Franklin Veaux's Journal

Imagine the scene: It's late at night. A Beautiful Young Woman has just had a fight with her Wretched Boyfriend at a nightclub, and is walking home through the bad part of town, an industrial park fallen on hard times, now the home of shuttered businesses and derelict warehouses.

A meteor streaks across the sky, growing larger and larger, until it crashes through the roof of an abandoned warehouse, now crumbling into ruin. Curious, the Beautiful Young Woman investigates, but soon finds herself in trouble when the alien drones spring from the dark recesses of the abandoned warehouse and drag her before the Alien Queen, which has hauled itself from the still-smoking spacecraft. The Alien Queen sprouts a mass of wet, slimy tentacles that violate the helpless Beautiful Young Woman in ways far too shocking to describe in this blog entry, lest you, Gentle Reader, pass out from the vapors, giving her ecstasy beyond anything she has ever known before until at last, delirious, she is overcome and loses her senses.

She wakes some time later, driven by a gnawing hunger more powerful than anything she's ever known before, an insatiable sexual need that drives her from the warehouse in search of prey. For you see, she is now host to an Alien Parasite, a creature that fills her with need, driving her to mate with all who cross her path, spreading the alien seed as she does. The parasite lives deep within her ladybits, granting unspeakable ecstasy to all with whom she copulates but denying her pleasure herself, as she roves the town in a frenzy of frantic, unnatural lust.

From this fantasy, spun by my Talespinner and me in a late-night sexting session, came our newest foray into weird sex toys from a realm beyond imagination: Project Ladybug.

“What if,” thought I, “I could actually make an alien that lived within her ladybits?” Picture something like a soft silicone fleshlight masturbator, designed to be worn vaginally, with a sinister alien opening and tentacles that wrap around her legs, holding it in place. It would grant great pleasure to those who have sex with the Beautiful Young Woman™ so afflicted, whilst denying her of any pleasure herself, so as to keep the fires of her lust unslaked.

This is Project Ladybug, and it comes after the first successful test of the nine-foot tentacle project.

So it was that when I was in Springfield two weeks ago visiting my Talespinner that we set about turning Project Ladybug into reality.

The idea was a sex toy exactly custom-fit to her internal anatomy, that would keep her nicely filled when the Alien Parasite was within her, so the first step was making a cast of her inside bits.

I thought this would be fairly easy. Slip in a female condom, fill her with dental alginate to the point she was properly full, wait for it to set, then remove it, make a 3D scan of it, and use that as the basis for the stroker. 3D print a model of the stroker, cast it in super-soft silicone...what could be simpler, right?

Ah, if only.

I ordered some alginate and, because alginate soon crumbles and is not very durable, some casting material to make a mold of the alginate, so that if it didn't survive the trip home, I could cast her internal bits in silicone and 3D scan that.

Armed with casting materials and a female condom, we set about the first bit, which quickly proved more difficult than we anticipated.

You'd think it would be easy. Lie your model on her back, slip in the female condom, fill with alginate, wait a couple minutes, and Bob's your uncle.

In practice, the first two efforts met with failure, because the alginate (a) sets way too fast (even if you get medium-set material) and (b) comes gushing back out, and (c) the entrance to the typical hoo-ha is soft and pliable enough that the casting won't stay centered.

However, my Talespinner came up with the idea of using a canning funnel to...um, provide structural stability at the vaginal entrance, and I used cold water to mix the third batch of alginate to slow setting...

...which meant she had time to play on her phone whilst it set...

...et voilà!

At this point, we had a (quite fragile) alginate representation of her internal anatomy. It was difficult and expensive enough to make, and the flight home fraught enough (I’d broken my suitcase on a previous trip to a convention, and so had flown out to see her with only a duffel bag), that I was paranoid, so I used a 3D scan program on my phone to make a quick, dirty 3D scan of the cast in case it was damaged on the trip home.

I shan’t bore you with the details of exactly what a PITA that turned out to be, except to say that it needed a place with (a) bright light that (b) I could move around in three dimensions (c) with a background that wouldn’t confuse the phone, so I ended up hanging her ladycast by a string from the ceiling fan in the middle of the living room with a sheet wrapped around, which is just as ridiculous and surreal as it sounds.

Anyway, emergency backup 3D scan made, it was time to make a cast, in the event the alginate didn’t survive the trip home.

I cast it right up to the midline, let the material set, sprayed it with mold release agent, then did a second pour to cast it full.

