The Betas' Lament

by Jean Roberta

[Scene: twelve white guys sitting on folding chairs in a circle, looking uncomfortable.]

First Guy: I’ll start. My name is John Green, and I’m a beta male.

Second Guy: No you’re not, man! You’ve just been beaten down when you were too young to know how to fight back. If your girlfriend in high school dumped you to go out with some hotshot football player, is that your fault? I bet you could show her a better time than he could. Am I right?

[All the guys grunt their agreement after glancing very quickly at First Guy’s crotch.]

Second Guy [realizing the dangerous path he is on]: I mean, I’m not gay or anything. I’m just saying.

Third Guy: I can’t get a job because of all these refugees who’ll work for two cents per hour.
[All the guys grunt sympathetically.]

Fourth Guy: It’s not just refugees. Let’s call it what it is. Niggers and spicks and chinks and fuckin Indians are taking our jobs.

First Guy: Whoa! Watch your language, man.

Third Guy: Yeah. I mean, I know what you’re saying, but you can’t call people degrading names nowadays.

Fourth Guy: Why not, if they taking our jobs? And I didn’t even mention the women. They’re all hiring nannies to raise their kids so they can have “careers.”

Fifth Guy: We can’t even get laid any more because if we make a move it’s called “rape.”
[Several guys nod their heads vigorously, while some look more uncomfortable than before.]

First Guy: It’s not really rape if she wants you.

Fifth Guy: But they call it that! Some of them even say we have a “rape culture.”

First Guy: Women who want sex don’t call it rape.

[All the other guys stare at First Guy.]

While the Angry Men’s Group ponders First Guy’s comments, let me introduce you to two characters in an early story of mine, “When Less Is More.” (This story is still available in my collection, Obsession, from Renaissance Publishing.)

Alighieri, who preferred to be known by his family name because of its long history, was awakened by the late-afternoon sunlight that carelessly penetrated the olive-green burlap curtains of his bedroom. Like melted butter, the light poured itself over Spondee’s blonde elf-locks as she stretched a white arm across Alighieri’s darker back. She preferred to be known as Dee, and preferred not to be known as the child of two much-published members of the English Department in the local university. “You awake?” her man growled tenderly.

“Mmm,” she smiled, admiring the discreet muscles in his chest as he rose on his elbows. The couple had spent the whole weekend eating, fucking and sleeping, and they were now as mellow as old wine.

“I want to watch the BBC version of Twelfth Night on the TV in the front room,” the host informed his guest, “and I want you to lie across me.” Dee sat up as gracefully as a dancer. “Don’t put your clothes on,” he added.

Dee was pleased because she loved being naked in the daytime.

She didn’t, however, like complacent men. “I must really enjoy your company,” she teased him. “I’m missing the women’s floor hockey.” The young man couldn’t think of a witty comeback for that so soon after waking up, so he wisely held his tongue.

Soon Alighieri, who had the dark beard and chest hair of a werewolf, was seated on his cool leather sofa with Dee stretched across his lap. His hands rested promisingly on the two firm globes of her bottom as her nipples brushed the leather upholstery while she adjusted her head and arms into a comfortable viewing position.

“Now you see,” he explained, continuing their previous discussion, “a position like this isn’t hard to arrange, and it contains so many possibilities. There’s so much I could do to you.”

Dee snorted. “If that scared me,” she asked him logically, “would I lie here?”

“Mighty woman warrior,” he acknowledged, almost sounding respectful. “But you know I would never really hurt you.”

“You know I’d get back at you if you did,” she countered.

Like several of the other beta males discussed here lately, Alighieri is a nerd, and he feels as if this is the logical consequence of being the distant descendant of a famous writer in the Italian Renaissance. Dee, on the other hand, is a proud rebel against academic parents.

Alighieri keeps making moves that he hopes will give him a dominant position in the relationship, and Dee keeps making counter-moves. He can’t complain about a lack of sex, but she always keeps him off-guard.

By the end of the story, he has reached an epiphany: he cares more about her than she does about him, and that is a problem with no solution.

While writing this story, I really felt for Alighieri. I wished I could give him a happier ending, but that would have felt artificial. He’s creative, he’s intellectual, he’s attractive, and I probably would have been glad to meet him in my youth, but he doesn’t fit Dee’s concept of a “real man,” and therefore he is bound to lose her eventually.

If Alighieri existed off the page (and surely there is someone like him in the real world), I hope and pray that he will learn to be philosophical about the disappointments of life and the apparently irrational nature of taste: every person wants what s/he wants, even if this makes no sense to anyone else.

I hope Alighieri won’t join the Angry Men’s Group and complain that women in general have ruined his life, along with all the other members of “minority groups” who no longer know their place. I really hope Alighieri doesn’t start asserting White Pride (he’s barely white, but logic doesn’t seem to be highly visible in these groups) and proposing to bring back slavery, or genocide. I can only hope.

Question for Discussion: Which guy in the group do you think has the best sex life?

The Quality of Mercy

Sacchi Green

When you can’t seem to get a grasp on a topic that really deserves to be considered seriously and in depth, who can you turn to?

Shakespeare, of course. By way of Merriam-Webster:

Simple Definition of forgive
: to stop feeling anger toward (someone who has done something wrong) : to stop blaming (someone)

: to stop feeling anger about (something) : to forgive someone for (something wrong)

: to stop requiring payment of (money that is owed)

You know where I’m going with this, and you know I’m stretching a point to equate forgiveness with mercy, but not stretching all that far.  The Merchant of Venice is very much about forgiving a payment, that “pound of flesh” that was put up as collateral for a loan, but it’s about other kinds of forgiveness as well, and about a mercy that includes forgiveness.

Shylock, the Jew who has made the loan, is both villain and victim. He has suffered massive amounts of bigotry and scorn and ill-treatment, some of it at the hands of Antonio, who has been granted the loan to help out a friend. We can understand why Shylock can’t forgive the treatment he and his people have suffered, and Shakespeare even makes us understand how being unable to forgive hurts those who bear a rightful grudge. (I should note here that there are many conflicting interpretations of the various aspects of this play, so I’m choosing an interpretation that fits my needs, while admitting that I am in no way an expert at this.)

I’ll also admit that my main interest in the play has always been the fact that the most impressive character is a woman, Portia, masquerading as a male lawyer to plead Antonio’s case. And what a plea it is!

"The quality of mercy is not strained;
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
‘T is mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown:
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptred sway;
It is enthronèd in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God’s
When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew,
Though justice be thy plea, consider this,
That, in the course of justice, none of us
Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy;
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy. I have spoke thus much
To mitigate the justice of thy plea;
Which if thou follow, this strict court of Venice
Must needs give sentence ‘gainst the merchant there."

