Sex in books, my quickest Twitter ban yet, and sending about a dozen noods! 😳

Dear Diary,

I’ve never understood why people object to reading about sex in books. I was writing the other day, listening to one of my favorite podcasts, (Writing Excuses – Self Publishing Episode), and the book of the week they suggested was a billionaire romance that was described as clean – one that contained zero sex. The recommender went on to mention that the story still had heat, just no sex. This made me stop typing and sit back in my chair. It’s a mystifying concept to me, and also probably one of my biggest pet peeves about adult literature. And movies. Any form of entertainment, really.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not talking about full-blown pornography, or even erotica. I’m simply curious why some authors don’t write about sex at all. I mean…

1. That’s not very cash money, yo. 😅
2. It’s completely unrealistic.

I mean, we’re humans. Much of our biology is centered on the sex act, and the biological imperative we feel is undeniable. They say sex sells, and the reasons for this are so obvious I’m not even going to insult your intelligence by listing them here.

So when an author writes a story with zero sex, no sexual attraction, or even a few moments of romance or eros, it always makes me scratch my head. How is that in any way realistic? How can you completely leave such a huge part of human nature out of something that is supposed to be a mirror of life? I mean, I understand when the stories are short and focused on a specific situation (like many of the stories in my Dark Jubilee series on Patreon) but full-length novels intended for young adults and adults? I dunno.

It just seems weird.

Sorry for the rant. It’s just always been something that perplexed me.

Moving on to my personal life…

Twitter banned me, yo! And I don’t mean some sort of weeny-ass shadow ban that I get all the time (your girl has a mouth… or, I guess, fingers… whatever) that gets her in trouble all the time. I stay getting lightly banned on social media on a regular basis. It doesn’t even phase me anymore. This time, though… this time was a bit different.

The Breonna Taylor decision was just announced. I was (as were most people) floored. I mean, those motherfuckers literally got away with murder. It’s an insult on several levels and makes me not only furious but deeply ashamed to be an American. Is this really what our country is about? So, you know me, I immediately sent out a tweet:

 

 

Moments later, I was blacked out of my account. It was my quickest Twitter ban yet! I couldn’t tweet, respond to messages, like (heart) posts… nothing. I could see posts and DMs, but I couldn’t interact. And apparently, I wasn’t the only one. Loads of other people (mostly high-profile types, which is another thing that confused me – I am not a high-profile type) that tweeted about Breonna Taylor experienced the same thing. Not only that, but follower counts vanished or were significantly reduced. Luckily, that didn’t happen to me.

We were all floored. I wrote to Twitter immediately, of course. They had me jumping through hoops: I verified my phone number, changed my password, and sent them about a dozen noods (😂). After all that, my account was finally restored – several days later! Twitter, of course, said the tweet was not the cause of my ban, that it was merely a glitch in their system, and they would have it fixed ASAP. I dunno, though. It all seems pretty suspicious…

…Ultimately, I’m just glad to be on my favorite social media network. Which, by the way, you should be following me on. Unless your account is straight porn, I usually follow back, and I’m on damn near 24/7, so go check me out!

See you there. 🥰

#Alexa

 

💡 The More You Know 💡

Research shows that everyone has up to 6 doppelgängers.

It has even been found that people of different genders can be doppelgängers of each other.

Furthermore, there is only a 9% chance that you will meet one of your doppelgängers in your lifetime.

 

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On being a domesticated loli…

Dear Diary,

I came to a startling revelation the other day: I’ve become a domesticated loli. 🤯 Way back in my younger days (i.e., last year), I was all about clubbing, getting wasted, and having recreational sex with a small, select group of friends and exes. I wrote when the mood struck, but otherwise, I was all about living. If you think some of my Diary entries last year and the year before were bad, you have no idea. The things I didn’t record we’re way, way worse. 😅

Then the Coronavirus happened, and I was forced to stay indoors. It was a dramatic lifestyle shift, for sure, but also an unexpectedly pleasant one. After the initial outrage/tantrums/bouts of crying, I decided to make the most of my incarceration and turn up the dial on my writing, and… well, before I knew it, everything kind of just changed.

