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Jean Roberta

Viewpoint Is a Social Justice Issue

by | June 27, 2017 | | 4 Comments

by Jean Roberta

For the past few weeks, I’ve been revising, reorganizing, and overhauling an erotic novel I wrote in 1998. What was once contemporary is now historical, or at least nostalgic. None of the characters have cellphones, and they don’t hang out on FaceBook, so they usually communicate face-to-face. When traveling, they are unreachable.

I decided to keep the period flavour, but what I thought of at the time as an omniscient narrative voice now looks like a dizzying road trip through too many heads that are not all in the same place at the same time.

The biggest challenge of the rewrite is the need to focus more consistently on one consciousness throughout most of the plot. I gave myself permission to devote a few chapters to the viewpoints of two important secondary characters, but since the story is really an erotic romance as well as a queer coming-of-age story, it needs to focus on the central character.

Viewpoint is never a side-issue in fiction. For every plot (a series of events based on a process of cause and effect), there seems to be an ideal narrator to tell it, or an ideal pair of eyes through which to view the world in which the story takes place. At the same time, focusing on one consciousness means excluding all others, except by hinting at other characters’ internal reality through action and dialogue.

Viewpoint can be a scary thing. Edgar Allan Poe’s horror stories get much of their effect from the voices of narrators who reveal themselves to be irrational and out of touch with reality. Narcissists, while able to function in the world, do a horrible job of impersonating other people. For example, in one episode of the sit-com The Big Bang Theory, the chief science nerd Sheldon Cooper decides that he needs to learn how to act. He approaches his neighbour Penny, a struggling actor, for help. She tells him to improvise a speech, which he converts into a play about himself as a misunderstood genius. At one point, he pretends to be his actual mother, and says, “I’m just an ignorant Bible-thumping woman from Texas. I can’t understand scientific reality.”

Some of the worst stories I’ve ever read include equally unconvincing confessions, often written by male authors and put into the mouths of female characters. “Exotic” accents and “ethnic” humour can be equally cringe-worthy.

Attempting an “omniscient” voice, I hoped, would at least enable different streams of consciousness to balance and comment on each other. In real life, everyone involved in a situation has a viewpoint, and a truly omniscient (all-knowing) perspective doesn’t exist.

As I delete whole passages of head-hopping, I regret having to “murder my darlings.” Some of those unspoken thoughts can’t be rewritten as dialogue, since there are reasons why the characters didn’t speak them aloud in the first place.

Fiction would be boring if every writer stuck to first-person autobiography. Writing about characters who are very different from oneself is one of the joys of the game, yet we all do it at our own risk.

If John and Mary have a conversation in a story I’m writing, I want the reader to get a sense of both viewpoints. If John is the narrator, is Mary being shrunk to a relatively minor character? If Mary is the narrator, is she fairer to John than he would be to her? Do they need a witness, a cooler and more detached head, to tell their story? In that case, what happens to the passion that keeps a reader involved?

In reality, being able to hear the thoughts of every passer-by would produce cacophony in one’s own head. We would all want to turn off that magical power. As a writer and a reader, I like coherence, and therefore I strive to resist head-hopping. It’s a struggle.

Comments welcome.

Consequences

by | May 26, 2017 | | 1 Comment

by Jean Roberta

Netflix has changed my life. Not only can I binge-watch my favourite TV series from the beginning in order to understand plots and the appearance of new characters (Who’s he?), I can watch without the interruption of commercials. Watching a backlog of episodes of a currently-running series is somewhat like cramming for an exam, but much more fun.

Lately, I’ve been catching up on the BBC serial Call the Midwife, a dramatization of midwife Jennifer Worth’s memoirs of delivering babies in the gritty East End of London in the 1950s and 1960s. As the viewpoint character, Jenny Lee, tells us in a reminiscent voiceover (in the mellow voice of Vanessa Redgrave) “midwifery is the very stuff of life.”

The birth scenes are certainly not sexy, but they show the natural consequences of sex in a time when it was only supposed to take place in marriage, and when married women were expected to spend most of their adult lives bearing and raising children. They didn’t always have a choice.

In Season 1, there is an episode in which Conchita, originally a refugee from the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, is giving birth to her 24th baby by her English husband. He seems to dote on her, but he never learned Spanish and she never learned English. Their older children are fluently bilingual, and they translate the midwife’s questions for their mother, and their mother’s answers for the midwife. The proud father tells the midwife: “Conchita and I understand each other,” presumably without words.

This episode raises questions about sex in the context of a long-term relationship. Is it possible to have love without language? (I can hear the cynics in my life saying it probably works better that way.) Is it possible to enjoy unprotected sex, year after year, knowing that it will produce more mouths to feed?

As far as I know, few people in modern urban society experience heterosexual sex the way most people experienced it in past centuries: as part of a bond that was supposed to last a lifetime, and which led to pregnancy and childbirth, over and over. Sometimes pregnancy led to the death of the baby or the mother, or both. I can’t imagine maintaining my enthusiasm for the sport after the fourth or fifth or sixth baby.

Watching birth after birth, I’m profoundly grateful that most of my sex life has had no such consequences, wanted or otherwise. I’ve only been pregnant once, and that was by choice.  For the past thirty-five years, my sex life has been with other women, and therefore I haven’t even had to think about birth control. It hasn’t been needed.

Much of my reading—fiction and non-fiction—during that time has involved sex and gender disconnected from reproduction. I’ve been sent review copies of books by authors who define themselves as “non-binary,” as “masculine” (if not born with a penis) or “feminine” (if not born with a vagina). Queer or “non-binary” writers who write speculative fiction often write about characters who also have a fabulous (in the literal sense) disregard for physical limits.  Same-gender couples in these stories often have offspring in ways which don’t involve nine months of pregnancy and a painful finale. It almost goes without saying that male dominance, as crudely expressed by old-style men like Donald Trump, rarely exists in these imaginary worlds. Speculative fiction in our time, especially if erotic, is a great distraction from the here and now.

I would like to believe that the future of the human race is queer, bionic, diverse, and limited only by our imaginations, but I don’t see much real-life evidence to support a “non-binary” vision of the coming utopia.  As a case in point, I sometimes have reason to explain to a binary male person (gay or straight) how the birth control pill works, and the only ones who seem to catch on are health-care professionals who already understand the term “ovulation.” In general, cis-gendered males have less reason to think about pregnancy than do females, and less reason to research various ways to prevent it.  Even male couples who want to raise children don’t seem to dwell on questions about how babies are conceived, whereas female couples considering parenthood usually consider the possibility that one of them will develop a child in her womb.  And this difference is visible in “queer” communities where gender roles are generally more fluid and less hierarchical than in the heterosexual mainstream.

