I Miss It Already

By Lisabet Sarai

I have a confession to make, one that may shock many of you who know me and have read my books.

I haven't had sex in more than two months.

And here's another stunner. I don't mind nearly as much as I would have guessed, if you'd asked me when I was younger.

I'm in my sixties now. My husband is more than a decade older than I am. Although we both are fortunate to be in excellent health, our sexual capabilities have significantly declined due to age. I won't get into the gory details, but let me just say that these days sex is a lot more work and a good deal less fun than it used to be.

There are remedies of course, that might improve the situation, hormones and lubricants, new positions and new techniques. We've tried some of them, with mixed results. We're still very physical with one another. People snicker when they see us, two old geezers holding hands or kissing on the street. Penetrative sex, though, is a significant challenge, one that we seem to be confronting less and less often (and oral sex has never been a favorite for either of us, for various reasons).

When I was in my twenties, my thirties, even my forties, I would have been appalled by the notion of such a long interval of celibacy. Looking back to my youth, it seems as though sex stood at the center of my universe. Every experience was drenched in eroticism. Any seemingly innocent encounter was enough to start me spinning fantasies. Most of my sexual adventures took place before the advent of AIDS and after the perfection of the Pill, during that brief period when true sexual freedom was possible. If I can quote from one of my own characters (the nameless narrator in “Before the Plague”):

It's nearly inconceivable to you, I know, the notion of spontaneous sex. No vaccines, no tests, no questions asked. No barriers – at least no physical ones. You might enjoy yourself, you might not. That was the only risk.

I lived in that age. The golden age, it seems now. You could revel in your own body, in someone else's body. Anyone you fancied. Maybe a stranger. Maybe your best friend's husband – or even your best friend herself! If desire called, you answered, as long as that was what felt right.

Every day was ripe with erotic possibilities. We moved through our world (well, perhaps I should speak only for myself) in a continual state of borderline arousal, ready to recognize and enjoy the next sensual adventure.

I wrote that story more than ten years ago. Even then, I was nostalgic, I guess, for what I felt myself losing.

The funny thing is, I've always lived more in my mind than in my body, even during those wild days when I was juggling three lovers plus being regularly propositioned by strangers. (I must have been sending out powerful signals. Definitely makes me believe in pheromones!) Eroticism, then as well as now, lived in the situation, in the relationship, in the sharing of fantasies, in the breaking down of barriers and the pushing of limits, far more than in the physical acts. I spent as much time writing about sex in my journal as I did in bed (or elsewhere) with my partners. The thrill of lust has always been at least as intoxicating to me as the activities it engenders.

And to be honest, I miss that thrill more than the actual fucking. Although I'm moderately well-preserved for my age, these days it's difficult to conceive of myself as an object of desire. I still have frequent sexual dreams. In those nocturnal sagas I'm usually young and nubile – probably between twenty five and thirty five, when I was at my peak. The other night, though, I dreamed that someone wanted to have sex with me, and I couldn't remember where I'd stashed the KY Jelly. Too often when I begin to spin a kinky fantasy for myself, recollections of reality intervene.

My DH apparently perceives me as sexy, despite my wrinkles, my sagging flesh and my joint problems. I'm grateful but sometimes I wonder whether he's blind. I still believe that imagination is the ultimate aphrodisiac. Imagining the erotic, however, is becoming increasingly difficult.

Of course I worry about how this will affect my writing. I yearn for the excitement, the freshness, that poured out of me in Raw Silk, a book that celebrates lust in all its guises. I suppose that it's natural to become a bit jaded, after fourteen years of penning erotic fiction. I console myself with the certainty that my skill has grown even though my passion has ebbed. Apparently I can still create sexual scenarios with enough light and heat to please my readers. However, I find that it's increasingly difficult to arouse myself.

I've always been of the opinion that sex is important – that carnal connections can provide not just pleasure but also wisdom and self-knowledge. I haven't changed my mind. That's one motivation for writing my stories. More and more, though, those tales are based on recollection rather than direct experience. I cling to my memories of how it felt to be overwhelmed by desire, as those feelings recede into the increasingly distant past.