That created an entirely new problem.

Enter the TSA

I flew back to Portland with the cast, and a nine-foot-long silicone tentacle, and a four-foot-long silicone tentacle, in my carry-on luggage.

These things created no small measure of consternation at security.

The finished cast looked like this:

The X-ray looked...bizarre. (I really, really wish TSA would let me take pictures of the X-ray screens when I travel, I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.)

They pulled my bag, as you would expect. They asked me many questions about the solid lump of heavy cement in my bag, as you’d expect. They swabbed it for explosives, as you’d expect.

Then they shut down the security checkpoint and called every single TSA agent over to examine the block of cement, which I did not expect.

They swabbed it for explosives again, using a different technique, one I didn’t even know they had.

They called a supervisor.

The supervisor comes over, glances at the X-ray, says “oh, I know what that is,” and waves me through.

As God is my witness, I really, really want to know what he thought it was. Because I can think of only two possibilities:

1. He had no idea what it was, but he thought he did, in which case I will confess I am super curious about what he believed it was; or
2. He knew exactly what it was, in which case he seems the sort of person I should get to know.

Upon arriving home, I faced yet another problem:

The mold release agent I put between the layers of the cast didn’t work.

Now I have a solid lump of cement with Kitty’s kitty trapped within, and freeing it is proving a nightmare. Half an hour of hard work with a hacksaw succeeded only in getting this far:

It may yet come to pass that I reconstruct Kitty’s kitty in a 3D program from the phone-generated scan and the photos I took. (I took a ton of photos, with a measuring tape for scale.)

In any event, Project Ladybug is proceeding apace, and at some point in the not to distant future I plan to have a monstrous alien parasite custom-fit to my Talespinner’s ladybits (for you see, the name Ladybug came from an autocorrect fail of “ladybits”) that will attach itself to her, driving her to a frenzy of unspeakable, insatiable alien lust.

Because if you’re going to make freaky sex toys, I think it’s time to move beyond “fantasy penises of supernatural creatures.”

Image: Chris Chow

Looking for insight for an upcoming novel.

Okay, so. It’s thousands of years in the future. A global calamity has caused civilization to collapse. The population cratered to less than a billion people. Modern technological infrastructure was wiped out: power generation, mining, logistics, everything.

Eventually humanity recovered, up to a point. Right now, in the real world, all the world’s near-surface deposits of metals, oil, and most minerals are depleted; a society that lost modern infrastructure would no longer be able to mine iron, find or use oil and other petrochemicals, coal, and so on.

Metals in the fictional society still exist, though in limited quantities. They have to be “mined” from landfills, and the capacity to smelt steel without coal or oil is highly limited. Fortunately, landfills are largely anaerobic environments, so metals would still exist in unoxidized states, but can you imagine trying to smelt anything useable from, say, a stainless steel oven or a car frame without coal or oil?

No oil means limited plastics. Firearms exist, but without modern machining they’re quite crude compared to modern firearms. Computers? No. Electrical power in large quantities? No.

Thing is, the knowledge to make these things still exists; it isn’t lost. Many books and so forth survive (though not, obviously, computer records). People would know how electricity works, how to smelt high-quality steel, and so on; it’s just that without ores, without coal, without oil except for plant oils, it’s difficult to do on a large scale.

So: Horses and carts are the predominant non-pedestrian travel. Simple firearms exist but not in mass-produced, industrial quantities. It’s a weird society: technologically backward but with full knowledge of what has been lost.

My question relates specifically to military doctrine and combat tactics.

Horse-mounted calvary and foot soldiers, armed with swords and mmmmaybe simple cartridge firearms brings to mind, say, Revolutionary War or Civil War tactics...but in this world, the knowledge of modern combined arms tactics, military doctrine, and small-unit tactics still exists, it wasn’t lost, only the technological infrastructure was lost.

So, what would military units look like? What would military tactics and strategy look like? Definitely not Civil War, but not modern either. How would industrial military techniques and doctrine adopt to that level of technological infrastructure?

I’d love to hear your ideas!

(This blog post originally started life as an answer on Quora.)

With men like Andrew Tate and his little Tater Tots making noise about the proper role of Alpha Men™ in modern society, I thought it might be useful to recap the rules for Alpha Men™ in today’s complex world.

An alpha male waits for the train. Image by Shekai.

