Author: LS Harteveld

After seeing the movie Book Club, Lauren has decided she’s going next level in her love life.
With help from the guardian angel that got her back on her feet last time.

I didn’t see this coming.
I mean, I knew that I left my long term relationship in 2006 to create a new love life.
Based on excitement, and the newness of being in love. On first times, new lovers and on conquering the fears that stood between me and the life I wanted.
And I succeeded.
It was actually really easy.
At least the conquering of the fears was.
Once I decided that I no longer wanted a life that was carefully crafted around things that scared the shit out of me, the hard work was already done.
Sure, I saw a sex therapist.
Once or twice, I can’t even remember.
But it was clear, to both the therapist and me, that I had made up my mind and nothing was going to stop me.
I might still freak out and have panic attacks. But I would never get knee deep into avoidance, consumed by fear, the way I had spent the two decades prior.
Yesterday I created the first video in my Sexual Mastership 40+ series.
It was just an introduction, on how the movie Book Club had inspired me to stand up for sex when you’re older.
That I was offended that the movie portraited elder women as barely sexual capable, and tied to limitations which may be valid when you’re young.
But that should have been dealt with long before menopause.
Mature women were not mentally unstable teenagers in aging bodies.
They were stronger, free, and daring.
And they could do anything they pleased.
That’s what Book Club could have, should have, emphasized.
That 50 Shades of Grey might have been a leap for virgin Anastasia Steele. But that there was an entire demographic ready to turn up the heat.
However.
Now that this opportunity had obviously been missed, I would take it from here. So I started a video series on YouTube, Sexual Mastership 40+.
Where the first video immediately received a lot of clicks.
I felt guilty for using the words “mature sex” in the title. Even though it was tied to Book Club as well!
So I don’t think I took advantage of people looking for porn, but still…
It was strange to have a video immediately doing so well.
And I felt strong in my new role, as an inspirator on this subject.
Until I started reading a sex diary from a well-known Dutch author, where she documents her love life with her young lover with whom she lives.
That was when I realized, that simply choosing 40+, did not mean I actually had something in common with other women.
If the most sexually advanced author of the Netherlands, lives together with her boyfriend, then who am I going to sell on the idea that if you make sex a priority, the first thing you should do is NOT live together?
That even allowing for garden variety sex, is the absolute death to your sex life.
Garden variety sex means any sex where you don’t have a MASSIVE build up of sexual tension.
And this tension can come from anything.
For example:
Not knowing him.
Being in love.
Not seeing each other.
Having an argument.
Danger.
BDSM.
Role playing and powerplay.
And this type of sexual tension was indeed fully absent on the first twenty pages of the sex diary. It was all garden variety sex. And this was the book that was supposed to liberate women, and teach them how to ask for sex.
Give them an example of how a sex life in a relationship could look like.
The author did acknowledge that there was a big difference in the way people talk about their sex lives when they were dating, as opposed to when they were in a real relationship.
But she didn’t seem to share my conclusion that this was a strong indicator there was something inherently wrong with being a relationship.
If you are a hundred percent serious about having a great sex life, you have to be willing to sacrifice your relationship if necessary.
But if the majority of women were apparently looking for a way to spice up sex with a guy with whom they were living?
Then I was out.
You go figure that one out by yourself.
So that was how my day started!
Not particularly motivating, to realize that my new passion project Sexual Mastership 40+ should probably have said for solitary women.
Or men.
Or gender neutral as long as they live alone.
In fact, I m going to add that right now.
( the project is now renamed to Sexual Mastership 40+ and Solitary )
So after I had gotten all reactive, witnessing my new calling to serve the masses, being marginalized to perhaps being of some use to the one percent within the one percent, I got back to my initial plans.
Thursday August 30?
What’s up?
And I realized I still had my “little” challenge waiting for me.
In order to kickstart Sexual Mastership 40+,  I had decided I was going to rebuild my love life.
Not so much the same way I had done twelve years ago!
Ha ha ha ha.
Nooo…. because what I had found was that I could have done it so much quicker. I took the long, longer, longest road. Which was okay. I mean it’s always okay, we travel the way that suits us.
There were a couple of things I did do right. And the first was also the most important element to success.
I DECIDED.
That’s really all you need.
Once you decide that you’re going to redesign your love life, everything else will follow from there. The right navigation tool will take you there faster.
But any road will get you there as long as you know the destination, and keep asking for directions.
The decision is the destination.
Twelve years ago I didn’t have the right navigation tool, but I did choose the right destination; A sex life that was based on what I valued.
First time experiences.
Being in love.
New men.
And it was no longer going to be based on my phobia that I would get hiv, or another std. That had been the big thing that had kept me tied to safe and long term relationships for as long as I could remember.
I wasn’t bad at long-term relationships. Quite the opposite, I was good at them.
But I was unsure if I would have had them, if it hadn’t been for the fear surrounding having a love life as a single.
Fear is the wrong reason to do anything.
Let alone build an entire life around it.
So I decided I was leaving the relationship.
One very important person during this time, was Benjamin.
Benjamin was someone who I had met when I was still a teenager, at a moment when I was in a relationship. But even though I was still very young, I was aware that I was in the relationship because my aids phobia simply didn’t allow for a normal love life as a single.
And Benjamin was everything I had been looking for.
Charismatic. Intelligent. And some thought he was arrogant, but I felt safe with him. He was very refined.
I felt loud compared to him, and I probably was.
I could have “had” Benjamin, if I had conquered my fears right then and there. But I didn’t.
And it would take me fifteen years before I did.
I thought about him a lot, in the months that surrounded my breakup from my partner, but also the breakup with my own, fearful self.
Eventually, I mustered the courage to contact him. He wrote that he had gotten married. It had been the same month my boyfriend and me had broken up.
He had basically been single up to the moment he met his wife.
I saw the bigger meaning. Obviously, he was not the man who would save me. Not back in the days, when I had been too fearful. And not now, since he had settled just as I was ready to start my adventure.
Although I saw that it was almost divinely orchestrated, how our lives had made it impossible to be together, what I failed to realize was that it wasn’t just him, who was not coming to save me.
NO ONE WAS.
That is one of the many, many things that I am going to do differently this second time around.
Creating the love life of your dreams is a two step process.
Step one, I already mentioned: Decide.
But step two is: YOU have to BE the new version of you.
Not “become the new version after being saved or helped by the right man”.
ALL you have to do after you decide, and this is the navigation system I was talking about, is to live from that place.
So in my case, it would have meant to start living as a responsible adult, who is aware of the dangers of sex, but who is also able to carry herself and take risks in order to express herself sexually.
Someone who will use condoms, but who will never dramatize the danger that she knows that is still present regardless.
Someone who understands that you can stay a hundred percent safe, but not if you also want to live your life.
Or at least HER life.
That was all I had to do.
But instead I was so focused on how my sexual experiences were going to be, and especially focused on getting the right partner, who could guide me through it.
What a waste of time.
To step into that role, that was all I had to do.
I could have cured my aids phobia without even seeing another man in my life. That fear lived inside of me. It didn’t have anything to do with the existence of men, and this idea is basically something that I feel touches on something much broader;
Sex is an inside job.
I ve experienced this with partners as well;
The ones who are good at sex, will enjoy it with a variety of women. Sure they will give me compliments, but we both know that I’m not exactly the first woman he’s having a good time with.
And the same with the ones who are having difficulties.
The experience of sex is for 80% the result of you being comfortable with it.
And 20% at most, what your partner brings to the bed.
So, anyway, I didn’t realize that twelve years ago.
That I shouldn’t make such a big deal of finding the man right for the job to sweep me off my feet, stand by my side or even magically heal me of my fears.
I never met an ideal man like Benjamin, and yet after eight years I did consider myself healed.
When I met my current lover Mr.Big, who was by far the riskiest of any of the men I met, I did say yes. And I did work through the residu of fears that I was still carrying around.
Although in a way conquering this fear is a lifelong thing.
But with Mr.Big, I didn’t make the mistake I had made with Benjamin.
And I never regretted it.
So when I say that I never expected “to do this again”, what I mean is that I never expected to set out on the same quest, as I had done twelve years ago. To rise above my fears.
First of all, because I considered myself healed.
And I now had the perfect lover Mr.Big.
And secondly, because I thought I would now “do” something else, and my next quest would be one to become famous and/or earn a lot of money.
I found it fascinating that people who had prioritized that, instead of their sex lives, had materialized that.
I had the great sex, because that’s what I had focused on.
They had the great income, because that had been their priority.
And now we were all in our forties, and I imagined we would all swap sides and get on to the next thing. They would go through their “but what about me phase” and I would get my shit together.
But then things with Mr.Big started to get a bit wobbly.
And suddenly I wasn’t convinced that I “had” the ideal lover.
I didn’t even know if we would ever get back to our lovely long dates and groundbreaking sex. It had been so long that he had given me a whole night..
And I started thinking of getting a second lover, more and more frequently.
So that I wouldn’t start obsessing over Mr.Big.
But also, as my creativity coach explained, to ensure that there would always be some sort of tension going on, so that I could write.
And there was a third reason why having two lovers, or a second lover, was appealing:
It meant that I would up my game.
One of the reasons I kept dismissing the idea of a second lover was that it completely freaked me out that I could then possibly transmit an std from one partner to another.
Even with condoms: I m phobic enough to know that unless you treat each other’s genitals like they’re radioactive material, there are viruses that you can transmit.
Mr.Big was my reward, my prize, for having conquered my own fears of getting an std. But pretty soon I realized that the phobia had been a two-headed dragon.
Not only could it shape shift from a fear of hiv to being scared of all life-long std’s; but the two heads also meant that there were two sides.
What I had been focusing on all those years was overcoming my fear to contract something.
But I was still phobic of transmitting something to a lover.
Especially if it was someone who would go home to his wife after.
I was nowhere near taking that responsibility!
I was miles from standing in my power, and being okay with the risks of being the villain here. The bad woman.
So twelve years after I have left my boyfriend and reinvented my love life, because I knew that long-term relationships based on fear were not a good thing, I will now work on this.
Not having two lovers because I’m scared, can never be a good thing.
I want to overcome this and reach the level where I am comfortable with it.
So no business goals or money goals for me.
Twelve years since I started my journey, and I m right back at the beginning.
With a decision:
I will get two lovers.
And by being that person, who already has that solved.
Everything in my life- the language I use, the ideas I express, the way I dress, everything – will now have to align with Me Having Two Lovers.
That was the secret I wish I had known twelve years ago.
You conquer your fears by living like it is already done.
You get two lovers by living like they’re already there.
You achieve Sexual Mastership, by acting like you own the part.
And then there is Benjamin.
Years before I broke up with my boyfriend (years!!), I cut a picture of a dark young man from a magazine, and pasted it into my notebook.
He reminded me of Benjamin.
That was the first time I thought of him since it all happened.
Shortly after my breakup I started writing about Benjamin.
And two years after my breakup I met a new young men, who reminded me so much about Benjamin, and I started writing about him too.
I ve looked up that initial picture many times.
Did I really cut that out, and manifested him?
Manifested that he would become so important to me on a spiritual level, as well as calling in a doppelganger into my life?
I think I did.
For the past twelve years, I dreamed about Benjamin, prayed to him.
Let him spoon up against him, an imaginary man lying behind me in bed. Giving me advice.
Lately I ve called onto him on several occasions.
When someone emailed me, and I was afraid to open it. Or when I had to do something scary.
“We can do this, ” I told the spirit of Benjamin.
He was my ally.
Maybe that was the real gift, over 25 years ago. That he was indeed never meant to be my real lover. Firstly because I was still phobic when I met him.
And then because he had gotten married, by the time I was ready.
I had met him so that I would have him in spirit, throughout my entire life.
Like a guardian angel.