If I were to be suddenly infected by the insistent, incandescent lust of my youth, I'd probably be alarmed. But I do miss it.

Against Fate

by Jean Roberta

Ancient Greek tragedy has fascinated me since I was in elementary school, and I’ve often wondered if its basic premises are true for all times and places. The audience can see that the central characters are doomed, but they don’t see the writing on the wall (or hear the wailing chorus – strange, that) until it’s too late for them to undo whatever act of hubris set the plot in motion. The ultimate hubris (an almost untranslatable word meaning arrogance and self-trickery) is to think you can outwit the gods, or fate, or the Way Things Are. Yet this delusion keeps the characters going until they crash to the ground, get walled up in a cave, or get stabbed or strangled by an angry relative. (The Big Three tragedians--Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles—showed the world how dysfunctional a family could be. No matter how much dysfunction is attributed to “modern life,” these guys still cast a long shadow over modern literature.)

Believing that you’re going to wake up, day after day, in good health and with good things waiting for you, is hubris. But if you didn’t have it, you probably wouldn’t want to wake up at all. The hubris sets up a contrast with the tragic ending. Without that contrast, there would be no plot, and no point.

So if a hope of happiness, or an unjustified sense that one is entitled to be happy, is an essential element in any story, a Happy For Now ending seems reasonable to me. It's not the ending of a life, just the ending of an episode.

When I began writing stories about lesbian life, the Happy For Now ending seemed like the perfect compromise between grim realism and the unconvincing Happy Ever After ending of a traditional romance. A formula ending that promises happiness until death seems to me like a sign on the front door of the newlyweds’ house that says: “Don’t ask. You don’t really want to know what happened after the honeymoon.”

When I began dating women, of course I hoped this lifestyle would be better than the place I came from, where men could erupt into rage at any time for no logical reason, and where a fair deal was hard to find.

Like many other newcomers in sexually-defined communities, I was taken aback by the conflict, rivalry and dishonesty in it. In short, I found that people have human flaws however they define themselves. The raw truth seemed to be that: 1) everyone is essentially alone, and hooking up with another person, for a night or for 50 years, doesn’t change that, and 2) long-term proximity doesn’t necessarily enable two individuals to understand each other.

There are also specific disadvantages to living in the social margins. If you’re fishing for a date in a relatively small pond, you have fewer choices than you would in the ocean of the social mainstream. And if you’re a woman supporting a child alone, your date is not likely to have a better income than yours, or a great interest in co-parenting.

But I was not resigned to giving up hope.

While thinking about my next lesbian erotic story, I read about a sub-genre of erotic fiction (and a sexual sub-community) called “splosh.” It’s about the thrill of wallowing in messy substances, or pouring them on your sweetie. Splosh! Here’s a pie in the face. Splosh! Here’s a spray of cold water to wash it off you. Sploshing seemed like a perfect metaphor for the messiness of life.

In my story, “Ariadne’s Thread,” Ariadne is a young woman living in the modern world, but she is a doomed character from Greek tragedy. Instead of being accompanied by a chorus chanting “Woe!” she is rescued by two friends who are determined to change her luck, her outlook and her mood. I was determined to give Ariadne a “Happy For Now” ending, dammit.
-----------------------

"Let me in, girlfriend."

The sound of Zoe's voice assaulted Ariadne's ears where she sat in the funk of her misery. Dirty dishes covered her tables and counters, pungent clothing littered her floor. Her curtains were closed, leaving the apartment in perpetual gloom. "Go away."

"Come on, baby. I know you're not feeling good, but there is life after a breakup, you know? We've all gone through it. You need company." Silence. "Ari, come on. I don't want to stand here talking to you through the door. Do you want all your neighbors to hear this?"

A dark, swollen eye appeared at the peephole, then the thin wooden door was yanked open. Ariadne Megalopolous blocked the entrance, taking up space out of proportion to her girlish, fine-boned, high-breasted body. The smell of her sweat and her contempt for the world confronted the brisk assertiveness of her friend Zoe, who stepped back before she could stop herself.

Ariadne sneered like a damned soul, her white face framed in greasy black hair. She held onto the doorframe, slouching in a T-shirt and a pair of jeans so old and dirty that they held the shape of her ass and thighs even when she wasn't in them. Her presence was so intense that Zoe felt it in her clit.