Like all pre-release products, alpha men are likely to be unstable and are typically lacking essential features. It’s important, therefore, to keep alpha men in the proper environment, to prevent unwanted problems. Some things to keep in mind:

• Alpha men are not suitable for public release. They should be used only by production teams and QA, and should not be introduced to the general public.
• Alpha men may not be secure and may have multiple vulnerabilities. Keep them away from any internet-facing system, because they may be easy to exploit.
• Alpha men should be assumed to be unstable. When presenting an alpha man in public, please verify the commands and processes you will be demonstrating in a controlled environment to avoid embarrassing crashes or lack of functionality in front of an audience.
• Alpha men do not have all the features you expect from a man who is ready for release. Expect to find significant areas where basic features have not yet been implemented.
• Document all crashes or unexpected behavior so that the developers can address it.
• Do not expect your alpha man to be resilient or to be able to process unexpected input. Provide only properly formatted input that the alpha man expects. The alpha man may not be able to respond to unexpected or ambiguous data gracefully.
• Alpha men are quite fragile and may not have error handling implemented. Expect hard crashes and/or complete shutdown if an error condition is encountered.
• Under no circumstances whatsoever should any alpha man be used in any mission critical environment where reliability or proper behavior are crucial, including any environment where failure of the alpha man may result in loss of life, significant damage to equipment, or corruption of important business data.
• Alpha men are not certified for access to internal networks without sandboxing and firewalling.
• Log all defects you observe in your alpha man so they may be addressed before release.

Okay, so.

Before I get into this, a bit of background is necessary. The Alien movie franchise holds a special place in my...um, heart? Psyche? Nightmare cellar? Something like that.

I was, you see, a huge fan of Star Wars. I saw the original in the theater on opening night when I was eleven, and it blew me away. For years after, I was absolutely obsessed with all things Star Wars.

So it came to pass that when Alien was released, my parents, thinking oh, it’s a science fiction movie about space, he likes science fiction movies about space,” took me to see it. I must’ve been...I don’t remember. Thirteen, maybe?

I had nightmares about the alien in Alien for the next thirty years. No exaggeration. This is, in fact, why my wife suggested that I make a xenomorph facehugger sex toy; she loves pushing my buttons so. 

You can imagine, then, what a disappointment Prometheus and Alien: Covenant were. What all the movies after Aliens were, to be fair.

I went to see Alien: Romulus with my Talespinner, for I am not so foolish as to see an Alien movie by myself lest I have nightmares for another thirty years. My expectations were, to be polite, tempered by the catastrophes that were the prequels, but I came away generally favorably impressed.

So, without further ado:

I don’t recall this exact image in the movie, but my, it gives me ideas. Where is the tail, I wonder? I bet I can make something like this...

First, the spoiler-free overview:

Alien: Romulus is, thankfully, not Alien: Covenant.

Is it worth watching? Yes. Yes, it is. It a solid, if uninspired (more on that later), addition to the franchise. It’s flawed, and it’s unlikely to become a classic the way the first two movies did, but it is a good, entertaining movie.

This movie understands what an Alien movie is supposed to be. It gets right what the prequels and the movies after Aliens get wrong.

And it’s gorgeous. The cinematography is just...wow. You ever watch one of those movies where you can hit Pause on any frame and what you see on the screen looks like a work of art? That’s Alien: Romulus.

Acid blood in zero G is a big, big problem...

The casting is very well done. Special shout-out to David Jonsson as “Andy,” the scrapped-and-salvaged artificial person (not a spoiler, we learn that near the beginning of the movie):

He plays a challenging role part pitch-perfect, and holds his own against Lance Hendrickson’s Bishop in Aliens.

And before you ask, yes, it did give me nightmares, which Prometheus and Alien: Covenant did not. So mission accomplished, I suppose?

Now, the critique (and the spoilers).

Eunice and I, for those who may have missed it, released a new novel earlier this month, London Under Veil. It’s a departure for us (though to be fair that happens often; we can’t seem to find a genre and stick to it)—a sexy contemporary urban fantasy that follows a coven of spellcasting sex workers in their secret underground war with Objectivist Tory rage mages on the eve of Brexit.

We launched the book at WorldCon Glasgow, and sold out by Saturday morning. The first printing is completely gone.

Since then, I’ve received a surprising number of emails, DMs, and Facebook Messenger messages asking if there will be a sequel. Honestly, you guys are amazing, I’m so glad the book has resonated with so many folks!