<3LSH
An unexamined life is not worth living

NEW connect on Linkedin

Angel is the fifteenth chapter from Project M. 
Want to know how you can create your dream sex life?
Follow this blog and watch me do it.
The subscribe button to this diary is somewhere on the right.
or follow Twitter ; or Facebook

or subcribe to YouTube for daily videos about being a mistress.

tenth anniversary of the book that changed my life!

Summer 2008 I started writing in English.
Dutch American Diary 
Just like now, I was in love with two men. And just like now, they were both taken.
And – yes, just like now –  I had no idea where life would take me.
This 2008 diary became the only thing that offered stability during a time where I had just left my partner after fourteen years and the two new men were driving me crazy.
A book about starting over in your mid-thirties and reinventing yourself as a lover;
As a woman;
And as a vengeful fury from hell.

Als je Nederlands bent is 22 erotische verhalen een aanrader.
Maar je kunt natuurlijk ook gewoon de hele shop leegkopen.

BOOK SHOP

These are my English titles:
Dutch American Diary 2008-2009  €15
LS Diary 2012-2013                                € 10
Bedtime Stories 2014                            €15
Mirage 2014                                               €5
Big, diaries and erotica 2015-2016 € 20
Get a 25% discount on all prices in the shop.
Select your store f.e. Nederland or United States
with the flag in the upper right corner.

After seeing the comedy Book Club, Lauren abandons everything and puts her cards on sex.
All of them.
Effective immediately.

It had been one of those extra long blog posts about day-to-day shenanigans, that took me five hours and left me feeling totally disintegrated, that had made me realize:
“Writing is not making me any money. 
If I want to build a business doing what I love, I have to put yoga first.”
“Yoga” referred to rebuilding my yoga studio teaching privates, and creating yoga videos.
The videos were not just a good way to do my marketing.
They were also the only way I could make myself do something that resembled a yoga self-practice.
Doing yoga at home was something I had been unsuccessful at for over a decade.
Making two half hour yoga videos was a lot easier.
Or so I thought.
Because the two Madonna yoga videos took me four hours a day. Including preparing the little talk about the song that was the title of the video, and writing a small column in the description box of the video.
I had high hopes I would be able to work more effectively but even then I could never see myself getting it under three hours..
The only reason I was still teaching yoga in the first place, was because the studio was providing a business address.
I had already chosen to go all in for my writing, but soon realized I would still need a business address to register my writing biz at the Chamber of Commerce. In the Netherlands this registration is mandatory; It’s not an option to not do it, if you want to start selling your own books.
Anyway, because my home address is secret, I needed to rent a location.
Ironically, keeping my yoga studio on, was the easiest and one of the cheapest ways to do this.
Also, this was a yoga space, not an office space. I could still earn back my rent teaching yoga.
When I combined my desire for a daily yoga practice, with marketing my private classes, the yoga videos were born. And I also added Madonna, to make it more interesting for myself. 
And dear God, after writing that blog post that had taken five hours, and had sucked the life right out of me, it became extra appealing to prioritize the two yoga videos and doing it first thing A.M..
Then I would never have a Writing Hijacked My Day experience again!
I got up at 05.45 to make the videos.
They were still taking four hours or more. I was losing precious time to feeling resistance, and a lack of concentration.
And then the day came when I got up at 05.45 and yet I didn’t make the bloody videos…
Fuck it.
I had assumed, that as long as I would get up on time, the rest would kind of take care of itself.
And I did prepare.
And I got dressed.
And although it had been an awful slow morning, I started filming at a decent enough time. But then I threw away three videos when I was already 15 minutes in or more.
One because I had failed to put on the lights.
One because my neighbor started playing guitar.
And the third because I felt so flat and tired, it was simply unwatchable.
I had already spent over four hours, and I had NOTHING to show for. I was calling it quits. No more yoga videos.
Now I knew that there was something infinitely more dissatisfying than finding yourself drained from writing a blog post;
It was losing hours and hours to creating videos that were ultimately not even made.
Meanwhile, on my latest session with my creativity coach Sara, she had pointed out that my work as the Good Mistress, was just the tip of the iceberg.
I had two books planned on the subject, and created Good Mistress videos, but it was becoming more and more likely that the Good Mistress was only a snipped of a much greater cause;
Sex and relationships as a way to claim ownership of your life.
And to acquire full mastery of it.
This realization had started with me ranting about a comedy called Book Club, about middle aged women reconnecting to their sexuality after reading the 50 Shades trilogy.
What had infuriated me was that despite Anastasia Steele, who surely pushed her boundaries in love and sex by accepting Christian Grey’s invitation to his Red Room of Pain; the four characters from Book Club did no such thing.
There was a maneater who had been trying to protect herself from being hurt, finding love again with her youth love.
That was it.
That was the character development.
And the other three were similar. All staying firmly on the vanilla side of the spectrum. 
You can’t possibly start a movie waving around 50 Shades novels, and then let the story end with four mature women finding relationships that would barely satisfy the average twenty year old, and expect the audience to like it.
My expectations had been a little higher than that.
Namely that it is especially in this age group where it is appropriate to differentiate from classic monogamous vanilla love, and start taking way more risks.
What made 50 Shades so erotic, but also controversial within the real BDSM community, was that Anastasia was a virgin, who had no experience with relationships whatsoever.
Being a submissive was not on her request.
Technically he had asked her consent, but in reality she was in no position to say No. It was like offering food to the starving, after you’ve spoiled it with sand.
He never should have done that. Offering sex to a virgin, but only within the context of a dominant and a submissive, was definitely his cruelest act. 
That is why it would have been so welcoming if Book Club had shown us, how fabulous the concept of dominance and submissive sex can work in a mature relationship.
And how exciting it can be, to explore all the things your mother warned you about, at a much later age. When you are no longer supervised and no one gives a rat’s ass, about what you do in the bedroom.
Your virginity or your reputation are no longer at stake.
You can’t get pregnant anymore.
And all the other real or imaginary dangers that are connected to teenage and twenties conditioning, are simply no longer valuable.
If they ever were.
Book Club had the potential to show that. That the game Christian Grey and Anastasia Steele had been playing in their twenties, is so much more fun when you’re in your senior years.
It could have saved that marriage in Book Club.
Which was now saved dancing to Meatlove, after hubby had effectively ignored all tie-wrap and Duct Tape hints his wife had dropped.
Book Club settled for being a movie where we learn older people can have sex.
Instead of raising the bar showing that they have the best cards to have THE BEST SEX EVER.
I feel that “forced” monogamy and glorifying chastity, are defendable and to a degree understandable when you’re setting up the rules for young people who want to start a family.
However they can no longer be used when you’re over 40.
Ideally you start off in your teens, having normal sex in safe relationships. And you build that up to exciting sex in safe relationships or normal sex in exciting relationships, whichever you prefer;
And when you’re over 40 you can do both.
You can have exciting sex in exciting relationships.
A mistress usually has normal sex, but in an exciting relationship. It’s not for beginners, but if you’re over 30 and it suits your preferences, the Mistress role could be played.
However, the mistress is only one of the avatars, or archetypes, of having an adult sex life.
There could be so much more.
And even the mistress could up her game by shifting to riskier sex, or by becoming the mistress of two men.
And it was at that moment, discussing how I wanted to put my broader vision out there, supporting amazing sex lives for a mature audience, that it hit me why I was always only interested in sex.
And also why I had felt depleted after writing for five hours over something that was not sex. 
Or even why I had felt so much resistance making yoga videos.
Because it was SEX where my message lay.
Not yoga, not building a business, not writing. Not even diary writing unless it was about these deeply transformative shifts.
And with this new insight, I could also start developing my own sexual identity, without having to pin it down to being a mistress.
I could rebrand my whole life to achieving sexual mastership over forty.
That was my new topic.
And I could include my current struggles, that had to do with being a mistress.
The unclear status of my relationship with my lover Mr.Big.
The deadlock with Christopher. Who had chosen not to see me again, now that we knew we had feelings for each other and he was married.
Those struggles would now serve as test cases for achieving that mastery over my sex life. On how to stay the course and get what you want.
Because if my new message was that you could create a brand new and fantastic sex life over forty, then there really was only one way to prove it.
Show it could be done.

