Remittance Girl's Blog, page 20

There is no Freedom without Risk: Suck it Up.

Many Britons I know are in an uproar about Prime Minister David Cameron’s threat to force Google to block certain searches. He’s riding on a massive wave of anti-pedophilia hysteria that has gripped the UK for the past 8 years, fed by an obsessive press that can’t get enough of reporting the titilating details of abominable offenses against children, and more laughably, the high drama of the 15 year old who ran away to France with her idiot 30 year old teacher.

Google does its level best to track down and block pedophilic images where it can. Furthermore, any expert in the field will tell you – pedophiles don’t find their porn searching on Google.

Allowing a government to legislate what can and can’t be searched on the only search engine in the universe that counts anymore is a dangerous thing. What terms will be considered ‘offensive’? Hot young pussy? I did daddy?

Not exactly up my alley, but here’s the problem: governments NEVER relinquish invasive powers once they’ve gained them. So perhaps age-play offends you and you don’t give a shit if “those” search terms are dropped. But think about how easy it would be block other search terms? Do you really think once a government can force a search engine to block terms that are offensive to you now, they won’t block others in the future.

When the Democrats were elected to the White House in the US, many people thought that covert surveillance of their private communications would stop, but it didn’t. This isn’t a party thing – it’s a power thing. Once you allow a government to determine what is good for you to read, to look at, to search for… it is almost impossible to curtail the depth of that censorship.

There is no freedom of speech, of expression, of congregation without risk. And the risk is that there will be highly offensive things floating around.  Of course, if they ARE floating around, there are laws that can be used to prosecute them.

But let me remind you that there were pedophiles before the internet and they’ll be there after Mr. Cameron has his way with your search engines. They’ll still do the appalling things they do, and you will have no freedom to search what you want.

You’re living in a democracy. Write to your MP, donate to organizations that lobby for and stand up for a free web. Because he who controls information controls everything. Including you.

There is a formal petition to the Government in the UK NOT to filter search engine results HERE. Please sign it. https://submissions.epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/51746

 

 

Once By Fire

Once I loved a man who loved canes.

This was not the first thing I knew about him, or the second, or the third. For many months, he masqueraded like a lover of other things: of serial compositions, old Penguin book covers, Bauhaus furniture and Belgian white beer. He showed me what he thought I wanted to see. He wooed me with picture postcards and ice cream in the park. It took him a fortnight to bend over and solemnly lick the vanilla drip off my bared thigh on a summer’s afternoon. When I thanked him, he pretended as if nothing of any note had happened. But then, I was young and didn’t know that I was supposed to giggle and act kittenish. He was quiet; it cost him a lot to talk. He made a monumental effort, thinking it was what was required of him. I wished he’d shut up and sit peacefully, but was too polite to say so.

Instead, we tolerated our mutual efforts with the grim determination of odd people who pretend to be normal in the vain hope that the other party will either be too stupid to notice or too smitten to care. Of course, that never works out, but it is an indication of the severity of the oddness. The ritual sacrifice of one’s persona to keep loneliness at bay.

The first time we had sex, it was spectacularly awful. I suspected him of going through an entire catalogue checklist of mediocre porn, all effected with a studied expertise that made me think I wasn’t really meant to be in the room at all. Immaculate technique and not an iota of passion. Which, unsurprisingly, did nothing for the emergence of mine. I wrote it off as ‘first time sex syndrome.’

The second time wasn’t any better, except now I could spot where he was in the checklist, having lived through it once and possessing annoyingly good pattern recognition. It was dawning on me that perhaps I should either call it quits or hunt for hidden cameras once he’d fallen asleep.

On the Sunday afternoon I was preparing to tell him it wasn’t going to work out, we were walking down New Oxford Street and passed James Smith & Sons, fine purveyors of umbrellas, walking canes and riding crops. Momentarily distracted from my unpleasant task of breaking up with him, I stopped and looked in the window.

I caught his reflection in the glass and, past it, a neat row of canes, crops and whips. It was as if I was standing next to a different person. He wasn’t smiling or leering or sly. He was suddenly wearing the expression of a passionate man.

“I’ve always wondered what kind of people shop here,” I said.

“People like me,” he replied, meeting my reflected gaze.

“Do you have a favourite?”

He nodded his head towards a simple Malacca cane. “I’m a traditionalist.”

“I should have guessed.”

“Is this where you give me the push?”

“Not anymore.”

I once loved a man who loved canes, and he made me his Joan of Arc.

On Kissing

First, I’d like to acknowledge my blatant thievery. The title is a shameless appropriation from Derrida’s book on Jean Luc Nancy: On Touching. It’s a damn difficult read and I’ve never made it all the way through. It’s one of those texts that, unless you’re doing a dissertation on Nancy or Derrida, probably works best as a book to dip into, to taste and luxuriate in and close.

But this post really originated from a dream I had. It was a dream of an ideal kiss. I almost never have wholly positive dreams. If they start out that way, they quickly devolve into something darker and more horrific. But this one didn’t. I’ve come to understand that, when my brain allows me those perfect dreams that contain no anxiety, it is always marking a moment of drastic interior change. The last time I had one, it was of slipping into a bath filled with blue water. The vapours tendrilling off the surface were, I knew, were fatally toxic, but I had no anxiety about it. I slid into the water, lay back, closed my eyes and breathed in, and died. It marked the end of my fear of death and the lack of anything beyond it. I’m not sure what this dream marks yet, but it had exactly the same quality of… transportation. I wish I could think of a better term.

So, this kiss. This ideal kiss. It brings up all sorts of questions. Who was I kissing / kissed me? And what was it like? It would be easy to answer the first by saying that it doesn’t matter who it was. But although that’s partially true, it’s not completely accurate. It was someone I would have accepted a kiss like that from. Someone I could kiss that way: a someone, not an anyone. If you were to kiss a stranger like that, they are immediately ‘unstrangered’. You can have interacted with someone for a lifetime, but that one kiss can transform all you have known of them and all you share, put it under erasure (if you don’t know this concept, look it up. It doesn’t mean to ‘erase’ but to destabilize the meaning you once thought was complete and definite). Once you have kissed, all that information, all that knowledge is rendered on a different plane. As if all you have known through language and semiosis is now gilded, thickened with something that defies language. It’s not simply another layer of information. It changes the nature of what you know itself. It is an act of ontological transformation.

“The first kiss in this understanding is the principle of philosophy–the origin of a new world–the beginning of absolute chronology–the completion of an infinitely growing bond with the self. Who would not like a philosophy whose germ is a first kiss?”

