Blog of the Day Award, and other things

I can't believe its been nearly ten days since I last posted. Obviously, I've been really busy.

The big news for today is that I just heard from Bill Austin that my site has won a Blog of the Day Award (BOTDA)! Very cool and unforseen. I even get to use this button:
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What else? Lets see... My friend S was just visiting--he is an airline steward and has had Friday night to Saturday afternoon layovers this month. On his most recent overnight I took him to the Samurai exhibit at the Asian Art Museum here in town. We ate pho and I showed him photos from the Japan trip in April. It has been a few years since he was there last and he now he really wants to go back.

My companion, M, is working like a fiend on a start-up project. I cleared the dining table of its settings so he could use it as an additional desk -- he's got 4 computers running right now, with MacOS, Linux, Windows Vista and Windows 7 beta. There are lots of routers, wires, and packaging all over the place--its madness. A madness I do my best to cope with while leaving it alone--quite an effort, I assure you.

I'm in talks with a friend, The Sayer of RedWordSaid.com who does his own erotic audio files for women -- we're trying to figure out how to expand awareness of our work and the unique niches we fill. I'm advertising on Google, looking at doing ads on FetLife.com (a captive audience of Kinksters!) and trying to figure out how to re-design my sites with DreamWeaver and make banners with PhotoShop.

M, being an internet guru, has given me some tips and suggestions -- like offering my high-quality erotic vignettes on iTunes for .99 each to get more traffic and sales. So I'll probably set something up with CDBaby, a music distribution company local to my favorite town (Portland, OR) which has been hit hard by the recession. Hopefully, selling short vignettes on iTunes will help drive traffic to the sites where my full-length, high-quality, kinky and creative erotic audio stories are available for sale, like SilkenErotica.com and AudioSensual.com.

I'm podcasting 3x a month on the 5th, 15th and 25th--just put a new episode out today, in fact, and recording and doing the production on audio is actually a rather time-consuming labor of love. Currently, the AudioSensual podcast is averaging about 7,000 downloads a week from 1500 unique IPs. I passed the 100,000 downloads mark at the end of May, in just 14 weeks. That still blows my mind.

I've been writing, too -- submitted stories to 2 anthologies this month, and have two more July 1 deadlines I want to meet, one of them for an anthology featuring erotica based in San Francisco.

I'm also heading out of town tomorrow. I'll spend a week in the Sierra Nevada's up near Mammoth Lakes, writing, fishing, and hanging out with family. I'm hoping to get some excellent photos taken. I get home on the 2nd of July and then on Sunday the 5th I'll be hopping a plane to Vegas -- M decided he wanted to see Bill Maher and so we'll be staying for a few days and catching Chris Angel's show, too.

Hopefully I'll find the time to post something naughty in the next week.

New podcast featuring sybian recording

I took a ride on my sybian, recorded it, and used it as the background for a podcast of the blog entry "She's got a sybian to ride." Do let me know what you think.

My podcasts are now available on iTunes. You can find them here.

I recorded another ride on my sybian, this one without voiceover--unless you consider gasps and moans and whimpers to be "voiceover." This recording is available for purchase here at Lulu.com.

silkenvoice.com and lulu.com

Instead of submitting my taxes today, I renewed the registrations for the domain names I own and updated the www.silkenvoice.com site while I was at it. The new site is more feminine than the prior version, more professional, and looks less like a questionable porn site. Now that I've been home a couple of weeks I am hoping that my life will settle into a rhythm that permits more time to write and record. I am also hoping that the recent updates to the silkenvoice.com site and soon-to-be-uploaded audio for sale at the lulu.com storefront will drive some business my way. Perhaps that will provide additional incentive to continue generating more audio erotica. I like providing my stuff for free, but at the same time, I like being able to enjoy the fruits of my labor, so hopefully all those people who give appreciative feedback will find it in their hearts and wallets to support me and my work by actually purchasing high-quality erotic audio mp3s.

