A Question For My Readers

As I mentioned in my last post, I am planning a book this coming year which will have a collection of shorter stories. I have developed a list of ideas, already about 13 story ideas. I am sure I will come up with more, and I’m just as sure that some of them will lead nowhere and have to be abandoned, but I expect when I am done I will have something on the order of a dozen stories in the book.

Now, here is my question: some of the stories will be about poppers, and some will be about non-poppers. Some of the non-popper’s stories will have depictions of accidental or unwanted popping. And there may be a couple of stories that involve both popping and not popping (for example, a non-popper who becomes a popper, or has to deal with a popper, or something like that). Should I put some kind of—I can’t think of a better way to put this—warning for each story? At the head of the story or in the table of contents, something that says if there’s popping, and in what context?

This isn’t something I’d normally do in a short story collection, but balloon fetish stories, I think, are taken more personally because of the subject matter. Do you want to know ahead of time what you’ll be running into? Or are you okay just diving in with the knowledge that you may find something that makes you feel uncomfortable?

Of course, it isn’t only the matter of popping or not popping that might make you feel uncomfortable with some of these stories. In short-short form, I feel less constrained, with less of a need to insure a happy ending for every single story, or to depict every balloon fetishist in the most positive light. It’s liberating, and it lets me explore more of the various aspects of this unusual sexual (and emotional) interest.

But you probably won’t like every story in the book, no matter what your preferences. And on that, you have already been forewarned.

A New Story

I know it's been a long time in coming, but I've been busy with other writing projects with, shall we say, a larger potential audience.

But, just in time for a nice Christmas download, I've finally come out with a new erotic short story, Friends With Fetishes. I won't bother to describe it here—it has its own landing page in the tabs above, and there's a link to the right. I hope you'll check it out.

This coming year, I'm going to try something different. No, not another novel. At least I don't think so. No, I'm going to try to write a larger number of short-short stories and publish them as a collection. We'll see how that goes, but I have a lot of interesting ideas that just aren't involved enough to make for five or ten thousand words.

And I just might do what I've threatened for awhile and write a non-fiction book about my balloon fetish. Maybe. I'm not making any promises on that one; we'll see what flows out of my keyboard in the next year or so.

And, in case I don't get a chance to post before then, I hope you all have a Happy New Year filled with whatever kind of kinky balloon fun you most enjoy.

Anticipation

Well, New Year’s Eve is coming, and naturally it has me thinking about balloons. Now, if you expect me to write of a glorious orgy involving hundreds of balloons and steamy, noisy, explosive sex, well, I might just do that. In a work of fiction. The reality is that we’ll be home, and the kids will be home, too, and so at best there will be some quiet balloon cuddling in our bedroom late at night.

And with that prospect ahead, the anticipation is driving me wild. Because it’s the reality, not the fantasy, that I really look forward to. The simple things that my wife allows me to share with her, rather than the flights of fancy that my writer’s imagination can come up with, get my juices flowing, propel me through the holiday season, and make me feel as giddy as I did as a young fetishist contemplating my first balloon encounter. Being married to the right woman can do that to you.

On the other hand, now that I’m thinking about those flights of fancy, maybe I should be making a story out of that.

I’ll consider that idea. After New Year’s Eve. Because right now I would rather relish my real life.

Give and Take

If you’ve been following me for any length of time, you know that I’m married to a woman who does not share my sexual interest in balloons. I am very lucky, because she not only accepts my fetish as part of who I am (and thus part of why she fell in love with me in the first place), but that she will, within certain limits, indulge my fetish from time to time. She’ll also lets me share fantasies with her that she would never play out in real life, and that’s almost as good as indulging me in fact.

But it’s not a free-for-all. It can’t be. My wife has her own needs and desires, among them the need to be loved for herself and not because of what she is willing to do with balloons to satisfy me. It’s not easy to strike a balance between her needs and mine, and it’s not as simple as adding up the numbers, half the sex involving balloons and half of it not. My wife needs and deserves to know that making love to her is all about how she makes me feel, all by herself, without any help from my nearly-lifelong fetish. She needs to know that I am excited by the sight of her, and the way she touches me, and the way I feel when I touch her.