<3LSH
An unexamined life is not worth living

NEW connect on Linkedin

Want to know how you can create your dream sex life?
Follow this blog and watch me do it.
The subscribe button to this diary is somewhere on the right.
or follow Twitter ; or Facebook

YouTube

Gambler is the fourteen chapter from Project M. 

tenth anniversary of the book that changed my life!

Summer 2008 I started writing in English.
Dutch American Diary 
Just like now, I was in love with two men. And just like now, they were both taken.
And – yes, just like now –  I had no idea where life would take me.
This 2008 diary became the only thing that offered stability during a time where I had just left my partner after fourteen years and the two new men were driving me crazy.
A book about starting over in your mid-thirties and reinventing yourself as a lover;
As a woman;
And as a vengeful fury from hell.

Als je Nederlands bent is 22 erotische verhalen een aanrader.
Maar je kunt natuurlijk ook gewoon de hele shop leegkopen.

BOOK SHOP

These are my English titles:
Dutch American Diary 2008-2009  €15
LS Diary 2012-2013                                € 10
Bedtime Stories 2014                            €15
Mirage 2014                                               €5
Big, diaries and erotica 2015-2016 € 20
Get a 25% discount on all prices in the shop.
Select your store f.e. Nederland or United States
with the flag in the upper right corner.

De volgende Nederlandse boeken
zijn ook op voorraad bij boekhandel de Feeks in Nijmegen
verzending gratis v.a. € 17,50

Het Boek Benjamin           € 45
verzameld werk NL en Engels.
Het enige boek dat hier niet inzit is Witte Tijgerin, dus mijn andere Nederlandse boeken zitten hier wél in.

Mango                                 €15
coming of age novelle

22 erotische verhalen   € 15
literaire pornografie in de geest van Anais Nin

Witte Tijgerin                  €5
gids voor solitaire vrouwen die een geweldig seksleven willen en plenty energie

Lauren has stepped up her game, posting a daily video on YouTube about how to be a good mistress.
Until it dawns on her, that she has broken one of the cardinal rules, last time she had sex with Mr.Big.
And hasn’t heard from him since.

I knew it, I knew it, I knew it.
As much I like to think I can prevent history repeating by learning from past experiences, ultimately you can’t change a fuck about anything.
Not in a positive way.
Nor in a negative way.
If someone is meant to be your friend, you can behave like a true asshole and yet somehow you will end up back together.
And the same thing is true for when there’s a mismatch:
you can tiptoe around their sensitivities but they will feel insulted or unwelcome anyway.
Best give it up entirely, if you think about it.
However these were not my thoughts last week, when I went over to see Big for a let’s call it “troublesome” breakfast date. Mr.Big had been holding out on me, only asking me for small encounters or dates in public places.
We had one proper date this entire year.
I think.
I m not sure.
Anyway, it had kind of been bothering me for a while, and yet it still came as a surprise to me that I fell in love with someone else.
By now I do have things sorted out with Christopher, and he has told me we cannot see each other anymore. Apparently it had been a surprise to him as well.
But I didn’t know that yet when I went over to see Mr.Big.
And either way I wanted to know what Big’s position was on this. The curiosity, or maybe “obsession”, over what had been going on in his life, and why he didn’t want to see me as often and for as long as he used to, had been killing me for months. Being in love with someone else gave me a good reason to ask questions I normally wouldn’t ask.
But I was aware that me pushing things, was going to make this morning a likely candidate to be our last.
Or worse; that we would have what should have been loving makeup sex.
But that it was incomplete, icky sex, where we acted as if we still wanted each other.
He wouldn’t tune into me, the way he had been doing for the past three and a half year.
And already in love with someone else, I wouldn’t respond to him, as fully as I always had.
It would not be makeup sex at all, but our last time. And the experience would stain everything we had had.
I didn’t want that.
So that was why although I was carrying condoms, I had no intention of having sex. It was the safest way to avoid another icky, out-of-tune, last-time breakup sex experience.
Something I had plenty of.
So I went over to see him, and told him I was in love with someone else, and that this made it relevant for me to know why he had not been wanting to see me the way he used to.
Why we had so little sex.
And that I could feel he still wanted me, and cared deeply for me, which made it even more confusing.
I got an answer, but it wasn’t the clear-cut answer I was hoping for. Maybe that had been unrealistic to expect, considering our affair had never been a clear-cut anything. And in a way it was one of the many things I appreciated about it.
We didn’t have weekly scheduled time together or anything.
I never knew where I stood.
And I fricking loved it.
So of course he wasn’t going to suddenly, magically, lift the veil and allow me to look into the depths of his soul as to what his motivation had been.
And we had sex.
And it was wonderful.
Even if this would prove to be our last time together, it would have been a good one.
But there was one moment during sex where I lost it.. kind of. I was still “on the lookout” so to speak, to not let this turn into a negative last-time experience. And now that we were about to have wonderful sex, there really was only one way this could turn sour, in hindsight.
Which was if he would breakup and get another mistress, or divorce and get another girlfriend, and me finding out that this woman had already been in his life at that very moment we were having our really-great-non-icky-in-retrospect-breakup-sex.
And somehow I forgot everything I knew about being a good mistress and asked him.
“I have to know: Is there someone else? Have you been seeing someone else?”
We were still half clothed, but physically we were way past the point where it was comfortable to return. I asked it at a moment when you should never ask questions like that.
It was that Paradise by the Dashboard Light moment, where someone will answer any way they have to, in order not to ruin the moment, and have sex.
So he answered: “What? No!”
And I was relieved.
I don’t know if I believed him, but when I asked that question I was just so aware that I didn’t want to ask it. I didn’t want to be a woman who felt she had a right to know what he did when he wasn’t with her.
That’s what wives do.
Or girlfriends.
Or inexperienced mistresses, who didn’t have a clue how to play the game.
But I was a Good Mistress.
I had studied this shit. I knew EXACTLY what I was doing, and yet I lost it. I slipped. Right at the moment when I thought we had made it through, and had avoided all bad scenarios imaginable, I overplayed my hand by wanting to prevent that one last scenario – of him already seeing someone else.
Whether he had spoken the truth or not hardly mattered.
My question proved that I could turn into doing the wifely thing in the blink of an eye. That my mistress side was a charade, a mask, that I knew how to wear.
But that could come off any second.
And underneath, I was just like all the others.

<3LSH
An unexamined life is not worth living

Want to know what happens next?
The subscribe button to this diary is somewhere on the right.
or follow Twitter ; or Facebook

or subcribe to YouTube for daily videos about being a mistress.

Stay is the thirteenth chapter from Project M. 

tenth anniversary of the book that changed my life!

Summer 2008 I started writing in English.
Dutch American Diary 
Just like now, I was in love with two men. And just like now, they were both taken.
And – yes, just like now –  I had no idea where life would take me.
This 2008 diary became the only thing that offered stability during a time where I had just left my partner after fourteen years and the two new men were driving me crazy.
A book about starting over in your mid-thirties and reinventing yourself as a lover;
As a woman;
And as a vengeful fury from hell.

Als je Nederlands bent is 22 erotische verhalen een aanrader.
Maar je kunt natuurlijk ook gewoon de hele shop leegkopen.

BOOK SHOP

These are my English titles:
Dutch American Diary 2008-2009  €15
LS Diary 2012-2013                                € 10
Bedtime Stories 2014                            €15
Mirage 2014                                               €5
Big, diaries and erotica 2015-2016 € 20
Get a 25% discount on all prices in the shop.
Select your store f.e. Nederland or United States
with the flag in the upper right corner.

