Dear Hef, You’ve Got E-Male: The Dark Side of Internet Hook Ups Meets the Playboy Cool of Hugh Hefner in my new Provocative Novel Dear Hef Released Today

The dark side of Internet hook ups meets the Playboy cool of publisher Hugh Hefner in my new provocative, sexy and hilarious erotica fiction novel entitled Dear Hef, which was released as an e-book by Lazy Day Publishing today.

My book, available in the Amazon Kindle Store, Barnes & Noble.com and other Web sites, is my third novel. My latest novel Monogamy Sucks, about a thirty something man’s swinging lifestyle adventures, is selling well on Amazon and other sites.

More than eight years in the making, Dear Hef explores my long-time admiration for Hefner through the e-mails of a fan, the book’s main protagonist, a 28-year old Long Beach man named Jimmy Rausch.

Essentially, Jimmy wants to be like Hef, but he’s clueless, and nothing like the iconic publisher, which only adds to the book’s humor.

However, Jimmy has a simple plan: to use the Internet in an attempt to transform himself into a playboy worthy of his hero Hef.  Jimmy even shares his hilarious erotic encounters or what he calls his “Playboy training” with his idol through explicit e-mails or e-males.

What Jimmy fails to realize is that his naughty adventures with women he meets online truly border on the ridiculous and the absurd, and hardly live up to Playboy’s sexy and cool tradition. Yet by the novel’s close, Jimmy continues to hope for a coveted invitation to the Playboy Mansion from Hef himself.

Since I had my first Playboy Magazine subscription in my mid teens, I have been fascinated with the Playboy mystique, and the interesting and unconventional life of publisher Hugh Hefner. Hef and his magazine represent for me (and many others) a peek into a sexy, wonderful, hedonistic and classy world that fueled my adolescent and later adult dreams.

My inspiration for my novel is actually a literary one — Ring Lardner’s dark and comedic short story Haircut. Haircut is told by a barber while giving a haircut to a customer. The barber relates a series of shocking anecdotes revealing that he is a closed-minded, uptight citizen, and condones the harassment of those who don’t fit into the strict community standards of the town he lives in. However, the barber remains oblivious to how he looks to the reader as he tell his troubling and ugly tales.

I have admired Lardner’s story since I first read it in my high school English class. I thought it might be interesting to create a character that shared his wild tales of desperation with Hef via the modern convenience of e-mail. Jimmy is pretty much as clueless as the barber in Lardner’s story in that he doesn’t realize how embarrassing and pathetic he looks in comparison to Hef’s cool example and lifestyle.

The entire novel is told through a series of e-mails between Jimmy and his lovers, and those Jimmy sends to Hef to keep him updated with the progress of his so-called “Playboy training”.  Jimmy’s female lovers are also given a voice in this novel as their e-mails are forwarded to Hef and hence shared with the readers.

Yet the highlight of the book is Jimmy’s hilarious e-mails to his hero Hef.  That is the core of my novel and what makes it unique from any other erotica book out there right now.

Internet hook ups are pretty much the norm these days. People of all ages are using the Internet to find sex, dating, companionship, and friends. According to some surveys and experts, the main reason hooking up is so popular among younger people in their teens and twenties is that in the United States and other Western countries, the age at which people marry for the first time has been steadily creeping up.  Check out this NPR story about this phenomenon right here.

Dear Hef does have some similarities with my previous novel Monogamy Sucks in that it is another unflinching look into the male sexual mind.

My character Jimmy is more naive, younger and oblivious than Jake Dalmas, the protagonist of Monogamy Sucks. Unlike Jake, it is debatable whether Jimmy learns anything by the end of Dear Hef, which has a much darker and hilarious ending than Monogamy Sucks.

Dear Hef is still funny and sexy, and Jimmy does share some of Jake’s sarcastic wit and humor in describing his sexual foibles and his encounters with the women he meets. I once again leave nothing out or hold anything back in addressing sexual and controversial topics.
I had  been writing Dear Hef off and on since 2003 while he also worked toward eventually getting my latest novel Monogamy Sucks published.   This book project is very loosely based on my own Internet adventures, but it is still a work of fiction.

I wanted to honestly show the good, bad and ugly of Internet sex and dating as I did with the swinging lifestyle in Monogamy Sucks. I was curious to find out if the Internet would make finding sex and lovers easier, but I have discovered that online life is no different from off-line life. The same principles apply.  Sex and dating is never so simple. There are consequences to all you do.

I am planning a sequel for Dear Hef to come out in the next couple of years so there will be more of Jimmy’s crazy tales.

If you enjoyed the raw, frank, funny erotica of my latest novel Monogamy Sucks, you will appreciate Dear Hef. It’s another dose of my real life erotica. I have no doubt you find many of the books’ depictions of online sex hook ups true to life and quite humorous and well worth the time.

GP