I have to admit that if there’s any trope I love in fiction — particularly in romantic fiction — it’s the U-turn.
You know the story — the two romantic leads (perhaps a guy and a girl, two guys, or two girls) just can’t seem to make it work. In fact, they’re starting to hate each other. They want nothing to do with each other. They’re better off single — or with other people.
But then … something happens. Something makes them do a dramatic U-turn and it has them careening in the opposite direction. Suddenly … what had seemed to be so hopeless and non-existent mere moments ago is now possible.
They hated each other … but now they love each other.
When it comes to gay or lesbian fiction, U-turns can take other forms too. Someone is determined to be straight — or the guy/girl is in love with their friend who they assume is straight — but then the truth comes out, feelings are revealed, and that seemingly impossible love story is suddenly possible.
I generally include the U-turn in almost everything I write.
There’s just something about the unexpected and sudden surge of emotions that I get from those scenes that makes me all tingly. I love reading these scenes and I love writing them.
Excerpt time!
Earlier this year I wrote and published my first gay young adult romance — Gay Love and Other Fairy Tales. It’s become my bestselling book by far, so I’m suddenly looking at starting a new line of young adult fiction books. (Talk about a U-turn in my writing life! All smut all the time to suddenly putting considerable focus on a smut-free line!)
In this scene, we’ve got closeted Ben who had a hard crush on his gay friend Jordan. Ben is not ready to come out — in fact, he’s not even able to say the word “gay” in relation to himself, so he wouldn’t be able to utter those words. But he knows he wants to kiss Jordan. He wants to get closer to Jordan. He wants to become more than friend.
Sweet, innocent Jordan thinks he’s just hanging out with his straight friend on New Year’s Eve, eating nachos and watching the ball drop. He’s never thought of Ben in any sort of romantic light — why would he? Ben is straight and that’s that.
But on this New Year’s Eve, there may be a surprise in the works, one that will lead to a sudden U-turn for both characters…
***
A burst of music from the television pulls us back to it, someone I don’t recognize is belting out some song I’ve never heard. I’m sure she’s famous. Whoever she is.
“Would you be okay with a hug?” I ask, staring hard at the TV. “Like, it’s tradition to have a kiss to ring in New Year’s, but we could, you know, hug or something. I’m okay if you don’t want to. You know what, never mind, forget I asked.” I want to kick myself. Coward.
He puts a hand on my forearm to stop my negative rant — and it also clears the dressing down I’m giving myself in my head — and instantly it feels like heat blooms from that touch of his hand on my arm. My only regret is that I’m wearing long sleeves and I can’t feel his hand on my bare skin.
“A hug would be great,” he says.
My heart beats and it’s like my whole body pulses with it. I can feel it throbbing in my neck. He’s going to hug me. I’m going to hug him. I sip my beer slowly as I watch the clock in the corner of the TV — they’ve displayed a countdown to midnight.
Twenty minutes.
Twenty minutes until my hug. Twenty minutes until I have Jordan in my arms.
Nineteen minutes and thirty seconds.
I can’t keep counting down like this. I’m going to drive myself insane. I’m going to kill the mood if I’m glued to the clock. I hear some rustling beside me and I see that Jordan has pulled out his phone and he’s scrolling through Instagram. He suddenly angles his phone away from me.
“What?” I ask.
He hesitates, then says, “Nikki’s posting pics of her and Winston.”
“I’m not her boyfriend,” I say automatically. I’ve never actually said that to anyone. I’ve always just let people make their own assumptions and I was happy to play along with it. “We were never together.”
“Really?” Jordan asks, raising an eyebrow.
“I make her look good in photos, but I have no interest in her,” I say. I can feel a bead of sweat forming at my temple.
He scoffs. “You put on a good act then.” He goes to her profile and scrolls down until he finds pictures of me and Nikki. Together. Kissing.
“That’s exactly what it is. An act.” My heart is beating so hard it feels like it’s going to punch through my ribs.
He looks at me like he’s assessing me. “She’s gorgeous,” he says. It’s like he’s pushing me, like he knows what I want to say, even though I don’t think he has a clue. “She’s a control freak sometimes, yeah, but she’s gorgeous.”
