Subjective

The older I get, the more I come to understand how subjective "truth" actually is. We recall moments from childhood with an exactness that cannot be questioned. Until someone else who was there corrects you on key points. Key points which were absolutely unquestionable in your own mind.
By that time, of course, it's almost impossible to know which of you has remembered it correctly, or at least the closest to correctly. By that time it really doesn't matter, either. You each have your truth.

I don't tend to get people asking me about my own stories, and the veracity of events within them. In a way that's kind of weird since nearly all of my stories are set within the real world, for the most part. I have a single paranormal story, and the rest are contemporary erotic romance. I know of people writing bear shifters and aliens who get asked if their stories really happened!

My answer, were I asked, would probably be some kind of vague half-and-half statement about stories being based on true events, or inspired by them. For the most part that's exactly how it happens for me, and I'm certain for a lot of other writers, too.

As I alluded to in my first paragraph, we're all writing fiction every moment of our lives. Our brains are processing "truth" through layers of memory and filters of emotion. Not just the emotion of the moment, but through the memories dredged up by any one event, we could be processing the "right now" through the emotions of "last time this happened" or even "the first time this happened". Plus we all have a tendency to remember events in the way which suits our own purposes. Either we make ourselves a victim or a victor, but we try like hell to avoid being the asshole of the story.

So if our everyday lives are essentially fiction, then it stands to reason even the truest of true stories will still be filtered and colored.

I've received a fairly scathing review recently for one of my characters acting in a way the reader thought was unrealistic. (Their review was far more emotive than I'm making out!) I actually agree with that reviewer to a certain degree. My character was behaving in a manner which was perhaps over the top, or perhaps inconsistently. My counter, were I to be silly enough to contact the reviewer, would simply be that I'm writing fiction. I strongly doubt people read erotic romance for its gritty reality and the way it shows relationships as being a long stream of waiting for each other to finish using the toilet. And waiting another ten minutes when your partner finishes in there.

Following from Lisabet's point on Monday, I feel the best service "truth" can do in our stories is to inform our characters. When I visited my friend and co-author, Katie Salidas, in Las Vegas last September, we were chatting about this very thing. Her example was one I thought summed up the whole concept very well.

Katie writes vampires. Not only vampires, but the great majority of her work is in various vampire genres. Now obviously, she doesn't know what it's like to crave blood. But as a smoker who's tried to quit, she knows only too well the sensation of a bone-deep craving that's just not good for ya. She channeled that feeling most directly into her character Alyssa, the star of the Immortalis series, and her teething (heh) troubles when she was turned. But it's there across the board. An authenticity to the blood-lust. (She also brings that same seed of craving, but with a different overall tone, to her werewolves).

For me, the most obvious and direct channeling I do is in the way my heroes revere the full bodies of their curvy heroines. His description of her body, and the way it turns him on, is always drawn directly from my own experiences. This is a constant in my stories, because it's a constant in my life. It's my smoking. It's my truth.

Enough Already by Giselle Renarde

I've been putting off writing this post because, as usual, it cuts close to the bone.

This fortnight's topic at The Grip is "craving" and, to be honest, there isn't much I do crave these days. Not even foods. Even so, I knew exactly what I needed to write about. Not my cravings, but my partner's.

I can't decide if six and a half years is a long time to be with a person or not. In my mind, it isn't. Fifty years--that's a long time. Six (and a half) years go by in the blink of an eye. Still, after six (and a half) years you kind of know what to expect from a person.

I vaguely recall a stage at the beginning of our relationship when my girlfriend couldn't keep her hands out of my pants, but that feels like a million years ago. Lately, it hasn't been like that. We talk casually about sex, we have sex fairly frequently, but I don't feel like sex is THE THING that makes this a viable relationship. We're built of so much more.

That's why I didn't know how to react earlier this month when my girlfriend's sex drive skyrocketed. It wouldn't have been weird if it was just one day when she was like, "I NEED you NOW!" But it wasn't just one day. It was every day.

Maybe proximity explained it? She's working a job close to my house and, considering we live in different cities, we've had occasion to be together much more than usual. But she's had jobs in my city before and it's never been quite like this. She went from wanting me once in a while to wanting me every day.

Which was... fine, I guess...