Presently I am working on a new story with the provisional title GEEK FETISH. It is for all those geeks who read naughty stories. I thought they might like to read one where the hero was one of their own ;)

"Jack" posted to Literotica

The text of the erotic story "Jack" has been posted to Literotica.
The audio version is available at HypnoFantasyFriends.com under KR Silkenvoice. I now have 9 .mp3 files there.

I've also just recorded my first hypnosis file, called "Laugh". It is a G-rated introduction to hypnosis, intended to make you want to laugh whenever you smile. Its a short (15 minute file) which I am making available here. It should be available on HypnoFantasy shortly. The script was written by Bob Brown. Please give it a listen and let me know what you think.

The delight of surprise memories

Life is full: rich and colourful, dark and painful, replete with abundance, plagued with scarcity. For all these reasons, I've not posted to my blog in too long. I have several thoughts started, but a scarcity of time has prevented me from completing them. I will, though.

For now, though, I feel an urge to post this: Earlier this week, two memories surfaced for me. They were good memories. Memories of my mother, and my maternal grandfather. I was talking to 'Doc' (Bob) at HypnoFantasy about the possibility of doing hypnotic scripts. I told him I did not know much about hypnosis and wanted to understand it better before I attempted to hypnotize anyone else.

At some point in the conversation, I felt some internal pressure, some resistance to the idea of hypnosis for some reason, and I took a moment to examine it. And when I did, I suddenly remembered why I've always found it so easy to meditate, to fall into trance--I remembered that my mother used to hypnotize me and my sisters. WHAT?! I felt this little jab of panic as my old distrust of her surfaced. What did she say to me, when I was in trance, what suggestions did she make? I've no idea. I'll never know, because she is dead. I have decided to trust that the suggestions she made to me were intended to be beneficial. It is difficult for me, this trust, because she demonstrated so little in the way of maternal feeling, and I have so little childhood knowledge or memory of her.

But I found it inside me to trust that when he hypnotized me, she meant well, because I carry that memory of her brushing my hair when I was a child. I remembered the pleasure of the brush scraping lightly against my scalp and pulling gently at the roots of my hair, running down my back, and the waves of gooseflesh that ebbed and flowed with the rhythm of the brush... I remembered the sun on my face and on my skin, warming me as I sat naked before her, my knees pulled up under my chin. And I remembered her voice, her beautiful, mellifluous, soothing voice, saying my name. And I was grateful for that one memory, and I held it until it glowed, and I basked the light of my mother's love once again--and the pressure, the resistance to the idea of hypnosis, faded. My unconventional, counter-culture mother helped make me the woman I am today. And I like who I am :)

The other memory was of her father. He died the same year she took off and I have very few memories of him. But I was talking to someone about voice-over recording, and microphones, and I suddenly remembered Grandfather. He had a radio show! I could feel laughter burbling up inside me as I remembered. He, too, had a wonderful voice, which he learned put to good use as a missionary evangelist. He was one of Aimee Semple McPherson's students, having graduated from Life Bible College at Angelus Temple in the late 1920's, and she had a radio show. So did he. Even during the years he battled cancer, after he retired from the pulpit, he was on the air. I remember that he had taken over one of the closets in the guest room, the one that had the pull-down door to the attic. I remember him sitting in that little room stacked with books and papers, with the big microphone in front of him and the reel-to-reel tape machine running as he sermonized, his voice resonant and his blue eyes blazing. He put the 'charismatic' in 'Christian', Grandfather did.

So here I am, by some cosmic convolution, sitting at a desk, surrounded by books and papers, with a big microphone hanging in front of me, spinning tales on sexuality in my mother's voice for an audience that likes to be hypnotized. It makes me smile. There is something fitting in that.

The Mountain

Mount Hood. The dormant volcano that dominates Portland's eastern skyline. The skiing wasn't so good. Two weeks of unseasonably warm weather turned powder into ice. Ah well. It was gorgeous, all the same, and the guest from England got to experience the full weather gamut from dreary rain, to hail, to brilliant, clear, warm days. He flew home Wednesday.

