We interrupt this blog hiatus to pimp a book

Or flog one. Or spank one. Anyway, I am needing time off from blogging here to write but had to share this.



Graydancer did a great job of reviewing my anthology Bottoms Up: Spanking Good Stories in 3:22. Not just because he said flattering things about it, though I am touched what he said, but this format is so personable and easygoing and I feel like it has way more of an impact on a potential reader than a few lines amidst many. I'm inspired to bust out my flip cam - also allows you to read out loud the passages you love. I sense a book vlog coming on!

Graydancer praised the story "Ass Worship" by Jerry Arthur and that touched me a lot because...I wrote it. I write under various pseudonyms for various reasons, this one's a new one, but the review made me realize one added bonus: if someone praises your pseduonymous story, you know they really like it. Thank you, Gray, for not only such a thoughtful review but inspiring me as to the possibilities of video reviews. And for the record - I sent Gray a copy of the book, the same way I do promotions with all my books, mostly on Twitter, giving away free copies to those who promise to review them on Amazon.

Ass Worship
by Jerry Arthur

Ass Worship, $2,000

That’s what the tag read on the photo staring down at us from the wall, the one of a formerly pale-white, decidedly female bottom now blazing red, streaked with tiny welts popping up from the surface. Unlike a painting, this wasn’t simulated or imagined; no touching up could have replicated the vibrancy of this butt, which took up a huge amount of gallery space, the lone piece of art on this particular wall, as if it couldn’t be bothered with having to share the spotlight, or perhaps to give the many congregants room to fully consider its implications. It was clearly an ass that had been beaten for a good while, and while it was up to the viewer to interpret what that meant, my old friend Vlad clearly meant it to convey pleasure—or at least, the kind of pain that’s worth whatever you have to go through to get it.

Vlad had done well for himself. This was no out-of-the-way art show in some neglected part of town that required a long subway ride from Avenue C to Brooklyn, followed by a walk down a deserted side street, but a real gallery in Chelsea, with not just wine and cheese, but a whole fruit platter, gourmet cheese selection, cold cuts, crudités, pastries and champagne. Oh, and art that cost more than my monthly rent.
The invitation had arrived in my inbox with a note that said anyone who might be offended by explicit images might want to skip this one. None of us had seen much of Vlad recently, and we weren’t sure whether he’d been working in his darkroom or gotten an out-of-town assignment. While we were all tech nerds who stayed up late into the night playing video games and IMing with each other about the latest iPhone apps, and updated our blogs at least five times a day, Vlad was more secretive, preferring to work in private and then unveil this photos when the time was right. He might give a very esoteric hint, but I’d learned long ago that these were mostly red herrings designed to make him sound more mysterious than he was. He felt that the more you talked about what you were doing, the more you took away from its magic. Most of his work had a political bent, focusing on the environment, with big slabs of beef juxtaposed over fields of grass, or an American flag with a giant cock in red, white and blue on it—he’d also done a pussy version, and gotten some underground attention for his efforts.

But despite the explicit nature of that work, Vlad himself had always seemed somewhat asexual to me, like sex was something he observed but didn’t ever really participate in, even when he was, technically, doing it. We knew he had a few girls who doted on him, and there was a rumor once about an older man, but he wasn’t the type to engage in locker-room talk. Suffice it to say, I wasn’t expecting to be confronted with, well, perversion, kink, nudity that held no pretensions of metaphor or obfuscation. This new collection of photographs was there for one purpose only: to turn people on, to suck us into the photographer’s lair, seduce us with body parts that were clearly overripe, hard, wet, round—begging, really.

Read the rest in Bottoms Up: Spanking Good Stories