Blog Integration

Back to that notion of blog integration. Can you be everything on one site or do you need to create a few brands for your shelf, as Boris suggests in this post.

I'm sitting next to a copy of Penthouse -- an advance copy -- I got yesterday in the mail. I have a short story in it. It's exciting as heck. It's a story I wrote about a guy who's widowed and despite all his good intentions (and those of his friends and neighbors) to get hooked up with a nice girl in the neighborhood (a neurosurgeon, a lawyer, a CEO of a high tech firm) he finds they just don't turn him on. Au contraire. He's finding they leave him a little limp, so to speak. The guy is an expert on robots and does a lot of speaking gigs on the circuit, attending a lot of high tech conferences. One thing does turn him on a lot. Here's the opening of my story, which I posted here last year and the editor of Penthouse read and bought:

He liked to make it with the maids at turn-down time. In one expensive hotel after another, at one fancy conference after another, he was finding the maids were a big turn-on and more than willing. And what he liked best was that they never really wanted anything from him. Everyone else did. He was getting to be rather famous in his field of robotics and so many women – educated, intelligent, well-dressed women of business -- were simply after his ass. It was really shocking to him. They had all read his book, or at least said so and obviously had read his bio and they scanned the interviews and they knew a lot about him – certain details would come up in conversation that showed these girls had done their homework. It was flattering at first, but now was alarming.

So can I integrate the person who writes erotic fiction with the person who makes lunch for her 8-year-old son, who writes about technology, who writes about the death of her father, who serves wine and wafers at communion in a mid-calf grey pleated wool skirt, white "good girl" blouse and school marmish grey cardigan with the woman who plays Scrabble with her 95-year-old shut-in lady and the same woman who gives speeches at Harvard and sometimes appears in photographs half-clothed and publishes case studies in The Harvard Business Review?

Is there a benefit to having all those personas live here at Halley's Comment?

Is there something wrong about wanting to hide one or the other of them?

As for Penthouse, I'm thrilled to have my story published there. Buy one. They went bankrupt last month and are just getting back on their feet. They need your money. There's an awesome pictorial of a menage-a-trois right before my story -- two guys and a girl. Much hotter than my fiction. I have to remember to make my characters do it naked with sunglasses and hats on next time. Classic but always cool.