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KD Grace

Garden Variety

by | June 30, 2013 | | 3 Comments

By K D Grace

Some people write in coffee shops, some people write in
libraries, some people write in their studies. But how much does where we write
matter? I’ve always prided myself in being able to write anywhere, but the
allotment is in full-swing right now. There aren’t really enough hours in the
day to be out there and do what I’d like to do to make our veg plot live up to the Gardener’s
World veg plot that exists only in my fantasies. It was only a couple of
days ago – one of those few sunny days in the UK of which a gardener absolutely
HAS to take advantage. With sweat dripping down my back and more than a potted
plant’s worth of good rich soil beneath my fingernails, I sat myself down on
the grass near our allotment garden shed, pulled out my notebook and pen and
began to write. We have a delicious spot of movable shade that works its way
along the back of our plot during the course of the day, so on those few days
when the weather is roasting –ish, we can sit and have a break in the shade.

I’d brought biscuits and cheese and for my lunch and a
bottle of iced tea I’d frozen in the freezer earlier. I seldom mind eating with
the allotment all over my hands. It’s just good, clean earth. As I sat down to
scribble a few paragraphs for The
Exhibition, my WIP, the resident black bird was already busy hunting worms and
unfortunate invertebrates in the patch I’d just dug. By the time I was on the
second slice of cheese, he was sitting in the tree above the garden shed
singing at the top of his lungs. Just a little reminder that this was his patch – especially now with the
birdie feast I’d uncovered and with the hungry mouths he, no doubt, had to
feed.

I listened, I watched and I wrote. I seldom write long-hand
anymore. I’m way more comfortable at the keyboard of a laptop, which allows me
the luxury of editing as I work, and insures me that I never have trouble
reading my own handwriting. But in the allotment, low tech’s the way forward.
It doesn’t matter to me if there are smudges of compost on the pristine page.
It doesn’t even matter to me if a spider decided to make a path across the
centre of the page I’m working on as long as he doesn’t linger where I want to
write.

Paper and ink, or even more to the point, writing down
words, though not quite as old as agriculture, is certainly not too far behind.
I mean if you think about it, the two go hand in hand really. Once feeding
ourselves became a little less of a crap shoot and a little less of a full-time
job and leisure became, at least occasionally a possibility, then it would seem
natural for story-telling to evolve to a way of permanently preserving those
stories. And once that happened, writing couldn’t be too far behind.

Okay, so that’s K D’s version of pre-history, something
you’ll not find on the History Channel, but definitely something I feel a little
bit closer too when I’m sitting comfortably on the grass listening to the birds
and the buzz of the insects, when I’m taking a break from the arduous efforts
of the veg plot to record events straight from my imagination. It feels pretty
primal when the young sweet corn plants and the words unfolding on the page are
linked by the callous and the earth on my hands.

Does the fact that I’m writing in my veg patch change what I
write? Does that particular location make what I write any more powerful, even
any more earthy? I suppose there’s no real way of knowing, no double blind test
I can do. And really, what difference does it make? The words were flowing that
day, and I was sitting in the sunshine listening to the bird song, and the
slightest whisper of a breeze in the trees. Does it make a difference to be
writing in a place where something more concrete than ideas has been planted,
where there’s the promise of more to come than just food for thought, along with
the reminder that life doesn’t always come sanitized and shrink-wrapped; that sometimes
being off-line and well-earthed is just the right place to be. And of course
I’m writing sex. Al fresco. I’d say it’s a win-win for the black bird, for the veg
plants and for the writer. Next sunny warmish day, I’m SO doing this again! 

In Praise of the One-Handed Read

by | May 30, 2013 | | 6 Comments

By K D Grace

I’m a bit like a kid at Christmas when May rolls around. Why’s
that, you ask. It’s National Masturbation month, that’s why! I can’t tell you
how happy it makes me to see something as healthy, life-affirming, and
down-right fun as masturbation get a little much-needed positive press. So I
decided that, as National Masturbation month draws to a close (not that the fun
is ending, just the month) that I’d write a few words in praise of the much-maligned
one-handed read.

Doesn’t it seem strange and more than a little sad that some of the world’s
best, most celebrated writers find themselves on the not-so-coveted short-list
for the Bad Sex Awards? Is there some misguided, unwritten rule that states a
story is only ‘worthy’ if it doesn’t
make the reader squirm deliciously in her seat, if it doesn’t makes her need to engage one hand in areas far south of the
novel in her grip? And where the hell did we get the idea that just that one
act, in fact the most crucial act of the human condition, sex, should not be
treated with the same weight, or the same tongue-in cheek irreverence or the
same heart pounding delight or wonder or horror as any other part of the human
condition?


If a writer gets the sex right, I mean gets it really right, then what other
response should there be but for our bodies to tingle and our hands to stray?

Which leads me to another reason why a one-handed read should be praised and
sought after by readers and writers alike. A well-written one-handed read
engages the reader on a physical level that no other type of read can. A
one-handed read takes the reader a level deeper than the voyeuristic experience
that reading tends to be. A one-handed read allows and demands reader
participation in solidarity with the characters, and, indeed, with the writer.
The story suddenly becomes interactive in a literal sense. And even more than
that, the story suddenly becomes a sexy ménage between the reader, the
characters and the writer.