That’s why balloons are only involved in a small percentage of our sexual encounters. This is not a source of frustration for me; I love me wife and I love making love to her, and I don’t feel that anything is missing if there are no balloons in the bedroom. True that there are some things I wish she could do for me. And she tries, and even gets pretty far outside her comfort zone sometimes. And for that I love her even more. But I can only push so far, and I value my marriage too much to push any further.

You see, a fetish can be very powerful. Its seeds usually go back beyond our earliest memories, and so it has been part of our lives, including our sexual feelings, for much longer than we have known our partner. That can be threatening to a relationship. If too many sexual encounters involve the fetish, how does your partner know whether you’re excited by him or her, or only by the object of your fetish?

That’s why communication is so important. You have to give permission, in so many words if necessary, for your partner to say “enough,” that the fetish has been taking over and needs a break. And you have to be willing to honor that, to reconnect with the one you love, one-to-one, without your “other lover” in the room.

Would I give up my balloons if my wife asked me to? That’s a tough one. I don’t think I could ever feel differently about them. But if she wanted to ban them from the bedroom, I think I’d have to say yes, I would. Fortunately, I see no signs of that happening, and after over a quarter-century of marriage we’ve worked it out pretty well.

But it didn’t just happen; we made it turn out this way. Together.

Hot Fetish

I don’t normally write about other fetishes, but there was something on Twitter that got me thinking. Someone posted: "I tried finding funny fetishes but they're all really boring like balloon I already know it, why does no one have a fire fetish or a ww2 fet.” And I thought, “Fire fetish? There has to be a fire fetish. It didn’t take me long to find one, and so I answered the tweet.

But that got me thinking further. With a balloon fetish, most of the things that we fantasize about most, even if they scare some of us (me, for example), are unlikely to actually harm us. But someone who, as the poster at isitnormal.com said, fantasizes about having "sex with someone while both of our clothes and the bed are on fire and we are getting burned a bit but we don't care because we are having too much sex to care,” is unlikely to be able to fulfill that fantasy without risking lives.

But bringing that fantasy to life on-screen, in this day of cheap special effects, might be pretty easy. Not that I’m up for it (too many projects in front of my keyboard, thank you very much), but if I fetish producer wanted to go after that niche, he or she wouldn’t even have to actually set anything on fire. Which was not true even a decade ago without some serious computing muscle and expensive software. But if you have a Mac and Apple Motion, and are very creative with lighting and sound effects, you could conceivably create a sex scene with lovers literally on fire.

And for some, it would definitely be hot.

The Cover Saga

I have decided that I need to spruce up the covers for all of my stories. I started, naturally, with Blowing It! because it is both the oldest and the longest of the three. Although no one has complained about the cover design, I always felt that it should have a woman on the cover and not just a bunch of balloons. Having no easy way to shoot such a cover, however, I figured I had to get along without.

Then along came Fiverr. It was inevitable, I suppose, that someone on Fiverr would eventually offer to pose with balloons, and sure enough, a couple of young women have. One of them was commissioned by my book designer and publishing helper to provide a few photos to choose from.

What we finally selected for the cover barely shows the young lady at all, and yet the difference, with just that little bit of nose and hand and the black front of her blouse, is remarkable. It says so much more about the book than the stock image I used before. I am inspired enough to move ahead with changes for the other two stories, and to make sure that my next story, when it finally comes, is launched with an appropriate cover photo.

I hope that balloon lovers who browse the new covers will be more inspired to have a read.

“I Don’t Get It”

It seems that the most frequent comment I see about balloon fetishes from people who don’t have one is: “I don’t get it.”

I don’t know why balloon fetishes are any harder to “get” than any other fetish, but that’s not really the point. The point is that we shouldn’t expect anyone to “get” our fetish, or indeed any fetish, if they don’t have it.

