Remittance Girl's Blog, page 29

Burning Book Press

It’s my very great pleasure to announce the launch of what I hope will be a wonderful literary project. Burning Book Press is an indie press dedicated to intelligent creative writing for grown-up readers who don’t require hand-holding, moral guidance, or limited vocabulary reading matter.

For many years, Aisling Weaver, Wyeth Bailey, Raziel Moore, Ximena Mendez, Will Crimson, T.R. Verten, Michele Bekemeyer and I have all felt that the erotica genre aimed too low, literarily speaking. We all had a dream of pulling something together to encourage the growth and evolution of our genres and of providing a publishing outlet for writers who crossed boundaries, embraced transgressive themes, and wrote with skill and intelligence.

“Our mission is to offer readers fine literature – the exceptional quality that defines literary fiction – across multiple genres, including Contemporary Fiction, Erotica, Romance, Mystery, Horror , Science Fiction and Fantasy. We publish ebook fiction (novels, novellas and short stories), poetry (anthology-length), and a limited amount of non-fiction (memoir, biography, essay).

Burning Book Press operates with the agility of a small indie e-publisher while seeking to set a high professional standard for editorial quality —  from manuscript acquisition, through editing, production, marketing and distribution. The company is privately held with principals operating in Atlanta and London.”

Please wish us well and please visit the site.

The Fourth Annual International Conference on Popular Romance Studies: York #IASPR12

Not only was The Fourth Annual International Conference on Popular Romance Studies:

The Pleasures of Romance  the first academic conference I have ever attended, it was my very first paper presentation. After talking to a lot of people, I get the sense that most of them aren’t nearly so much fun.

If you take a look at the presentation schedule, you can see just how broad and how rich the topics and studies were: http://iaspr.org/conferences/york-2012/york-conference-schedule/ . The presenters were digging deep and unearthing really meaty knowledge regarding all forms of popular romance – books, films, fan fic, etc. I’m sure it isn’t a common academic term, but the whole three days were… juicy.

I spent a lot of the time with my jaw dropped at the level of insight, investigation and genuine passion for the subject that I had the good fortune to play witness too. It was also, I might add, daunting as hell to share space with incredibly knowledgeable people. I think I probably came off a tad goofy, because I could not stop thanking people after their presentations for all the wonderful ideas they triggered in me.

And that’s the central point I think I want to make. This wasn’t just a conference where people show off their research prowess like a bunch of cerebral bodybuilders standing around posing. It was an inspiring and profoundly creative experience for me, both as a baby academic and as a fiction writer.

It was clear, with very few exceptions, that these people were investigating without pulling the subject apart reductively. I think, perhaps, the passion and the genuine respect that people had for the subject meant that, instead of breaking things down into denatured, constituent parts, the approaches were mostly holistic, contextual and – therefore – a very meaty experience.

I have come away so recharged, so full of ideas, so curious about things I had no idea I was even interested in. Three days of that is a life-changing experience.  The only negative aspect of it is that my brain is simply not big or agile enough to house and digest all the questions prompted by listening to the vibrant, fresh, delicious ideas being thrown around.

If I were to start to tell you about all the presentations, this post would turn into a novel, so I’m just going to list some of the ideas I brought away with me – they’re abstract, tantalizing, and I need to let them rise like good bread dough and then do something with them:

Romancing Sex, Kink, and Rape

Wonderful presentations, very close to my heart as an erotica writer. I came away thinking about the fact that the ‘vocabulary’ women use to tell sexual stories with is the familiar and historical, re-purposed to discuss their own pleasures. That condemning women for the way they seek to explore those ‘strange yearnings’, as Sarah Frantz called them, is fundamentally unfeminist. We use the language, the semiotics we have available and the one that resonates for us at a deep level. Fictional ravishment is not, as Brownmiller would have it, a sign of our domination. It’s the enabling signifier of something much more complex and unnamed, and essentially liberating.

Male Bodies / Female Desires

What I really came away with from this presentation and a number of others on the subject of fan fic and slash fiction is that publishers and other producers of entertainment media still don’t get it. There is a vast audience hungry for non-normative romantic and sexual stories. In just the way I started writing erotic fiction because I could not find what I wanted to read, the fan fic and slash fic communities represent a huge audience who resort, creatively, to producing what the mainstream media refuses to offer them. Genuine, honest, engaged.

Keynote Address: John Storey

Of all the compelling data Storey presented on the way people use romantic representations in media to reflect and give voice to their own romantic yearnings, the one that struck me most was the use of pop songs as emblems of heartbreak and revisiting romance in memory. It got me thinking… what about the songs we use as markers for the romances that we yearn for but will never be? There’s a story in there. I need to write it.

North / South, East / West: Romance Across the Boundaries

Listening to the presentations on popular romance in Turkey, where the language has no gendered pronouns, I was off in a lateral thought cloud of how one goes about writing sex scenes without gendering the participants. Yeah, juicy stuff. Sexy stuff. Edgy stuff. Yum.