Shylock is, of course, unmoved by this, so the presiding Duke rules that his price must be paid…until Portia, as lawyer, says okay, take your pound of flesh, but not a drop of blood, or your lands and goods will be forfeited under Venetian laws. In fact threatening to take a citizen’s life leaves Shylock, as an “alien,” subject to loss of property and possibly even his life. The Duke, possibly influenced by Portia’s speech, pardons Shylock’s life, and Antonio agrees to let the property go eventually to Shylock’s daughter, Jessica, who has married a Christian Venetian greatly against her father’s wishes. There's some level of forgiveness all around, except that Shylock is unlikely to be any less bitter.

I’ve read Portia’s speech several times, and memorized the first half-dozen lines when I was a teenager, but this time I paid more attention to the later parts, and was struck by the references to mankind’s need for mercy and forgiveness from God, which should lead us to show mercy and forgiveness to each other. Which of course echoes the lines from the Biblical Lord’s Prayer I learned as a child; “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” There it is. Forgiveness is essential for us, in the giving as well as the giving. (My own thoughts on the concepts of sin and guilt could lead me widely astray here, but for now let’s just leave it at that.)

Wait a minute, though. We’re erotica writers. Shouldn’t I feel guilty quoting from the Bible here? Will you forgive me if I quote just a bit more from the work that surpasses even Shakespeare as a source of inspiring quotations? How about the Old Testament book The Song of Solomon? Just one lovely erotic verse among many:

“My beloved is mine, and I am his;
    he grazes among the lilies.
Until the day breathes
    and the shadows flee,
turn, my beloved, be like a gazelle
    or a young stag on cleft mountains.“

Excuse me. I’ll be in my tent, not feeling at all in need of forgiveness just at the moment.





 

   

Misteaks, Mis-Takes, m-Stakes, Unconventional Writing

by Jean Roberta

In some contexts, I can agree that there are really no mistakes, that every experience has the potential of making one wiser, and that the journey is more important than the destination.

If we’re discussing sentence construction, however, I doubt if I will ever agree that every word choice is beautiful in its own way.

There is a war on over this, and I can’t see how the two sides could possibly agree on a treaty.

Here is a passage from an essay written by one of my students in the final exam:

“When an individual reads this poem, they may be (in a sense), be interacting with Shakespeares lover. Even though the person may not physically be here, the poem is the root for their soul. Shakespeare indicated that this poem shows the amount of care and love he has put into a poem, which then gives him the first of many to indicate his eternal love for them.”

Does this explain Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 (“Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?”) to your satisfaction? If not, are you a philistine who refuses to see the beauty of creative composition? When I explain to students that their writing is unclear, ungrammatical, or both, I am often told that I am a born bureaucrat, a stickler for old rules that no longer apply in the twenty-first century.

When I ask students why they switched verb tenses in the middle of a paragraph, I don’t necessarily mean that they made a mistake. When a statement that “Character A walks into the room” is followed by “Years later, he had considered the consequences,” I would really like to know why present tense is followed by past perfect, especially if the description of events seems intended to be chronological.

In this case, I rarely get a logical explanation. Usually, I get a confused look, and a defensive claim that “I just write what I feel,” or a question: “What do you want me to write?”

These reactions could be excused as evidence of naivete in typical university undergraduates (generally aged 18-22), but those who write unclearly have an enormous amount of support.

There is the special-needs argument that students who have learning disabilities or psychological problems such as attention-deficit disorders shouldn’t be held to the same standards as students in the default (“normal”) category. A spokesperson from the university office for students with disabilities once addressed a meeting of the English Department by pleading for the “rights” of the disabled, including the right to get passing grades on written assignments, apparently without regard for their quality. “Is it really that important for students to use commas in the right places?” she asked. For a moment, there was a loud silence in the room.

Compared to global warming and the constant threat of another world war, I thought, the placement of commas is not that important. If I were in a life-threatening situation and needed to contact someone who could save me, I probably wouldn’t worry much about commas. It doesn’t follow that punctuation should be considered irrelevant to the needs of students in a university English class.

Then there is the anti-racist argument that if a person who learned (or is still learning) English as an adult writes unclearly, he/she should not be “punished” for this by getting a failing grade in a class, or by getting fired from a writing job. When I have complained about the writing of students from elsewhere, I’ve been asked, “How well can you write in their language(s)?”

My response is that when a bilingual friend of mine who learned French at her mother’s knee advised me to apply for a job at L’Eau Vive [“Fresh Water,” the local weekly French-language newspaper] on grounds that this would be a good job for a writer, I said, “Pas du tout.” I knew that my French is nowhere close to being “comme il faut” and that a hefty French-English dictionary couldn’t help me enough.

Then there is the Humpty-Dumpty argument. (In Through the Looking-Glass, Humpty-Dumpty tells Alice that when he uses a word, it means whatever he wants it to mean. He tells her that the issue is “who is to be master.”) Several months ago, one of my students contacted the Associate Dean of Arts to ask him to assign some other prof to reread her essay (on guess what? Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18) because I had given her a disappointing grade on it.

Among other statements in the essay, the student claimed that Shakespeare was describing “irreverent beauty.” When I met with her, I explained to her that if you revere something, you respect it a lot. Therefore, if someone or something (?) is “irreverent,” this adjective essentially means disrespectful. I asked how the “beauty” described by Shakespeare was disrespectful – of what or whom? She couldn’t really answer my question, but she said the sentence sounded “right” to her.

Luckily, in this case, the Associate Dean was on my side, but there seems to be a Peasants’ Revolt going on outside the Ivory Tower, and its spokespeople have been firing shots since at least the 1960s. From time to time, a delegation of rebels breaks in to tell us we’re doing it wrong, and that we need to become aware of how unfair it is to discriminate between “good” and “bad” writing. Isn’t that a completely subjective value judgment? (No.) How dare we grade non-English-speaking writers “down?” (We dare this because language is ethnocentric by definition – not that adult language-learners can’t learn to write brilliantly in their second or third language.)

I’m sure the war won’t end in my lifetime. I just hope that no misplaced punctuation or misleading verbiage finds its way onto my tombstone.

Happy First Day of 2016! May the force (of clear expression) be with you!

Illusions by Candlelight

By Jean Roberta

There is so much to say on this topic that I hardly know where to start.

At one time, I didn’t think it was possible to write explicit sex scenes in the style of some past era. I probably believed that sex hadn’t been discovered before the time of my parents’ courtship (WW2, hubba-hubba). Then I read The Mammoth Book of Historical Erotica, edited by Maxim Yakubowski (circa 1999). Those stories were both hot and realistic, and some were set in times and places before the Christian Era.