I’ve always felt that just because a writer strives to give the reader a
well-rounded literary experience with a story that’s gripping (no pun intended),
pacey, thought-provoking and satisfying on some level; just because a writer
tries to offer the reader a well-written, stonking good story doesn’t mean that
 stonking good story can’t involve a little one-handed pleasure mixed in. Why
the hell shouldn’t it?

Okay, maybe it’s that feeling of exposure; maybe it’s that
fear of being caught in the act, so to speak, that frightens writers away from
making the sex hot and squirmy. But it’s a lesson straight from the pages of
creative writing 101 that the place we most fear, the place we feel the most
vulnerable is the place where the most powerful writing happens. Embrace the
wank!

Those of us who love to read love a story we can be pulled
into. I love a good adrenalin rush, a good heart stopper, a good brain teaser,
a good tear jerker, a good happy ending, so why wouldn’t I like a good wank all
in the spirit of a sexy story? Why do we think that good writing is negated if
our stories make people want to go rub one out?

I’ve been involved in the world of erotica for enough years now to have seen
the quality of writing go through the roof, enough years to have been gripped
by heart-stopping, tear jerking, brain-teasing stories that STILL have
fabulous, seamlessly-written, deliciously sensual one-handed scenes. Why can’t
a good book be both a page turner and a one-handed read? We now connect with
story on so many more levels than ever before. We read eBooks, we listen to
audio books, we curl up with a good old fashion trade paper-back and a glass of
wine. But really, was there ever a time when reading a good book wasn’t
intended to be a sensual experience, wasn’t meant to make us FEEL things in our
body that we wouldn’t otherwise feel, wasn’t meant to scratch an itch that
nothing else could quite scratch? So why, oh why, should we exclude that best
of, most intimate of — that even better than a nice glass of wine sensual
experience of the one-handed read?

Oh no doubt there’ll always be a need for sexy snippets just
long enough and hot enough to get the rocks off, and I like those just fine
too. But why should one-handed reads be reserved for just such works? Why
shouldn’t the sex scenes in any type of novel or story be well-written enough,
steamy enough, raunchy enough to send one hand straying? It seems to me that if
a sex scene is well written, then we should at least feel something down in the
genital direction. I’m not saying that everything written about sex should be a
turn-on, but I am saying it should affect us in some way because sex affects
us. It affects us powerfully, uncomfortably, sometimes disturbingly, and it
often affects us the most because we don’t want it to and we don’t understand
why it does, nor do we understand its power over us. But it most definitely
DOES have power over us. It’s supposed to have, so to try to write sex that
excludes and banishes the one-handed read seems absurd.

Without getting all mystical and goose-pimply and bringing
on the sex magic; doing my best to keep it real and genuine, I have to ask;
when is there a time that a writer doesn’t want a reader to feel her work, to experience her story as so much more than words on a page? Why
should our sexual responses not be fully included in the experience of story?
So I’ll say it again: let’s hear it for the one-handed read!

Happy Masturbation Month! I wish you all gripping, touching,
deliciously squirmy reading. And writing!

What Lies Beneath

by | April 30, 2013 | | 4 Comments

By K D Grace

Because I’ve spent the last year and a
half working on my erotic paranormal Lakeland Heatwave Trilogy, I’ve made it a
point to check out anything that might contain valuable information about the
Lake District, and I take loads and loads of pictures each time I visit the
Lakes. I’ve only recently launched Elemental
Fire, the last book in the trilogy, and am definitely feeling some
empty nest syndrome, so it was only natural that when I came across Sarah
Hall’s novel, Haweswater,
I had to read it. Haweswater is an
older book, written long before I knew anything about the English Lakes. Hall’s
is a historic novel set just before and during the time the dam was
being built which created the Haweswater Reservoir.

Haweswater used to be a natural lake
with a tongue of land out in the middle that nearly divided the lake in two,
forming what was then known as High Water and Low Water. The reservoir was built
in the then remote valley of Mardale, with the controversial construction beginning
in 1929, after Parliament passed an act giving the Manchester Corporation
permission to build the reservoir to supply water for Manchester. The valley of
Mardale was populated by the farming villages of Measand and Mardale Green and
the construction of the reservoir meant that these villages would be flooded
and lost, and the people who lived there would have to relocate. There was no
compensation, no help, no recourse.

Hall’s novel is the story of the love
affair between the engineer sent to supervise the project and a local farmer’s
daughter who was born and raised in the valley and loved the land she’d grown
up on. Their tale is set against the tragedy of the land itself.

