Remittance Girl's Blog, page 26

Tourist – Part 1

“It’s what she wants.”

Impatience turned the words brittle.  Marcus arched an eyebrow and gave me one curt nod, then relented. “And it’s what you want or you wouldn’t be here. Would you?”

Meanwhile, the twenty-something girl bent over the bench and cuffed to its legs craned her neck to face me and scowled. I’d been introduced to her and told her name but had promptly forgotten it. Probably by design. All I knew was that she didn’t do women and was only interested in the cropping. Her ankles wobbled in the six-inch stilettos. Her plump ass glowed white under recessed ceiling lamp. The club’s lighting seemed designed to offer a vista of spotlit porn dioramas.

I stood just beyond the bright circle of one, crop in my sweating fist, hesitant to step inside.  Inside that circle of light was another world: one I’d hungered for, one that had fueled a thousand frenzied wanks and a number of disembodied fucks.

Marcus stepped behind me, laid his large hands on my shoulders, stooped to whisper. “I’m not going to give you a supportive hug. She doesn’t want a beating from someone weak. If you can’t do it, give me the crop and I will. This is what she wants. It’s our job to give it to her.”

“It’s not her I’m worried about.”

He pressed his lips to the top of my head and inhaled deeply once before kissing me.   His palms slide down, over my bare arms. Fingertips brushed the sides of my breasts, settled over my hands and closed. “You’ve been on the receiving end this crop. You know how good it makes you feel. What’s stopping you?”

“Not in public. Not with a stranger.”

“This is the best place to start,” he said. “She’s ready. She’s willing. I’ve done her before, myself.”

My throat dried. The bright white ass was blinding me. “What if I can’t stop?”

“The agreement is ten strokes to begin with. So you’ve got to stop. There’s no choice.”

“No, I mean what if I can’t stop wanting to do this? What if I just turn into some awful sadistic monster?”

I felt him nod. “Am I am monster?”

“No. Of course not.  You’re everything to me.”

“God, I want to take you home and fuck you so badly.  I want to watch you take pleasure in striping her ass and then punish you for liking it.  You’ll be tight and flooded with the pleasure of having hurt her. Soaking fucking wet. And that’s a good thing. Because I’ll take you hard.”

Marcus released me and stepped back. “Now, will you just get on with this so I can do that?”

The words were silvery drops of molten lead, dribbling down my spine, pooling in my cunt. That’s what did it: his words. They reminded me how little this was about what was rational. How much it was about swallowing every sensible thought and stepping through the door.

And so I did. I stepped into the circle of light and gazed down at the prone girl.  All quivering, desiring five and a half feet of her.  “I apologize for the delay.”

Perhaps it’s what she saw in my face, but all the impatience was gone.  “That’s okay,” she said, all mousey and aflutter.

Look at the flesh. The doorway it makes. Touch it, I told myself.

I trailed my finger over fevered skin, over the plump little dimples caught up in the laces of her corset, over the inviting and exposed globe of one ass cheek.  Before I knew it, the crop was slicing through the air as if it had a mind of its own. The soft suck of vacuum it left pulled me in its wake to made a date with that pale flesh.

It wasn’t the sound of the strike that cupped my cunt like a lover and left me suddenly wet. It was the echo of it I ripped from her throat.  The harsh, dry gasp. The almost imperceptible tremble in her thighs. The real percussion of her pain. Not the crop, but what it left behind.

Adrenalin screamed up the sides of my neck and kicked my heart into a canter. “Count them,” I demanded.

“Yes ma’am,” she said. “One.”

Maybe I heard a note of defiance in her voice, or maybe I just wanted to hear one.  But it made the second strike so much easier to deliver.  Even as it landed I noticed the feint red welt left by the first.

A brittle moment of ecstatic joy lanced through my heart. It spoke to me. I mark, it whispered. I mark here on this piece of unknown flesh. Here is proof of my pleasure written on skin.

“Two, Ma’am.”

Still I heard the defiance, burrowing its way into my chest, into my blood, into my muscles.

Laying the third stripe and I heard myself groan.

That stopped me. The shock of how quickly was lost in the act. How fast and hard the tugging rush of it took me. How eagerly I plunged down into the singular delight of the moment.

“Three, ma’am.”

The sweetness of the adrenalin curdled, souring in my veins. It was like a massive hand had grabbed me from behind and pulled me backwards. Out in to the hubbub of the club, the feint smell of spilled alcohol, the glare of the downward spots. I looked around, panicked. But my eyes latched onto the tall figure in the warm gloom, beyond the circle of light.

