Happy Friday, everyone.... For your reading pleasure, the new column and calendar.
And, a Stranger staffer's view on using spanking as a cure for Seasonal Affect Disorder. (It's the last segment.) I had a lot of fun warming up Mr. Kiley's cute little butt, especially after he told me he was the office prude. Not any more, Brendan!

I love my life.

Furniture Lust, Continued…

I haven’t got time to do any real-time shopping for a new furniture yet, so I’m still poking around online to satisfy my desires. Couches are the big thing right now, as my current one is old and it’s really starting to sink.

I think black leather is the way to go. Yes, I know it seems sort of obvious – dominatrix, black leather, yeah yeah yeah… But really, leather is easy to keep clean, and if you get decent quality it stays looking nice a long while. And black goes with everything.

So this one looks nice. It’s basic, but it’s got nice clean lines.

(These little side tables are cute, too. The tops lift off for storage inside.)

Then I saw this one. I liked this shape more, but in chartreuse? Oh, I so don’t think so.

On a whole other site: I like this shape, too. A lot of the stuff on this site seems cool. But it’s suspiciously cheap, and I’m reluctant to buy something this big from a mail-order company, especially since I don’t know anyone who’s dealt with them, and I’ve never seen any of their products in real life.

Now, I was resisting looking for a couch at Ikea because – well, because it’s Ikea. Don’t get me wrong, I think Ikea is great - for some things. God knows my office walls are lined with those inexpensive particle-board bookcases. And they have cute funky accessories. But I wouldn’t tend to shop there for stuff like couches and beds and so forth.

However, I have to admit, this is a cool looking couch. Perhaps I'll have to make a run past the Swedish Disneyland to take a little look-see at it...

A client asked me the other day, “How often do people come to see you?” I think he was feeling a little self-conscious about the fact that he came in twice in a month. But that’s not really unusual, especially at the beginning. If you’ve been fantasizing about something for years and you finally get an outlet, you’re probably going to binge a little, it’s natural.

So it’s common for me to see someone once, and then have them call a week later and schedule again for few days out. Unless they’re in from out of town and only have a small window, booking more than once in a two-week period is a bit unusual. It does happen sometimes, though, and I certainly don’t mind.

After the initial rush, if there is one, has died down, it seems to break down into a couple of different groupings. First, there are the once-a-month guys. Obviously, I get to know these boys very well, since many of them have been seeing me for years.

Then there’s a group that seems to call about every three months. Again, I’ve been seeing lots of these guys for years, and I know a lot of them well, too. A number of them came to see me oftener when they could, but job or lifestyle changes have reduced their opportunities. They’re still very good regular visitors.

After that, I have a bunch of guys I know who call me about twice a year. It’s sort of interesting playing with these guys, because I get some of the effect of a known quantity, which I like, but since I don’t see them very often, there’s still a lot of unexplored territory, too. With six months in between visits, they often need to jog my memory a little about just which “Sam” or “Mike” I’m talking to when they call. Sometimes it’s harder than others, but usually, they’ll come up with some bit of trivia – “I’m the guy who works for the IRS,” or “Last time I saw you I brought you a catnip toy for your cat” – that makes me say, “Oh, right - THAT Mike! Hey, how you doing, honey? Long time no see.” But even with long gaps, after a certain number of visits, I’ll recognize their voices when they call.

Every now and then I’ll see someone once and then they vanish. Which is fine – but it’s unusual. And you can’t ever assume you'll never see a client again. Just today someone called and said. “So I saw you once three years ago...Can I make another appointment?” Three years? He must be on the extra-long kink cycle…

Well, I had a good time at Wicked Women, although I was really only around for one day. But my workshop seemed to go well. I was amused to see any number of women attending who I know perfectly well have no intention of ever becoming pro dommes. Apparently they just wanted to hear me rant. Hey, that’s fine, I’m always happy to entertain my friends.