Okay, maybe someone with a good imagination, or another fetish, might be able to see how we might relate to balloons. But really understanding how we feel? How could they?

We don’t even get each other sometimes. It’s not just the poppers not getting the non-poppers, either. I don’t get how anyone can be turned on by watching someone mass pop balloons with a pin. It’s a total turn-off for me, a waste of balloons I could pop in more intimate ways, and a lot of noise for nothing. I can intellectually understand how this could be a turn-on for someone else, but it will never make sense to me on an emotional level.

I also don’t get other fetishes. I accept them, at least those where no one gets hurt and everyone consents. But I don’t connect with them emotionally.

So, any effort on the part of us, the actual balloon fetishists, to get people to understand our feelings, much less share them, is probably a waste of time. Oh, I know, I’m guilty of it myself to a certain extent. I try to explain for the curious in my blog, and I’ve even been known to correct some misapprehensions among Twitter folk, but only if I think they actually give a damn.

But it’s an impulse thing, really. When I write my stories, I write them for people who have a balloon fetish, and perhaps for people who love someone who has a balloon fetish, for entertainment, and also to portray balloon fetishists as real people who have a life and feelings outside the fetish.

And, to be honest, in the tradition of writing what one knows, I write stories that reflect my fetish. Even my non-popping story (only one, but there might be another coming up) involves feelings I have about balloons despite the fact that I get sexual pleasure (and no other pleasure, really) from popping them. I’m not sure if I will even attempt a story featuring someone who’s into pin popping, or cigarettes, or stomping on balloons. By the same token, I’m unlikely to write a story about homosexual balloons fetishists. I just don’t know enough about it to do it justice.

Because although I can observe people whose fetishism, or sexual orientation, is different from my own and be accepting, understanding, friendly, and even loving, the truth is that I just don’t get it.

And I can be perfectly comfortable with that. Maybe it’s time we all were.

Fantasy Collides With Reality

Recently I noticed that the Slim Jim balloons, the lovely, 6-foot long balloons from Tilly, are back. I have always wanted to order a large package of these balloons, and I was really upset when they went off the market that I didn’t get the chance to have more than one or two to play with. I can get bags of 50 from Amazon.com or a wholesaler in Connecticut, and the price, for such unusual balloons, is not bad.

So why don’t I just jump on it and buy a bag? Because, frankly, although I’m very tempted to buy them, I don’t know what I would do with them. Balloons have three purposes in life. They can serve as decorations, as objects that I like to touch, or as sexual toys (preferably in contact with my lovely wife). Now I’m sure readers of this blog would have many suggestions of just what I might do with some big, long balloons, and I certainly have a few ideas myself. But the reality is that balloons this big would rarely get blown up in my house. They would sit around in a drawer for years.

Why? Well, for one because I am a wimp. Long balloons scare the crap out of me, and I have to get a lot of courage up to inflate them. Another problem is that I have no place to keep big balloons around, and I would really hate to pop a Slim Jim without having kept it around to play with for awhile. I even have trouble find a place to keep 16-inch rounds.

I do decorate with balloons, but I almost never get a chance to do that with anything larger than 11s, partly because I don’t have a lot of space, and partly because the smaller balloons don’t make my wife feel like I’m exposing my fetish to the kids if they happen to come into the bedroom while the balloons are hung up. Anything 6-feet long wouldn’t go over well.

And my sexual fantasies with them? Probably, if I’m being honest with myself, nothing that my wife would feel comfortable with.

It’s not the first time I’ve had this problem. I have a few 36-inch balloons in a drawer that may be too old to trust, but they’re there because I have some very specific fantasies involving those as well, and I have never had the chance to fulfill them. And even if I did, I’d have to pop the balloon soon afterward, because I definitely don’t have a place to keep something like that.

Perhaps someday, when the kids are grown and on their own, I’ll have a little more flexibility with big balloons. My wife and I do talk about it from time to time, and she seem amenable. For now, though, I probably have no use for bag of Slim Jims.