I wanted to write that stuff, but I wasn’t sure I could.

A lot of popular historical art that has been produced since 1980, approximately, manages to produce the flavor of a past era, but with full use of current technology and the relative freedom of a culture that isn’t dominated by a Church or an all-powerful Emperor. Historical movies that fit that description include the painterly films The French Lieutenant’s Woman (with a kind of Victorian palette) and Goya in Bourdeaux (which looks like the kind of film the Spanish painter Francisco Goya would have produced if video cameras had existed in the 1700s). Then there is Schindler’s List, set in the 1940s and shot in black-and-white, but with a crisper, clearer chiaroscuro than you can see in any movie actually made in that time.

The literary version of that kind of thing avoids the kind of euphemisms that were generally used in “literary fiction” (as distinct from “porn”) right up to recent times. (Try reading Hemingway’s famous line that “the earth moved,” or the intense abstractions in D.H. Lawrence’s sex scenes, or Radclyffe Hall’s version of lesbian sex: “And that night, they were not divided.” See if you can keep a straight face.)

Like Lisabet, I love the Victorian era (1830s-1900), though the Enlightenment and Romantic eras seem fun too (mid-1700s-1830s). I like the combination of a culture that is now far enough in the past to seem exotic, yet close enough to our time that the literature actually written in those days is still comprehensible. The language doesn’t need to be translated.

Shakespeare’s era (approximately 1590-1616) is a little more remote, but as Sacchi demonstrated, it’s still possible to write a story with a Shakespearean feel that doesn’t require pages of footnotes to be understood. (And on that note, William Shakespeare was born AND died on April 23. We can still drink to his memory a day late.)

Then there is the Renaissance and before that, the Middle Ages. Linguistically, 1100-1450 (more or less) was the era of Middle English, which definitely does not look or sound like modern English. Here is a famous passage (part of the Prologue of the Canterbury Tales, circa 1380s), which I can still recite from memory:

WHAN that Aprille with his shoures soote
The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne,
And smale fowles maken melodye,
That slepen al the night with open ye,
(So priketh hem nature in hir corages):
Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.

(There are many more lines, but these are the ones I remember.)

Anyone who wants to set a plot in an English-speaking environment before the mid-fifteenth century, and lure a non-scholarly 21st-century audience to read it, has to improvise a lot.



In order to write a story set in the universe of King Arthur (though technically, it’s about his conception), I reread my old copy of The Morte d’Arthur by Sir Thomas Mallory (mid-1400s).

Here is the beginning of my story:

My lord, the Duke of Cornwall, has accepted Christ Jesus as his savior for a score of years. As his lady, I have a duty to pray as he does before our people, whatever I believe in my heart. My lord’s honor deserves no less.

How different things were when the Maiden, the Mother and the Crone commanded us to follow our hearts. No man took offense if his lady held a paramour in her arms before the Beltane fires, nor would a good woman try to keep her wedded lord on a short tether throughout life. I remember a time when love was not confined, but I was a little maid who barely understood it. I was simply Igraine then, and I was too merry to be wise.

Now I wait alone behind the thick stone walls of Castle Tintagel for news of my lord Cornwall, and of the King that I love beyond measure. They plan each other’s destruction, and I fear for them both.

I’ve written elsewhere about the challenges of writing this story. The editor to whom I sent it liked the style, but didn’t find the story sexy enough, even after I had revised it to give Igraine more, shall I say, physical ecstasy. Her emotional ambivalence (the King and the Duke are threatening to tear the kingdom apart over her – oh, for the love of all the saints!) seemed inherent in the original story. Whether this story will ever find a home remains to be seen. I might have to rewrite it as straight historical fiction, with much of the sex kept out of sight.

Since Annabeth was so flattering about The Flight of the Black Swan (set during the American Civil War, 1861-1865, and slightly beyond), I’ll introduce the narrator, Emily (represented in the audio version by a British actor, Catherine Carter). Here are her opening lines:

Almost the worst thing that can happen to a young lady is to be loved by her parents.

Consider it: attentive mothers and fathers do all in their power to protect their daughters from risk and notoriety—in short, from every experience which gives savor to life. Fortunately, I approached the age of majority with my most exciting memories of childhood intact.



The book is available in several formats from Amazon and from the publisher, Lethe.

I would love to read a sexually-explicit version of the gothic novel Wuthering Heights (written in the 1840s, but with much backstory set in the late 1700s). Since a certain British publisher has been soliciting raunchy versions of the “classics” for several years, I suspect that someone more qualified than I will write it before I could finish the necessary research. But then, there are quite a few intense female-female relationships in the fiction of that era that would benefit from a clearly lesbian interpretation. :)

At Play in the Fields of the Past

Sacchi Green

History has always fascinated me. The past is a different enough world from the present to be as interesting as any fictional story, and sometimes even more so, because the present grows out of the past and can’t be fully understood without knowing what came before. Of course written history can’t be relied on to be factual—it depends on who wrote what from which perspective, and with what agenda, and so many other variables—but that doesn’t prevent it from making an engrossing story, especially when presented in fictional form by really good writers.

As a kid, and on into my teens, I loved to read Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn (which took some further maturity to really understand, but still grabbed my imagination,) and Little Women, and all of Jane Austen’s novels, and the Sherlock Holmes stories (as much for the sense of the period and the atmosphere as for the mystery element) and so many other books that let me feel immersed in the world of the past without having to cope with the discomforts of really living then. Those were books written more or less during the eras they depicted—Mark Twain was already looking back at a past world, but one he’d inhabited—but I also loved books by authors writing of eras long before their own, like Scott’s Ivanhoe and stories about legendary figures such as Robin Hood, and novels about more recent periods like Gone with the Wind.

Maybe my longing for other times that seemed more interesting than my own had something to do with growing up in a small town in the truly boring 50s. When I discovered Kerouac, it was in the 60s or close enough, so by then the Beat Generation was well in the past, but still an active influence on “our” generation that produced hippiedom and sit-ins and rock-and-roll and even feminism. I said in a comment to a previous post here that history is what happened before a time you can remember, but I take that back—the 60s and 70s are history now to me, and so is pretty much everything before the 21st century. History never holds still.

When it comes to my own writing, I especially love to set stories in the ready-made world of the past, and I often enjoy the research more than the writing. Almost always, in fact. Writing is the hardest part. Whenever possible I try to read contemporary accounts of the period, to get a sense of the flow of the language and the perspectives of the people, although the farther back the time period the harder that gets.