The simultaneous sessions were gutwrenchingly painful, only because choosing to attend one was denying myself the pleasure of the other and they were all so damn tasty, it was frustrating. But I chose to attend the non-Western session because so much of my writing is set in other cultures and the challenge of writing erotics in post-colonial worlds is like walking a tightrope:

Local Heroes, Heroines, and Pleasures: Popular Romance in Algeria, India, and Albania

Different cultures and languages have distinctly unique ways of examining romantic and sexual love. The difference in vocabulary is not just linguistic but semiotic. Digging deeper into other traditions is a way of enriching our own fictional romantic landscapes. I was reminded of how much more frightening the Japanese version of The Ring was, because the rules of storytelling are so different and appear so fresh and unfamiliar to us. I think we can do the same with erotic fiction – there are other tropes, other structures that can offer new possibilities for Western writers too. Yeah, let’s appropriate them. Mwuahahahaha. (ahem, respectfully, of course).

Africa and the Black Diaspora: Empire, Sex, and the Post-Colonial Remix

The first of these presentations was a delicious literary archeological mystery in the form of ‘Rupert Gray: A Tale in Black and White’. By Stephen N. Cobham, it chronicles a mixed-race romance at the beginning of the 20th century. It closes on a strange cautionary note against intermarriage which, in a way, puts the whole text under erasure. It’s like a murder mystery without a corpse.

Julie Moody-Freeman’s paper took us into the world of African American romance – territory I’ve never explored, but am now very anxious to get to. Her talk on the way many of these novels attempt to provide role-modeling for responsible African American men is powerful. It is a type of activism through romance. And cleverly powerful, because mothers raising sons are reading these books. Not only may they influence what women demand of the men they love, but how they raise their kids in a time of HIV and social strife. It bounced me back to my own genre and to question what role-models we are subtly but persuasively championing.

The Allures of Romance: Text, Paratext, and Real Life Love

This session was a lovely investigative journey into the pleasures of immersing in the fictionality of romance. I wish I could say I remember a lot about it, but I think my brain was on overload by this time. My notes make no sense.

Problem Texts and New Approaches: Disaggregating “the Romance”

Lu Jin’s presentation of the Lamia stories in Chinese romances was both, from an imagery perspective, close to my heart. If you’ve never read my story ‘The Baptism“, do it and you’ll know why. But also it brought up the question of how other cultures don’t see happy endings as essential to a romance story. In fact, often, quite the contrary.

Ria Cheyne’s magnificent presentation of representations of disability was probably one of the intellectual highlights of this conference – for what was said, and the myriad overhanging questions it brought up. Disabilities, in the form of blindness and paralysis are frequent in romance. She examined the schism between the reality of disability and what these disabilities were being used for within fictional texts. It got me thinking about the medieval tradition of characters whose disabilities and scars are physical manifestations of inner, spiritual deficits. It also got me thinking of the symbolism of the ‘cure’, the laying on of hands, the concept of love as the miraculous cure-all. But most of all, it got me thinking about a need to rethink the way disabled characters are constantly represented as being in need of ‘fixing’.  It got me a little angry and stroppy frankly. Many disabled people don’t need to be ‘cured’, they are who they are. They deserve to be loved without being ‘fixed’.  But that might just be me. I’ll cop to the fact that I find most physical flaws erotically intriguing and the people who cope with those challenges attractive because of the strength they have built up living with the realities of their disabilities.  But then I’m a ‘let me lick your stump’ sort of perv. I can’t really help but see disability as a garden of creative erotic solutions.

Eric Selinger’s presentation went a little over my head. I took notes, and looking at them now, I can hardly decipher them.  It reminded me that I need to do a lot more foundational reading before I can engage with this at an adequate depth.

Romancing Material Culture: Wedding Dresses, “Bella Bedding,” and All the Comforts of Home

Although all the presentations in this section were very compelling, Athena Bellas’ examination of the part textural imagery plays in Twilight was powerfully evocative, because it set me off in many directions. I went to bed with vivid memories of the scene where Dracula enter’s Mina Harker’s bedroom in the early F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu - all the billowing sheers, her filmy, virginal nightgown, etc. But it also got me thinking about the adolescent female fantasy world is always situated in the lair of her comfort: he comes for her in her most intimate spaces, trespassing into her sanctum. The cosy, soft bed – the site of all adolescent girls’ first forays into sexual fantasy and masturbation, with all the attendant romantic and anxiety driven implications of it.

Happily Ever Afters–and Afters: Romance and Repetition

This was the session I presented at. I was very grateful that I was slotted to speak first, because otherwise I would have been so angst-ridden, I wouldn’t have been able to digest the two other speakers, who were both spectacular.

An Goris presented on the dichotomy that emerges from the HEA and serialized romance. She examined the various strategies for producing serial fictions and the ways in which they can either keep faith with the reader/author contract of the emotional safety-net of a Happy Ending and the ways in which that trust can be betrayed.

Susan Kroeg also presented on her examinations of serial romances, focusing on how reader-feedback plays a major role in the lived-experience and sense of reader engagement with the texts, fellow readers and the authors of romance series.

