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Stories in Paint

by | January 21, 2021 | | 2 Comments

“The Singing Butler” by Jack Vettriano

Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3809260

I’m sure you’ve seen the image above. Certainly I had, but until a few days ago I didn’t really know anything about Jack Vettriano, the artist who created it. I’ve always liked the painting, though. Beneath its light-hearted quirkiness, one senses an enigma. Who are the couple dancing? Why are they on the beach? What do the maid and the “butler” of the title think about their frivolous employers? Are they jealous? Resentful? Or is this just another day in the life of a servant? The painting clearly has a story behind it – possibly several.

Last week I was browsing in my favorite used bookstore and happened upon a coffee table art book of Vettriano’s work. As I leafed through the gorgeous volume of high quality reproductions, I found myself spellbound. Vettriano may be most famous for the sunny image above, but many of his other paintings have a very different vibe. They’re dark, sensuous, intimate – detailed portrayals of sex and love, desperation and ennui. The best are erotic gems, complex vignettes frozen by the painter’s brush.

Vettriano is my contemporary. He was only a child during the fifties, but most of the scenes he paints seem to be set just post-WWII. They brim with a sort of bitter nostalgia. The women wear permed hair, dirndl skirts, ball gowns, high heels; the men sport wide lapels and fedoras. The details are meticulously rendered. And every painting seems to have a story behind it.

In “After the Thrill is Gone”, a glamorous woman in a strapless gown and heels sprawls on a couch, exhausted or perhaps in despair, a cigarette smoldering in her graceful fingers. Has she returned home from one party too many, drained by the superficiality of her life in the fast lane? Has she just dismissed her lover, bored by his attentions? Or is she the one who has been rejected?

http://www.jack-vettriano-prints.org/jack-vettriano-After-The-Thrill-Is-Gone

“Altar of Memory” is disturbing, almost perverse. An older man in a suit embraces a shapely, headless mannequin wearing a powder-blue gown. Was this his wife’s dress? His mistress’s? Did the absent woman die, or simply leave him for someone else? There’s a champagne flute on the table, a mirror on the wall. Whoever she was, one can almost imagine him stripping off the dress to make love to her mute simulacrum.

http://www.jack-vettriano-prints.org/jack-vettriano-prints/jack-vettriano-Altar-Of-Memory

“Beautiful Losers” presents us with what has to be a ménage a trois. On the right a man in a vest and shirt sleeves embraces a slender blonde, burying his face in her nape while he pulls her against his body. On the left, another man watches them, attentive despite his smoking butt and casually dangling leg. Is he waiting his turn? Judging? Giving instructions? And what about the woman? Is she the seated man’s wife, loaned to his friend? I could see that. Or perhaps she has been hired for their joint pleasure. Her arms are crossed over her breasts, perhaps in a gesture of self-protection, but possibly to make it easier for her to slip the straps of her gown off her shoulders.

http://www.jack-vettriano-prints.org/jack-vettriano-prints/jack-vettriano-Beautiful-Losers

“Couple X” are clearly in the throes of lust. But who are they when they’re not lost in the intoxication of each other’s bodies?

http://www.jack-vettriano-prints.org/jack-vettriano-prints/jack-vettriano-Couple-X

“At Last My Lovely” is even more enigmatic. The beautiful blonde strokes her lover’s cheek while his hand rests upon her bare knee. Meanwhile, her shadow looms over them, dripping with menace.

http://www.jack-vettriano-prints.org/jack-vettriano-prints/jack-vettriano-At-Last-my-Lovely

I hope you’ve taken the time to check out these images on Vettriano’s website. I couldn’t include them in the post for copyright reasons. Do you see the stories in them, the way I do? Erotic stories, in many cases, though perhaps not with happy endings?

Needless to say, given his subject matter, Jack Vettriano is controversial. Though he received the Order of the British Empire from Queen Elizabeth in 2003 (he is Scottish), he has also been panned by prudish critics as a purveyor of “badly conceived soft porn”, and a painter of “dim erotica”. Of course, that doesn’t bother me, given that I believe sex is one of the most important subjects for art.

Indeed, one of the reasons I found his images so thrilling was that they triggered all sorts of story ideas. I thought I’d finish this post by sharing a flasher I just wrote in response to his 2006 creation “A Very Married Woman”.

http://www.jack-vettriano-prints.org/jack-vettriano-prints/jack-vettriano-A-very-Married-Woman

A Very Married Woman

By Lisabet Sarai

“Same time next Wednesday?” As she fixes her hair and make-up, she doesn’t bother to look at him. She’s gotten what she came for.