In 1976 there was a severe drought and,
after forty years of being totally submerged in the reservoir, the village of
Mardale Green once again made an appearance. Before the valley was flooded, the
villages were demolished with explosives and everything that might float and might
cause problems for the water extraction channels in the dam had to be removed. So
what remained was the foundations, the dry stone walls and, amazingly enough,
the bridge over what was once Mardale Beck. Several times since then when there
have been severe droughts, the village of Mardale Green has been exposed, and
when that happens, tourists come from all over to get a rare glimpse of what
was lost. After reading the novel, I did some research on my own and found this
site that had pictures of the villages and the farms before they were flooded
and also pictures of the remains exposed by the drought. http://www.mardale.green.talktalk.net/

This might seem a strange topic to bring
up on the Erotica Readers and Writers Blog, but my reasons are simple. The
story moved me, more deeply than I’ve been moved in a very long time. Hall
created a powerful relationship between her two main characters with some of
the most simply written, most visceral sex scenes I’ve ever read. Hall created
a world which was so much more than concrete and yet so very, very fragile and
fleeting. She pulled me in and held me in that space where characters interact
intimately, not only with each other, but with the landscape. I found myself
thinking that if those two characters, Janet Lightburn and Jack Liggett, had
been in any other place, in any other setting, their relationship would have
had nowhere near the impact, nor the magnetic pull to me as a reader.

One of my heroes, AlfredWainwright had this to say about the construction of the Haweswater dam in
his A Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells:

If
we can accept as absolutely necessary the conversion of Haweswater [to a
reservoir], then it must be conceded that Manchester have done the job as
unobtrusively as possible. Mardale is still a noble valley. But man works with
such clumsy hands! Gone for ever are the quiet wooded bays and shingly shores
that nature had fashioned so sweetly in the Haweswater of old; how aggressively
ugly is the tidemark of the new Haweswater!


I think Wainwright might have found the work of
Sarah Hall’s hands much less clumsy, much more eloquent in her recreation of
the Mardale Valley as it was before the dam. Her novel seems such a fitting
tribute to a place that now only makes its appearance in dry times, when both
people and the land are thirsty. There seems to be something vindicating and
something accusing, and at the same time something quietly hopeful, in a place
that reveals itself all these years later in such a dramatic way, in a place
that won’t stay buried, won’t stay hidden, in a place that inspires maybe even
more because it’s hidden most of the time. There’s something almost magical in
a place that was nearly lost from memory, but just keeps coming back.

After I’d read Hall’s novel, I went back through my
pictures of the fell walks we’ve done near Haweswater and found something that
still gives me a goose bumps whenever I look at it. It’s a picture of my
husband, Raymond, standing above Haweswater Reservoir on our 5th day
walking the Wainwright Coast to Coast Walk. We’d spent the day walking in the
mist and rain and had been cold and wet all day long. We had descended from Kidsty
Pike, out of the mist and were coming down to follow the lake shore of
Haweswater to the village of Burnbanks. Burnbanks itself didn’t exist until the
dam was built, than it was quickly assembled as a pre-fab village for the
workers building the dam. But it’s the view behind Raymond, in this photo, that
stuns me and moves me, that I didn’t even think about until I read Sarah Hall’s
book, that I didn’t even notice when I took the picture.

Behind Raymond and to the right is Mardale Head. If
you look closely, you can see where the dry stone walls fall away into the
waters of the lake. If we could have turned back time, if we’d been standing
there in 1929, it would have been the village of Mardale Green in the photo
below Raymond rather than the grey waters and the vanishing stone walls. So
much is hidden in this photo, and so much is revealed.

I’m not drawing any parallels for writers. There is
no moral to the story, only that there is a story that I wanted to share with
you, only that I’ve been moved by another writer’s words and by a place that
conceals so very much more than it reveals.

Permission to Write Badly

by | March 30, 2013 | | 5 Comments

By K D Grace

I’ve been thinking a lot about the process of writing
lately and what makes it work. Why is it that sometimes it flows and other
times it just doesn’t? The first time I realised I might be able to exert some
control over that flow, that I might be able to do more than sit in front of a
keyboard and hope the Muse would take pity on me, was when I read Natalie
Goldberg’s classic book, WritingDown the Bones. There I discovered the timed writing. It’s simple
really. You write non-stop for a given amount of time. You write against the
clock, and you don’t stop writing until time runs out. No matter what! You
write whatever comes without fretting over whether it’ll be good. And when
you’re done, some of the end result – even a good bit of the end result – might
be crap. But mixed in with that crap might just be the seeds of something wonderful.

At the time I felt like I’d been asked to write with
my left hand. Even writing for five minutes seemed like a daunting task when I
made my first attempts. But Natalie Goldberg knew what she was talking about. I
was amazed at what came out of the abyss between my ears! It was only after I
read Writing Down the Bones that I
began to write real stories. So why did one book make such a difference?

I finally had something I lacked in the past, something
very important. I had permission to write badly. Every writer needs permission
to write badly. Later Julia Cameron, in her book, The Artist’s Way, called those off-the-cuff, devil-may-care writings morning pages, and she prescribed three
morning pages every day – written without forethought; written in haste. From a
fiction writer’s perspective, she didn’t give them the weight that Natalie
Goldberg did. They were only a part of a plan to open the reader to the artist
within. To her, they were more about venting, sort of a daily house-cleaning
for the brain. In addition to morning pages, Cameron insisted that every creative
person should give themselves what she called an artist date once a week. An artist date was a date with oneself
away from writing.