I know you probably want to know about my presentation. I will put up the powerpoints with references attached. Honestly, I don’t know how I did. I felt like a kid playing around adults. I don’t think I did very badly, but I think that both my isolation as a scholar and my practice as a writer, framing my investigations through a lens of practice-based research, played a part causing me to approach my work in a rather eccentric way.  However, I received nothing but support, encouragement and a hefty helping of ‘you can do it!’ from everyone around me.

What I’d like to say to fellow writers is… I think it’s important for us to see our writing as practice-based research. The conference wasn’t academic in the scary or dry sense. It was a riot of critical thinking and examination of themes and issues that are fundamental to our work.

We need to go to these things, participate in them, both for our own enrichment but to close the loop between the subject and the object, so to speak. It is a great place to put your practice as a writer into perspective. To understand where our work fits into the cycle of production, reception and consumption. It gives us the opportunity to see the big picture of how what we do impacts on culture in the large. If you’re a romance or erotic romance writer and you can attend the 2013 conference, you really should. You won’t regret it for a second.

Flasher: The War on Error #sundaysilliness #200words

The two highly trained Navy Seals crouched on either side of the door.  Moments earlier, they’d descended by rope from their stealth helicopter, rappelled over the compound wall, and made their silent way up to the third floor.  Now they glanced at each other, embarrassed, as a woman’s moans echoed through the upper hallway beyond the door.

“You sure he’s in there?” whispered Joe.

“‘Fuck knows. That’s what the intel said, Frank.”

“God damn it! We can’t just burst in there and shoot him in the head. She hasn’t come yet.”

“Who gives a shit. Fucker blew up the Twin Towers. We’ve been hunting this asshole for ten years! The time is *now*, good buddy.”

Still neither of them moved. The shouts of ecstasy intensified. Beyond the door, a wooden headboard battered a wall. Frank tapped his toe impatiently.

Joe shrugged. “She’s almost there.”

“How would you know?”

“I watch lots of porn.”

“Oh, great! You call that intel? We’re going to be here all night.”

Finally, after a long, ululating wail, the female voice died away.

“Now?”

“Sure.”

Bursting into the room, they confronted two naked women clutching sheets to their chests in terror.

“Shit. Wrong house.”

“Fucking CIA.”

Flasher: Dear Perplexed #sundaysilliness #100words

Dear Dr. Ruth,

Since we inherited this antique four-poster bed from my crazy Uncle Cyrus, my husband has been acting strange. Our sex life was perfectly normal. Now, he’s insatiable and demanding.

Tuesday, he woke me up, flipped me over and shouted, “Spread your legs, you wanton slut!” Yesterday, he grabbed my copy of March’s Better Homes, rolled it up and tried to insert it you-know-where, while attacking my clitoris with his tongue.

This isn’t the man I married! I’m sure the bed is haunted.

Perplexed.

* * *

Dear Perplexed,

Sounds horrific. You poor, poor woman. Sell me your bed.

Dr. Ruth

Fixed in Amber

Malaga,  June 21, 1990

The marine bows with stiff formality and releases his armful of red carnations onto the cafe’s stainless steel table. They blanket it, cascading over onto the pavement beneath.

“Flores bonitas para una mujer bonita,” he says in broken Spanish.

“It’s okay, I speak English.”

“Pretty flowers for a pretty girl.” He’s young and his smile is bright white and uncertain.

Malaga, June 21, 1937

Tethered to each other by a single rope, the blindfolded prisoners are pulled through the empty streets, in the dappled light of dawn. For the most part, the denizens of this terrorized, war-torn city are still in their beds, sweating through sheets of nervous dreams.

On his very first shore leave off the USS ‘Theodore Roosevelt’, he has wandered up from the port, through the flower market. This is the advice he’s been given by his fellow marines, veterans of the Med Cruise. ‘Wanna get laid? Buy a shitload of flowers at the market, bro. Then dump them at the feet of the first chick you meet,’ they’ve told him. I know he hasn’t bought the flowers for me.

Either I’m the first attractive one he’s stumbled upon, or he’s a good judge of women and decided I’m the most receptive. In either case, he’s perfect for my purposes. And, although he doesn’t know it, I’ve been expecting him. Still, I keep him waiting a while without a response; it’s just too tempting to watch him squirm. Besides, it’s what he expects.

I remind myself this isn’t a game. He’s exactly what I need: a soldier. Young but with no blood on his hands yet. I give the chair opposite a nudge with my foot. “Would you like to sit down?”

There are few witnesses to the blind chain’s passing. And fewer still who allow themselves to be seen to witness it. But there is at least one who lives to tell what happened. The captain who leads them has fortified himself with a little agua ardiente. The burning cigarette clamped between his lips bounces with his steps.

Until he stops, pulls it from his fleshy mouth, and kills it on the cobblestones. “This will do,” he says to the three soldiers with rifles bringing up the rear.  “Line them up.”

We sit and talk at the cafe. Jim the marine drinks beer to shore up his courage and I drink coke, silently reviewing the details of my plan. As the afternoon wears on, he invites me to a movie. They’re showing a rerun of ‘Apocalypse Now’ with subtitles at the Cine Victoria. Above the sound of explosions and the snaps of people cracking sunflower seeds with their front teeth, he stokes my bare thigh and offers me a running commentary on the authenticity of the armaments featured in the film.

