I finally traded in my 1991 Suzuki Bandit GSF400 for one of these:

John Wayne

It’s difficult to concentrate on work today because of it. On the other hand, I bought it before I’d finished saving up all the cash, so I’m motivated to hit as many billable hours as I can.

My list today:

Finish documentation suite plan for new flagship product (Client #1)
Invoice (Client #1)
Invoice (Client #2)
Deposit checks
Brainstorm organization for internal documentation repository (Client #1)
Blog (Client #2)
Blog Again (Client #2)
Pick up the dog poop
Schedule interview with sex researcher about sex toys and high-risk sexual behaviors (Client #2)
Email radio host about tomorrow’s interview
Send books and columns to judges (I’ve been nominated for an Erotic Award, cool)
Begin database reference guide migration from Framemaker to AuthorIT (Client #1)
Feed the dog
Take dog to dog park
Cardo salsa class at 12:45
General email
Wash bedding

And that’s all I can think of at the moment.

Too glamorous for words, I know!

Lovely to meet y’all last night at Monroe’s. I haven’t had a chance to shout at strangers and meet other writers and editors in a long time.

I talked with copywriters, screenwriters, producers, line managers, new freelancers, old freelancers, and even met a couple of neighbors (in LA distances, you’re practically next door). But in case you couldn’t hear me over the din and were nodding and smiling as if you could hear me, the way one does at these things, here’s the quickie:

I write about sex and tech.

Sex and tech is more pervasive than you think.

I got a lot of story ideas out of you folks so keep an eye on Wired and see if you see yourself (anonymously, of course) sometime. Bwahahahha.

Big Dave, they had a name tag for you but I guess you couldn’t make it. Bummer. Next time?

Atop my Gmail inbox runs a steady stream of Google News headlines. Just now, I got this:

“Scientists debunk astrology”

followed by

“43-year-old fruitcake found in attic”

I don’t know why but that really cracked me up.

I meant to post this yesterday and ran out of time. This is the follow-up to yesterday’s radio interview about marketing and online community (aka social networks).

Join online communities that interest you. Don’t just do it “for work.”

Contribute to the community beyond just talking about your product. The Sex Drive Forum has several “official” people in it but they all participate as regular members. They don’t shove in our faces that they work for the companies they do, that they rep the products they do, etc. They participate in conversations and share their own experiences and so on.

Use your email sig as a subtle marketing tool. Put your URL and title in it. That lets other community members check out your stuff on their terms, when and if they want to, rather than their feeling marketed to.

Give it away. We’ve had great success in the Sex Drive forum with free samples, discounts, calls for beta testers, and so on. Again, the marketers participated as community members, “Hey look what I’m working on, I’d like to share!” rather than making people feel used.

Don’t post press releases unless the community exists specifically for such things. Most don’t. Press releases are impersonal and make the community feel like you’re just there to use them, and they will turn against your product/service and you personally. It’s okay to announce events and whatnot, but do it like you’d announce to your friends that you’re having a BBQ.

Online communities and internet-savvy folks are highly suspicious of marketese, marketing, marketers. Respect that.

To find communities you want to join, lurk for a week and see how the discussion flows, who posts most often, how much moderation is involved. If you feel comfortable with the community, introduce yourself. And participate.

Remember that this is a community, not a focus group.

Be positive, don’t flame, post only when you have something valuable to contribute, and otherwise comport yourself as a fine upstanding community member, and you will create a positive aura about yourself that other members will respect. That will spill over into their opinions of your product/service/company.

Our sewer system is 105 years old. The city is fixing it this month. The foreman told me that unlike all the other houses on our block, my house and my two closest neighbors do not have our own sewer pipes down to the main — we share one. Is that intimate or what?

I don’t know why I keep posting about potty today. It’s not like I have a new puppy or anything.