“Not my type,” I say.
“Oh?” He shuts off his phone and tosses it on the couch between us. “What is your type?”
You. You’re my type. But can I say those words out loud? Hell no. Coward.
Instead, I turn my attention to the TV. Fourteen minutes left.
“I’m still figuring that out,” I say.
He seems to accept that as an answer, or at least accepts that I’m not ready to talk more about it. We silently watch the rest of the countdown and inwardly I’m kicking myself again — way to ruin the mood right before the hug! I’m saving my last mouthful of Bud Light for midnight, so I’m just sitting here idly holding an almost-empty can of beer.
Finally, what seems like ages later, we’re down to less than a minute. Slowly, the energy in the room warms up. I lean forward, like getting closer to the TV is going to somehow make this more exciting. Beside me, Jordan does the same.
“Ten!” he says out loud, joining the cheering people on the screen counting down.
I join in with him. “Nine! Eight! Seven! Six! Five! Four! Three! Two! One! Happy New Year!”
I take that final swig of beer, letting the alcohol give me a burst of courage. I stand up and hold my arms out and Jordan stands up and comes into them. I wrap my arms around him, holding him tight.
“Happy New Year,” I whisper.
“Happy New Year,” he whispers back.
I know I should let go, end this hug, because it’s getting too long — it’s past the limit of how long friends hug. But I don’t want to let go.
I never want to let go.
Jordan feels so right in my arms.
But there’s something I want even more.
I loosen my arms a little bit and he backs up just an inch or two and he looks up at me. His eyes sparkle in the light and I can see a question behind those clear, brown eyes. He knows something is different.
With the alcohol pushing my decisions, I angle my head in and kiss him.
He puts his hands on my chest like he’s ready to push me away, but I keep kissing him, even though he’s not moving his lips, even though he’s as still as a statue. Panic starts to rise in me and I can feel myself starting to shake. Jordan isn’t responding.
Cameron D. James is a writer of gay smut. His most recent publication is the (surprisingly smut-free) gay YA romance, Gay Love And Other Fairy Tales, under his YA pen name, Dylan James.
Showing posts with label tropes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tropes. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 13, 2018
Thursday, July 27, 2017
Tried and True
By Annabeth Leong
I wrote my first vampire story well after the fad had passed. It was about the fad, though, and an editor who wasn't over it. To this day, it remains one of my favorite stories. I felt exuberant while I wrote it, and I both amused myself and turned myself on.
Because I spent most of today on a train, I'll give you a healthy chunk of the story, which is titled, "Vampire Vikings and Other Desperate Attempts at Originality," and was published in Like a Circlet Editor: Erotic Fantasies of Our Office.
***
Come on," Lacey whispered. She scratched down the back of my neck and toyed with the collar of shirt. "Remember last time? You thought we'd done everything possible, but I showed you didn't I? That vein in your inner thigh? And then, later, the tiny one that beats along your clit?"
The memory made me shudder. I hadn't told Lacey, but I'd had my clit pierced after that for the constant reminder. Every time I shifted and the stainless steel bar repositioned itself, I thought of her face between my legs, penetrating my most sensitive flesh with the very tip of one delicate fang, and then her tongue darting out to lick where her fang had been. I'd been too afraid to let her suck me there—at first. Once I'd given in, Lacey had introduced me to a new level of orgasmic intensity as her feeding directly from my clit drove my nerves to the point of insanity.
"You remember." The unmistakable smile in her voice was accompanied by a firm hand winding around my body to take possession of my breast. "How can you tell me the readers aren't interested in this anymore when you still want it so badly?"
I leaned into her palm, my nipple hard inside my bra. She'd bitten me there once, too. That was the third time we were together, when she'd asked if she could milk me. I had felt so fertile and alive that night, holding her cradled in my lap, feeding my breast to her, watching the peace that came over her face as she suckled. I had squeezed my breast to the point of bruising trying to give her as much blood as I could, just because I didn't want the experience to end.
"Tell me that you still want it," Lacey prodded. "Tell me we're going to work together again. You can send all the others away."