When he gets up the nerve to kiss me, I let him. He tastes of hops and violets.  With courtly persistence, callused fingers thread between the buttons of my blouse. Fingertips slip into the cup of my bra and coax a nipple that needs no coaxing.

I want him. His youth and his strength, his freshly forged adult body, his optimism and his desire, raw as any open wound.

Aren’t they all young and raw? I look up at the screen and remember all the history I’ve ever read, ever heard from people old enough to remember. My father said if you read too much history, you can get caught there, in the past. I know he’s wrong. We’re all caught in history.  We keep doing the same awful things, over and over again. But I can stop it. I’ve been working it all out and I know, if I do everything just right, I can make the murderous wheel of our own blind hatefulness grind to a halt.

We leave the cinema blush-cheeked and breathless.  But the sun has not yet set. I need darkness for the magic I plan to perform, and so I take him to a quaint little bodega on a side street off Calle Larios. I feed him fresh sardines in brine and roasted red peppers. Filling his glass with rough red Rioja until his laugh has lost its jagged edge and his smile gentles.

He’s a sweet boy, caught up in a terrible machine. For him, history was just something he had to endure in high school.  He doesn’t know he’s trapped in amber, just like the rest of us.

In this quiet little alley, no one speaks, although Arturo, the youngest of the prisoners, is weeping softly. But no one begs for mercy they know they will not get. No one collapses, or pleads, or tries to break away. Ramon, Carlos, the two Juans – elder and the younger, Antonio and Paco all knew this would be their end the moment they were captured.  This is how it always ends for the losers.  Up against the wall of a slumbering house in some unfamiliar barrio.

Mellow-eyed, he turns somber. “You sure are beautiful.” He traces his thumb over my cheek. “I guess you’re not the kind of girl who gives it up on a first date.”

Truly, I hadn’t expected chivalry. This is awkward.  I smile at him and arch an eyebrow. “You don’t know me very well.”

“I know, I know,” he says, leaning back in his chair, looking wistful and heartbreakingly sincere.  “And I’m sorry for thinking you were.”

God damn his decency, I think. It’s going to fuck up everything.  This requires a change in game strategy. “That’s not what I meant at all. I’m exactly *that* sort of girl. Have some more wine.”

By the time we leave the bodega, it’s dark. Above the rooftops, the cathedral’s tower hovers, luminous and ancient. The orange trees weep sweet scent into the thick heat of the evening. In front of an old stone bench, I make him kiss me, raking my fingers through the bristle of his crew cut, pressing my body against him, crushing my hips to his.

He is hard. The insistence of his erection tents his jeans.  “Oh, my lord,” he says,  his southern drawl is languid. “You *are* that kind of girl.”

To the left of the line of blind men, a window box full of scarlet geraniums lift their hydra-like heads towards the sun, which has only now crested the tile roof of the house opposite and begun its inexorable descent to the cobbles. Two streets away, the seagulls at the port tear into the azure sky with their jagged cries.

“Of course I am. Come on.”

And, clutching his hand, I’m off, hurrying through the winding and dusty streets, headed for the site of the ritual. My sacrificial altar. The place I will perform my small moment of magic.

The alley is still cobbled and still blind.  This is the place. I read it in three different accounts of the execution. The space remembers, the stones remember. If now the window is shuttered against the dark, that doesn’t mean it has forgotten. Tonight there is no sun to ride the wall down to the stones, but there are still crimson geraniums in the window box beside the old pockmarked bricks. They may have changed the street name, but that couldn’t wipe away the cruelty. Only I can do that. Only I and this soldier.

“Here,” I whisper, pressing my back into the wall of memory.

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. Right here.”

Closer, the finality of bullets sliding home into their firing chambers calls the prisoners’ minds home and back into their bodies. Although the Captain will use his service pistol to make the job go faster, there are not enough soldiers to shoot all the prisoners at once.

It’s not my words that convince him to overcome his caution; it’s my hands, deftly popping the first button on his jeans. Then the second and the third, as he kisses me again. My hair catches on the wounded stone.

His hands are up and under my skirt, cupping my mound and, feeling their dampness, he tugs at my panties until the thick of my thighs no longer holds them up and they drop to a puddle at my feet.

The four who die first are the lucky ones.  Unfortunately, young Arturo is not among them. Now he begins to scream.

With that first sweet finger that splits my swollen cunt and teases my opening, I know the incantation begins. Not with my words, but with my body. No longer just a sequence of events, I am caught in the roll of the spell. Lust tapers my waist and leaves me panting.  My hips are shameless, and so are my hands. They push his jeans and boxers down his hips. His freed cock dances, twitching and pulsing, into the curl of my fingers. I must have it inside me.

For a moment, I wonder how I’m going to engineer the rest of this because, although I’ve thought this through in my mind many, many times, I haven’t actually done it before. I’m a complete neophyte.

