Copyright Β© 2005. All characters, events, and text in this story are purely fictional, and are created by and the sole property of the author. All rights reserved.
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Writer's Note
: It's time for Canadagander to make a public disclosure, to come out of the writer's den, so to speak. 'Gander is not a real person. We are a group of four adults, two men and two women, all with a passion for writing - short stories, Christmas letters, technical reports, mystery novels, you name it. We are probably as diverse a group as you can imagine. Our eldest, and also best writer, is a silver-haired petite gal in her sixties, with black half-glasses perched on her nose. She was an attendee at Woodstock, a Peace Corps volunteer, and writes stories gory enough to frighten Edgar Allen Poe. The other female is our Barbara Cartland wannabe, in her forties, who could be the prototype for Garrison Keillor's soccer mom/Republican babe. The youngest in the group is a male tech writer with all the fancy stuff - wireless laptop, etc., but who can outline great plots. And finally, there is a fifties-something male, who likes humor and surprise endings. He's the one who insists that a good story must make a point. We're letting him tell you about how we invented Canadagander.
Since the summer of 2002, the four of us meet every week at our library, where we critique each other's work, and then decide on some sort of writing challenge for the next get-together - sort of like Weight Watchers for the word processor. It wasn't long after we began doing this that our Cartland wannabe wanted to write a sex scene for her romance novel, and wanted help and advice on the erotic parts. None of us admitted to having read much of this genre, so we decided to do some on-line research right there in the library. It must have been amusing to our librarian to see four adults behaving like horny teens, crowding around our techie's laptop, searching the Internet for info on erotic literature, all the while trying to appear cool and intellectual.
The Google search on 'reviews of websites for erotic literature' yielded over a hundred thousands hits, so we used the Google directory of writer's resources, listed in alphabetical order, and randomly selected the letter 'L'. The lucky winner was Literotica.
We logged in and had to suppress chuckles at the 'Oh, my God!' reaction from our romance writer, when she saw the graphic sponsor ads. Our saucy little old lady remarked, "That's the way it looks, honey, if you do it in the daytime, or with the lights on." We perused the index of genres, and each of us agreed to read at least two stories from each of five categories.
The following week we met again to discuss our opinions on what we had read. This time, our little old lady declared, "I haven't seen that much horseshit in one place since my boyfriend and I went behind the paddocks at Churchill Downs on Kentucky Derby day. It doesn't take much writing talent to describe in detailed minutiae how some hot babe, with huge boobs and wet panties gets it from some inexhaustible guy with a 10-inch cock."
"Well, then, let's each of us try to write a better story," our humorist replied. "I personally found a few authors whose stuff was pretty good. I would find it interesting to write a humorous erotic story."
We opined that the joy of sex comes from the mind, not the friction and moving parts, and the challenge was on. Our tech writer suggested the rule that our stories must be erotic while having no nudity, and the protagonists must not touch another person.
Tougher than you think, but our humorist came up with "In Diane's Mind." We have found that having a non-author read a piece aloud is the best way to critique that piece. Let me tell you, erotic stories get even hotter if one person reads it aloud to a group. Both ladies behaved a lot like Diane, and we thought it was witty as well as sexy. The consensus was to submit the story to Literotica, and see what reaction we got from the readers.
We made some minor changes that day, and devised a pseudonym and writer's profile. Our techie writer, showing off his Internet prowess, created an anonymous ISP account, and joined Literotica. Canadagander was born, and his Author's Profile was basically our mission statement, namely that we were ordinary, straight people who could write an erotic story with a point. 'In Diane's Mind' was submitted, and much to our surprise, by our next meeting, 'Diane' made the charts, and Canadagander received a number of Feedbacks. Cool!
Getting published and receiving compliments is sweet nectar to all writer bees. The group decided to write another, then another, and another, eleven all told. If you've read them all (for which we say thank you), you may have noticed the range of plots and categories, and the degree of sexual explicitness within all eleven of Canadagander's published stories. Now you know the reason why. We became very proud of our sex-on-the-mind author, thrilling at each new submittal that achieved a 'Hot' symbol.
But Canadagander almost killed our group. Our fun was like a narcotic - we couldn't let it go. And all too quickly, competition for the ratings created hard feelings among our foursome of 'gander submitters. The final blow came when we were horrified to see 'It's a Family Tradition' included in the Incest category, one which we all had declared out of the bounds of our taste. It actually was created concurrently with 'Over Hill and Dale,' in which mature adults coached an inexperienced eighteen year old. In an attempt to correct the incest blunder, we submitted the sequel 'It's Another Tradition.' That was when we changed the author's profile to declare Canadagander dead.
But, much to our surprise, Feedback to Canadagander continues to arrive, urging sequels to our stories. Temptations arose, but we erotica junkies supported each other during our withdrawal period, and the group returned to its original purpose. Then, last month, the group decided our challenge would be to select a published story and write a different ending from the original author's, but still be consistent with all the facts of the story. The idea was to practice writing one of those mystery story plots where the suave inspector or the rugged PI explains all the confusing facts and sub-plots in the final chapter, and the villain is revealed.
One member (you can guess which one after reading this piece) returned with a plot line that explained the 'why dunnit' of the two 'Tradition' stories with a surprising twist. This explanation of the purpose of the Powell family traditions surprised even the originator of Sam Tonnelli and Callie Taylor, and we hope that you are, too. The group decided that her offspring deserved publishing, and so we brought Canadagander back to life for one more submittal to Literotica.
If you haven't already read the first two Traditions stories, we recommend it. Otherwise, you will miss some decent writing that merited two 'hot' votes as well as elicited the most Feedback requests for another sequel. But for those of you who are OK with coming in on the third episode of a series, we have included brief synopses of the first two parts, like they do in TV series. That way you will at least get acquainted with Sam and the Powell women, to better appreciate the ending to the story.
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Part One Synopsis
It's a Family Tradition