Marcus. My Marcus. He didn’t speak . He sucked his bottom lip into his mouth, scraped his teeth against it as he released it slowly and shot me a wide, wide smile. His turned-on, evil lecher smile.  Even at a distance, I could breathe him in.

After number eight, the girl over the bench whimpered. The feint welts on her ass didn’t form a neat series of lines, but overlay each other and, where they intersected, the flesh was ruddier. She’d kept on with her count. Whatever trace of defiance I’d once heard in her voice was gone, replaced with something more autonomic. Above the cuffs, her hands were balled into furious little pink fists, threatening an elaborate manicure. It was a posture I recognized, and seeing it from that vantage point fed my urge to lay that crop down again and again until her hands relaxed. But ten strokes weren’t going to get her there. Resistance moves around the body, staging barricades against the slip beyond civility.  It starts in the eyes, the voice, and the muscles of the neck. Then it moves to the thighs, the arms, the hands, the feet. As the ordeal goes on – whether pain or pleasure or a mixture of the two – it finally gives up the ghost. For me, the last place it lodges is in the mind. It sits there like a harpie, bitching away nonsensically.

What surprised me most about the experience, between the gusts of hot, feral exultation, was a growing sense of oneness with the unnamed woman. The desire to get her over the lip I knew so well: to take her past that resistance and on into the sweet, dark, airless void beyond.

Ten crop lashes were not going to get her there. As she spoke the last count, I dropped my arm. Prickly with sweat, despite the lack of real effort the cropping took me, I panted out my praise.

“Good girl.” I caressed her unmarked hip. “Well done.”

I watched Marcus kneel to undo her cuffs. He spoke to her in his deep, soothing undertone. Checking to make sure she was calm and settled. As he helped her upright, I felt a strange sense of failure. Like I’d let her down. Like I’d taken pleasure from someone without true reciprocation.

She teetered on her heels and grinned at me shyly. “Thank you, Mistress.”

The urge to laugh was almost insurmountable. It might have been the word, or the residual adrenalin bouncing around my brain.

“Oh, no. Thank you…” I stalled.

“Sandy,” she offered.

“Thank you, Sandy,” I said. I didn’t have the focus to be ashamed of not knowing her name while I beat her. My nipples were so tightly seized they stung, wasp stings on my breasts. Under my skirt, the tops of my thighs were drenched.  The familiar nutty scent of my own arousal was an assault.

“Can I…” Sandy spread her arms a little.

“God, of course,” I replied, stepping into them and enveloping her with my own.  She was a little taller than me in the heels. The power dynamic between us evaporated: a construction of drinking straws annihilated in a puff of breeze.

“Come on, girl. Homewards,” said Marcus, threading his fingers through mine once the young woman had released me and toddled off towards the bar. “Time for a payback. You’ve made me wait too fucking long.”

TBC

Entry Points: Ways into a Story

photo: D.J. Norton

“A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.” The End of the Affair, by Graham Greene

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about linearity and the different points of entry into a story. We experience time in a linear fashion. Telling a story from the beginning and following, step by step, through until the end seem like the natural way to go about it.  However, very often a story starts off slowly. The building of circumstance and tension are incremental and so approaching stories by starting at the beginning can tax the reader’s patience. I can’t remember how often it has taken me several attempts to get past the first 50 pages of a novel because, although I realize the story is building towards something, it’s just taking too damn long and I’m not in the mood to be patient. Other times, I’m very happy to be led along and climb that slow upward grade.

It really does depend on the story. Not just what the story is, but how it’s told. Let me offer you an example:

“It was a pleasure to burn.”

This is the opening sentence of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (if you haven’t read it, you should). Set in a dystopian future, the government has banned the reading and possession of all books. Books, they have decided, are a social evil that makes people dissatisfied with the boring but livable lives they have.  Books are dangerous because they make us dreamers, because they make us ponder alternatives. The story is told, primarily, from the point of view of a single ‘Fireman’, whose job it is to seek out illicit books and burn them, so the story arc follows his experience from burner of books, to illicit reader of them. It’s the story of one man’s rebellion, and so the story starts at the very dawn of his journey of change.

“124 was spiteful.”