Ariadne filled the silence. "What are you, Zoe, human Prozac? If you think you know how I'm supposed to feel, then fuck you."

For an instant, Zoe heard her say, "Fuck me." What a pleasure that would be.

“Okay, you wanta be a good Samaritan, you can come in and wash my – Jesus.” Ariadne had stepped far enough into the hallway to see Carter lurking a few feet away from Zoe.

Suzanne Carter, who preferred to be known by her last name, was wiry and wily. As an employee of Child Protection Services, she took bewildered, mistreated children away from their violent or distraught parents after warning the adults of the legal consequences of their behavior. Carter dreamed of being a secret agent for the federal government.

Carter grabbed Ariadne by the arm before she could slam the door on her two friends.
Zoe tried to soothe her with words. “Ari! We’re concerned about you. We just want to—“

“Help me get her inside,” grunted Carter.

Zoe worked for the Department of Social Services, like Carter, but in a milder role. She specialized in job-readiness counseling.

Ariadne saw through the good-cop/bad-cop act. “Fuckin’ Christ!” She made no effort to control her volume. “You two dykes are a fuckin’ joke! What is this, a scene for World’s Worst Videos?” She wasted so much energy expressing herself verbally that Carter had no trouble forcing her back into her apartment. This didn’t prevent Carter from glaring at Zoe for awkwardly trailing behind and closing the door quietly instead of helping to restrain the prisoner.

Carter’s pale, spiky hair seemed to bristle more than usual. It was naturally blonde, and Carter tried to compensate for the baby-chick color by keeping it short and artificially stiff. Zoe suspected her of using starch.

“What the hell do you want?” Ariadne was still hostile, but quieter.

Carter loosened her grip, and slid a hand up to Ariadne’s chin. “Why didn’t you answer your phone for a week, Ari? Don’t you think anyone cares what happens to you?”

Ariadne backed away. She seemed to be wondering whether anyone in the world could actually worry about her. “You didn’t have to spaz out. You knew Denny dumped me so she could be with whatsername. Everyone knows everything in this community. There’s no flippin mystery here, okay? That’s why the fuck I didn’t answer my phone.”

Ariadne still gave off a dull-red glow, but Zoe could feel her exhaustion. Zoe offered traditional advice. “You can forget her, Ari. Denny didn’t deserve you. You’ll find someone better.”

Ariadne fended off a hug by pushing Zoe’s hands away. She looked like a cornered animal. “You can go to hell, both of you.”

“Hey!” Carter objected.

Ariadne wasn’t finished. “Damn social workers get all your lines out of a book. I’m not gonna find someone better. You know that damn well.”

Something in the air chilled Zoe to the bone. It was the presence of death, lured in by the despair that lingered in the smell of stale food and body odor.

Zoe had watched the luck drain out of Ariadne’s life, one event at a time, for the past seven years. She had had to drop out of university due to lack of funds and lack of credit. She had found a good job at an advertising agency, but a volatile male boss had first groped her and then ridiculed her ideas until she quit. Her mother had died and her father had moved his girlfriend into the house a few days after the funeral.

A series of alcoholic girlfriends had wrecked or taken all of Ariadne’s most treasured belongings, including her car, her good-luck stone and her grandmother’s earrings. She had given notice on her apartment after accepting Denny’s invitation to move in with her, then Denny had changed her mind after a one-night bar hookup with someone else.

Like her namesake in Greek mythology, Ariadne seemed to be lost in a maze with a monster at its center, and no one had given her a thread to guide her back to the open air.

“Just leave me alone,” she said. The dark eyes in her puffy face said something else.

“We can’t do that,” Carter told her, unconsciously imitating the coolly-dangerous voice of a cop in a crime show on prime-time. “A stupid little thing like you can’t be trusted alone.” Carter seized her by both arms from behind as though she were planning to handcuff her. Ariadne’s T-shirt was pulled against her small, perky breasts and her hips bucked provokingly.

Zoe was appalled at Carter and herself.