De volgende Nederlandse boeken
zijn ook op voorraad bij boekhandel de Feeks in Nijmegen
verzending gratis v.a. € 17,50

Het Boek Benjamin           € 45
verzameld werk NL en Engels.
Het enige boek dat hier niet inzit is Witte Tijgerin, dus mijn andere Nederlandse boeken zitten hier wél in.

Mango                                 €15
coming of age novelle

22 erotische verhalen   € 15
literaire pornografie in de geest van Anais Nin

Witte Tijgerin                  €5
gids voor solitaire vrouwen die een geweldig seksleven willen en plenty energie

Lauren has DECIDED she’s going to be rich and famous as fuck.
The reason she’s finally getting her shit together is that she wants a chance to adopt stay-over cat M.
But also because having a career beats pondering over her miserable love life. But then the Universe gives her some real shit to worry about.

I heard a weird sound coming from the hall.
Initially I was going to ignore it because I was already half a day behind on my Master Plan to Fame and Glory, and I was in the middle of the third take of my Mistress video.
I had to keep my eye on the prize, which was a flourishing career as a writer.
The reason I was half a day behind on schedule, was that I had practically become physically ill, after yesterday’s blog post had taken me five hours to write.
Instead of the ninety minutes or such, I assumed things like this should take.
As a backlash from that I had been suffering pains in my body, in places that were not even supposed to have nerves as far as I knew.
After my body’s violent response to long hours behind the computer, I switched up my daily to-dos.
Instead of starting with writing, with then little or no time left for anything physical, I would start with making yoga videos, for my Dutch account/ my private yogastudio. It was a great way to reach more people, and to get fully booked.
But most of all yoga would help me relax, stay in shape, and stay away from the damn computer.
This process of shooting yoga videos was however not nearly as neat and tight as I expected it to be. And after hours and hours they were done but now I had to rush because I had a friend coming over, and still had to do grocery shopping.
By the time she left, I still hadn’t done any of the stuff I wanted to do for my writer’s account.
Not the daily video.
Not the daily blog.
And the entire workday, or what others would call a workday, was already gone.
Although I knew I would not be able to do all Key Activities To Success, I did think doing my mistress video was feasable.
But I didn’t get my story straight, and started over twice. Both when I was already at fifteen minutes or so.
After the yoga videos, I was now making a mess of this Mistress video.
And then I heard the scratching from the hall.
I wanted to ignore it.
So what if cat M had found something to scratch in the hall, right?
Because that’s what it sounded like anyway. No reason to get up.
But I did.
And it was not M: Someone was picking my lock.
In the conversation that followed I realized I didn’t know him, didn’t like him, and as far as I could understand the vague story, I didn’t believe him.
There were however aspects that won me over to assume, if only for a minute, that in theory, he could still be the temporary tenant from one of the other apartments. He said that he wanted to see the apartment.
I didn’t open the door, but I could see through the peephole. He had a set of keys that looked as if they were from a coorperation, including an original key to the front door.
“You may want to check that apartment,” I said.
With the number.
He was looking at the label on his keys.
“Okay, thank you. This number is unclear. I think that must be the right number.”
The other apartment was around the corner, so I couldn’t see it.
I put my head out of the window, and saw him leaving the building.
Enough time had passed for him to check the keys, but not to really “see” the apartment. If I had understood correctly.
“Did you find it?” I yelled.
“Yes, thank you!” he said.
I crawled behind my computer to check with our contact if they had given a new tenant a key.
“I m sure it’s all okay,” I lied.
And wondered if I still dared to go out at night, if I was coming home to a building where he could be lurking in our basement and hallways. 

<3LSH
An unexamined life is not worth living

Want to know what happens next?
The subscribe button to this diary is somewhere on the right.
or follow Twitter ; or Facebook

or subcribe to YouTube for daily videos about being a mistress.

Pretender is the twelfth chapter from Project M. 

tenth anniversary of the book that changed my life!

Summer 2008 I started writing in English.
Dutch American Diary 
Just like now, I was in love with two men. And just like now, they were both taken.
And – yes, just like now –  I had no idea where life would take me.
This 2008 diary became the only thing that offered stability during a time where I had just left my partner after fourteen years and the two new men were driving me crazy.
A book about starting over in your mid-thirties and reinventing yourself as a lover;
As a woman;
And as a vengeful fury from hell.

Als je Nederlands bent is 22 erotische verhalen een aanrader.
Maar je kunt natuurlijk ook gewoon de hele shop leegkopen.

BOOK SHOP

These are my English titles:
Dutch American Diary 2008-2009  €15
LS Diary 2012-2013                                € 10
Bedtime Stories 2014                            €15
Mirage 2014                                               €5
Big, diaries and erotica 2015-2016 € 20
Get a 25% discount on all prices in the shop.
Select your store f.e. Nederland or United States
with the flag in the upper right corner.

De volgende Nederlandse boeken
zijn ook op voorraad bij boekhandel de Feeks in Nijmegen
verzending gratis v.a. € 17,50

Het Boek Benjamin           € 45
verzameld werk NL en Engels.
Het enige boek dat hier niet inzit is Witte Tijgerin, dus mijn andere Nederlandse boeken zitten hier wél in.

Mango                                 €15
coming of age novelle

22 erotische verhalen   € 15
literaire pornografie in de geest van Anais Nin

Witte Tijgerin                  €5
gids voor solitaire vrouwen die een geweldig seksleven willen en plenty energie

Lauren’s creativity coach asks her what “Madonna” means, at the very root of Lauren’s drawing of a Creativity Tree.
And in the process, she sets off Lauren’s ambition to rule the world.

The biggest difference between Sara my creativity coach and my last business coach Warren, was that Sara first saw me dressed only in a pink bikini that couldn’t even be considered proper swimwear.
We had our first video call scheduled in the middle of a heat wave and the temperature in the house was over 30 degrees celcius. I immediately apologized for what no coach should have to see. Especially not on a first appointment.
But in retrospect, I think I sold myself short.
First of all because all my other coaches had been men, and I had never experienced any trouble with heterosexual men not enjoying a scantily dressed female body.
And secondly because we had now found “I have no shame” Madonna as the driving force behind everything I had done, or had aspired to be, since the age of 13.
With the exception of the times Madonna had been married and had cleaned up her act. During which we both went our separate ways.
“I never considered myself a fan in the eighties,” I told Sara. “I loved Madonna, especially Desperately Seeking Susan. But she was famous for six months or something, and then she cleaned up her act for Sean Penn.
Out of all people, right?
You clean yourself up for Sean Penn?”
But reinventing herself a lady had of course little to do with Madonna’s misbehaving actor husband. And everything with Madonna herself.
She wanted to be someone else.
It took until 1990 for me to get on the Madonna wagon, with the movie Dick Tracey and the controversial video for Justify my Love which in hindsight was the starting point of a five year long Sex Era.
And having stood by her then, I was so convinced she was my woman, that I even stuck through the Evita phase.
And the children’s-books-author- English-countryside phase.
Because eventually, she always came back to stripping down to her version of a tiny pink bikini, and stir shit up.
Sara and me deciphered that it had probably been Madonna’s shape shifting, which had caused me to miss out on spending the eighties with her, that had been the reason I worshiped the ground she walked on.
My desire to change had been why I had experienced teaching yoga as so limiting. I had felt I was being paid to stay the same.
Or to at least to let my change be small enough so that I would still teach the same yoga, at the same time, year in year out.
It wasn’t because I had not liked teaching yoga, that I had ended my career.
But because I had been doing it like everybody else.
If I were to ever return to making a living out of it, I would have to find a way to do it my way.
More like a performance, a series of classes with a certain theme or style. But just like a tour, it would always have to end. And there could never be any expectations as to what I would be doing next.
I needed freedom to start again.
And there was another similarity Sara pointed out to me. And she used a word that I don’t think even existed until Sara used it yesterday.
Sara pointed out that I had a nick for being sexually disruptive.
Oh my God! How cool is that!
And so true.
Indeed, I can be disruptive in many areas, and with regard to many things. But I am never more passionate than when I rock the boat of sexuality.
Monogamy.
Marriage.
And offer an entirely new idea instead.
My sexual orientation is that of a mistress. I have no doubt about that. Sexual tension and secrecy are requirements for me, and I desire to have only one partner. Those preferences can only be met as someone’s secret mistress.
So I AM THAT.
But my God what a great disruptive role to play!
Not only do I feel compelled to point out to other potential mistresses, that they should stop trying to fit into a box that is never going to fit.
But I also believe that as a society we need to put the mistress back into the equation, if we want to get long and lasting marriages.
The mistress, as well as the cheating husband, and even to an extend the betrayed wife, can all belong to the same bigger picture where everybody gets what they want, and nobody gets hurt.
Once we get passed the idea of condemning the mistress for what she is, we can train good mistresses that are a blessing to all.
So the disruptive part of my sexual orientation, really does come naturally to me. And it is no coincidence that I am most drawn to Madonna when she’s being sexually disruptive, and can feel myself moving away from her at times when she seems to be conforming.
And Sara also pointed out how I need the tension of my sexuality, or the angst it has been creating my life. I need it in order to write.
Happily ever after would be the end of the story, end of my writing.
“Maybe that’s why I continue to come back to the idea of a second lover,” I agreed with Sara.
“I keep having this idea that I should have two lovers. Even though it’s unpractical, and not a full fit with my sexuality. But it’s probably the writer in me who wants that.”
If I had two lovers instead of one, I would have double as much stuff to write about.
And a slimmer chance one would choose for me, and we would ruin the story.
We briefly talked about the fact that it was not ideal, to be dependent on men for my writing.
Which I described as:
“I write so much easier, if I know that at some point somebody is going to get laid.”
But there was one exception.
And this too had to do with Madonna being the root cause of everything I had called Life since when I was 13.
Because even though Madonna had forbid journalists to ask her about this all throughout the eighties and presumably most of the nineties as well;
And all those around her were not allowed to talk about it either;
In one aspect of my life, Madonna had been the only person inspiring me, up until I was way over forty.
Now naturally this was not sex!
As important as sex is in my life, as well as for my writing, I can’t contribute that solely to Madonna. I have been a sexual being from when I was five years old, or younger.
I was born for it, so to speak.
But the area where Madonna had been the sole inspirator, had been her ambition. Her career, which she had managed herself, when all pop stars from her generation had left it to their managers, to record companies and so on.
Madonna didn’t.
And she switched managers and labels, whenever she could upgrade going to someone else.
She was ruthless.
And she was also in total control.
Her ambition had been so blatantly obvious in everything she did, it didn’t matter that she didn’t speak about it. It showed!
And it inspired.
“When I think of making a career from writing, I don’t need men,” I told Sara. “It’s like, in 2006 I broke up my relationship, because I wanted to fall in love and have those experiences of first time sex.
And that’s when I started writing.
I wrote about what I wanted, and how I developed myself.
And ultimately, I got it.
So that’s why I know that if I set out to make a career out of writing, I can do it. And when I feel that, the reality of that, I don’t give a fuck if I have two lovers, or none. I am completely in the zone.”
And I showed her a page in my notebook, that I laid open on my keyboard every night so that it would be the first thing I would read every morning before turning on the computer.
“These are the three things I want to do every day.”
It was
1. write a blog post,
2. make a Madonna yoga video (Dutch account)
3. one hour of finance and sales activities.
“That’s it!” Sara said. “Own your ambition! Just like Madonna. Writing about being a mistress can bring you where you want to go.”
Where I wanted to go was circled with a bright red marker.
I had hesitated to show it to Sara, but ultimately I had.
Because it showed that this really was on my mind, and that I wasn’t bullshitting her when I said that my career made me so excited I even forgot my lovers.
The circled statement, that I had on my desk and that inspired me every morning before I got to work was:
“I DECIDE LS Harteveld is FAMOUS AND WEALTHY AS FUCK.”