Toni Morrison’s Beloved starts, in some ways, towards the end of the story. This makes what came before it a mystery for the reader to discover. The book opens with an horrific scene of the main protagonist’s attempt to save her dogs life, after it has been almost fatally brutalized by what we are let to believe is a malevolent spirit in the house. Who the spirit belongs to, whether it’s real or imagined, and how the protagonist and her family came to be burdened with it are explored as flashbacks. How she is finally rid of it becomes the conclusion of the tale. Of course, it would have been possible to start this story with Sethe’s (the main character) experience as a slave, but that would make the magical realism aspect of the story harder to accept. Because the story is not about slavery itself but what slavery does people’s construction of their own identities, the half-light world of a haunting is the perfect way to examine an inner landscape rather than an historical set of events.

I don’t want to compare my own writing with that of the brilliance those that I’ve mentioned above, but I do want to show you that the dilemma of where to start a story is relevant to all writers. I have a tendency to begin the telling of my stories a little way in. But I’ve noticed that some of my best pieces don’t start there. Click starts, in a way, years before the story does.  Blindness opens right at the point of conflict. Gaijin starts at the first point of consequence, long after the initial events that start the story into motion.

I should be far more strategic than I am in where I start my stories. The ones I’m proudest of are often those where I have really taken the time to make a conscious decision NOT to start at the beginning and NOT to start where I’m naturally inclined to do so.  But this requires me to formulate at least a rough outline of the plot, damn it.

Where do you start your stories?

 

 

 

The Atomic Weight of Names

Tuesday I learned the name

of the woman who has hung

sword-like over me

for years.

I had always thought knowing it

would leech the venom

from the past.

But no.

It sat like a dead bird

in my cupped hands,

its atomic weight

an atrocity.

There’s no burying this creature

in hallowed ground.

Ghosts will always get

the last word.

* * * *

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Molly’s Ass #TwitterFiction #FuckToyFriday

I trail my lips down your spine, counting the vertebrae, and my hair follows. All the way to your ass. Bare and vulnerable.

Then back up over your bent, bound form. “Listen,” I whisper.

The crop in my hand twacks against my own thigh. Sharp. Hard.

Once, twice, thrice. “Hear that? That’s my heart beating for you. pretty girl”

My hand smooths over the curve of your ass. Delectable, warm, and far, far too white.

My cunt clenches in anticipation. Even as I raise my arm, even as I step away, one firm hand threaded into your short hair.

The crop, when it lands, snaps like bubblegum, but I’m not listening to that. I’m listening for that first tight, choked gasp.

And then for the sigh as I trail the leather tip up between the valley of your succulent thighs. I’ll stop only when I see

the raised red pattern of my labours on the lovely expanse of your ass. When I see the obscene trail of opalescent desire

has trickled down to your knees. Only then will I bend again, trace the welts with my tongue tip, a blind woman’s braille,

kiss you goodnight, and mourn that you are not mine to eat.

Spectacle: And What Is Not Shown.

No one covers me the way he does. The storm of him rolls over my horizon, dark boiling banks of cloud that blot out the sun. His energy seethes, coils, writhes, and serrated forks of lightning bleach the world to white in singular, blinding flashes. The glint of an eye, the spark of a smile that isn’t. The tongue that wets his lips in anticipation of the first strike.

No one holds me like he does.  Face down, flat against the bed. His hands, claws, encircle my wrists, mnemonic bonds of ownership. Reminders, as if I had need of them, of who I am in his eyes, in his presence, in his arms.

I always struggle. Not hard, but I do. If I were just to lie still and acquiescent, things would go easier for me. I know this so well, and yet I can’t. Instinct takes over, rebels against the looming prospect of the onslaught, the temporary disassembly of self.

He will devour me. Not with his mouth but with every cell of his body. He traps me in the tightening of his sinews, in the coil of his muscle, in the black-holed hunger of his desire to take me in and colonize my flesh. And so, for an instant, before resignation takes over, I panic, like the prey I am. Then I accept.

My predator. My shark-skinned assassin. Drinker of tears. No one destroys me the way he does. I believe I’ve built my defenses with such cleverness and care, but I’m wrong. Every time. No one else knows the location of my many hidden hinges, the load-bearing walls of my structural integrity. He knows the perfect places to lay the charges and take down my artifice, my edifice, with such elegant economy.

But this is all so abstract, isn’t it? Where’s the meat, the details, the arterial spray? You want the arena, the sand, the sweat, the blood. As you read, you roar for the killing blow.  Where’s the splayed cunt? Where’s the pounding cock? Where’s the lash, the lick, the suck, the spray, the slit, the spasm, the bruises? Where the fuck is the fountain of flaming lust?

I cannot give you that.

That is mine.

And his.

Alone.