Here’s the view from my office window:

Why is it that I can prepare all I want for a radio interview — and I don’t mean read the questions ahead of time, I usually improvise — by getting a glass of room-temperature water to have handy, by peeing 10 minutes before the call, by shutting the dog into another room, by turning off the sound on my cell phone, by muting my computer, by creating a little fort of pillows and blankets around the phone area to absorb the noise from the sewer construction crew out front — and yet 15 minutes into the conversation, I have to pee again? And for good radio sound you have to be on a tethered land line, no cordless phone or cell phone, which you can take with you to the restroom and mute your mic while the host is talking to you.

I’m going to post the link to the MP3 of the interview I just did with RSS Ray as soon as it’s live. I’m also going to list the DOs and DON’Ts of participating in online communities as part of your marketing strategy.

But right now, I’m going to pee. And maybe do a few yoga poses to limber up, as I tend to keep very still when I concentrate on a phone interview, and now I’m all stiff. OOOO and there’s dark chocolate in the kitchen.

:: Interviews : Regina Lynn: Sexually Open

Tux needs to get laid more, at least if free open source software is going to mature and grab its place in the multi-billion dollar sex tech industry. As this candid and highly personal interview with Wired.com Sex Drive columnist Regina Lynn explains, the sex tech industry is a vast and important business network, driving billions of dollars and millions of lines of code every year into technology that interoperates with the desktop PC. For the short term, much of that code is proprietary, and much of the content is DRM’d. It’s time for Tux to grab that situation by the balls, and turn the sex tech industry upside down, in much the same way he has done in other areas of high tech.

WARNING: THIS INTERVIEW CONTAINS SEXUALLY EXPLICIT MATERIAL, AND IS NOT SUITABLE FOR READING AT WORK, NOR IS APPROPRIATE FOR PERSONS UNDER THE AGE OF 18. IF YOU ARE UNDER 18 YEARS OLD, STOP READING NOW.

Then ensues a long transcript of our interview, or if you’d rather hear it, $2 for the audio.

If nothing else, go read the intro, where Christian ties the open source community into sex-tech in ways I’d not thought of before. Great stuff!

Groovin’

I hate going to my column on Friday and finding things wrong. This week, the photo gallery I spent a couple of hours assembling, writing captions for, getting permissions for photos I didn’t take myself, etc, is not showing up with the column. I’m certain it’s a matter of understaffing and overworking at Wired News, our poorn intern has to do all the art and whatnot for the entire site. But damnit, had I known they weren’t going to use the art, I could have pre-blogged it in the Sex Drive Daily and linked directly from the text. Or saved myself two hours of “free extra” and concentrated one something billable instead. What, me mercenary?

I guess I’ll go ahead and blog the art now, even though that’s going to require another hour of unpaid time to scale the photos down and upload them with our molasses-fast blogging tool.

Here’s this week’s column:

Groovin’ on a Sunday Afternoon
The programmable Je Joue sensual massager moves in a groove of pleasurable patterns rather than traditional vibration. If this is the future of sex toys, we’re diggin’ it.

And the blog post with the photos.

I’ll link to the podcast when the MP3 becomes available — and since I still have to drive 200 miles to get home to SexRev2.0 headquarters, that might be a while. The Wired.com home page has the links to our feed and to our podcast blog, and you can search iTunes’ podcast directory for “Wired News” to find it, if you want to hear it before I get back here with the link.

I have sex on the brain this week. As in sex, not sex-tech.

I was blending some Trader Joe’s broccoli slaw with Litehouse jalepeno ranch dressing I’m stealing from my SF roommate and got fascinated watching my hands. I don’t have the precise, elequent hand motions that my mom does. I tend to fling salad around the counter when I toss it. But despite the importance of my hands to my career — because writing really does make my brain compose differently than talking — I don’t pay much attention to my hands except to realize belatedly that I should have gotten a polish-free manicure before going on tv, meeting a source or speaking to a group.

Male hands are a totally different story. I probably look at hands more intensely than anything else, after I’ve seen enough for a man to register on my “interesting” or “cute” meters. Maybe this hand thing accounts for the preponderance of musicians and engineers in my relationship history. I don’t tend to dwell on cosmetic things like clean or ragged fingernails, but rather on motion, and strength.