I can’t count the number of times I stood myself up
for my artist dates. I would have broken up with me long ago if I were actually
dating me. But then I realised that an artist date didn’t have to be dinner and
dancing or shopping or even visiting a museum. An artist date was a change of
pace. It could even be ironing or weeding the garden. In fact the whole point
of the artist date was to create space in which I could disengage the internal
editor and give myself permission to write badly.

So many of us are under the impression that every
word we write must be precious and worth its weight in gold. What I’ve learned since
I discovered the pleasure of writing badly is that on the first draft, every
word is most definitely not precious. On the first draft, every word is a crazy
frivolous experiment. Every word is a chance to test the waters, to play in the
mud, to let my hair loose and run dancing and screaming through the literary
streets. Every word is a game and an adventure. Every word is eating ice cream
with sprinkles for the main course. Every word is shit; every word is compost, and
every word is the ground out of which the next draft will grow. I never know what’ll
work until I try it. I never know what my unconscious will come up with while
I’m writing like a wild crazy person, grabbing words and cramming them in and
rushing on to the next ones – just after I’ve pulled the weeds in the garden.
Without that bold and daring first draft, without opening the floodgates and
letting the words spill onto the page, there’s nothing to work with when the
next draft comes. And when the next draft comes, the words do get precious. Every single one becomes weighty and irritable and
reluctant to fit anywhere but the place it belongs, the place where I feel it
just below my sternum like the point of an accusing finger.

But by the time I get to the second draft, by the
time I get to that place where every word has to be perfect, I’m up for it. I’m
ready to slow down and feel what every word means. I’m ready to find all the
nuance and all the cracks and crevices of meaning in between the words. I’m
ready for it because I’ve been playing up until now, and I’ve been allowing the
words to play. And now, recess is over!

The longer I write, the more I realise what else, besides
Natalie Goldberg’s timed writings and Julia Cameron’s reluctant artist dates,
get me there. And what gets me there is often totally being somewhere else,
somewhere other than writing. Sometimes it’s playing the piano badly, or sweating
at the gym, or weeding the veg patch. Sometimes it’s walking through the
woodland not thinking about anything, Sometimes it’s reading something frivolous.
Sometimes it’s reading something profound. All the space that taking time not to write opens up inside me makes
room for that wild ride of the first draft. And when that first draft is
finished, I have what I need to pick and choose, to sort through and sift, to
change and rearrange until I find the best way to tell my tale. But up until
then, it’s child’s play. It’s dancing naked. It’s shameless abandon and multiple
verbal orgasms.

Writing badly? Permission granted.

Images by K D Grace

by | January 30, 2013 | | 2 Comments

http://kdgrace.co.uk

I’m always a bit behind in the technology curve and
even more so in the social media curve. I’m a toe-dipper in the techno-pool of
social and promotional possibilities always testing the water to make sure it’s
not too cold and not too deep. I like to make sure it’s navigable with my
marginal skills before I hop on in. That’s a very long-winded way of saying
that I finally discovered Pinterest over
the Christmas holidays, and I am SO addicted!

The thing is I never thought I would be. I mean my
job is to create pictures with words, right? It all happens inside my head,
right? That’s what having a great imagination is all about, right? And yet, I’m
like a kid in a candy store when it comes to the images on Pinterest. At first,
I found that fact a little bit disturbing, a little bit like watching too much
reality TV. Looking at lovely, brightly-coloured, preeeetty pictures for hours
is – you know – a guilty secret that I really wasn’t sure I wanted to admit in
public.

Oh, it all started innocently enough. It was just
one more way to promote my novels. I put the cover images of my novels up on
individual boards and added other related images that were relevant to the
stories or the characters, and it was cool. But then I started a ‘fun stuff’
board, and a ‘sexy stuff’ board, and a board for myths and inspiration, and a
board for my favourite places and favourite books, and a board for walking, and
a board for garden porn…! You get the picture … er the image.

It’s no secret that I’m pretty neurotic. I’m forever
navel-gazing and trying to analyse just what it is that makes me do some of the
strange things I do — like hurrying to finish my work so I can reward myself
by looking at pretty pictures. That being the case, take my analysis for what
it’s worth – an effort for me to convince everyone, but mostly myself, that
looking at pretty pictures is a good thing, and that I really am okay. Honest!

The powerful parts of story, the parts that I
remember most vividly are the parts in which the image is so clear in my mind that
if I saw it on Pinterest, if I saw it in a glossy magazine, or if it were
shared on Facebook or on telly, I’d recognise it in a heartbeat because I’d see
it with way more than just my eyes. An
image is a representation of the external form of a person or thing in
sculpture, painting, etc. An image is the reflection in the mirror, the
imitation of a thing. And the imagination
is the place where those wonderful word
images are created.