Carter looked at her like a conspirator. She kept speaking to Ariadne. “Besides, if you can’t find anyone better than Denny, you’d be lucky if we do you a favor. Everyone knows everything in our community, honey, and we’ve heard all about you. We know what a greedy little pig you are, and you have nothing to lose.”

Ariadne looked at Zoe in disbelief. “Oh please. You’re not going to try cheering me up by fucking me.” It was more of a question than a statement.

The heat of evil joy spread through Zoe. “She said please,” she told Carter. “We both heard her.”
-------------------------------

And thus begins a three-way orgy in which Zoe and Carter make Ariadne dirtier in every sense so they will then have a reason to wash her clean. Ariadne reaches catharsis (another ancient Greek concept) and Zoe, the witness, is moved. Here is the conclusion:
-------------------------------

Carter looked more shaken than Zoe had ever seen her. The two conspirators formed a pungent sandwich with Ariadne as the filling, and they kept her balanced between them.

The three women swayed together, slipping against each other. Zoe wondered if they had fucked open a new crack in the universe, a way out of no way. She felt as if they had all fought a monster, and it made her love the other two like crazy.

Zoe knew there was plenty of time for them to clean up the mess and continue their game, or vice versa. She could hardly wait to offer her own ecstasy, an explosion out of her skin, to whatever gods might be watching.
--------------------------------

This story is in my e-collection, Each Has a Point, by publisher Love Your Divine/Alterotica, which will be closing soon because the owner has health problems that no one should have to cope with. But there it is: life (and more specifically, the U.S. health care system) often sucks.

I know that happiness and success are both against the odds. But sometimes I manage to give my characters a little satisfaction as a consolation prize. Sometimes defying the gods just feels too good to resist.

********************************

The Allure of Unhappiness

by Amanda Earl

“I think by the time you're grown you're as happy as you're goin to be. You'll have good times and bad times, but in the end you'll be about as happy as you was before. Or as unhappy. I've knowed people that just never did get the hang of it.”

― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

They say people cheer up after listening to the blues because they realize their lives are better by comparison or because they feel a kinship for others who've undergone bad experiences too. Kids love Lemony Snicket's "A Series of Unfortunate Events" where the characters are subjected to increasingly horrible misfortunes with miserable ends. In the award-winning, highly popular television series "Breaking Bad," the main character goes from learning he has cancer to cooking meth to selling it to becoming a drug kingpin. Every season becomes more and more dramatic and dire.

Why are humans attracted to tragedy? Edvard Munch's painting "the Scream," a portrait of a man in agony in front of a blood red sunset is one of the highest selling paintings in the world and has been the object of many an art theft. People stealing agony? Why, because they don't have enough of their own?

Have you seen Louis, the show starring the stand up comedian Louis C.K. as a stand up comedian? In the first episode he talks about how life is ultimately unhappy because we're all going to die. Even romantic relationships are doomed because the best case scenario is that you end up with someone for years and then one of you dies. A fairly bleak outlook, but not wrong. And most of us find this sort of comedy amusing, cathartic even.  Art, music, film, tv, and literature that  portrays or embodies some form of unhappiness gives us all a chance to laugh at life's absurdity and to relate to misfortune.

My own theory is that because humans go through a lot, have to deal with adversity, it is reassuring to imagine that others are also going through such. It's a feeling of solidarity and relief that we are not alone.

I've never been much for happy endings, either writing them or reading them. For the sake of this blog entry, let's say that happy ever after endings in fiction are those where the main character gets what she wanted by the end of the story: she ends up with the man of her dreams; she receives a million dollar advance for a book, etc. But basically whatever conflict she has undergone is resolved by the end of the story.

I occasionally write unhappy stories, but more often than not I write happy for now fiction. It just doesn't sit well with me to wrap up a story nicely with a tidy ending. Nor does it please me aesthetically.  It feels too improbable. I simply can't or don't wish to make it work. I can't reconcile it to any kind of reality. It feels too much like painting the walls of the psych ward pastel pink and blue in order to calm the patients down. It feels like placating. What I want to do in my writing is to stir things up, to make my readers and myself restless. To jar them out of complacency. Somehow suggesting that there is happiness at the end of the rainbow seems inauthentic to me.

