Write Stupid Book

by Giselle Renarde

Giselle's To Do List

There's an interview question that typically comes up for authors: "What makes your books different from others in the genre?"  It's too bad you can't answer a question with a question, because the first thing that always comes to mind is, "Which genre are we talking about, here?" Although it doesn't even matter because I don't fit in anywhere.

I think a lot of us here at The Grip are in the same boat. We're not the popular kids. And we don't want to be.

But, as Lisabet mentioned in the comments of Monday's post, I make my living at this. I don't have an evil day job.  Writing is my evil day job.  It's povertylicious.  And I don't say that jokingly, so don't be offended or think I don't take low income seriously.  I literally live below the poverty line.

I never answered that interview question, did I?  The thing that makes my work different from others' in the genre is that I'm queer and I'm pretty genderfucked and, though there are a few men I find interesting, they aren't anything like the Alpha Males who are so popular in erotic romance today.

The kind of erotic fiction readers want is not the kind of erotic fiction I write.

When I started writing erotica in 2006, I came into this venture soooo naively.  I still hadn't figured out that I wasn't a normal person.  I thought the stuff that appealed to me erotically would appeal to everybody else. So.... yeah, that's not the case. I've mentioned before that editors and publishers advised me to stop wasting my time on fiction about lesbians or bisexual women. Instead, I wrote more. I wrote a trans lesbian novel that won a Rainbow Award but, as Sacchi mentioned, awards don't help sales. You'd think they would but they don't.

What's a poor author to do?

Write a stupid book.  That's what I decided on.  Dark romance is popular these days--erotic fiction at its rapey-est. I really had to push myself into this project.  Non-consent doesn't appeal to me. But if there's one thing I learned from writing my Adam and Sheree trilogy it's that writing a taboo topic can change my opinion of it. (I thought incest was really squicky before I wrote Adam and Sheree. Now it's all I want to write.)

Actually, the idea for my soon-to-be-self-published novel Seven Kisses came to me as I was cutting through the grounds of a very Victorian-looking rehabilitation centre. I've lived in the same neighbourhood for over a decade but I'd never seen this place before. It was one of those magical realism moments where you think, "Where did that come from?"  I found myself wondering what kind of rehab this clinic provided. I had an image of two orderlies mistaking me for a patient and dragging me inside kicking and screaming.

As I continued my walk that day, a hazy idea for a dark romance formed in my mind.  What if they locked me up and subjected me to strange "therapies"?

Hmm...

I hadn't quite committed to writing this dark romance until I spotted this on my book shelf:

That's "Beauty and the Beast" to you.

A book I'd bought and never read. A tale of capture and confinement. It's the original dark romance!

I've had a soft spot for Beauty and the Beast ever since 1991, when the Disney feature came out. Writing this book as an adaptation made me more comfortable with the concept of dark romance.

Of course, it didn't take long for my adaptation to run off the rails. Sure there's a beast, but he exists under the command of the cruel psychotherapist Mme de Villeneuve.

Get it? Hahaha I'm so funny.

Madame can see everyone's follies but her own. She doesn't seem to realize that she's been repressing her attraction to women so long that it's coming out in harmful ways... like binding our young beauty to an antiquated hospital bed and subjecting her to a turn-of-the-century fucking machine.

What just happened here?  A book that was supposed to be strictly heteromance with a hard, unforgiving hero turned into an I-don't-know-what romance (yeah, it's still a romance) about a fairy tale wicked witch therapist with serious issues. But don't worry--I didn't forget the monkey butlers.

Even when I try to write for the market, my books always turn into ME. That's great news for my fellow erotic authors who appreciate my work. It's bad news for my bank account (which currently has $53 in it. Canadian.).

Same thing happens every time I write "for the market."  So do I regret trying? Actually, no. Sure my frustrated code name for Seven Kisses was "Stupid Book," but I really like the story I ended up with... even if readers might not be sold on my spin.