And I had a good time schmoozing and socializing with a lot of women I haven’t seen in a while. I didn’t go to any of the other workshops, though. I’m bad about that, especially at local events. There were a couple of classes on techniques I do want a refresher on – branding and saline inflation – but I know all I have to do is call up one of my advanced pervert pals, and I can go over to their house for a private demo. It spoils me.

I had a perfectly delightful time at the dungeon party with Jae. I suspended her, beat her, attached vicious spring clamps to her nipples and labia, and electrified her girly parts at such length and intensity that it’s a good thing she doesn’t plan on having children. Then after the scene was (sort of) over, I left the long metal electrode buried in her pink parts and made her walk around the party with me as I socialized. I took great delight in pushing the remote control button and zapping her every little while. Jae has a marvelously expressive face, and her reaction to the electricity charmed me. I think at one point she claimed I was cauterizing her cervix. I told her that was nonsense, I didn’t smell any burning flesh. And then the next day, what does she do but volunteer to help with the Branding class? See how she is?

But seriously, she’s great fun, and just to prove what a sport she is, this week she’s going to help me do a decorative faux finish to the reception room of my new dungeon. (It’ll hopefully look something like this, although a slightly different color. More like this, although this is a Venetian Plaster finish, whatever the heck that is. We're just doing a glaze.)

Normally, you understand, I do not paint and such myself. It’s not something I’m naturally good at. As far as I’m concerned, home improvement is something one does with a checkbook. However, Jae is quite talented at such things and she's done a lot of decorating. She swears glazing is easy, so I’m going to give it a try. But just in case this project turned out to be a case of Jae's Revenge On The Mistress, I went by the Bellevue Home Show yesterday (Thanks for the tickets, Liss!) and picked up a card for a professional faux finisher. Always good to have expert backup when you have no idea what the hell you're doing.

The newest column and Kink Calendar. Enjoy, and I'll see you Monday, perhaps with a tale about my weekend adventures at the Wicked Womyn conference...

Weird sex work jobs I have known: I once worked for a stripper telegram service. You know, the more-or-less legit ones, where you show up at someone’s office and pretend to be a delivery person or a job applicant or something, and then you surprise the person by taking your clothes off.

I wasn’t crazy about it. I didn’t mind if someone knew it was coming, but the sneak-attack ones didn’t sit well with me. It’s that consent thing. Often the surprised recipient – or should I say victim? - seemed uncomfortable with the whole thing. I’m fine with doing some sexy entertainment for someone, but I didn’t like feeling like a tool for his friends to embarrass him with, for their entertainment.

I refused to do the ones in restaurants and bars and such. No way. Even if it was only a down-to-my-lingerie gig, I wasn’t up for that. Offices were about as public as I’d get, and even that was iffy.

The bachelor parties presented a different set of challenges. The service I worked for was one of the mainstream, franchised outfits, that also had clowns and magicians and other non-sexy performers featured prominently in the Yellow Pages ad, and they did make the point to the customers that nothing illegal was allowed to happen at these shindigs. But still, anytime you’ve got a bunch of guys, drinking, and two or maybe three girls, you need to manage the situation carefully.

Balanced against that was one’s willingness to perhaps let a guy’s hands wander a bit, if the right financial incentive were offered. But you also had to weigh the possibility that if you did that, one of the other girls might rat you out to management and get you into trouble. Unless, of course, she did it too. (Although I have known of instances where both girls broke the rules and then one tattled on the other anyway. So much for honor among thieves.)

I wasn’t making a big living off it, but it was some extra cash. (I honestly cannot recall what my main income stream was at the time.) But the job took a strange turn one night when I was told I'd been booked for a boy’s high school graduation party. By his mother.

O-kay, I thought. She’s the cool-mom type, very relaxed about her son’s sexuality. Or, she’s got no personal boundaries whatsoever.

And when I got there, it wasn’t the boy and a bunch of his adolescent friends, as I’d thought. No, it was a family party. So there’s his parents, and his aunts and uncles, and his four-year-old little sister, and his grandmother. Yeah, I said his grandma. I’m supposed to do a striptease for this kid in front of his whole damn family. Jesus Christ.