It's not that I'm some sad sack who doesn't have hope that some things go right. After all, I am alive despite all odds to the contrary. But it's the struggle that attracts me, the process of clawing one's way up through seemingly insurmountable odds that I find interesting about people and about characters. I like to leave my characters still fighting rather than having fought.

Where's the Reward

By Daddy X

Who’s happy? We’re happy! Everybody’s happy. Aren’t we?

Doesn’t really work out that way, does it? We all seem to be riding this non-stop roller coaster, stumbling from crisis to crisis just to get along in our lives. Where’s the reward?

Of course, the rewards lie in life itself. That primal zen experience extraordinaire we should all be happy to engage. Such a gift. But happiness can be difficult to attain, especially in the present. Many of us may not even identify with what it is to be happy and content in the moment. It often takes the passage of time (and maybe some true misery) to glean happiness from our lives, or, indeed, to even know it’s available. Happiness can be elusive, something we just get a breath of between crises. Things will be better later. Happiness often lies in memories … or somewhere in the future.

Right now? Hmm … kinda busy.

Do our writerly efforts allow readers to escape the trials of their lives, or give them something more like the real thing? Less? Do we dare give them Happily Ever After? Does anybody get that in real life? It’s up to the professional writer to determine the reader he or she wants to court.

With so many endings possible, surely we have more choices than HEA, HFN, or whatever the acronym is for Misery To Come (MTC? HNA?). In fact, most choices lie somewhere in between. We don’t have to give readers a Garden of Eden at the end, not any more than we have to kill off the protagonist. Some authors prefer to leave us hanging, tying up loose but substantial ends after a fashion, others prefer to allow for the readers’ imagination.

It all depends on how we leave the reader. That long-anticipated vacation that’s been planned so well and comes off so well, in that exotic land we’ve been dreaming of all our lives. We finally go. It’s as wonderful as we’d planned, but when we return, we arrive at the kennel and find that our dog has died. How would that color the trip? In what ways would the memory stick with us?

I think most times, the story dictates the end for us. In reproducing life on the page, we should stay mindful of a balanced approach--some humor, some sweet romance, lots of out-and-out freaky sexy heat, some darkness, and anything else in the form of characters, plots, or situations our active minds come up with.

But it all comes down to how we leave them. That’s what’s going to stick with the reader.

And then some endings don't make any such distinctions.

 With apologies to MP, I offer you…

                            Remembrance of Things Assed           © 2012 Daddy X

“Roll over.”

“Oh. You want me like … that?”

“Afraid so.”

“You have to?”

“Not a matter of having to.  Just better this way.”

“That’s a matter of opinion.”

She knows how it is, in her butt. From the corner of her eye she watches him lube the thing.

As his fingers spread her fleshy cheeks he consoles her, “It’s not so bad.”

Then, a twisting penetration … until he’s satisfied with its depth.

She remembers the photo at the erotic art show. A black and white. A woman’s ass, bending over from behind. A hand in a starched white cuff grabbed the girl in an improvised bowler’s grip, thumb anchored in her asshole. The viewers’ imagination was put into play to suggest the location of the four other digits.

But that was a flesh and bones thumb, not the hard, inanimate object now clenched in her own anus. Such a difference in size.

All this time he says not a word. How humiliating. That thing poking out from between her buns. He seems content just witnessing her mortification. The image of that picture has her pussy sopping. She hopes it won’t give her away. How she wishes he would just slide it in and out a bit.

Suddenly, he pulls it free. 

“Normal!”

“Huh?”

“Temperature’s fine, ma’am. Ninety-eight point six.”

END

Yeah, it’s a ‘gotcha’. Figgered I’d try and reward y’all with an up-note.  

And BTW—stay HEA.

It is what it is

Check out the contest at the end.

We’ve been talking about Happy Ever After, Happy For Now and maybe not even Happy At All (my personal NoNo.) Call me a sap, but when I read or write a book, I’m only truly satisfied if the ending is “happy,” whatever that turns out to be. I’ve read books that left me hanging and hated the author. I’ve read books that depressed me with the ending and hated the author even more. I love a good cry at the end of a book but only if the tears are happy ones.

So call me a sap. It’s who and what I am.

