Too Beautiful, the blog

Too Beautiful

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Monday, September 14, 2009

Buy my new book

You can now buy my novel How They Scored, a book about Silicon Valley, sex, privacy and the internet, and real estate in San Francisco.

This is the book I wrote in 2007 for my erstwhile publisher Cleis Press. We disagreed about the final form of the book and it wound up back in my hands. It's now available as a paperback, for $17.75, or as a download for $4.

Get it, it's funny, sexy, and au courant.

Labels: books, novel writing, sex, zeitgeist

Saturday, August 22, 2009

Newly available: Lesbian Camp Girls

For a long time I've had a broken link to the porn book I wrote under a pseudonym, "Lesbian Camp Girls." First published on the Lulu POD site by my friend Marilyn Jaye Lewis as part of her work with the Erotic Authors Association, the book was unavailable for a long time, more because of my laziness than anything else. But now you can order it as a book or as a PDF download (the latter only a buck fifty). It's 135 pages of jaw-dropping, shocking porno, and of course should be read by ADULTS ONLY. Really. It's books like this that make people draw distinctions between erotica and porn, and this is the latter.

It's also really funny, I think. I wrote it partly as an homage to the silly, nasty paperback porn of the late 1970s, the kind of stuff with self-descriptive titles like "Dog Loving Lesbians" and "Her Horny Cousins." But I also wrote it to measure up (or down) to that material. So be warned (or intrigued).

technorati: porn, summer, lesbian porn

Labels: books, porn, pornography, sex

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

New story: 'The Truth Hurts'

A few years ago a contact in the erotic writing ... um, it's not really a community, it's not a club, I'm not sure what to call it... Let me start over. An acquaintance of mine, a young woman who was a sex columnist for some time and also an editor of anthologies of erotic stories, sent me a call for submissions. She was doing an anthology of spanking stories, would I like to send something in? Sure, okay; I thought it was a somewhat limiting topic, but I did write a story that I had fun with, and sent it off to her.

She rejected it, saying the mere suggestion of incest made it verboten. Keep in mind no such behavior occurs in the story itself or offstage between the characters (unlike some of the stories already published in my books). The story I sent had just a whiff of intergenerational sexual energy. That was too much for her.

Time passed, and another acquaintance asked me if I had any stories. I sent her a couple and she bought the spanking story the first editor had rejected. And it's for an online publication, and it just went up. So here you go: "The Truth Hurts." (Caution, story contains explicit descriptions of sex.)

Labels: Bad Behavior, fiction writing, heterosexuality, sex, short stories

Tuesday, July 07, 2009

All of TIME's sex covers

Weirdly, you can search the TIME magazine site for covers by topic. Here are all the covers related to:

The latter query gets both covers on employment and on the Apple co-founder. Anyway.

Labels: magazines, sex

Monday, March 09, 2009

Teaching, sex and death

Great post by Sirenita Lake on Open Salon, about a near-death experience.

I reviewed the options. It was 2:00 a.m. I was very alone. I could bang on the neighbors' door, but the neighbors were porn actors who appeared to be under-resourced in the brain department. I imagined myself doing the universal "I'm choking" gesture and them assuming I was dying to perform a blowjob.

technorati: sex, teachers, choking

Labels: choking, dying, sex, Sirenita Lake

Thursday, December 11, 2008

Bettie Page, 1924-2009

Bettie Page, inspiration for young women across America and an icon of the 20th century as surely as Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor, died today at age 85. A selection of her classic pinup photographs, as well as drawings of her classic image, appear with an obituary on her website.

technorati: Bettie Page

Labels: art, sex, strippers, superheroes, women

Thursday, November 20, 2008

A very nice mention

Thanks to Alexis McKinnis, the sex columnist for the Twin Cities' vita.mn, for today's very complimentary mention of my book How I Adore You. In answer to someone asking for pointers on learning something about power play, she writes:

If you need some inspiration, pick up a copy of Mark Pritchard's "How I Adore You." It's a collection of erotic short stories that mostly focuses on different degrees of BDSM. The first story, "Pretend," is so tastefully salacious that you won't need much more to inspire you, though you probably won't want to put the book down until you hit the back cover.

I'm a fan of Alexis' writing too, and I hope she writes a book someday soon so I can return the favor.

technorati: Alexis McKinnis, sex columnists,

Labels: Alexis, books, sex

Sunday, October 07, 2007

A weekend to concentrate

After returning to the city, I had a whole weekend in which to work on my book, and I happily wrote over 6000 words. Today I wrote about one of the strangest and most ironic sexual experiences of my life: The time when I went to bed with my girlfriend Stephanie and one of her co-workers from the Lusty Lady. I already wrote about this experience in a short autobiographical essay published in Best Sex Writing 2006, but in that essay I left out the most ironic part of the experience because it didn't reflect on the main point of the essay, which was about Stephanie. So I'm writing about it again in a work of fiction, but the description of the event is actually more complete, because I include the ironic part of the evening.

But I'll leave it at that, to whet the appetite of anyone who might be reading this.