Jim, it seems, has done this before. He guides my arms up to his shoulders, takes a firm grip on my ass cheeks and hoists me up and onto his cock in one surprisingly graceful move. It isn’t until he encounters the resistance of my hymen, that he hesitates.

“Good… good god,” he stutters. “You’re a…”

“Just push a little harder.” I can hear my own throat, squeezed tight with the sharpness of the pain.  He can’t stop now. He just can’t.

Because I have saved myself for this moment. I’ve read the histories. I’ve wept over the stupid, hateful cruelty.  I’ve devised this incantation all on my own to ensure that it never happens again. Not here. Not anywhere. It’s the smallest of sacrifices, but I’m convinced it will work.

“You can’t stop now! Please. You’ll ruin everything if you stop now.”

Tender as the tenderest lover anyone could hope for, he presses his forehead against the old wall and whispers in my ear, “Are you sure this is what you want?”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” grunts the Captain, waiting for the soldiers to shoot their bolts and rack a second bullet into the chambers of their ancient rifles.  “How many times do I have to tell you? Always shoot the noisy ones first.”

I don’t answer him. With one almighty tug, I pull myself up by my arms and let myself drop, forcing him past the barrier of my innocence. The back of my blouse rips against the wall.

There’s no more pain after that, and no more hesitation on his part either.  The world dissolves into muscle and sinew and the blind path that leads to those few glorious moments when everything is right with the world.

I’m filled with his cock and his sweetness of purpose. His urgent, earnest breath against my cheek, so full of life and wanting to be alive. Holding him tight, tucking my face into the crook of his neck, I can feel his pulse, vital in his veins, feeding each fluid thrust. And each thrust pushes away the awfulness of the place, erodes it to dust. Until he bruises my bones with his body and spills all his hope into me.

When he’s finished, he lowers me onto my feet and pulls my bunched up skirt down over my hips. But I’m not finished yet. There’s one last thing I have to do to make the spell complete.

I reach between my legs and slide my fingers through the soup of spent pleasure and blood. Turning, I smear it over the wall and whisper my secret incantation.

The second volley does the job. There are seven fresh splashes of crimson against the ancient wall. Silence returns to the alley only temporarily, before the ‘Velasco’ and the ‘Alboran Sea’ begin their bombardment of the city from the port.

The marine tilts his head. His face is all new, smooth planes in the slanting lamplight.

“What the hell are you doing, babe?”

“I’m fixing things.”

My Response: A Writer’s View

[image error]After attempting to edit an anthology myself and failing miserably, I have a deep appreciation and respect for anthology editors and the work they do to compile a cohesive yet varied collection of stories that will be salable and, to one extent or another, feature something to everyone’s taste.

They often have to cull through hundreds of stories on a single call. And sometimes, when they make those calls, their choices are over-ridden by the publisher’s editors.  They don’t always have the final say over the cover, and yet are expected to be responsible for the sales of that book, most of its promotion, etc.  It’s a hefty undertaking and many anthology editors have a day job, too, which means that making their choices is, by necessity, a slow process.

Yesterday, both Alison Tyler (Writers Fucking Writers) and Sommer Marsden (Don’t Shit Where You Eat) posted blogs about the difficulties of editing anthologies and how much grief some  writers have caused them.

And yes, you might say: ‘hey, that’s the job. If you don’t like it, don’t do it.’ But that would be a genre slitting its own throat. As Alison says – editors are human. If you expect an editor to be sensitive and empathic enough to recognize a good story when she or he reads one, then why would you expect them to be insensitive about being publicly insulted or privately harassed? These aren’t optimal working conditions for ANY editor. Cut them some slack. Otherwise, no one will be publishing any short erotica that has gone through a thorough editing process at all. And the plethora of unedited crap coming out under the banner of ‘erotica’ is not doing our genre any favours at all. These people are saving our communal genre butts.

Okay, now, from the writer’s viewpoint:

I’m honestly stunned to hear that editors get nasty letters from writers whose stories have not been included in a book. I’ve had my fair share of rejection emails and I always take them as a blessing.

Honestly, do you really want a piece of your not so good writing immortalized in print? Once it’s out there, there’s no retracting it. There’s only cringing over it as the years go by and you improve and recognize its flaws. Personally, I have a couple of stories I’ve heartily regretted having published. There’s no taking them back. They eat away at my pride.

Sometimes your piece just doesn’t fit the editor’s concept of the theme call. You’re submitting one piece of a puzzle, but readers consume the book as a cohesive work.  And, believe me, you don’t want your piece sticking out like an irrelevant sore thumb in an antho. It feels like shit. So be grateful for the near miss and find a better fit for your story. I submitted a piece last year and was almost fucking relieved when I got the rejection letter, because on consideration, it just wasn’t good for the antho. She saved my butt. Truth.

On the other hand:

The length of time it is now taking anthology editors to accept or reject stories is edging, to my mind, on the ridiculous. I absolutely understand their workload. I do. And yet having a piece tied up without word for a year (which has happened more than once to me) is growing increasingly untenable.  This isn’t a threat, but I write to be read. It’s my primary motivation. The kind of money being paid per story on erotic anthologies simply isn’t enough to buy a year in the ‘maybe’ pokey. I recently submitted a story to an anthology and was later informed that it would take 10 months to find out if it would be accepted. I decided that was too long for me. I wrote back to the editor and very politely asked them to pull it from the submissions pile.