But, in truth, that doesn’t guarantee that I won’t buy them anyway.

A Real Writer

Okay, let me start out by saying that no one has ever said that, since I write fetish fiction, I can’t be a “real writer.” In fact, readers have complimented me on my style, and not just the balloon fetish content of my stories.

On the other hand, I’ve never had anyone interview me the way they do other writers. I’ve been contacted by people who want me to give an interview (which I’m happy to do by email), but they always want to interview me about balloon fetishes. I never get asked the standard writing questions, like “Where do you come up with your ideas?” or “How do you develop your characters?” or even “Do you write in your pajamas?”

Which is a shame because I do all of those things. Well, except writing in my pajamas. I don’t sit in front of the computer thinking, “Okay, how am I going to do the next sex scene?” I think about my characters and the situation they’re in, as it relates to their balloon fetish (or the fetish of one of the other characters), and I try to figure out how they would react, and how their feeling about balloons (but not just balloons) influences what they say and do. And, yes, even how they have sex with balloons.

And, sure, a very large part of the purpose of the story is to titillate readers who get sexually excited by balloons. But I think my readers also like to see themselves portrayed as real people with real lives to live outside of their balloon activities, and fairly run-of-the mill people at that, which you can’t usually get away with in fiction. But the balloon fetish offers the quirk—or flaw if you insist—that makes the character more interesting, at least for the intended audience.

Now, I know about this because I am a real writer; I don’t just write fetish fiction, I write other kinds of fiction under my real name, and non-fiction as well. I choose to separate my balloon fetish writing from all my other writing, not entirely out of embarrassment (although my family would be unhappy if I were too public about it), but so that the fetish fiction doesn’t influence readers’ opinions about my other writing.

So, I have chosen to put my alter-ego in a corner, trapped by his niche, not really so surprised that no one treats him like a "real writer."

But still hoping.

Balloons Everywhere

Summer is a time of year when I get to spend very little time with balloons. Not because I don’t think about it, but because the kids are home from school, and it’s hot and sticky and contact with latex just makes my skin feel even more hot and sticky, and so the balloons just never get pulled out and blown up. But it doesn’t mean I’m not thinking about them.

And seeing them. Everywhere. You know that phenomenon wherein the very thing that you’re thinking of seems to be all around you? It’s just because you’re paying more attention, of course, not because the Universe actually cares what happens to be on your mind. On the other hand, when it comes to balloons, that kind of thing happens to me all the time, because I don’t see balloons the way other people see them, so I notice them wherever they happen to be, even when no one else notices them. In the back of someone’s car, in a corner of the restaurant (I notice if the restaurant has a helium tank, even if they don’t actually have balloon around), even un-inflated balloons in a box behind a store counter.

So why do I seem to notice more balloons at this time of year, when I am deprived of actual contact with balloons? Well, I think it’s mostly because it bothers me so much more, and so the sightings stand out in my mind. But there’s also the fact that a few of the situations in which I see balloons in the summer are more annoying to me.

For one thing, there are water balloons. My wife tries to tell me (and I try to tell myself) that it’s not the same thing, that I don’t even play with balloons that small, that they don’t pop like air-filled balloons and so it shouldn’t bother me. But it does. I think it’s because small balloons (not necessarily water balloons) were an important part of my childhood play because that was often all I could get hold of. In fact, the first orgasms I had with balloons were with five-inch rounds and airships that were about a foot long, balloons I’d never consider buying today. But that’s what they sold at the market, and it was better than nothing.

As an aside, 9-inch balloons were my favorites in those days, when I could get them. They were the perfect size for stuffing into my clothing. Now I use Qualatex 11s and 16s almost exclusively.

But I digress. The other thing that comes out in the summer is something called a Balzac. It’s a cloth sack, originally made my Wham-O, now owned my Hasbro, and currently no made by anyone, that holds a balloon inside to make a fairly rugged play ball. I have to admit, that it’s a very clever idea. We’ve had ours since the mid-90s, and it is one of the prized playthings in my household.