Somehow in the past year the great “out there” has decided that erotic romance doesn’t necessarily mean a happy ending, and I can’t for the life of me figure out why. What can be happier than truly wonderful sex? If the author develops the characters well and invests the reader in them, if the emotion comes across as real, then the sex—detailed and graphic—is just a natural progression of that.

I like to create characters who have challenges to relationships, who have boundaries that are difficult to cross. I want the reader to cheer them on and celebrate with them when they achieve their “Happy Ever After.” A really good example of this is Grace Delaney. The heroine of Rodeo Heat. Do you remember Rodeo Heat? It’s the book I read a passage from to Bill Geist on CBS Sunday Morning. I think I made his eyeballs roll back in his head.

Grace was widowed young with two small children and lived a very contained, restricted life. She’s an excellent accountant but tries to keep the pieces of her life in ruled columns just like numbers in an account. Enter Ben Lowell, ten years young, decades more experienced, and nearly at the end of his rodeo career. When you meet them you think there can’t possibly be any way for them to get together. He’s too jaded and she’s too inexperienced and afraid.

But something not only clicks between them it snaps and sizzles. In small stages Ben takes Grace on a journey of sexual awakening that had me crying while I wrote it. And by the time you get to the final chapter, won’t you be upset if Grace and Ben, after having fulfilling erotic sex, don’t end up together?

Here’s a taste for you:

He moved his mouth over her body as if drawing a map with it, tasting every nook and crevice, seeking her pleasure spots and dwelling a long time on them. His open-mouthed kisses on her heated skin sent shafts of electricity through her, igniting nerves already snapping and firing.

His cock pressed against the soft skin of her inner thigh and her hands suddenly itched to touch it and hold it. Pulling Ben’s head up from its drifting path down to her pussy, she smiled at him. “Stop.”

His eyebrows raised. “Stop? Am I doing something wrong? Something you don’t like? Just tell me—”

“No. You’re doing everything just right. But I want to play too.” She pushed at his shoulders.

“And just what is it you want to do?” he asked, his eyes bright with curiosity as he rolled onto his back.

“This.”

Wondering where this spurt of boldness had come from, she shifted onto her knees next to him, her gaze riveted to his erection which pointed directly at her. Tentatively she reached out a finger to touch the bead of fluid sitting like a viscous marble atop the slit. Rubbing it back and forth along the velvet surface, she watched the thick stalk bob under her touch and saw Ben’s thigh muscles tighten.

She hadn’t done this since Joe’s death. The few men she’d had sex with hadn’t appealed to her this way at all. Sometimes she wondered if they really appealed to her in any way. Worried that maybe she just wasn’t a sexual person.

No. Wait. Then she wouldn’t be where she was doing what she was. Right?

Inquisitively, she bent her head and licked the surface of the purple head with the tip of her tongue, swiping it back and forth two or three times, loving the slightly salty taste of the fluid and the sensation of the soft skin against her tongue. Her fingers barely wrapped around the thick length of him but she felt the steel beneath the supple covering. She unclasped him and ran one finger the length of the heavy vein, feeling the blood pulsing through it.

“Am I doing this right?” she asked, her voice tremulous, unable to look at him as she waited for his answer.

“Are you kidding?” Ben asked in a strangled voice, one large hand coming up to squeeze her buttocks. “I think you’re trying to torture me.”

Grace’s laugh held just a hint of uncertainty. “Just finding out what you feel like. How you feel.”

His hand moved in slow strokes on the cheek of her ass. “Surely this isn’t the first one you’ve ever seen or felt,” he joked.

“Believe it or not, the first in bright light. At least for longer than I want to remember.”

Because the others didn’t bear looking at. Except for Ben.

Contest:

To celebrate the rerunning of my segment on CBS, I am giving away a $50 GC for either Amazon or B&N. Here’s all you do. Post a review of the book, send me the link at desireeholt@desireeholt.com and you’ll be entered in the drawing.

Ready? Set? Go!

Happy For Now? Happy Ever After? What do you think?

Happy For Now? Happy Ever After?