I’ve written several erotica stories set during WWII, and found invaluable first-person accounts (although often through interviews by more recent writers) of what it was like to be a woman WASP pilot ferrying warplanes or the Russian “Night Witch” women pilots and bombardiers flying hundreds of missions against invading German troops. I’ve written Vietnam-era stories, too, with memoirs by WACs and nurses serving “in country” augmenting my own memories of what it was like stateside. In those cases, of course, language was no problem. Writing a story set during WWI was more of a stretch, but not much—dozens and dozens of British mystery novels set more or less in that period had been a large part of my youthful reading, and I still love the Lord Peter Wimsey books by Dorothy L. Sayers. Not to mention Wodehouse.

When I ventured into the Elizabethan period, Shakespeare was my obvious source, both of language and plot. What could inspire a transgender story better than a theatrical tradition of boys playing girls (and sometimes playing girls disguised as boys?) The language had to tread a line between the modern and the Elizabethan, of course, leaning much more toward the modern, and I don’t know how successful I was, but it was a lot of fun. So much so that I’ll indulge myself in an excerpt:
__________

A Dance of Queens

Midsummer’s Night, the play safely done, dusk sweet as a languorous touch on yearning flesh...and still I could not take my love into the greenwood and lay her on my cloak and be consumed in her fire.

I cursed my own impatience. We should have pressed on without pause, but Quenta had tormented me so, slipping a hand beneath my shirt and then down into my breeches until I could scarce walk, and must stop for a taste of the feast to come.

So the Queen’s messenger had caught us. And truly, by the shimmer in the air at the instant she appeared, I knew there had never been hope of escape. In the Welsh hills and valleys we have tales, more than tales, of such creatures, though I had thought the filth and disbelief of London must repel them. At another time I would have been glad that the green countryside along the Thames still held such folk. Glad or no, we had no choice now but to let the greenwood’s promise fade into shadow.

Frustration pounded in my veins. I jerked away from Quenta’s touch, the mere brush of her hand making me forget that I must not even think of “him” as “her” until we could be blessedly alone.

I focused on the wide skirt sailing just ahead. Though the farthingale was not devised with a lady dwarf in mind, its absurdity was more than countered by the messenger’s bearing and the Queen’s crest broidered on her sleeve. It scarcely needed Quenta’s nudge to put me on guard against those keen, merry eyes, though they looked up at me from about the level of my belt.

Such danger should have chilled my ardor. But surely the Queen would waste little time on us, might have forgotten already her whim. At most there could be a gracious word or two, perhaps a small purse. Why, then, command that we bring our play-garb? A jest among her ladies?

But in the great bedchamber we found Her Majesty alone, a slim, pale figure whose aura crackled through the paneled room like heat-lightning.

Our diminutive guide swept a curtsy. “The player boys, Madam. Quentin O’Connor and Kit Rhys.”

Bright tired eyes assessed us. “Well enough, Gwen. Now keep us private for a bit.” The attendant gave me a wicked sidelong glance as she went to sit between the great oak door and the carven screen before it.

Quenta elbowed me sharply. I joined her in an elegant stage bow, feeling the royal glance caress our snug-hosed calves. Her Majesty was said to have ever an eye for a well-turned leg; if it went farther than a look, or a leg... But I had never heard so much as rumor that it did.

Her voice was cool enough. “So, Titania and Hippolyta. You played the queen’s part well, each in your own way.”

“Never so well as you, Your Highness.” Quenta’s green eyes gleamed wickedly, and I suppressed a groan. This was no time for her sly wit!
__________

What follows is something of an erotic comedy of genders, with twists and turns, a snippet of history, and a bit of magic.


I’ve wanted for a long time to get a chance to edit an anthology of historical stories. I did, in fact, do an alternate history book a few years ago, Time Well Bent, under my alternate name, Connie Wilkins, for Lethe Press. It wasn’t erotica, per se, although some of the pieces were definitely erotic, including Lisabet’s rif on Gilbert (of Gilbert and Sullivan) being seduced by a handsome young understudy, which I believe she mentioned in her post last week. Excellent stuff. But a gig editing an historical erotica book has eluded me until right now, when I have an actual Call for Submissions out for Thunder of War, Lightning of Desire: Lesbian Historical Literary Erotica, to be published by Lethe Press. The deadline is near, but extensions are possible. And I have another CFS for an historical lesbian romance anthology, Through the Hourglass, with The Liz McMullen Show as publisher. For these guidelines, you can check out my blog, http://sacchi-green.blogspot.com (just scroll down a few posts past my other current CFS, for Best Lesbian Erotica 2016.)

Such good timing! An historical theme for OGG right now, just when I actually have something to say on the subject!

In Love with the Past

By Lisabet Sarai

Ever since I began reading (which was not long after I got out of diapers), I've loved historical fiction. As a child, I couldn't get enough of ancient Egypt or imperial Rome. Give me a tale set in medieval France or colonial America, Moorish Spain or Druidic Britain, and I would disappear into that other world for hours or even days. My mother would despair of getting me to do my chores or persuading me to go outside and play. The historical realms that I visited seemed far more real than my family's three bedroom ranch house or our grassy back yard.

I still enjoy a well-crafted tale centered in another time and place. In fact, I think I appreciate historical fiction more deeply now that I understand how difficult it is to write it well. A successful historical novel should transport you back to the past. You should see the sights, smell the smells, experience the sensual delights and the painful inconveniences of the time in which it occurs. (No matter how romantic the Age of Chivalry might sound, I’d never want to live in those dark and uncomfortable times!)

Of course, you've also got to get the details right. However obscure the period that you've chosen, there's bound to be some reader who will be an expert on that time, that dreaded critic who will throw the book at you (literally!) when your characters in twelfth century England drink tea, or your Aztec prince wears robes of silk. I remember long rants on one list I belong to, because a well-known romance author mentioned a spinning wheel in a period before they'd been invented. (The ranter was an individual with extensive knowledge about textiles.)

Immersive description and obsessive accuracy are not enough, though. To write convincingly about another historical period, you need to have a sense of how people thought, what they believed, how they behaved—the unspoken rules and assumptions of their society. I've read some so-called Regency erotic romance set in eighteenth century Europe in which the characters acted, and interacted, in ways that were far too modern to be believable (particularly in the area of sexual expression). These books were entertaining, but they didn't really deliver on the promise of a genuine historical experience.

The best historicals that I've read also capture the cadences and vocabulary of speech in the period. The most engaging historical romance that I've read in a very long time is Erastes' homoerotic Regency novel, Standish. I could almost believe that the story really had been penned by an author of the period, rather than a modern writer. Another writer who excels at capturing the linguistic tone of a historical period is Louisa Burton. The stories in her Tales of the Hidden Grotto series range freely through history, from pre-Roman times to the modern day. Each segment does an exceptional job anchoring the reader in a particular time and place.

