We don't talk about these things: #Sex, #Taboo & 90210

by Giselle Renarde

I'm loving everybody's posts this week. Taboo is such a great topic of discussion.

As I read Lisabet's post, I was reminded of something you're going to laugh at me for doing but I don't even care.

I've been re-watching Beverly Hills 90210 on DVD.

I just finished the first season and I'll tell you this: I remember watching EVERY SINGLE ONE of those episodes when they originally aired in 1990.

Yesterday I got to the episode that has lived inside my brain since I first watched it: the one where Dylan and Brenda have sex for the first time. It's been almost 30 years since I first watched this episode and I still remember tons of lines from the show. Like how after they have sex for the first time Brenda makes the hotel bed and when Dylan tells her she doesn't have to do that she says, "What will the maid think?"

That line has stayed with me all these years. I don't know why.  I just like it.  It would make a good book title, wouldn't it?  The butler did it! What will the maid think?

Okay, something else about that episode has stayed with me too.  Something more personal.

My parents knew I loved 90210 even though, being a preteen when it first came on the air, I was a tad young to be watching it.  Maybe not by today's standards, but I don't have kids so what do I know about today's standards?

Anyway, I've mentioned before that my mother worked nights and my father was always passed out by the end of Entertainment Tonight.  That meant I got to watch 90210 (and everything else that came on after 7:30) without parental supervision. And THAT meant I didn't experience the awkwardness of having my mom glaring uncomfortably in my direction as teenagers on TV discussed the risks and rewards of having sex.

Thank goodness for that, because sex was a taboo topic in my household. Still is. Nobody ever discussed sex when I was a kid.  Nobody ever discusses it now. I'm very close with one of my sisters. We've never talked about sex.  Not once.

My mom did give me "the sex talk" (which was more awkward than informative) but here's what prompted that discussion:

When my mom announced that she was pregnant with my youngest sister, I was mad as hell.  This wasn't your typical sibling rivalry or whatever kids go through when they're afraid a new baby will usurp their Favourite Child crown. I already had other siblings. I hadn't been upset about their existence.

This one was different. I was ten years old and already I had more than enough experience raising children.

You know, I had an epiphany a couple months ago. I heard the word "neglect" and started thinking about the way definitions shift over time.  When I was a kid, I would have defined child neglect as, like, taking off for two weeks and leaving your kids to fend for themselves. I wouldn't have considered myself or my siblings neglected. There was always an adult body present in the house. Now I realize that if that adult body is not conscious, it doesn't count. If one parent is out of the house and the other is perpetually drunk and you've got a 7-year-old running the show, yeah, sadly, that's neglect.

Ouch.  I hope my mom never reads this.  It would kill her.  She is such a devoted parent.  Being a mother is the most important thing in her world.  I know she did what she thought was best for us, always, but living in a domestic violence situation with an alcoholic made life really difficult for all of us.

Not only was I raising myself and my siblings, but I was babysitting a parent as well.  I remember that I always had to wake myself up during the night to go downstairs and check the kitchen. My dad had a habit of coming to late at night or early in the morning and cooking when he was barely conscious. He would put something on the stove or in the oven, then pass out again.  One of my responsibilities was to get out of bed at regular intervals to make sure there was nothing burning downstairs.

So when my mom announced that she would be having another baby, my little 10-year-old brain did its little 10-year-old version of screaming, "How dare you stick me with another kid?" I felt like she was spitting out babies for me to look after. I was so mad.

For whatever reason, my mom was convinced I was angry about her pregnancy because I didn't clearly understand where babies came from.

When I heard this theory, everything inside me did a little 10-year-old version of going: "You have got to be fucking kidding me!" Her theory seemed so juvenile and irrelevant. I had bigger fish to fry.

Of course, I didn't communicate to my mother WHY I was mad.  It would have hurt her feelings, for starters.  More than that, we didn't talk about feelings in my family.  That was a taboo even bigger than sex. I chose to sit through the awkward sex talk rather than admitting to my mom that, at 10 years old, I was already too worn out to take care of another kid.

A few days after that highly memorable Brenda-and-Dylan-have-sex episode of Beverly Hills 90210 first aired, my mom confronted me on the topic. She told me I wasn't allowed to watch the show anymore. Apparently that episode had caused an uproar. Moms across America (and Canada too, I guess) were pissed these two teen characters on a TV show discussed the possibility of having sex, had sex, were happy about their decision, and nothing bad happened.  Everybody knows that when teens have premarital sex on TV, their genitals are supposed to shrivel up and fall into a bucket of boiling lava.