His mom took me aside to pay me and I said, “Are you sure you want me to do this? In front of everyone?”

She kinda looked at me like she couldn’t understand why I’d ask. “Yes, I’ve been telling everyone you were coming.” And then she starts introducing me to everyone, like I’m some long-lost cousin or something. “This is Marcella, she’s going to do a little show for us.” Now I know: this woman has no personal boundaries.

Then I met the graduate. It was immediately clear to me that he didn’t have a sex life for his mom to be relaxed about. There was no girlfriend present at the party, and he was not – to be blunt – terribly attractive. I imagined he would be nice-looking when he grew up a bit, but I pegged him as still a virgin.

Now imagine this nervous, obviously uncomfortable teenage boy sitting on a chair in his living room, with all his relatives ranged in a semi-circle around him, waiting to watch him try not to pop a woody when some sexy girl puts her cleavage in his face. The poor kid. I felt so sorry for him.

I was pretty uncomfortable with it myself. But dedicated professional that I was, I put my music on and took a position in front of him. Under the cover of the Prince tune, I leaned forward and whispered to him, “Kinda bizarre doing this with all these people here, huh?”

He rolled his eyes slightly. “Yeah - way.”

“Yeah, I feel a little strange too. But don’t worry, we’ll be cool.”

It was one of the longer five minutes of my life, and I’m guessing he felt the same way. I was definitely doing the PG version of my show, but even without putting my ass right in his lap, I could see that he wasn’t completely in control his teenage-boy hormones. The look on his face, however, would have been more appropriate to someone suffering from a deep gastro-intestinal disorder.

I did try to minimize the erotic effect by not making much eye contact with him, which was tricky, because I was also trying to not look at anyone else in the room. Not everyone was so inhibited. In my peripheral vision, I could see Uncle Al, over to my left, turning pink and sweating slightly as he bobbed his head to the music, an odd little smile on his lips. The kid’s father was also watching me very closely, apparently unaware that his wife was watching him watch me and looking none too pleased about it. (Hello, lady, did you not think of that when you booked me?)

Grandma was saying in a quavering voice, “Goodness, I think the ladies should have left the room for this. This is for gentlemen only.”

And the four-year-old girl had to be restrained from coming right up to me to dance along with me. I’m sure that would caused her brother’s head to implode.

So we got through it. When the song ended, I scooped up my clothes and retreated into the bathroom to get dressed and try to compose myself. When I came out, the boy had vanished into his room, for which I did not blame him one bit. The mother suddenly seemed quite ready for me to leave, but as I walked towards the door, the little girl attached herself to my leg and announced that she wanted to dance just like me when she grew up.

Boom, that’s it, my weirdness meter just went into the red. I am so quitting this job.

A few links for your enjoyment...

A cool new-ish blog by a local poly and kinky guy…

Is this for real? I wish some Aussie person would tell me if this is a gag site or not. If it’s real, well, all I can say is: Context is everything, apparently. (Caution: Annoying sound file when you open the link.)

Interesting article about the sex industry – and the debate about decriminalization – in Europe.

Upcoming event: On Thursday, February 2nd, Max will be doing bondage performance art at the Traveling Erotic Art Show in Seattle's Pioneer Square. Come watch him tie up cute girls and check out the cool art.

Well, we had a busy weekend – so busy I didn’t even get to post yesterday. Max’s pal Tom (and his girlfriend) came up from California to co-present the Exotic Bondage Gear class. When Tom arrived on Saturday afternoon, he opened up his bags and started stacking all the gear up on the kitchen table. I seriously wondered if it might buckle under the weight by time he was finished unloading.

And the TSA had a field day with Tom’s suitcases - note the forms saying, "We opened your bag."

Yeah, I bet they opened them up. This isn't even all the stuff. Not shown in this shot, for example, are the two Secretary-style neck-and-wrist stocks. Those had to have looked pretty wild on the X-ray. I wish I could have been a fly on the wall when they unpacked Tom’s stuff and looked at it. He's convinced they just did it out of curiosity, as opposed to really thinking he might be dangerous. (Although, now that I say it that way: Tom, you are dangerous. Cute, but dangerous.)

