It’s a beautiful Sunday afternoon here today. Weather is cool. I had breakfast in bed, plus a few other fun activities, spent an hour on karate practice, and then had a nice long hot bath. Now I’m sitting on the couch blogging whilst the Hubster makes lunch. He has spent the morning working on the floor in our foyer, trimming carpet, laying down transition board, etc. Thus we are that much closer to having the downstairs floor re-tiled and the downstairs bathroom re-installed. Life is good.
Yes, life is good. My work schedule is even finally settling down now that the kids are in school and I’m wrapping up season three of the Heat Flash Erotica Podcast. That’s been a big project for me for the last three years, and by the time I record and upload the last episode I’m doing before taking a 3-month hiatus, I will have produced 164 episodes. That’s 164 speculative fiction erotica stories, written, recorded and released on the inter-tubes for anyone and everyone who finds them to enjoy. Total all that up to 300,000 words written in the last 3 years, and that doesn’t even include additional stories I’ve written and had published. Life is very, very good.
So I’m thinking lately that if my life is so very good, I ought to share the wealth. I don’t make a ton of money off my work, but I do make some and I would like to put that money to good use. Frankly, I’m fortunate in that I don’t have to earn any money. I am the proverbial “kept woman” (who takes care of the kids, cooks and cleans when I’m not busy writing porn). I’d like to take at least some of the money I make off writing erotica and put it to a good cause. But what cause to pick?
How do you choose a charity to support? How do you identify a cause that appeals to your hot button issues and say, “That’s how I’m going to do my part to fix the world!”? I know that among other things, I feel very strongly about the way women are treated in other parts of the world. Let’s face it; in India, Africa, the Mid-East and many other places, woman are little better than slaves, and they live every day in brutal circumstances. As a woman who’s used to be able to exercise her rights to free speech and sexual choice, I fully believe that every woman should have the ability to read and write and the opportunity to express themselves sexually as they see fit. This bullshit of covering women from heat to toe and hiding them away in one tiny portion of the house, or of forcing them to undergo ritual genital mutilation, or of subjecting them to rape on a daily basis as they go about trying to make sure their families have enough food and firewood to stay alive is unacceptable to me.
Thankfully, there are opportunities out there for me to do something with my work. In the past, I’ve had stories accepted to two of the Coming Together anthologies, and I intend to submit many more (and if you haven’t bought something from Coming Together, I suggest you get your tuckus over there now and fix that!). But I’m looking to champion a specific cause now. So I want to ask you all who read this to suggest some charities to me. I will look at any charity suggested, but will have a strong preference toward ones that work to improve the lives of women, especially in third world countries. And I want to make sure the money goes to an organization that puts most of its donations toward helping people rather than in campaigning and advertising.
Help me out, folks. Help me find where to put my money. Because my life has been very good, and I want to share that with as many people as I can.