So I watch dramatic representations of women giving birth in slum dwellings because it does seem to be the very stuff of real life, in the past and—for the majority of human beings—in the present. One hopeful note in Call the Midwife is that health care in Britain, since 1948, has been free even for the poorest, unlike in the U.S. and most Third-World countries. An American fan of the series wrote about how impressive the British health care system looks, even in a TV drama. As a Canadian, I’m able to take for granted the local version of that system, established in 1962.

I can’t help wondering what will happen to millions of Americans if Trump’s administration succeeds in destroying Barack Obama’s monument, the Affordable Health Care Act. The contrast of the apparent working partnership of Obama and his lawyer wife, Michelle, with the uncomfortable distance between Trump and his wife Melania doesn’t seem like a coincidence. Women tend to support universal access to good health care, and so do left-leaning men who can see beyond their own crown jewels. No guaranteed access to reproductive support correlates to powerlessness for women.

Do I think erotic fiction should include more references to birth? Not necessarily. As I’ve mentioned, scenes of poor women in labour don’t look especially sexy, even to woman-loving me. However, I would like to see more acknowledgment that sex between men and women is more than a form of recreation. It is literally the stuff of life.

The Free Lunch in the Secret Cave

by | April 26, 2017 | | 3 Comments

by Jean Roberta

Queers Were Here: Heroes and Icons of Queer Canada, edited by Robin Ganev and R.J. Gilmour (Windsor, Ontario: Biblioasis, 2016)

This book is a charming little anthology in which a group of “queer” Canadians answers the question: Who were your role models when you were “coming out?” One of the editors teaches history in the same university where I teach English, and I attended the local book launch.

In the introduction, the editors explain: “Our guiding purpose was the conviction that queer pioneers who challenged the dominant culture and fought for greater tolerance needed to be remembered and celebrated.” It seems that the 1980s were a crucial decade for most of the contributors, as they were for me. (I “came out” then too). Most of the contributors seemed to have been drawn to the “gay scene” in Toronto when they were young, and I recognized their references, even though Toronto seemed as far away from my prairie town as San Francisco or New York City.

The contributors are both male and female, and none of them emphasize the differences between gay-male and lesbian culture, but the differences are clear. Much of the urban “gay culture” described by the men seems exclusive to them.

This book fits into a pattern of recent histories of LGBTQ life in Canada since 1969.  All of them discuss the long-term influence of the Omnibus Bill that was passed that year (under a previous hip, sexy Prime Minister, father of the current one), a sweeping piece of legislation which decriminalized sex between men throughout Canada, among other reforms. And of course, no book on “gay” life could avoid mentioning The Plague: the trickle of AIDS deaths in the early 1980s that soon became a flood.

Both these events left lesbians fairly untouched, except as concerned bystanders. In that sense, these events were parallel to the U.S. government’s drafting of young men into a war of imperialism in the 1960s, which supposedly inspired the rebellions of the Baby Boom generation and motivated American families like mine to move to Canada. I was a teenager at the time, but I didn’t need to “dodge” the long, uniformed arm of Uncle Sam. I was a girl.

Here in Canada, the Omnibus Bill has been described as another thing that helped to define a generation. Like the Stonewall Riots in New York City in the same year, the bill paved the way for “gay rights” by modifying (not completely ending) the legal persecution of male-male sex in Canada. This change was groundbreaking, but it had no direct effect on women.

Female-female sex has never been mentioned in the Canadian Criminal Code, which had its roots in Victorian England. There is an anecdote that Queen Victoria refused to sign a bill which would have criminalized sex between any two or more people of the same gender on grounds that “ladies wouldn’t do that,” but I have my doubts. I suspect that the gentlemen who wrote that legislation simply thought that whatever sexual games women could play with each other were unimportant (even if unladylike), and should therefore remain unnamed, even as a crime. At that time, few women had the rights of adult citizenship, so the law-makers probably assumed that improper behavior among girls or women could be privately dealt with by fathers or husbands.

Regarding the Plague, various writers and lecturers in queer venues in the 1980s tried to frame AIDS as a threat to everyone on the margins of society. An earnest lesbian acquaintance once tried to convince me (during a long car ride) that we should all start using dental dams and gloves in bed with each other because transmission of the virus from one female body to another had not been disproved.  While I admired her good intentions, I felt as though she were advising me on how to protect myself and my dates from hurricanes and earthquakes, none of which happen on the Canadian prairies.

The Plague reached my town several years after I first read about its effects in larger cities, and I was sincerely upset when it destroyed the lives of men I liked and respected. I was disturbed when I read about the effects of AIDS on heterosexual women (or those who couldn’t avoid unprotected sex with men) in African countries. In the 1990s, I joined a drama group, directed by my sweetie, that went into schools to perform educational skits about HIV prevention. I wished there was more I could do.

Nonetheless, the Plague didn’t seem any more universal in the world than a hurricane slamming into a Caribbean coast. Where were all the HIV-positive womyn-loving womyn? Where was the evidence that AIDS-related deaths were cutting a swathe through the Amazon Nation?

I came to realize that lesbian sex (not to be confused with lesbian life) is the free lunch that we have all been told does not exist. Women don’t get each other pregnant, except when this is mutually desired, and one woman wields a turkey baster. Even then, the sperm has to come from someone else. Women are less likely to spread sexually-transmitted infections to other women than any other sexually-defined population. Although lesbians, even in Canada, have faced discrimination based on gender identity and general nonconformity, sexual activity between women here has largely occurred below the radar of police intervention.

The relatively conflict-free nature of lesbian sex becomes clear to me when I am deciding what kind of sex to describe in a story. Conflict in some form seems necessary to move the plot along, and in some scenarios, it’s easy to find. Sex between men and women can result in unwanted pregnancies, as well as disease. Women have reasons to fear violence from men. Men have reasons to fear manipulation from women.

Sex between men seems much less stigmatized now than it used to be, but HIV is still around. Plus there is still a feral, homophobic, straight-white-male subculture which seems especially dangerous now that it is less socially accepted than before. I don’t want any of my gay-male friends to seem too obvious among strangers.

Conflict between women in an erotic story usually has to come from something other than their sexual orientation. A story about the seduction of an innocent maiden by an experienced dyke is likely to seem unbelievable if set in the current era. How many young women, fresh out of high school in the 21st century, are unaware that sex between women is possible?  How many are inclined to faint when they figure it out? (Fainting from pleasure seems like a different thing.)

I sometimes wonder why more erotic writers, of various genders and sexual inclinations, haven’t focused more on lesbian sex as a set of activities with a high ratio of immediate pleasure to negative consequences. Maybe it’s because lesbians are still often seen (if at all) as a subset of some larger demographic.

Playing in Someone Else's Garden

by | March 29, 2017 | | 5 Comments

by Jean Roberta

My actual posting date was March 26, but my post wasn’t ready then, and someone else’s post conveniently appeared. I hope I can slide this into an available date.