Other Orifices: New Ways In to the Erotic Moment

When you first start writing erotic fiction, most of us come to it with years of imagery built up in our brains. Stories we’ve honed through multiple self-tellings, over and over, with our hands between our thighs. At first you may stall a few times, but then the courage comes and with it words flood across the page.

I don’t know what it is like for other writers, but I definitely reached a point where, although I loved developing the characters, the setting, the twists and turns of their circumstances, I started to get very bored with writing the sex. Or rather, I started to bore myself. It seemed I had found all the ways it was possible to describe the act. But this is an arrogance. Our language is far, far too rich for one person to exhaust, in a lifetime, all the ways of telling that are possible.  The problem is, our understanding of how to write it becomes too calcified. That’s when you need Kristina Lloyd‘s Sex Machine (which she featured in her wonderful session on creative writing at Eroticon 2013):

Yeah, it’s just a spreadsheet. Admit it, you thought it would be phallic, right?

It works by forcing you to think about imagery and language in a non-linear way. It makes you form associations -  things, actions, feelings and sensations -  which  you would not normally make. The green parts are, for the most part, bodyparts applied to sex. Pretty straight-forward. The red areas are sexual verbs, the purple parts metaphors, adjectives, descriptives, types. For example, #1 ended up being, a type of animal for a lover. I chose ‘scorpion’ but had no idea how that would apply to everything else. But just chosing the animal without initially associating it with a person meant that, when I did so, I had the makings of a character I might never have thought up if I had sat down and approached his creation in a rational, linear way.

Similarly, for the purple block on the far right, the prompt was – you push your face into the lush moss of a forest floor – what’s it like? Later, it’s used to think about proximity to another body: damp, decaying, nourishing, ancient. Wow.

Under #4, the prompt was: things that are white: vapour, sand ice, marble… for ejaculate.

I’m sorry to say I can’t remember exactly how she managed to elicit all the responses to fill in the blanks, but you get the idea. This is really a metaphor machine that will produce original, fresh, vibrant metaphors for erotic events. It prohibits you from relying on the same old ones. It doesn’t write anything for you, and of course, there are going to be things that clearly aren’t going to work, but it does rescue you from the trap of relying on cliche.

At some point in your erotic fiction writing life, you are going to need something like this. If you’ve been writing a while and haven’t arrived at it yet, ask yourself if you are pushing yourself enough. It could be that you’re a creative genius who never revisits the same way of writing something twice, but that would make you a rare bird. The rest of us mortals need help.

This strategy, of using lateral prompts to engender creativity, is not new. I have used Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies on several occasions, to get me started, especially with plots. There’s a random Oblique Strategy generator online here.

There are also some great resources at the Seventh Sanctum site.

Good luck with your creative endeavors. I’m going to retire to think about my scorpion lover, and how his poisoned orgasms are like opium vapours.

*shiver*

 

 

Jouissance Précoce

This story requires a warning if the portrayal of adolescent sexuality offends you. There is no intentional adult participation, but hey, some people are hell bent on believing we are suddenly fully realized sexual beings at the age of 18.

I sat up amid the swaddles of bedding in the berth and rolled up the sleeve of my white cotton nightdress with the same tangle of fear and anticipation that all children and many adults have about injections. Hating the idea of having a piece of metal stuck in your arm, and yet bearing the pathetic, hopeful illusions that the medicine will make you feel instantly better. I had been violently seasick for days. So desperate to be relieved of the never-ending nausea, the needle looked wholly benevolent. Even when the doctor slid it into the vial and drew out the clear liquid. Even when he squirted a little of it out again to clear the air bubbles. Even when he laid it, with a plink, onto the metal tray and tore open the little foil package and took out the neat square of sterile swab. It smelled of promise.

To my thirteen-year old eyes, the ship’s doctor was a god. He was austere and handsome and uniformed. He’d entered the cabin, requisite stethoscope dangling from his neck, and carried the sort of bag born by doctors in films from the 1950s.

In response to my bared, proffered shoulder, he tilted his head and gave me a consolatory smile. “No, I’m afraid this one goes in the top of your hip. Please lie down on your side and face the wall.”

Perhaps I wouldn’t have been struck dumb in horror had he been an uglier man, or wearing a white coat, or if I had been in a doctor’s office, or if I had had the foresight to wear panties under my nightie but, being young and lacking all sense of proportion, I was.

“Go on, lie down,” he prompted.

Heart racing and my stomach knotting, I slid back down into the berth, rolled on my side, and stared at the mute, semi-gloss bulkhead.