And I hate it. I hate that I have to use one of my lovely 16-inch balloons for a play ball, that the balloons will get inflated, tied, and eventually popped, without me ever having seen it, much less played with it. My wife offers to buy official Balzac balloons for it, but it doesn’t make sense, since they cost about three times as much as the better-quality Qualatex balloons, and are hard to find. So I capitulate. But it makes my unhappy. (Though, granted, I do try to wrangle some extra balloon-play out of my wife by way of compensation.)

Summer will soon be over, and here in the Northeast I will come to regret wishing for its end when the snow has to be shoveled. But the air will cool, the windows will get closed, the kids will go back to school, and the balloons will come out of the drawer for my pleasure.

But meanwhile, they just seem to be everywhere.

Scholarly Source?

Recently—well, in fact, after May 29th of this year, I've been seeing traffic from Wikipedia on this blog. At first it didn't make sense to me, since the last time I had looked at the entry about balloon fetishes, there was no reference to me at all, which is how it should be, because I'm not (as I keep saying) an expert.

Although I guess I'm as much of an expert as any of the people who are claiming to be experts out there, so who knows?

But when I looked, there it was, a footnote with a link to my May 29th entry about the difference between kinks, fetishes, and fetishistic disorders. It follows the text:

"However, it is now in the DSM-VI to where a fetish is no longer considered as a disorder (except for fetishistic disorder where if the fetish interferes with the person's life)."

Ignoring the poor writing for a moment, linking to my blog to support this statement hardly seems rational. Especially because I was mistaken, partly. I think I read something that mentioned DSM-VI and the description of fetishistic disorders (I can't find my source because I was not writing a scholarly article), but in fact DSV-VI has not been released, and the definition I used was as from DSM-V, which was released last year.

Unlike the editor of the Wikipedia article, I have corrected my mistake.

If someone is going to edit a Wikipedia article, they should be looking for more authoritative source material than, well, me. It would be fine to mention my blog or any of my books as an example of writings on the subject, but not as a factual authority.

I am not a Wikipedia editor (and I don't have time to become one), but I hope someone will correct this error sometime soon. I want the entry, such as it is, to be as factual as possible, and including me as a scholarly source hardly serves that purpose.

There are a lot of Wikipedia articles that are lacking in factual information, written by biased people, which is why, in my opinion, the site should only be used as a jumping-off point. And since the subject of balloon fetishism is near and dear to me, I hope that everyone who reads the Wikipedia article about it will, if they have any interest in arriving at the truth of the matter, heed that advice.

And on that, you may quote me.

Surprise

There is a story that I have been struggling with. I think I know where it is going, but I don't have any idea how it gets there. I probably will have to abandon it altogether or start it over with a different situation or a different character to support the same theme. I don't know.

What I do know is that, out of the blue, another story idea came to me, and to find out whether it seems to be going anywhere, I decided to just sit down and write for about 30 minutes.

And I pumped out about 700 words! They just flowed out, as if I had been preparing to write the story for months. I don't know if I'll run into any roadblocks or not—that sort of thing does happen—but from the first scene, knowing who these characters are and what their relationship is (although I haven't actually revealed that in those first 700 words), I find myself liking them already and seeing ahead to what's in store for them, and being very excited about getting them there.

With luck, you'll be able to see the results of this burst of creativity soon. No pun intended. Well, maybe a little.

From Kink to Fetish to the DSM

What is the difference between a kink and a fetish? And are either of them anything to worry about?

I often see postings on Internet sites about people who are "experimenting" with a balloon fetish, or just "getting into it." And I think they're using the term in too broad a sense. Now, I'm not going to get into a fight over semantics, but I think the difference is worth noting. If you are experimenting with a sexual variation, like sexual activity with balloons, for example, I don't think you are participating in a fetish; I think you are trying out a kink.

It's something you are deciding to do, something you want to try out. It's not something that you feel compelled by some inner feeling to do, and most likely if you decided to give it up tomorrow, you could do so without any difficulty.