The answer is yes. We’re working on the second novel in the Guild and City series, working title London Falling, right now.

In honor of all the people asking if there will be a second novel, I’d like to offer up this teaser, from the first draft of the still-in-progress sequel:

Eventually, the door opened. A bald man in a white shirt, sleeveless and sweat-stained, glared out at them. “I don’t imagine you’ll just go away if I ask you to?” he growled.

“I’d prefer not to,” Serene said. “We’ve travelled quite a distance.”

He paused for a moment, his expression sour, then his face changed, as though he’d reached some sort of decision. “Suppose you might as well c’mon up, then.” He turned and climbed a steep set of narrow, worn wooden steps. Serene followed him up. May hesitated, then climbed after her. Lillian and Iris followed. Iris shut the door, plunging them into gloom.

The steps ascended for longer than what seemed, strictly speaking, reasonable. Bare lightbulbs overhead cast a dim yellow glow that didn’t seem to illuminate the stairs so much as provide opportunity for shadows to gather. May frowned. A tingle swept over her skin. The acrid scent of ozone stung her nose.

The stairs ended, an entirely unnatural distance from the long-vanished entrance, at a small landing, before a massive wooden door carved with intricate reliefs of men and women cavorting lecherously beneath the boughs of an enormous tree. It swung open silently, into a penthouse suite lavish beyond the dreams of decadence. Luxurious white carpet covered the floor. To one side, a long bar, lit by glowing neon, ran the length of the wall. Bottles of exotic liquors, some with labels that seemed to twist the eye, lined up on shelves of dark polished wood. Along the other wall, huge windows that May couldn’t quite imagine belonging to the shabby industrial building looked toward the New York skyline. Three shallow steps descended into a large rectangular pit in the centre of the room, occupied by the largest sectional couch May had ever seen. A small round fireplace of brass-coloured metal squatted in the centre of the sectional, filling the space with warmth and light from a cheerful fire.

The man, Sam, turned to face them. May blinked. She’d somehow expected to see a stereotypical American, a middle-aged man with a paunch but no hair, in a grungy, sweaty tank top that whose best days were well behind it, and hadn’t been particularly good even then. Instead, a tall, slender man with long flowing hair and eyes the colour of honey, features as beautiful and androgynous as a Renaissance painting, scowled back at her. When she thought back, he’d always looked this way; why had she imagined anything else?

“Serene,” he said in a voice that carried Arctic frost. “I wish I could say this is an unexpected pleasure. It’s certainly unexpected, at any rate. Why you, of all people, might possibly believe you would find welcome here is beyond—oh, hey, Iris!”

“Sam!” Iris squealed. She flung herself forward, past Lillian and a gobsmacked May, to throw her arms around him. He embraced her warmly.

May’s jaw dropped. Lillian burst into laughter. Serene lifted an eyebrow. “Okay,” Lillian said, once Iris had release him. “I have got to hear this story.”

“A bit before your time,” Iris said. “Hey, Serene, you remember that infosec conference you sent me to in Glasgow, right after I started working for you? You know the one, securing private networks against intrusion? Defence in depth for network-facing servers?”

Serene folded her arms. “I have some vague memory of that, yes.”

“I met Sam there! He was brushing up on design of low-latency content delivery networks for streaming media.”

“And the rest is history,” Sam said. “Iris gave me her email—”

“Of course she did,” Serene said.

“—and we stayed in touch. I’m glad to see you’re keeping a better class of company these days, Serene.”

“Sometimes I wonder if I’m really necessary at all,” Serene said.

“Humble, too.” Sam looked her up and down with his strange eyes. “One almost might wonder if you’re the same Serene I know and love—well, I know so well. I’m less familiar with your other companions.”

His gaze met May’s. A physical jolt ran up her back. She found herself falling into his eyes, like pools of shimmering gold. A long slow flush passed through her body, a wave of tingling pleasure that flowed across her skin. She wondered, for just a moment, what it might be like to taste his lips on hers. “I’m May,” she heard herself say. “I’ve been part of the Guild since—” The shields slammed down in her mind. “Wow, nice trick. You’re good.”

“May and Lillian have been with us for a small while,” Serene said. “You need not concern yourself with them.”

“I concern myself as I choose. And yes, I am.” He turned his gaze away from May, who shuddered at the sudden absence.

His eyes locked onto Lillian. She blushed scarlet. “Okay, you’ve made your point,” Serene said.