I began to nod because she'd used her most hypnotic tone, but the mention of others reminded me what I was supposed to be doing. With great effort, I mentally crawled out from under Lacey's spell before it closed in on me completely.
Dozens of other creatures waited outside my office for informational interviews. A senior editor and I had indulged in a long brainstorming session the day before, coming up with really unusual stuff. "Competition is increasing. We need something different to keep sales up," she had said. "Were-binturong? Phoenixes? Snake women?" She had paused, then repeated that last one. "Snake women. That's something you could write a whole book about. Think about them twined around each other, those long, forked tongues, just a touch of venom—enough to make you swell."
The fantasy that followed had been fervent enough to shock even me. In the end, I'd given her the key to my vibrator drawer and slunk out of my own office. The worst part was she obviously wanted to do snake women herself, so I was left with the other, less inspiring ideas and a command to "make it original."
I put out a call for the wildest stuff I could come up with along with a few themes gleaned off our most recent reader survey. To show my commitment to the job, I'd even managed to track down a were-binturong, though I suspected few readers would see the erotic potential of a creature whose genus name translates to "bear-weasel."
There were some decent possibilities, though. The head shots from some of the elves had been really striking. I could almost go for one of them, maybe in a dungeon, done up in a blood-red gown, a rust-colored stain dripped from one corner of the mouth...
Damn it. That senior editor had told me to be original, and my last book hadn't done well at all. Of course, I wasn't entirely convinced that readers hadn't wanted to buy the book. There had been a little side-boob on the cover, and I strongly suspected that some of the major e-retailers had pulled the book from their virtual shelves for long, vital swathes of time. Maybe this wasn't a content problem. Maybe this was a cover art problem. Or a censorship problem.
I could have convinced myself if not for the way the senior editor had started our private meeting. She had snapped her fingers in front of my face three times and then pronounced in loud, slow, careful tones: "Vampires. Are. Over."
I took a deep breath and turned to Lacey. "Sweetheart, you're a cliché." It was true. She stood beside my desk wearing a black leather cat suit sewn with red thread and an oversized pair of Hollywood-style sunglasses. Her nails were long, blood red, and decorated with spider decals, and her skin was pale as milk, pale as cream, pale as snow—you get the point. "At our last editorial meeting, we talked about the importance of getting away from the same-old."
She squared her shoulders. "I'm not a cliché. I'm a trope." A curve of red lips revealed the baby fangs I'd always loved for being so cute and feminine. "I'm a familiar jumping-off point. I'm not the same-old, baby, I'm the tried-and-true."
To make her point, she grabbed the back of my office chair, rolled me out from behind the desk, and straddled my legs. We sailed a few inches across the floor before bumping into the overflowing bookshelf behind my desk, but I didn't care because she'd already bent her head and brought her mouth to mine. She smelled of iron and freesia, and her perfect ass ground against the top of my thigh as she settled herself in place. A tendril of cool, black hair worked loose from her updo and tickled the side of my face. She kissed me with the expertise of deep familiarity combined with the passion of a long separation. Fuck.
I hadn't followed the distinction drawn between tropes and clichés at that last meeting, anyway, and so I had no defense against Lacey's argument—which grew more compelling by the moment as she untucked my shirt from my skirt and ran those fingernails over the flesh of my bared belly.
My favorite thing was for her to bite my shoulder first then work her way toward my neck, sinking her fangs deeper and taking more blood every time. She could do it from behind, one hand pinching my nipple and the other on my clit. Or I could work my own clit, and she could hold both nipples, tugging me by the breasts until I stood sandwiched between my office wall and her long, cold body, giving up my blood without care because her teeth in my flesh made me need to come so badly.
I broke away from her kiss, and for a second I almost asked her for that fantasy. Then I forced myself, yet again, to remember what the other editors had been telling me. "Lacey, I can't. You know I can't. They told me that this year I have to find something new."
"You don't want anything new," she said, but the bravado in her voice was breaking. Her throat caught on a plaintive tone, and she turned the sound into a snarl as she wrenched herself away from me and toward my desk. I knew what she would find there, and I cringed, waiting for her reaction.