Labels: fiction writing, sex

Saturday, September 15, 2007

Spreading American values abroad

I was amused by this story from the Sydney Morning Herald about "an American chastity evangelist" whose show includes plenty of stories of bad behavior that his tearful listeners soak up before pledging not to imitate them. This is a classic American approach, letting its audience revel in that which it purports to warn against, as seen in hundreds of Hollywood "anti-war" movies. The preacher, one Denny Pattyn, says he thinks Australia is ripe for his message. It would be depressing if it weren't so stupid and obviously doomed to fail.

In Japan, a filmmaker has made a Japanese version of a spaghetti western, called Sukiyaki Western Django. The actors speak in "ornately colloquial dialogue that rolls out of monolingual mouths like someone reciting the Gettysburg Address while gargling water."

technorati: evangelicals, chastity, evangelists, Christians, missionaries, TOTHER

Labels: evangelicals, films, Focus on the Fundies, sex

Monday, September 03, 2007

Study: Men prefer beauties but are still 'less choosy' than women

Researchers monitored the behavior and choices of 26 men and 20 women in Munich (?) and found that men often didn't choose women who fit their pre-stated criteria, instead going for the best-looking women.

Men tended to select nearly every woman above a certain minimum attractiveness threshold, Todd said.

Women's actual choices, like men's, did not reflect their stated preferences, but they made more discriminating choices, the researchers found... "Women made offers to men who had overall qualities that were on a par with the women's self-rated attractiveness. They didn't greatly overshoot their attractiveness... [but] they didn't go lower. They knew what they could get and aimed for that level."

So reminiscent of high school, where status is linked mainly to whether an attractive person will date you.

Meanwhile, in Scotland, researchers discovered that even the worst pickup lines have an evolutionary purpose.

Labels: dating, sex

Tuesday, July 31, 2007

237 reasons why

The New York Times tells of a University of Texas study of reasons why people have sex. Four hundred forty-four Texas students and hangers-on came up with a total of 237 different reasons why they have sex; 1500 others were then asked to list how much each reason applied to them. Here's the whole list (MS Word document at the utexas.edu server), but among the reasons are:

Someone dared me.

I wanted to make the person love me.

My friends pressured me into it.

I wanted to capture someone else's mate.

I was slumming.

The longer you read the list, the more it starts to sound like those lists of "classic plots" which are supposed to contain the boiled-down themes of every story, play and film ever written. There are 36 of them, or seven, or perhaps twenty. Things like:

Rivalry of kinsmen

Murderous adultery

Madness

Fatal imprudence

Involuntary crimes of love (example: discovery that one has married one's mother, sister, etc.)

Personally my main reasons for having sex are:

It feels great

I'm fascinated with the other person's responses

I like and feel comfortable with my persona in bed

Now let's compare with the list. Let's see... Those are reasons 15, 41 (sort of), and 95 (sort of). Of course, many of the other reasons have applied at different times.

I think my favorite reason from the list is "The person was famous and I wanted to be able to say I had sex with him/her." Not because it applies, but because it's really funny. I had sex with a slightly famous person once, not for that reason, but because I was curious whether the sexual persona she had displayed in her writing was anything like her real sexual self (reason 41). It was.

Labels: narrative, plots, sex

Saturday, July 28, 2007

And there's nothing better than a stand-up triple

It was Philip Roth in his novel The Great American Novel who depicted an intimate conversation between a baseball star and his lover, who asked him what his favorite part of the game was -- assuming he would reply "Hitting home runs." No; it's hitting triples,

...smackin' it, first off. Off the wall, up the alley, down the line, however it goes, it goes with that there crack. Then runnin' like blazes. 'Round first and into second, and the coach down there cryin' out to ya', 'Keep comin'. So ya' make the turn at second, and ya' head for third--and now ya' know that throw is comin', ya' know it is right on your tail. So ya' slide. Two hunerd and seventy feet of runnin behind ya', and with all that there momentum, ya' hit it -- whack, into the bag. Over he goes. Legs. Arms. Dust. Hell, ya' might be in a tornado, Angela. Then ya' hear the ump -- 'Safe!' And y're in there...

I wonder if that might be something of what the writer of the blog I Blame the Patriarchy might have been thinking when she titled her denunciation of anal sex Anal is the new 'third base'. (Courtesy Boinkology.)

The posting is so well written and so acidic that at first it seems like satire, but by the end it's clear the writer is perfectly serious in asserting that "Since the excessively vaunted sexual revolution decreed that all women henceforth would be empowerfulized by their service to male sexuality... too many women have been giving up the vagina too easily, and even blow jobs are hackneyed now that housewives are writing mundane marriage manuals on the subject. 'Regular' het sex just isn't brutal or insulting enough anymore" and thus more and more men are demanding anal sex.

Labels: sex

Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Focus on the Fundies: radio net going to 'unfit' minister

Quite a story in the LA Times about an aging fundamentalist preacher who is preparing to surrender his extensive radio network to a protegé considered unfit due to allegations of sexual hijinks.

And in Rolling Stone, a nice piece on Rick Santorum and other "evangelicals in exile."

technorati: Chuck Smith, fundies, Mike Kestler

Labels: Focus on the Fundies, radio, sex