Okay, I don't crave sex the way I used to. I don't think about it every three seconds like I did when I was nineteen. I'm supposedly in the prime of my life, but I'm happy to merely take sex when it comes to me. I won't go out looking for it.

But my girlfriend certainly sought me out--again and again, and in a growling taking-what-she-wants way I found strangely intimidating. You think you know a person, and suddenly she's stripping you bare in the alcove beside the emergency exit at her workplace with the door unlocked, when anybody could walk in and catch you at it...

As I wrote that last sentence, it occurred to me that we've done EXACTLY that on more than one occasion, but that was back at the start of the relationship. It's the same act in a different phase of US. That's why it seems so off.

I kept asking her "What's got into you?" and "Where is this coming from?" and she told me, "It's always been there," and I felt shocked. I felt like she'd been hiding this monstrous craving from me for all these years.

The sex itself wasn't problematic. I don't want to sound like I wasn't into it because, honestly, she does a body good. What became problematic, for me, was that suddenly EVERYTHING was sex. The hours we spent talking every day suddenly became SEX SEX SEX. It was like every other aspect of US fell away and all she could see was SEX.

Everything came to a head when I was about to tell her some stupid work-related nothing one day and she was like, "You know what? SEX SEX SEX."  Two weeks of SEX SEX SEX had gone by and it was starting to feel dehumanizing. I had to speak up. And I did. And we had a big argument, but we kept talking (as we always do when we have a big argument) and she understood completely and apologized and told me everything would go back to normal.

And it did, right away. The SEX SEX SEX vibe disappeared overnight and I felt like I had my girlfriend back.

But the thing I couldn't help dwelling on was like... where did it come from in the first place? Had she really been walking around with all that SEX SEX SEX inside her for six and a half years?

I asked her that question and she said, "You have no idea how much you turn me on."

Apparently not.

So where does it go? That became my primary concern. I don't want to think, speak and act SEX SEX SEX every hour of every day, but I also don't want my girlfriend to feel like I'm shutting her down. Luckily, she's too mature to think that way.

She asked me, "What do you do when you want me and I'm not available?"

I put the want away. I tell it to wait.

She said, "That's what I do too. So what are you worried about?"

Where do I even begin?

Unrequited

By Lisabet Sarai

Do I seem mad to you? If so, they are responsible. They've driven me mad with their beauty and indifference.

They don't even bother to hunt anymore. They spend their days in their king-sized coffin, alabaster limbs entwined in a frozen tableau of passion. They devote their nights to surfing the Internet, listening to Bach or Dvořák, or lounging on their deck, the endless grid of the city sparkling below them.

Except, of course, for the nights when they feed.

Occasionally, on rainy days when there's no risk, I muster the courage to lift the polished rosewood lid of their communal casket and peek inside. I'm always startled by the scent that rises from their inert forms, orange blossoms and sun-warmed stone, no hint of dankness or decay. Their exquisite pallor complements the perfection of their naked bodies. They seem like statues modeled from translucent, milky glass.

He slumbers with one palm cupping her pert breast, the other arm wrapped around her waist. Her honey-brown hair fans over his chest, fine as spider silk. She curls her fist around his cock, which is rampant even as they sleep. The bold gesture contrasts with her innocent features. She has the smooth cheeks, pointed chin and plump lips of a teenage cheerleader.

My fingers twitch. The urge to trace the shape of that sweet, ripe mouth is almost irresistible. More times than I can count, I've seen her girlish face grinning and smeared with gore. It doesn't matter. She will always be my angel, my inspiration, my heart's desire, my doom. My beloved mistress.

My master is equally magnificent in his own way, with a dancer's subtly muscled arms and legs and a head of glorious ebony curls like some pale gypsy. He has a bookish look, with a high forehead rising above bushy black brows and a sensitive mouth that cries out for kisses.

I've never dared to lean close and take advantage of his immobility, much as I ache to feel the chill of his flesh against my own. If I gave way to temptation, would he know? I'm not certain that their death-like daytime sleep stills their minds the way it freezes their bodies. I doubt he'd punish me, if he discovered my transgression. He knows I'd welcome the mark of his bullwhip or the icy invasion of his knife. No, more likely he'd mock me, or simply ignore me, refusing to acknowledge my existence. I couldn't bear that.