(Derrida, quoting Novalis. On Touching: Jean Luc Nancy)

I’m not going to go on to discuss the second to last part of this quote. Derrida expands on the uncanny recursive phenomenon of a kiss and it’s very interesting, but that’s another post.

To be specific about the kiss, I’m talking about a first kiss. Not a social peck on the cheek, not a tentative kiss to discover whether physicality is possible or not. A first lover’s kiss. When I woke from this kiss, I tweeted it, and fell back into a dreamless sleep, but it began a vibrant twitter conversation on kissing, which made me ponder it further. And I tweeted: From a Lacanian perspective, a good kiss may start in the Symbolic, but it lives in the overlap between the Imaginary and the Real.

There are, assuredly, kisses that serve a Symbolic function. A social kiss hello, or a kiss goodbye to mark a parting. There is the kiss you give to someone simply to initiate a fuck. They serve as language and as social ritual. But the kind of kiss I dreamed about, the ‘good kiss’ of my tweet, moves past language, past social convention or even adherence to the social order very quickly.

It inhabits that quantum space between embodiedness and the transcendent abyss of the Real. Of course there were lips and mouths and hands and breath. The taste of skin and saliva. The urgency to reach and to drink and to offer up. And, in a way, there is a sort of language there. The kiss speaks not only of the presence of desire, but of its momentary yet eternal insatiability. This sort of kiss, like touch, is different from other erotic acts. It offers no satisfaction. Pleasure in being caught in the engine of desire, with no promise of orgasm, no height to reach, no terminal pause. It celebrates the pleasure of hunger, even when no meal will be forthcoming.

Who would eschew a kiss like that, even if it were to be the last experience one ever had?

It put me in mind of rethinking the Judas Kiss. In a way, all ‘good kisses’ are the kiss of Judas. The mainstream reading of Judas Escariot’s kiss with Jesus is that of betrayal and hypocrisy. But I’ve always had philosophical problems with that (Please note, I’m not a Christian. I’m an Atheist, but religious texts have posed some of the deepest existential questions and so they’re worth referring to).

Without Judas’ betrayal, there would be no crucifixion, no resurrection, no Christ the Redeemer. Of all the apostles, Judas is the only one burdened with an essential part in the narrative. He must put the wheel in motion that leads to Christ’s ‘passion’ and in doing so, damn himself to being the absolutely unforgivable villain. His sacrifice, in a way, is greater than Christ’s. The question is, did he know it?

This kiss. This dreamed first kiss is a Judas Kiss. Because it thickens the knowledge of each lover for the other, but also for the limits of it. There is never a second ‘first kiss’ to be had with that lover. You only ever walk across the threshold once, and then it is as if that threshold had never existed. This pleasure of the crossing cannot be repeated. It leaves you with a hunger for more, but there is no more of that first kiss.

There is only a second. And it’s different. It’s a betrayal.

Not to end on such a seemingly negative note (although I don’t really consider it one), I offer you this:

What Would Happen (If We Kissed) courtesy of @Studio_M_

 Click to listen

 

Problematic POVs

Photo: Jason A. Samfield

I’ve been reading through the submissions for the Under The Skin antho and doing some writing myself, and pondering the issue of problematic POVS.

There are some pretty hard and fast rules about POV, but there are a lot of grey areas where the way forward is not quite clear. Literary fiction is typically (but not always) in 3rd person limited (i,e. the narrator is referring to people as he or she or by name, but elects to follow the interior thoughts of one of the characters per scene). Most genre fiction is in first or third person limited. Some, like fantasy and, in the past, sci-fi, has been written in third person omniscient (the god voice).

Head-hopping (showing what more than one person in a scene is thinking) is usually frowned upon – and for good reason. It tends to distance the reader from immersion in the story because it’s not how we experience reality. But there are some interesting fine lines.

What happens when one character can, with reasonably surety, know what the other is thinking?

Elise stood under the building’s portico watching the rain plummet down. She pondered what to do. Ethan stood beside her and pondered also.

The paragraph is in 3rd person limited. We’re in Elise’s brain and we know she’s pondering. But how can we know, in 3rd person limited whether Ethan is pondering or not? Isn’t this head-hopping?

Well, yes and no. A more stogy and correct way to write this would be.

Elise stood under the building’s portico watching the rain plummet down. She pondered what to do. Ethan stood beside her and appeared to be pondering also.

But perhaps we’ve already established that Elise and Ethan know each other well? And that, when Ethan stands like that, in silence, she knows he’s pondering? Is the ‘appeared to be’ (as in, it appeared to Elise that he was doing the same thing) really necessary. I like my language sparse and clean.

I did this in a recent story called ‘Kiss of Fire‘ and someone pointed out what they felt was, quite rightly, an incident of this minor head-hopping. I think there is a compromise to be made about rules, here. You need to ask yourself – is the other person in the scene, who is not our 3rd person limited perceiver, reacting in a manner that is either highly expected, predictable, or understandable in view of what has gone before in their relationship in the story? If this minor head-hopping doesn’t interfere with the reader’s sense of lived experience of reality, then I say you can let it stand. And, when in doubt, just get a reasonably experienced reader’s opinion.

The other rule that I rarely but occasionally break is writing in 2nd person. The bane of badly written free-read erotica and cringeworthy fan fic, 2nd person POV can be incredibly annoying. The text is referring to YOU (perceived to be we, the readers) and telling us what we’re doing and how we feel. It’s offensive. The only place where it really works is in role-playing game narrative where it is the tool by which the writer pulls the player into participation the story storyspace.(You find yourself in a darkened room. You see a dagger glinting on the stone floor. Pick it up? Leave it?)

I just finished a story in 2nd person. I wrote it in 1st person POV first, because I wanted immediacy. (I and him, Frank, etc.) But for some reason it really didn’t work. It still felt detached. Admittedly, ‘Eversharp’ is a strange little piece of flash fiction and my aim was to examine the experience of cutting from the cutter’s POV. There are far more knife-play stories where the narrator is the cuttee. And the few where the narrator is the cutter which I’ve found fail pretty miserably to offer any insight into why the experience is erotic for the person wielding the blade. Very often, the cutter presents as utterly dominant, and there is some, mistaken in my opinion, belief that revealing too much of a dominant’s mental processes makes them appear weak.

So my first effort, in 1st person (I trailed the blunt edge of the razor down the centre of his chest) seemed okay. But having to refer to the cuttee in 3rd person (he or Frank or whatever) also seemed to put the person being cut at a distance. As object instead of subject.