This applies to any kinky sex you might decided to experiment with, not just balloons, but since this is a blog about balloons and sex, we'll stick to that topic.

And as kinks go, I think balloon play is probably a pretty good one. It's harmless, with a low risk of injury. Balloons are fun, sensual, and yet in some ways kind of scary, though in a superficial sense. That is, the balloons won't really hurt you, but popping them might give some enough adrenaline rush to provide some extra stimulation.

I wouldn't know. I can't see balloons the way others do without it being influenced by my very real fetish, something I did not choose, feelings that just happened to me along the way, starting very early in my life. They are ingrained in me, and I can't just decide that I don't want to be turned on by them (or afraid of them or emotionally attached to them) and change my feelings overnight.

If I did want to make such a change (and I don't), it would be a long battle, and I truthfully believe that some vestige of those feelings would just never go away. And that, in my opinion, is the difference between a fetish and a kink.

That and the fact that I am convinced that not all fetishes are sexual, whereas all kinks are, by their nature. There's nothing wrong with that; I have nothing against kinky sex or experimentation as long as no one gets hurt, but I do care about the difference, personally.

Now, what about the second question: is kinky sex or fetishism anything to worry about?

I once had a commenter on Twitter tell me I need to see a psychiatrist. I was tempted to reply: "I don't think you'd agree with what the psychiatrist had to say." (I resisted the temptation.) Because according to the latest Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-V), which is what the psychiatric profession uses as a guide, fetishism in itself is not any kind of disorder.

There is something called fetishistic disorder, but that only comes into play if the fetish interferes with the subject's daily life. I wouldn't qualify. It's true, I do sometimes get very anxious when I'm around balloons in public, but that has little to do with my fetish and everything to do with my phobia.

So, whether you're doing balloons as a lark, or you're in it for the long haul through no choice of your own, there's nothing to be concerned about.

As long as nobody gets hurt.

NOTE: If you arrived here from Wikipedia, you should know that citing my blog as a source for what DSM has to say is a bit misleading to say the least. To see my opinion about that, click here.

Fetishist From Birth?

After my last entry, someone on Facebook was discussing the post, and talked about being "born with the fetish." And I asked, as an aside, "Do you think we're born with the fetish?" Because I don't actually think that's true. I think that, even for true fetishists (a subject my predecessor touched on a couple of years ago), there is an event, before our earliest memories, that triggered some reaction to balloons that became an attachment to balloons which became, for most of us, a sexual connection to balloons, of some stripe.

But I could be completely wrong.

Anyone who claims to know how fetishes occur is blowing smoke into your balloon. Because, for us who truly have the fetish, our reaction to balloons was never something we chose. It was a reaction to something that happened to us; exactly what we have no way of knowing because most likely it happened in that time before we were four while we were forming memories that, for whatever reason, don't stay with us.

But born with it? Well, of course, there's no gene or birth trauma that makes us have a particular fetish. We're not born to love balloons, specifically. But maybe, just maybe, we're born to have this kind of attachment. After all, there are a lot of fetishists in the world, if you count all the fetishes that there are. Maybe there is a rather large subset of the populace is predisposed to have an emotional and/or sexual attachment to some object or another, with the particulars of which object falling to the whims of circumstance.

I don't know. And I don't think anyone else does either. My inclination is that fetishism is more likely an awakening of propensities that almost all of us share, but some incident or series of incidents turns the attachment process on its head and sends us in an unusual direction (and, as I said, not all that unusual for fetishism as a whole).

Not necessarily a bad direction, either. Sometimes my life would be simpler if I didn't have a fetish for balloons. But for the most part the balloons not only bring me sexual excitement, but comfort and happiness as well. It would only be a problem if my fetish interfered with living a full and satisfying life. And frankly, if that was the case, it probably wouldn't be just the fetish that was the issue.

So, while I cannot say with any confidence why I feel as I do about balloons, I'm quite happy with the way it turned out.

It's Not All About Sex

If you do nothing but skim the surface, balloon fetishes seem pretty simple. Some guy or gal blows up a balloon until it pops and gets horny. Or does the nasty with a balloon or watches someone else play with a balloon.