One aspect of sexually-explicit fiction that doesn’t seem to be discussed much is its connection to parody (or in some cases, libellous caricature), or imitations of work that is usually taken more seriously. Sex is a funny activity in some literary traditions, dating back to Lysistrata (ancient Greek comedy from approximately 450 BC). The British tradition of the Christmas pantomime is always advertised as family-friendly, but there is usually a “Dame” (over-the-top female character played by a man in drag) and a lot of double-entendres intended to amuse the adults while going over the heads of the children, who are entertained by the fast-moving plot, which often occupies the same territory as a Walt Disney movie: a familiar story such as Aladdin or Cinderella. Adding sex (even in the form of mildly naughty suggestions) to a traditional story tends to debunk its seriousness.

In the lead-up to the French Revolution of the 1790s, Queen Marie Antoinette was apparently a favourite subject of satirical writing, some of which focused on her “furious womb” or supposed inexhaustible appetite for sex with people other than her husband, the last of the French kings named Louis. The purpose of this type of porn was clearly to ridicule the contemporary Court, and it didn’t help that the Queen Consort was originally a foreigner from Austria. I don’t know how much influence this kind of underground fiction had on the actual revolutionaries who stormed the Bastille and dragged much of the aristocracy (including the royal family) to the guillotine, but it certainly didn’t encourage the kind of respect for the hereditary upper class that lingers on in Britain to this day.

There is a parallel tradition in porn films, which I discovered when I held a position on the local film classification board in the early 1990s. Some porn films are deliberately based on popular mainstream movies of the time, which is why I got to watch Edward Penishands, among other epics. The relationship between Hollywood and the porn industry seemed to be friendlier than that of Marie Antoinette’s detractors and the ancien regime. As far as I could tell, the people who produce visual porn often want to comment on popular culture, not necessarily to sneer at it.

Two literary traditions that have contributed to sexually-explicit art (both porn and more complex erotica) are fan-fiction (including “slash”) and tell-all paperbacks with titles like: I Was Joe Rockstar’s Sex Slave. When I was starting out as a sex-writer, just before the beginning of this century, I didn’t think I was influenced by either of those genres.

I learned about Kirk/Spock “slash” in the 1980s, and I was intrigued that some writers were willing to spend time and effort constructing a love affair between Captain Kirk and the half-alien Mr. Spock from the Star Trek TV series, even though stories about copyrighted characters couldn’t be “published” for sale. They could only circulate in the form of little ‘zines, and then on-line, among devotees. I liked Star Trek, but I didn’t feel moved to write about a male/male affair between two major characters since I didn’t have male plumbing myself, and didn’t think I was likely to get the details right.

In 2000, an anthology titled Starf*cker: A Twisted Collection of Superstar Fantasies was published by Alyson Publications. It was edited by a major sex-writer, Shar Rednour, who collected other sex-writers’ fantasies about actual people whom they hadn’t actually fucked, or vice versa. I was aghast. To this day, I don’t know why that book didn’t give rise to a flurry of lawsuits. This seemed like an updated version of eighteenth-century porn about Marie Antoinette.

I had already promised my Significant Other that I would never violate her privacy by describing her in my stories about sex. I thought I had even less right to describe sex scenes starring real people I had never met in person. I prided myself on being saner than a celebrity stalker.

However, the popular culture of today and yesteryear has a huge influence on sex-writing, and every literary tradition involves a certain amount of imitation. Anne Rice’s homoerotic vampires of the 1970s are clearly descended from the nineteenth-century vampires of Bram Stoker and Sheridan Le Fanu, even though every writer seems to have a slightly different take on the bloodthirsty undead. Writers with a distinct style and an appealing imaginary world tend to spawn imitators.

Over time, I wrote two stories based (at least loosely) on Lewis Carroll’s dream-like novel, Alice in Wonderland (1865), a BDSM fantasy based on Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado,” a story about a contemporary woman who composes raunchy little ditties in the style of Gilbert and Sullivan (who wrote comic operettas in late Victorian England), a lesbian fairy tale based on “The White Cat” by Countess d’Alnoy (circa 1690s, pre-revolutionary France), a modern lesbian threesome involving a version of the Shakespeare romantic comedy Twelfth Night for a Shakespeare-themed queer anthology, and a sexually-explicit story about the conception of King Arthur, based on the brief version in Le Morte d’Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory (from the 1480s, itself based on French sources).

After all this frolicking in the imaginary worlds of earlier writers, I was prepared to write something more clearly satirical, even if it didn’t include explicit sex scenes. In late December, I tried my hand at a Sherlock Holmesian mystery story which suggests more scandalous sex than it delivers. (Several women are found naked and murdered, but the thickening plot reveals something much different from Victorian conceptions of lust, adultery, or perversion.) I don’t know yet whether this story will be published in the foreseeable future.

In the winter of early 2016, I read a call-for-submissions that had been cooked up by a publishing couple at an annual literary con in Baltimore, Maryland, named Balticon. The working title was “Inclusive Cthulhu” and the stories were to be based on the work of horror writer H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937). The editors asked for stories which would horrify Lovecraft himself by deliberately challenging his prejudices: racism, White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant chauvinism, class snobbery, misogyny, homophobia. The stories needed to be Lovecraftian in some sense. I wrote a story and sent it off. After several months, I was asked for revisions which I was glad to make (the revised version gives my plucky heroine a happier ending). I waited some more.

At last, the editors have sent out contracts and announced that the book, now titled Equal Opportunity Madness, is due to be launched at Balticon near the end of May 2017. I’ve never been to this con, and I would love to go. (Baltimore is the setting of the comic musical Hairspray, about the cultural Spirit of the Sixties. I experienced that as a teenager.) I bet Baltimore has good weather in the spring, and a trip could be inspiring.

Alas, I’m afraid to cross the border from Canada under the current political regime. Before I could board a plane, some new ban would probably be in place. As a Canadian citizen who was born in the U.S., I could be treated with suspicion even if I travelled with no electronic gadgets whatsoever.

I’ll just have to stay in my own real-life setting until the regime changes, while visiting others only in my imagination.
————-

Getting to the Good Parts

by | February 27, 2017 | | 3 Comments

by Jean Roberta

The introduction of sex in a work of fiction can feel problematic for several reasons: sex has traditionally been considered “unspeakable,” something that can’t and shouldn’t be described in detail, at least in the social mainstream, and sex is considered an exceptional activity, a form of interaction that is completely different from any other. Of course, sex is different from every other shared activity, but even the most casual hookup is usually preceded by a comment or question (“Looking for a good time, sailor?” “Are you alone?” “Do you come here often?”).

The challenge for an erotic writer is how to get from here to there. Going beyond conversation to the shedding of clothes usually means shedding certain readers as well. Erotic writers know that some readers won’t read writing about sex, even if these readers actually have sex lives, and even if they bring murder mysteries with them to the beach for “light” reading.