When I tried it again in 2nd person, I felt it worked better. There was more immediacy and intimacy. But honestly, I’m just not sure.

Sometimes you just have to try things. I’m a huge advocate for the traditional rules of fiction writing, but I also believe that once you know them, you can occasionally break them to good purpose.

Eversharp

Gregorio Fernández 1625

The sharpness of the steel lives on the tip of my tongue. A strange synesthesia that bridges outer and inner worlds. The ghost of its edge hums in my veins. The cut it will make, the blood it will spill, the pain it will cause all push my heart up into my throat until my pulse pounds in my ears and my mouth floods with saliva. It is a metal-flavoured anticipation.

To say that there is a war going on inside me is a cliched understatement. The angels and the demons are meeting on a vast, scorched battlefield, and I’m standing in no-mans-land with this razor in my hand.  It’s not a civilized thing to want what I want. Nice girls don’t fuck themselves to fractured images of parting their lover’s skin. Perhaps, for some people it is about marking, claiming territory. Not for me.

Because I can hear the tight, shallow breaths you are taking. The brittle shield of a laugh you use to obscure your fear. There is a war inside you, too. The sane part of you wants to back out, wonders what on earth you were thinking when you agreed to this. But the other part of you wants to give me this as an act of love. It wants stay the course, to know you are brave enough, free enough to take it. You want to trust me not to turn sociopath and casually pull this fine, sharp blade across your throat. But you will never know for sure until it’s over.

So, here, I say, straddling your hips and trailing my fingertips over your fine, fragile flesh. The dusting of hair, the flat taupe nipple that quells at my contact, the hilly landscape of your ribs. Here just below the last one. Here, where Christ took the Roman spear. This is where I want to cut you.  And beneath my fingers, the muscles tense. I smile.

You are meat and more. The miracle of being a human animal, and the audacity to think ourselves gods. And here, in this moment, I am god. With my instrument of destruction, I take the illogical, the unnecessary, the senseless fruit of your fear.

That’s the spot I press my lips to, burnish with my breath. Beneath me, despite your reservations, I can feel the your reluctant cock swelling.  My cunt twitches like a clock, marking the seconds that pass when you flinch and hold your breath.

I know you want it to be fast and over, but I want it slow. Silver and gleaming, mirroring your skin as it travels, I tease the blunt edge down the center of your chest – a parodied autopsy – and watch the wings of doubt cast shadows across your face, the flint of fear crease your brow. But most of all, it is your eyes, flitting between the razor and me, until perhaps we are one and the same.  How ever did you let this sick little woman into your bed?

There are no rewards on offer. No bargains or barter. No ‘if you let me do this, then I will do that.’ Give me this because I want it. Because you tell me you love me as I am and I am this thing that wants this. Let me be me, here underneath your rib, where Christ took the Roman spear.  Be more for me than he was. Do it without the promise of resurrection.

Bending to the task, I hold your skin taut with my fingers and, angle the blade, let it rest there, anticipating its path. Then the slow shallow draw and the delayed hiss of breath as your nerves finally inform you of the offense being played out upon your flesh. The slow, wicked eversharp tug into the sacred softness of your skin.

Such a little cut, really. My eyes tear up at the sight of the deep red beads that are born in the wound, and spill over hesitantly, like thick tears as your chest heaves now that the deed is done.

I lay the razor down, close my eyes, and slide the rounded hill of my cheek over my sin. Inhale the scent of your skin and copper until I can bear it no more, until I draw my parted lips through the bloody smear, the raw new line, and taste my misdeed.

There is no always, no forever, but in that moment, I possess you. You are entirely mine.  My sweet little imitation of Christ. So, give me one more.

Eating Invisible Pasts: For Eliot and Baudelaire

I stroke my cock

to the jagged rhythm

of the syllables,

their meaning smeared

to indecipherable loss.

I luxuriate in the

stagnant waters

of a nostalgia

for something

that never was.

Its bitterness

turned with age

to cloying aphrodisiac,

its depths to

languid quicksand.

The paralyzing

elixir of love.

Fixed in the contemplation

of a happier ending

to a story I wrote

in the madness

of longing.

If only.

 

Kiss of Fire

Blair had never kissed anyone, ever.  And, of course, no one had ever kissed him. That seems obvious, but when people kiss, it’s never really clear who is doing the kissing and who is being kissed once their lips meet.

I met him at a craft fair in Camden.  He watched me weld the edges of a copper sculpture together. That wasn’t odd in itself – lots of men like to watch girls weld.  Something about the goggles and the gloves and stuff. They stand there and fantasize about what’s beneath it. Or maybe it’s the torch. Kind of like girls with guns. Fantasy crap.  Sometimes I get guys who want to talk shop, discuss the relative merits of different rods, but that stuff doesn’t interest me. I only taught myself to weld because I wanted to make the sculptures. I’m not fetishistic about it.  It’s just a means to an end.

But Blair wasn’t one of those guys either. I could tell he didn’t really care about the process. He was antsy and impatient for me to finish, shifting his weight from foot to foot, crossing and recrossing his arms over his bleach-stained black t-shirt.  The first thing I noticed, when I took my goggles off and looked up was that he was sporting a lot of ink, everywhere.

“Hi,” he said. “Is this your art?”

If I couldn’t tell that he wasn’t in the market for an art piece by the tone of his voice, one look at his face clinched it for me.  It sounds awful to say he was hideously ugly, and it wouldn’t be strictly true. Underneath all the ink and the piercings and shit, he had once been a handsome man. I could have overlooked the christmas tree worth of stuff hanging from his ears and jammed through his lips and eyebrows, but it was the swastika on his cheek that did it for me. It was impossible to ignore and impossible to look at it for long. My very first thought was ‘asshole’.

“Yup,” I said tightly, turning back to the work.

“I like what you do,” he said.

“Thanks.”

“Can I buy you a coffee, or a pint?”

I kept my eyes down. “Nope.”

“Why not?”

I found the next piece of copper to join to the structure and shook my head. Blunt is always best, I figured. “I don’t like your face.”

“I don’t like yours much either.”

“Good, then we’re done.” I said, pulling my goggles back on and reigniting the propane torch.

I started on the next join.  The goggles cut peripheral vision, and I figured that if I just ignored him long enough, he’d move on. But when I’d finished and pulled off my goggles again to inspect the weld, he was still there. Still shifting from foot to foot.

“Don’t you take commissions?”

