Remittance Girl's Blog, page 38

Erotic Romance Readers: What does a Happily Ever After Ending do for You?

I've had a marvelous time in conversation with 10 erotic romance writers. Each of them have given me wonderful insights into their craft, their challenges and their unique understanding of what constitutes erotic romance and their relationship with the genre and sub-genres.

One thing that impressed me overwhelmingly was how close they feel to their readers and how much their readers' opinions and reactions matter to them. I think it is fair to say that the reader/writer relationship in erotic romance is a truly unique one.

So now it's time for me to talk with erotic romance readers. This is really the most important part of my research: to learn more about how happily ever after and happily for now endings shape the reading experience. I want to find out what constitutes a HEA for you. Is it a wedding? A pledge of undying love? Do they move in together? Is it a plateau on which you feel the lovers have reached a place of emotional settledness and safety?

Knowing that the book will end happily, how does that affect your reading adventure? Does it allow you to engage more deeply and emotionally with the characters? Do you forget what the outcome will be while immersed in the middle of the story?

I would be very grateful if you would consider giving me between 30 mins and 1 hour of your time to talk about your relationship to the genre of erotic romance. As with my writer research, I'm using a conversation-based style of data gathering because I feel it gives me more insight, it allows the conversation to go where it wants to go and it doesn't limit the discussion to questions that may be too narrow.

If you have Skype and you are willing to have a conversation with me, please contact me via email at remittancegirl(at)gmail.com or you can always get in touch with me via twitter at @remittancegirl .

Why Conversations Matter: Hermeneutic Phenomenology

I've been having a wonderful time having conversations with writers about their writing and the uses and effects of the 'Happily Ever After' convention.  However, in some cases, it has been difficult to persuade people to speak to me via voice with Skype, or explain why a text chat or an email exchange won't work. When most people think of research, they think of labs and testing or going to the library and culling information from books. More recently, people have grown to understand questionnaire based research because of its use in the field of marketing.  There are broadly speaking two types of research: quantitative (which ask questions of how much, how many, frequency, etc. and results in numerical answers) and qualitative (which asks questions of how, why and what is it like?). Quantitative research would lead me to, perhaps, ask 'How many of my readers are erotic romance writers?' or 'what percentage of my readers prefer a happily ever after ending?' and what I'd get would give me a count. But it wouldn't tell me what was so important to those readers about having a story end happily. It would not give me any insight into how the given [...]

Erotic Romance Writers: Your thoughts, please

If you read my blog fairly regularly, you'll already know I'm working on a research project investigating the function of the HEA/HFN ending in erotic romance, not simply as a form of narrative closure, but examining if and how it plays other roles in how you construct, imagine, character build, etc. If you write erotic romance, I would really love to chat with you on your perspective as a writer. For the purposes of this research, I really want to engage in conversation to explore this, which means using Skype. I would need between 30 minutes and 1 hour of your time. I would like to approach this as a discussion based exploration, not as a questionnaire in which your answers are limited to the questions I ask. So I think Skype is the best way to do this. I am using a research method called discourse analysis. Why would you bother doing this? 1. First and foremost you would be doing me a tremendous favour. 2. Hopefully, discussing aspects of your writing in an analytical way will not only enlighten me about how you think about this issue but may also prompt you to think of the way you [...]

Graves' Cool Web, Foucault's Sexual Discourse and the Erotics of the Unnamed

" …But we have speech, to chill the angry day, And speech, to dull the rose's cruel scent. We spell away the overhanging night, We spell away the soldiers and the fright. There's a cool web of language winds us in, Retreat from too much joy or too much fear…" The Cool Web, Robert Graves I recently finished giving a very long online interview. Reading back through the final draft of the article, I was asked a question I didn't quite know how to answer. We got onto the subject of whether I felt a responsibility to portray fictional acts of kink in a realistic manner.  Somehow I went on to babble – very badly – about how I didn't like using the 'words' that are commonly used to identify acts. It wasn't my most eloquent hour. What I was trying to get at was that, in my fiction, I have instinctively shied away from the technical 'terms' for things, in the same way I shy away from using euphemisms.  This sounds like a contradiction, so perhaps a couple of examples are in order. I don't think I've ever used the word 'bondage' in a story, unless it was in [...]

Read My Lips on 4-Letter Words

I'm very chuffed to have been invited by Harley Moore to write a monthly column for 4-Letter Words, e-Book Eros' lively blogzine on erotic lit and its readers. My column is called 'Read My Lips' and my post this month is on the myth that women aren't visual, sexually. This month also features a fabulous piece by Alison Tyler: "Just Spank Me",  on getting over the need to apologize for being a spanko. There's also a review of the very steamy m/m  "Private Eye" by S.E. Culpepper, and a hilarious set of links to historical hotties. Please drop by and check it out.