When you get to the end of a story, what is it you want to feel? For me, it’s optimism and happiness. I certainly dnlt want a Happy For Never which was the way a NYT Bestselling author left her readers a few years ago. To quite a firestorm, I might add. No, I don’t want to feel sad, or depressed, or unhappy or any of those things. I read to escape. I read to live out my fantasies. I read to get away from the things that plague is every day in real life.

So now we come to the debate between Happy Ever After and Happy For Now. Although I have written a couple of Happy For Now stories I have to say I am a truly addicted Happy Ever After person. Yup, that’s me. I want everyone to end up with each other and have a wonderful future.

I am so obsessed about this that I often read the last chapter of a book before I buy it, just in case. Because…what if I read the whole book, the hero/heroine get together and in the end they are separated? End up with someone else? Have a big fight and break up? I ask you, will that make you feel good?

Not me!

It’s one of my biggest complaints with television. Writers focus so much on conflict and they don’t seem to have enough imagination to find different ways to bring it in except to constantly break up the couples you’ve fallen in love with. Do I want that in the books I read?

Absolutely not.

Books are like comfort food to me. Since I constantly battle a weight problem I read instead of consuming a large bag of potato chips or two pounds of M&M chocolate covered peanuts. Therefore, I want stories that make me feel warm and happy inside. I want to laugh and cry with the hero and heroine and cheer them on in their struggles to find each other, But most of all, in the end, I want to be ecstatically happy that they overcame the Big Problems and ended up together. Forever.

I mostly don’t read erotic when I’m I the middle of a writing project because I don’t want the author’s voice to bleed over into mine. I save that for the in-between times when I can rest my brain. So I’ve found some authors who feed my habit and satisfy my craving. I read the last two chapters of Robyn Carr’s My Kind of Christmas at least two dozen times because it’s just…so…wonderful! It gave me that bubbly feeling inside.

And I knew they’d be together forever. Just like the h/h in nearly all the books I read. Happy For Now might work okay for some people, but I want that resounding conclusion. That guarantee that, despite everything, no matter what troubles confront them, my h/h will always be happy together. Forever.

I always say stick with what works for you and that’s what works for me. How about you? Leave me your opinions. I’d love to know what readers out there are thinking.

www.desireeholt.com

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Who Could Ask for Anything More?

Sacchi Green

[Sorry, I was sure I had this scheduled to post early this morning.]

There was a time, very, very long ago, when “romance’ referred to fictitious tales of heroic adventure, popular in the aristocratic circles of Medieval Europe. And there was a time, not so long ago and perhaps not entirely gone, when sad stories pulled emotional strings in ways as satisfying as the “true love” romance genre today. Think of the traditional “three hanky” movie or operas like “La Boheme.” In terms of audience satisfaction, the readers or viewers were Happy For Now because they’d got what they’d come for.

The romance and erotic romance genres as they’re pigeonholed these days are pretty narrowly defined. Erotica may get a slightly better deal because it can end happily or not, as long as there’s enough sex in it. On second thought, erotic romance may have as good a deal because it can have just as much sex plus a happy ending and fit into both categories. I’ve published quite a few stories that could, as they say in a different context, park on either side of the street. I’m certain that the relatively recent “erotic romance” tag was created solely to seduce readers who were reluctant to venture in the territory of outright erotica. As someone was quoted, somewhere in all the hoopla about 50 Shades of Whatever; “It’s okay because they’re really in love!” You need an excuse to read erotica, but as long as it’s also romance, it’s okay. (As an aside, “paranormal romance” makes it okay to frolic among vampires and shapeshifters and ghosts without getting those nerd cooties from fans of science fiction and fantasy and horror, because it’s still romance.)

My own preference is for a story to go where it needs to go. I recently wrote a ghost story for a Civil War anthology from the viewpoint of a young army surgeon, with the inescapable blood and stress that job involved. His love interest had already died several years before, and was present only in memory, except for a few fleeting moments that might have been ghostly contact. There was no way the ending could be “happy” except insomuch as the surgeon chose to live and keep on doing all he could, with just some feverish hope for something after death. Well, that one was neither erotica nor romance, so it doesn’t count here, but some stories are worth telling even when neither HEA nor HFN are possible.