I'm feeling a bit like that mountain this week. Cool, smooth exterior concealing the rough spots and the volcanic energy. Its been one of those weeks with bad news on almost all fronts personal and professional. My sister's condition is unstable--we are waiting on test results to find out if she has cancer. I somehow managed to make one of my best friends anxious and uncertain, which rocked the foundations of my support system; and my boss had a minor stroke and will be out indefinitely, and the head of a supporting department will be out for surgerry next week, so my workload has effectively doubled and may even triple until further notice.

The good news is that HypnoFantasy.com is streaming my audio stories. I uploaded Attention Please I and II and I expect Doc will have them on the site before the weekend is over. I've recorrded Check and Mate but want to finish editing it and recording the intro. I'm such a perfectionist--I need a recording studio.

The best news is that a friend is coming to town for the weekend. So once again, I'll be too preoccupied to do much writing or recording.

Not that I mind...

Mini-post

Being back home has been an adventure. Belated birthday wishes, gifts, and get-togethers. Company updates, new people to get on board, division VP in town. Finishing up some business arrangements with Hypnofantasy.com and TheStoryMill.com. Recording stories old and new. Picked up a guest from London at the airport. Whee! I'll make a real post later.

Wouldn't it be nice if...

Wouldn't it be nice if...my hobby paid for itself? It is tax time, and I've been going over my expenses and receipts, and I've come to the realization that, over the course of the past 18 months, I've invested a fair amount of time and money into writing and recording erotica. I've purchased recording software, a mic, and preamp. This lead to the purchase of a laptop computer because the noise of the fan on my desktop computer was interfering with the quality of the recordings. I've spent hours learning how to use the recording software, how to edit and mix. I even learned how to amplify my voice 300%, since I'm so soft-spoken those listening to my mp3s had listen at max volume.

In July of 2005 I listed my first erotic story on Literotica. By the end of August I had posted six stories, most of them garnering positive feedback, including (surprisingly enough) encouraging words from professional writers and editors. On Halloween 2005 I posted my first audio story. It got mixed feedback, but a lot of it was from people begging me to record more, more, more. In early 2006 I was contacted by various people with proposals ranging from offering me free access to their porn sites in exchange for permission to use my stories, to internet radio, to going into business together. All of this was unanticipated, but intriguing. I contacted some people in the sex industry and received more proposals and expressions of interest. I did a voice-over for TheStoryMill and allowed a couple of my audios to be posted there. I talked with Oceania of PeacockBlue about possible collaborations, and The Sayer of RedWordSaid whose erotic audios for women are peerless. However, none of these produced any tangible results, as during this time I was also embroiled in the ordeal of my sister's illness, an ordeal that occupied me for nearly a year. Between her heath crisis and my work, I've been swamped, but I'm slowly surfacing.

Soon after my most recent audio post to Literotica, I received a request from a listener (for some reason I am hesitant to use the word 'fan') asking me to do an erotic hypnotic induction/recording just for him, for a fee. I'd never heard of erotic hypnosis or 'hypnofantasy' before, and he sent me off to Inraptured for more information and how-to tips. Wow. There is a very interesting hypnofantasy subset of the erotic audio market. I quickly made the acquaintance of the folks at HypnoFantasy and just might be working with them soon.

I am excited about this possibility, for a few reasons. One, I like their approach. Its professional and matter-of-fact instead of amateurish and sleazy. The sites are user-friendly, and they've got erotic and non-erotic material for men, women, and couples, with everything already in place to serve up audio recordings to an attentive audience. Two, there is a possibility of generating some revenue from selling access to my audio stories, which, three, could reimburse me for my time and expense and perhaps provide an incentive to devote more time to this hobby. I know I would be more prolific/productive with my erotic writing and recording if the benefits outweighed the costs. As it is, there are so many other activities that take priority over this hobby.

It should be interesting to see what happens. I can't help but wonder if people would be willing to pay to listen to me telling intimate sexual fantasies. It sure would be nice if my hobby paid for itself.