Remittance Girl's Blog, page 39

Dark Matter #wankwednesday

When you are not here, I'm in shadow. And when you are in shadow still. Your absence is a silent void burned onto concrete. Your presence simply the shaded preface to your eventual departure. My precipice hang over of everything I desire. ________ Read all the Wank Wednesday erotic writing for Shadow on Word Ejaculation

Dentata

My dream teeth shred against my tongue like sodden fingernails I am my father's daughter and I have his teeth secreted inside me Hard and cold as death these gumless, vicious ivories hidden and forgotten in a drawer that stinks of spilled perfume and moth's wings. They have followed me abided with me, a swallowed secret, lodged in my gullet shut tight with fear for all these years. And so, like him, I vomit out barbed words that gnaw on those I love. I choke on what I cannot keep down, and I bite the hand that feeds me.

Words Made Flesh

Here is my hand cool word curled around the curvature of your neck. Here my lips soft, moist letters plumped with desire pressing, half parted against your cheek. And here my cunt abstracted, weeping signifier of need, along  your upper thigh Lust spelled out with such desperation no differance can squeak through Between my words and your body; between my call and your response I'll lick you into dissolution with my native tongue until no drop of juissance remains. * * * Inspired by Thomas John Bacon's journal article abstract for Traces of Being: a document of absence in words

Introductions and Thank-Yous

This is a post to introduce you to a few erotic fiction writers you may not have read yet. They all very generously talked to me on the subject of non-con in erotica and they are all writers I respect. Please take a look at Gillian Colbert's site Catherine Leary's site Kathleen Bradean's site M. Christian's site Elisabeth Schechter's site Lisabet Sarai's site Zander Vyne's site I.G. Frederick's site Charlotte Gatto's Site Kitty Thomas's site

No More Crits: I have a form letter

It has taken me years to figure this out, but I've finally come to the conclusion that when people send you stories and ask for feedback, most of them just want you to say 'it kicks ass'. Which, in a way, is good, because a few lines of praise are SO MUCH EASIER to drool out than a good hard critique. In the last four months, I've basically lost friends and readers, because they sent me a story and asked me to give them feedback, and I did. And I actually read the stories and I thought about them, and I pondered on what I felt was positive about them and what I felt was letting the story down. And I told them. My HUGE mistake. Because it takes me at least two hours to put together a half-decent critique on TOP of the time it took to read the work. And I always follow the rules. I always point out what I felt was strong first. And then I specify what I thought didn't work. Exactly where I thought the problems were. And then, if I can, I think about ways to fix the problems. And I do this [...]

How to Approach the Question

I've been giving a lot of thought to approaching the subject of happily ever after endings. I have a deep prejudice against any form of literature which proscribes plotlines. As a writer, I've been deeply influenced by theoreticians like Eco who view formula driven fiction as a lesser form of literature. As a creative – a writer – I don't think I'm ever going be comfortable with the strictures of having to make sure my characters fall in love, and having to contrive plot devices that will pair them forever – or even for now.  As a reader, the attraction of knowing how a story will end before I begin it still baffles me. To be honest, I look at a piece of erotic romance as a chore to read. It's like reading a text book. I know how it is going to end, so why read it? In her essay "Happily Ever After: The End as Beginning", Guntrum addresses this question head on: So why read a novel when we already know how it is going to end? Because it is the process, not the conclusion, that we are reading for. Indeed, it is safe for us to enjoy [...]

The Hard Goodbye: When the Artists We Admire Disappoint Us.

  Today I'm sad. I'm sad because I read this: Frank Miller's invective-filled hate piece about the Occupy Wall Street movement. It's a pretty shocking piece of badly reasoned, idiosyncratic garbage. Not because he disagrees with the OWS folks, but because he unloaded a shitload of baseless hyperbole on a movement he clearly doesn't even understand. It should come as no surprise that Frank Miller's politics are right of center. That should have been abundantly clear to anyone who has done even a superficial survey of his work. His graphic novels Ronin, Daredevil: Born Again, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, and Sin City all revolve around the theme of man vs his society. They all glorify the sovereignty of the individual and the lone man's fight against a corrupt and apathetic system. Needless to say, he has never been a great admirer of or believer in the power of the collective to effect change for the better. So, I'm not surprised he doesn't support the Occupy Wall Street movement. But I did not actually expect him to be so ideologically invested in his fictional work as to be unable to recognize that a) he is currently living in a society [...]

The semi-colon: underused and over-abused.

Has it ever struck you how inadequate punctuation can be? Do you find yourself over-using ellipses? Have you ever yearned to use both an exclamation mark and a question mark at the same time? Sometimes, when I write, I just get so frustrated by how punctuation-poor our language is. Commas seem brief. Periods seem so final. I try to use dashes and ellipses to eke out a little more nuance from written language, but it's always a compromise. So it stuns me that so many writers eschew the lovely semi-colon. Many editors despise them. There have been whole publishing houses that refuse to print one. The demise of the semi-colon can be traced to the rise of journalistic writing in the early decades of the 20th Century. The reason for its death was simple: most journalists just didn't know how to use them. It's just that stupid. They died because of ignorance. There are two uses for a semi-colon. The simplest use is easy to learn and makes a lot of sense. Use a semi-colon after a colon when creating a list of clauses that contain commas: There are many shades of black: ebony has a dusty, dry colour; midnight [...]

Sword Swallower

The throat's convulsion makes no sound as the vocal chords are cut and the subject's closed with time's sutures. The fortune teller has said her sooth til the water's clouded over stagnant with repetition fallen on deaf ears. There are no scales of justice on the snakeboy's skin no happy ending in the bearded woman's heart. Just the squeaky wheel of chance turning in the gritty wind. I know illusion when I see it: wrought with mirrors and gaslight, the figure behind the red plush curtain. And yet it was such a sweet trick I could not look away. At dawn I can see the tent is threadbare, the costumes stained and worn. And I am not the pretty girl on the silver horse. I know all that. I am the swallower of swords.      

The Uses of Closure. Some thoughts on Happily Ever After.

I have been disdainful of romance and erotic romance, and yet it is undeniable that it brings a huge number of women, and no small number of men, joy. These people are not idiots. They are not intellectual midgets who cannot cope with writing that reflects the harsher realities of the human condition. The sheer number of romance readers puts lie to the myth 1 I owe a debt of gratitude to Sarah Frantz, of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance for setting me a scholarly and intellectual challenge: to write about the functions of the 'happily ever after' ending in erotic romance and erotic fiction. She encouraged me to look at the conventions of romance  – not as an inhibition to creativity – but as instruments that perform their functions so precisely that romance outsells all other genres by orders of magnitude. This challenge has entailed reading a lot of romantic erotica, a lot of academic writing on the romance novel and delving back into the literary theorists to see if I could some new ways to frame the discourse. Umberto Eco would say, without a doubt, that a HEA ending is an almost pristine example [...]