“Have I?” he said, tone mild. “What point do you believe I am making? No, never mind, I don’t care. I’m more concerned about what ill wind has tossed you up upon my shore.”

“I’m certain you must’ve heard the news, even in a magical backwater like this,” Serene said. “The Adversary, open war…”

“Ah, yes, now that you mention it, I do think I heard some rumblings,” Sam said. “Rather nasty affair, from the sound of it. But what I cannot quite grasp is how that relates in any way to me. Where’s the proud Serene, the Serene so confident in her ability to manage her own affairs?”

“Believe me, if I felt I had any other choice, I wouldn’t be here.”

“Oh, I have no doubt. It must’ve been terrible, swallowing your pride. Though I am pleased you brought along such lovely company. Iris, it’s been far too long. Your work on waveguide-thaumaturgy over digital packet-switched networks is remarkable.”

“Your who what?” Lillian said.

“Casting spells over the Internet,” Iris said. “I’m still not certain it’s possible.”

After almost three years of effort, I finally had my last dental appointment yesterday. In honor of the journey, my dentist wore bunny ears during that last session.

It started with a failed crown. That in itself shouldn’t have turned into a three-year nightmare, but gather ’round, Gentle Readers, for a harrowing tale to send chills down the spines of the most manly of men.

The crown was old; I got it in 1998 or 1999. Apparently these things don’t last forever (who knew?); they're usually rated for fifteen years and this one lasted 25, so yay for that, I guess?

Anyway, I took the broken crown to my dentist, who looked at it, peered into my mouth, probed around a bit, said “hmm” a lot, then said something you never want to hear from a healthcare professional:

“We don’t deal with this kind of situation here. You’ll need to go somewhere else.”

Now, we're talking about what ought to be, in the scheme of things, a rather simple and straightforward procedure (ha ha ha as if, just you wait), not the sort of medical condition where a doctor gets to name a new disease, so I found this...peculiar. But, referral in hand, I made an appointment with a new dentist.

They too looked at the broken crown, poked around for a bit, said “hmm” a lot, took a whole bunch of X-rays, said “hmm” some more, took a different kind of X-ray, said “hmm,” and then my dentist called another dentist over, who looked at all the X-rays, said “hmm,” then said “I’m going to call someone else to have a look at this.”

That is when I knew, Gentle Reader, that Something Was Up.

The new guy showed up, looked at the X-rays, said “hmm” several times, and then said “okay, so, Mr. Veaux, you see...”

The problem was not the crown that failed, but the one next to it. I’d had a root canal in...goodness. Um, 1996, maybe? Somewhere thereabouts.

In this world, there are people who take pride in their work, people for whom it’s not just the money but the satisfaction of a job well done. The guy who did that root canal...wasn’t that sort of person.

The X-ray showed a small void, a gap between the crown on that tooth and the tooth itself.

It also showed a large piece of a broken tool lodged inside the tooth.

And it showed that the dentist had, and as I type these words I did not know this was possible, missed one of the tooth roots completely, which had, of course, become infected.

They had a meeting, in which they discussed whether they wanted to re-do the root canal by taking off the existing crown, drilling through the existing crown, or (and yes, this actually came up as a possibility) drilling through the bottom of my jaw into the tooth, which is apparently a procedure that, God help them, some people actually undergo.

Then my mom was diagnosed with cancer, so both my sister and I started flying back and forth between home and Florida to help my dad care for her.Which pretty much scuttled most of my ability to plan multiple dental visits.

My mom died after a thirteen-month battle, the last few months of which were just awful beyond belief.

When I returned once more unto the breach of this dental misadventure, I had The Talk™ with my dentist, and with the dentist called in to re-do the root canal. The Talk™ looks like this:

Just so you know, I am highly resistant to local anesthetics. It’s a genetic trait, I inherited it from my mom. It is much harder than you think to get me numb, and it takes a long time, and it wears off quickly. So, be warned.

I always tell them. They never listen at first. “Oh, don’t worry, I can get you numb,” each new dentist says, “it won’t be a problem.”

Narrator: “It was a problem.”

The guy they called in to handle the root canal took nearly an hour, and seven ampules of lidocaine(!!), before he declared himself ready.

He went in through the existing crown, which was something of an ordeal involving several fascinating smells, including one I could almost swear smelled like smoke, and rather a lot more “hmm” and “that’s interesting” and “I wonder if...” than I am, generally speaking, entirely comfortable with from someone who is placing medical instruments in any part of my body.