<3LSH
An unexamined life is not worth living

PS! Starting today ->
Daily YouTube videos about being a mistress.
Subscribe here. 

Want to know what happens next?
The subscribe button to this diary is somewhere on the right.
or follow Twitter ; or Facebook

Material Girl is the eleventh chapter from Project M. 

tenth anniversary of the book that changed my life!

Summer 2008 I started writing in English.
Dutch American Diary 
Just like now, I was in love with two men. And just like now, they were both taken.
And – yes, just like now –  I had no idea where life would take me.
This 2008 diary became the only thing that offered stability during a time where I had just left my partner after fourteen years and the two new men were driving me crazy.
A book about starting over in your mid-thirties and reinventing yourself as a lover;
As a woman;
And as a vengeful fury from hell.

Als je Nederlands bent is 22 erotische verhalen een aanrader.
Maar je kunt natuurlijk ook gewoon de hele shop leegkopen.

BOOK SHOP

These are my English titles:
Dutch American Diary 2008-2009  €15
LS Diary 2012-2013                                € 10
Bedtime Stories 2014                            €15
Mirage 2014                                               €5
Big, diaries and erotica 2015-2016 € 20
Get a 25% discount on all prices in the shop.
Select your store f.e. Nederland or United States
with the flag in the upper right corner.

De volgende Nederlandse boeken
zijn ook op voorraad bij boekhandel de Feeks in Nijmegen
verzending gratis v.a. € 17,50

Het Boek Benjamin           € 45
verzameld werk NL en Engels.
Het enige boek dat hier niet inzit is Witte Tijgerin, dus mijn andere Nederlandse boeken zitten hier wél in.

Mango                                 €15
coming of age novelle

22 erotische verhalen   € 15
literaire pornografie in de geest van Anais Nin

Witte Tijgerin                  €5
gids voor solitaire vrouwen die een geweldig seksleven willen en plenty energie

Lauren has opened up her palace to take care of a cat, M.
Who doesn’t want to be there.
But despite Lauren’s plea, M’s daddies refuse to pick up their stressed out gayby:
“Hon’, any midwife can tell you: Just carry on with your life as usual.”

I got completely stressed out from M not wanting to have anything to do with me. She had been a perfectly social cat when her daddies were still here.
And she had made daily dramas at home, for having to share her living space with male cats. But now that she was here she acted as if she’d been left with the witch from hell.
I decided I needed a nap.
Just as I was about to fall asleep, after a little fiddling with my phone, M crawled from underneath the bed, jumped on it, and stared at me with me pale light-green eyes.
M is a grey cat, but the official colour is either “blue” or “lilac”. She’s a beautiful Ragdoll with long hair and a round face.
Her full name means something like furry little creature.
Which is about accurate, except that Ragdolls are large. And M is overweight because she has been stress eating.
So she is by no means small.
It’s not the primary goal to let her lose weight, but it is expected that she will, now that she’s got a place to herself.
I was surprised that after 24 hours, M had apparently given up distrusting me, and was ready to start anew.
I petted the silky fur and started talking to her.
And tears started running down my face.
This was the first time since Max had died, that I had a cat in my bed.
M and Max shared the same soft hair.
I took my camera and shot a video of me and M cuddling, and sent it to my friends. They both responded independently from each other:
“Oh my God! She looks totally stressed out! We’re coming to get her immediately!”
Followed by laughing smileys with tears.
M however turned out to be a real diva, in the sense that she responded strongly to:
Me turning on my other side;
Or standing up;
Or opening the balcony door.
And just when I decided that I was going to stick to my guns and not tiptoe around the house, and clean the rug where she had been hiding under my antique bed, we had what will go down as Vacuum Gate.
I wanted to clean the rug in the corner she had been hiding.
She was presumably on the kitty litter box, because that was where I had last seen her.
And I had closed the bedroom door, assuming I was keeping her out.
I pulled the bed from the wall, and vacuumed the carpet, and then pushed the bed back AND SHE CAME OUT FROM UNDERNEATH THE BED!
Omg….
That wasn’t good.
Now I had violated her safe place, with her in it nonetheless.
She demanded I opened the bedroom door immediately, and hid under the couch.
Three hours later I had to leave, and she still hadn’t moved. She was staring back with accusatory glow-in-the-dark eyes.
The friend who I was about to see offered that I could stay home, if I wanted to please M and try be friends again, but I said I really needed a break.
I had been in the house for two days and the walls were closing in on me.
“I need a fucking drink,” I replied.
And I put on a pair of red high heels, stonewashed jeans and a red and white blouse, to convince myself that I was more than just an animal caretaker.
My friend complimented me on my outfit.
“I had to. I was starting to feel like one of those new moms. With baby spills on her clothes and such.”
I drank two wine, and became vaguely aware of men desperately trying to get our attention. On the way home I had a man shouting at me while hanging from a car window. And a full terrace of one of those Turkish coffee houses that only had men on it, got into a slight uproar simply because I had to wait on my bicycle at the traffic light.
And I made a note-to-self to remember this outfit.
Being in love with two men, and neither one of them making plans to see me, it wouldn’t hurt to bring out the big guns.

<3LSH
An unexamined life is not worth living

Want to know what happens next?
The subscribe button to this diary is somewhere on the right.
or follow Twitter ; or Facebook

Lucky Star is the tenth chapter from Project M. 

tenth anniversary of the book that changed my life!

Summer 2008 I started writing in English.
Dutch American Diary 
Just like now, I was in love with two men. And just like now, they were both taken.
And – yes, just like now –  I had no idea where life would take me.
This 2008 diary became the only thing that offered stability during a time where I had just left my partner after fourteen years and the two new men were driving me crazy.
A book about starting over in your mid-thirties and reinventing yourself as a lover;
As a woman;
And as a vengeful fury from hell.

Als je Nederlands bent is 22 erotische verhalen een aanrader.
Maar je kunt natuurlijk ook gewoon de hele shop leegkopen.

BOOK SHOP

These are my English titles:
Dutch American Diary 2008-2009  €15
LS Diary 2012-2013                                € 10
Bedtime Stories 2014                            €15
Mirage 2014                                               €5
Big, diaries and erotica 2015-2016 € 20
Get a 25% discount on all prices in the shop.
Select your store f.e. Nederland or United States
with the flag in the upper right corner.