Anyway, the hoopla around this episode was such that my mother heard about it and confronted me on the issue.  I remember her exact words: "I've heard that Dylan and Brenda have already had sex!"

And you know what I said?

"No they didn't."

I lied for them.

I lied for Dylan and Brenda.  I did it to protect their reputations.  No, that's not true.  I lied because I wanted to keep watching the show.  Mind you, one of the perks of being a neglected child is that, between raising someone else's kids and making sure the house doesn't burn down, you can really watch whatever you want on TV.

Giselle Renarde is an award-winning queer Canadian writer. Nominated Toronto’s Best Author in NOW Magazine’s 2015 Readers’ Choice Awards, her fiction has appeared in well over 100 short story anthologies. Giselle's juicy novels include Anonymous, In Shadow, Cherry, Nanny State, Seven Kisses, and The Other Side of Ruth.
http://donutsdesires.blogspot.com

Dreaming True (#uncanny #imagination #magick)

By Lisabet Sarai

I’ve always believed in magic.

My dad may have had something to do with this. He used to concoct wild stories about monsters and ghosts, ogres and trolls. I remember sitting cross-legged next to my brother, on the floor by my father’s chair, held spellbound by his tales of heroes tasked with magical trials and elementals battling one another for control of the planet.

Maybe I inherited his imagination.

When I was in elementary school, I had a garnet birthstone ring that I believed could grant wishes. Mostly I remember asking for simple, silly things—like a blizzard, so we’d get the day off from school. Then my mom came down with pneumonia. She was so ill that at eight years old, I had to take over cooking for the family. I was terrified by the sudden helplessness of the woman who was at the center of my world, who could, and did, do everything. The ring got a workout during that period. My mother recovered fully, solidifying my faith in the unseen and the effectiveness of asking for one’s heart’s desire.

I’ve written many times here about the mystical quality of my first BDSMrelationship. At dinner on the night before my initiation, my soon-to-be Master told me he was descended from a family of sorcerers—that his Germanic ancestors had practiced the dark arts back in the old country. I’m still convinced I experienced true magick that night, though he often teased me about being suggestible.

Most of my life has been ordinary and mundane, of course, like everyone else’s. I’ve never been convinced I had any special powers. There’s one area, though, where I have experienced the uncanny, more than once. Every now and then, I have prescient dreams.

The first one I remember involved my Master. We didn’t see one another very often, since we lived on opposite coasts. After not having talked to him for several weeks, I had a deeply disturbing dream about him. In the dream, he was hospitalized, bandaged, unconscious and immobile on the bed. I recall everything being pale white, drained of color and life. I sat beside him, holding his hand, willing him to wake. He roused, at least enough to squeeze my fingers, but on his face was a look of absolute despair. I didn’t know what to do, so I just sat there, being with him, holding him, loving him the best I could.

I called him the next day, worried. He told me his father had hanged himself in the basement the night before. I didn’t tell him about my dream, not then. As I had in the dream, I held him in my thoughts, soothed him with my words, and hoped that he’d heal.

Another, later case involved a dear female friend, a woman I met on a ride board, with whom I drove halfway cross country in the dead of winter. Jeanie was the epitome of a free spirit—an author, artist, actress and musician, a fascinating creature who seemed to exist outside the boring realm of jobs and responsibilities. She married a guy as crazy as she was. They had wild parties, a rock and roll band, and a pet pig.

One night I dreamed that she told me she was going to have a baby. I was astounded. I tried to talk her out of it. “You’re not the motherly type,” I told her. “Think of all the responsibility! The constraints!” In the dream she just shook her head and smiled.

Two days later, I learned she actually was pregnant. (She turned out to be a fabulous, if unorthodox mom, by the way.)

These are two examples that stick with me, but I know they’re not the only ones. Indeed, I’ve had multiple less traumatic dreams about my Master that turned out to have elements of truth. “How did you know her name?” he asked me when I confided I’d dreamed of him with another woman. To be honest, I’m not sure he believes in magick, at least not the way I do.