I really don’t know what the solution is to this one, but the self-pubbing revolution (especially the ability to pub shorter work and novellas)  is going to take a considerable toll on the amount of good writing going into editors’ submission piles. It is commonly assumed that the major motivation for this is financial, but I’d guess the spectre of a protracted waiting period is also playing a significant part in the decision.

Even when you get accepted, you’re not always accepted. I once got an acceptance letter to an anthology I very much wanted to be in, only to find, when it was published, that my story wasn’t included. A simple ‘ack, sorry, not this time’ letter, would have been polite. I know editors are busy, but they’re busy with our material. A modicum of mutual respect is not too much to ask for.

Sadly, there is a midset that sometimes emerges with some editors. Being the gatekeepers to publication, especially in print, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that raw material they are working with is someone else’s labour of love (it certainly isn’t a labour of money).  The power dynamic can get out of hand.

Witness Alison’s “How to make Me Want to Fuck You” post. I have nothing but respect for Ms. Tyler and she is both a wonderful erotica writer and an exceptional anthologist. However, I won’t agree to having my pen name changed and I’m no less busy than she is, so my bio is probably not going to arrive in five minutes. Although it is not a concern for me, some writers cannot accept certain forms of payment, so unless an editor wants to risk a writer turning around and requesting that their story be withdrawn, it may be smart to state, up-front, how you pay for them.

If I have to be honest, that post is why I have never submitted anything to any of her calls. There are many far, far better writers submitting to her anthologies; my work will not be missed by her or the readers of her anthologies. But for me, it’s an issue of personal principle: I only engage in that sort of power imbalance with lovers.

(Alison Tyler also wrote a post from the POV of the writer here: http://alisontyler.blogspot.com/2008/03/how-to-get-me-wet.html)

So, as Sommer would say, I am one of those awful writers that Shit Where They Live. Or rather, I care about the environment of where I live. I care, very passionately, about the genre as a whole and I like to see it kept respectful.

Meanwhile, although it boggles my mind why anyone would give a bad review or star rating to an anthology they were accepted in, I think it’s pretty unethical to review or rate an anthology you appear it at all. Alison’s generalized complaint that erotica writers shouldn’t ‘tear each other down’ with a bad review needs to be explored a little further. Because I don’t think we are doing ourselves or our genre any favours by failing to point out really awful writing when it occurs. In fact, I would say that, if this genre needs anything, it needs a good deal more critique than it’s had in the past. Most good writers of erotica are voracious readers and fairly decent critics, too. By suggesting that no one should ever give a fellow writer a bad review, we’re condemning our genre to permanent ridicule.  I’m not certain that’s what she meant, but that’s what it read like to me.

I do think, however, that we need to be skilled critics. If you’re going to pan a novel, for god’s sake discuss its structure, its character development, its lack of good descriptive writing or implausible conflicts, its reliance on cliche or formula. What we need in this genre is genuine literary critique, not vicious, bitchy infighting.

Anthology editors are the engine of this genre. They do a bloody hard job and they do it well. For the most part, the job is pretty thankless and yields little in the way of significant remuneration. So, Sommer Marsden, Alison Tyler, Rachel Kramer Bussel, D.L. King, Alessia Brio, M. Christian, Maxim Jakubowski, Violet Blue, (and all the others I’ve been too braindead to remember), I salute you and I thank you for your amazing work.

Stories are the raw material of this genre. Writers deserve to be treated as an essential part of it. They deserve  your respect even when they send you pieces that don’t fit your call, because they can’t read minds anymore than you can. Just because you’re working with bronze instead of marble today, doesn’t mean you can’t appreciate a nice chunk of marble.  And you may need some at a later date.

The goal, ultimately, is to publish excellent work within our genre. That should be a single aim we can all agree on. And for that to be sustainable, mutual respect and an acknowledgement of the value each party brings to the table is essential.

Dominion

This is my body,

there are many like it,

but this one is mine.

First, let me say that by current reigning definitions of ‘feminism’, I’m not one. Mostly because, for fear of getting stuck in history, feminist theory often demands that its adherents pretend that it didn’t happen.  That, somehow, we should all stop being silly and purge ourselves of all the linguistic, social and psychological overhang as if it were as easy as flicking a switch. Yet we, both men and women, are burdened with deep rooted models of identity. I’m not saying they are good, or healthy or productive models. For the most part, they’re not. But we have them and the expectation that we should drop them at once is, in my mind, the psychological equivalent of shipping some poor grunt out of the jungle and into the library of congress in the space of five minutes. You’re bound to end up with a high rate of PTSD.

Still, there are certain things – fundamental things – that I think do require our agreement to move forward, and not look back, like Lot’s wife, lest we turn to a pillar of salt. A woman’s legal dominion over her own body is one of them.