This week in the New House department: the painters come! (Hopefully they’ll clean up after themselves, though.)
And next week: new carpet. Yes, did get the 8-pound pad and all nylon fibers. Thanks for the tips, kids.

I’m taking time off from house stuff to teach my class at Wicked Women, and then to thrash the living daylights out of Jae on Saturday night. That should be delightful. I have some general ideas for the scene – especially after talking to a pal of mine who’s an electrical engineer - but I’m still soliciting really, really vile and terrible suggestions, if anyone’s got any. She’s tough, that girl, and I’ve been playing with her for a number of years, so it’s a challenging to keep topping myself, so to speak. But I have some schemes.

Note: yes, I got bumped out of the paper edition of The Stranger this past week. That happens to most of us at one time or another, if the paper is running thin. But no fear, I’ll be back as usual this coming week.

The weekly column and calendar... Enjoy! See you all at the Bondage Class Sunday...

So, I’m preparing for the class I’m teaching at the Wicked Women conference in ten days: “Pro Domme 101”. Which might also be entitled, “Everything You Always Thought You Knew About Becoming A Professional Dominatrix, Debunked.”

Seriously, I am going to try to touch at least briefly on every aspect that I can think of regarding starting up a business as a pro domme. It’s only 90 minutes, so this will be the Cliff notes version, but hopefully I can make it a learning experience. (If you have questions or suggestions about things you think should be covered in such a class, BTW, you’re welcome to send them in. I don’t promise to answer you all personally, but I’ll consider your input for the class.)

Someone asked me, “I’d love to attend that class, but I’m not going to WW. How come you don’t teach a class like this at Babeland or somewhere?” My response: A.) Why the hell not? And B.) Because I don't want to.

It's an issue of who I want to spend my time teaching. Understand, I definitely don't make big money teaching classes - often, as with WW, I get nothing at all but a comp to the event. So if I teach a class, it's just for the pleasure of passing on my knowledge. And I do feel a certain moral obligation to teach the next generation of perverts, seeing as how lots of patient people shared their information with me when I was just a pup.

But I reserve the right to be picky about who I give my time to. There are a lot of not-particularly-kinky women around who are taken with the idea of being a pro domme because they think it would be easy money. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you what I think about that. If I taught a class where anyone on the street with twenty bucks could walk in, I’d get a lot of “show me the money” girls, and they would annoy the fool out of me.

But it’s different at a leather conference. You see, when you teach at a leather conference, you know something about the attendees before you ever stand up and start talking. And what you know is: they’ve made a certain level of commitment to the theory and practice of being a kinky person. They shelled out a not-insubstantial number of dollars to attend the conference, and a lot of them spent time and money traveling to get to it, too. To me that means that they’re willing to self-identify as a kinkster, and they’re willing to mix and mingle with a whole bunch of other people who also identify as such.

Not everyone will do that, and it signifies something to me. It’s not that I have an issue with bedroom-only perves. Hey, however you want to get your freak on is okay with me. Mazel tov.

But if you want to take it into the business realm – well, now I have some ideas about where the bar should be placed for you. You could call it professional rigor, although there’s almost something religious about it for me. Anyone can worship in the church, but if you want to get into the pulpit and start passing the collection plate? Oh, my dear, you got to have the true religion to do that.

So before I start teaching you how to be a pro domme, I need to know that you’ve got faith. One of the ways you can demonstrate an adherence to what I consider to be the basic principles of good kinksmanship (kinkswomanship?) is by going to a BDSM conference. It’s not the only way - far from it. And god knows there are few dangerous assholes (that I know of) who go to conventions. But since I can’t personally interview everyone who attends my class, it’s a good shorthand method of determining whether I am sowing my seeds of my knowledge and experience on fertile ground.

A clarification, because someone asked: I am not "closed for business" right now. I'll be seeing people as usual in my current space until my new space is ready, and then, towards the end of this month I'll move, most likely over a weekend when I normally wouldn't be seeing people anyway. I may take a Friday or Monday off, I suppose, but no more than that. Otherwise, for you, my dear clients, the transition should be fairly seamless.