Besides all this, there still seems to be an amazing amount of confusion about what is sexually acceptable in the real world. I recently had a conversation with my stepson (age 36, and a veteran of several serious heterosexual relationships) when he agreed to drive me to the home of a fellow-volunteer counsellor on the local sexual assault line so I could pass on the satchel that contains a mobile phone for emergency calls.

Stepson seemed to feel he was under suspicion of various crimes just because he is male. I assured him that I trust him more than I trust most men, having known him since his ninth birthday.

My assurance apparently didn’t ease his discomfort enough. He told me that when he sees an attractive woman, he wants to have sex with her. I wasn’t sure if he was confessing a sin or defending his male nature against a particularly feminist form of prudery. I told him that wanting sex is fine. (He knows I’m an erotic writer, but this fact often seems to slip from his consciousness.) I explained that wrestling a protesting woman to the ground or putting a drug in her drink to knock her out is not fine; in fact, those activities are crimes. He implied that no sane man would do any of those things, but he still seemed troubled.

I was aware that a stepmother-stepson relationship is an awkward context for a conversation about sex that is not intended as foreplay. For all practical purposes, I am one of his parents, but we’re not actually related by blood. I still feel as if someone needs to explain the concept of consent to him as thoroughly as possible, but I doubt if I’m the best person to do that.

I wonder how many other men either feel like criminals because the sight of attractive women excites them, or who feel entitled to do whatever they have to do to overcome most women’s refusal to have immediate (unpaid) sex with strangers—or with men they know too well.

A fellow erotic writer recently suggested to me that none of us are “politically correct,” which apparently means that scenarios about men using force or deception to have sex with women shouldn’t offend any of us. It’s not as if any erotic writer was ever a young woman who needed a job, and didn’t want to be tricked into a sketchy situation involving non-consensual sex and no pay, with the risk of getting killed. And it’s not as if any erotic writer was ever a woman who wanted human status.

As I’ve said here earlier, my fantasies about true sexual freedom (without degradation, contempt, or various forms of punishment) take place in an alternative world because I’ve rarely seen it in this one. I can imagine a culture in which it would be perfectly acceptable for a person to approach another person for sex, and perfectly acceptable to accept or refuse. In the case of rejection, the seeker would just continue looking for a playmate. In the absence of sexual hypocrisy, homophobia, or a sexist double standard, the search probably wouldn’t take long.

In a fantasy novel that I read years ago (sorry I can’t remember the title or the female author), the question “May I offer you anything?” was widely understood to be a proposition, and the answer was often yes. The simple honesty of this form of etiquette appealed to me, and I wished I could visit that imaginary world.

So in the world we live in, as well as in the stories we write, how do we take two or more sympathetic characters from everyday interactions—in which everyone is fully dressed—to sexual ecstasy? A standard guidebook on sexual etiquette would help. More honesty and empathy in the culture at large would help more.

What would help the most would be a general understanding that no one is “out of character” when they are out of their clothes. Au contraire. The butcher, the baker and the cabinet-maker want sex is some form, with someone. So do the doctor, the lawyer, the accountant, your child’s kindergarten teacher, and the bag lady pushing a shopping cart.

I haven’t found a way to segue comfortably from non-sex to sex on the page without feeling as if some part of the narrative doesn’t fit with the rest. As my spouse often says, I want to live on my own planet.

As long as I am stuck on this one, I will be tempted to describe sex (when I do) in a culture that speaks what is still largely unspeakable here.
———————-

Doing It Wrong

by | January 26, 2017 | | 2 Comments

by Jean Roberta

Over the years, I’ve read a lot of advice on how to write, what to write, and how to promote it. Some of that advice has been contradictory, while some of it might have been brilliantly relevant to current trends, and for particular writers who are not me.

During the Feminist Sex Wars of the 1980s, I was warned by sister-feminists that “porn” was a male writer’s genre, and that its goal was to reduce live women to objects, or sex toys without wills of their own. There was evidence to support this theory, and “jokes” about the sexual abuse of women have not disappeared from the culture. They probably never will.

However, I discovered that sexually-explicit fiction is as diverse as fiction in general. In fact, since most human beings secretly or openly want sex in some form, it’s hard to imagine a narrative about humans in which sex is absent. In some cases, the sex shows up in a central character’s dreams and fantasies. In nineteenth-century fiction, it often shows up in Latin/legal terms. (“They were caught in flagrante delicto.”) In “literary” fiction, the sex used to appear in euphemisms (“And that night, they were not divided”) and metaphors (“The earth moved”).

Since the sex is already there, I thought, coyly lurking between the lines, why not bring it out into the light so we can see it? If the sex is meant to violate the will of one or more of the participants, an explicit description makes that clear, and readers can respond.

Writing about sex felt thrilling when I first tried it. I knew that most of my relatives, not to mention friends, coworkers and other acquaintances, would probably disapprove and consider me misguided at best, but it was still a big relief to describe things I had actually done as well as things I had only imagined. Okay, I thought, call me a slut if you want, but if you never think about such things, why do you read my stuff?

The Erotic Readers Association (as it was called in 1998, when I joined) was a great source of support. Other members consoled me when I complained on-list that my stories seemed to disappear into the Bermuda Triangle when I sent them off to editors in response to calls-for-submissions. (My first three erotic stories had been “accepted” in the 1980s by a small publisher that mailed me a letter, then immediately went bust.)

I began getting stories published in anthologies, and I thought the thrill would never wear off. It never completely did, but as Lisabet has mentioned, books are more ephemeral now than we bookworms of the Baby Boom generation ever believed in our youth. Having dozens of erotic stories in anthologies has not made me famous on any level, nor has it provided a reliable income. Thousands of books are published each year, and most of them probably won’t be remembered in another generation.

Besides all that, as M. Christian has said somewhere (probably in a blog post), there are only so many ways to describe sex. Characters, situations and plots can be different in every story, but body parts are limited, and what can be done with them fits into a few categories. I grew tired of repeating myself, and I hesitate to go far beyond my own experience in describing elaborate scenes that might be physically impossible. (And on that note, unclear sentence construction can suggest that a character has three arms, three breasts, or three balls, or that two characters can grope each other from across a room. The logistics of a sex scene have to be carefully managed.)

My age has probably played a role in my desire to write about something other than sex. I doubt if I will ever completely turn off like a burned-out lightbulb, but I no longer feel as if I will just die if I don’t get some. And if I don’t need it desperately, it’s hard to convince myself that my characters do.

In short, I have begun to stray into other genres. According to those who advise writers to discover their “brand” and stick to it, this is a problem. If I have a brand at all, it is clearly erotic fiction.

During the past two years, I’ve written several stories that are not sexually explicit, and most are still unpublished. My story for an anthology that is meant to tweak the imaginary world of a famous horror writer was tentatively accepted, but I haven’t been offered a contract, and this project seems to have no clear completion date. I wrote a queer mystery story for a Sherlock Holmes-flavoured anthology, and I haven’t had a response yet. (In fairness to the editor, he probably hasn’t had time to make decisions yet.) I sent a fantasy story to an editor who said explicitly in the call-for-submissions that the anthology was not meant to include erotica. This editor sent me a flattering rejection (“This was an enjoyable read, but it’s not quite right for this collection”), so I sent the story to a speculative-fiction magazine that rejected it.