De volgende Nederlandse boeken
zijn ook op voorraad bij boekhandel de Feeks in Nijmegen
verzending gratis v.a. € 17,50

Het Boek Benjamin           € 45
verzameld werk NL en Engels.
Het enige boek dat hier niet inzit is Witte Tijgerin, dus mijn andere Nederlandse boeken zitten hier wél in.

Mango                                 €15
coming of age novelle

22 erotische verhalen   € 15
literaire pornografie in de geest van Anais Nin

Witte Tijgerin                  €5
gids voor solitaire vrouwen die een geweldig seksleven willen en plenty energie

To Lauren, living alone with cats is the ultimate life-style. But she has a new roommate who doesn’t like the solitude of Lauren’s home one bit.
Someone with large green eyes and whiskers.

Yesterday, my friend Damian discovered my kitty vision box: a beautiful hot pink and black box that originally held a €200 tablecloth.
Not mine, I don’t even have a table.
It was now filled with the tangible memories of all my cats, such as their passports and the address tube from my first cat when I was still a teenager.
It also held a bracelet that I had bought for myself a month ago, that said Cat Mom.
I wore it occasionally when I was working behind my desk, to remind myself what the reason was that I wanted a career writing from home. Which was to provide for myself, and for my new cats.
To be there for them and to have the day to myself as well.
It was basically how I had lived for nine years, as single cat mom, until my last cat Max died in January. It had been years where I had fully embraced both the joys as well as the limitations of having cats.
I barely went on holidays, and cancelled them last minute if my cats got sick.
When Max died it would take at least a year before I could have new cats.
My career as a yoga teacher had slowly but steadily slipped downhill.
And we had an upcoming refurbishment from the housing corporation, where the house would be uninhabitable for a month.
So I had at least an entire year to myself, before everything would be cat-ready again. Yet the absolute last thing on my mind was a holiday.
I longed for my career to be figured out.
For the refurbishment to be over.
And to have new cats.
And that was eight months ago, and I’m still nowhere near figuring out point one, my career. It’s been a pretty wild ride, but currently I am no longer a yoga teacher, although for business purposes I do still own the studio, and do teach occasionally.
It’s all very new, but it looks like I m going to do pop-up classes that I plan only 24 hours in advance.
And teach privates.
It’s not a fulltime occupation, or income, yet I don’t have a business model in place for my writing either.
And I seem to have a dangerous tendency to recreate a job, or business model, that consists of things that I don’t really want to do.
That are not my strengths at all.
The past few weeks I ve been working with a creativity coach, which has led to the discovery that I have been “majoring in my minors”.
Instead of working starting with my inner world, and focusing on creating, I seem to automatically make a career out of being a guide to others.
First by being a yoga teacher.
Toyed with the idea of becoming a math teacher multiple times.
Added being a mindset mentor to my list of expertise.
With a spin-off to being a mindset and marketing mentor to entrepreneurs, writers and artists.
And now for my writing too, and my latest work there which revolves around being a mistress, I thought I would be helping mini-mes who were still in the dark about their sexual identity.
I even intended to start a new video series about being a mistress, on my YouTube channel. Which I immediately discarded when I realized I was putting myself “out there”. When my best work was created “in here”.
I am an introvert.
Teaching or guiding or being great company, or simply being company at all; might be available AFTER doing my purpose work.
However they are not, my purpose work.
I can think of jobs that are relatively “energy neutral”, so to speak. In the sense that although they are not my purpose work they won’t drain me of my energy.
But being a guide isn’t one of them.
Social encounters or endeavors are perfect to spice up my life or my work, but if they require planning, or are mandatory, or if they require my attention before the purpose work gets done?
Guiding sucks the life out of me.
And knowing that my new life began to take shape.
If I had it my way (and why wouldn’t I?) I would create whatever I wanted;
Send that out into the world , and not create for the sole purpose of serving;
Put on my coat and go to the movies or have a drink with a friend.
And I would have cats who could lie on my lap as I was writing, or walk over my yoga mat as I was creating yoga videos.
Just like the nine years prior, I wouldn’t need any holidays, because I was so content with my life, and loved to put the cats first.
And it was that dream life, that was embodied by the box with cat paraphernalia.
The moment I had put together the box had been really sad.
I had been decluttering and stumbled upon things like notes from the babysitter after she had visited Max; My description on which medicine he needed and how it should be administered.
Just in case I got hit in traffic.
And it made me so sad that my cats had died and that I had to go without cats, for God knows how long.
My professional life was nowhere near cat-ready.
And I cried and felt miserable that Monday night, but by collecting all the little things in a box, I was holding the vision that one day I would have cats.
And it manifested really quickly because on Thursday my friends asked me if I could look after their cat for a limited period of time. Because she seemed to be having stress from living with the other cats. And she was supposed to only eat diet food, but that was difficult to manage as they had multiple cats.
If she could live with me for three months, they would be able to see how she did eating only her preferred food, and without stress from the other cats.
And I would have a little feline these cold, lonely months.
But it’s Sunday morning now, and she has not left her spot under the bed since I got up.
She was still meowing and walking around like a real queen when my two friends were still here, and she did occasionally left the bed the first hours after they had left.
But since last night she has only left her spot under the bed, when I was asleep. She’s so quiet.
The reason I think having cats and working from home go hand in hand is because that’s the only way you can keep an eye on them, to see if they’re okay or if they want you to do something.
And this little lady is clearly not doing okay.
And the only thing I can do for her, is to get her home.
Apparently, she’s not too keen on holidays either.

<3LSH
An unexamined life is not worth living

Want to know what happens next?
The subscribe button to this diary is somewhere on the right.
or follow Twitter ; or Facebook

Holiday is the nineth chapter from Project M. 

tenth anniversary of the book that changed my life!

Summer 2008 I started writing in English.
Dutch American Diary 
Just like now, I was in love with two men. And just like now, they were both taken.
And – yes, just like now –  I had no idea where life would take me.
This 2008 diary became the only thing that offered stability during a time where I had just left my partner after fourteen years and the two new men were driving me crazy.
A book about starting over in your mid-thirties and reinventing yourself as a lover;
As a woman;
And as a vengeful fury from hell.

Als je Nederlands bent is 22 erotische verhalen een aanrader.
Maar je kunt natuurlijk ook gewoon de hele shop leegkopen.

BOOK SHOP

These are my English titles:
Dutch American Diary 2008-2009  €15
LS Diary 2012-2013                                € 10
Bedtime Stories 2014                            €15
Mirage 2014                                               €5
Big, diaries and erotica 2015-2016 € 20
Get a 25% discount on all prices in the shop.
Select your store f.e. Nederland or United States
with the flag in the upper right corner.

De volgende Nederlandse boeken
zijn ook op voorraad bij boekhandel de Feeks in Nijmegen
verzending gratis v.a. € 17,50

Het Boek Benjamin           € 45
verzameld werk NL en Engels.
Het enige boek dat hier niet inzit is Witte Tijgerin, dus mijn andere Nederlandse boeken zitten hier wél in.

Mango                                 €15
coming of age novelle

22 erotische verhalen   € 15
literaire pornografie in de geest van Anais Nin

Witte Tijgerin                  €5
gids voor solitaire vrouwen die een geweldig seksleven willen en plenty energie

On top of her game, Lauren feels fully confident she’s got it all under controle.
She’s a mistress.
And she’s good at it.
Until she makes a terrible discovery.