“Good girl.”

He pulled the covers back with what I imagined was utter dispassion, although I couldn’t see him do it. Trapped in a slow, stately ritual of monstrous humiliation, I lay frozen, unbreathing as he drew up the hem of my nightgown with embroidered strawberries on it. I felt his hand on my thigh, warm as took the fabric with it, baring me in a terrible unhurriedness. Up over my hip. The coolness of the air my only measure of exactly how ashamedly naked I was beneath the nightie.

In fairness to the doctor, he was probably doing all of this with as much efficient speed as possible in consideration of the 300 other upchucking passengers he had yet to see, but to me, stars were born exploded and became red dwarfs over the course of my modesty’s total anihilation.

“Now,” he said, swabbing the target area with the chill alcohol swab,  “You’re going to feel a pinch. Just a little one.”

It was the faceless voice, bored and cold and topped with a veneer of superficial optimism, which would, in later years, send my thigh muscles into clenched quivers. It was the admonition to lie completely still please that would bring the blood to my chest and cheeks, and turn my nipples into hard little beads of need.  But, most of all, it was the fraction of a second in which the needle pressed into flesh, but had not yet breached skin, that would forever remain the faithful source of my most productive masturbatory fantasy.

There, in that silent, rolling room, blinded by a vista of plain white wall, still as a corpse, I felt the needle slip into my flesh and, even before I felt the chill liquid seep into my body, I gasped, pressed my balled fists between my legs, and shuddered through the most titanic orgasm of my young life. I twitched, gasped once more, and felt the sting of embedded needle. My body shook and my cunt spasmed with a violence that obliterated the needle’s sting.

The doctor said nothing. I said nothing. He withdrew the needle, drew my nightgown down over my nakedness and pulled the up the bedclothes.

I was still staring at the white wall when I heard the cabin door close gently.

#Eroticon2013 – Monday’s hungover recollections of Sunday

For personal reasons that aren’t germane to this post, Sunday’s experience was quite different. All I can say regarding my state of mind is that watching Molly  (@MollysDailyKiss) getting flogged took me within mere milimeters of an orgasm, which is not usual for publicly reserved me.

First up was the Anthologies Editors Panel with Maxim Jakubowski, Lucy Felthouse,(@CW1985),  Victoria Blisse (@victoriablisse) and Rachel Kramer Bussel (@raquelita). I hadn’t been expecting to meet the delightful Rachel in London since she normally makes her home in NY, but she was here visiting family. It was a lovely treat to see her again after having the pleasure of meeting her at EAA in Las Vegas.

Firstly, I have to admit to being biased about all the people on this panel. Both Maxim and Rachel have published my work several times, and Lucy and Victoria are the two sweetest women you could ever want to meet. But having fessed up to that, none of these people are in the least bit unapproachable. If they have a call and you’re thinking of submitting – DO IT. I can’t honestly say I heard anything I didn’t already know, but I will pass on the main points for you: if you want to get a story accepted, please read and follow the submission guidelines. Not doing so is, frankly, just a subliminal way of saying you don’t respect the editor you’re sending your story to. And if you don’t respect them, why would you want to be in their anthology? Make sure your story fits the call (if there is a theme or a length parameter) and if you’re not sure it really fits, I find that a frank admission of your doubts in the accompanying email is helpful. That way, they can read the other, more fitting stories first and, if they are still stuck for another story, they can take a look at yours. Sometimes a slightly lateral slant on an anthology theme can be helpful to the editors if they end up with too many stories with very similar approaches.

Some people are more flexible about variations in length than others. Rachel tends to go for shorter pieces, Maxim prefers them longer. With Lucy and Victoria it depends on which anthology they’re working on. Both Maxim and Rachel usually produce print and ebook anthos. Lucy and Victoria primarily concentrate on eBooks but I think they’re doing some POD (Print On Demand).

How responsive an editor is going to be depends mostly on what kind of  submission volume they’re dealing with. Rachel, Lucy and Victoria ask for submission via email, and my experience is that they all acknowledge receipt. Maxim, being the quirky lad that he is, only accepts submissions by snail mail, and he doesn’t acknowledge receipt. If you want to make sure he’s received it, send it by receipt-acknowledged post.

Why is Maxim such a stuffy old curmudgeon about this? Because his Mammoth anthologies end up garnering over 1000 submissions. Very few of us like to read THAT much on a screen, and think about the cost and organization of having to print out 1000 stories that are 8 – 10 pages each, just to do an initial read? I have no problem with him wanting snail mail. For one thing, I think it culls the not-very-serious who can’t be arsed to buy the stamp. Personally, I do submit to Maxim’s calls and the whole ritual of doing it in that charmingly archaic way kind of brings out the obedient ‘sub’ in me.