I feel as if I have started over. If I continue to write fiction without sex scenes, I will continue to send it to editors and venues that probably don’t recognize my name. The competition might be even more intense than it is in the erotic fiction market, though this is debatable.

I am grateful that the “Writers’ Block” I thought I had when I was responsible for a child and for too much unpaid work, while scrounging for a living, seems to be permanently gone. As Virginia Woolf put it so well, a woman writer needs a room of her own, and I now have several. And while I’m on sabbatical, I’m not distracted by the day job.

What I didn’t expect, and what writing coaches never seem to acknowledge, is that the Muse changes over time. For that matter, individual identity changes over time. As long as that is the case, I’m not sure how more “successful” writers (in terms of royalties and name recognition) manage to promote their “brand” for a lifetime without burning out. That seems to be one fate that ever-changing writers don’t need to fear.
————–

Holiday Drama

by | December 26, 2016 | | 1 Comment

by Jean Roberta

‘Tis the season when other obligations take time away from writing. I had good intentions of writing this post a week ago, but shopping, cleaning, decorating, and cooking with my spouse, plus socializing with other people, took over most of the time. My apologies for the lateness of this post.

For traditional Christians, today is St. Stephen’s Day, feast day of the first Christian martyr, who was supposedly stoned to death by pagans for daring to proclaim that baby Jesus was the Messiah. For the secular hordes in Britain and all the Commonwealth countries (including Canada, where I live), today is called Boxing Day.

When I first moved here from the U.S. with my parents and sisters, nearly fifty years ago, I was puzzled that the day after Christmas had a name, and was officially a holiday in itself. (If I were getting paid to write this, I could demand time-and-a-half.) At first, I thought maybe it was a day for professional sports, including boxing. (I wasn’t completely wrong.) Then I thought maybe it was a day for all the tension of the holiday season to result in physical fights between relatives, spouses, and even lovers and friends. (I wasn’t completely wrong about this either.)

I was told that December 26 is when you box up all the Christmas presents you don’t like, or which don’t fit, and take them back to the store to exchange for something you do like. For everyone who works in retail sales, today is clearly not a holiday.

In a more openly class-divided era, Boxing Day was apparently when servants, delivery-men and the like were given Christmas boxes of money and leftover food by their employers, along with a day off, to compensate for the underpaid and overworked nature of their jobs.

In the last fifty years, though, Boxing Day has become increasingly known as a day of shopping madness, when everyone who is not too hungover and exhausted to brave the weather and the crowds rushes out to buy things on sale to stock up for next year.

Boxing Day sales probably benefit the community here that practises the Orthodox Catholic tradition of celebrating Christmas on a day in January which was known to Western Christians of Shakespeare’s time as Twelfth Night or the Feast of the Epiphany, the day when the magi or the three kings (not sure which) arrived in Bethlehem to see the baby Jesus. While the rest of us are glumly going back to work in the cold, when the hours of daylight are still short, a few programs on local TV feature choirs singing hearty Ukrainian hymns, and wishes for a merry Christmas in the Cyrillic alphabet.

This brings me back to reasons for boxing, fighting, or arguing with your nearest and dearest—or simply snubbing them and hoping they understand your reasons for not showing up and not speaking to them.

As far as I can see, there is no easy way to integrate holiday traditions when family members acquire Significant Others, but don’t want to completely ditch their own parents and siblings on holidays. I felt lucky to hook up with a Latin American in 1989, when I was a single mother with a daughter who looked forward to Christmas Day with her grandparents every year. As a secular Protestant (agnostic with Protestant roots), I had grown up opening presents under the Christmas tree on December 25, when my mother served a holiday brunch of apple strudel and eggnog or coffee, which adults could get spiked with the booze of their choice. My Chilean spouse had grown up with the Catholic tradition of having a big meal on Christmas Eve, then attending Midnight Mass, and opening presents afterward before collapsing into bed in the wee hours.

After some uncomfortable conversations with my mother, in which she claimed that my daughter’s routine shouldn’t be changed at all because my relationship with a Chilean woman and her two sons was not equivalent to a marriage, my new nuclear family settled into a two-day tradition of eating roast beef on Christmas Eve in the home I shared with Spouse, passing the time until midnight by chatting, playing games and watching movies on TV, then opening presents. The next day, my daughter went to her grandparents (where she could also see her aunties if they were in town), and my two stepsons went to spend the day with their father, his wife, and eventually, their half-sister. It worked out.

My daughter left town to attend art school, then moved to a bigger city, and my parents both passed away in 2009. The absence of my blood relatives simplified things and also made it possible for us (lesbian couple) to start a new tradition of making a roast turkey dinner on December 25 and bringing it to the local gay (LGBT) club for those who have nowhere else to celebrate, or would prefer to avoid other company. Other club members bring ham, side dishes and desserts. We spread the word that everyone we know (regardless of gender or sexual expression) is welcome to join us. The crowd is usually small, but it works out.

Clashing traditions and/or families don’t always integrate well. If someone in my extended family grew up celebrating Hanukkah or Ukrainian Christmas (as it is usually called here), that might extend the holiday season, or result in uproar and feuds that could last for years. I won’t mention dashed plans that I’ve heard of, involving people I know who would undoubtedly claim I am telling it wrong.

The expectation that peace and love will prevail in the holiday season is unrealistic, and the effort involved in trying to avoid open conflict is one of the causes of holiday exhaustion. Made-for-TV movies about family reconciliation (hard to avoid in this season) are feel-good expressions of wish fulfillment, and they need to be recognized as such.

The great thing about the life of a writer, however, is that all experience can be used in some way. If Uncle Ned got sloppily drunk and sexually harassed his niece by marriage at the family get-together, or if Mom burst into tears and refused to come out of her room after cooking all day, or if the controversial couple (same-sex, different-race, different-religion, whatever) was kicked out by the conservatives, or left after being insulted, these events probably can’t be described on the page exactly as they happened. Writing about this stuff and including the real names of people and places might get you sued, and would probably get you written off a guest list or two.

However, conflict is a great engine for moving the plots of stories, novels, and plays. When the dust is settled, and when the winter holidays are over (thank the Deity of your choice), the drama of the season can be artfully worked into a narrative that can entertain a variety of readers for years.

It’s hard to imagine a better holiday gift for the writer, or for the readers who understand.
—————-

The Real Wall

by | November 26, 2016 | | 4 Comments

by Jean Roberta

So much has been said (even here in Canada) about the election of Donald Trump as President of the U.S. that I can’t think of anything new to add on a political level.