"Were-binturong? Seriously?" Lacey cackled. Then her voice turned darker, hurt. "Werewolf? I thought you said they were overgrown hairbags?"
I sighed. "That doesn't matter. Werewolves are over, too. I was just brainstorming. You have to get the bad ideas out before you can access the good."
"So what's the good? The stuff at the bottom of this list? Fairies? Angels? Vikings? I can do all of that."
"You?"
She turned to me, her eyes bright and wide. "I'm creative. You know that. Let me show you."
"Lacey, I don't think..."
"Be right back," she said, before I could finish my sentence. She went out the door this time, probably so she could stake her claim on me in front of the other creatures, and I sighed as I watched her go. I'm not sure if that was because of the way her leather outfit hugged her ass or because I had a bad feeling I wouldn't be getting a bonus this year.
***
If you'd like to read the rest of the story, you can find Like a Circlet Editor at this link: https://www.amazon.com/Like-Circlet-Editor-Erotic-Fantasies-ebook/dp/B015QIL7RU/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1501187837&sr=8-1&keywords=Like+a+circlet+editor
I wrote my first vampire story well after the fad had passed. It was about the fad, though, and an editor who wasn't over it. To this day, it remains one of my favorite stories. I felt exuberant while I wrote it, and I both amused myself and turned myself on.
Because I spent most of today on a train, I'll give you a healthy chunk of the story, which is titled, "Vampire Vikings and Other Desperate Attempts at Originality," and was published in Like a Circlet Editor: Erotic Fantasies of Our Office.
***
Come on," Lacey whispered. She scratched down the back of my neck and toyed with the collar of shirt. "Remember last time? You thought we'd done everything possible, but I showed you didn't I? That vein in your inner thigh? And then, later, the tiny one that beats along your clit?"
The memory made me shudder. I hadn't told Lacey, but I'd had my clit pierced after that for the constant reminder. Every time I shifted and the stainless steel bar repositioned itself, I thought of her face between my legs, penetrating my most sensitive flesh with the very tip of one delicate fang, and then her tongue darting out to lick where her fang had been. I'd been too afraid to let her suck me there—at first. Once I'd given in, Lacey had introduced me to a new level of orgasmic intensity as her feeding directly from my clit drove my nerves to the point of insanity.
"You remember." The unmistakable smile in her voice was accompanied by a firm hand winding around my body to take possession of my breast. "How can you tell me the readers aren't interested in this anymore when you still want it so badly?"
I leaned into her palm, my nipple hard inside my bra. She'd bitten me there once, too. That was the third time we were together, when she'd asked if she could milk me. I had felt so fertile and alive that night, holding her cradled in my lap, feeding my breast to her, watching the peace that came over her face as she suckled. I had squeezed my breast to the point of bruising trying to give her as much blood as I could, just because I didn't want the experience to end.
"Tell me that you still want it," Lacey prodded. "Tell me we're going to work together again. You can send all the others away."
I began to nod because she'd used her most hypnotic tone, but the mention of others reminded me what I was supposed to be doing. With great effort, I mentally crawled out from under Lacey's spell before it closed in on me completely.
Dozens of other creatures waited outside my office for informational interviews. A senior editor and I had indulged in a long brainstorming session the day before, coming up with really unusual stuff. "Competition is increasing. We need something different to keep sales up," she had said. "Were-binturong? Phoenixes? Snake women?" She had paused, then repeated that last one. "Snake women. That's something you could write a whole book about. Think about them twined around each other, those long, forked tongues, just a touch of venom—enough to make you swell."
The fantasy that followed had been fervent enough to shock even me. In the end, I'd given her the key to my vibrator drawer and slunk out of my own office. The worst part was she obviously wanted to do snake women herself, so I was left with the other, less inspiring ideas and a command to "make it original."
I put out a call for the wildest stuff I could come up with along with a few themes gleaned off our most recent reader survey. To show my commitment to the job, I'd even managed to track down a were-binturong, though I suspected few readers would see the erotic potential of a creature whose genus name translates to "bear-weasel."