For me this goes past politics, and given the choice of any two political ideologies, I would always choose the one that granted me absolute rights over my own flesh first, regardless of ideas about taxation, education, religion, anything else.

Because without absolute legal dominion over my body, nothing else matters.

I understand that it is not a totally black and white issue. There are cases in which I am ambivalent. What if I want to end my life by involving someone else in my demise? That is certainly an issue. What if what I do with my body harms others? If I were HIV positive and kept irresponsibly having unsafe sex with multiple partners?  And there are others.

On these issues, I am willing to listen to argument, to compromise.

But not when it concerns my womb. Whether it contains life or not. Zygote, fetus, whatever. If it can’t survive outside my body, I get final say in whether it stays or goes. No one else. Just me.

I don’t understand why a huge percentage of women are willing to compromise on this issue to obtain lower taxes or a smaller government or prayer in schools.  I just don’t understand it.

Moreover, I can’t begin to imagine the outrage that would ensue if someone proposed to legislate the bodily functions of men. If someone tried to legislate against masturbation, because it was wasting potential life… Or if someone could implant a tapeworm into you, and you weren’t allowed to be rid of it for 9 months. Or take away one of your kidneys because someone else needs it and in refusing to give them yours, you’re killing them?

Either my body belongs to me, or it belongs to the state. If my body belongs to the state, then so will your wife’s body, and your daughter’s body, your mother’s.

Why do so few men take this issue personally? Because they don’t have wombs? But today it’s a womb, and tomorrow it might be something else. Something that men have that someone has decided they can’t be trusted to make rational decisions about.

Oh, you say…I’m being far fetched! But 20 years ago, none of us imagined we’d ever have to have to have this fight again. Never.

And look at us now.

 

 

 

My Response to ‘The Good Men’s Project: The Day I Went for an Abortion’

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In Kenya, 2,600 women die a year from botched backstreet abortions

At the age of 10, I lived in Madrid. The first thing I remember about the event was watching my mother carry a basin-full of blood out of our housekeeper’s room. There was so much blood, and it scared me. The Spanish doctor came, and I heard he and my mother shouting at each other. He was screaming that Angelita (our housekeeper) was just a stupid peasant girl who got what she deserved. Then he stomped out of our apartment, slamming the door. An hour later, a tall African American was at the door. He was a doctor from the US airbase. He went into Angelita’s room and spent hours with her.

What I came to understand later was that my housekeeper had become pregnant. Her fiance was still doing military service and wasn’t allowed to marry, and so, because abortion was illegal in Spain at the time, she had gone to a backstreet abortionist who had almost killed her. When she made it home, she was hemorrhaging badly. My mother called our Spanish doctor who refused to treat her. Finally, she called an American she had only ever met once, and that brave doctor came up from the base, risked his career and probably jail-time, and saved her life. He did it in response to a call from a virtual stranger.

14 years later, despite practicing birth control fanatically (you can imagine, considering my childhood experience), I became pregnant. Despite the fact that I was with a man I loved, I decided – in consultation with him – that neither of us were ready to commit to a life together or to have a family. I went for an abortion. My lover came with me. Sat with me. Held my hand. Asked me, just before I went in whether this was truly what I wanted.

The doctor was an older, spry, witty woman. She was businesslike but very kind. When she had finished the D&C, I asked to see the fetus. She was surprised, but agreed. A lovely, brawny nurse helped me down from the chair and I hobbled, still cramping, over to the counter to look at the small collection of cells in the jar. For me, it was important to acknowledge exactly what I had done. I didn’t want to allow myself the opportunity to ignore the consequences of my actions. Although I have always been pro-choice, I have never entered into the debate about when life starts. To me, this is a non-issue. In that jar, life of some sort had clearly started. This did not cause me to regret my decision, or second-guess my motives for the abortion. It simply made me cognizant that I had done a serious thing and it was important that I take cognitive and moral responsibility for it.

25 years later, I am married to the man who held my hand in that waiting room. We have never had children, because neither of us have ever felt the call to have them. He has no desire to be a father, I have never had a desire to be a mother and, in addition, I carry a strong genetic marker for something quite nasty which I do not want to be responsible for passing on.

I still don’t regret having the abortion, but acknowledging the graveness of the act has caused me to be far more vigilant and informed about the birth control I practiced.

My challenge to anyone who is morally offended by abortion is: show me you really care about ALL the lives involved by being a strong and vocal champion of sex education, social support and easy access to safe and reliable birth control. By far the best and most civilized way to reduce abortions is to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies.

Until Christian conservatives in the US put their considerable energy into preventing unwanted pregnancies, instead of abusing the people who choose to have abortions or the people who facilitate them, I will doubt their REAL sincerity that they are ‘all about life’.

Until then, to me, they will simply be ‘all about dogma’.

To this day, I still clearly remember being that 10 year old little girl, watching some privileged bastard dismiss Angelita’s life as worthless. I remember my mother’s outrage and fear. I remember Angelita’s scared, pale, sweating face, as she lay on a bed surrounded by bloody towels.  I knew then WHO anti-abortionists were protecting. And it wasn’t me, or my mother, or Angelita. To them, we were all disposable.