The sight of them, locked together in eternal stasis, holds me captive. Blood pours into my cock, blood I know they'd savor if they'd only take it, until I'm hard as the concrete walls of the basement room where they sleep. My pulse pounds in my temples as my futile erection strains my trousers. I am their creature, their slave, stunned into helpless worship by their unearthly beauty.

I know they need me. That should satisfy me – the knowledge that without me they'd might fry or starve or succumb to some overly zealous reader of horror fiction. Month after month, year after year, I guard them and I procure them their victims. It's my privilege to serve them. That should be enough. But I want more from them, God help me, more than I can ever hope they'll give.

From Renfield’s Lament by Lisabet Sarai

Our topic this fortnight is “Craving”. One can crave many things, of course: food, water, sweets, alcohol, drugs, attention, fame, money. For authors of erotic fiction, though, carnal yearning naturally takes precedence.

Unlike food or water, one can live without sex (as unappealing as that might sound), yet the craving for sex – or more commonly, for a particular sexual object - may well be more powerful than physical hunger or thirst. Sexual desire can be all-encompassing – physical, emotional, and spiritual. It can strip us bare, lead us to take actions we’d never consider if not under its irrational influence. Crimes of passion demonstrate the strength of this craving, its capability to render us temporarily insane with want.

Indeed the experience of sexual craving, that desperate longing for the desired other, may well be more intense than the pleasure achieved in its fulfillment. Yet erotica frequently focuses more on the latter than on the former.

When people ask me for my personal definition of erotica, I tell them erotica is fiction that portrays sexual desire. According to my definition, it’s possible to write erotica in which no actual sexual acts occur.

This is not a fashionable perspective. These days it’s tough to publish a story without at least one orgasm. A more popular definition of erotica is “explicit fiction intended to sexually arouse the reader”. Implicit here is the notion of satisfaction (either physical or vicarious). A tale of unrequited craving without the “payoff” may leave this sort of reader feeling cheated or frustrated. I guess I can sympathize. After all, so many people feel dissatisfied with their real-world sex lives; why would they want to be frustrated by the sexy fiction they choose to read as well?

As for me, I’m actually more interested in the desire than I am in the sex itself. I admire an author who can vividly evoke the state of neediness associated with acute sexual craving. One of the best tales in this category that I’ve encountered recently is Preston Avery’s “Won’t Last the Week”, in Tenille Brown’s recent anthology Can’t Get Enough. The narrator meets the woman of his dreams at a party. They spend the night on the beach, so entranced by one another that they forget to exchange phone numbers.

She isn't skinny like the girls I usually go for, like my ideal “on paper” woman, but curved and soft and she fits me just right. Her breasts are big with a delicious slope to them, and I know they will overflow my grasp. I could bury my face in the valley between them and never come up for air. I could have seconds and thirds and fourths of her and die a gluttonous happy man. She does everything I lead her into. I don't ask – words are still lost to us. The first time I lower one of my hands to those gorgeous mounds, hidden between a thin blue cotton shirt, she doesn't protest of push me away- she arches into me, into my touch, and makes the most beautiful noise in her throat. That moment, those moments, are all that I can feel. The future is as unreal to me as a unicorn on the planet Saturn. That place where names and phone numbers matter is at least a world away.

As the week goes on, dreams and fantasies of the lost woman consume the narrator. He wanders through his days in a trance of longing. He spends his nights re-envisioning their connection and rubbing his cock raw. Will he somehow manage to find her? Or will he go mad with need and frustration? The beautiful urgency of this story left me in wet wonder.

In fact, at the end of the tale, the poor guy does find his dream girl, against all odds. The story, though, is not really about that happy ending. Its focus is on narrator’s craving, so powerful it totally overwhelms everything else in his life.

And what about a story where the narrator does not get what he or she wants so badly? Can that still be erotic? I invite you to read the rest of Renfield’s Lament, over in the ERWA gallery. One of my goals in writing this story was to create a tale where the desires of the protagonist are ultimately frustrated. In fact the narrator does have an orgasm and achieve physical release. This, however, does not satisfy his craving.

Can I call this tale of unrequited desire “erotica”? Is it arousing? What do you think?