And I guess for some balloon fetishists, it really is that simple: the balloon is an object that stimulates or enhances their sexual desire. There's a lot of variety within that description, of course, but it does cut to the chase. I think that my character in Popping Out meets that description pretty well, and maybe even the guy in Eric's Secret.

But for me, and I suspect a lot of us, it isn't nearly so cut and dried. I had a non-sexual relationship with balloons for at least eight years before they began to relate to sexual feelings at all. I will never understand how it started, around the age of three. I do know that I was deathly afraid of balloons popping, and that I felt a sense of loss when they were destroyed. I do know that I loved having balloons around whenever my parents would let me.

And for some reason that I do not understand, I loved having balloons stuffed into my pajamas. Aha, you say, a sexual relationship after all. No, not at all. A sensual relationship, maybe. It just felt good, like a stuffed animal or a particularly warm and fuzzy blanket. I just loved balloons. Even as I was afraid of them.

The sexual feeling for balloons came later, with puberty. Oh, there was probably some anticipation of that transformation earlier. After all, I was a boy, and things that get held against a boy's penis, especially with any amount of pressure, tend to cause an erection.

That's not necessarily a sexual response, mind you; often it's just the body protecting a vital reproductive organ from loss of blood flow. But your mind treats protective erections and erections from sexual arousal pretty much identically, and so the connection was made.

But discovering my sexual feelings for balloons did not take away the non-sexual feelings, and even decades later, as a middle-aged man, balloons in various circumstances can bring on waves of varied—and sometimes conflicting—emotional and even visceral responses.

I still love just having balloons around. At a former job, I decorated my office with them (we were in the entertainment business—such quirks were tolerated). Now I decorate my house with them in the winter. They oxidize in the summer, and I don't like oxidized balloons, even though when I was little, I kept them until they were oxidized and nearly flat. See? It's complicated.

I still like to cuddle with balloons, although I don't get much opportunity these days. Some of the cuddling leads to sexual activity, but a surprising amount of it does not.

And where popping balloons is concerned, things get even more complicated. I pop balloons now, something I never, ever did until I was in my teens. I can even do it without earplugs, in most circumstances.

But when I'm around someone else who has a balloon, I get a sudden flight response, and I want to get away as quickly as possible. I don't like being around popping balloons if I'm not in control of the situation.

And yet, watching a lovely lady do something that might pop a balloon is sexually arousing for me. So there's where the conflicting feeling come in. I really want to get away from the balloon, and I really want to stick around and watch the lovely lady pop the balloon.

Provided she's popping it the right way. If she's going after balloons with a pin, forget it, I'll run away as fast as I can. If she's sitting on it, I'll stay. If she's blowing it up until it pops...well, I don't know what I'll do because it scares the crap out of me and it turns me on. Conflicted!

I'm sure that there are a lot of stories out there just like mine—not in the details, you understand, but in the general sense that their feelings for balloons are not simply sexual.

Not, in fact, anything simple at all.

A New Story, Finally

I know that I have neglected this blog for a very long time; I have spent most of my balloon-fetish-writing energy on fiction for the past three months. And the result is a story that ended up being a novelette: Popping Out.

You can buy Popping Out on Amazon.com now. I'm still working out a few kinks that fail to link the  Kindle and paperback editions, so if you want print, search for "Tim Popper Popping Out" in Books, and if you want an e-book, search for that same set of terms in the Kindle Store.

Not sure if you're ready to buy? Then download a sample of the Kindle edition. Because the story is so long, the preview actually gives you quite a good feel for the story, without really giving anything away.

And, as I've mentioned before, if you don't have a Kindle, you can still read the sample (or the whole book—hint) on a free Kindle reader for your tablet, phone, or computer, or in the Cloud Reader.

And if you haven't yet, why not download samples from Blowing It! and Eric's Secret?

So no excuses! Download the samples today and get a little taste of inflatable latex fun.