By Annabeth Leong
We’ve talked a lot about the truth in fiction, so I want to talk about the fiction in truth.
Interlude: Lisa and Rob
We all used to hang out at an open mike night. Rob was known for his joyful covers of “Brown Eyed Girl.” I sang a cappella versions of my poems. I don’t remember Lisa performing, though she was always there. Mostly, I remember her for handing out pills.
On this particular night, we went back to my place after the open mike ended, probably to smoke (more?) marijuana. But as was often true during that era, I wasn’t very patient with the conversation. Rob, particularly, seemed to be the type who got high and wanted to discuss mind-blowing, half-baked theories about quantum mechanics, and the more he waxed philosophical about The Dancing Wu Li Masters, the more I wished I’d left him out of the invitation.
Lisa saved the day by asking us to do her a favor, something she loved but hadn’t gotten to try in a long time. She wanted us to drip candle wax on her bare back, blow on it until it dried, and then peel it off and blow on it some more. I was down for just about anything that involved people taking their shirts off, so I quickly agreed. Rob was down as well, probably for similar reasons.
Many candles adorned my room, so we had the materials at hand. Lisa stripped down to her bra, and Rob and I took turns going through the wax procedure with her. I remember my fascination with the texture of her skin and the way it reddened in response to the heat. I have a major thing for freckles and moles, and I can still recall one just beside her bra strap and how badly I wanted to touch it. I’ll also never forget her gasps and moans.
After she said she’d had enough, I decided I wanted to try it. I never wore a bra back then, so my torso was entirely bare when I peeled off my shirt. The scald of the wax felt sharp and itchy at first, but as the heat spread over and through my skin, it settled into a squirming warmth that transformed into an erotic sensation. But there was also the matter of the breath. Cool or hot, soft or strong, different depending on whether it came from Lisa or Rob—it landed with an unbearably pleasurable shock each time, on raw, nervy skin stripped of defenses.
Rob tried it, too, though I remember having the sense that he was perhaps not as much of a masochist as Lisa or I, and was largely enduring pain in the interest of having two women touch his back and bring their lips close to it.
We did several rounds of this, and, predictably, the scenario evolved into heavy making out. I remember kissing both of them and playing with Lisa’s breasts. Pants didn’t come off, though I’m not sure why—I’m sure I would have gladly removed mine. At some point, Rob and Lisa went home, and I went to bed.
Oh, and by the way, I had a boyfriend at the time, who would have been extremely unhappy to know what I’d gotten up to.
The next week, I arrived at the open mike to find Rob waiting with one rose for me and one for Lisa. I remember thinking the roses showed a certain sort of naivete. He had no idea, I thought, of who Lisa and I were and what that night had actually meant. I don’t recall if we ever discussed things, but nothing erotic happened again with that particular configuration of people.
***
So, that story is as true as I can make it. I’m sure I’m representing the events and facts accurately, and I’ve represented my thought process to the best of my ability.
However, whenever I tell a story, I’m aware of all the choices I’m making about what to say when—just as I do when writing fiction.
For example, above, I waited until the end to mention I had a boyfriend who wasn’t present for these events. If I’d mentioned that up top, though, it would have colored the entire story and made it “about” cheating in a way it isn’t if I reveal that fact at the last minute.
I spent paragraphs on the sensual details of the candle wax and glossed over the kissing and conversation. That’s an implicit decision about what constitutes the “important” part of the story.
I also left out the context and back story for my friendship with Lisa, which involved a complex love triangle between me, Lisa, and Lisa’s best friend, not to mention previous ambiguous sexual encounters and a lot of drugs I felt ambivalent about taking. I wonder if that back story and context is part of why I didn’t do more to escalate the situation between me, Lisa, and Rob. In a similar situation with different people, I might have been much more into making a triad out of it, but I already had reasons I felt reluctant about getting more deeply involved with Lisa. If I’d put all that, the story would have been more complicated, but maybe it would also have been more revealing?