Apparently, from what I gather, the tooth had an extra root, which I didn’t even know was a thing that could happen, and that explains why the previous guy back in the 90s missed it but doesn’t explain why he left a broken bit of tool inside the root canal (they didn’t give me a copy of the X-ray, more’s the pity, because it’s freaky and I’d love to horrify you, Gentle Reader, with it).

After rather a lot of work, he pronounced himself satisfied, and I was back on track, only this time with replacing two crowns rather than one.

I be-bopped off to Springfield to spend time with my Talespinner, then returned to tilt once more at the windmill, when my dentist took a whole new set of X-rays on account of, you know, I’d been away for thirteen months helping care for my mom, and decided that a third crown, also from the mid 90s or somewhere thereabout, was separating from the tooth and thus was well past its use-by date.

I will spare you the details of the last seven months, even though Fate did not spare me, because unlike Fate I have a conscience. Suffice to say that seven months, a detached temporary crown, and three thousand dollar in out-of-pocket expenses later, I have been given a clean bill of health, and my dentist sent me off from yesterday’s appointment with a celebratory pair of ears of his own.

Which I, and the entire rest of the office, found charming.

Now the days spread before me, my calendar has no dental appointments on it, and I breathe in and say to myself, “is this what normal feels like?”

Some while ago, I answered a question over on Quora about whether or not it’s okay to pirate a video game if you can’t afford it. I write for a living, which of course means I take intellectual property seriously. Also, I write for a living, which means I don’t have very much money.

So, as you might imagine, I answered no, it’s not okay to steal other people’s work, even if you can’t afford to buy it, and as an example I used Starfield, the massive single-player role-playing game from Bethesda.

I like Bethesda games. I have, as of the time of writing this, sunk over 1,990 hours into Skyrim and 1,570 hours into Fallout 4. I’ve itched to play Starfield since I first heard of it, but at seventy bucks for the “normal” game and a hundred bucks for the “premium” version, I was like nah.

So, Quora being what it is, one of the kind folks over there bought me a copy, and another friend on Quora gave me a machine that could play it.

Which was amazing.

I now have about 225 hours in Starfield, and it’s so, so close to being a good game, but it just...isn’t.

All the ingredients are there for a truly amazing game except one: the game designers forgot to make it fun.

It’s an innovative game. It’s a pretty game, in places (and in places it’s howlingly bad). It has a bunch of cool, well-thought-out design ideas. It’s just not fun.

So, let’s do a deep dive into why Starfield misfired so badly. Caution: Long essay is long.

Earlier this morning, I wrote an answer on Quora that reminded me I've spent a lot of time talking about the sex toys I design and make, but I’ve never really talked about the work that goes into those designs. So if the method to engineered sensation interests you, read on!

There are a lot, and I mean a lot, of boutique sex toy stores out there right now, the most famous being Bad Dragon, purveyor of monster cocks of all varieties. And honestly, some fo their designs are quite beautiful. But they, and most of their competitors, seem to have basically a single schtick: dildos of fantasy penises.

Which, don’t get me wrong, is perfectly fine. Hey, if that’s your jam, it’s your jam. But I absolutely think tiny bespoke sex toy makers can do more. To me, and I don’t know if I’m unusual in this regard, what interests me is exploring totally new sensations, so I think of what I do more in terms of designing sensations than designing mythological penises.

Most of my designs go through multiple iterations, refining not the look so much as the way it feels.

For example, the Tentacle Butt Plug went through almost a dozen design iterations:

I am firmly of the belief that if you are looking for a tentacle violation experience, then the tentacles should feel as violating as possible.

This is a prototype about midway through the design process. I added the suckers to the stem and I made the end, where it curves to the right, more prominent (the first design was shaped closer to where the red line is), to make the plug feel more intrusive to the wearer. You can’t ignore it.

I had five or six people test the various design iterations, and unanimously agreed that “violating” is a good word to describe the feel of this plug.

So what got me to writing this?

A question floated through my Quora feed asking how it feels to be pegged by one’s wife. I have, in fact, long been an enthusiastic fan of pegging (I hold a patent on a new type of strapon for pegging), so this was something I thought I could speak to, and the answer is:

There’s no such thing as what it feels like to be pegged. It’s different in different positions, obviously—being pegged in missionary position is much different from being pegged doggy style—but it also depends a lot on what you’re doing it with.