How would those hands feel on my hip? On my belly? My breast? How does he move his hands when he talks? Is he expressive with his hands? Does he pound on his keyboard or does he caress it? What kind of grip or handshake does he have?

I had an explicitly sexual dream Saturday night that featured — let’s just say someone I work with or have worked with in the past — and what’s really funny about this is I’m tempted to tell him about it. But that’s silly. Just because the internet encourages us to share — and overshare — doesn’t mean I have to go mouthing off about my dream.

But I can’t help it.

I rarely have erotic dreams. When I do have them, they’re usually about frustration or fear.

For example, one common theme is I’m hand-in-hand with [whoever] and we’re frantically running all over the place looking for privacy, a “safe” place to Do It. But every room is full of people, or walls disappear, or the door opens to a manure pile, or some such. Meanwhile we’re burning up with desire … but eventually that starts to sour because it’s too difficult to find a place to consummate it.

The other common theme is we’re Doing It but I reach my hips up, or my hand down, to guide penetration, and it doesn’t happen. I strain to reach and the most that happens is the penis brushes across my skin so lightly I don’t know if it really touched. Then the dream ends before the entry, or the man gets pulled away, or someone is coming and he has to hide, or whatever reason my over-read and over-worked imagination cooks up, and I wake up all frustrated because we were *almost* there but couldn’t get there.

On Saturday night, though, not only did we get there, but we were romping around in bed, down comforter all kicked around, sheets hanging half off, pillows flying. We were laughing and slick with sweat and juices, both male and female aromas thick in the air, and really just having a great ol’ time. Eventually he entered me and it was gooood, and then after a couple of thrusts he pulled out and I was about to say “hey!” but he grinned and slid down my body and buried his mouth in my center, tongue across clit then up inside me, and I arched back and rode it and damn, it was hot.

And then some old lady walked in and you know what? Instead of the dream ending or either of us freaking out and withdrawing into ourselves, instead of desire’s end, we just laughed some more and tried to get enough breath to tell her to get out. She stood there with her jaw down to her toes and disapproval and shock warring on on her face and all we could do was laugh and his face was all shiny wet and that made me laugh harder until we were both crying but then a miracle happened: she left, didn’t shut the door all the way, and we just dove back into each other like it didn’t matter.

This is a big deal in my life. Because of my early childhood experiences and subsequent knowing that bad things happen when you leave the door open, because of my history of vivid, action-movie style dreams (I have an incredibly detailed dream life, apparently, according to my friends’ idea of what’s “normal” for dreaming and remembering dreams), because of my history of the last vestiges of my sexual fears still surfacing in dreams, and because of my past where anyone walking in was like the abuser of my childhood walking in and I lost all sexual feeling and couldn’t get it back … it’s a big deal.

As for why I feel the need to share, well, writing online has taken the place of journaling for me. And I would normally discuss this dream with about a dozen people so why tell it or write it out a dozen times when I can blog and they can read and then we can get to the talking. And I find that when I get personal in my column or my book, people write to tell me that they’d felt or thought that way too and thought they were the only ones, and they’re glad I shared, they feel validated.

And frankly , the main reason is that I’m a storyteller and this dream delighted me on several levels and if I don’t tell the story I will BURST.

This morning I had the funniest bedhead. It’s like I woke up with this unruly mane all in a big puffy halo. I took this picture without realizing I’d set the camera to black and white, but I decided I like it better this way anyway.

Here ya go, you folks in the forum who have been asking for pictures. Here’s a “real” picture, no makeup, not even a shower, taken with a little digicam by a total unprofessional (me). If your fantasy or mystery is destroyed by this record of reality it’s your own fault.

One break the rain and it’s a beaut. Check out this picture of Jedi in dog heaven. (Fort Funston, SF) Having four hours of this not only brought hundreds of dogs and their people to the park, it postponed the day we all go mad from SAD. I’m really starting to feel like I’m going to crack if I don’t get out of the rain soon. Tell me again why people don’t believe in global warming?