Now available: "Eighteen with a (Silver) Bullet: An Erotic Christmas Carol"

Eighteen with a (Silver) Bullet: An Erotic Christmas Carol is now available on Amazon.

This short erotic tale was inspired, in part, by Charles Dickens’ immortal classic A Christmas Carol, written and published in 1843, and now long in the public domain.  I have freely and unapologetically borrowed material from the novel, including the names of several characters. Those readers intimately familiar with the original text of A Christmas Carol will be sure to find many small—and even a few rather obscure—references to episodes and characters from Dickens’ novel here.

My purpose in writing Eighteen with a (Silver) Bullet was solely to entertain through the use of parody and social satire with a contemporary erotic sensibility. Prigs, prudes, and purists will probably not be amused; my unhallowed hands have most definitely disturbed the similes of Victorian propriety, though I doubt the Country’s done for as a result. We have reached an almost-absurd level of moral panic in these times regarding the portrayal of adolescent sexuality, to a point where it has now become de rigueur in erotica to beat readers over the head with the fact that imaginary characters are “eighteen or older” as they engage in fictional behavior, which harms no one in the real world.

Thinking about this, I envisioned a scenario in which someone “old enough to be a character in an erotic short story” might wake up on the morning of their eighteenth birthday with near-complete amnesia regarding puberty, adolescence, and the all-important years of their formative erotic experience. Of course, I play this scenario for laughs, even going so far as to break the “fourth wall” from time to time in the service of satire. Yet, in all seriousness, if we cannot learn to be honest about things that happen quite naturally every day, come to mature grips with our normal human desires, or, at least, develop some proportional sense of humor about ourselves as sexual beings, a lot more than the Country’s done for. 

from Eighteen with a (Silver) Bullet: 

Marla was eighteen to begin with. Eighteen with a bullet, there was no doubt whatever about that. She had the birth certificate to prove it, and that was good enough for any court of law in the country. She had the body to prove it, too.

Still, Marla was not entirely convinced.

We’re not talking barely legal here with eighteen in air quotes; some overeager seventeen-year-old using a fake ID to get into a club, or fudging her date of birth by a week or three in a plot to bring down the adult film industry. No, Marla was really and truly un-fucking-deniably eighteen, and today, Christmas Eve, was her birthday. She was old enough to vote or be drafted—assuming they ever brought back the draft. Old enough to be independent and make her own decisions—assuming none of those decisions involved the consumption of alcohol. Old enough to be a character in an erotic short story.

Oh yeah! Marla was eighteen if you know what I mean, nudge-nudge, wink-wink: you must understand this or nothing sexy or exciting can happen in the story that is about to unfold. Marla Jacobs was eighteen, and that was where the problem started: She couldn’t remember anything before waking up on the morning of the 24th—at least, nothing having to do with sex. Surely something must have happened between the ages of twelve and seventeen. So why was it all a huge blank?

Like a woman with no shadow suddenly appearing out of thin air, Marla had no erotic backstory.

If only I’d been a character in a detective novel, she thought bitterly.

She tried asking her parents at breakfast that morning, but nobody would tell her anything about the “time before”—it simply was not talked about. Her folks began to hem and haw when she hinted at the mystery of her adolescence, mumbling as if their mouths were full of mush.

“Some things are on a strictly need-to-know basis.” Marla’s dad pretended to glance at his watch before rushing off in terror. Her mom heaved a heavy sigh and changed the subject...