This was written in response to ‘The Day I Went for An Abortion‘ post, over at the Good Men Project

The Handmaid’s Tale Revisited: All our Dystopian Tomorrows @MargaretAtwood

I was 22 years old when I read Margaret Atwood’s ‘The Handmaid’s Tale.‘ I remember being angry for days after I read it. My father, who read it at the same time, laughed at me and told me to be a more critical reader. He said it was a novel that typified feminist hysteria. My mother gave him one of those ‘shut the fuck up’ looks, and he very wisely did.

The novel is set in a dystopian Christian theocracy. The protagonist is a woman named Offred, who is kept as a reproductive concubine by Commander Fred, a man of power and  position in the Republic of Gilead government. As you might have guessed, she has no name; she is ‘Of Fred’.  Enslaved for her uterus by the state. Atwood pulled absolutely no punches in painting the horrific, predictable outcome of a system which views women only for their breeding potential and their domestic labour.

I won’t give you a synopsis of the story. There is one at Wikipedia, and there is an excellent BBC audio interview with the author discussing the book in 2003. In 2009, Canadian parents complained that the book was too brutal to be taught in schools.

Here, strangely blinkered now, is an excerpt from a New York Times Review of the book by Mary McCarthy, in 1986

A fresh postfeminist approach to future shock, you might say. Yet the book just does not tell me what there is in our present mores that I ought to watch out for unless I want the United States of America to become a slave state something like the Republic of Gilead whose outlines are here sketched out.

Atwood herself has repeatedly rejected the label of sci-fi for this novel, although it won the very first ever Arthur C. Clarke award. She insists that science fiction is a genre dealing with thing that could not happen today or in the near future. She prefers the term speculative fiction. 30 years ago, my father would have disagreed with her. Now, I doubt there’s anyone in the Western World who would disagree with her, but quite a few Republicans who might happily use it as a blueprint.

If you have never read ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, you really should. It is, in my view, one of Atwood’s most powerful novels. And in the light of the tone of discourse currently pervading the US presidential race, it is incredibly timely.

There is a film of the book, directed by Volker Schlöndorff. It really doesn’t measure up to the book at all. It’s toned down considerably for the screen.

20,000 Bosnian Women Want to Know… @toddakin @RepPaulRyan

… why their mysterious feminine juices didn’t protect them from pregnancy, Mr. Akin.

And you, Mr. Ryan. Yes, you. The man who solidly and passionately backed a bill that would deny women the right to an abortion in cases of rape.

Let me tell you a story, both of you. Because perhaps you are too young, or too old, or too fucking ignorant about history to remember.

Between 1992 and 1995, during the Bosnian war, an estimated 20,000 women (this is the lowest estimate – some estimate as high as 50,000), mostly of Bosnian Muslim or Croat origin were herded into prisons and  camps, systematically and repeatedly raped. This was an organized, deliberate act of ethnic cleansing on the part of, primarily, the Serbian army.

In some camps, like Karaman’s House and at Luka they were raped daily, purposefully impregnated and held prisoner to the term of their pregnancies. This tactic was used as a way to force Serbian ‘blood’ into the Bosnian populated areas. This happened to women and girls as young as 12.

In a landmark study of 68 victims of this abuse, 21 were raped daily, during their captivity. 29 of them became pregnant. 25 had suicidal thoughts, 52 had major depression a year after the end of the war. (Loncar, M.; V. Medved, N. Jovanovic and L. Hotujac (2006). “Psychological consequences of rape on women in 1991-1995 war in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina”)

So for 40% of the women studied, their magic uterus didn’t work, Mr. Akin. Perhaps you imagine that for those 40% it wasn’t ‘legitimate’ rape. Maybe you think they enjoyed it, you sick fuck.

And of the 29 who did become pregnant, Mr. Ryan. YOU would have denied them the right to an abortion, you despicable bastard.

There were places where, towards the end of the war, knowing that what they had done could be prosecuted as a war crime, the Serbian army simply killed all the women. Places where the women were freed and wandered shellshocked and insane. Many committed suicide, Mr. Ryan and Mr. Akin.

Mr. Ryan, Mr. Akin, I want you to look at these women. I want you to roll out all your magic fluids crap and your ‘gift from god’ baby garbage to these women. There are at least 20,000 like them.

Sabina Rizvanovic, 16, her sister Senada Rizvanovic, 17, and Mirela, 23. They are three girls from Brcko who were rounded up with hundreds of other women and girls and then raped by Serb forces in Brcko. Credit: Nina Berman (Photo from http://bosniangenocide.wordpress.com/...)

In fact,  I will pay to fly you both to Bosnia so you can face the stadium full of women (it will take a stadium to hold them all) and trot out your ridiculous policy proposals to them.

Mr. Ryan, Mr. Akin, and you too, Mr. Romney – because you will actually tolerate Mr. Ryan standing next to you. I feel no hesitation in saying I despise you all. I hope you both rot in the deepest hell reserved for ignorant, sexist assholes who haven’t a fucking clue about women’s realities  but want to run our world anyway.