I sighed and looked up at him. “You’re kidding.”

“No. I’m not.”

“You can’t afford me.”

“Yes, I can.”

It really was hard to look him in the face. All that mess was just so hateful. Symbols, signs, icons. People don’t think they matter, but they do. They speak just as loud as any voice, with all the weight of history and the meanings we’ve piled onto them. Blair had a face that screamed at me, even with his mouth shut.  “Look, I’m really not interested.”

“I wouldn’t ask you to make anything you’d find offensive.”

I sat on my haunches and put the torch down. I was broke.  It wasn’t like I was overburdened with commissions from rich collectors. The last one I’d had was for a primary school south of the river, six months before.  I’d only sold two pieces since then.  My money was running out and I didn’t want to suffer the humiliation of signing on for the dole again.

“What exactly do you want?”

“I’d rather not discuss it here.”

“I thought you said you didn’t want anything offensive? I’m not bloody making you an eight-foot Nazi sculpture for your living room.  I’ve got ethics, you know.”

He looked dismayed. At least I thought it was dismayed. It was hard to tell with all that junk on his face. “It’s nothing like that. I just…” he glanced around; people jostled him as they brushed past. “I just don’t want to talk about it in a public place.”

* * *

It wasn’t really the prospect of a commission that made me relent. It should have been – I needed the work – but it wasn’t.  What finally prompted me to pack up my gear, store it in the locker beside the stall and walk up to the pub on the corner with him was his ugliness, the handsomeness it was hiding, and curiosity about what a man like him could want.  I have always loved a good puzzle.

That’s what I was thinking as I sat at the little table, awash with prior alcoholic spills and watched him order our drinks.  People allowed the man his space. Up at the bar, bustling with punters, they gave him a foot’s clearance on either side. The bartender kept his eyes on his work and barely looked at him when he handed Blair his change.  What would it be like, I thought, to go through life with a face like that? One that frightened people into maintaining a conscious distance? It might be very convenient in a lot of situations. But lonely, I thought. In the end, it would be achingly lonely. Why would anyone in their right mind consign themselves to that kind of exile?

I’m no great beauty myself. There was a time when I’d been angry about that. I saw just how much easier it was for pretty girls to have the things they wanted given to them. But then I saw that being given things had its downside. I watched the pretty women I knew make so many compromises, get snarled up in webs of expectation and obligation. And it turned out that being pretty was never enough in itself. People wanted to possess that beauty, to say they owned it, to consume it, to wear it, to employ it to enhance themselves. At worst, beauty made you a public spectacle. At best, someone always expected a blowjob as well.

I came to the conclusion that getting what you wanted for yourself was less complicated, and you didn’t owe anyone anything. I only had to suck dick when I felt like it, and I still got laid as often as I felt the itch.

Having mused on all of that, by the time Blair sat down and slid my pint across at me, I was ready to engage with him on another level. For a while we just drank in silence, and I looked at his face. Really looked at it. And the more I looked, the more the swastika and the bullet piercing his eyebrow and the inked noose around his neck, and the ragged scar that meandered, like a tear streak, down from the corner of his eye to his jawline, stopped offending me. The spider-web at his temple, the enigmatic numbers on his upper lip, the badly inked Frankenstein bolt on his other temple. It was like sifting through the contents of a charity shop.

“Most people don’t look as long as you.”

The movement of his face was a bit of a shock. I’d been lost in my scrutiny. “I bet. They look away, don’t they?”

“Usually. Or they end up bleeding and unconscious.”

I sat up and put my pint down. “Is that a threat?”

“No. Just a fact.”

It’s not like I was actually worried he’d hit me.  “Were you as angry before you got all that crap done?”

He met my eyes and worried the ring in his lip with his teeth for a moment, then settled his mouth into a thin smile.  “I got the crap done because I was angry.”

“It didn’t help, did it?”

“No, not at all. Can we talk about the commission?”

“Sure,” I said, rousing myself and pulling my notebook and a pencil out of my knapsack. “What were you thinking of?”

“I need a pair of lips.”

I smiled. “You already have some, underneath there, somewhere.”

“A pair of metal lips.”

“Like the bloody Rolling Stones thing? With the tongue lolling out?”

“No. Just a pair of lips.”

“Do you want it flat or in three dimensions? Like, plumped out lips, or more like a cartoon?”

He thought for a while. Closed his eyes, recalling I guessed. I waited.

“I want…” he hesitated, then opened his eyes.  It was only then I realized just how beautiful they were. Like tiger’s eyes. Brown and gold flecked. Warm and rich and full of pain. They were, I had to admit, very sexy eyes.  “I want a kiss.”

“A kiss?” I repeated, mechanically, because I was unable to look away from those eyes. Once I’d noticed them, amidst all the other distractions, I couldn’t stop. It was a shock to realize I did want to kiss him. To close my eyes and feel the warmth of that flesh surrounded with all the detritus. To feel the cold bits of metal interrupting the contact with flesh.  There was something so chaotic about all that anger. I thought I’d be able to taste it on his mouth.

“Yes, a kiss.”

I gnawed at my own lip, feeling its plumpness.  “Well, lips aren’t really a kiss. But, I guess you want pursed lips, yeah? A kissy mouth?”

Glancing down at my notepad, I sketched furiously, quickly drawing a series of lip outlines, pursed for a kiss.

“It needs to be very simply done. Just enough lines of metal to make it obvious that it’s a kiss.”

“Stylised?” I muttered, continuing to draw all sorts of kissy mouth shapes. Plump ones, thin ones, mouth open, closed.

He moved closer along the bench and looked down at the pad. “Yes. Not too plump. Not stupid. Just… real. As close to real as you can.”

Then, he put his index fingertip down on the notepad on top of one of the sketches. “That one.”

“Okay.” I glanced up at him.

He moved away skittishly along the banquette and then over onto the stool across the table. “Yes. Exactly like that,” he said, taking a pull of his pint and looking away.

I guessed that whatever momentary bonding we’d just done was over. “What kind of metal?”

“Stainless steel.”

Puzzled, I shook my head. “I don’t work small. I don’t make jewelry for piercings.  But I’m sure you could just go out and buy something like that.”

“No,” he said. “I want it big. Not for a piercing.”

“Then what?”

“I want to mount it on a wall.”

“How big?”

Blair thought. Raised his hands to his chest. Thought again. Did odd things with the shape of his open hands.  “About that big,” he said, showing me a distance of about six inches between his palms.