Instead of managing to squeeze out hundreds of words a day, I bled out thousands. Instead of straining to publish three or four Patreon posts a month, I released three times that. And I had an immense amount of fun with it all, so much so that at the end of the day, I felt creatively (and mentally) drained. So awesome.

Which makes me wonder. What’s going to happen once this is all over with? Once the virus is more or less under control? Once I can go out again and I’m free to frolic to and fro like I used to?

I’m not entirely sure that I want to anymore. I kind of like staying indoors, being productive, and being safe from all the craziness outside my door. I was thinking about all this the other day, and I came to a startling revelation: my prison, my bubble, has become comfortable. In fact, I’m not sure how often I’ll go out at all once this is all over with. Is this kind of how prisoners feel when they’ve been incarcerated for a long time? Do they dread suddenly having absolute freedom thrust upon them?

What about you? Are you going to resume your normal life once all this insanity is finished, or has it permanently scarred you in some way? Let me know.

#Alexa

 

💡 The More You Know 💡

There is a technical name for the “fear of long words.”

It’s called “hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia.”

 

Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links that earn me a small commission, at no additional cost to you. This is because I’m a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com.

Storytime…

Dear Diary,

I have three things to write about this Diary entry: a writing progress report, a personal update, and a situation that embarrassed the living hell out of me.

I’ll start with the writing progress report: I’ve done tons of it. My main focus is still on Nephilim: Prisoner, the sequel to Nephilim: Daybreak, though I’m also fluttering through two other projects during my downtime: Erotic Urban Legends: The Casting Couch (a story featuring one of my favorite Naughty Cheerleader’s as the main character: Shae, the quiet redhead. Such an awesome story so far) and The Wencher: Blood & Sacrifice. So much fun!

On a personal update front, I’ve been spending a lot more time with my brother lately, making sure I keep Anne by my side. I’ve even (albeit slowly) started having friends over… it’s been nice to take a break from writing, and the pandemic, and just let loose and live a little. I’m an incredibly happy little loli. 😊

Now about the situation that embarrassed the hell out of me. So. Anne and I bought a vibrator because I figured it was time for another sex toy review on Patreon. IT IS SO AWESOME. Anyway, I was actually in the middle of, ah, ‘using it’ when my brother came over, and I barely had time to get dressed and toss it on the bed. Anyway, he came in, gave me his typical massive bear hug, and went to give Anne a hug too when he spotted the vibrator. He said something to the extent of ‘oh yeah, I’ve been meaning to get one of these,’ and proceeded to use it to massage his left calf (he had, apparently, pulled a muscle working out). He said it was a great massager and wanted to know where I got it.

The entire time he was massaging his leg, Anne was barely keeping it together, enjoying the shit out of the situation just a little too much, while I was trying hard to not pass out from embarrassment.

Anyway, I told him to save his money because the ‘massager’ was mine, and he asked if I could use it on his leg before we went to bed that night.

So, long story short, he has a new personal favorite ‘massager.’ 😶😭

When he ended up leaving, Anne looked at me and just exploded in laughter.

I’m still blushing. And dreading the moment he asks me to massage his calf.

Like I said. Three things.

I hate my life sometimes. 😂

I love you all.

Stay safe!

#Alexa

 

💡 The More You Know 💡

In 1968, a convention of beggars in Dacca, India, passed a resolution demanding that “the minimum amount of alms be fixed at 15 paisa (three cents).” The convention also demanded that the interval between when a person hears a knock at his front door and when he offers alms should not exceed 45 seconds.

 

Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links that earn me a small commission, at no additional cost to you. This is because I’m a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com.

Agony and ecstasy…

Dear Diary,

The agony and the ecstasy of writing a series… I never envisioned when I started writing the Nephilim pentalogy (five-book series) that I would have such a hard time sticking to it. The problem isn’t that I’m bored with the series or disenchanted in any way, but that I have so many other things I want to write in so many different genres (through a handful of pen names) that it’s hard to sit down and give all my attention to just one.

I have creative ADD. I’m not writing that lightly. I come up with an idea for a story and immediately set to outlining, rough drafting, and flushing it out before I remember that I’m supposed to be working on something else entirely. So I end up archiving it for later and reluctantly (painfully) pulling out whatever it is I’m supposed to be working on.

Repeat.