For example, here are two things I’ve created for the purpose of pegging that feel vastly different, both of them being worn by my wife:

This tentacle strapon dildo is…invasive. I designed it to simulate, as closely as reasonably possible, the sensations one might experience in one of those pornographic Japanese anime with the tentacle monsters.

It’s made of a fairly hard silicone (Smooth-On Dragon Skin 20, with a Shore hardness rating of 20). The suckers are deliberately designed to be fairly large and bumpy, and the tentacle twists a bit at the tip to make it feel even more invasive.

The tentacle in the photo is two colors because this was a prototype, a test cast in a brand-new mold, so I poured it with whatever silicone I had left over from making other toys. It works…really really well.

What does it feel like? Intense. When that thing is moving in and out, believe me, you feel those suckers. Most dildos, you can’t actually feel the tip of it because the top is centered and smooth; the tip on the tentacle is slightly twisted so that the very end, with that last sucker on the point, presses against you and you know EXACTLY how deep it is.

The xenomorph hiphugger, on the other hand, is…deceptive. Yes, the “tail” has ridges, but the tip is blunt, smooth, and shaped so it goes into the…err, orifice relatively easily and smoothly. The thing about this design is you don’t really realize just how deep it is until it comes time to pull out and it just keeps sliding out and out and out and out…

It’s also hollow, with a silicone tube running down the center, so that you can pump fluid through it from the reservoir. That feels…odd. Not really sure what to say besides odd. It’s a warm rush that just kinda keeps going.

That, for me, is the thing. Not what the toy looks like, but the experience it evokes, the sensation it creates. I love making art out of sensation. The question is not “how can we make the toy?” but rather “what new experiences can we call forth with this toy?”

London Under Veil, the new book by Eunice and me, is publishing next week at WorldCon Glasgow!

Sadly, I won’t be there, but Eunice will, and she’ll have paperbacks and eBooks with her. (Plus you’ll be able to pick up copies of our other books too).

This is a...strange book. It’s like...um, well, imagine Harry Potter meets The Matrix by way of Tom Clancy. It’s got a wizarding school, and an alternate reality, and political intrigue, and Brexit, and computer security, and cats.

This book almost didn’t exist. It came into being because of a question I saw on Quora:

I laughed, I showed it to Eunice, I laughed, she laughed, I said “we could totally write a book about a coven of spellcasting sex workers,” we laughed, then she was like “...no, really, we could.”

Inspiration is everywhere.

Fast forward a couple years and somehow we’ve written a novel about a young British-born Chinese infosec worker at a webhosting company in Shoreditch who evades a kidnapping attempt and finds herself drawn into a long-running underground war between an ancient guild of spellcasting sex workers and a group of rage mages who have infiltrated the Tories. Along the way, she befriends Iris, the Guild’s asexual spell engineer, and they have adventures.

There’s intrigue, and chases, and a school of sex magic, and mathematics, and computer security, and sex, of course cats, because every fule know you can’t have spellcasting sex workers without cats.

Here’s a G-rated excerpt, so you know what you’re getting into:

After class, May rode the lift down to the old car park. “Iris!” she sang as she walked into the workshop. “Are you ready to watch me wank—oh. Who are you?”

“This is Lillian!” Iris said. “Lillian, this is May. She officially came on board yesterday. Lillian’s been a member of our little family for about ten months, haven’t you?”

May offered her hand. Lillian regarded her for a moment through intelligent grey eyes in an elfin face, then accepted it with dainty courtesy. “Lilly volunteered to accelerate your education,” Iris said. “Shall we get to it, then?”

“Get to what, exactly?”

“Ah.” Iris fished around the clutter on her workbench, dragged out a compact whiteboard, and balanced it precariously against one of the monitors. “So you know how Madame Sophia has been teaching you how to hold patterns in your head?”

“Yeah.”

“Right. Think of it like learning maths. The universe runs on maths, yes? Except it doesn’t, not really. The universe does what it does. Maths is the language we use to describe it.” She pulled the cap off a whiteboard marker with a grin. “If I write 1+1=2 on this board like so,” she went on as she scribbled on the whiteboard, “you know what that means. But these symbols, they’re arbitrary, right? They’re just characters that represent things.”

May folded her arms. “Okay, and?”