“That’s still a bit small for mounting on a wall. Wouldn’t you like something bigger? And aluminum would be a fuck of a lot cheaper than stainless steel. I can polish it and varnish it so it doesn’t haze over, you know.”

“No. It needs to be stainless steel.”

I shrugged. “Okay. You’re the client. Anything else?”

“Can you mount it?”

“Of course.”

“On ceramic or stone or something?”

“Yes, of course. Which would you like? Granite might look good.”

“Granite then.”

* * *

I did do all the due diligence and took down his contact details and told him I’d get back to him with an estimate cost, but I needn’t have bothered, because on the way down to catch the tube he pushed his hand into mine, and I ended up taking him back to my loft.

All the way there, the other passengers looked at him and then looked away.  They left the momentary contact with scowls on their faces, or a shake of the head, or pursed lips, but not the kissy sort. Part of me kept wondering why I was taking this man back to my place. Then I’d glance at him and feel a sort of gnawing hunger for him. It was all that mad energy, I think, that made me feel that way.  The prospect of fucking a whirlwind, like the fascination of looking up at a funnel cloud. As if underneath, there was this strange natural phenomenon that was both frightening and thrilling.

* * *

I let him through the door and into my mess of a loft. Bits of metal everywhere, and my workbench. It still stank of hot copper from the work I’d done in the morning before I’d left for the craft show.

“I’m sorry about the mess,” I said, not really meaning it.

“Don’t be.”

I tried to kiss him then, but he turned his head and wouldn’t let me.  When I tried again, he pushed my face away with the palm of his hand.

Standing back, I glared at him. “I didn’t ask you up here to see my etchings, you know.”

“I know.”

“So what are we doing, then?”

He was silent for a while, walking around the space, eyeing my bench, and my unmade bed, and the cobbled together kitchen in the corner, until he stepped up behind me and circled my waist with his arm. He pulled me back against him and he was hard.

“I don’t kiss,” he said, smearing his cheek against mine.

“You don’t…” but I never managed to finish the sentence. He’d popped the button on my jeans and slid his hand down the front of my knickers. A man with really good fingering technique can make me forget almost anything.

The ink and the piercings and the purposeful scars didn’t stop at his face.  I wish I could remember most of them, but time and other things have faded my memory. I do remember sucking his cock, if only because it was also pierced and I worried my teeth might catch on the ring and do him damage. But it didn’t worry him at all. He simply grabbed a fistful of my hair and came down my throat with a satisfied groan.

It was the fucking I remember. After he’d rolled on the requisite latex, pushed my legs apart, and seated his cockhead between the lips of my cunt, our eyes met. Once again, I was drawn in to those deep brown irises and the black pupils they surrounded.  It was a strange sensation to be so horny, so aching to be fucked, and yet stunned into immobility by the vertigo of his eyes.

“Don’t look at me,” he warned. “Turn your head or I’ll fuck your ass.”

I swallowed and raised my chin in defiance. “Make me,” I said, and a delicious, awful queasy terror raced up my spine. It felt brazen and combative and hungry all at once.

With one big hand, he cupped my face and turned it aside.  That’s the way he fucked me. Holding my head so I could not see him. At first, I was so angry, I felt the first thrusts, but it was as if I was out of my body, looking at these two mismached people go at it.  Slowly, as he kept thrusting into me and twisting his hip as he seated his cock, something changed.

There was, I realized, no obligation to look at him. No need to make sure my expression was appreciative or benevolent or approving enough. It didn’t matter who he was. Only that I was being fucked and it felt good. For a while, that sense of utter disconnection seemed erotic in itself. The sheer vacancy of it almost made me come.  But then, in a single note of breath, of quiet moan, it changed. I heard it in his sounds first, but then I felt it in his muscles, smelled it coming off his skin with his sweat. His hand shifted from my face and fisted into my hair. It might have been the normal climb towards pleasure that happens every time, but I didn’t think so. It was an awful, inexorable wounded rage. And there was no maintaining that sense of disconnection anymore: a searing, invasive desert wind that burned me up from the inside out. I came just seconds before he did.

Later, after he fell asleep, I sat cross-legged in bed and rolled the one cigarette I allow myself each day. Asleep, he was beautiful. All the wreckage on his surface just floated there like so much litter on a pond, which doesn’t stop the pond from being beautiful.

I thought about leaning over and kissing his cheek while he slept, but I didn’t. It occurred to me that there was something unethical about that. Like robbery. I lit my fag instead.

* * *

I completed my commission for Blair the following week. A cut steel stencil of a pair of lips in the act of a kiss, mounted on a lovely slab of black granite that contrasted nicely with the work itself.  I was pleased with the work. Not because I was crazy about the symbolism, but because I’d been a perfectionist about the finishing. It would look nice mounted on a wall, even if it was a little small. But I’d raised the lips enough from the stone to allow it to cast a neat, clean shadow in angled light.  It would look just as good sitting on a table, with the lips floating above it.  I wouldn’t have called it a work of art, conceptually, but it was a very satisfactory piece of design. We’d spoken during the week, but he’d never mentioned anything but the sculpture and, taking my cue from him, I’d kept it strictly business.

“Would you like to come and pick it up at my loft?” I asked, when I rang him.  I admit to being hopeful of another evening in bed.

“I was hoping you could bring it over to my place and help me mount it on the wall and…” his voice trailed off.

“And other things?” I said. I’ve never really believed in beating around the bush with someone I wanted to fuck.

“Yes, other things.”

“Sure. What’s your address?” He gave it to me and I agreed to meet him there at seven in the evening.

“Alicia?”

“Yes.”

“Bring your propane torch?”

“I don’t need it. I’ll bring a drill and some brackets to mount it.”

“Bring the torch.”

“But…”

“Please.”

* * *

I didn’t fancy lugging all my tools as well as the sculpture with me on public transport and, being carless, I had to borrow it off my downstairs’ neighbor who makes oak furniture. I bartered for it with a set of custom-made drawer handles.

The address surprised me.  I guess I had expected him to live in a squat somewhere, but he lived on a thoroughly middle-class street of the quiet Victorian variety. The sort of place where housemaids used to get knocked up and kicked out, and now people run wife-swapping soirees that eventually end in divorce. I pulled into the graveled forecourt in front of red brick house with lovely pseudo gothic arches on the windows.  Blair met me at the door and helped me carry my things inside.

The place was eerily empty of anything. No carpet on the floors, no furniture, no pictures. Nothing. It was all painted a prim, glossy cream, but that was the extent of the decor.