Most of my own work thus far is contemporary, though I have taken a few stabs at history — with great trepidation! Incognito has a subplot, revealed in a secret journal, that takes place in Victorian Boston. I had a wonderful time doing research for this, particularly in the area of costume. I had actually lived in the historic district of Beacon Hill for a year, so it was relatively easy to bring the setting to life. Walking the streets of Boston, I found the past was palpable.

Monsoon Fever is set on a tea plantation in British India just a few years after the first World War. This was much more difficult to pull off, even though the time period is more recent. I've never visited Assam and even if I could discover what was going on in Europe or America during the 'teens, extrapolating to a remote colonial outpost required considerable imagination to fill in the factual gaps.

(Fortunately, imagination is not something I’m usually lacking. My husband accuses me of routinely making things up when I don’t know the answer, and I have to admit, he has some reason for this claim.)

My bawdy story Shortest Night is set in Elizabethan London, during William Shakespeare's time, and indeed the plot is a riff on the cross-dressing comedies of errors Shakespeare did so well. In fact, the Bard himself has a bit part in that tale. London and the theater also figure in “Opening Night”, the alternative history story I wrote for Sacchi’s anthology Time Well Bent, in which I imagine what would have happened if William Gilbert (of Gilbert and Sullivan fame) had been seduced by his star actor during the debut of the infamous operetta “Ruddigore”.

My most recent attempt at historical erotic fiction takes place much closer to the present. Challenge to Him is set in Newport, Rhode Island during the Gilded Age, sometime before 1910. I’ll never forget visiting the Newport mansions (now museums) and marveling at their near-obscene opulence. My hero is one of the newly-wealthy industrialist class who built those mansions, while the heroine is an intellectual and labor activist from (yes, Sachi!) Amherst, Massachusetts.

Here’s an excerpt from that novella, which describes the first meeting between the hero Andrew MacIntyre and the heroine, Olivia Alcott, outside a textile mill in Lowell, Massachusetts.

“We’d rather starve quick than starve slow. A living wage or we just say no.”

Olivia Alcott chanted along with the mill girls as they marched in a circle in front of the rambling brick factory buildings. A semicircle of police and spectators fanned out in front of the strikers, but no one made a move to hinder them. Behind her, the normally clattering machinery lay quiet. When the workers paused for breath, Olivia heard the muted rush of the falls.

Itchy sweat gathered under her arms and at the base of her neck, where random strands of her hair had come loose from the pins that secured it. It was several hours past noon, and the summer sun battered them all. Like the women with whom she marched, Olivia wore a drab, ankle-length shirtwaist and heavy, laced boots, though her clothing was of finer fabric and in better repair. A red scarf knotted at her throat added a spark of colour—and soaked up some of her perspiration. She was desperately thirsty, but they’d agreed not to take a break until three o’clock. She certainly wasn’t going to be the one who gave up early.

She glanced around at her companions. They ranged in age from fourteen to fifty-five, though most were younger than her twenty-six years. Their lean, wiry bodies showed the effects of their twelve hours of back-breaking labour per day, six days a week. Even the young women had lined faces and streaks of grey in their hair, and the older ones looked frail, almost skeletal.

In the cool of the morning, when they’d started the strike, there’d been a holiday atmosphere. Liberated from work, they’d laughed, joked with one another and sung old Québécois songs. Now each woman’s face was a grim, dusty mask. Each was determined not to surrender to fatigue or discomfort. They had made a commitment to one another. No one was willing to betray that commitment—certainly not Olivia.

Doubts assailed her, though, as her back ached and the blisters on her feet stung. Had she done the right thing, coming here and stirring up these women’s aspirations? Would it do any good? Greed ruled the modern world. Profit was all that mattered. Human beings were expendable, just cogs in the great industrial machine that was America. If one component failed, it could be replaced. Meanwhile, the masters of the new century grew ever richer.

She could have been at home, reading in her father’s shady garden with a glass of iced lemon at her side, or walking with her sister under the spreading elms of the Common. Indeed, if the strike failed, she could return to her safe and comfortable life in Amherst—become a teacher like her parents, or an author like her brother Will.

These women around her, though, didn’t have those options. For them, this was a matter of survival.

“Mademoiselle Olivia!” A skinny girl raced up the street that led to the riverside mill, stirring clouds of dust. “Il vient! He is coming!”

The sputtering racket of an internal combustion engine drowned out the girl’s excited voice. The crowd parted like the Red Sea for a boxy vehicle of shiny black, with silvery headlamps like extruded eyes. The noisy Studebaker rolled to a stop in front of the strikers, who stopped in their tracks like everyone else to stare at it.

The door creaked open. A tall man unfolded himself from the somewhat cramped interior, snatched off his hat and goggles and tossed them into the vehicle. He strode towards the massed strikers, his fists clenched at his sides.

“Where is she? Where’s your damned leader?”

The newspapers generally described Andrew MacIntyre as handsome. The epithet did not do him justice. As he stormed towards her, Olivia was struck with a sense of physical power and keen intelligence. He had wavy red-gold hair, a high forehead, a square chin, a determined mouth. His eyes were hazel, deep set under brows darker than his hair. Those eyes drilled into her, fierce and compelling. The women around her shrank backwards in alarm. Olivia steeled herself, holding her ground and fighting the urge to grovel at his feet. Instead of retreating, she took a step forward, holding out her hand.

“Mr Andrew MacIntyre, I presume?” She marvelled at the steadiness of her voice, the cool neutral tone.

“Damned right. And you are…?”

“Olivia Alcott.” She pulled herself up to her full height and forced herself to meet his gaze. She saw anger simmering there, but behind his irritation there was something else, something that intrigued and thrilled her. Something that she might be able to use to further her goals. Olivia Alcott recognised lust when she saw it.

He towered over her by at least a head. Though his body was hidden by his loose touring coat, his decisive, economical movements suggested he was lean and athletic. For a moment he hesitated, staring at her proffered hand. When he finally accepted it, his firm grip confirmed her impression of strength. His palm felt warm and dry against hers. She suddenly wished that she were not so sticky and dishevelled. When he released her, a momentary lightness swept through her, as though she might float away.

“And can I assume that you are the instigator and cause of this illegal strike, Miss Alcott?” He seemed flustered, less confident than she would have expected. Her spirits rose.

“Instigator? Perhaps. But not the cause.” Sweat trickled from her hairline, down into her eyes. She wiped it away with the back of her hand.

“Here.” He surprised her by offering a crisp handkerchief of fine linen, of a white so pure it almost seemed to shine with its own light. The initials ‘AM’ were embroidered in the corner, in golden thread. A faint scent of lavender reached her nostrils.