Consumer porn of the day: Really beautiful couch. Gorgeous.

You should all brace yourself for a wave of non-kinky consumer porn around here, because there's going to be a lot of shopping-for-the-house in the next few weeks. Roman is trying to warn me against going to the Seattle Home Show next month, as he swears that the predatory vendors there can smell new homeowners - and their money - a mile away. But what can I say, it's a fetish. I'm obsessed with my new toy.

Like my gas stove. Now, I have a wood-burning fireplace in the living room, and that's nice, but in the playroom-to-be, there's a freestanding gas stove, which looks more or less like this:



I hate it. I mean, it does kick out the heat, and that's great, but christ, it's so old-fashioned looking. It is un-sexy, to the nth degree. I am thinking about just tearing it out completely, but it seems like a shame somehow, as it's fairly new.

And I did some looking around, but all gas stoves seemed to be similarly ugly... Until I found this one. This is pretty. Of course, it's also hideously expensive. The top one on this page is cute, too, and I'm guessing it's also pricey. My bad luck, to have champange tastes.

Okay, enough house stuff. On a much sexier note: Check out Miss Candy's kinky personal training. It's a niche service, but she's a great trainer, and I'm betting there are some pervy, paunchy boys who'd love her to beat them into shape. Yowza!

Happy New Year, everyone. I had a good 2005, but I’m looking forward to 2006, too. And I had fun bringing in the new year with an intimate little gathering of friends. Big parties are fun, but I just wasn’t up for a seventy-plus-people event after the madness of the last six weeks, so we just had a few close pals. Thus, there are no cage-stuffing pictures this year. (More blasts from the past here.)

We did get a few shots of other fun activities, however. (Note: Pics are not work-safe.)

Here’s a cute boy with a big smile.

And while I can’t see her face, Rossi was probably smiling, since she usually is when you play with her. It's a wicked smile, too.

I myself did not play, preferring to follow my once-a-year tradition of drinking champagne until I am...slightly uninhibited. It’s rare for me to drink alcohol at all, but I allow myself this indulgence on NYE. Still, I was very good this year. I did not forcibly disrobe and spank my attorney, nor did I piss on anyone nonconsensually. Roman and I did sing some show tunes, but you know, I can sort of stay on key if someone sings in my ear. Sort of.

Someone who drank less than I did has decided that my memorable line for the evening was, “Mommy needs some more champagne!” You may have to know me to realize just how lit I must have been if I actually referred to myself as Mommy. And while I don't usually have much of an accent, apparently I dropped back into my Georgia drawl last night, too. Lordy.

So, now that the debauched festivities are over, I’m preparing to plunge into The New House, Phase Two. I’ve got appointments with people to give me bids on new interior paint and new carpet. (The paint guy is someone Max has used before and liked, but if anyone local has a recommendation on a good carpet supplier/installer, I’d be interested.)

Less Fun: I also need to start packing and/or getting rid of everything at the current dungeon. I’ll be moving a lot of stuff, naturally, but there’s a ton of stuff I just need to get rid of. I have a feeling Craig’s List: Free Stuff will be seeing something of me in the next few weeks.

And I’m thinking about having a kinky rummage sale. Seriously. I have all kinds of various weird stuff that I don’t use – in some cases, have never used – and I should just get rid of it. I don’t want to bother with Ebay. I’d probably just make big piles and say, “Everything in this pile is a dollar, everything in that pile is five dollars”… ect. I just want to get it gone.

My next big social events: the bondage party this Sunday. Max’s good friend Tom is coming up to co-present the Exotic Bondage Equipment class, and then there’s party afterwards. The weekend after that: The Wicked Womyn conference, where I’ll be teaching "Pro Domme 101". And I have date to thrash Jae at that event, too - always a pleasure. My life doesn’t slow down much, does it?

While I amuse my family, please amuse yourself with the new column and calendar.

