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.