“Why, thank you!” The square of cloth was far more effective than her hand. When she’d mopped the perspiration from her face, she held out the swatch of now-damp fabric. “Here you are.”

He waved dismissively. “Keep it. I’ve got dozens more. Let’s get back to the matter at hand.”

“How much did this handkerchief cost, Mr MacIntyre?”

“I have no idea. My secretary handles my personal expenses.”

“It’s imported linen, I suspect. Belgian, perhaps?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. Look, Miss Alcott…”

“And the monogram looks like real gold. Is it?”

“Honestly, what does that have to do with anything?”

Olivia tucked the handkerchief into her bodice, noting that MacIntyre’s eyes followed the movement. Indeed he didn’t try to hide his survey of her figure, rude as it was. Another tremor of strangeness fluttered in her belly.

“I’m no expert—I don’t have anything so fine myself—but I’d estimate that each of the dozens of handkerchiefs like this that you possess costs at least ten dollars.”

“Ah—really I don’t know—perhaps. Something in that vicinity.”

“That’s about two weeks of salary for one of these women who work here in your factory.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“The cause of the strike, Mr MacIntyre. You asked about the cause of the strike. These poor women—your employees, sir, to whom you have a certain responsibility—generally make five dollars a week. They’d have to work for two weeks—twelve days, twelve hours per day—to afford one of your handkerchiefs. Do you think this is just?”

“Well, they should be grateful they have jobs.” MacIntyre leaned closer, his manner and his voice menacing. “And if you don’t stop your meddling, they won’t. I’ll fire every single one of them in a minute. There are plenty of people who’d be happy for steady work, for a reputable company that’s not about to go bust and put them out on the street.”

“Won’t you consider raising their salaries, Mr MacIntyre?” Olivia countered, inserting a bit of sweetness into her own voice. She laid her hand on his upper arm and felt his muscles shift under her fingers. “An additional dollar a week would make a big difference to them.”

“I’m running a business here, Miss Alcott, not a charity.” He pulled away from her grasp and shook his head, as if to clear his thoughts, then stepped past her to speak to the assembled workers.

“Go back to your machines, ladies. Don’t listen to this—this rabble-rouser. She’s only here to make trouble. You know that MacIntyre Textiles has always taken good care of you…”

“Oh, really, Monsieur?” Lisette Beauchamps pushed her way through the clot of ragged women to confront him. “Did you care when my daughter got the brown lung? Poor petite wheezing and coughing so hard that she couldn’t walk, let alone work? And no money for a doctor or medicine? Or when Maria Clermont’s hand got tangled in the spinning machine? After they cut it off at the wrist, the fever took her. Left her four children all alone, les pauvres. Now they work here too, in this hellhole that killed their mother.”

“Oui!”

“C’est vrai!”

The women besieged Andrew MacIntyre, crowding around him, blurting out their sad stories in broken English. For a moment, Olivia almost felt sorry for him.

“Silence!” His voice drowned out their pleas and complaints. The babble died away. He raised his fist as though to batter the closest of the supplicants. Then he let it fall to his side. “The next person who makes a sound will be arrested and thrown in jail.” Despite his rough words, though, he appeared uncertain.

* * * *

I should mention that this book includes quite a lot of BDSM. I have no idea how much of that is historically accurate!

P.S. (Patience)

By Jean Roberta

It takes patience to produce a finished piece of writing, especially if it requires research. Information can appear serendipitously, out of the blue, or it can be hard to find. Following up on a hunch is like investigating a murder. The trail of clues can be cold.

On January 31, I missed my posting day here (Topic: patience) because I was frantically preparing my talk for my colleagues in the English Dep't. I called it "The Muse Was a Leather Daddy," and it was (is) about the influence of two gay men, both rumoured to be into BDSM or “le vice anglais,” on the authors of famous gothic novels.

Apparently the character of Lord Henry Wotton in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (and "Erskine" in his lesser-known The Portrait of Mr. W.H.) was based on an actual Scottish nobleman, painter, sculptor & Member of Parliament, Lord Ronald Gower. He was believed to have, shall we say, an intense sex life, but he tended to threaten lawsuits (& actually sue people) if they said anything in print. I assume this kept his "private life" out of the late-Victorian media.

Now here is one notable difference between the late nineteenth century and more recent times: physical punishment was a standard feature of almost everyone’s upbringing in the time of Queen Victoria. Upper-class young men, in particular, were usually living in exclusive boys’ schools when they reached puberty, and canings were the usual penalty for breaking the rules, as high-spirited teenagers tend to do. (The central characters in the Harry Potter novels do this a lot, but they can justify it because they’re fighting supernatural Evil.)

Lower-class children got beaten too, and not only in the privacy of their families. It’s not surprising that whorehouses in the Victorian Age did a thriving business in bondage and discipline. It wasn’t respectable to go to a whorehouse at all, of course, but an association of pain with lust was understandable.

Unfortunately for me, Lord Ronald Gower seems to have covered his tracks well. The little information I have comes from a recent book, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde, which has been criticized in reviews for making claims that are not well-enough documented. Internal evidence in the Oscar Wilde stories (The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Portrait of Mr. W.H.) is intriguing. Both are about painters and painting, which was a serious pursuit of both Lord Ronald and Frank Miles, the young man who introduced him to Oscar Wilde. (Oscar Wilde lived with Frank Miles when Miles was trying to establish himself as a society portrait-painter.) Both the “dom” figures in the Wilde stories (the witty Lord Henry Wotton and the Scottish nobleman Erskine) play cruel mind-games on impressionable young men.

I was able to compare Lord Ronald’s brief diary entry about meeting Oscar Wilde in the 1870s (from The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde) with the fictional meeting of Dorian Gray and Lord Henry Wotton as well as with a passage about Dorian’s flirtation with Catholic ritual and imagery (in the novella, he collects ecclesiastical garments as objets d’art). In his diary entry, the real Lord Ronald mentioned that the real Oscar Wilde “talked nonsense” about Catholicism. But the evidence I have just isn’t enough.

The other “leather daddy” I proposed to talk about seems easier to track down. Seems. It's fairly well-known that author Anne Rice developed a close friendship with John Preston (writer of gay BDSM “porn,” his word) in San Francisco in the 1970s, about the time she was writing Interview with the Vampire, published in 1976.

Interesting coincidence: John Preston was born exactly 100 years after Ronald Gower.

I’ve known about these links for a long time, but demonstrating one person's influence on another person's work is tricky. I knew that John Preston died in 1994 from complications from AIDS, and that Anne Rice spoke at his funeral, where she claimed he was the best friend she had ever had. When I tried looking this up, I couldn’t find it on-line, where I had first read it.

