Every year at Frolicon, I participate in the Bedtime Stories event. Authors read a short story while attendees act it out — and the attendees have no idea what’s coming next, which makes it hilariously improvised for all involved. Some folks will write a story just for the event; some will read a story they’ve already written. Usually there’s some humor in it.

Humor is hard, though.

Last Frolicon, I performed part of “Professor Pain and the Unstoppable Force“, which will be out in full in a new short-story collection coming later this year. While it wasn’t hilarious, per se, it had funny moments. I actually wrote it specifically for Bedtime Stories.

This year, I didn’t have anything funny to read, and I didn’t have the impetus to write a funny, sexy story. Humor is hard, and while a lot of my stories have humorous elements, the focus usually isn’t on that.

I brought two stories with me to Frolicon this year: “Tail”, which is a story about a human man who has sex with an alien woman who has a tail (the full story will be out later this year in the aforementioned collection), and “National Attitude Day”, which is about a woman who gets an attitude about something her girlfriend is going to do and said girlfriend spanks her for it (which will be out in the June edition of the holiday stories). I picked those primarily because they’re short; readers only get 3-5 minutes (ostensibly). Neither one has anything especially humorous that goes on, but I think they have their sexy parts, and they could be acted out by the attendees.

I wanted to write something new. I wanted to write something funny. But it just wasn’t happening, so I had to go with what was already on-hand. Maybe next year.