The webpage tackles the question of the ages: How many condoms can you wear at once?
I believe them that you shouldn't try this with a real penis, although I can think of some guys who find tremendous pressure on their cocks to be fun. But I doubt they'd care for the removal process pictured here.

Having my family here visiting really, really distracts me. It's not a bad thing, per se, but you know you're really scattered when you pick up a can of deodorant and spray it on your hair. Thank god I haven't tried to brush my teeth with with my eye cream.

So if you're one of the people from whom I'm being distracted: sorry. I'll be normal again on Saturday.

So, Mom is here, my older brother and his girlfriend are arriving later today, it'll be the whole family fiesta. And they're all very impressed with my new house. Of course, they have no idea what debauched and evil deeds I'm going to be committing in it, heh. They think I'm going to rent it out.

My brother, alone of all my family members, has some slight notion of my alternate persona, because he lived here in Seattle for awhile. Basically, he knows about the column in The Stranger. He carefully cultivated ignorance about the rest of the sticky details.

But then, my whole family does that, which is quite fine with me. I've had people close to me be outed to their families about being kinky or poly or whatever, but if you tried to tell my family any juicy details about my sex life, they'd probably stick their fingers in their ears and go, "La-La-La-La-La-La-Laaaaaa, I can't hear you..." It's a convenient attitude. In fact, years ago, in the midst of our spectacularly unpleasant break up, my ex-husband actually did out me to my mom about being poly. She asked me about it, and we discussed it calmly for about five minutes. And then she sort of sighed, and we started talking about something else. The topic did not arise again until I brought it up three years later.

But all that aside, I thought I was doing a pretty good job of, shall we say, maintaining the boundaries between my lives. But my confidence about that has wavered slightly, because Christmas day, my mother told me that my brother's girlfriend was somewhat intimidated about meeting me.
"About meeting me? Why on earth would she be?"
My mother shrugged. "I don't know, he's told her some stories about you, or something."

Now my brother likes to make a good story out of things - he's an actor and a writer, it's an occupational hazard. But still, that surprised me. I mean: me? I'm a pussycat. I'm sugar and spice and everything nice. Aren't I? Damn, I thought I was. Unless, of course, we agree that it's going to be otherwise, but you know, with my brother's sweetie, that's just not a situation that's going to arise. (Yes, I do know that for sure. Some lines you do not cross.)

So I do wonder exactly what kinds of stories my dearest brother has told his sweet little girlfriend that she's scared of me. It's not the kind of thing you can ask outright, either. "So, did my brother tell you I'm a professional dominatrix?" At least, you don't say that kind of thing in my family. "Don't Ask/Don't Tell" cuts both ways.

While I'm off signing my life away: the new column and calendar...

Okay, I finally feel sure enough about this to reveal what all the mystery and busyness has been about lately: I’m closing on a house on Friday morning.

The act of actually buying a house for the first time feels strange. It’s such a grown-up, mainstream thing to do. And frankly, it's made me uneasy. I have strutted naked on stages in front of a crowd, I have made personal revelations to hostile audiences, I have done deeply intimate things with people whose names I didn’t know, I have looked into a stranger’s eyes and made a split second decision about whether or not I could trust them with my safety. None of those things make me particularly nervous.

Sitting across a desk from a mortgage broker made me nervous. That's why I've been unwilling to blog about the whole house-buying adventure step-by-step, because of my feeling that the mortgage process might very well go sideways at any moment. Max reassured me, and so did Roman. "These people want to give you a mortgage, really they do," they both told me. "When you get a mortgage, they make money." Well, that's a motivation I can certainly understand.

But still...I am not the kind of person banks like to lend money to. Don’t get me wrong, I pay my taxes and my bills. But my life simply does not fit into those little boxes on their forms. Dealing with banks makes me feel like Supergirl confronted with Kryptonite. The powers that serve me very well in most of my life do not work in the offices of financial institutions.

Except one – my ability to generate and save (reasonably) large chunks of money. Banks like that. Hence the recent hectic schedule.