“I thought you lived here,” I said.

“I do. I just don’t use it. I have a room upstairs. I mostly just live in there.”

“Are you trying to rent it out?”

“No.”

“So where would you like the sculpture?”

“Upstairs. In my room,” he said. Our eyes met briefly. He seemed uncomfortable, nervous.

“You don’t want it here in the living room? It would look very nice on that wall, above the fireplace,” I suggested.

“No. Upstairs. I’ll show you,” he said, picking up my duffle bag of tools and starting up a winding, wooden staircase. “Bring it.”

His room on the floor above was at the front. It was big and high-ceilinged and almost as bare as the rooms on the ground floor.  There was a mattress on the floor, and I was pleased to see he was just as domestically challenged as I was.  Against the back wall, he had a desk with a laptop on it, and a small bookshelf full to the brim with tattered novels.  There was one large photograph on the wall opposite his bed. It was framed like an art photo.  The subject was a smiling young girl, standing on a pebble beach with the sea churning in the background. Even though the photograph was in black and white, it was obvious by the light that it had been a grey day.  The girl had struck a rather glamorous pose and her cotton dress and long dark hair were both caught up in the wind coming off the sea. There was something familiar about her.

“It’s a marvelous picture,” I said, setting the sculpture down on the floor and moving closer. It was an old photograph. The grain of it, and in the style of the girl’s dress. “Did you take it?”

“No. My mother did.”

“Who’s the girl in the picture?”

“My sister Emily.”

“Oh, yes. She looks a lot like you. I can see it in the bones, and the forehead. And the mouth.”

“We’re twins.”

“What about you? Where are you?” Because it struck me in that moment that when people had twins, they were mad about taking pictures of them together. As if they wanted to capture the phenomenon of sameness over and over again.

“I’m over to the right,” he answered. “Not in the picture.”

“Why not?”

“She didn’t want me in it.”

“Your sister?”

Blair was silent for a while. And the silence made me feel unaccountably guilty for having asked the question. Finally he spoke in a low, blank tone. “No. My mother.”

* * *

Blair wanted the sculpture on the opposite wall, above his bed, so we pushed the mattress away from the wall and I got out my drill and the brackets to hold the granite. He was very sure of exactly where he wanted it placed.  Rather too low on the wall, as far as I was concerned. I explained to him that it would look better just below eye-level, but he didn’t seem to care.

I used a spirit level, marked the corners and after sinking the bottom brackets into the plaster, got him to help me hold the piece in place as I installed the top and side brackets.

“What do you think?” I asked, stepping back and looking at the piece from a distance.

He smiled and pushed a fold of fifty-pound notes into the back pocket of my jeans.  “Thank you. I think it’s perfect.”

I felt the sting of regret. It was done.  I looked over at him. “I guess that’s it, then?”

“No. I need you to do one more thing for me,” he said, pulling his cotton long-sleeved t-shirt over his head.

I grinned and laughed. “Oh, I think I can do that.”

Blair tilted his head in an apology. “Not that, actually. I need you to heat it up.”

“You what?”

“Heat it up with your blow torch.”

“Why?”

“You’ll see.”

I folded my arms over my chest and stared at him.  “No, I need to know why I would ruin the finish on a perfectly good piece of my sculpture.”

“It’s not a piece of sculpture.”

“Fuck you. If you didn’t like it, why didn’t you just have the balls to say so?”

“I do like it,” he said, sliding his arm around my shoulders. I shrugged it off but he pulled me into his chest. “I just meant that, to me it’s not a piece of sculpture.”

“What is it then? A fucking door knob?” I said angrily.

“No. It’s a brand.”

* * *

No, not brand as in luxury brand, he explained.  We sat on the floor and I cried.  And Blair admitted to me that yes, it had been his plan all along. And yes, he’d known that if he’d told me, I would never have made it for him. And yes, that’s why he’d asked me to bring the torch.

“I’m not asking you to do anything to me. Just heat it up.”

“Why?” I bleated pathetically.

“I can’t explain it. It’s way beyond words. It’s just something I need. I need it.”

“I don’t understand.” But I did, of course, as I looked up into his face. All the scars and the tattoos and the piercings. He wanted just one more angry mark on his body and he’d used me to get it. And still those beautiful brown eyes, peering out from all that anger.  “No, I can’t do it. I won’t do it.”

“Then I’ll just buy a torch and do it myself,” he said coldly.

“It’s fucking big. It’s going to hurt like hell.”

“I know.”

“Then why? Let’s just fuck and forget it. I’ll take the sculpture back. You don’t have to pay for it.” I reached for his hand and he let me take it, curled his fingers into mine.

“It’s not enough.”

“Why?”

He shook his head. “I…” and his jaw worked, trying to pry out words that he obviously couldn’t find. “Please,” he said.

I sat there looking at him in that blank room, with the smug, happy little twin on the wall. And opposite the thing I’d made. Which looked sinister to me now. As if there were teeth just beneath those metal lips. What if I let him do it on his own, and he fainted and burned the house down, or hit his head and bled to death?

“Okay.”

He smiled and looked relieved. “I’ll pay you for the extra time.”

“Fuck you. This,” I said, trying to put it into words, “can’t be a transaction.”

“No. I guess not.”

* * *

As small as the piece was, it took some time to heat it to cherry red.  And still I worried that it wasn’t evenly hot enough. It had to be red hot, Blair said, to mark just right, so the skin seared and didn’t tear, coming away from the metal. My hand shook as I played the torch across the metal surface, long, constant even strokes from below, letting the metal and nature take the heat upward to the top of the piece.

“What about after,” I said out loud. “What happens after? Do you have bandages?”

“No. It’s best if you just leave it open to the air.”

“What if you faint?”

“Then I faint. Just don’t let me fall on you. I’m heavy.”

“Shut up. Fuck. I don’t know why I’m doing this.”

“Is it ready?”

I stood back from the metal, glowing even and pale red, and shut off the torch. “God, I don’t know. I think so.”

He stood beside me and looked at it. “I think we’re good.”

Without warning, he wrapped his arms around me, turned, and pressed his back flat against the searing steel.

It was, in a way, our very first kiss.

The Tender Rage of Flesh

There is some nameless valve that will not shut out the knowing of you. In the matrix of my thoughts, some muscle the anatomists missed, forever bruised to tenderness. Affection’s velvet petals curl tight around a wounded corona of inevitable loss. Love exists in the shadow of that awful, ephemeral truth: you and I and time are finite.