There’s also the urge to make some sort of meaning out of the story, another thing familiar from fiction. So what is that story about? Is it about the fucked up things I did back when I used drugs? Is it about my discovery of the kinky uses of candle wax (something I still enjoy in BDSM play)? Is it about a missed opportunity at an interesting three-way relationship? Is it about my willingness to explore sexually? About infidelity? About how Rob maybe deserved better than to make out with someone who didn’t care about his interest in quantum physics? About how Lisa and I really should have talked about what we wanted from each other? About how an open mike is a good place to hook up with kinky people? About how I’ve wised up? Or how I’m still the same?
I could write the story to match all those things and more.
This says a lot about writing, both fiction and nonfiction. Perspective is inescapable. Opinions get infused.
Right now, though, I’m more interested in what it says about life and how I look at myself. I can shift the true stories of my life in all sorts of ways. I could use them to tear myself down for sluttiness and risky behavior. I could use them to portray myself as an interesting, adventurous, experimental person. I’ve done both. And sometimes I wonder if there’s any really “true” way to see it all. It’s a true story, so there are true things about me in it. What those things add up to, though, is complicated, and, to some degree, chosen. I’m a writer, and it seems like I do get to write myself, depending on how I tell this and many other stories.
Showing posts with label true sex stories. Show all posts
Showing posts with label true sex stories. Show all posts
Thursday, January 12, 2017
Monday, January 9, 2017
The Truth about True Stories (#Lesbian Sex Stories #Lambda Awards #Calls for Submission # Best Lesbian Erotica)
Sacchi Green
Very soon I’ll be sending around a new call for submissions, but much to my relief, it won’t be like the one I wrote in 2012 for Wild Girls, Wild Nights: True Lesbian Sex Stories. After several years of resistance, I’d finally given in to my publishers’ plea to do an anthology of true stories. The first time they’d ever contacted me for editing, that’s what they’d wanted, but they’d put up with my reluctance through five other books, and this time, I knew, it was true stories or nothing. One of my anthos had tanked, saleswise, and I think they only kept putting up with me because that one hadn’t actually been my idea. I’d done it, with reluctance, as a favor when the boss’s wife had said a lesbian cops theme would be great (and the boss sent me a photo of the them doing a cops scene for Halloween.) It did, in fact, turn out to be a great book, and was even a finalist for a Lambda award, but apparently most folks who wanted to read lesbian cop stories didn’t want to pay for books, and I doubt that they wanted the kind of complex, well-written, non-cartoonish stories my writers provided. (Annabeth’s was truly outstanding.)
But back to Wild Girls, Wild Nights (a title I’d proposed for an adventure-themed book that was turned down) and the true stories. Yes, I keep almost saying “true” stories, but I was determined to do all I could to make the “true” part true, at least for some values of the truth. Here’s how I began my guidelines for ubmissions:
You put something of yourself into everything you write. You know you do. Now it’s time to take a deep breath, go that extra step, and write an erotic story firmly grounded in truth. Real encounters, real emotions, real sensations, real people, drawn from memory and transformed by your art into real stories as gripping as any fiction.
Some degree of poetic license—or erotic license—is all right. Memories are inevitably filtered through time and experience, and telling a story can sometimes reveal the inner truth of feelings and actions better without a precise list of actions or a verbatim account of conversations. In the heat of the moment—and I do want the very hottest moments—certain parts stand out so vividly in your mind that everything before and after blurs and must be imagined. Combining events into a shorter time span can make the overall effect more intense. Pseudonyms are fine, and even if you use your own name, you must use fictional names for any other characters in order to maintain some degree of privacy.
Then I went on to list the kinds of stories I want for any of my anthologies.