However, let’s consider how government by the “alt.-right” (loosely defined as a broad coalition of white male supremacists, proud gun owners, climate-change-deniers, Christian fundamentalists, and fans of robber-baron capitalism, unrestrained by unions or governments) might affect writers. The first thought that occurred to me was that new laws might criminalize erotic writing, as distinct from crude boasts about “grabbing pussy.”

My second thought was that legal censorship would not be the most serious threat to writers. The English writer Virginia Woolf came closer to the truth in 1928 when she gave a series of lectures which were later published as an essay, A Room of One’s Own, about how women writers are affected by a shortage of actual space and time in which to write. This argument could be extended to everyone who is socially and economically marginalized.

Thinking about my own past, I can honestly say there has never been a time in my adult life when I didn’t write anything. However, as a single mother in the 1980s, I always felt guilty about spending my scarce “free” time on any activity that didn’t involve tending my child or earning a living. I was also trying to finish a Master’s thesis in English, and this project – which is supposed to take a year or two at the most — took me most of a decade, partly due to delays on the part of a supervisor who had other priorities, and partly due to lack of time, energy and self-confidence on my part.

The real wall that tends to keep marginalized or oppressed people out of “mainstream” culture consists of obstacles to self-expression. If you’ve been taught that your real purpose is to serve someone else’s needs (or that you have no purpose and might as well be dead), and if apparently random circumstances reinforce those messages, writing anything feels like an act of rebellion. Everyone has stories to tell, but the obstacles to telling them are likely to be internal as well as external.

As an instructor of low-cost, non-credit creative writing classes in the local university in the 1990s, I met students who wanted to express themselves in written language, but they were afraid of possible consequences. Several of them insisted that they would never write for publication because their relatives and especially their spouses would never forgive them. My students wanted to tell the truth about their lives, but they were afraid that their truth would offend everyone they knew.

My advice might have seemed contradictory on the surface. I encouraged them to write down their most shocking (to themselves) feelings, suspicions and experiences in very private journals that they never had to show anyone, including me. This was Step One. After letting this raw material cool for awhile, students could continue to Step Two: rereading the secret diary, and pulling out sections that could be reshaped to form poetry, fiction, drama, or creative non-fiction.

Turning a spontaneous rant, a rambling journal entry or a masturbation fantasy into a coherent piece of writing makes it more comprehensible to others. It’s the beginning of a conversation. And a conversation that includes enough participants can change a culture.

In the November newsletter of Circlet Press, writer and publisher Cecilia Tan defended what she does so brilliantly (IMO) that I can’t resist quoting part of her editorial:

“It was a tough night here at Circlet HQ as the election results rolled in and I probably don’t have to tell you why–but I will. This wasn’t about Hillary Clinton versus Donald Trump for us. This was about the fact that the Trump campaign and the Republican platform are serious threats to our existence as marginalized people. Gay, lesbian, trans, bi, gender non-conforming, minorities in sexual identity of every kind, including survivors of sexual assault (and not to mention women and people of color in general) are all seen as less than human by the Trump camp. Literally.

So I thought it might be a good time to remind you all what Circlet Press stands for, and why even in the face of a difficult uphill battle, we’re not giving up, and why even in the face of massive global upheaval, erotic fiction still matters.

1. Writing matters. All writing is a declaration of humanity.

The act of writing is self-expression in a declarative form. Whenever we make words, even if they are tweets, at the most basic level we are saying “I am here!” Unlike vocal speech, writing is a deliberate act, one that combines cognition with communication–with intent to communicate to an imagined other who is not present. It’s a powerful act whether one is writing a personal blog, an article, a story, a letter, or even a diary entry. It might feel right now like putting down words doesn’t matter. But it does. It does because you matter, your voice matters, your personhood matters.

2. Erotica is a claiming of sexual identity.

The extension of the fact that writing matters is that writing about sex matters in particular. Not only do we write “I am here!” but “I am queer!” (or whatever flavor of non-standardized sexuality or sexual identity you declare) No matter what your sexuality is–even if it’s vanilla heterosexual–society has judged you for it and wants to tell you how you can or should do it. If you cannot be yourself in your private thoughts, you cannot be yourself anywhere. In our sexual fantasies is where some of us first discover our true selves, and then through that act of putting down words, of putting that fantasy to paper as if communicating with another sentience, we express that truth. There are those out there who literally wish death on us for being queer or sinners or ‘liberated women.’ Declaring our existence as sexual minorities and celebrating our sexuality with joy through erotica is an act of courage and an act of self-preservation, too. The more we are seen, the better we are known, the more space on the stage we take up, the more difficult it is to marginalize us. “

There you have it. The whole editorial is much longer than this, and it was intended for wide circulation. You can read it here:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/some-post-7202497

Their Words Live On

by | October 26, 2016 | | 4 Comments

by Jean Roberta

Halloween is approaching, and this means (according to some) that the veil between this world and the next is growing thin.

For the ancient Celts, October 31 (or approximately this date in their own calendar) was called Samhain (pronounced sow-in), and it was the last day of the year. When Christianity was spreading throughout Europe and giving new names to old seasonal festivals, a Pope declared November 1 to be the feast day of all the saints, which made October 31 All Hallows Eve, or Hallowe’en. November 2 was declared All Souls Day, and it is still celebrated in Mexico as El Dia de Muertos, the day to honour all your loved ones who have passed on. (Picnics in cemeteries!)

‘Tis the season to think about the spirits of the dead, and whether they still contact the living.

Writers, in particular, tend to haunt their readers during their lives and long afterwards. William Shakespeare died on his own birthday in 1616, but his plots have circulated far and wide ever since. A writer’s death doesn’t change the relationship of readers to his/her words, but it ends the possibility of discussing them with their source, except in a séance. (“Will, when you wrote Macbeth’s ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’ speech, that wasn’t your own cynical manifesto, was it?”)

Too many writers have died since 2000, and I’m sure they are all missed by their fans. Since space doesn’t allow me to honour them all, I’ll just mention a few whose lives brushed mine, and who left us too soon, IMO.

In February 2003, I spent Reading Week (an annual break from classes for students and faculty in the university where I teach) in New York, where I took part in a reading from Best Women’s Erotica of that year in Bluestockings Bookstore. One of my fellow-readers was a writer and singer-songwriter known simply as “zonna.” She read from “What You’re In For,” an intense story of seduction in a women’s prison, and she invited members of the small audience to read the parts of minor characters. “Zonna” was clearly a performer, and she owned the stage. I was taken aback to hear that she passed away several months later. I haven’t been able to find much information about her, but I hope she is at peace.

