Toppings

This is post number three in my series about writing (mainly). One of the things that has held me back from blogging has been my desire to concentrate on writing novels and not get caught up in the online netscape with its endlessly voracious hunger for ever more. But it seems that if one is an "indy author" who publishes via the net, "extras" like olives and pepperoni really are needed for making this narrow slice of intellectual pizza scrumptious for the all-too-discerning public. You want them to eat your pizza? You attract them with olives. And maybe pepperoni. They get it that there is always cheese (and in my case heaps of it) and tomato sauce. Mushrooms. Yo! Anchovies? Well, to tell the truth, I am not at all sure about anchovies though they are definitely desirable to certain classes of the human species. See below.

Anyway it's fun, this. It's an opportunity to be playful when novel writing is pretty serious business, even if one is trying to be funny. Novelising is pretty structured, though one can build in some deconstructive elements that allow wild careenings, and my present opus has just now hared off into a direction I had briefly considered before starting, but thought I'd dropped. But no. It's back, and it's mean!

Partly this relates to sex. My books typically have a reasonable amount of sex; I like it, think other people like it, and have something to say about it: I'm a sort of Reichian about sex (Wilhelm, not Third), and to me that means acknowledging people's interest and dealing with it positively and hopefully anyway not just erotically but also intellectually. My that was a long sentence.

But before I put finger to keyboard on my first book, I thought about how I was going to handle this potentially explosive topic, and worked out a standard: that whatever I wrote it should be at least in principle erotic to women. I reckon that's a good way to be, and it's helped me through my books since the first one in 1999.

In that time though, things have changed. Fifty-zillion shades of grey later, it seems what's erotic to women extends well past what I thought it ever would, and I'm not sure of what that means, at all. Put into my pizza metaphor, anchovies are in! S & M is not my own cup of tea, but it turns out that many women like both initials. A male friend who is into it has tried, without my taking part, to explain to me what it's all about, and I've watched some DVDs that had me killing myself and cringing in embarrassment for those involved, but not in the slightest bit aroused. One of these, made in England on the sly, had a gentleman tethered by a nipple to a chain his "mistress" yanked from time to time to keep him whining and mewling, dragged him out onto a driveway, urinated, and forced him to lick the pebbles. ??? Well, whatever turns you on...it did for me what the Young Ones television series did. I was howling with laughter till it got too repetitive, and hence boring.

Despite my lack of enthusiasm for this kind of sexual encounter, I'm still trying to learn about these evidently ever-enlarging, elastic boundaries, about what is acceptable in male and female imaginations, in their erotic fantasies. My aim is to excite and liberate, not offend. Sex in fiction that leads to serious violence just makes me shiver, as it would in real life, and I think even if it becomes de rigeur, I'll stay old-fashioned. But others, like so-called "water sports"...well, maybe...still thinking about this. If you have thoughts on your pizza preferences, drop me a line: how salty do you like your anchovies?

A five star epic. Go on, reward yourself. You know you want to.