The biggest issue with submission to anthologies at present is the very long turn-around time. Although Victoria and Lucy’s tend to be a little shorter, it’s 9 months to a year for most of them. This isn’t the editor being lazy. This is the anthology’s publisher wanting final approval of each bloody story and dragging their fucking asses. Sorry, but I have to say that. The problem with this, moving on into the future, is that the turn-around rate for self-pubbing or digital pubbing one-off stories or novellas has gotten so short, a lot of people are not as willing to tie up a story without acceptance for a year as they used to be. I really have to own to this one. Unless it is an editor I REALLY want to be associated with, or I happen to know that I could be in the company of some writers I really want to nestle between the covers with, I’m pretty damn reluctant these days to commit keeping a story on hold for a year while I wait to hear if it’s been accepted. I get way too much pleasure from simply posting the story on my site, knowing it is getting read and interacting with my readers. It might be different if the rate of pay for stories in anthologies was better, but it’s shit and I can’t see it getting any better in the near future. Don’t blame the editors for this. It’s just the way things are at the moment: content just doesn’t command the sort of economic remuneration it should. It’s a shitty thing, but there it is.

Wanna know the very best place to look for current Calls for Submission? One answer: http://erotica-readers.blogspot.com/ . Almost every call worth noticing ends up on that blog and you can subscribe to the RSS and get them delivered to your in box (along with monthly posts on writing from me, and a number of other brilliant writers – not that I’m modest or anything).

Sadly, what no one really got into was the subject of concepting anthos, or selling that concept to a publisher. I think I’m going to put in a request to Eroticon 2014  for something that addresses that issue. Some of us (ahem) would like to produce anthos rather than submit to them.

Moving right along: the wonderful, entertaining, witty and very inspiring Ashley Lister (or Mista Lista, as I like to call him) (@ashleylister) delivered a truly fun and productive session on erotic poetry. What I love about him is that he realizes all of us are not hell bent on being poets, but learning to write it, and using it as a tool for inspiration, focus on the sound of words, their song, their rhythm and different types of rhyme really does make you a better prose writer. And look, I’m sorry, but he’s just 100% right. Writing poetry trains you, as a writer, to not use the first word or phrase that comes into your head, but to consider other possibilities. And although prose doesn’t have to be constantly poetic, a well-written sentence – one that rings in the reader’s ear and stays with them – is probably one that flows well. Writing poetry helps you be more attuned to the raw material that prose is made of – language. The bastard made us write limericks to a digital countdown clock.  He squeezed filthy haikus out of us. And you wouldn’t believe just how stunning some of the under-the-clock work some people produced. I was floored. What it told me was, there are a lot of people writing prose who should seriously consider writing poetry as well. Unfortunately, I made a poor show of it. My creative mind was firmly on strike on Sunday morning.

The last session before lunch was the publisher’s panel which I was on with Hazel Cushion, for Xcite, and Maxim Jakubowski, who was representing Constable & Robinson. I was there representing Burning Book Press. I honestly think the panel would have greatly benefited from having a moderator. After a very short introduction from each of us, we took questions from the audience. The best way to characterize it was that people were really seeing the extremes of ideology on what publishing is or should be. Hazel and I have almost diametrically opposed ethos as to what purpose publishing serves.  I’m a fucking communist. The main object of Burning Book Press is not to make money, it’s to publish seriously well-written, transgressive erotic fiction. If we do make some money, that’s great, but that’s doesn’t even rate on our top five goals. For Xcite, it is a business concern. This is not to imply that Xcite doesn’t care what it sells. It does. But they are first and foremost a business and that drives the decisions they make.  Maxim was hovering somewhere in the middle (which is kind of funny because I happen to know he’s just co-written – under a pseudonym – a series of romance-with-heavy-erotic-content books that have sold shedloads.  Not quite EL James shedloads, but pretty damn successful) I guess I wanted represent the obscene proposition that there are other reasons to create and distribute great writing other than financial gain. Which, in today’s society, makes me pretty much an alien. I sincerely believe good literature makes the world a better place. I think Hazel, Maxim and a fair percentage of the audience think I’m insane. I feel I’m in good company. James Joyce was also insane. Now, if only I could write as well as he did.