Over the years I’ve published quite a bit of paranormal erotica, including my newest release Damned If You Do; Necessary Madness, my MM novel about the burden of seeing the future; my urban shifter romance The Eyes of Bast;, and my collection of dark paranormal tales Fourth World. My paranormal worlds are mostly ordinary—mostly indistinguishable from our own. Every so often, however, bright power streaks through them, like lighting illuminating a thundercloud from within. That power—it’s easy for me to write. It feels natural, true. I hardly have to think about it.

In the realm of fiction, my dreams also shape reality.

Flow My Tears

By Lisabet Sarai

I cry easily. In fact, it’s embarrassing how often I dissolve into teariness. Almost any strong emotion is enough to set me off.

Of course I cry from grief or sadness. The loss of a loved one or a pet—one of the all too frequent natural, or unnatural, disasters that wreaks havoc among the innocent—even a sad movie can make me cry. I remember being hit with fits of weeping for weeks after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami (which killed over 200,000 people). And I was holding back sobs at the end of The Wind Rises, Hayao Miyazaki’s exquisite animation about war, flight and love.

But anger also evokes my tears. I don’t yell or get violent when I’m really mad; I cry. An incident a few years ago comes to mind. There was a used bookstore I frequented, which would give you credit toward new purchases in exchange for books you’d read and returned to them. I had saved up about thirty bucks in credits and was gleefully looking forward to a buying spree. However, when I arrived at the shop, I discovered that the bookstore had been sold to new owners. The new management refused to honor my credit slips. I was furious. I argued with them for a while, to no avail. Finally I headed home, tears streaming down my cheeks as I walked along the sidewalk plotting how I’d trash them on social media. (I didn’t.) (However, I refuse to set foot in that bookstore ever again.)

Frustration is probably the most common reason I cry. When I can’t get some piece of software to work, or when my students continue to fail exams despite my devoting huge amounts of time to them, or when some recipe I spend hours preparing turns out to be inedible, I may well weep. In fact, I sometimes throw tantrums, much to my long-suffering husband’s distress. Stress from over-commitment and looming deadlines will also trigger a crying jag.

I really should act more mature. After all, I’m old enough to be a grandmother. On the other hand, I’d rather be the sort of person who expresses emotions freely than one who holds everything in. At least my crying fits these days, especially the less appropriate ones, tend to be short. For one thing, they really take it out of me physically. Ten minutes screaming, crying and railing against my fate will leave me exhausted and hoarse, with burning eyes and a runny nose.

As I sat down to write this post, I realized that unlike me, my characters rarely cry. That’s not for lack of tragedy or angst, either. Stella Xanathakeos in Exposure nearly dies in an arson attack that totally destroys the house she inherited from her father, her only asset. She responds not with tears but with emotional numbness that even love can’t dispel. Kyle McLaughlin in Necessary Madness is destitute, homeless and plagued with horrifying, prophetic visions of disasters. He tries to commit suicide, but he never sheds a tear. In Mastering Maya, the heroine is raped and betrayed by her master. To cope, she trains herself to be a Dominant, so detached and precise she earns the nickname “The Ice Queen”.

In fact, I can only think of one published scene in which a character succumbs to tears, in my erotic romance The Ingredients of Bliss. And Emily has a good excuse. Her lovers have been kidnapped by a brutal Hong Kong gang. The captors are threatening to kill the two men unless Emily can recover a load of narcotics stolen from the syndicate by another gangster—dope that has already been passed on to a buyer.

Emily’s not the sort of woman to sink into despair for very long, though.

It was barely two. Toni had promised to come fetch me at four-thirty. After the feverish activity of the last thirty-six hours, I wasn’t sure what to do in the interim.

I glanced around. At this hour, I was the café’s sole customer. One waiter hung out behind the bar, peering at his mobile and ignoring me.

All at once, I felt utterly alone.

Roger had called the Tastes of France team back to the States. No one knew how long it would be before Etienne and Harry were freed, and meanwhile, we didn’t want one of the crew to let the secret slip. If the police decided to take another look at the case, the Triad might respond by cutting their losses—and their prisoners’ throats.

We broadcast the official story that Etienne was in isolation due to complications from influenza. Apparently, the studio had been deluged with get well cards and messages of sympathy.

