Erotic-On Me

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6th March 2012

So there we go. It has sat on the horizon for many months now; The Eroticon Conference and then all of a sudden it was here and we were on the train to Bristol with a surprising amount of luggage, which is what happens when you are married to a tech geek and maybe the odd pair of shoes, which is what happens when you are married to a shoe whore. We had two nights in a rather nice hotel ahead of us and weekend of, well we were not really sure to be honest I mean it is not every day you get to attend a sex bloggers/writers conference and so apart from knowing we were going to meet friends old and new the rest was really just a case of rocking up and going with the flow.

And flow it did because as I write this it is Sunday afternoon and we are sitting on the train heading back to the London in a rather dazed and slightly over stimulated yet exhausted state. The risk of rambling my way round all this is high and if I that occurs then you shall have to forgive me but finding a place to start, making some sense of this weekend and conveying to you the reader and to everyone whom I meet this weekend what I got from it seems a rather daunting task.

The conference itself most definitely had some serious highlights, for me the opening panel on Identity Ethics and Sex Blogging with myself, Lori Smith, Mina Lamieux and Zoe Margolis was a really cool starting point to the day. I think it set the tone for much of the following sessions in that it demonstrated to everyone that as a group we are a thoughtful, thought-provoking and highly intelligent bunch. The overwhelming feedback I got from the session was that it went too quickly, many people had questions that remained unanswered and that they would have been more than happy for it to have gone on longer.

As with all conferences I have attended you have to pick and choose your sessions wisely as there are no repeats (although more on this later) and no matter how well you try to plan your day you are always going to find that many of the groups that you want to attend are scheduled to take place at the same time. Pick and choose I did and along the way I discovered some gems; most notably Scarlett French. Unfortunately I also missed out on one of the sessions I really wanted to attend as I was being interviewed by the journalist from The Sun on Sunday magazine, a decision I thought long and hard about. I hope she writes a fair an honest piece about the conference and doesn’t turn it into tabloid twaddle but only time will tell on that one.

The other major highlight of the day was the demonstration by London Faerie and Lori Smith entitled Scared Kink. I have witness lots of kink play over the last year or so and I find watching the right couple who have that connection a highly erotic experience and these two did an awesome job of portraying that to a group of people who despite all being erotic writers of some description or another on the whole seemed to have never witnessed, let alone partaken in any sort of kink scene. It seems strange to say this but I would say as far as this group was concerned they were a fairly novice crowd at this sort of thing and in some ways that makes the success of this session all the more important as they got to witness a demonstration that will hopefully have given then new insight into the loving nature of kink and BDSM.

There is so much in my head from this weekend and I hope over the next week or two I can order my thoughts on some of the more specific issues and topics that I took away from the day and write about them too. Right now thought I need a bit more thinking time before I can turn them into words that might make sense here.

One of the main things I have come to realise this weekend is that as a community we really want these opportunities to get together with each other and discuss the issues and dilemmas that surround the work we do, we want to learn from each other experiences, hear about people’s sexualities and life styles and just spend time with other people who really get what it is we do because when we do, we come away enriched and nourished by sharing those things. We want to talk and laugh and debate and feel like we belong and for me that is probably one the most amazing parts about this weekend was that I spent it with a truly awesome group of people where I felt like I belonged.

Mollyxxx

Ps… I met so many different and amazing people this last weekend at Eroticon and so many of them have written about the event but I just can’t keep up with reading them all at once. So I thought I would create a reference space to store all the links in so that I can slowly work my way through them and rather than keep the list to myself I thought I would share it here with you. I have listed as many of the posts that I know off in the linky tool but if you wrote one, or know of one that I have missed please do add it in and spread the word to everyone that they are all welcome to leave their link on this page. I hope it will work as a useful tool for everyone to be able to find each others work. Feel free to link back to this page if you wish to share with your readers what other people have to say about this event.