The Period Versus the Question Mark

Today I welcome to my blog the lovely, talented, and extremely naughty, Tiffany Reisz! (She writes BDSM erotica for Harlequin.) As a juxtaposition to Ike's post a few days ago, she'll be arguing *against* Happily Ever After endings.

So, without further ado, welcome!!

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Allow me to begin by first thanking Daisy for letting me guest on her blog and apologizing to her for taking two months to get the damn thing written. I never knew getting a book deal would make it so hard to, you know, write stuff. And the topic at hand is certainly not an easy one. I know I'll offend at least half of Daisy's readers but I write BDSM erotica so if I don't offend somebody once a day at least, I'm not doing my job right.

And They Lived Happily Ever After. The six most boring words ever written. When I was a child of about twelve or thirteen, I devoured historical romance novels. I ate and drank their vanilla love scenes, their passionate embraces, their totally unrealistic depictions of two people falling in love and staying in love for all eternity. I read so many romance novels that I thought that's how love worked. Someday I would fall in love with someone who *gasp* would fall in love with me back. We'd get married. We'd have kids. We'd never ever fall out of love. The End.

Then I grew up. And I fell in love. And he loved me back. And it was sunshine and orgasms for everybody. We were talking kids, talking marriage, picking out rings. We were going to live happily ever after. The End. Period. Full stop. Then one night I went to bed smiling myself to sleep over the true love I'd found at the tender age of eighteen. The next morning I woke up and I hated him. Literally hated him. It was as if a fairy had come in the night and broken the love spell I'd been under for the previous six months. I felt suffocated by his constant attentions, annoyed that he seemed to have no interests in his life other than me, bored by our teenage attempts at a sex life, repulsed by his body that had gained twenty pounds while we were together. I discovered then and there that falling in love with someone and him loving you back was no guarantee of happily ever after. I learned, horror of horrors, that two people can fall out of love with each other. The period on my life turned into a question mark—what now?

And thus ended my love affair with romance novels and their full stop endings. I am thirty-two years old now. I am not married. I have no children. I don't have a boyfriend, I have a lover. We can see other people but I don't because I'm too busy building my writing career. I have an IUD because I have zero interest in having children now or ever. When friends get married, I have to fake my smiles for them. The last two weddings I attended ended in divorce or separation in under six months after the wedding. I am cold, practical, and ludicrously happy with my life. And when I write, I don't write romances.

I write erotica.

Here's what I like about erotica. Erotica novels don't have to end with periods—literal or metaphorical. They can end with a question mark. It doesn't have to be "And they lived happily ever after. The end." They can end, "The end…or is it?" In my Spice Brief Seven Day Loan, the two protagonists don't end up together. I got some negative reviews for that alone. And that shocked me. My female lead, Eleanor, is only 23. She knows her lover in the story for all of one week (hence the titular Seven Days). And a few readers wanted her to give up her whole life and commit to a veritable stranger. That doesn't sound happy to me. That sounds crazy. Plus Seven Day Loan is a little prequel story to The Siren, my full-length novel coming out in November. To marry off my Eleanor at twenty-three would be to effectively end her adventures, to give her a full stop ending to her crazy life. By thirty-three she's grown up, made a major career change, and has become a whole different person. Marrying off my Eleanor at age twenty-three would have killed the sequel. She's a rich, weird, wild character and no one book can contain her. You try to put a period on her life, and she'll grab it and twist it back into a question mark. She knows exactly what she wants out of life—but will it change? She finds her true love—or does she? Her story will end on the last page—or will it?

This post isn't an attack on marriage or kids. It's an attack on a trite ending that's been done to death. Even if an author doesn't intend to write a sequel for her book, I'd like to be able to write a sequel in my mind. That period at the end of "And They Lived Happily Ever After." is like a wall the reader can't see over. And the best way to break down that wall is by ending with a question mark. The End?

And thus ends my blog post. Or does it?

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Tiffany Reisz lives in Lexington, Kentucky with two roommates, two dogs, two cats, and one hedgehog which doesn't belong to anyone who lives in the house and no one is actually sure how he got there. She graduated with a B.A. in English from Centre College in Danville, Kentucky and is making both her parents and her professors proud by writing erotica under her real name. She has five piercings, one tattoo, and has been arrested twice.

When not under arrest, Tiffany enjoys Latin Dance, Latin Men, and Latin Verbs. She dropped out of a conservative southern seminary in order to pursue her dream of becoming a smut peddler. Johnny Depp's aunt was her fourth grade teacher. There is little to nothing interesting about her.

If she couldn't write, she would die.

www.tiffanyreisz.com

littleredridingcrop@gmail.com