For the past four years, the most important objection from my friends, in regard to my mistress status, has been;
“But how can you do this to his wife?!”
This question always comes from female friends. Male friends tend to be totally undisturbed by that aspect. Naturally they have their own wives to worry about, and many of them don’t even become friends because the price of seeing me is too high, and the revenues too low.
You re not going to invest in secrecy, if you don’t know if you’re going to score.
And you’re not going to make a stand fighting for your freedom to have female friends, if you intend to sleep with me.
It would be like alarming the dogs, before you break into the house.
So although the “few” men who actually make it to a date with me, do have questions regarding my choice to be a mistress, it’s never how I work around my guilt over what I m doing to Big’s wife.
First of all, Big’s situation was easy because I didn’t know his wife. I do have one male friend, whose wife accidentally became a client of mine.
At that point I made her my priority.
And the friend and me reviewed our friendship, first checking in with her. If it had been necessary I would have chosen not to see him for a while, even though he is one of my absolute favorites.
So once I have a relationship with a woman, I will never get involved with her husband or boyfriend, not even for friendship if it would bother her.
But other than that I don’t feel guilty.
There are so many reasons this aspect of being a mistress doesn’t bother me.
The biggest chunk of it is that I don’t like (here we go);
Being part of a group;
And a group of women in particular;
I don’t like shared identities;
Not among women and not between man and wife;
I think most marriages are claustrophobic;
And that most women are mean to their husbands;
And that most men victims, who have lost their masculinity;
And what I do is basically set things straight.
I m the wolf that keeps the population healthy. And sometimes I don’t even have to do something.
I can recall multiple situations where the sheer presence of me, the thought of me (a beautiful woman wanting to date her husband) completely transformed a marriage, without ever going on a date.
Marriages that had been stuck for years were suddenly wide awake, now that there was another woman unapologetically offering herself to the male, and usually I really only had friendly feelings for him.
Although I would never say:
“PLEASE DON T MAKE SUCH A FRICKIN DRAMA I DON T EVEN WANT TO HAVE SEX WITH HIM!”
I think I kind of liked watching how it all played out.
That I saw it as a purge, as the two of them weeding out all the toxins that had been building up between them.
And I ve also witnessed couples that had been dating for a long time, and he had not committed and she was letting him get away with it, suddenly shifting into the highest gear, when she realized the space was being used to see me.
Then she would step up and show the pre-breeder stage she was already in. Waiting impatiently, but pretending to keep her cool.
You can’t keep you’re cool with the wolf around.
No one can!
And I m so happy to be the wolf, it’s the best part for sure.
So although Mr.Big is my only lover, my impact has been much greater than just his marriage. You could even say that Big’s marriage is least impacted by me. And the men who are my friends or at one point were about to become a friend, that those marriages or relationships were the ones that changed.
That’s the place where the herder is now watching the sheep like a hawk.
Or make the meadow really nice, so that the sheep doesn’t bother to graze somewhere else.
Or remembers to always go home.
Big’s marriage however, has not been impacted by my presence at all. They didn’t have conversations where my name came up, they didn’t reinvent their marriage.
He just got himself a little something extra on the side.
That he’s enjoying exactly as often as he wants to.
And I know – he never told me this explicitly but I could hear this between the lines – that during our affair he has become a better husband.
Because he has created his own solution for the moments he doesn’t feel loved at home. So that they can make up as soon as she’s ready, or they are ready. And he’s not holding on to anger.
If Mr.Big had not started taking care of himself this way, their relationship would have had many more bad days the past couple of years, than it did.
So that’s why I don’t feel guilty:
Because first of all, I believe this is Mr.Big’s choice.
I even believe it’s his bloody nature to need two women with whom he shares vastly different things, but that’s up to him and other men who have mistresses to tell that story. Not up to me.
The second reason I don’t feel guilty towards the wife is because like I said, I think Mr.Big’s marriage has improved with me on the side.
His wife may be lied to, but she’s getting the benefits, for sure.
An independent husband who takes responsibility for himself first, and doesn’t let himself be tamed. What a tremendous gift he’s giving her.
So no.
I don’t feel guilty.
For all of the above reasons.
However, on a practical level, I have been concerned with how being a mistress could be dangerous, because of the wife and public opinion, if this blows up.
The mistress is always the one who’s wrong, the villain.
In the movie Fatal Attraction this storyline is played out, by actually making the mistress into an aggressor. But I don’t need to be aggressive to make women hate me.
To justify being aggressive towards me.
Whether I sleep with their husband yes or no.
It’s the reason I m writing in English, and will never be on Dutch tv or such, speaking about mistresshood, even though I have SO MANY things to say about it!
But I’m not going to put my life on the line for this, I m really not.
I know what I am, right?
I want to inspire other women like me (who like mystery and having only one partner) to be a mistress. Because it can be done in a good way. You don’t have to create a blood bath with a meadow full of dead sheep.
Being a good mistress is something you can learn.
And I can teach you how.
Just like I can show men how a mistress can have a place in your life.
However, I am not going to give my life for this.
Like I said: it’s not my problem if your life is a blood bath with too many cadavers, if your husband is a spineless push-over, which you by the way created yourself; Or if you re consumed with bitterness and rage because life is not giving you what you want.
I did the work and I invested big time, in figuring this out. And the mistress does play a significant role in keeping everybody happy.
Yet, I still want to go to the supermarket without being bothered. Or hated.
So this work will be in English, and if I ever do media, it will be English too.
In English media I m this overseas, exotic writer, with her European ideas. Which is way less threatening, than someone who lives in the same country or even same city.
That way I try to limit the risks for myself.
But I can’t avoid risk entirely.
My biggest fear has always been that my current affair is going to get me killed.
If our affair would come out, 99% of women, and all men who want to stand out as a new candidate for Mrs. Big to date (now that her marriage has collapsed) will think it’s completely fair to turn their aggression on me.
The mistress.
And Mr.Big will be nowhere to be found, because he’ll focus on saving what he can from his marriage, and his relationship with the children.
I would have to face it alone.
That has been my biggest fear.
Now naturally, I think it’s worth it. But it’s one of the reasons why I would never go to bed with a married man, and take it lightly.
“Am I prepared to pay for this affair with my life?”
That’s my line of thought.
Always.
Now there are reasons why I believe being Big’s mistress in particular, includes this risk. Which may explain why I did something stupid…
Why I did an online investigation of Christopher, in order to find out more about him. Christopher and me have been friends in real life, but we never added each other on Facebook.
Nor do we have a shared circle of friends.
Christopher has ended our friendship, because I have confessed my feelings to him, and he doesn’t want to see me anymore.
But it doesn’t feel like the end of it.
It still feels as if some time in the future, I m going to be his mistress, or at least discuss this option with him in all seriousness.
Not to rationalize what I did, because obviously I should have waited screening him until he wanted to get back in touch, but I couldn’t help myself.
I had to know.
It took some time to figure things out, because both he and his wife had secure profiles. But I have a knack for Facebook, and Google photos did the rest.
And there it was.
I couldn’t believe what I saw.
The wife of Mr. Big, the affair that was already putting me at risk of being lynched, was linked to the wife of Christopher. Both were serving the same public cause: a powerful organization that presented itself as charity, but there were persistent rumors that it was tied to sectarian practices.
Including burning down everything that stood in their way, in a variety of ways.
Intimidation and blackmail.
Lawsuits and bribes.
Some say murder.
If I would have an affair with Christopher and it would blow, his wife would have the same powerful organization backing her up, as Mr.Big’s wife.
And possibly?
Mrs. Big and Mrs. Christopher, would also find each other.

<3LSH
An unexamined life is not worth living

Want to know what happens next?
The subscribe button to this diary is somewhere on the right.
or follow Twitter ; or Facebook

Borderline is the eighth chapter from Project M. 

tenth anniversary of the book that changed my life!

Summer 2008 I started writing in English.
Dutch American Diary 
Just like now, I was in love with two men. And just like now, they were both taken.
And – yes, just like now –  I had no idea where life would take me.
This 2008 diary became the only thing that offered stability during a time where I had just left my partner after fourteen years and the two new men were driving me crazy.
A book about starting over in your mid-thirties and reinventing yourself as a lover;
As a woman;
And as a vengeful fury from hell.

Als je Nederlands bent is 22 erotische verhalen een aanrader.
Maar je kunt natuurlijk ook gewoon de hele shop leegkopen.

BOOK SHOP

These are my English titles:
Dutch American Diary 2008-2009  €15
LS Diary 2012-2013                                € 10
Bedtime Stories 2014                            €15
Mirage 2014                                               €5
Big, diaries and erotica 2015-2016 € 20
Get a 25% discount on all prices in the shop.
Select your store f.e. Nederland or United States
with the flag in the upper right corner.

De volgende Nederlandse boeken
zijn ook op voorraad bij boekhandel de Feeks in Nijmegen
verzending gratis v.a. € 17,50

Het Boek Benjamin           € 45
verzameld werk NL en Engels.
Het enige boek dat hier niet inzit is Witte Tijgerin, dus mijn andere Nederlandse boeken zitten hier wél in.

Mango                                 €15
coming of age novelle

22 erotische verhalen   € 15
literaire pornografie in de geest van Anais Nin

Witte Tijgerin                  €5
gids voor solitaire vrouwen die een geweldig seksleven willen en plenty energie

Lauren seems unharmed by Mr.Big’s wishy washy behavior, as well as Christopher’s decision to not see each other anymore.
She feels comfortable in her own skin, being a mistress.
Without knowing if she’s a mistress to anyone in particular.