“Sure.” That’s what he says, not what he thinks. She’s drained him twice in the past hour, once with her mouth, once with her wicked cunt, but it’s not enough, not nearly. Stay, he wants to tell her. Let me devour you. Let me hold you. She’d just laugh.

Nothing outside this room matters anymore. This is the only place he’s alive. Things that used to thrill him – the deals, the chase, the triumphant days and the glittering nights – mean nothing. Once a week, for an hour or two, his monochrome world turns Technicolor. Then gray shadows close in again.

How did this happen? When did simple, healthy lust morph into obsession? When they’re apart, he dreams of her sleek thighs. He wakes with her perfume in his nostrils.

“I think Fred’s getting suspicious.” A teasing smile on her ripe, bruised lips. “Maybe we should stop.”

“No!” He leaps to his feet and encircles her with desperate arms. “Forget about him!”

“Silly! Got to go pick up the kids.”

Her quick kiss shatters him.

What about you? Do any of these paintings – or the hundreds of others showcased on his website – inspire you? If so, why not create a flasher to capture your inspiration? You can share the flasher in a comment here on the blog. Or post it next Sunday on the Storytime critique list, where Sundays are devoted to flash fiction and poetry.

Not a member of Storytime? You can sign up here:

https://erotica-readers.com/erwa-email-discussion-list/

I’m eager to taste the stories you see in these provocative images.

Negotiation

by | May 21, 2014 | | 13 Comments

By Lisabet Sarai

A word to readers: this blog post has nothing to do with BDSM. However, it does feature some pain.

A few months ago, inspired by one of my blog posts here, Donna George Storey challenged ERWA followers to take the NWWTHYW challenge. “NWWTHYW” stands for “National Write Whatever The Hell You Want”. We declared March to be NWWTHYW month at ERWA and even established a special blog page for people to share their experiences.

I was pretty quiet during that month. I felt like a hypocrite. Because even as my fellow authors were crowing about setting their muses free and flying high on the currents of their personal visions, I was laboriously twisting and reshaping my most recent novel, trying to fit it into the pigeon hole established by my publisher. While other blog commenters basked in the glow of their creative fervor, I was agonizing about just how much I’d have to cut and rewrite in order to satisfy the submissions editor.

A bit of history is required to understand the situation. Late in 2013 I responded to a call for short erotic romance works (15-20K) on a particular theme. This theme was supposed to provide the foundation for a new imprint with this (highly successful) publisher. They planned to put lots of energy into marketing the series, as it was part of a major rebranding effort.

The publisher was quite specific about what type of story was required: light, humorous, romantic, with a bit of a chick lit flavor. BDSM and ménage were okay as long as things didn’t get too intense. The first few ideas I had didn’t get the editor’s approval, but then I hit on a winning concept and went on to write Her Secret Ingredient. This is a slightly silly story about an ambitious female chef who tries to seduce the devastatingly handsome but authoritarian Frenchman running the cooking network where she’s been hired as a special guest. Instead she snags the rumpled but attractive producer, who turns out to be a closet Dom.

After this book came out, in late 2013, the publisher asked if I would be interested in writing a novel-length sequel. After a bit of wavering, I decided to give it a try. I wrote a blurb and sent it to the editor. She loved it. So I plunged in, making steady progress. I submitted the book on Valentine’s Day, and waited for a response. I thought the book was pretty good. I’d managed to broaden and deepen the characterization, focusing on a BDSM triangle in which my heroine dominates the French chef but submits to the producer. The plot premise of a series of on-location cooking shows in France gave me lots of opportunities for local color. (Since I took a three week vacation to France in 2013, I had plenty of material!)

This publisher usually turns submissions from their established authors around in a few days to a week. In this case, though, several weeks went by without my hearing anything. Finally I inquired about the status of the book.

Well (the editor said), The Ingredients of Bliss was well-written (a sop to my pride?) but the dark, raw tone didn’t fit well with the imprint. And wasn’t the plot a bit too elaborate for a romance? (In a case of mistaken identity, the heroes are kidnapped by a Hong Kong drug cartel and the heroine must figure out how to save them.) Meanwhile, could I make this be a true ménage, with Emily be equally in love with both of the men (producer Harry and chef Etienne), rather than having her feelings portrayed as ambiguous? Or else could I tone down her relationship with Etienne and focus more strongly on the fact that she and Harry are in love? Readers won’t like her if they think she’s fickle. And while we’re talking about fickle, the fact that she’s attracted to and considering having sex with the villain (who happens to be a dead-ringer for Etienne) is just not acceptable. Oh, and the little hints about F/F attraction to the police officer who’s helping her? Our readers don’t really like F/F interactions in a heterosexual book.