At the end of the navel-gaze, my fascination with
Pinterest and pretty pictures isn’t really all that hard to understand. I see
stories in pictures. By that, I mean what I read or what I write, I see
visually in my head. Though I don’t see the characters in my stories as looking
like actors or famous people, I see images that reflect their personalities,
their actions and reactions to the plot unfolding around them, to the world
they live in, to their response and reaction to each other. Words are the
building blocks for images in story, for pretty pictures and scary pictures and
sad pictures and happy pictures. Words are the finesse for images. Words take
images to the next level by twisting and sculpting and recreating, by breathing
life into those images and bringing them screaming and kicking from the world
of the imagination out onto the written page. There’s a reason why the book is
always better than the film. There’s a reason why the best images only exist
inside my head — as well as the most moving images and the most terrifying
images.

Two years ago in August, my husband and I walked the
Wainwright Coast to Coast path across England. We made the trip with two
cameras and two BlackBerrys. Some days we took hundreds of images. Other days
we took only a few because it was pouring rain and we just wanted to get
somewhere warm and dry. I blogged that fourteen-day journey across Cumbria and
North Yorkshire, from St. Bee’s Head to Robin Hood’s Bay, so I wanted as many
images as we could get for my posts. Even now, two years later, I can look at
those images, and I’m there! I’m there in the Lake District, on the top of
Kidsty Pike in the wind and the mist, I’m there walking through the old mining
ruins on the high level route between Keld and Reeth, I’m there on the North
York Moors looking out over a sea of blooming heather.

Those photos along with thousands of images from
hundreds of walks in the Lake District were revisited, studied and reimagined
in my mind as I wrote the Lakeland Heatwave
Trilogy. Now, so many of those images have stories beyond the stories, so
many of those images take me places I could never go in the real world, but
only in the world of my characters and their stories. Every image has a thousand
stories, stories that I haven’t written yet, stories that I haven’t even
imagined yet, stories that I won’t live long enough to write. So it’s not really
surprising that my imagination is so easily captured by pretty pictures.

The power of image in a story is the power to take
me there and make me want to stay for the whole thing, and not want to leave
when it’s over. The power of image in a story is the power to take me there, then
to make me wish I could leave, the
power that won’t allow me to leave, even after the story’s over. That’s a lot
of power.

I know a lot of writers use an image board, of some
sort, to help them clarify in their heads elements of their story and their
characters. I’ve never done that. The Pinterest boards of my work are all after
the fact. But then perhaps I do something similar in my mind that I’d not
really thought about until my Pinterest addiction reared its pretty head.
Perhaps every story I write is a board of images, images brought more and more
sharply into focus, as I write and rewrite, until they do what I need them to
do, until they make the reader look hard and feel deeply. Well, that’s what I’d
like to think, anyway. Maybe it’s more of a goal really, to make what I write
clear and sharply focused and impossible for my readers to look away from
without being moved in some way without being changed in some way. 

Find me on Pinterest here: http://pinterest.com/kdgraceauthor/

The Time Before Beginnings

by | December 30, 2012 | | 3 Comments

By K D Grace

I really wasn’t going to do this. I really wasn’t going to
write an end of the year post for ERWA because there are probably a gazillion
of them out there. And yet the fact that there are so many indicates to me that
there’s something so intriguing about the last few weeks of the year that even
when we tell ourselves it’s no big deal, it really kind of is …

As I was walking along the canal the other day between rain
showers, watching the moorhens leave water con trails across the surface, I was
thinking about why this time of year is such a big deal. It’s dark, it’s
dreary, it’s seemingly dead. Really, it seems like something we should just
want to skip right through as much as possible, and yet we celebrate this time
of year more than any other.  For several
years I celebrated the seasons of the year with a Wiccan coven, and one of the
best parts of that time in my life was the effort made to understand and live
in sync with the changing seasons of the year. That I’ve held onto long after I
left the coven. That ebb and flow remains an important part of who I am and how
I celebrate.

Then, as now, the magic of this time of year intrigued me
the most. In the Pagan cycle of the year, the winter months are represented by
the direction of north, the cold, dark direction, the place where everything
seems dead and silent. The days are short and the nights are long and it’s a
temptation to go to bed early and sleep late. In the darkest days it’s even a
temptation to follow the example of our bear cousins and sleep the whole dreary
time away until the spring returns. The holidays aside, by the time January
gets here it’s all about the return of the light. We’ve all had enough dark
days, and we want sunshine.

So what’s so magical about that? Of course we want the
sunshine. Who doesn’t? But the magic comes in the waiting. The dark powers of
the north, the dark earth energy of the pagan wheel of the year is dream magic.
It’s the time before beginnings. It’s the time when we sit with a cup of tea
clenched in our hands and reflect on what has been, while everything in us
looks forward to what lies ahead. On the one hand we dream of the past and we
say our good-byes to this turning of the year, on the other hand, we dream and
scheme and anticipate the future that will begin, just like new life, in the
dark place. And we wait for the end that has to happen before the beginning.
The time before beginnings. It’s a phrase that has no meaning if we don’t have
a past to reflect upon. It’s a phrase that has no meaning if we don’t have a
future to anticipate and to dream and scheme for.