In 2005, I was writing book reviews for an on-line site, “The Dominant’s View,” having been invited by “Kayla Kuffs,” whom I met in the Erotic Readers and Writers lists. I reviewed a witty book of non-fic, Painfully Obvious: An Irreverent and Unauthorized Manual for Leather/SM by Robert Davolt, a gay man and former Mr. Leather, who co-owned a bar in San Francisco. I spent Reading Week in that city that year, and took part in a reading from Best Lesbian Erotica. I was impressed when Robert Davolt showed up, and invited me to a queer bar down the street for a drink. He was perfectly sociable, and not intimidating. Later, I learned that he was diagnosed with cancer in April of that year, and by May, he was gone. When I first got the news from Kayla, I wasn’t convinced, especially since her informants all seemed to be people from BDSM chat rooms with single names like Slavegirl.

I took the liberty of contacting Patrick Califia, another famous BDSM writer from San Francisco, and he snail-mailed me a copy of The Bay Area Reporter, a newsletter-style journal that included a long, respectful obituary of Robert Davolt. I hope he was welcomed to the Other Side by a chorus of adorable slave-boys.

In 2010, a famously reclusive American writer passed away, leaving a small but well-known body of work. J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories made such an impression on my daughter when she was in high school that she decided to name any future daughter she might have after a precocious young girl in the story “For Esme, With Love and Squalor.” My granddaughter, Esme Stang, was born in February 2010. (I travelled to Toronto during Reading Week, when I met her two days after her birth.)

In 2011, the world lost a legendary pioneer in the world of modern lesbian literature when writer/publisher/archivist Barbara Grier passed away. I’m so sorry I dropped her torch.

I’ll explain. For six months in the early 1980s, I was a full-time employee of a collectively-run “alternative” bookstore which was literally underground, with a display window at ground level. I wanted to order more lesbian titles, including romances from Naiad Books, the company founded by Grier and her partner. I called the Naiad office in Florida and reached Grier herself. I placed an order, and we discussed ways to get the books across the Canadian border without interference from government censors.

I mentioned that I had typed up a list of lesbian books published since the latest edition of her own annotated bibliography, The Lesbian in Literature, came out in 1981. (The first edition of this list was compiled with Marion Zimmer Bradley in the 1970s.)

She said she was too busy to produce a new, expanded edition, and she hoped someone (me?) would continue this important work. For awhile, I actually tried to do this. I kept book titles and brief descriptions on file cards. In 1988, I ran off photocopies of my own typed, unofficial version of the new Lesbian in Lit to hand out at a local LGBT conference. Note that I had no access to a computer. By the 1990s, I realized that I couldn’t possibly keep up with all the new publications, and I hoped that information about writing with lesbian content was more accessible than when Grier and Bradley began compiling a list, beginning with the poet Sappho (circa 600 BCE).

Another notable lesbian writer, Victoria Brownworth, wrote a moving remembrance here:
www.lambdaliterary.org/features/rem/11/11/in-remembrance-barbara-grier

Two other important women writers (both authors of fantasy/sci-fi) passed away in 2011. One of them, Anne McCaffrey, wrote a series of novels about the “dragonriders of Pern,” which I read in second-hand paperback editions. (Actually, there are 20 books in the series. I’ve only scratched the surface.) I loved her explanation in an interview that she moved from the eastern U.S. to Ireland because it was thousands of miles away from her ex-husband.

Joanna Russ, who also left us in 2011, was a more explicitly feminist and openly lesbian writer. She is probably best known for a novel, The Female Man, published in 1975, when Second Wave feminism was gathering strength. Lethe Press publisher Steve Berman named his annual anthology of the year’s best lesbian speculative fiction, “Heiresses of Russ.” I was honoured to be chosen as co-editor of the 2015 edition. (For more on the cultural significance of Russ’ fiction and non-fiction, you could read my introduction, or Google her name.)

In 2012, I was shocked to read that writer/publisher Bill Brent of San Francisco had jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge some time on the weekend of August 18-19. I had met him shortly after 9/11, in October 2001, when new copies of Best Bisexual Erotica 2, co-published by Bill’s small press, Black Books (and Circlet Press of Cambridge, Mass.), were available to contributors, including me. He had stories in the Best Gay Erotica series from Cleis Press, and he also wrote The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Men for Cleis. The bankruptcy of Black Books and of Bill’s zine, Black Sheets, must have been a blow, but after that, he moved to Hawaii, and all those who knew him hoped the change of scene would do him good. On visits back to SF, he apparently didn’t seem suicidal to friends. I wish them comfort.

In 2013, Rhodesian-born “British” writer Doris Lessing passed away. Although she moved to London in 1949, she always thought of herself as a colonial, an outsider with little formal education and no connections with the literary establishment. Nonetheless, when I began writing my Masters thesis on her five-novel “Children of Violence” series, I discovered a horde of fans, critics and academics who had discovered her before I did. When the final version of my thesis was handed in, it had a 12-page bibliography (single-spaced, 10-point font).

I always hoped I would meet her someday, and possibly even get her opinion of my analysis of her work. Now this can only happen on the Other Side.

I first encountered the fantasy writer Eugie Foster of Atlanta, Georgia, when we both had stories accepted for a doomed anthology of noir fantasy, Blasphemy, which was never published. By the time several other contributors pulled out of this project because it was taking too long, we were all exchanging messages in our own chat group, set up by the editors. I was the only one in the group who wrote erotica primarily; all the rest were writers of spec-fic. I found them intriguing, and they treated my genre with respect.

Later, I befriended Eugie on Livejournal and Twitter, where she posted updates about her beloved pet, a de-scented skunk named Hobkin. When Hobkin caught a respiratory infection, Eugie described her efforts (with her husband Matthew) to save him, but Hobkin passed away. Soon afterward, Eugie reported that she had been diagnosed with a rare form of sinus cancer.

Eugie’s passing on September 27, 2014 (which I remember because it was the day before my own spouse’s birthday) was unnerving, since she never lost hope of recovery, and continued to post tweets about her treatment almost until the end. Matthew Foster posted a brief announcement that she was gone, and added:

We do not need flowers. In lieu of flowers, please buy her books and read them. Buy them for others to read until everyone on the planet knows how amazing she was.

Here is a bibliography: www.eugiefoster.com fiction

Eugie and Matthew were both organizers of Dragon Con, an annual fantasy event in Atlanta, and Matthew has continued in that role. This con now features a Eugie Foster Award for the year’s best fantasy story of 20K or less.

On the theme of fantasy fiction, a giant in the field was Tanith Lee of England, who claimed in introductions and interviews that writing was the only thing she ever did well enough to earn a living at it. (She was living with her parents when her first novel, The Birthgrave, was published in 1975.) I taught her novel, Night’s Master (first of the Flat Earth series) in my fantasy literature class, Sympathy for the Devil, until the beautiful latest edition of that book suddenly became unavailable when the boutique publisher, Norilana, went out of business. (This version of the book featured stained-glass artwork by the author’s husband, John Kaiine.)

I was able to find numerous second-hand mass-market copies (with cheesier cover art), but since I couldn’t keep selling dog-eared paperbacks in class, I reluctantly replaced Nights Master with a steampunk mystery by two other writers.