Closure in Erotic Fiction

"The Happily Ever After, while often decried as one of the most limiting aspects of a romance novel, provides a secure anchor to the reader and allows a romance author considerable leeway in the sorts of conflict she can present, as long as she doesn't cross a reader's personal line in the sand, beyond which no happy ending can be possible." 1 There are two major conventional distinctions between erotic romance and erotic fiction. Erotic romance may, and indeed often is, just as explicit as erotic fiction, but it has as fundamental requirements a developing love-bond between the characters and a happily ever after or happily for now ending 2. Although there are writers within the genre that might disagree with me, I think there is very good evidence to show that erotic romance is a sub-genre of romance. It's romance with explicit sex scenes where a good deal of the evolving romance between the main characters is explored through their developing sexual relationship. Although erotic fiction can, and often does, have either or both of these elements, it doesn't have to. It's not a requirement or a convention of the genre. In fact, many erotic fiction authors have eschewed [...]

In My Hands

Take your hands away from your balls. Stow them safely behind your back and breathe. You need to know exactly how much I could hurt you. How much you could take before you break. Everyone does. It's the not knowing that terrifies. Will your capacity to endure ever live up to your own exacting standards? Isn't that what you fear, my love? That place, beyond tears or doubts, beyond words or confusions, no ambiguity, no lukewarm sentiments. Nothing but fierce and purifying light. Nothing but the truth. How long has it been since you imagined bathing in that radiance? You wonder if it will unman you, but only long enough to know it will. You wonder if you will come apart in my hands like a child, and you surely will. But they will be  my hands. That much I promise. And that is the only promise that truly matters.

Graves' Cool Web, Sexual Discourse and the Erotics of the Unnamed

" …But we have speech, to chill the angry day, And speech, to dull the rose's cruel scent. We spell away the overhanging night, We spell away the soldiers and the fright. There's a cool web of language winds us in, Retreat from too much joy or too much fear…" The Cool Web, Robert Graves I recently finished giving a very long online interview. Reading back through the final draft of the article, I was asked a question I didn't quite know how to answer. We got onto the subject of whether I felt a responsibility to portray fictional acts of kink in a realistic manner.  Somehow I went on to babble – very badly – about how I didn't like using the 'words' that are commonly used to identify acts. It wasn't my most eloquent hour. What I was trying to get at was that, in my fiction, I have instinctively shied away from the technical 'terms' for things, in the same way I shy away from using euphemisms.  This sounds like a contradiction, so perhaps a couple of examples are in order. I don't think I've ever used the word 'bondage' in a story, unless it was in [...]

Foucault, Death and the Happily Ever After.

Thinking about the metanarrative possibilities of the Happily Ever After trope, it has occured to me, in re-reading Foucault's "What is an Author?" that there is a kernel of something here to be explored. In examining the relationship between writing and death, Foucault gives us two examples: the hero in the Greek epic and case of death postponed in 1001 Arabian nights. In the Greek epic, the hero must die a young death in order to be immortalized. Not just immortalized within the boundaries of the story, but beyond it. It is, in a way, as if his death buys his passage out the confines of the fictional text, out the back cover of the book and into our collective cultural landscape. It's a very religious notion. He dies in the text so that he can be resurrected to a sort of immortality in the real world. Perhaps in this same way, the 'happily ever after' ending serves as a similar veil between the fiction and the world. Does it allow for the the essence of romance, always new, always in a state of desiring, always at that glorious point of consumation, of 'I love you' to be captured in [...]

Interrogating the Happily Ever After: research approaches

For those of you who are actually reading these posts on my 'Happily Ever After' exploration, I thank you for coming along for the ride and I do hope I'm not boring you to tears. One of my sneaky reasons for posting these blog posts is in the hope that I can encourage some of you modern erotic writers to consider taking your passion and your interest in the genre into the academy – because there's basically fuck all there. And because, I believe, it deserves to be there. Our genre deserves to be examined and explored and written about. One of the struggles I'm having with doing this kind of work is that I have a lot of opinions, a lot of questions, a lot of strategies for exploring the function of the 'happily ever after' ending, but very little experience in academic writing. So I'm learning as I go along. There are really four elements to my research process. Four questions I need to answer. What methods do I propose to use to dig into this subject? What methodology – why is this method the right one for the questions I'm asking? That theoretical perspective will I take [...]