bucks or anything, is clearly there.

So I had some funny little idea and I basically just wrote it up.

Voila.

Four stories, or ‘products,’ if you care to think of it in those terms. I think that was Selena’s Escape.

Notice the elegant dress, the hair, the makeup. That's clearly not The Sasquatch Sex Tapes, right?

That one also allowed me to escape from the naked butts and go for something a lot more tasteful, more aspirational for the target readers. 

(No honest effort is truly wasted.)

However, it really is true that once you have a few titles, each one is somehow less significant, but then, just think about it—your first book or story, or maybe a poem, really is a big thing.

It’s an important event in your life.

Ah, but for the true professional writer, it's all in a day’s work.

***

A short story is nice and easy to format, and the reason is because it doesn’t take too long—with a ten year-old running around, and some sort of frickin’ crisis around here every day it seems sometimes, that’s important because writing, editing, making images, even simple uploading, requires tight focus on detail. The less time you spend on routine tasks, the better off you are because there are fewer interruptions…(yeah, that’s what I said.)

Put those energies into the creation of the works.

***

You want a good cover, even if you do it on the cheap. Don’t let the cost deter you—learn how.

Once you’ve done a few, it rarely takes more than a few tries to sort it out, and you get an eye for the potential layout of a cover before buying an image.

That’s what my buddy said, and I think he was right. Now he’s telling me that lately my covers are better than his. (He might even be right, and I concede that so rarely with males these days.)

So the novella serial trilogy, (whatever,) has the first book for free. That sucks ‘em in. However, any promotion, even perpetual freebies, grows stale over time.

Ah, but now I’m up to ten or eleven products. Why not write something specifically to give away?

It doesn’t even have to be a 10,000-word story.

Throwing Chocolate is themed for Valentine’s Day. It’s less than 2,500 words.

And, I can give it away for two weeks, maybe a month, then set the price thereafter, and hey, presto!

I have another story up for sale, and oddly enough I might be able to give it away next year.

This is where the marketing goes into subtle levels. They all build on one another in terms of exposure, attracting new readers at minimal cost in time and money, creating simple awareness of the brand or author name. It builds sales overall and supports priced products that are presently out there.

Now, my buddy, who shall remain nameless, says all of this is cumulative.

The effects of all this builds up gradually over time and at some point it gathers its own momentum.

The more you write and publish, the better your chances of success, which he described as a graph, with a vector, traveling a set distance over time. The only thing sales can do he told me is to bend that vector.

It can go up or it can go down…

My plan is to make it go up.

It’s crazy enough, it just might work.

I love you all. 

I hope you'll take the time to check out and maybe download a copy of ‘Throwing Chocolate.’ 

Enjoy the story.

(Smooch.)

Bye, y’all.



End























Thursday, January 16, 2014

The Alpha Beta Chi Incident.

Nothing shocks him any more. 


























by Dusty Miller





“Hey, soldier.”

“Huh?”

Private First Class Tom Brannigan was walking from his personal vehicle, way out in the lot, towards the gaping maw that was the front of Wal-Mart here in this creepy little northeastern town. He needed some toothpaste, and couldn’t get his favourite brand at the base Px.

“Soldier?”

She really was talking to him. It was a nice-looking young girl, with her head sticking out of the window of a big and shiny white cube van. She was waving and beckoning him over.

Looking behind him quickly, so as not to get knocked over by a car, he went up between the passenger side of the cube van and another big grey pickup truck with a topper on the box.

“Yes?”

“I wonder if you could help me.”

She opened her door, and the van rocked a bit for some reason. In one corner of his consciousness, he heard the door at the back going up, but there was obviously someone else in there. She was in the passenger side after all.

“Yes? So, what seems to be the…” Tom literally yelped when about six young women came around the end of the van, and the girl got out of the passenger door, shoved him out of the way, quickly closed it partially, whipped through the gap and then held the door wide open against the cab of the grey pickup to his right.

“What! Whoa!” The girls grappled with him and pushed.

Now someone inside the cab of the cab was pulling at him, and it happened so fast Tom was halfway up on the passenger seat before he knew it. “Whoa! Hey, hold on!”

Six girls outside, plus the door girl for backup, ensured that the two girls struggling with Tom in the cab won the day. More hands inside the capacious back bay of the vehicle tugged and pulled and clasped as Tom struggled, cursing, babbling in shock, taken totally by surprise and stunned beyond reasoning.

“Oh, my God! No! What—”

The back door was already closed again. He heard the slam of one of the two front doors. He fought for breath as two or three young women sat on him, one of them right on his mouth, arguably to shut him up. 

More young women popped in through the intervening hatch from the front end and the motor fired up. 

Another door slammed. That’s all he knew.