I’d stayed in France ‘out of concern for my colleague’, a tale that only confirmed the popular assumption that Etienne and I were a couple. Meanwhile, Harry was such a low key presence—at least outside the bedroom—that nobody even seemed to realize he’d disappeared.

Nobody but me, that is. I hadn’t had time think much about my Master since we’d spoken two days ago. Now it hit me, like a speeding train with failed brakes—sharp fear and terrible need. My beloved, rumpled, horny, bossy Harry! There was some possibility I’d never see him again. That he, or I, might not get out of this alive.

My stomach lurched and a sour taste filtered up into my throat. This wasn’t a game of Go. One false step and his life could be forfeit. I liked to imagine I was clever, some sort of woman of international intrigue, bargaining with the Iron Hammer as if I had the upper hand. But what did I have, really? Nothing. No drugs. No weapons. Nothing to offer in trade for Harry’s life. Nothing I could use to protect him.

Hysteria built in my chest. Tears blurred my vision. I had to get out of here. I tossed a twenty onto the table and ran for the elevator before the storm burst.

Back in my room, the floodgates opened. I sobbed and wailed, face down on the bed, until the pillow was soaked with tears. A fit of hiccups seized me. My moan became a silly yelp with each rhythmic clench of my diaphragm.

‘Get hold of yourself, girl.’ I could almost hear my grandmother, scolding me. ‘Crying won’t help.’

Closing my swollen eyes, I breathed deeply, trying to will the spasms away, along with my despair. I needed a clear mind for what was to come. Fear would only muddle my thoughts and corrupt my judgment. Gradually my panic ebbed. I released it, grateful for my Dragon training.

That’s it. The whole crying scene lasts four short paragraphs. It’s a bit weird.

Maybe my characters are changing, though. The Ingredients of Bliss is a rather recent novel. In my current WIP, The Gazillionaire and the Virgin, both main characters succumb to tears, albeit briefly. In this case, the stimulus is lost or thwarted love—a standard in romance. They may well cry again before the book is finished.

Which reminds me—to meet the publication deadline, I have to finish the manuscript in the next two weeks. With at least 15K to go, that feels impossible. I’ve got to get to work on it, right now. But I hate working under stress.

I think I feel a tantrum coming on...

Blood and Guts

By Lisabet Sarai

You know, I love Garce dearly, but he comes up with the hardest topics! This week his choice is "character dynamics". He wants us to talk about what makes our characters tick when they're together—how their interactions reveal their separate motivations and their mutual conflicts. At least I think that's the gist.

As you've probably gathered from his posts, Garce thinks about these things a lot. He takes a remarkably analytical approach to his writing. I say remarkable partly because all that analysis somehow doesn't suck the blood and guts from his writing, the way it would for me. He manages to keep the flame of genuine emotion alive in his work even as he slices and dices, rethinks and reworks.

Not me. I can't pick my own characters apart the way I used to do with Anna Karenina or Holden Caulfield. If I do, I'll kill them. I'm not one of those authors who hear voices in their heads, potential characters screaming for me to write their stories, but when I write, my characters sit on my shoulders and answer my questions. “Now what are you going to do?” “What do you want?” “Why do you feel that way?” I ask. Then I listen to what they tell me. When I write a conversation, I mentally put the characters in the same room and wait to see what they'll say. It's something of a mysterious process, and definitely synthetic rather than analytical.

About a month ago I was working on an erotic romance tale involving BDSM initiation of a younger woman by a more experienced man. I'd recently been reading a blog about character profiles, so I decided to try that technique with this story. I wrote down everything I could think of about the two protagonists. You know, all their back story, plus items like “deepest secret”, “strongest desire”, “biggest fear”, “biggest character flaw”, “most admirable quality” and so on. Then I began writing the story. I promptly ignored about half of my analysis. When I went back and re-read my profiles, I saw that I hadn't followed them very closely. But I couldn't force my characters to fit their descriptions. I'd written those sketches before I got to know the two of them, and the analyses were only partly accurate.

