Pulling Back

As I mentioned in an earlier post, writing balloon fetish stories is not what I do for a living. And what I do to put food on the table is now taking much more of my time. And so compromises are in order.

I will still be writing balloon stories; I love them too much to let that go. But my social media presence is about to get much smaller.

Before the month of July is out, I will have deleted my Facebook account, and with it the mostly-inactive page for Blowing It!

I am not leaving Facebook because of any mistreatment; it's just taking too much time and attention. I will also be bowing out of Pinterest and my practically non-existent presence on Goodreads and Library Thing.

So, where can you continue to find out about my new stories as they appear? Twitter is still a good bet, and this blog will still be around. You can also check my Amazon author page from time to time. And I check my email every day.

I want to thank everyone who's friended and followed me over the last few years since the publication of Blowing It! And I hope that you'll keep up with me.

And, of course, I wish you many lovely balloons in the years to come, in whatever ways you most enjoy them.

May Have To Give In

I've been successfully resisting my strong urge to buy some Tilly Slim Jims for several months now, since I discovered them on eBay. It's not that they don't look like fun, it's mostly that I don't know that I've have any opportunities to put them to good use anytime in the next, well, five years or so until my kids leave home.

But now I have yet another reason to patronize the Tillotson family. If Neil Tillotson had done nothing more in his life than give us the latex balloon, people like me would still be forever in his debt. But he also created the Tillotson Foundation.

Recently, the Tollotson foundation, which supports charity in and around Coos County, donated $300,000 to various projects. This was a man who cared about the people in his community.

Neil might not have been one of us, but he gave us something special that changed our lives, I think for the better. I don't know if I would be the person that my wife fell in love with without my balloon fetish. Not that she loves my fetish so much, but I think I would be a different person without it.

When the Tillotson family decided to start making balloons again, they didn't start back up in Dixville Notch, but they didn't go far; just a little north to Colebrook, on the Canadian border.

I think this kind of dedication to both quality balloons and the local community deserve my support. I don't know when I'm going to get to try out my Tilly balloons, but I think I'll be buying some very soon.

Breaking Through the Wall

I have been working, or avoiding work, on the same story for months now. I kid myself that it is because of my other work, and there is some truth to that. I have done a lot of writing for my "normal" audience this year.

But I've also felt a little dry on the balloon fetish front. Even with several story ideas in front of me, it seems in some ways that I'm writing the same scenes over and over. Today, I still have some of that feeling, but I did finish the first draft of the story, at least.

I will have to leave it alone for a few days and then go back to it to see if I still feel the same way about it. Is it stale? Is the change in setting enough to make up with the fact that there are only so many ways to have sex with balloons (at least, only so many ways I feel qualified to write about)?

I could be completely wrong about that. I have had the same feelings before about my more conventional writing, and upon re-reading discovered that it wasn't as much the same as I had originally thought.

Meanwhile, I'm going to dive into the next story, picking something more about feelings and less about the actual sex, hoping to find a fresh angle.

I suppose that I will eventually run out of balloon fetish stories to tell. But maybe I haven't.

Not yet.