Tom shut up and stopped struggling. The girl’s ass came up enough for him to catch a breath.

“Ladies…please…”

The bum came down again as the vehicle began backing out of the constricted space with a lurch.

***

They had Tom stripped down naked and duct-taped to a pine bench running long-ways in the back. From the brief glimpse he’d gotten, the bench looked like something out of a college changing room.

There were  ten, twelve, fifteen of them, maybe more, bumping and swaying as the vehicle moved along, all standing there laughing and looking down at him.

He stared wildly up at them.

“Why are you doing this?” He shouted in vain even as the girls, all of them appearing to be between eighteen and maybe twenty-two years old, shouted and giggled right back. “Why are you doing this to me?”

Some of their remarks were awful. There was swift movement down at the end.

“Oh, no!”

The first girl’s mouth latched onto his cock, erect and certainly beyond any rational control at this point.

Another girl came up beside his head and carefully pointed at a camera mounted up in the left front corner of the box.

“Smile, Baby, you’re on Candid Camera.”

Then she lifted a leg over his head and sat down on his face. She began to gasp and moan and gyrate. The sweet and not unfamiliar taste and smell of good clean pussy invaded all of this senses as the other girl did her best to polish his member to a new-car shine. He needed to breathe and his vision began to sparkle and twirl around the edges…

The rest shouted and screamed and shrieked and giggled as they passed a bottle. Then they got quiet. They were passing around some kind of glass pipe issuing wreaths of slightly acrid smoke. The only other noise was the whisper of wind and the whine of the tires going down the boulevard.

The only time he saw much was when they changed over.

***

“Oh, God.”

A slender Asian girl mounted him, gazing deep into his face.

“Hi, lover.” She closed her eyes and started to slide up and down his member, then the view was blanked out again by yet another vagina ramming down on his face.

***

Tom had an orgasm inside the third one, this one a cuddly little blonde girl with pouty lips, silky, curling hair and firm, high breasts.

She managed to get her mouth up to Tom’s ear while his face was empty for a moment.

“I’m not on the pill.” She said that with shining eyes and the most serious intent on her face.

He had to say something. Anything.

“Nothing shocks me anymore.”

“You’re cute.” Then she sat up and went to work and another pussy homed in, this time he thought it was the Hispanic girl, tall, leggy and with straight black hair down to her ass.

***

The next one wanted him alone. She was kind of heavy, and he stared up at her. She seemed a little older.

This one was here for the sex, for God’s sakes, and her performance was something to watch. Finally she moaned, thrashed, and the girls, lining up on each side of the bench clapped and cheered as hot sweat dripped onto Tom. The woman collapsed on him, knocking what little breath he had out of him.

His ordeal was just beginning.

***

“So how is he?”

The doctor looked at the Captain.

“Well. He’s certainly disoriented, and physically drained.”

“I see.”

The Captain chewed his lip.

Finally he spoke.

“Do you believe him?”

“Well. I’ll put it to you this way. The patient has weals, welts,scrapes, marks, bruises, swellings…traces of drugs in his system. We have plenty of hair removed, forcibly…that’s when someone pulled the tape off of him. He certainly ejaculated, more than once. We have all kinds of unidentified DNA. Many, many, different samples. So I would say, yes, something happened to him.”

Private Brannigan had been found wandering around in the Wal-Mart parking lot, incoherent, drunk, stoned, reeking of drugs, lipstick all over his face, and his A-Dress uniform remarkably disheveled.

There were some shocked passers-by, but a former military man, thinking on his feet, collared Brannigan. He had called the MPs, and thank God for that.

“Do you think it really happened, Doctor? I mean, just the way he said?” Tom Brannigan was a good soldier, but this sort of thing could put a real crimp in a promising young man’s career.

The Army hated liars. If you went on a bender, own up to it and take your punishment like a man. It earned a lot more respect.

The Captain considered what he knew of Brannigan.

It was hard, but not impossible to believe…it could be true.

The doctor took the Captain over to his personal desk, as evidenced by pictures tacked up on the wall of his wife, his kids and his dog.

He pointed at a camera, already plugged into a port on the computer. He clicked on an icon, leaning over the desk, and then clicked on a folder. He clicked on the first image.

“There it is.” He shuttled through.

The doctor had taken a dozen pictures, making sure he got a good one.

“What in the hell is that?”

“That, Captain…is Alpha Beta Chi, written in lipstick on Private Brannigan’s chest.”

“Whew.”

The Captain thought.

“That really doesn’t prove anything. Ah, does it?”

“No, it doesn’t, Captain. However, there is one point you might consider.”

The Captain looked up from the screen. There could be little doubt, that’s what it was. The Greek symbols were familiar enough from his own college days.

“It’s too good a story to make up.”

There was a long silence.