This time of year the sun, when we do get it, is never very
high in the sky, and it’s often a cold anemic sun. This time of year when
everything seems so dead, there are already buds fattening on the trees — the
beginnings of the leaves that will shelter the birds and shade us from the sun when
it’s at its most powerful. This time of year even the winter visitors, the waxwings
and the fieldfares, are anticipating new beginnings, feeding up for their
return to the north and for the raising of the next generation.

It’s in these dark days, in this space in between when it’s
not quite the end, but it’s not yet the beginning either, it’s in this liminal
space that we experience a magic that’s different from any other time of the
year, a magic of stillness, a magic of holding ourselves tightly and inhaling
deeply just before the sun returns and we’re off once again, running forward
into the headroom and the creative momentum that this time before beginnings
has afforded us.

Happy Time Before Beginnings!

http://kdgrace.co.uk/

Voyeur or Body Thief?

by | November 30, 2012 | | 2 Comments

by K D Grace

One of the most intriguing parts of story for me has always
been the way in which the reader interacts with it, more specifically the way
in which the reader interacts with the characters in a story. I find that
interaction especially intriguing in erotica and erotic romance.

To me, the power of story is that it’s many faceted and it’s
never static. And, no matter how old the story is, it’s never finished as long
as there’s someone new to read it and to bring their experience into it. Like
most writers of fiction, I’m forever trying to analyse how a powerful story is
internalised, and why what moves one reader deeply, what can be a life-changing
experience for one may be nothing more exciting than window shopping for another.

In my own experience as a reader, there are two extremes. I
can approach a story as a voyeur, on the outside looking in from a safe distance,
or I can be a body thief at the other end of the spectrum and replace the main
character in the story with myself.

One extreme allows the reader to watch without engaging and
the other allows the reader to create sort of a sing-along-Sound of Music- ish
experience for themselves. As a reader, I’ve done both and had decent
experiences of novels doing both. As a writer, however, I don’t wish to create
a story that allows my reader to be a voyeur of a body thief.

As a writer I want to create a story that’s a full-on,
in-the-body, stay-present experience from beginning to end. I want characters
that readers can identify with and are drawn to but don’t necessarily want to
be. I want a plot that feels more like abseiling with a questionable rope than
watching the world go by from the window of a car. I want to create that
tight-rope walk in the middle. I want to create that place in story where the
imagination of the reader is fully engaged with the story the writer created.
That place is the place where the story is a different experience for each
reader. That’s the place where the story is a living thing that matters more
than the words of which it’s made up. It matters more because the reader has
connected with it, engaged with it, been changed by it. In that place, the
story and the reader are in relationship. Neither can embody the other, neither
can watch from a distance. The end result may be a HEA, the end result may be
disturbing and unsettling, but at the end of a really good read, the journey to
get there is at least as important as the end result.

Erotica and erotic romance are by their nature a visceral
experience. Though I think that’s probably true of any good story. I don’t
think good erotica can be watched from a distance any more than it can be the
tale of the body thief. While either will get you there, there’s no guarantee
that the journey will be a quality one. And I want a quality journey. I want to
come to the end wishing I hadn’t gotten there so quickly, wishing I’d had the
will power to slow down and savour the experience just a little longer. I want
to come to the end wondering just what layers, what subtleties, what nuances I
missed because I got caught up in the runaway train ride and couldn’t quite
take it all in.

A good read is the gift that keeps on giving. Long after
I’ve finished the story, the experience lingers, and little tidbits that I
raced through during the read bubble up from my unconscious to surprise me,
intrigue me, make me think about the story on still other levels, from still
other angles. When I can’t get it out of my head, when I find myself, long
after I’ve come to the end, thinking about the journey, thinking about the
characters, thinking about the plot twists and turns, then I know the story has
gotten inside me and burrowed deep. There was no pane of glass in between;
there was no body for me to inhabit because all bodies were fully occupied by
characters with their own minds and their own agendas. The experience extends
itself to something that stays with me long after the read is finished and
makes me try all the harder to create that multi-layered experience in my own
writing.

http://kdgrace.co.uk/ 

Small Flashlight, Big Darkness?

by | October 30, 2012 | | 4 Comments

By KD Grace

Today’s post is a hard one for me to settle into because it
could so easily devolve into navel gazing, and one of the promises I made to
myself and to my readers back when I wrote my very first ever blog post was
that I would keep the navel gazing to a minimum. There must be a gazillion
writer and write-hopefuls blogging, and each one is convinced that their
journey to writing success is totally unique and must be shared. Well maybe not
each one, maybe I’m only speaking for myself, in which case, I blush heartily
and apologise.

My point is that all of the energy, angst, fear, adrenaline,
exploration of dark places, exploration of forbidden places that used to go
into the pages and pages of that gargantuan navel-gaze that was my journal now
go through that strange internal filtering process that takes all my many
neuroses and insecurities, all my deep-seated fears, all my misplaced teenage
angst and magically transforms them into story.

That was sort of my little secret — that I alone, in all
the world, suffered uniquely and exquisitely for my art. I took all the flawed
and wounded parts of myself, parts I wasn’t comfortable facing, examined them
reflected through the medium of story and found a place where I could view them
and not run away screaming.