There are circumstances when happiness just can’t last, and when you’re writing about LGBTQ people, especially in historical settings, the odds of that are high. I’ll pad out this entrys with an excerpt from the end of one of my own pieces, set in London during WWII, where a US WAC nurse and an American pilot ferrying new planes for the RAF have had a brief, intense affair that has to end:


We parted with promises to meet one more time before Cleo's last flight. I mortgaged a week of sleep to get my nursing shifts covered, and at Hamble Air Field, by moonlight, she introduced me to the planes she loved.
"This is the last Spitfire I'll ever fly," she said, stroking the sleek fuselage. "Seafire III, Merlin 55 engine, 24,000 foot ceiling, although I won't go up that high just on a hop to Scotland."
From Scotland she'd catch an empty cargo plane back to the States. I had just got my orders to report to Hawaii for assignment somewhere in the South Pacific. War is hell, and so are good-byes.
"Could I look into the cockpit?" I asked, wanting to be able to envision her there, high in the sky.
"Sure. You can even sit in it and play pilot, if you like." She helped me climb onto the wing, with more pressing of my ass than was absolutely necessary, and showed me how to lower myself into the narrow space. Standing on the wing, she leaned in and kissed me, hard at first, then with aching tenderness, then hard again.
"Pull up your skirt," she ordered, and I did it without question. She already knew I wasn't wearing underpants. "Let's see how wet you can get the seat," she said, "So I can breathe you all the way to Scotland." She unbuttoned my shirt and played with my breasts until I begged her to lean in far enough to suck my aching nipples; then, with her lips and tongue and teeth driving me so crazy that my breath came in a storm of desperate gasps, she reached down into my slippery heat and made me arch and buck so hard that the plane's dials and levers were in danger. I needed more than I could get sitting in the cramped cockpit.
We clung together finally in the grass under the sheltering wing. I got my hands into Cleo's trousers, and made her groan, but she wouldn't relax into sobbing release until she had her whole hand at last inside me and I was riding it on pounding waves of pleasure as keen as pain.
I thought, when I could think anything again, that she had fallen asleep, she was so still. Gently, gently I touched my lips to the nearly-healed tattoo above her breast. Tiny wings matching mine. Something to remember her by.
Without opening her eyes she said, in a lost, small voice, "What are we going to do, Kay?"
I knew what she was going to do. "You're going to claim the sky, to make history. And anyway," I said, falling back on dark humor since I had no comfort to offer, "a cozy menage in Paris seems out of the question with the Nazis in control."
Then, because I knew if I touched her again we would both cry, and hate ourselves for it, I stood, put my clothes in as much order as I could, and walked away.
I looked back once, from the edge of the field. Cleo leaned, head bowed, against the plane. Some trick of the moonlight transmuted her dark hair into silver; I had a vision of how breathtaking she would be in thirty or forty years. The pain of knowing I couldn't share those years made me stumble, and nearly fall. But I kept on walking.
And she let me go.

On June 24, 1944, against all justice and reason, the bill to make the Women Airforce Service Pilots officially part of the Army Air Force was defeated in Congress by nineteen votes. In December, the WASP were disbanded. By then, though, after going through hell in the Pacific theater of war, I had met Jack, who truly loved and needed me, who had saved my sanity while I saved his life, whose son was growing below my heart. His kisses tasted of home, and peace, and more unborn children demanding their chance at life.
Thirty-three years later, in 1977, when women were at last being admitted into the Air Force, the WASP were retroactively given military status. It was then, through a reunion group, that I found out what had become of Cleo Remington; she had found a sky that was high and wide enough to hold her fierce spirit, and freedom as a bush pilot in Alaska.
And she was, as I discovered, even more breathtaking at sixty than she'd been at twenty-six.
But that's another chapter of the story.


I think of that story as romance, even though they never got to be a couple. I did write that “other chapter,” where they met again in Alaska, but by then they each had firm, committed families. They did make a brief threesome with Cleo’s long-time partner, a Russian woman pilot who had defected to Alaska, but there could never be anything more beyond long-distance friendship.

Maybe the only erotica that isn’t also romance deals with people who are there mainly for the sex, and if they get all the sex they wanted, everybody is Happy for Now. Who, really, can ask for anything more?