The response was wonderful, but the responsibility weighed on me. How could I claim that everything I chose was truly true? Several of the writers were familiar enough to me that I knew something about their lives and backgrounds, enough to know that their stories were, at least, plausible, and a few I knew well and was sure they were telling the truth, or close enough. Some others told me details that were convincing; one writer from Germany wrote two stories, set in different periods of her life, and told me she’d been wanting to share them for a long time but hadn’t felt she could trust anyone before me to do them justice. Okay, I’m a sucker for that sort of flattery. In any case, I was reasonably sure that each story was “grounded in real life.” There was another writer, too, with more than one story worth telling—Giselle might know something about that. In both cases they used pseudonyms for at least one of their pieces;
I was even more sure after the book came out and I organized a “blog tour” for each writer to discuss her story. In fact I was amazed at what came to light. There was a lovely story about a bittersweet romance between a mid-30s-ish woman going back to college to earn a degree in education, and a very young student who pursued her. The author revealed in her blog that she herself had been the younger girl, long ago, and she’d reversed their roles to tell the story from the viewpoint of the older woman, the age she herself is now. True enough for me. And there was the young writer who had trespassed into her older partner’s computer, misunderstood a search item she’d found, and ended up being firmly spanked—and enjoyed it so much that as soon as she could she went online to tell her close friends about it. I believed her. There were other writers who made me realize that their stories were even more true than I had thought they were, and several who had been wanting a way to tell their stories (under pseudonyms,) including one who didn’t want her grown kids to know she’d written it.
The best story-about-the-story, though, concerns a submission that I didn’t accept at first because I really couldn’t believe it. There was a humorous orgy party involved, and animal-ear hats, and it took place in the San Francisco area. I had to drop one story I’d accepted (co-written by a couple who’d met recently, and broke up soon afterward) so the publisher asked if I had something else to fill in with. I explained my doubts about the orgy story, sent it in—and discovered that several of the young staff members in the publisher’s office (in Berkeley) had actually heard about that party, and it was, in fact, pretty much true. How could I have doubted it?
So that’s my true story about wrangling true stories for an anthology (which, in fact, won that year’s Lambda Award for lesbian erotica.) I don’t plan on doing that kind of thing ever again, but one never knows. Meanwhile, I do have a new anthology in the works—Best Lesbian Erotica of the Year Volume 2 (actually BLE 2017, but they’ve tweaked the title) with my call for submissions coming up soon, but unless I get some submissions within the next two weeks, I don’t think I can work that into the upcoming What Are You Reading topic. Sad.
Very soon I’ll be sending around a new call for submissions, but much to my relief, it won’t be like the one I wrote in 2012 for Wild Girls, Wild Nights: True Lesbian Sex Stories. After several years of resistance, I’d finally given in to my publishers’ plea to do an anthology of true stories. The first time they’d ever contacted me for editing, that’s what they’d wanted, but they’d put up with my reluctance through five other books, and this time, I knew, it was true stories or nothing. One of my anthos had tanked, saleswise, and I think they only kept putting up with me because that one hadn’t actually been my idea. I’d done it, with reluctance, as a favor when the boss’s wife had said a lesbian cops theme would be great (and the boss sent me a photo of the them doing a cops scene for Halloween.) It did, in fact, turn out to be a great book, and was even a finalist for a Lambda award, but apparently most folks who wanted to read lesbian cop stories didn’t want to pay for books, and I doubt that they wanted the kind of complex, well-written, non-cartoonish stories my writers provided. (Annabeth’s was truly outstanding.)
But back to Wild Girls, Wild Nights (a title I’d proposed for an adventure-themed book that was turned down) and the true stories. Yes, I keep almost saying “true” stories, but I was determined to do all I could to make the “true” part true, at least for some values of the truth. Here’s how I began my guidelines for ubmissions:
You put something of yourself into everything you write. You know you do. Now it’s time to take a deep breath, go that extra step, and write an erotic story firmly grounded in truth. Real encounters, real emotions, real sensations, real people, drawn from memory and transformed by your art into real stories as gripping as any fiction.
Some degree of poetic license—or erotic license—is all right. Memories are inevitably filtered through time and experience, and telling a story can sometimes reveal the inner truth of feelings and actions better without a precise list of actions or a verbatim account of conversations. In the heat of the moment—and I do want the very hottest moments—certain parts stand out so vividly in your mind that everything before and after blurs and must be imagined. Combining events into a shorter time span can make the overall effect more intense. Pseudonyms are fine, and even if you use your own name, you must use fictional names for any other characters in order to maintain some degree of privacy.