Ivy was one of the friends who responded personally to my post where I got put on hold by both Big and Christopher.
The deep-dive after a five day rollercoaster ride where I had finally understood how my feelings for these two men had been disrupting my life from the deepest layers of my soul.
Like low whale noises, you’re not supposed to hear, but that had vibrated my entire life out of place.
Until I found myself between the ruins, and with two men who said they didn’t know if they could still see me.
And yet after the initial shock, I had not felt a thing.
If I looked in the mirror I saw a blushing, happy woman, as if I just had sex. Which was accurate because I did have sex with Mr.Big.
But we didn’t exactly part on the best of terms.
“Mr.Big always withdraws when he’s not feeling well,” Ivy pointed out to me. “He thinks you’re in it for the good times.”
“I’ve told him a million times that I would still love him if he was old and poor,” I sighed. “So that would be pretty stupid.”
But of course Ivy was right. That was what Mr.Big was thinking. And I couldn’t have picked a worse moment to crack open my monomaniacal devotion for Mr.Big, by falling in love with Christopher.
It was hurtful.
But it had been like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Mr.Big’s apparent lack of interest had started months and months ago.
Marginalizing our contact to sixty, ninety minutes instead of the magnificent dates we used to have.
In his defense: he was always fully tuned in to me, and a joy to be around.
The sex was less groundbreaking than it had been, but that had to do with how little time we had for our date.
Not because the intimacy or the desire for each other had not been there.
So nothing was ruined between us, as far as I was concerned. But my heart had found a way to fill the void he left.
And it couldn’t be undone.
A month ago I recorded a cute video (Nederlands), where I asked the Universe for a second lover. I had been quick to dismiss it as a silly idea, and had only posted the video because it had become a tradition that I made an annual video about me and Mr.Big in the Ferris wheel.
I didn’t actually thought having a second lover would be the solution to anything.
I was unsure if my body would even respond to two men.
But what strikes me now if I watch that video is:
You can SEE IT!
I’m in love already!
I might have missed the two giant whales, swimming and vibrating their voices deep down into my subconscious:
One a familiar voice who seemed to be needing time alone.
And one new whale who I thought was there ….  by chance I suppose! That it was just a good whale season or something.
Who knows what I was thinking.
But if you see that video, you can see I m practically high on love hormones. That the whales were impacting me greatly, even as I was recording a video that said:
“I need a second whale.”
Baby, it’s already there!
Look down!
A month has passed since then, and the first whale Mr.Big still needs his time alone. And the second one Christopher has said we can’t see each other anymore.
“I don’t understand why I still feel so good,” I said to Ivy. “My position with Mr.Big is critical as fuck, and I can’t do anything about it.”
And I wasn’t going to contact Christopher either. I was fully going to honor his desire to not see each other anymore.
Yet I felt like putting my hand into the water to let them know I was still here.
“It just doesn’t feel over,” I admitted.
Referring to Christopher.
Ivy shook her head, and said this would not be the end of it.
“That ship has sailed.”

<3LSH
An unexamined life is not worth living

Want to know what happens next?
The subscribe button to this diary is somewhere on the right.
or follow Twitter ; or Facebook

Physical Attraction is the seventh chapter from Project M. 

tenth anniversary of the book that changed my life!

Summer 2008 I started writing in English.
Dutch American Diary 
Just like now, I was in love with two men. And just like now, they were both taken.
And – yes, just like now –  I had no idea where life would take me.
This 2008 diary became the only thing that offered stability during a time where I had just left my partner after fourteen years and the two new men were driving me crazy.
A book about starting over in your mid-thirties and reinventing yourself as a lover;
As a woman;
And as a vengeful fury from hell.

Als je Nederlands bent is 22 erotische verhalen een aanrader.
Maar je kunt natuurlijk ook gewoon de hele shop leegkopen.

BOOK SHOP

These are my English titles:
Dutch American Diary 2008-2009  €15
LS Diary 2012-2013                                € 10
Bedtime Stories 2014                            €15
Mirage 2014                                               €5
Big, diaries and erotica 2015-2016 € 20
Get a 25% discount on all prices in the shop.
Select your store f.e. Nederland or United States
with the flag in the upper right corner.

De volgende Nederlandse boeken
zijn ook op voorraad bij boekhandel de Feeks in Nijmegen
verzending gratis v.a. € 17,50

Het Boek Benjamin           € 45
verzameld werk NL en Engels.
Het enige boek dat hier niet inzit is Witte Tijgerin, dus mijn andere Nederlandse boeken zitten hier wél in.

Mango                                 €15
coming of age novelle

22 erotische verhalen   € 15
literaire pornografie in de geest van Anais Nin

Witte Tijgerin                  €5
gids voor solitaire vrouwen die een geweldig seksleven willen en plenty energie

Lauren feels the best she’s felt in weeks, even after Christophers rejection and Mr.Big’s persistent unavailability.
Which could be explained because she had sex with Mr.Big. And also, because she can be really proud of herself!
Because she did the right thing. 

One of my favorite movie lines is from Brad Pitt.
In Thelma and Louise, his character JD is living hand to mouth, hitchhiking across Texas posing as a student.
And he robs gas stations and bed partners alike.
But Thelma doesn’t know that she’s gonna pay for her time with him. Still intrigued with his honesty that he robs stores, she asks him how he does it.
JD grabs a hair blower, holds it like a gun, and gives a little performance. Practically charming himself through the armed robbery.
“My gosh, you sure gentlemanly about it,” Thelma says.
At which he replies:
“I’ve always believed if done right, armed robbery doesn’t have to be a
totally unpleasant experience.”
And I can now say the same of being a mistress. I can charm my way through it, without causing unnecessary damage.
Naturally I felt horrible yesterday. Within five days I had gone from realizing I was in love with two men, to basically being rejected by both.
Mr.Big was battling his inner-demons and we were as undefined as ever. Maybe worse.
And Christopher had decided we couldn’t see each other anymore.
Which was not that bad, since I wasn’t sure if I even wanted to be a mistress again.
After three and a half years I knew exactly what the pitfalls of Mistresshood were. And although I was still convinced that I was a mistress by nature, as far as anyone can pinpoint a sexual orientation, that didn’t make it easy.
But the way I had handled my crush on Christopher had impressed even myself.
I had proved that affairs didn’t have to be a painful ball full of conflicting emotions and interests, the way it had been at the start of my affair with Mr.Big.
The ball could be unravelled.
An experienced mistress could control the damage, because she knew what she was doing. In the words of JD:
“It doesn’t have to be a totally unpleasant experience.”
I knew for sure, that although what I had done may have seemed like a small thing, warning Christopher about my feelings for him was in fact huge.
It was the difference between robbing a liquor store, and traumatizing people for life; Or leaving them baffled, and with a good story to tell.
I had asked consent. And at a very early stage, not when emotions were flying high.
Because it would have been soooo easy, to just ask Christopher out on a new date. Or stage a new situation where we would be spending time together. And then make him fall in love with me, or offer him an opportunity to act on his feelings.
But I had chosen not to.
Instead I had said:
“You need to think about this, before we see each other again.”
And he didn’t want to see me again, and he told me why.
He didn’t owe me an explanation, but I appreciated it that he told me.
There is a law in several countries, making sex illegal unless you have asked for consent. I think what’s wrong with that law, is that it misses out on the most important thing: a shared vision of where you want this to go not now, but in the future.
One of the things Mr.Big once told me, was that he did ask for consent. Explicitly. Not just that he would not rest until a woman was actually begging in five different languages to be taken. He didn’t say that, but I know that’s how he works.
That was the easy part.
When he was about to have sex with someone, he explained to her that this would very likely be only for one night. That he wasn’t available for more.
And that she had to think about it, if that was enough for her. Because otherwise they could also just cuddle up and go to sleep.
And sometimes a woman had then chosen to not have sex, and that had been completely fine.
So maybe in the end, it was Mr.Big who taught me the true meaning of consent. That asking permission, or getting consent, or feeling what somebody wants in the now are only the beginning. That a good lover takes responsibility for the future.
“Do you still want to proceed if this and this might be what happens next?”
When I started dating Mr.Big I had made jokes that I was now playing in the Major League of dating. That this was where the strongest players were. Where hearts were broken, lives were ruined, but also the place where the biggest of pleasures and the greatest of victories would be our rewards.
It was not a place for pussies, so to speak 😉
But although I realized there was a lot of foul play going on, and that we were all playing to win, there were still several players who insisted on playing by the rules.
Mr. Big.
Me.
And we would protect the newbies, anyone just entering the game, until they had decided if they wanted to stay. And we’d help them get their defenses up.
We were fair players, and that’s what we taught others.
Each in our own way.

<3LSH
An unexamined life is not worth living

If you want to receive the next blog post though, the subscribe button is somewhere on the right.
or follow Twitter ; or Facebook

I Know It is the sixth chapter from Project M. 

tenth anniversary of the book that changed my life!

Summer 2008 I started writing in English.
Dutch American Diary 
Just like now, I was in love with two men. And just like now, they were both taken.
And – yes, just like now –  I had no idea where life would take me.
This 2008 diary became the only thing that offered stability during a time where I had just left my partner after fourteen years and the two new men were driving me crazy.
A book about starting over in your mid-thirties and reinventing yourself as a lover;
As a woman;
And as a vengeful fury from hell.

Als je Nederlands bent is 22 erotische verhalen een aanrader.
Maar je kunt natuurlijk ook gewoon de hele shop leegkopen.

BOOK SHOP

These are my English titles:
Dutch American Diary 2008-2009  €15
LS Diary 2012-2013                                € 10
Bedtime Stories 2014                            €15
Mirage 2014                                               €5
Big, diaries and erotica 2015-2016 € 20
Get a 25% discount on all prices in the shop.
Select your store f.e. Nederland or United States
with the flag in the upper right corner.

De volgende Nederlandse boeken
zijn ook op voorraad bij boekhandel de Feeks in Nijmegen
verzending gratis v.a. € 17,50

Het Boek Benjamin           € 45
verzameld werk NL en Engels.
Het enige boek dat hier niet inzit is Witte Tijgerin, dus mijn andere Nederlandse boeken zitten hier wél in.

Mango                                 €15
coming of age novelle

22 erotische verhalen   € 15
literaire pornografie in de geest van Anais Nin

Witte Tijgerin                  €5
gids voor solitaire vrouwen die een geweldig seksleven willen en plenty energie