Where is all this borderline navel-gazing leading? There was
a BBC article about ten days ago asking the question, is creativity ‘closely
entwined with mental illness?’ I shared it on Facebook and Twitter to find
that lots of other writers had shared it as well and the general response was
simply that it sounded about right. There were some very moving conversations
that came out of those sharings of that article along with the realization — something
I’ve long suspected — that I am not all alone out there in my vibrant unique
neurotic bubble. And really, it comes as no surprise that one has to be at
least a little neurotic to be ballsy enough to try to bring, in one form or
another, what lives in our imagination into the real world and to attempt to put
it out there for everyone to see.

As the article was shared around and the responses mounted,
I found myself thinking of C.G. Jung’s archetype of the Wounded Healer. The
healer can only ever heal in others what she herself is suffering from. Empathy
goes much deeper than sympathy. The human capacity for story is as old as we
are. Before the written word, story was the community archive. It was our
memory of who we are, our history, our continuity, our triumphs, trials,
sufferings, joys, all memorised, filed away, and kept safely in the mind of the
story teller. That had to do something to your head, knowing that you were the
keeper of the story of your people! How could storytellers be anything other
than neurotic?

It’s a lot more personal now that we have the written word.
No one has to dedicate their lives to memorising the story of their people. Now
we tell our own story, the story of the internal battles that wound us, the
story of those wounds transformed. We all tell our stories in our own personal
code. What may well start out as a navel gaze into the deep dark wilderness of
Self can be transformed into powerful, vibrant story, and we’re healed! At
least temporarily, or at least we’re comforted. And hopefully so are those with
whom we share our stories. When I journalled my navel-gazes, I wasn’t
interested in anyone else seeing what was on those pages. It was a one-sided
attempt at a neurotic house-cleaning. Sharing the story is a part of the
healing; sharing the story is a part of the journey. The Storyteller had no
purpose if she didn’t share the story with her people.

As a neurotic living among other neurotics, I doubt that
there’s anything we’re more neurotic about as a people than sexuality. I don’t
think it’s any real surprise that there’s suddenly a huge market for erotica.
Last night I sat on a panel of erotica authors, editors and publishers at the
Guildford Book Fair – something that would have never happened before Fifty
Shades of Grey, and even at 9:00 in the evening, we played to a full house.
Each of us had a story of how we came to write erotica. We shared our stories
with a roomful of people, who then took those stories away with them to
possibly be shared with others. The archetype of the storyteller is alive and
well. And I believe writers live out the archetype of the wounded healer on a
daily basis.

Most of the time I write my stories because it’s just too
much fun not to. That’s the truth of it. I seldom consciously dig deep to find
those wounded, neurotic places. Really, who would want to do that deliberately?
But the wounded places find me, and they end up finding their way into the
story. And what surfaces is never quite what I expected, always more somehow,
even if started out to be nothing more than a little ménage in a veg patch.

The Power of The One By K D Grace

by | September 30, 2012 | | 4 Comments

By K D Grace

Like most writers, I spend a lot of time analysing what
makes a story work. Why does one story grip me when another doesn’t? Why do the
characters in one tale make me want to curl myself around them and never let
them go while others feel more like they’re only people waiting at the bus stop
with me, people who barely register in my mind.

How much of what makes a story work is plot and how much is character?
Sometimes nothing happens in a story, and I’m enthralled. At other times
everything happens in a story, and I don’t care. Am I just picky? I wonder if in
the age of free Kindle downloads, being spoiled for choice hasn’t jaded us so
much as it has left us frantically searching for The One. And the stories that
really do work for me are the stories in which I most fully experience the
power of The One.

It seems to me that the power of The One is more evident in erotica and romance
than it is in any other genre. I suppose that sounds really obvious in a
Cinderella and Prince Charming, or best fuck ever sort of way. At the risk of
over-simplifying, it’s all about being The One, finding The One, enticing The
One, seducing or being seduced by The One. Happily ever aftering with The One.

In our need to connect, in our need for intimacy, it seems to me that the power
of The One draws us more than any other element of story. It isn’t so much the
need for a knight on a white horse as it is the need for a kindred spirit, as
it is the need for someone who groks us, someone who gets us on the deepest level of our quirkiness, our flaws, our potential,
our Oneness. The archetypal story is that The One goes on a journey that no one
else can go on, and on that danger fraught journey, The One finds The Other
One, the only Other One who really gets
him/her, who is the flint to The One’s steel. And the resulting fire is what
propels the story, what takes the reader in and entices her into her own place
of Oneness. Hearts and flowers – maybe. Best fuck ever – could be. Magnetic
connection – bound to be.

The thing is, not everyone’s fire is fueled the same way. One person’s One is
another person’s bloke at the bus stop. The story of The One can be a game of
substitution in which our minds edit out the hero/heroine and insert ourselves
making the story about us. WE become The One. Or the story of The One can be
more of a voyeuristic menage in which we find ourselves happily inserted into
the relationship, experiencing a bit of the hero, a bit of the heroine, and
basking in the chemistry that happens in the space between, when two Ones
collide. I find this to be more of a 3D way to experience The One. In a lot of
ways that space in between, that joining place where the rough edges rub up against
each other is the real One. The joining place is the space in which the two become
a different kind of One.