Still, I understand the value of Garce's approach, digging deeper. The sort of questions he asks (we've discussed this quite a bit) bring out the underlying meaning in a story. In the best literature (and I count Garce's work in this category, though I know he'll deny it), characters are more than just players acting and reacting. They also embody abstractions—psychological, philosophical, or political. Nixie is more than just a confused, horny, bitter, very female monster. She's trust betrayed, faith destroyed, and yet she's also the flickering of hope, refusing to be drowned in despair. The suicide bomber in “How Paradise Comes to the Blind” strikes me as a very real person—arrogant and yet humbly seeking the peace and reassurance of God's presence—but at the same time he represents intolerance, ignorance, fanaticism. Even Garce's intimate tale “An Early Winter Train”, about a man stuck caring for his Alzheimer's-afflicted wife, has multiple levels. It's about the persistence of love and memory, about power, about flaunting conventions.

I didn't really intend this post to analyze Garce's character interactions. He can do that far better than I. I was going to talk about my current work in progress, a dystopian scifi romance. As it happens, at the moment I'm actually stuck trying to understand the dynamics between my two main characters.

Rafe is the sole human guard at an internment camp for gay men. When the Plague raged and the dying populace rioted in the streets, the Command swept all men with a supposed genetic marker for homosexuality into remote “quarantine” camps. Legions of powerful robot warriors patrol the camp. Rafe himself doesn't understand why he's needed, but he accepted the lonely, boring job as alternative to a prison sentence for a gang murder he didn't commit. He's cynical and bitter, a loner just trying to do his time.

Dylan has been a resident in the camp for seven years, since he was seventeen. A genius with electronics, he has been working methodically on a plan for escape for the past three. He has become convinced that the multiple levels of security at the camp are too difficult even for his skills, so he's using social engineering to snare Rafe into helping him. Dylan is cynical, too, but he's also a manipulator. He's not the type to sit around waiting to see what will happen. He has almost boundless self-confidence. He's also an extrovert, a natural leader.

I'm a chapter and a half into the story. Rafe and Dylan are just about to meet for the first time. (Rafe has watched Dylan on the security camera. Dylan knows this.) Dylan is being hauled into Rafe's control room after deliberately and visibly reprogramming a robot guard.

What should happen next?

I know that before long, Dylan needs to seduce Rafe. It's part of his plan. Rafe needs to think it's his idea, however. I also know that ultimately, the two must fall in love (this is a romance, remember) and both become fugitives from the Command.

So how should I play this scene?

I could dive in, just letting the characters do what they want. But they're not talking to me.

What are the emotions here?

Rafe: curiosity (how did Dylan manage to control the guard?); anger (who did this hotshot kid think he was, breaking the rules?); a bit of fear (would Rafe be blamed? and what about the Plague? Is Dylan a carrier?); lust (Rafe has watched Dylan masturbate); a touch of sympathy (Rafe has looked up Dylan's sad history).

Dylan: triumph (his plan is working); guile (he must not let on that this is deliberate); fear (but just an edge); exhilaration; lust (this is his first sight of Rafe, and the guard is something of a hunk).

And what are the underlying themes in their relationship? Obviously trust—initially they mistrust each other. Dylan must seduce Rafe and win his trust. Then he'll lose it again when his deceit is unmasked. Freedom. Rafe is as much of a prisoner as Dylan. Being with Dylan will make him realize this. There's also the political dimension of discrimination. Rafe has had sex with men, but he doesn't have the “homo-gene”. He's been conditioned to think of Dylan and the other residents as deviant and in some sense less than human, the scum who unleashed the Plague upon humanity, while he himself is not “queer”. So part of the character arc will involve Rafe coming to terms with the fact that there's no real difference between him and Dylan, sexually speaking. This will lead to a re-evaluation of many things that he has taken for granted.

But that comes later. Right now I'm just trying to work out the control room scene. I think that it ends with a blow job, Rafe deciding to use Dylan's mouth. Dylan's hands are bound behind him. There's a power dynamic here. Rafe believes that he is in charge.

Dylan knows better. How should Dylan act? Should he taunt Rafe,or should he pretend to be frightened and humble? I think that the former would work better. He'll goad Rafe, work him up, encourage the guard to take him. That's Dylan's immediate goal, to snare Rafe sexually and induce him to assist in Dylan's escape. At the same time Dylan will subtly show Rafe that the guard is no freer than the inmate. He'll also earn Rafe's grudging respect. As an ex-gang member, Rafe will think more highly of a bold, rebellious Dylan than a compliant one.

Hmm. This might work. But honestly, I really won't know until I sit down and try to write the scene. All the analysis in the world isn't going to help if my characters decide that I'm wrong.