You should see my backlog of almost finished/unfinished stories. It’s horrific. There are so many…

Recently this creative ADD manifested with the Exitium Mundi series. See, I had finished the first Nephilim book, Daybreak, and as I was rough drafting the second installment, Prisoner, I decided to take a break and expand upon the universe a bit by flushing out some of the backstories for a few of the newly introduced characters. I figured I would write a short story entitled Exitium Mundi, which would deal with not only the new characters but serve as a catalyst for the event of the same name. I wanted to keep it short, around 7,500 words or under, and I would include it as a bonus to the paperback version of Prisoner. I do this kind of thing all the time with my paperbacks, so I figured it would be easy.

I was wrong.

I wrote the story fine, but it kept getting longer as I added more detail, fleshed out the characters, introduced new concepts and twists… to make a long story short, I ended up with five books totaling 300 pages and over 121,000 words. Not quite the short, 7,500-word story I envisioned. 🙄

I realized after I laboriously bore that child that I needed help. I needed to rethink my writing process and prioritize my projects, else I would never produce the things I really wanted to. So I devised a new system of what equates to a sort of creative tunnel vision – using any ideas towards Nephilim instead of new projects, and trying to find a way to integrate the sporadic ideas that randomly drop in my head into the current storyline. It’s a lot of fun so far and has led to some really unexpected results. Some exciting results. I love it.

So my focus is going to be solely on Nephilim until the series is complete. It has to be. Otherwise, I’ll get so lost in other projects that it will never get finished. And, in the future, I’m keeping series (not counting Voyeur or the Dark Jubilee) at a trilogy max.

Because of my new system, I am already about 52% finished with Nephilim: Prisoner. 🙌 So bear with me, beloved readers. You’ll have it in your hands before you know it. And you won’t have to wait long for the third, fourth, and fifth books either. Progress, y’all!

#Alexa

 

💡 The More You Know 💡

We’ve all heard of aphrodisiacs such as strawberries and oysters helping to put men and women in the mood, but what about apples? One 2014 study found that women who ate apples more than once a day reported better self-lubrication and overall sexual function compared to women who ate less than one apple a day.

 

Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links that earn me a small commission, at no additional cost to you. This is because I’m a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com.

Being social on social media: a cautionary tale

Dear Diary,

When I first created a social media profile back in 2015 (on Twitter, which also happens to be my favorite and the one I’m the most active on), I did so with a wide-eyed view of what social media really was. And yes, it really was my first social media account – before I started writing, I simply wasn’t interested in being social online. I mean, I had plenty of friends in real life, and I didn’t need the internet to date someone. I just didn’t see the appeal.

Basically, I avoided social media because there were other, more important things to do with my time. With my career. I was simply too busy making things happen to kick back and spend the day posting about what I was doing. The way I figured it, I could either be active on social media and reduce my productivity in half or skip social media entirely and be a productive beast.

I chose the latter. And I reaped the rewards.

Because of that, I had the option of becoming a full-time writer, and the paradigm shifted a bit. I wanted a way to have conversations with my (potential) readers, a way to be accessible to them. I never wanted to be the kind of person who let any sort of success go to my head; I wanted to be, you know, social. I figured if someone is going to spend some of their hard-earned money on something I created, the least I could do was banter with them for a bit. Just to let them know that I appreciate their patronage, and to see what they think about whatever it was they bought. You know, talk about the good and the bad. Be real. Share things. Teach things. More importantly, learn things.

So I created social media accounts for all the major platforms and began reaching out. I even created a Patreon, a place where I could sort of go creatively wild and cut loose a bit in a way I would never do on regular social media. So much fun.

I never expected the Fuckboi Army. The perverts. The men who probably have never in their life touched a (willing or conscious) female body. See, in the beginning, I used to be so much more social, so much more trusting with my personal information. I learned my lesson.

Storytime.

There was this guy. We’ll call him Steve. Through time, we became friends (I thought), and he convinced me to give him my home address so he could send me a birthday gift. He lived in another state, so I figured why not—no big deal.

Boy, was I wrong.