Apparently Brown University has the John Preston archive, including a voluminous correspondence between him and Anne Rice, much of it by fax. (This probably seemed like cutting-edge technology in the 1970s.) I don’t know how hard it would be for a researcher from elsewhere to access this material.

I tried sending a message to Anne Rice on Facebook, but apparently it couldn't be delivered because of a full mailbox (hers, I assume). In my message, I asked if she would answer some questions about her friendship with the late John Preston. Since she has never tried to keep it a secret, I had some faith that she wouldn't be offended. I sent a message to a mutual friend on Facebook, asking him to pass on my message to Anne Rice, if possible. No reply. I suppose that wasn't surprising, but it was frustrating.

In my talk, I read two passages aloud to show their similarities. I read a scene from a John Preston novel in which a new wannabe slave in “The Network” (forerunner of Laura Antoniou’s “Marketplace,” a fictional network for the training and leasing of voluntary slaves) meets the charismatic Dom who will groom and sell him. After the new slave is told to take off all his clothes, they are burned in the fireplace to signify the erasing of his old life. Then I read an initiation scene from Interview with the Vampire in which Louis is “turned” by the vampire Lestat, who clearly has the upper hand. Then I read part of the scene in which Louis deliberately sets fire to his plantation to cover his (and Lestat’s) tracks and erase his old identity as the human master of a plantation in Louisiana in the 1790s.

The small but interested audience who came out to hear me in the English Department of the university where I teach seemed entertained. (The department secretary had made me a fabulous poster image, featuring a seated man, all in leather, smoking a fat cigar. The name of my talk appeared in red across his chest. The secretary joked that she might get in trouble if anyone followed her browser history.)

I gave my talk as part of a series that often involves books-in-progress or at least articles that are scheduled for publication. Someone in my audience asked if my article would appear somewhere soon. I had to say no because it still needs much more work.

Sigh. Well, now I have another Work-in-Progress.

By the way, one current author who has really captured the quirky flavour of The Picture of Dorian Gray (first serialized in a magazine in 1890) is Mitzi Szereto in her sexually-explicit sequel, The Wilde Passions of Dorian Gray. For best results, read them both.
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O Curse of Marriage

by Jean Roberta

In Othello, Shakespeare’s tragedy about the causes and results of jealousy, the provocateur who plants suspicion in the mind of General Othello that his new bride is unfaithful warns him:

“O! beware, my lord, of jealousy; it is the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on.”

Iago, the sly underling, resents Othello for reasons that are never clear enough. Iago might resent Othello for not giving him a promotion, or for rising so fast through the ranks of the army, despite his being an outsider in Venetian society. (Othello is a “Moor,” i.e. Moroccan, so he is visibly different from the Italians around him.) Iago also claims that his own wife Emilia has fooled around with Othello behind his back, though the audience never sees this. Jealousy, it seems, doesn’t need substantial evidence.

Iago’s warning about jealousy drips with irony. He, of all people, knows how it can destroy a life.

Othello is newly-married to Desdemona, a younger and whiter woman who fell in love with him when he told her about his military adventures, the battles he survived. He claims to love her because she admires and sympathizes with him, but he can’t trust her.

Here Othello makes it clear that husbands in general can’t afford to trust their wives:

“O curse of marriage, that we can call these delicate creatures ours, and not their appetites! I had rather be a toad, and live upon the vapour of a dungeon, than keep a corner in the thing I love for others’ uses.”

Othello is so much more to me than a dusty Renaissance play that many English majors have studied in university. As a student of literature and new bride in my twenties, I studied this plot AND lived it. As my desperate, ambitious, hard-drinking Nigerian husband grew angrier on alien turf (I had brought him to Canada from England, where we met), I racked my brains to find explanations and solutions. Why was he so upset that I had had other boyfriends before him, even though he knew that when he proposed to me? Why was he so convinced that I was a nympho who had random hookups with men, and when did he think I was doing all this? Was there an Iago among our friends?

Could I possibly prove my loyalty, even while my husband’s behaviour made me so hurt, angry and afraid that I didn’t see how I could stay with him much longer?

This was the most urgent question: Was he going to kill me, as Othello kills Desdemona?

Luckily for me, I was able to escape, continue my education and raise our daughter with no further violence. (Not that any of that was easy.) My ex-husband tried to persuade my parents to kick me and my baby out of their house on grounds that I was obviously a cheating wife -- otherwise I would never have left my home & husband. When his plan didn’t succeed, he went on to marry another young white Canadian whose parents seemed able and willing (at first) to support him financially. That relationship collapsed as well, and my ex-husband moved to another part of Canada, presumably to find a good job (not to mention a relatively well-off family with a daughter).

Like Othello, my ex eventually died in despair, though his life seems to have declined for years before then. On New Year’s Eve 2006, I learned in a surprise phone call that he had died of a heart attack in a town where he was alone except for the patient friend who phoned me because the hospital was asking for a next-of-kin. The reasons for my ex's isolation weren't hard to guess, and I got lurid bits of information on the day of his funeral: apparently he had gone to the local hospital several times with complaints about plots against him and evil spirits in his apartment. He had been diagnosed with a mental illness. (But my opinion of the “mental health” establishment is a whole other post.)

My current female spouse (a better choice!) usually answers my lingering questions about the drama of my first marriage with this line: “You have to remember he was mentally ill.” Case closed.

This epitaph doesn’t resolve anything to my satisfaction, and my own Othello is no longer able to speak for himself. He was definitely the most jealous man I ever met, but he wasn’t alone.

During the “sexual revolution” of the 1970s, I kept meeting guys who expected me to go with the flow and live for the moment by having unprotected sex with them, but none of them seemed to want a relationship with a sexually-experienced woman. Even in theoretical discussions about dating relationships, one guy after another paraphrased Othello’s “O curse of marriage” speech. They hated the fickle nature of women, as they saw it, and their own inability to put a chastity belt on the mind of any woman they had claimed as “theirs.”

This irrational value system has been called the Double Standard, and it seems incredibly long-lived. Trying to argue it away just doesn’t work. Trust me, I’ve tried that. Writing off every jealous heterosexual man as “mentally ill” seems parallel to summing up women in general as “weak-minded” and therefore prone to go to the Dark Side.

There has to be a way to analyze this monster, this curse or this epidemic without resorting to shallow insults.

Like Giselle, I’ve experienced some disturbing little outbreaks of jealousy in my long-term lesbian relationship. Sometimes I wonder about her real motives for being with me; love can be asserted, but never proved beyond a doubt. More often, I think I see jealousy in her eyes. (I have a much more secure job than she does -- with shorter working hours, higher pay, and no crazy-making office politics. Do I deserve all this? Doesn’t she? Who knows?) But then, I can never be sure if I am seeing and hearing her clearly, or overreacting because of the Shakespearean tragedy of my past. It’s complicated.