It makes of my heart a clenched fist. I cannot let you go. This raging hunger clamours at the flesh. Sometimes, it seems there is no difference between my desire to fuck you to sleep or to bring about some hellish cataclysm. To make you laugh or smile or hurt or lust, it matters not which. They are all  flavours of the same, urgent kiss. Bruised or in ecstatic pleasure, tears of laughter or rage, it is the tender somatic response we seek in the other. The fleeting confirmation that we are, for now, sentient and not alone.

We are bound for nothingness, but before then, we must burn bright and burn together.

Fear, Love and Loss: Izzy’s Questions

I don’t usually go in for blog memes, but Isabella E. Marks posed a great one on her blog, originating with this quote:

“Everyone you meet is afraid of something, loves something and has lost something.”

H. Jackson Brown Jr.

So, her challenge was: What are you afraid of? What do you love? What have you lost?

Personally, these are uncomfortable and revealing questions for me. But I think they are exceptional questions to ask your characters, when you’re forming them. And if the answers you come up with are too standard, too obvious, too pat, then you probably need to go back to the drawing board and conceive of a more complex character.

Another interesting exercise for creating rich, realistic characters is to examine what they might have in their pocket or their purse. Consider this masterclass from the Scottish Book Trust.

Okay… my answers, which will reveal me to be a very poor model for a fictional character.

What are you afraid of?

This one is easy. Mediocrity. I’m terrified of being mediocre. If you think this seems like a small thing, consider this: I simply won’t do anything I don’t think I can do very well. That becomes rather paralyzing.

What do you love?

I love people, situations and things which contain paradoxes. People who are, for instance, generous but have violent tempers or who are both kind and corrupt or who are immensely sexually attractive and also physically ugly. I’m not just attracted to people like this. I tend to fall in love with them. However, only if they are aware of their own paradox. If they’re unaware, they don’t interest me. Situations that are both terrifying and arousing, or awe-inspiring and tawdry, or horrific and somehow funny, too. Things which, in some way or another, are anachronisms, defy their own purpose, cancel themselves out. (I have a thing for fountain pens)

What have you lost?

Although I was brought up in a pretty critical and jaded family, I guess that for a long time, unconsciously, I felt my innate anti-authoritarianism was simply a knee-jerk kick against the pricks reaction. Somewhere inside me I still harboured the hope that, in most cases, institutions and people with authority were basically benign and well-intentioned. I’m not sure when it started to dawn on me that, with very few and notable exceptions, this was not the case. Authority almost always simply serves itself and the perpetuation of its position of authority.  I can’t say that one day I just woke up and knew this. But now, in middle age, I feel the loss of that illusion. It’s not a sharp pain. It’s a terrible, chronic dull ache.

The other thing I have lost – and this pain is worse than the first and more acute – is friends. In the late 80s and early 90s, I lost almost all my closest, longest-termed friends to HIV. It changed me and I’ve never recovered from it. I sat by their besides. I helped swab out their mouths. I changed their sheets with gloves on. I listened to their regrets. I watched some fight like tigers. I watched others go willingly. I held their hands, wasting away and bony, as they died. I think I lost most of my ability to make close and deep friendships after this. I am still, 20 years later, very hesitant to take someone too deeply into my heart. It has made me a difficult person to be friends with.

 

 

 

Best Men’s Erotica: Interview With the Editors

Will Crimson and Raziel Moore (who both post on the blog Erotic Writer) are the editors for Burning Book Press’ upcoming anthology, Best Men’s Erotica. I invited them to answer some questions on the specific of men’s erotica, and what makes it different from erotica for women.

What do you think distinguishes erotica written for men from erotica written for women?

Will Crimson:

However, with that disclaimer out of the way (and with a gun held to my head), I would say that erotica written for men will focus more on the physical act of sex rather than the emotional content. A man doesn’t necessarily want to know how the slave girl feels when she’s being fucked. He wants writing that will evoke his pornographic imagination. What position is the slave girl in? What kinds of sounds does she make? What does she do when she orgasms? Does she scream? Cry? Pant? Shake? Stretch? Arch? Madly kiss the man fucking her? Men, I think, are much more visually oriented than women. One can quickly see this by what kinds of erotica are being written and read by men on sites like SOL or ASSTR. There’s little if any interest in the emotional content or consequence of sex. The stories are simply loud and orgiastic descriptions of fucking. The stories are meant to evoke the pornography of sex. The women in these stories are simply the vehicle of the expression of male sexual desire and nothing more.

That said, women are the primary consumers of erotica. In very bookstore, there’s the romance section — a euphemism for “Erotica for Women”. There is definitely explicit erotica sex in these stories, but the emphasis, shallow and simplistic though it may be, is on the emotional content and consequences of sex and desire. Erotica for women is all about context. Where is the sex happening? Who is it happening with? What does he say to her? What does he do to her? How does he do it? *Why* does he do it? What is the meaning of the sex? Women also enjoy physical description and pornographic picture making, but they like those descriptions to have a meaning within the larger narrative – think Romance.

Raziel Moore:

Much, and perhaps most erotica written for men today doesn’t have a great deal of respect for men’s intellect and complexity, and assumes that most men are looking for a good stroke story that twig’s their personal kinks hard and fast. Thinking of that, I started answering this with a listing of what I think most “men’s erotica” lacks in trying to cater to its intended audience. But that’s not as useful as trying to examine what the best of these kinds of stories does, so I’m going to try that, and distinguish, perhaps arbitrarily, erotica vs written porn for the male reader.

Erotica ‘for men’ makes the attempt to engage us beyond simple stimulation. These stories, perspectives, and situations help us understand and experience by proxy the flavors of male desire, appreciation, and conflict in and around sex. Men’s headspace is no less complex than women’s, and the negotiation between a man’s desire and actions are not always easy, or linear, and do not always have predictable results. I think erotica for men, at its best can show the reader (male or female), not “what men want” but what different men _think_ about want; stories that are not so much what men do, but what drives a men to act certain ways. The best of men’s erotica can show how men churn over their thoughts and desires and translate them into words and actions, and how those all impact them and those around them. Erotica for men, even if it’s not written by a man, or from a male POV, centers around the male identity in the erotic state.

Not that that discounts the physical. The male sexual experience is different from the female, and the masculine sensory lexicon and engagement with physicality is different. I think the best writing shows that as well, and can communicate the male experience even too those without the same equipment and different drives.

Could you speak a little about male erotic authors whose work you find engaging?