I was on track to buy a house anyway – but I was thinking, oh, March of next year. Then in late October my landlord called and said “We want to sell the house – how soon do you think you could move out?” So my plans had to be fast-forwarded. I can do fast-forward, though, if I have to. So I did.

Of course, I had help. A lot of my guys were extra-generous during this period. But one particular guy - even more so than all my other really fabulous boys - was my angel in this matter, and for that, he merits special mention. He knows who he is so, thank you to him!

The other thank you goes to my terrific real estate agent, Ted Allison. I am not your average home-buyer, to put it mildly, but when I told Ted what I wanted, he listened without raising an eyebrow and got right into the spirit of it. He never tried to push me when I said, “It’s nice…but it’s not quite right”. And he worked really hard to get the deal I wanted on the house I wanted. He’s just been great, and I’d recommend him to anyone.

A point of clarification for my friends: I’m not moving out of Max’s house. The house that I’m buying will serve as the headquarters and private dungeon of Mistress Matisse, Inc. Note my use of the first person singular pronoun - I have always felt that in the same sense that good fences make good neighbors, having some separate financial investments makes for good relationships.

Now I have a new place for my dungeon, which I am looking forward to. And now I have to pack up the dungeon and move it, which I am not looking forward to. My new place isn’t far at all from where I am now, so those of you who know the way won’t have to learn a whole new route. Just go about half a mile further south, is all.

So now you know. I’ve always been something of a capitalist. But Friday, Mistress Matisse becomes part of the land-owning bourgeois.

Resistance Was Futile

Okay, okay, I give up. Everyone else has already read them, I’m way behind the cutting edge on this. (In fact, I think they've now become un-cool.) But lately I did at last succumb to the genre-novel pleasures of the early Laurel K. Hamilton “Anita Blake” books.

Notice I said the early ones. Because I’ve now read all of them, and my verdict is that the later ones? Are not so good. I think after book seven, Laurel’s agent came to her and said “Laurel, honey? Put in a lot more sex. Actually – put in a lot more kinky sex. We’ll make more money.” And Laurel did, and I’m sure they have made more money, but the books are not nearly as entertaining anymore.

You’d think I’d like kinky sex in novels, wouldn’t you? But you know, when you are kinky, it’s hard not to be really picky about the details. For me, it’s kinda like watching porn – since I’m a part of the sex industry, I cannot suspend my disbelief enough to not notice the shadow of the boom mike in the money shot. I don’t know if Ms Hamilton is a member of the BDSM community or not, but the way she writes about it – well, it just doesn’t feel like something she knows intimately. Maybe she does, and she’s just distancing herself from it a bit to keep from alienating the more squeamish readers. But it sure doesn’t get me wet. I usually find myself skimming quickly through the long (way too long) sex scenes, because they don’t ring any bells in my head.

Then there's the character herself. In the beginning, Anita Blake, as a zombie-raiser and vampire hunter, was a charming twist on the Dashiel Hammett hard-boiled detective type. She was tough, she got pissed easily and mouthed off to people a lot, and if they fucked with her, she killed them. Whoo-hoo, big fun.

Then she started fucking the vampires, and werewolves, too. Which is fine with me, but she’s so damn angsty about it that she comes across as whiny. I mean, a little angst about sleeping with monsters for one book, maybe two – okay, fine, it’s a growth opportunity. But my personal stance is: you can complain about something once or twice, and I’ll give you sympathy. After that, I’m going to ask you what you’re doing to change the situation, and if your answer is “nothing”, then I’m pretty much out of sympathy for you. This applies to fictional characters as well as real life. So Anita, face it: you’re kinky. And since you have practically a whole stable of male lovers, you’re poly, too. And you really need to get over all the whinging about it, because I’m tired of listening to it. It’s a good thing you’re not bi, because I’m sure we’d never hear the end of that.

All that aside: yes, they’re fun to read, and I’ve turned Roman onto them too. I’ve been so busy lately that light stuff I can pick up and put down has been just the thing. Ms. Blake has got two more Anita books coming out in 2006, and I’m still game to give her a chance on them. Better late than never.