Dark, raw tone? She should read some of my other stuff! Bangkok Noir, or Exposure, for instance. Okay, the book includes a bloody gun battle and an attempted rape (by the villain) with some strong language, as well as a gory but erotic nightmare, but none of this is gratuitous. It all advances the plot and helps develop the heroine’s character.

As for Emily’s “fickleness”, her uncertainty about her true feelings, I see this as the core emotional conflict in the story. While she fights for her lovers’ lives, she’s also trying to come to terms with her dual attraction and to decide which, if either, of the men she Loves. (I deliberately capitalize the word, since I mean “love” in the romance sense of soul-mate/long-term commitment.)

Sure, she’s not in love with the gangster Jean Le Requin, but the plot requires her to seduce him in order to achieve her goals. Given that he looks and even smells like one of her lovers, wouldn’t she react to him physically, even if her emotions weren’t involved?

Meanwhile, what’s with the “too much plot” issue? This is, after all, a novel. Sixty five thousand words. I can’t just fill that up with one love scene after another, no matter how creative the BDSM! I’d get bored, even if my readers wouldn’t.

My first reaction was to pull the book and submit it elsewhere. “This is National Write Whatever The Hell You Want Month”, I told myself. “Why should I compromise my artistic vision to fit the expectations of somebody else?”

I soon realized, though, that the novel would lose a lot if it were not associated with the original short story. So I bit the bullet and did a revision, trying to address at least some of the editor’s concerns. This was pretty tough. My work has a lot of inertia. I revise continually while I am working, but once I write “The End”, the book starts to fossilize. I don’t have trouble modifying a few sentences or paragraphs, but for better or worse, my stories tend resist major structural changes.

In this first round of edits, I removed the part where the villain fingers Emily to orgasm at the Grand Prix races, destroying her fancy lingerie in the process (though I was really fond of that scene). I took out a passage where she’s guiltily contemplating the pleasures of screwing him. I added more declarations of love between Emily and Harry. I streamlined the plot a bit and tried to make the details more coherent.

The modifications were not substantial enough to satisfy the editor.

I tried again, completely removing any hint of attraction between Emily and Jean. I softened the attempted rape scene quite a lot, removing both the most extreme epithets and much of the physical violence. Without being asked, I excised the terrifying erotic dream, which had an extremely dark tone.

Better. Can you try one more time, please? And while you’re at it, could you edit the blurb? It’s a bit long and elaborate and gives the plot away. Can you take out some of the details, to help build suspense? Oh, and it would be good to focus more on Harry and less on Etienne. Don’t want to give potential readers false impressions.

I sent in a third revision. As far as the blurb was concerned, I made some minor changes, but I told the editor that I disagreed with many of her comments. The suspense in this book (I wrote) does not revolve around the kidnap plot but rather around Emily’s ambivalence regarding her two lovers and the roles of dominant and submissive.

Finally, the book was accepted. I suspect that the editor may have been tired of all the negotiation. Or who knows, maybe they really do like it.

Other authors I’ve talked to have told me this is a normal process that they’ve been through many times. However, being asked to do multiple rounds of substantive edits like this was a new experience for me, an experience that I found quite unpleasant. At several points I was tempted to throw down my toys and walk away in a huff.

I kept at it for several reasons. First, this publisher has always treated me very well (and I don’t want to imply that they were anything less than professional and courteous during this process, either). Part of me (the part that always tried to get straight A’s) felt guilty and embarrassed that I hadn’t met their expectations. Second, I knew it would be hard to sell this book elsewhere. I could find a publisher – that wouldn’t be a problem – but despite my relative lack of success, I had targeted this specific imprint and the book would be something of an orphan otherwise.

Still, I feel a bit sheepish after championing NWWTHYW and blogging about “writing commando”. After all is said and done, I guess I’m just another pussy-whipped author, meekly adapting my work to fit the market. (Okay, maybe not “meekly”!) Was this a matter of principle? Should I have stood my ground? Did I betray my Art?