“Magic is the application of intent to the world. The visualisation exercises you’ve been doing, they’re part maths and part training you how to think.” She wiped the board clean. “Okay, so. Casting spells is just a matter of learning to think in a certain way, and learning to channel emotional energy into the world. Stronger the emotion, the better it works. Any kind of emotion can do in a pinch, but some work better than others. Fear, that’s strong but hard to control, and hard to bring up when you need it. Love and hate are less strong than people think. Rage, rage works really well. But lust, ah. Lust, desire, arousal, those are versatile. The thing about emotional energy is, it’s unpatterned, right? Chaotic. The trick is…well, the skill is letting that emotion flow through you without losing your focus.” She turned to the board. “So you have your home symbol, whatever it is. Don’t tell me what it is. Don’t tell anyone else, either. That symbol represents yourself, your will, your ‘I that is I,’ see? It’s like the number 0 in a mathematical system. Did you know you can build an entire system of maths with no numbers except a symbol for zero and a symbol for incrementation?”

“No.”

“Old hat for me,” Lillian said. “My undergrad degree is in mathematics.”

“Undergrad, huh? What’s your graduate degree in?”

Lillian perched on the edge of the bed. “Master’s in philosophy. Long story.”

“So how’d you end up involved in…all this?”

“Ah.” Lillian grinned. “I like maths. I like philosophy. I like fucking. Where am I going to find another job that lets me put my interests together?” She leaned back on her elbows with a lopsided smirk. “What brought you here? Maths, philosophy, or fucking?” She stretched out a foot in May’s direction. “I hope it’s fucking.”

Iris snapped her fingers. “If you’re finished hitting on the new girl, can I direct your attention to the whiteboard, please?” She drew a letter H in the centre. “Okay, so this is your home symbol, right?” She drew five more symbols around it. “And this is one of the basic visualisations Sophia taught you, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Right. This diagram forms your basic channelling array. This is what you hold in your mind when you want to focus your will on something, got it? This is your simple, boring, one plus one equals two stuff. Now let’s show you what calculus looks like.”

The book is up for preorder on Amazon, and if you’re going to WorldCon Glasgow, be sure to say hi to Eunice! 

Hard to believe it’s been a year. These past twelve months have been a wild ride. Bits of it have been extremely good, bits (like the death of my mother) extremely bad, but there’s been nothing average anywhere in this year.

Today marks the one-year anniversary of something very, very good.

It began, as these things often do, more than a year ago. A beginning is a very delicate time, I hear, and so it was much more than a year ago that I first talked to her about beta testing some new prototype sex toys.

I don't exactly remember how we first noticed each other. I know where—it was on Quora—and I vaguely remember seeing her around, thinking she struck me as a good writer and a generally positive person. She said something in passing about trsting sex toys, I had some prototypes, I was looking for beta testers, so I slid into her DMs with something like “I hope you’ll forgive the intrusion, but would you be interested in trying something out?”

We started talking after. She invited me to a pen and paper role-playing game. I grew to appreciate her skill at wordsmithing, of the pragmatic and erotic sort. She called me her Toymaker. I called her my Talespinner.

A friend of hers observed that the Talespinner and the Toymaker sounds like a YA novel. We were both like “You know...”

I said “Do you wanna?” She said “Sure!”

Time went on. I invited her to accompany me to Barcelona with the rest of the poly network. She said yes.

And so, a year ago, I got on a plane to Springfield.

She showed me around her town: a giant alien xenomorph made of scrap iron.

Chrome steel bunnies and a frog.

And a lovely little rum bar, where I confessed I would very much like to kiss her. “Hold that thought!” she said.

She took me to a rushing fountain, where we shared our first kiss, one year ago today.

We went to Barcelona, where she met the rest of the polyfam. Later, she would tell me she was amazed by how warm and welcoming they were—no hesitation, no reservation.

I am so deeply grateful to have surrounded myself with people I love who love me, who have no weirdness, no animosity toward one another. It’s deeply relaxing and wonderful.

The book still marches on. We meet over videoconference to work on it when we aren’t together. We are, as I write this, just over 93,000 words in, which in any other book would mean we’re nearly done, but this thing is a monster—the most complex novel I’ve ever been part of. We’re targeting 160,000 words.

We’re calling it Spin, and it’s grown into something that is definitely not a YA novel, something dark and brooding, something complex and ambitious. Fitting, I think, because our relationship is turning out to be something more than I expected as well.

And she still helps me beta-test new prototypes.

I am profoundly blessed.