Disappointed by the Prince

by Annabeth Leong

At first I thought I was the only one unsatisfied by the ending of Beauty and the Beast. On paper, the story ought to work. Beauty learns to see through the Beast's monstrous veneer and falls in love with the man underneath. At the right moment, that man—a prince—emerges. I suppose it's meant to play as if the prince is the person she has learned to see, so that his appearance is confirmation and validation of the feelings she develops over the course of the story. There's a moral to that story, the idea that true beauty and goodness are inside, not on the surface.

Except that to me the prince always seemed like an imposter who showed up and usurped the place of the dear beast. I knew my heart was supposed to leap with romantic joy when the thin blond man joins Beauty at the end of the story. But I couldn't make myself feel that. I missed the monster, with his awkward sweetness, his turbulent moods, and, yes, his sexiness. Before I was old enough to put that into words, I sensed that Beauty had a lot more chemistry with the Beast than with that perfect-looking prince.

I know plenty of people hate to see the Beast replaced. In the foreword to Kristina Wright's Fairy Tale Lust, Angela Knight discusses this at length. "Personally," she writes, "I liked him better with fur, claws, and a bad attitude." Indeed, the opening story of that book, Delilah Devlin's "The Obedient Wife," is a riff on Beauty and the Beast and allows the beast to remain a beast.

You could talk about kinky sex and bad boys, but believe it or not, that's not where I'm going with this.

My favorite case of this realization (that the beast should stay) is in the body of work produced by fantasy author Robin McKinley. Her first retelling of Beauty and the Beast, called Beauty, was an early work. I remember liking the book, and recognizing that it had been a heavy source of inspiration for the Disney movie (bookish Belle seems to have been cribbed from McKinley's story). This book follows the traditional script and changes beast to prince at the end.

However, in 1998, twenty years after writing Beauty, McKinley produced Rose Daughter, another retelling of Beauty and the Beast (and one that I consider to be better, deeper, and much more original). I've lost track of my copy and there doesn't seem to be an electronic edition, so I'm afraid I can't pull out exact quotes, but I recall a fascinating introduction in which McKinley discussed why she felt the need to revisit the story. Then, at the climactic moment, the Beauty character sees the Beast beginning to change into the prince and feels loss, because that's not who she's fallen in love with. The Beast's body reasserts itself, however, and she is glad of it. I remember being so pleased by that moment, that revision of the story.

I think it's because it's actually truer to the moral of Beauty and the Beast than the more common ending. "Rewarding" Beauty for falling in love with a monster by replacing him with a non-monster is actually a slap. It disrespects the nature of the sort of love she's experiencing. Learning to love a person as is, flaws and ugliness included, is a beautiful thing, and I think the true romantic vision of it is not just about acceptance, it's about embrace. Taking away the flaws and ugliness, once they are included in the love, diminishes the love.

Not only that, who's saying those things are flaws? To me, the Beast generally looks better as beast than as prince. Correcting his supposed flaws becomes doubly misguided.

The point is that the Beast of this story actually isn't a monster—not in the sense of evil. As people have written on this topic over the past couple weeks, I've realized that this is an important distinction. Garce and Lisabet, for example, both gave examples of true monsters—beings who by nature aren't capable of loving back. A story about loving a monster, as in loving a being of implacable evil or utterly alien disposition, is disturbing to say the least. Stories about loving a bad person and believing that person will become good make me cringe because to me they ring with the rationalizations of victims of domestic violence.

On the other hand, there is Beauty and the Beast, which I think is about loving someone who is considered by society to be a monster—a very different thing altogether. In my vision of this story, Beauty falls in love with someone who doesn't look "right" and has moments of monstrosity, but is deep down a fundamentally good person fully capable of returning love. This could simply be a comment on how everyone is human and all of us have unlovely parts. I think it's more, though, because of the important role that prejudice and societal judgment often play in the story.

Whenever a monster appears, the question is always whether this is a real monster (implacable evil) or something that seems to be a monster because of prejudice (the Beast, beneficial and nonvenomous snakes, and so on). I look at Beauty and the Beast and see a representation of people who don't live lifestyles approved by the mainstream, or who don't look attractive in a traditional way. I really don't want the message of this story to be to transform and conform (to turn into that bland and supposedly handsome prince). I want to see the Beast stay the Beast, because he's awesome that way.