When I get to this point, I have to laugh at myself. I don’t view my words as sacred. I write to entertain myself and my readers, and to explore certain ideas and scenarios I find intriguing. And of course, to make a bit of money, if I can. Yes, these edits skewed the book away from my original vision, but so what? The revised book probably will be more popular than the original would have been. I don’t doubt that it’s closer to what this publisher’s readers want.

After all, this is just one book. I can always go dark, deep and raw in the next.

Art and Play

by | October 21, 2013 | | 12 Comments

By Lisabet Sarai

I discovered buried treasure today.

There’s a box in our storage closet
labeled “L’s Writing”. I hadn’t examined it in quite a while. I
knew it held my old journals, my poetry notebooks, various term
papers, theses and other academic artifacts. I couldn’t recall,
though, how much I’d kept of my very early schoolwork and writing.
After all, my life journey has taken me through five decades and
halfway around the world since I was in junior high school. Maybe I’d
jettisoned some of my childish output – or maybe it had
disintegrated, the paper drying out and crumbling away after half a
century.

In particular, I was looking for a set
of science reports I remembered from eighth grade. Each week the
teacher would perform a demonstration and ask us a set of questions.
In our reports, we were supposed to diagram the experiment, then
answer the questions and draw conclusions. I liked to draw and I
liked my teacher. So instead of simple scientific figures, I created
a series of cartoons, some of them harboring private jokes. I had
great fun concocting those reports. I’m sure it took me far longer
than if I’d merely followed the instructions, but I didn’t care. I
was happy putting in the effort, expressing myself. It was homework
but it was also a kind of play.

Imagine my delight when I found a
tattered manila envelope crammed with documents going back to
elementary school – some as fragile as I’d feared, but many in
decent condition. My book reports and my compositions from French
class . My high school honors thesis about the Great Chain of Being
in Tolkein’s Middle Earth. My plays about the Beatles, about the
jealous gods of Olympus, about the 1964 presidential election. My
ghost and science fiction stories. And, just as I’d hoped, the full
set (as far as I can tell) of said science reports.

You might ask what all this has to do
with writing erotica.

I’ve been pondering the way we look at
our writing as work. Many of the posts here at the ERWA blog discuss technical aspects of the writing process. We discuss conflict and
pacing, the theory of the short story, the exterior and interior
elements of character, techniques for evoking sensory experience in
our scenes, strategies for self-editing. We wrestle with revisions.
We “kill our darlings”. We train ourselves to view everything we
write with a critical eye.

I don’t mean to minimize the importance
of self-analysis or craft. However, I sometimes worry that we’re too
analytical, too focused, too left-brained, about our writing. Or
maybe I should say “I” as opposed to “we”. I’m so concerned
with markets and word count, sentence structure and word repetition,
that I forget why I started doing this in the first place. I’ve lost
my sense of play.

Nobody taught me how to write
creatively. I’ve been doing for as long as I remember, and from the
very first, I did it for fun. I played with words, and back when I
was a kid, I played with images too, as can be seen from my eighth
grade efforts. (I was always a better wordsmith than visual artist,
though.) I was, in psychological jargon, intrinsically motivated,
writing, drawing, painting and rhyming simply because I enjoyed doing so.

And that’s what’s often missing now.
The product is what counts, from the perspective of readers and
publishers. They’re waiting for my next book. I try to ignore the
pressure, but I’m never entirely successful. The limited time I have
available for writing adds to the sense of stress. I only have this
day, these few hours – what if I can’t get the words out?

Art cannot be compelled. You have to
simply open yourself and let it flow. I know there’s a theory that
all great artists must suffer. I don’t know if I buy that, but in any
case, I’m not aspiring to greatness. No, I just want to enjoy my
writing the way I did when I was younger. I want to play.

I managed this, to some extent, with my
last novel Rajasthani Moon. I undertook this project solely
for my own amusement, as a challenge to myself: how many sub-genres
could I combine in a single book? In a sense, I was thumbing my nose
at the erotic romance establishment, which so loves to slice and
dice, categorize and label, every story. So I let my imagination run
free, and I didn’t censor myself to please my publisher. I even
included some F/F interaction, generally considered to be the
marketing kiss-of-death in traditional erotic romance. If it turned
me on, I put it in and damn the markets.

When the book was done, I knew it was
no work of enduring literary significance – but it’s lively,
entertaining, and pretty hot. Most important, I had a fabulous time
writing it.

I want to do that again.

I’m willing to put in the effort it
takes to write well – but not without the payoff of having fun. Not
anymore.

Hot Chilli Erotica

Hot Chilli Erotica

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