I have to own up turning up late to the first set of sessions after lunch. I was indulging in some transatlantic transcendence of my own. But it goes some way to explaining why, when I sat down at Molly Moore and Michael Knight’s session on BDSM – Tools of the Trade, I eagerly grabbed every instrument of torture that was passed around to the audience and tested each of them on my own thigh with manic relish. There’s something fundamentally sad about auto-masochism.

This was a truly practical and BDSM humanizing session which explored a range of BDSM implements from the truly evil ‘Vampire Paddle’ to the fluffily soothing ‘leather boas’. What made the session great for many was that Michael underscored the point that, in general, you don’t need to break the bank on instruments of torture. Wooden spoons, rubber-banded chopstick pairs and garden bamboo staves all make lovely pain possibilities. He also covered a lot of sensation-play tools, which are good for people interested in exploring beyond the vanilla realms but not quite ready to jump into caning hell.  I’m trying to be a faithful chronicler of this session, but in all honestly, watching Molly get flogged was just too fucking thigh-clenchingly, labia-swellingly sweet. I don’t get off on formal public scenes with strangers, and this was short and casual, but once I know someone and like them, watching them take pain becomes seriously erotic for me.  I have total data-drop after witnessing that. No, I did not thrust my hand down my pants, but I did discretely visit the ladies room afterwards.

Which made me slightly late for the Sex and the Media’ session with Zoe Margolis and Nichi Hodgson. Of all the sessions at the conference, I found this one the most problematic and disturbing. I’m not going to say much about what was discussed, because I found the entire framing of the discussion a bit disingenuous. I have every respect for both women, but it seems like they both missed the ‘medium is the message’ course in media studies class. Maybe at a later date, I will give this more thought and blog space. But at the moment, all I have to say is: if you don’t want to be taken advantage of by the media, do what Miss Uranus does and make your own content, or just slam the door in their face. You are under no obligation to feed the machine,and if you do, because you’re selling some message of your own, be fully prepared to have it twisted and made more superficial and prurient for the peanut gallery.

The closing plenary was delivered via videocast by Cindy Gallop, founder of makelovenotporn.tv. Cindy is a ‘beat them at their own game’ and ‘if the odds are stacked against you change the game’ sort of person. It was a very good choice for the closing the conference. Instead of giving a synopsis of what she said, watch her talk on at Publica

 

 

 

 

 

#Eroticon2013 – Monday’s hungover recollections of Saturday’s sessions

I didn’t do my usual avalanche of tweeting during the Eroticon London 2013 conference, which goes some way to telling you just how absorbing it was. First and foremost, huge congratulations to Ruby Kiddell (@eroticnotebook) for her masterful organization of the event. It really was superbly done.  Also, a big congrats need to go to Harper Eliot (@harpereliot) who organized the associated “Aural Sex” event on Saturday evening, featuring readings from many of the conferences writers/bloggers.

The crying shame  of all conferences is that sessions run simultaneously and, inevitably, hard choices have to be made. I always end up feeling like self-cloning technology needs to get its ass in gear and offer us a way of being in three places at once. Which could also have interesting sexual possibilities. If you take a look at the schedule, it will come clear that, for the most part, I followed a writerly course through the conference. Had I attended alternate sessions, I might have had a completely different experience.

But I digress. (Like I often do)

Saturday, the opening plenary was delivered by the Brook organization. It was a mini-history of sex ed, technologies, social and cultural attitudes, and the current state of sex education and reproductive health services in the UK. Although I thought it was an excellent presentation, I think it highlighted one of the major challenges in the contemporary sexual dialectic: the practice of sex and the many and diverse topics surrounding sex issues tend to get lumped together. Being neither a teenager embarking on my sexual life, nor a policy-maker, determining focus or funding, nor a social worker dealing with the consequences of lack of education or access to services, I did find it an odd, and overly concrete way, to kick off the conference. That being said, it was well constructed and would have made a fine seminar.

