“But Denise, there IS a way to signal hotties if you can’t text’em,” Lauren said, laughing underneath the sun umbrella at the patio table. “You don’t hafta dial their cell if you know Crypton.” She flounced her platinum pixie cut in the breeze and plucked Denise’s smoldering cigarette right out from her slender fingers.
This is the favorite part of Deirdre’s morning; arriving at Imperial Port, to board the early morning ferry departing the New Jersey dock for midtown Manhattan, a relaxed crossing of the Hudson River. She finds it good for half an hour’s relaxation with (maybe) three Virginia Slims. A trim five foot seven brunette with a pageboy cut, and soft grey three-quarter length coat, accessorized with black rabbit gloves, she cuts the image of a woman sensitive to fashion but flavored heavily by conservative couture.
“Oh yes, considerably,” she replied, her anger growing, so that when she took a violent pull on her cigarette, her eyes blazed nearly as fiercely as the blazing tip. “There are lands and financial benefits, to say nothing of the political alliances and connections to the Tories that would fall into his grasp. This would greatly ease the way for his gaining a seat in the House of Lords.”
Diane looked forward all week to this girls-night-out, specifically the 'casino' that would assemble after the party swelled and got noisy. She had already made her fashionable entrance to the party, which was rocking, but expecting the players to gather and make up the 'casino' at any moment, she fled outside to wait in a patio lawn chair. She drew thoughtfully, maybe desperately on her Eve 120 and in the twilight of this summer's star-flecked evening, her soothing cigarette glared out for as many seconds as her lips coaxed inward the stream of smoky flavor.
This is a brief excerpt from the September–October 2010 issue of Smoke Signals magazine, and one of my first columns for the free/public version, "My First Decade at The Orgy":
Boardhost shut down my forum and multimedia archive near the end of March because they recently implemented a ban on smoking and fetish content. Way back in 2000 when I opened the first incarnation of "Sublime," I asked the then owner of Boardhost (who was pretty much a one man band at the time) if he had any problems with SF content. He told me flatly that he absolutely did not.
La petite mort is French for "the little death." The expression is most often used to describe the experience of having an orgasm, but is also used to describe the release of emotional energy (catharsis) that accompanies experiencing the climax of a creative expression, as well as the experience of going through a shocking life-changing event.