He started demanding more and more of my time (as guys always seem to do 🙄), and eventually, I just had to give him a reality check. I told him I’m a writer. I write. That’s the only reason I even have an online presence. He got mad, threw a tantrum, and said some terrifying things. So I blocked him. I was shook, I admit, but nowhere near as shook as I was when he showed up at my doorstep unannounced. There was never anything romantic between us (I mean, come on), and if my big brother didn’t happen to be home at the time (he took the day off to hang with me), I don’t know what would have happened. Steve scurried, and rightly so, as my brother is fucking ginormous and in excellent shape. Steve was neither.

Not long after, our windows started getting broken. My brother’s tires were flattened. I was terrified to leave the house because I was paranoid that he was watching, waiting, stalking.

You know what they say about paranoia: sometimes, you’re right.

I ended up getting a restraining order against him, which he violated when he tried to corner me at the bus stop. If it wasn’t for some friendly strangers there… to make a long story short: he went to jail, we moved, and I haven’t heard from him since.

This is why I don’t give out my real address to people. Or phone number. Or anything else. I don’t trust them. I can’t. There’s only one of me, and I like my life.

I learned my lesson well that day. I never give out my real phone number (I have several eNumbers I use instead), address (even my newsletter points to a library in Corpus Christi), or anything else to random motherfuckers online.

You shouldn’t either.

While there are a ton of genuinely good people out there, there are also some scary, unstable motherfuckers that are desperate for attention. People that, if you give them even a little of your free time, will completely misread the kindness as something much more involved and intimate.

Which is fucking insane.

It’s just not worth it. I know enough people in real life to risk something like that again. You do too. Just please remember when you’re online that you never know who you’re really talking to, or what their real motivations might be. Be safe. Be cautious. And have fun. Because the internet can definitely be a fun place – as long as you’re protecting yourself. Kind of like, you know, other things… 😏

#Alexa

“It’s intoxicating for a man to be waited on. Combine this with very, very skillful sex, and that will get them.”

– Doris Lilly

Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links that earn me a small commission, at no additional cost to you. This is because I’m a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com.

Innocently being creepy and dancing like a drunk white girl having an epileptic seizure in a full body cast…

Dear Diary,

So there I was, innocently being creepy and watching my big brother working out in his personal little mancave gym. My arms were crossed, and I was leaning against the doorframe, just standing there and thinking a million miles an hour (as usual) about Nephilim: Prisoner (book two of the Nephilim heptalogy and my current work in progress). I’ve given myself until the end of the month to finish it, and there are so many things I need to add thanks to my recently released Exitium Mundi series… I was watching him, but not watching him. If that makes any sense. I was more deep in thought than anything else.

Anyway, out of nowhere, he goes, “Come get some,” in that slight country twang of his.

My initial reaction was to raise my eyebrows. See, my mind is *way too corrupted* by the internet, but I know he isn’t like that, so I just laughed and asked what he meant. Here’s how the conversation went down.

“The weights. Don’t just stand there, put em to use.”

“I don’t lift weights. I do cardio. Running and calisthenics. You know that.”

“And? Get your dainty ass over here and give it a try.”

Now see, my big brother knows one of the ways to get under my skin is to make fun of my diminutive size. I get little woman syndrome. 😅 I’m not even that short – I’m 5’0, 100lbs! Not exactly tiny. I’m huge. Practically a monster compared to most five-year-olds.

So I gangsta-strolled over to the weights and told him to bring it. Mind you, I wasn’t even dressed to work out: I was wearing a baggy cookie monster shirt and light green man boxers (so comfortable, don’t judge me). The first thing I approached was his deadlifts. After calculating all the weight he had on that thing (five times my body weight!), I quickly gave up on that option. So I went looking around for something a bit more realistic.

He ended up having to adjust the weights on this weird monstrous contraption he was sitting at just so I could make it rattle. 😅

I am not a weightlifter.

But I wasn’t about to just let him one-up me. So I challenged him to a dance-off using Just Dance 2019 on my Switch. I’ve never once seen him dance, so I felt confidant in this (even though Anne tells me I dance like a drunk white girl having an epileptic seizure in a full body cast). (Bitch.)

In the end?

