The damn gray zone

 I'm someone who likes to worldbuild. I want to create a world with a set of rules, create characters with a history, and see how that history in those rules would naturally sort themselves out. 

In my bound friends series though, there is a reason I start it on the 18th birthday of the youngest character. I understand why there is an invisible wall at that 18th birthday, but that's not how real flesh and blood people live. And less sexualized media gets to explore that, there are simply too many shows to name where all characters are set in high school and most if not all are under 18 where relationships are the primary driver of plot. Because of course high schoolers are thinking about or having sex, they always have and always will.

I don't want to violate rules by exploring that, especially because I as now quite the adult do not want to be describing sex scenes of young teenagers. I especially don't want to attract or validate the kind of people who would like to hear that. 

But who are we kidding? What 18 year old is born anew their 18th birthday?

So I guess to some degree this is also me crowdsorcing a question, if your primary characters are 18, how do you write a sexually charged book without ever including their sex lives before the day of their 18th birthday? Are there any good examples that spring to mind?

Because Preview:

I'm writing many things, but one of the many things I'm writing as a potential series is I want to kind of follow a single person through their life, from college to into their 30s at least. The Erotic Adventures of Emily (not a real title yet). I have the idea that she is basically in the closet about being bi, but it feels cheap. Maybe I'm one to talk, because as someone who is bi-adjacent I never really dealt very seriously with "being in the closet" in any of my Bound Friends series because.. I am not sure, it might have just been not something I wanted to deal with. But now making it plot central seems, also not great. Maybe I'm just self critical and don't like what I write no matter what!

Anyway, Book Recommendation

This will be in a very different vibe than my last one but I got to mention Tangled Vows by Anna Stone. The writing is well done, the characterization is interesting in that it's like pealing back layers. I don't know, I just really got into it even though it's light on bondage, "SugarKink" as I've newly learned the term. 

Get the Damn Shot

 So, I know I just said I'd be trying to make update journals every two weeks or so, but my last little bit has been thrown into a little chaos from family issues and the resulting headaches that come with that.

To make a long drama short, a whole branch of the family tree are getting hit with COVID. And they didn't have to. They could have gotten the damn vaccine free months ago. The only ones down there in Texas who did were the ones forced to by work, and between them they have 16 kids under 12 their recklessness has now put in danger. The spikes last year, there was so little alternative. Now there is a god damn miracle of science a decade in the making is available for free while the rest of the world struggles to get any at all. Southern states are throwing out vaccine that is spoiling because no one is getting them any more. Like that whole cluster of my family has decided not to, and now there are two struggling for their life on ventilators.

Get the damn vaccine. If you already have, pressure those you know who haven't. We have the technology to make COVID relegated to the status of polio, we just have to have the collective will. Whatever negative you've heard about it likely isn't true, and the alternative is I may lose my last uncle and more than a dozen children too young for the vaccine have all been exposed and to a variant that seems much more deadly to children than the ones that came before. That's the side effect of not taking it.

I'm a bit of a history buff, and one lesson I wish could be written on giant letters in the sky is that the world's first government-sponsored immunization campaign was initiated by George Washington while camped at Valley Forge. Smallpox had been spreading and so he required every one of his troops to get what was at the time an experimental treatment of placing a small bit of pox-puss into a cut on the arm. He required all serving under him, including himself, to take this new treatment because he was losing more men to disease than to the British and a big outbreak of smallpox at that moment in the revolution could have snuffed it out. There is nothing more American than all of us coming together to save each other, of many we become one. E pluribus unum. Right now we all need to become one, we need to get the damn vaccine as one society so that it stops spreading to those who can't get the vaccine, like children. 

Is the sappy pap? Sure, but I can't give this speech to someone already on a ventilator, someone who already chose to selfishly and destructively prolong this plague by rejecting the one tool needed to end it. I can give it to you fellows though, so I am. 

I've not been writing much, I'll return to updates hopefully soon.