Beyond romance and erotica, the power of The One is what so much of story is
about. The One who catches the serial killer. The One who is the serial killer.
The One who wins the battle, The One who pulls the Sword from the stone, The One
whose face launches a thousand ships. The One who can wear the glass slipper.

The tale of The One is the mathematics of story. The One plus the Other One
equals One, and that One is the Whole, the plurality of One.

The tale of The One is the physics of story. When the One
fuses with the Other One, when they join together to form THE ONE. That fusing
results in a release of energy, energy that feeds the reader, energy that
drives the story.

When The One reader finds The One story, the energy released
can change the reader’s internal landscape. The constant search for The One
story by the reader is a treasure hunt that can change everything. Every reader
has experienced that post coital bliss of indulging in The One story. It’s
chemistry, it’s fire, it’s magic! It doesn’t happen often, but every time it
does, it’s enough. It’s enough to drive us on in search of the next One. 

Inspiration

by | August 30, 2012 | | 10 Comments

I’m very excited to be blogging for ERWA.
Back in the early days when I was just getting started as an erotic author,
ERWA was not only the go-to site for all of the latest calls for submissions,
but it was also a place to go for inspiration and encouragement. Now, here I am
writing what I hope will be inspiring and encouraging.

Today, I want to talk about inspiration,
because like most writers, I think about it all the time, and crave it
constantly. I want to talk about one of my favourite stories from Greek
Mythology, one that made me think more about inspiration than any other, and
that’s the story of Daphne and Apollo. In a nutshell, Apollo, the God of Light,
falls in love with Daphne, a woodland nymph. But Daphne flees his advances, and
when it becomes clear to her that she can’t escape him, she calls upon her
father to help her, and he turns her into a laurel tree to save her from
Apollo’s lust.

Perhaps it’s my naughty nature, but I’ve
always thought to myself, if I were Daphne, I would not only have let Apollo
catch me, I would have pursued him.
After all, he is the god of poetry
and music and art and wisdom and all those wonderful things that we writers
long for. A good fuck for a little wisdom and inspiration – a fair exchange,
I’d say. For some reason, I could never quite get my own private version of
that myth out of my head, nor the idea of that masterful exchange of power,
becoming the lover of the divine in exchange for divine gifts.

That got me to thinking about other lovers
of the gods, lovers who hadn’t been turned into trees before they were ravished
by the divine. Most of them got knocked up, true enough, and since the Greeks
were pretty misogynistic, that was the end of the story for the women-folk. In
short, they were pretty, some god took a fancy to them, knocked them up, and
there ya go! But, the result of their ‘inspiration’ was a child that was more
than human, a child with special powers, a child that was a savior or a hero.
Of course, Psyche didn’t get knocked up. She just married a god, bested her
mother-in-law at her own game and was made a goddess for her troubles.

But it’s when I started thinking beyond the
misogyny of the day to the archetypal message of the story that it hit me.
Daphne is really a tragic character because at the end of the tale, she misses
out on divine inspiration. She becomes rooted in one place, unmoving, never
able to do more than passively endure the changes of the world around her. All
she’s left with is her chastity. But Danae, when seduced by Zeus, gives birth
to Perseus, and Leda, also seduced by Zeus in the form of a swan, gives birth
to Helen of Troy and Pollux.  And the
stories of the children they give birth to are larger than life, exciting
adventures, stories that cause the rise and fall of empires, and all are the
result of divine and human coupling. Granted there was often no choice for the
women, or the men, the gods took a fancy to. Who could really argue with a god?
But the result was no less amazing.

Inspiration is like that, I think. We can
bargain for it. All of us writers have our techniques, the things that we do,
the rituals that work to get us to the story we need to tell. I walk and grow
vegetables. Some people listen to music, some people cook. I love hearing the
stories of how people get their inspiration, how people open themselves to the
Muse in an effort to get knocked up creatively. But I also love those times
when inspiration broadsides us, comes in a form we least expect and ravishes us
until we’re full and overflowing and we give birth to a story that we didn’t
see coming, a story that has a life all its own far more than we could have given
it if we’d simply sat down and planned it out.

Even leaving the Garden of Eden is a story about
seeking inspiration, about seeking to discover more, about becoming more than
ourselves, and about the price we pay when we’re willing to take that risk – powerful
stuff, all of it. And because the creative force will not be controlled, it
often doesn’t work out the way we planned it. It’s often expansive, explosive
and dangerous. It’s hardly any wonder that Daphne is seen as virtuous, and
chastity is the surface message for the rule of the properly behaved. But the
subversive message, now that’s another matter. The subversive message launched
a thousand ships, killed the sea monster, grabbed divinity and claimed it in
mortal hands, and wow! Writers do that every day, every time we yield to
inspiration, or grab it by the hem of its toga and refuse to let go until it
ravishes us, we re-create that archetypal story all over again.

Hot Chilli Erotica

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