by Cameron D. James
I am probably the last person who should write about magical realms.
Though my husband is an epic fantasy writer, I just cannot get into anything fantasy.
I made it to page 13 of Lord of the Rings and never picked it up again. (Hilariously, everyone knows I hate fantasy, yet when the movies first came out, three people each got me the box set of the books. Despite having three copies, I still couldn’t make it past page 13.) The movies? Wow. I almost fell asleep during them.
I’ve pushed myself through A Song of Ice and Fire, mostly because my husband is nuts about those books and the Game of Thrones TV show. When we started watching the show, the only way I was going to make sense of it was by reading the books.
And that’s about my whole experience with fantasy.
But that doesn’t make for a good blog post.
So I started thinking outside the box.
What, exactly, is a magical realm?
To me, a magical realm is a place and time where place and time really have no meaning. It’s where the only thing that matters is the surrounding energy and the mysticism of the moment. And it’s a realm where anything can happen.
That sounds like sex. Damn good sex.
We write erotica and erotic romance — we write sexual fantasies — we write about characters who come together (and cum together) in a magical realm of desire and lust and love. We write sex scenes where the time and place don’t matter — it falls away, even if just for a moment, so that all the readers and characters focus on is the very act of coming/cumming together. There’s a magic and a mysticism to this realm, like it’s somehow not real, yet it is amazingly very real.
And this magical realm isn’t always contained just to fiction. Most people — hopefully all people — have at one point in their lives had that very same magical realm of sex, where it’s all so mind-blowing and entirely consuming that you don’t know if you’ve been in the act for minutes or hours or days. And regardless of whether we’ve had such an experience in the distant past or we have yet to have that experience, we all know it’s possible. And since it’s possible, we search for it.
That’s where we as erotic writers come in. Our readers know this magical realm exists — perhaps they’ve been in it, perhaps they’re searching for it — and we give them a glimpse of it. We show them how fantasy and reality can very much be the same thing. That’s the power of erotic writing, the power that so many non-erotic-writers refuse to acknowledge — we transport people to a magical realm just as much as writers of fantasy do. The only difference is that our magical realm is real.
Cameron D. James is a writer of gay smut. His most recent book is New York Heat.
You're extremely wise for a young guy... ;^)
ReplyDeleteSeriously - I agree 100%. Sex is, or can be, magic. The power of mutual desire can change reality. I've been there - and trying to capture that in my fiction ever since.
Ah yes...long nights that bleed into daytime. Waking up still impaled by my lover...not even caring that neither of us have brushed our teeth yet, because we just have to have more orgasms NOW! Not being sure where I end and you begin. Those were the days, my friend.
ReplyDeleteThere's a song with those lyrics, for a reason. I'd hate to be getting older and never have had that kind of experience. Like Lisabet says, since I have, I try to recreate it in my books. I love that heady, new-love feeling, and that's rare. That's what I try to give my readers, and myself, each time I write. And that really is a magical realm.