One of the highlights of the conference, for me, came in the second set of sessions. Author Kristina Lloyd’s  (@kristina_lloyd)workshop was  45 minutes of the best creative writing teaching & learning I’ve ever attended. It could serve as the gold standard for creative writing pedagogy. It was engaging, funny, challenging, inspiring, fertile and tangibly productive. I walked out, having used her ‘sex machine’ with the bones of three stories simmering away in my brain. The fact that she is not heading up a Creative Writing department at a major university is a fucking sin. And far from the oft-related witticism that there are those who write and those who can’t, and therefore teach it, Miss Lloyd can write erotic fiction phenomenally. Seriously, if you are shopping for a really deeply erotic, meaty read, buy any of her novels. I swear you won’t regret it. (Well, you might, because after reading her work, you’ll read a lot of crap and feel bereft)

Cressida Downing‘s (@BookAnalyst) session on editing was not only informative, but it highlighted a thread of concern that ran through the entire conference. The fine art of good literary editing has been dying a slow death for years, meanwhile, digital publishing and the explosion in self-pubbing means that more and more works are in dire need of a good editor’s help and not getting it. A truly staggering example of this is the complete lack of competent editing in books like ‘Fifty Shades’ which was originally self-pubbed and then picked up and republished by the giant Random House, without even a modicum of editorial oversight. Good editing doesn’t just make your book better, it subtly sets a standard of expectation for readers. Random House is not the only major publisher pumping out poorly edited books by any means. Ultimately, it is the reader who suffers. They are being slowly but surely taste-trained to a vastly inferior product. Don’t believe me? This review haunts me. I cringe every time I think of it. Get your manuscript professionally edited, whether you’re pubbing yourself or going through a publisher.

The third session was my own creative writing presentation. Far more theoretical and probably not as materially useful to erotic fiction writers as Kristina’s was, but hopefully thought provoking. Attached is a PDF - it is slightly longer than the presentation I gave live, and has a writing challenge at the end. But remember, powerpoints are by nature skeletal and slightly telegraphic. Hope you can muddle your way through it.

After lunch, I attended Hazel Cushion‘s session on pitching to publishers. Hazel is the founder of Xcite Books, a UK based erotica publishing company that has grown from strength to strength under her very savvy leadership. She is a lovely lady and a very smart business woman and, after the first demise of Black Lace/Nexux, she almost singlehandedly reforged a significant place for erotica within the publishing business in the UK. Panels on pitching to publishers all suffer from the same problem. Each publisher has a very specific idea of the ‘product’ they want to sell and the relationship they want with the writer. They want writers who will accommodate them to produce that product. So, no matter how much commonality of purpose there appears to be, there is, always has been, and always should be a fundamental tension between publishers and writers. It’s an historic and healthy adversarial relationship. Writers want to write the great novel that will shake the universe, publishers want to publish what they know will sell with as little investment or hassle as possible. Between that narcissistic/altruistic creative force and the pragmatic/commercial one, the idea is that good books which are accessible to readers are made available to them, and I’ve never attended a publishers panel that ever really owned up to this reality.

With the advent of eBooks, audiobooks and the massive explosion of self-publishing, the landscape has really changed. I think Hazel offered some persuasive reasons for writers to consider publishing under an imprint like Xcite but, at the moment, I think erotica publishers have not yet taken on board the implications of some of the changes that the rise in these new technologies have meant for writers, and I believe they will need to offer significantly more in the way of support and services in order to compete with the self-pub option. Xcite has a great reputation amongst erotica writers: it treats them fairly and offers competitive royalty rates, but even with its Amazon ranking advantage, its editorial services and the advantage of having your work offered under the cover of a reliable ‘brand’, I’m not sure it is enough to make up for the stylistic and content compromises a writer may have to make, and the significant drop in royalty percentages. I was on a panel on publishing with Hazel and Maxim Jakubowski on Sunday, and I’ll write about that in another post.

I have to own to playing hookie from the last set of Saturday sessions because by that time, I was in a huddle with a whole group of fellow erotic fiction writers I admire desperately. We communed, we reinforced each other’s sense of the unacknowledged importance of our place in contemporary literature. In essence, it was a lovely, long and delicious group headfuck.

 

Enlazada (Interlaced)

Silence, half a world away, is broken glass underfoot. Whether traversed slowly and carefully, or at a run, you’ll cut yourself regardless. The only choice available is one of modality: fast and panicked or slow and aware. And the meaning you make of it; monstrosities are born from the womb of silence.

Time, half a world away, is the spectre of your hands on someone else’s flesh. Pleasantries, intimacies with a stranger, instead of me. Time becomes the the space between the tip of your finger and the curve of my hip. The gap that never closes. Time runs over glass, shredding itself into tattered spaces, stinging like come on a cut lip.

Desire, half a world away, is the crack of light beneath the door. Molars ground to alchemical dust in the interminable wait for assurances and consolations. The slap that comes too fast, the contact evaporated. The marks that fade too soon and leave their traceless ache beneath the skin. The need that feeds on the ligaments of patience.

Your mouth on her skin is a razor on mine.