There were some decent possibilities, though. The head shots from some of the elves had been really striking. I could almost go for one of them, maybe in a dungeon, done up in a blood-red gown, a rust-colored stain dripped from one corner of the mouth...
Damn it. That senior editor had told me to be original, and my last book hadn't done well at all. Of course, I wasn't entirely convinced that readers hadn't wanted to buy the book. There had been a little side-boob on the cover, and I strongly suspected that some of the major e-retailers had pulled the book from their virtual shelves for long, vital swathes of time. Maybe this wasn't a content problem. Maybe this was a cover art problem. Or a censorship problem.
I could have convinced myself if not for the way the senior editor had started our private meeting. She had snapped her fingers in front of my face three times and then pronounced in loud, slow, careful tones: "Vampires. Are. Over."
I took a deep breath and turned to Lacey. "Sweetheart, you're a cliché." It was true. She stood beside my desk wearing a black leather cat suit sewn with red thread and an oversized pair of Hollywood-style sunglasses. Her nails were long, blood red, and decorated with spider decals, and her skin was pale as milk, pale as cream, pale as snow—you get the point. "At our last editorial meeting, we talked about the importance of getting away from the same-old."
She squared her shoulders. "I'm not a cliché. I'm a trope." A curve of red lips revealed the baby fangs I'd always loved for being so cute and feminine. "I'm a familiar jumping-off point. I'm not the same-old, baby, I'm the tried-and-true."
To make her point, she grabbed the back of my office chair, rolled me out from behind the desk, and straddled my legs. We sailed a few inches across the floor before bumping into the overflowing bookshelf behind my desk, but I didn't care because she'd already bent her head and brought her mouth to mine. She smelled of iron and freesia, and her perfect ass ground against the top of my thigh as she settled herself in place. A tendril of cool, black hair worked loose from her updo and tickled the side of my face. She kissed me with the expertise of deep familiarity combined with the passion of a long separation. Fuck.
I hadn't followed the distinction drawn between tropes and clichés at that last meeting, anyway, and so I had no defense against Lacey's argument—which grew more compelling by the moment as she untucked my shirt from my skirt and ran those fingernails over the flesh of my bared belly.
My favorite thing was for her to bite my shoulder first then work her way toward my neck, sinking her fangs deeper and taking more blood every time. She could do it from behind, one hand pinching my nipple and the other on my clit. Or I could work my own clit, and she could hold both nipples, tugging me by the breasts until I stood sandwiched between my office wall and her long, cold body, giving up my blood without care because her teeth in my flesh made me need to come so badly.
I broke away from her kiss, and for a second I almost asked her for that fantasy. Then I forced myself, yet again, to remember what the other editors had been telling me. "Lacey, I can't. You know I can't. They told me that this year I have to find something new."
"You don't want anything new," she said, but the bravado in her voice was breaking. Her throat caught on a plaintive tone, and she turned the sound into a snarl as she wrenched herself away from me and toward my desk. I knew what she would find there, and I cringed, waiting for her reaction.
"Were-binturong? Seriously?" Lacey cackled. Then her voice turned darker, hurt. "Werewolf? I thought you said they were overgrown hairbags?"
I sighed. "That doesn't matter. Werewolves are over, too. I was just brainstorming. You have to get the bad ideas out before you can access the good."
"So what's the good? The stuff at the bottom of this list? Fairies? Angels? Vikings? I can do all of that."
"You?"
She turned to me, her eyes bright and wide. "I'm creative. You know that. Let me show you."
"Lacey, I don't think..."
"Be right back," she said, before I could finish my sentence. She went out the door this time, probably so she could stake her claim on me in front of the other creatures, and I sighed as I watched her go. I'm not sure if that was because of the way her leather outfit hugged her ass or because I had a bad feeling I wouldn't be getting a bonus this year.
***
If you'd like to read the rest of the story, you can find Like a Circlet Editor at this link: https://www.amazon.com/Like-Circlet-Editor-Erotic-Fantasies-ebook/dp/B015QIL7RU/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1501187837&sr=8-1&keywords=Like+a+circlet+editor
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