I always hoped to meet Tanith Lee in a writers con some day, and discuss the publishing biz with her. Unfortunately, she passed away from breast cancer in May 2015. How ironic to die in the spring! However, she achieved an enormous amount before leaving this world.

In 2011, I received an email out of the blue from a legendary (at least to my mind) radical dyke of the 1970s, Jeanne Cordova. I recognized her as the editor of an early lesbian journal from California, The Lesbian Tide, which folded in 1980.

Her autobiographical book, When We Were Outlaws: A Memoir of Love and Revolution, was published in 2011, and she wanted me to review it. She had read my reviews in The Gay and Lesbian Review, and she thought I could do justice to her story. I was delighted.

I explained that neither of us could let the editor know we were in contact, since his policy was to let his stable of reviewers choose titles from lists of books received, and not to allow collusion between a writer and a reviewer. (In principle, I admire the integrity of this position.) I wrote the review, asked the editor if he could find room for it, and he did.

Later, Jeanne wrote to me from an email address under the name of her partner, Lynn Ballen, saying she enjoyed finally meeting me at a literary event. I was mystified. I wrote back to say that I was sure she met many people there, but I was not one of them. I hoped we could actually meet someday.

And then I read that Jeanne Cordova passed away from cancer in January 2016.

If I ever meet all the writers I would love to meet, it will probably be at a literary con on the Other Side that will be more fabulous than anything put on by mere mortals. I really hope that all the writers I’ve mentioned have vanquished the inner and outer demons they wrestled with in this world, and that they are enjoying what used to be called their “reward.”

For those of us who are still here, their work is waiting to be discovered.

Eugie Foster and Hobkin (together forever?)

How Much Sex?

by | September 27, 2016 | | 4 Comments

by Jean Roberta

Is erotica a genre unto itself, or does the term just refer to sex scenes that could appear in any work of fiction? Most book-length works of “erotica” can also be classified as something else, and since words that refer to sex can result in books being sold only in an on-line version of under-the-counter, all of us who write about sex have a motive to define our work as romance, or contemporary fiction, or paranormal suspense, or dark fantasy, or some other thing.

When I was invited to co-edit an annual anthology, Heiresses of Russ: The Year’s Best Lesbian Speculative Fiction, I wondered how much sex, if any, could be allowed in an anthology that was not designated as “erotica.” Steve Berman, publisher and co-editor, told me that sex was fine as long as the stories fit the mandate of the series (speculative and lesbian in some sense, which I interpreted to mean that female characters had to have primary relationships with other girls/women). Several of the stories were chosen from erotic anthologies, and the fantasy elements fit in well with the fantasy elements in the less-explicit stories.

While choosing stories, I realized once again that there is really no such thing as a completely non-erotic story. Any situation in which sentient beings interact is potentially erotic. Human beings (not to mention shapeshifters, strange hybrids, androids, and extraterrestrials) tend to have sexual feelings, and these often form a subtext or a kind of bass line under the melody of plot.

Some calls-for-submissions that don’t appear here on the Erotic Readers and Writers site include a paragraph stating that “gratuitous” sex and/or violence is not welcome, but explicit sex scenes are okay if they fit the context, help to show character and further the plot. Well, duh.

So the question a writer must consider is not whether sexual explicitness would be accepted by an editor and a publisher, but whether it would fit a particular story – which it could, depending on how it is approached. In a way, calls for “erotica” per se are easier to respond to, because they require plots on a particular theme (e.g. men in uniform, women in college dorms) in which sex is the goal and the climax.

I have sometimes surprised myself by passing up a chance to include a sex scene in order to focus on other aspects of the relationship, or of the social context. Back in the 1980s, when I was not yet writing “erotica,” I wrote a collection of lesbian stories, including one with the working title “Love and Death in the Canadian Novel.” (My better judgment led me to rename it “Winter Break.”) I was trying to show why two women are attracted to each other, yet too divided in various ways to spend their lives together. The story includes the steamiest scene I had ever written (literally – it is set in winter, when outdoor breath becomes steam). The sex is followed by mutual accusations based on misunderstandings, which lead the pair to realize that moving in together would not be a good plan. Ironically, this is their most serious agreement.

The one-woman publisher put the steamy scene on the back cover as a teaser, although there was no more where that came from. A friend of mine who read the book asked me why I didn’t “come to the point.” Clearly, the point she wanted to come to was not exactly the one I wanted to make.

Do I plan to rewrite that old story and try to resell it? No. It was based on an actual relationship that didn’t last long, and I could hardly give it a Happy-for-Now ending (let alone a Happy-Ever-After) without changing the characters to make them more compatible. I might as well write a new story.

More recently, I wrote a story set in the imaginary world of H.P. Lovecraft, in which the central character is a young woman attending normal school in the 1920s,and enjoying sex with her fiancé, who wants to speed up the wedding date so their pleasure can be legal, respectable, and reproductive. This relationship is also doomed, but I absolutely believed what both characters told me about how much they enjoy their hard-won privacy. I was tempted to spend a page on their joy, which is destined to end because she, newly privileged with income-earning skills and the right to vote, wants a more exciting future than marriage, children and church. He, as a man of his time, thinks she is like a skittish colt who needs to have her first baby in order to “settle down.”

Ultimately, though, I wanted to go somewhere else with the story, which needed to stay within a limited word-count. So although it includes a sexual relationship, it doesn’t really qualify as “erotica.” If anything, the heroine’s first away-from-home adventure is anti-erotic for her, although she recognizes the value of expanding her horizons and calmly respecting other beings whose strangeness terrifies her until she controls her fear.

Years ago in the ERWA lists, someone posted a discussion of percentages (percentage of sexual description vs. percentage of narration and dialogue) as a way of determining whether a piece of writing qualifies as “erotica.” I’m sure some of the best-known novels we think of that way would fail the test. Yearning and sensuality can be expressed even when no one is having “sex,” as it is generally understood. And sometimes a fuck isn’t what is needed most, at least in the moment.

Am I trying to escape from the erotic writers’ ghetto altogether, so as to get more respect? I can’t absolutely deny it, since the persistent myth that erotic writing is sub-literary tends to be hard on one’s Muse. Yet the pressure of a story that wants to be written – or the voice of the character who wants to tell it – feels sexual in a broad sense.

The amount of sexual description in a story or a novel ultimately has to conform to the nature of the story. Whose story is it, and what does the narrator want the reader to know? One good way of finding answers would be to write a story with passing references to sex, then to expand the sex scenes to see if they fit the general tone of the piece. Or conversely, a sex scene could be written first, and then the backstory and the logical aftermath could be added to see if they form a coherent whole. If not, something needs to change.

The best stories, of course, don’t come only from one’s conscious mind. The writing process is more visceral than that, and characters sometimes need to take over.

What do yours tell you?

Hot Chilli Erotica

Hot Chilli Erotica

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