I smoked his ass. It was so much fun, too, especially watching him struggle through the more feminine moves. I almost peed myself. 😭

I also realized halfway through his dance-murdering that it had been forever since we spent time together like that. I mean, thanks to the lockdown situation, we’ve spent a lot of time together, yes, but we were both kind of doing our own things, not truly enjoying each other’s company. That’s going to have to change. We have such a rare opportunity here to be all up in each other’s business, and we’ve been kind of wasting it. I mean, he’s the most important person in the world to me, and I can probably count on one hand the number of hours we’ve actually spent together together.

The pandemic is horrible, yes, but it’s given us a once in a lifetime opportunity.

So tonight? I’m kidnapping his ass for some movie watching: a supernatural horror flick a friend of mine hipped me up to called V/H/S. It’s supposed to be scarier than Anne’s hair when she wakes up in the morning, so I’m really looking forward to it.

What about you? Have you been fully taking advantage of this lockdown by spending time with the people that mean the most to you? What have you done? I’m really curious. Let a hood rat know!

#Alexa

💡 The More You Know 💡

Mrs. Caroline Squires of Cincinnati filed for a divorce from her husband in 1949 on grounds of desertion. She testified he’d stepped out “for a beer” on the Fourth of July 1917, and had never come back.

Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links that earn me a small commission, at no additional cost to you. This is because I’m a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com.

Anxiety… and letting go.

Dear Diary,

I’m not going to lie: last month was a hard month for me. I took the latter part of it off, largely secluding myself from the real and digital world to cocoon myself with love and positivity, and when I came back from my glorious vacation… I was hit with all kinds of strangeness I usually don’t have to deal with. Online trolls. Losing someone I thought was my friend. Senseless death. Violence. Looting. Almost every single tweet and interview from our president. (🙄) I think the best word I can use to describe everything would be pandemonium.

I even tweeted about my mindset on my favorite social media network, Twitter:

This was not me throwing in the towel, of course. I’m far too stubborn for all that. I was venting. I had to. More on why in a moment.

See, when all of this first started, I admit I was largely caught off-guard. I wasn’t fully prepared to maturely and intellectually process everything as it seemed to spontaneously manifest. In truth, that is one of the few ways someone can truly upset my equilibrium: by catching me completely off guard. That is harder than you may think, as my mind never seems to shut off (even when I’m trying to sleep), but most of this did.

And it pisses me off. For several reasons.

The first of which is because it ripped me out of my creative zone and made writing almost impossible. Writing is my therapy, you see, the way I vent all these chaotic emotions swirling around in my crazy little head so they don’t become toxic to not only myself but the people I care about the most.

And I found myself unable to do it. I tried. I really did. I sat down, put my headphones on, and tried to find my writing Zen, but… it just wouldn’t come. Day after day. No matter how hard I tried, it just would not come. It felt like trying to force yourself to go to sleep – you know you need it, you know it’s good for you, but you just can’t make it happen.

So I quit trying.

I let go.

I calculated all the writing/author time I would typically do for the week (35 hours, in case you’re curious), set a countdown timer for it, and just kicked back and said fuck it and played around on social media. And watched some anime. And read. And ignored bedtimes. And, of course, played the hell out of Skyrim.

And then my eyes started drifting to my timer…

I figured, OK, let me just knock a few things out really quickly and I’ll get back to my fuck it vacation. So I turned on the countdown timer, knocked some things out… and then a few more things… and wrote some… and wrote some more… and knocked out tasks that weren’t even due yet… and played around with Patreon content… and wrote again…

And before I knew it, my time had all run out.

Interesting how things like that work, isn’t it?

I guess there’s a lesson to be learned somewhere in there, but I dunno. I’m no teacher. Just a student. Always a student.

Hopefully, the month hasn’t been too bad for you, and you’ve managed to keep it together. This will all pass. It really will. You just have to hang in there. Or not: you can do like I did and just, you know, let go. Accept your feelings for what they are and just express them. Vent them out. And then see what happens. It may do you some good. I know it did for me.

Just a thought. ✌💖😷

#Alexa

“I really think that people’s right to happiness shouldn’t be dictated by some policymaker in Washington, D.C. I’ve come to know a lot of people that – sexual orientation is such where they’re in love with people from the same sex, and I just don’t think it’s our role in the government to say, ‘No you can’t be married.’”

– Jon Tester

Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links that earn me a small commission, at no additional cost to you. This is because I’m a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com.