Then I went on to list the kinds of stories I want for any of my anthologies.
The response was wonderful, but the responsibility weighed on me. How could I claim that everything I chose was truly true? Several of the writers were familiar enough to me that I knew something about their lives and backgrounds, enough to know that their stories were, at least, plausible, and a few I knew well and was sure they were telling the truth, or close enough. Some others told me details that were convincing; one writer from Germany wrote two stories, set in different periods of her life, and told me she’d been wanting to share them for a long time but hadn’t felt she could trust anyone before me to do them justice. Okay, I’m a sucker for that sort of flattery. In any case, I was reasonably sure that each story was “grounded in real life.” There was another writer, too, with more than one story worth telling—Giselle might know something about that. In both cases they used pseudonyms for at least one of their pieces;
I was even more sure after the book came out and I organized a “blog tour” for each writer to discuss her story. In fact I was amazed at what came to light. There was a lovely story about a bittersweet romance between a mid-30s-ish woman going back to college to earn a degree in education, and a very young student who pursued her. The author revealed in her blog that she herself had been the younger girl, long ago, and she’d reversed their roles to tell the story from the viewpoint of the older woman, the age she herself is now. True enough for me. And there was the young writer who had trespassed into her older partner’s computer, misunderstood a search item she’d found, and ended up being firmly spanked—and enjoyed it so much that as soon as she could she went online to tell her close friends about it. I believed her. There were other writers who made me realize that their stories were even more true than I had thought they were, and several who had been wanting a way to tell their stories (under pseudonyms,) including one who didn’t want her grown kids to know she’d written it.
The best story-about-the-story, though, concerns a submission that I didn’t accept at first because I really couldn’t believe it. There was a humorous orgy party involved, and animal-ear hats, and it took place in the San Francisco area. I had to drop one story I’d accepted (co-written by a couple who’d met recently, and broke up soon afterward) so the publisher asked if I had something else to fill in with. I explained my doubts about the orgy story, sent it in—and discovered that several of the young staff members in the publisher’s office (in Berkeley) had actually heard about that party, and it was, in fact, pretty much true. How could I have doubted it?
So that’s my true story about wrangling true stories for an anthology (which, in fact, won that year’s Lambda Award for lesbian erotica.) I don’t plan on doing that kind of thing ever again, but one never knows. Meanwhile, I do have a new anthology in the works—Best Lesbian Erotica of the Year Volume 2 (actually BLE 2017, but they’ve tweaked the title) with my call for submissions coming up soon, but unless I get some submissions within the next two weeks, I don’t think I can work that into the upcoming What Are You Reading topic. Sad.
Thursday, January 5, 2017
Secret, Sapphic and Spicy Confessions #truestory #erotica
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Thursday, May 28, 2015
Did that really happen?
by Giselle Renarde
A few months ago, I devoured a book of funny little stories about living with roommates. The reason I picked up The Roommates: True Tales of Friendship, Rivalry, Romance, and Disturbingly Close Quarters is that I've never lived with people. Well, I lived with family, growing up, but I've lived alone all my adult life.
I was curious about the lifestyle. I wanted to know what it was really like to have roommates. One of my sisters has lived with tons of friends, fellow university students, even strangers. And has she got tales to tell! That's what I hoped to find in this book.
And I totally did! Truth stranger than fiction--that sort of thing. Do you ever experience something in your life and go, "Man, if I wrote this in a story readers would say, THAT COULD NEVER HAPPEN"? I love stuff like that.
(By the way, I just looked up The Roommates on Amazon and it had nothing but poor reviews, so I left a positive one. Do you ever love a book, then see all these terrible customer reviews and wonder if you're stupid or something? Like, what did I miss?)
Anyhoo...