Will Crimson:

In all honesty, I have *always* preferred erotica by women (and for all the reasons given above). I like erotica that has context and emotional resonance (even in the shortest of stories). That said, the whole reason The Erotic Writer got started is because of Raziel. No male’s erotic writing consistently engages me the way Raziel’s writing did or does. I enjoy short forms and Raziel is a skilled writer of short-form fiction. He brings a poet’s succinctness to his work. He also gets context in a way that’s imaginative and even fantastical. He gets erotic tension, and can write about the erotic experience that appeals to me reminds me of my own writing and the reasons I enjoy writing erotica. Other than that, I can’t think of a single male erotic writer by name. I used to read erotic paperbacks, on occasion, but I usually found them too generic (probably because of the reluctance of publishers to offend).

Raziel Moore:

I think there are a fair number of excellent male writers out there, who engage me in the ways described above.  Mike Kimera is one of those writers who compels, engages, and sometimes disturbs me. His characters and perspectives draw me in and keep hold through intense, arousing, and sometimes very rough rides. Sadly he doesn’t write erotica anymore. Chris Garcia goes deep into the interior spaces of his male characters. These characters whether fanciful, or not, are extremely real. My blog partner Will Crimson dives deeply into some of the primal, so-simple-as-to-be-sophisticated aspects of masculinity, and the feedbacks of male-female desire – there’s a reason we became partners in a writing blog, after all. There are more; The Provocateur, Guy New York, M. Christian, and others. Hopefully we’ll be able to introduce readers to some of them in BME.

Do you think the difference between male oriented and female oriented erotic fiction is a matter of nature or nurture?

Will Crimson:

Setting aside issues that pertain to talent, education and cultural influences (nurture), I would definitely say that there are real and recognizable differences between male and female writers and readers (nature). Our biological differences are apparent in the different kinds of literary and visual erotica that we pursue. However, there is a sweet spot where our desires intersect and intertwine, and the best writers and videographers, in my opinion, are the ones that have a natural feeling for that sweet spot. That’s erotica at its finest, in my opinion. That sweet spot is a biological necessity. Without it, men and women would never find a common ground. We wouldn’t be sexually attracted to each other. We would have gone extinct a long time ago.

Raziel Moore:

I think it’s a bit of both. The male sexual nature is pneumatically different from female. Our senses are wired similarly, but have crucial, often complimentary differences in nuance. Much (though certainly not all) male sexual physicality is ultimately penetrative, and I think that absolutely informs a fundamental attitude toward erotic acts, and toward how men think and read about them. On the other hand, a huge amount of erotic fiction aimed at men seeks to engage _only_ the physical layer, ignoring layers of nuance and emotion that are more often in greater focus in female oriented erotica. In that way, the contemporary ‘nurture’ environment actually channels and limits male-oriented erotic fiction into a pretty narrow, and ultimately unfulfilling band.

Do you think the easy availability of visual pornography helps or hinders in the number of male erotica readers?

Will Crimson:

I don’t think it matters. If porn weren’t available, then there would certainly be a broader market for erotica; but “visual erotica” has always been available in one form or another. On a recent Radiolab (NPR), archaeologists were  discussing a 10,000 year old trash dump (a mound that was, itself, a site with 10,000 years worth of garbage). Buried in that mound were thousands of sheaves of ancient paper. Some were, predictably, religious: Sayings of Jesus. Interestingly, they also found long lost erotic literature — something, annoyingly, few articles comment on.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/04/0425_050425_papyrus_2.html

However, whatever this piece of erotic fiction was, it was the most popular work of literature in the dump.You can hear about it here:

http://nhpr.org/programs/radiolab

It’s exactly 17 Minutes into the story. The erotica begins:

“Oh, I’m terribly on fire. Uh oh, it’s thick and big as a roof beam. I’m burning, I’m on fire. I’m terribly on fire. A stream runs over me, do you understand?”

That’s erotica, possibly by a woman, loving the same things that we love today, thousands of years ago — a big, thick cock. Isn’t that cool? Human beings *love* their erotic lives. Hopefully, we’ll get to read more of this erotica from ancient Egypt and Greece.

Back to your question:  No. I think that male readers who are interested in erotica, will read it. It’s another kind of fetish, in a way, and those men who like it, will find it. Those who are more visually oriented, will always be so and find a way to express that, whether through sculpture, paintings or otherwise.

Raziel Moore:

I think visual pornography may be a wash. For the viewer that wants only stimulation, a wank, a grin, and job done, visual porn may well short circuit any reading, or suggest a reading list that stops at Penthouse Letters or the like. Some of these viewers may get jaded to the whole genre and not give deeper erotica a chance, but then some of them may be driven to want more after having their fill of the simplistic and plastic. Those who wonder what more there is besides fleshy pistoning and theatrical moans a could be the next wave of readers and writers.

What are you looking for in the Best Men’s Erotica entries in terms of approach?

Will Crimson:

Not just fuck stories, but self-awareness — awareness of ones own masculinity, how ones masculinity attracts a woman, persuades her to have sex, brings her to orgasm and influences her view of that connection afterward. Alternately, what is it about masculinity that makes a woman want to seduce a man? What is it that she is willing to surrender to or, alternately, what vulnerability (in masculinity) does she savor and want to seduce? What *is* it about the masculine that *works* for women? What do women see in the masculine and what do men enjoy about their own masculinity? How does their masculinity define their understanding of the feminine? Do they see the feminine as something to subdue? Do women see the masculine as something to submit to? What about when those relationships are reversed? What does it mean to be a masculine submissive?

These are all questions which deserve an answer, even if only provisional one. What is masculine sexual energy and how is that used to attract the feminine — and what does the feminine pursue in it and want from it?

Raziel Moore:

For BME, I want to see inside the male characters’ heads – either directly through POV, or through the illumination of action and perceptions from the narrative. Beyond physical sensation, or want, or hunt, or conquest, are the thoughts, desires, and conflicts that drive them. Even the simplest, most vanilla love story is _not_ simple. We don’t call it ‘stepping lightly in love’ for a reason; the man falling has a story, and I want to hear it. And men don’t operate in a vacuum. Their partner(s) or potential partners are ‘other’, but not objects (or, if they are treated as or act as objects, the “why” of that can be a whole additional layer of complexity). How does the male character’s internal circumstance manifest? How does it interact and affect that other? What is the consequence, the feedback, the ultimate change of state over the course of the story – from physical to emotional and more? That’s the kind of story I would love to read.

The call for submissions for 2013 Best Men’s Erotica is open until August 1.