I’m convinced that no one is immune from jealousy, or the messy soup of feelings that are described that way. The only way I know of to minimize the damage is to think before I speak or act, and not to blurt out the first words that come to my mind.

Respect (for oneself and others) is probably the best antidote.

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A Conversation with Polonius

By Lisabet Sarai

Felix Aylmer as Polonius in Laurence Olivier's "Hamlet", 1948

“This above all: To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.”

The old man shook a gnarled finger at me. His snowy beard wagged as he gulped for air, somewhat overcome by his own animation.

“Good Polonius,” I say, helping him to a velvet-upholstered armchair. “I thank you for your advice. But if we all followed such precepts, what kind of world would we have? A me-first sort of place, full of ego and ambition. No one would hesitate to take advantage of his fellows in order to further his own goals. Violence, cruelty, indifference—to an even greater extent than we already have.”

“Nay, child, 'tis not so. Although I am known as a taciturn and reticent individual, a man of few words who would never vaunt his wisdom or pretend to superior understanding, I cannot refrain from enlightening you and demonstrating the validity of my counsel.”

“Indeed, sir, I wait upon your explanation.” It occurs to me to wonder why I've adopted such antiquated speech patterns, but then, I'm easily influenced. When I visit my relatives in South Carolina, I find myself unconsciously adopting a southern accent. When I'm in New York City, I'm often mistaken for a native.

“As you have truly observed, the world is a sorry place, rife with horrific crimes against God and society that sadden and sicken the hearts of virtuous men such as I. The hard-won wealth of industrious men is squandered and pilfered by perfidious financiers. Did I not say, neither a borrower nor a lender be? Headless bodies are unearthed, the scourge of the undeclared wars between rival purveyors of addictive intoxicants. Every day, it seems, we hear tell of some misguided fanatic hoist with his own petard, taking scores of innocents to hell along with him.

"Some would argue that the perpetrators of such evil deeds suffer from an excess of self-love. In pursuing personal goals, be it glory, riches or power, the villains care not whom they deprive of life or livelihood. Their overarching egoism permits any injury to another. The desires and dreams of others matter not a whit should such desires stand in opposition to the criminal's objectives.”

“Exactly my point.” I slip in my comment as the elderly Dane is gathering his breath for another paragraph or two. “Self-love leads to many ills.”

“You are deluded, daughter, if I may be allowed to say so. I believe that every individual is entitled to hold his or her opinion, however ridiculous, and it is not my place to correct him. Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice, that is my motto. Nevertheless I cannot allow you to persist in such an unfortunate misunderstanding.”

“Yes, sir?” I know I will receive enlightenment whether I agree with him or not.

“These vile creatures who are responsible of the crimes of which we speak, do you think they love themselves? I will be brief. These persons are propelled not by self-appreciation but by self-doubt, inadequacy, an insufficient regard for their own worth which drives them to try and prove that they are better than their peers. It matters not how often they triumph, how full their coffers, how many they slay. No deed, however marvelous or vicious, can assuage their deep-buried convictions of their own worthlessness.”

“So you are of the opinion that self-love engenders virtue rather than vice?”

The elder's cheeks were pink with exertion. He gestured with such energy that, had he a sword, he might well have cut me to the quick.

“I would represent my position not as mere opinion, a bauble to be tossed about in the tavern by drunken wastrels, but as manifest truth. Think on it: what said our Lord Jesus Christ? 'Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.'”

“Sir, I do not think it is advisable to descend into religious arguments on this blog...”

“This is not religion, you green girl, 'tis merely common sense. How is it possible to be considerate, compassionate, generous, if one is not at one's own ease? How can I care for my neighbor unless I care for myself? Kindness toward others is the fruit of self-love, as are respect and affection.

"If you suffer from the belief of that you are inferior, others appear only as threats. Their accomplishments and their worldly possessions accuse you. Voracious envy gnaws your heart. Suspicion clouds your eyes. Believing that you have little, you live in fear that it will be taken from you. Suffering from a sense of lack, you attack those who enjoy the blessings of which you feel you have been deprived.”

“Self-love protects a man from this curse. Knowing one's worth, one can appreciate the worthy deeds of one's fellows. A man who is true to himself can afford to be even-tempered, tolerant, charitable. He can follow my oft-repeated maxim: take every man's censure, but reserve thy judgment. He can share his bounty, loving his neighbor as the Scriptures dictate, because he is confident that no one can deprive him of the love he bears himself.”

Despite his volubility, the old man made some sense. “Well...”

“Think on thine own case, wench. You are a scribbler, I believe, penning fantastic tales for the ignorant masses.”

“Well, I'd like to imagine that my readers are not ignorant...”

“No matter, that is not the meat of the matter. I have heard that you are quite willing to help other authors, are you not? You write peer reviews, offer critiques, share information on opportunities for promulgating news of their activities and for disseminating their own scribbles, and so on, do you not?”

“Um—yes, but I don't see...”

“I beg you not to interrupt your elders, girl, when they are attempting to share their hard-won wisdom!”

“Sorry. I offer my apologies, good Polonius.”

“I accept them graciously as is my wont. Beware of entrance to a quarrel, I always say. Where was I? Oh yes. You are moderately generous with your time and your energy. You do not feel that these other authors are your enemies, do you?”

“No, of course not! I am happy to provide assistance where I can. Many people have helped me. It is only just that I reciprocate, maintaining the flow of positive deeds.”

“You do not envy other authors' success?”

“Perhaps a bit, but I know that in most cases they have worked hard to achieve what renown they may claim.”

“And what do you think about your own writing ability?”

“Well, to be honest, I have a fairly high opinion of my work. I know that I am not a great artist – I will never be a William Shakespeare – but when the inspiration hits, I can write a spicy tale that entertains.”

“You see, you love yourself. You believe yourself to be worthy, in the realm of your writing at least. This allows you to share your time with other writers without feeling threatened. You are true to yourself and hence you cannot be false to your fellows.”

“Hmm. I suppose that you may be right, sir.”

“Of course I am right. Videlicet, a sage, well-tempered in the ways of men, bearing the benedictions of age along with its burdens. But the king calls me, no doubt to solicit my counsel. I must hasten to his chamber. Farewell, Lisabet, and remember well what I have said to you.”

“'Tis in my memory locked, and you yourself shall keep the key to it.”

“Good girl.”

“But Polonius, sir, if I might offer you some advice of my own...”

“What is it, child? Be brief.”

“Do not be too curious or eager to spy. And stay away from the arras.”