Next week, my third book of erotic confessions hits the market. The first one was Secret Confessions (a veritable smorgasbord of erotica), the second was Sapphic Confessions (all lesbians, all the time!), and this one will be called Spicy Confessions: 12 Steamy Sex Stories.
I've written a lot of letter-style erotica over the years. That's pretty much how I started my career in this industry. Are all my confessions true? Ummm... no. Are some of them true. Well... yes.
What's the appeal of confessional erotica? It's gotta be the curiosity factor. I'm curious about roommates because I've never had roommates. Readers are curious about sex because they've never had sex.
Wait... that doesn't sound right. Maybe readers just want to know what's going on in other people's bedrooms. Maybe they want to draw ideas from other people's experiences. Maybe they haven't had THAT kind of sex. Maybe they have had that kind of sex and want to read about other people's experience of same--good, bad or mediocre.
I'm upfront in my Confessions books about some stories being true and some being false. Actually, some are in between as well. Some are things I wish had happened.
Ultimately, how much would a reader care if a story they thought was true wasn't really?
If you told me none of the stories in The Roommates were true, it honestly wouldn't matter to me. I was entertained by the book. That's good enough for me.
I'm the same way with ghost stories. I think I've mentioned before that I love those "my real ghost story" TV shows. Do I necessarily believe everything the interviewees tell the camera? I kind of think I don't believe or disbelieve them. I don't think people are lying, but I also know TV is there to entertain me, and a lot of that entertainment involves deception.
So, what's your take on true sex stories, or true anything stories? Why do people crave them? And does it matter if they really are true?
A few months ago, I devoured a book of funny little stories about living with roommates. The reason I picked up The Roommates: True Tales of Friendship, Rivalry, Romance, and Disturbingly Close Quarters is that I've never lived with people. Well, I lived with family, growing up, but I've lived alone all my adult life.
I was curious about the lifestyle. I wanted to know what it was really like to have roommates. One of my sisters has lived with tons of friends, fellow university students, even strangers. And has she got tales to tell! That's what I hoped to find in this book.
And I totally did! Truth stranger than fiction--that sort of thing. Do you ever experience something in your life and go, "Man, if I wrote this in a story readers would say, THAT COULD NEVER HAPPEN"? I love stuff like that.
(By the way, I just looked up The Roommates on Amazon and it had nothing but poor reviews, so I left a positive one. Do you ever love a book, then see all these terrible customer reviews and wonder if you're stupid or something? Like, what did I miss?)
Anyhoo...
Next week, my third book of erotic confessions hits the market. The first one was Secret Confessions (a veritable smorgasbord of erotica), the second was Sapphic Confessions (all lesbians, all the time!), and this one will be called Spicy Confessions: 12 Steamy Sex Stories.
I've written a lot of letter-style erotica over the years. That's pretty much how I started my career in this industry. Are all my confessions true? Ummm... no. Are some of them true. Well... yes.
What's the appeal of confessional erotica? It's gotta be the curiosity factor. I'm curious about roommates because I've never had roommates. Readers are curious about sex because they've never had sex.
Wait... that doesn't sound right. Maybe readers just want to know what's going on in other people's bedrooms. Maybe they want to draw ideas from other people's experiences. Maybe they haven't had THAT kind of sex. Maybe they have had that kind of sex and want to read about other people's experience of same--good, bad or mediocre.
I'm upfront in my Confessions books about some stories being true and some being false. Actually, some are in between as well. Some are things I wish had happened.
Ultimately, how much would a reader care if a story they thought was true wasn't really?
If you told me none of the stories in The Roommates were true, it honestly wouldn't matter to me. I was entertained by the book. That's good enough for me.
I'm the same way with ghost stories. I think I've mentioned before that I love those "my real ghost story" TV shows. Do I necessarily believe everything the interviewees tell the camera? I kind of think I don't believe or disbelieve them. I don't think people are lying, but I also know TV is there to entertain me, and a lot of that entertainment involves deception.
So, what's your take on true sex stories, or true anything stories? Why do people crave them? And does it matter if they really are true?
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