“Any recommendations, Doctor? Strictly off the record?”

“Who, me? Other than getting my own ass down to that Wal-Mart parking lot, why no, I haven’t got a clue. But my point is this, Captain—if it happened the way he said it happened, why, then, ah, maybe, maybe, it really could have happened. But if it happened in some other way, it seems so much less likely—all of those DNA samples, don’t you know.”

The Captain thought some more.

“Yeah—I hear you.”

He shook his head.

“Wow.” That was it—just wow.

“Anyway, we have Private Brannigan rehydrated, and we got some soup into him. He’s under light sedation—not that he needed much. He’s been all cleaned up. I’d like to keep him here for observation. A minimum of seventy-two hours. That’s mostly for psychological assessment. But, in my opinion, your boy is going to be just fine.”

“Ah. Yes. Good.”

The air was heavy with something unsaid.

The doctor sighed.

“Well?”

“It’s just…it’s just that…” The Captain was hesitant to put it into words.

The only school in the area that remotely qualified as a university was very exclusive.

It was a private school.

Students came from some of the most influential, the richest, and most powerful families in America. He thought the Vice-President’s daughter was enrolled there. He’d seen something about it on TV, or at least thought he had.

He had no idea of how they were going to keep Brannigan’s mouth shut.

The odds were that it couldn’t be done.

Shit.

The doctor had no need to know any of this, of course.


END











Sunday, January 12, 2014

More Than Mere Rutting.

It's about basic human needs and desires.













by Constance 'Dusty' Miller



I hope I am not being too analytical, but I have asked myself the question.

Why write romance? Even worse, why write erotica? Because there’s no doubt that while there is some romance in the work, the focus is largely on sex.

It really is about relationships. It’s about people, and like, how do you go about meeting one?

Where do you start, in some cases? The author is a single mom, and not in high school any more.

The social environment and her circumstances are a lot different now.

A common theme in my stories is two lonely people. Obviously there’s no full stop after that statement. The interesting question is how, or where, they might meet and how they manage to get together. I suppose it could happen anywhere, and probably does.

The writing has some challenges, it must meet all the criteria for the written work. It must have the three unities of time, place and action. It must have a beginning, a middle and an end.

The whole thing started off as a lark, more than anything. I was bored stiff. Life wasn’t that fulfilling or even all that interesting. I put my mind to it and realized that writing westerns was out of the question, as I know nothing of horses and cattle, six-guns and saloons…the list of genres goes on, but one thing for sure: I will never write a cookbook. There would be a lot of disappointed readers if I did, because my cooking is that bad.

I kid you not, ladies and gentlemen.

I was desperate for something different to do. I mean, something really different.

I was looking for some kind of excitement. Oddly enough, I think I found it, too.

I’m not even really sure why I turned to writing at all. It was just one of those things.

Everything on that page came out of my head. It sprang from my imagination. I had to imagine two people, in a certain set of circumstances, and bring them together, in spite of some obstacles, which are part of any genre. In my stories those obstacles usually revolve around simple but rational fears: the fear of betrayal, the fear of actual injury, diseases, the fear of discovery, rejection, heartbreak, abusive relationships, or even just being used and flung aside. And all that sort of thing.

Overcoming all of that is what makes a story.

And yet there is that desperate need to be loved in there too. That’s scary shit for any author. We really do put something of ourselves in our stories.

There is a chunk of reality in any story about sex, or love, and a pretty good sized hunk of me in every story that I write.

That’s an awkward thing to admit. Yeah, any initial thrill, the fear based one, has sort of faded, although you always get it in a story at some point. But now it’s like I’m looking for more things to do, bigger things, bigger thrills.

That’s interesting. The boundaries of the comfort zone have been extended.

My own personal space is now larger in some indescribable way. I never would have expected that.

I learned something about myself along the way.

But yeah, it is weird sometimes to sit there and pound away at what is essentially a kind of written smut.

All of those images began in my head. I think if it was just raw, animal-like sex—totally mindless rutting, then it really would be intolerable.

That’s where the romance comes in. That’s where the love interest comes in—two people get together, and it’s not just about cheating on a spouse, a drunken one-night fling in a motel far from home sort of thing. Lust has its role, I admit. It plays a pretty strong role.

But for me, the story is ultimately about finding somebody. It’s about finding somebody to love, and in any adult relationship sex is a big part of that. Seems simple enough.

Anyhow, I can’t put it any better than that.

If I had an idea like that, I would definitely write it up. We can always use more hot stories. Even then, (the motel room fling for example) I would still try to end the thing on some more romantic terms than mere rutting.

Heartbreak, regret, loss…or just a poignant reminder of the past.

Almost anything; besides mere rutting.

There has to be some beauty in there somewhere or it just wouldn’t be me, would it?


END