I was all set to tell the tale of the long holiday weekend and the forgotten key when two things popped up in comments that I wanted to hash out.
First is a question asked in a more lengthy comment by reader SunLocked:
As for the price: I think you should first decide on why you write the book – is it to make money or is it to give advice to those seeking it…?
That’s an excellent question.
It seems as though if all I cared about was advice, then this blog is it. Anyone willing to wade through the years of posts will undoubtedly find almost anything they need to know on the subject (at least is it pertains to my experiences). However, way back when I first introduced the purpose of this blog, it wasn’t so much I was thinking of advising others as much as I wanted a place to sound out ideas and even solicit others’ advice. That’s still the point, I suppose, though along the way my experiences rolled up into a big enough ball that I became an advisor, not the advisee. I think of the book concept as a declaration of where we’ve found ourselves. The opposite of the rambling and often inconsistent and contradictory play-by-play of the journey that is the blog. Told from a position of experience looking back, not from inexperience looking forward. Hell, when I started writing this I still hadn’t ever had anything locked onto to me and had barely been denied any orgasms at all (Oooo, he went three whole days without coming!).
Also, while this blog seems to be fairly well-known among a certain subset of netizens (yes, I did just use that word), I think that having a title listed in the various places one goes to find books can introduce a whole new group of people who otherwise would never find me because the internet is a scary place filled with some scary things (even my own site). When I think back on how we started, one of the first things we did was buy Male Chastity: A Guide for Keyholders. For Belle especially, this was a much easier introduction than most of what was available on the web then (with the notable exception of Tom’s blog from which I sent her many links). There was no Keyheld back then (or, for that matter, She-Held) and, even if there were, even those sites are more advanced than I’m thinking would have been right to share with Belle at the time.
With regard to the money thing, I’m not looking to make a lot off this. I’d like to get something in exchange for my efforts, but I already make a pretty good living and don’t really need the income (though more’s always better, right?). I don’t criticize Sarah Jameson her cottage industry, though that approach isn’t right for me. The more this feels like a job, the less I want to do it (which is the biggest threat to ever completing the book).
Billus chimed in with a thoughtful comment but said in the midst of it…
Tom’s site has more or less self-destructed, for reasons known only to him.
Which garnered a response from Tom to the effect that time has marched on and, like I’ve found, his blog is not what it was because he’s not what he was. Billus replied back that he’s lost interest in where Tom’s taken the blog, but it’s no skin off his nose.
The reason I highlight this (besides thinking that “self-destruct” is a tad harsh) is that I started this blog with an eye towards Tom’s and have thought that its evolution might also be influenced by his. I like to write. I like to write here. So what if someday I start to write about things other than those found in the chastity ghetto repertoire? These are, after all, personal blogs, right? What’s to stop me from talking about politics (man, I’d really like to) or media or whatever the fuck? Except that it may lead to fewer people reading it.
And that’s such a rub for me. No, I shouldn’t care about how many people read my words, but as a person who writes, I can tell you it’s a lot more rewarding when someone’s reading you than not. I have another blog written under my real name. If I get a dozen eyeballs a day (thirteen if one’s a pirate), I’m lucky. That lack of attention makes it hard for me to write there, though I know that more writing is what I need to do in order to get the eyeballs. In either event, as its popularity has grown, I’ve come to think of Denying Thumper as something like a channel. HGTV doesn’t show baseball games and ESPN doesn’t talk about kitchen make-overs and DT doesn’t compare and constrast UK Top Gear to US Top Gear (short story, US Top Gear sucks). But, of course, this isn’t a channel. It’s my personal blog, as I said. So why not write what I want? Sooner or later, it feels like I will have to expand the content here if I’m going to keep it going. Some of you may think of that as a kind of self-destruction, but where are the lines between your expectations of what I’m supposed to write about and what I really want to write about?
Anyway, it’s an interesting conundrum I’ve been pondering and one Billus’ comments bubbled to the surface.