When I started writing erotic novels, I used to wonder how much sex is too much. Years a go it seemed there never could be enough. Nowadays though I notice that a lot of reviews contain opinions like, 'one sex scene after another with no plot to speak of' or 'I started skimming over the sex scenes, there were just too many of them'.
Strange, I thought, if you're reading an erotic novel, how can there be too much sex? Lately though I've come to the same opinion. I'm not opposed to the number of sex scenes, but OMG it's the length of some of those sessions that boggles the mind, and makes me start counting the pages to find out when the protagonists will finally collapse from sheer exhaustion.
Sex is sex, and there are only so many variations on the theme. Some authors have come up with several more that are, quite frankly impossible, and I would imagine extremely painful. And how quickly the guys recover after spilling their load. Maybe at age twenty, but not men in their mid thirties and forties no matter how gorgeous their partner is or how fantastic he is in the sack. There still has to be recovery time, and those who are ready to go again while still 'sheathed' just want to make me laugh, not gasp with awe or envy.
I love writing erotica, and I love reading it too, but I do want a decent story and believable characters at the same time. Is this too much to ask? I don't think so. Sometimes in on line interviews I'll be asked what advice I'd give to a fledgling author. Well, I'm not arrogant enough to believe my pearls of wisdom have any merit. I only have several years of writing experience and you do learn some stuff along the way. So I'm not afraid to say, 'Love what you do, learn your craft and write about characters that people can like, believe in and ultimately wish the best for'. I could add I suppose, don't just write sex scene after sex scene with only a few lines for everyone to take a deep breath.
Tuesday, May 12, 2015
Monday, May 11, 2015
It's Complicated
By
Lisabet Sarai
During
my third year in graduate school, I blossomed sexually. Or to put it
more crassly, I started to sleep around. The shy, studious mouse I’d
been up to that point burst from her chrysalis (inflicting severe
violence on a metaphor) to become a gorgeous butterfly, flitting from
flower to flower.
I
realize now that hormones contributed to this explosion of sexuality.
I was in my mid-twenties. My body was trying like crazy to procreate.
(Fortunately, modern contraceptive technology thwarted this
biological imperative.) At the time, though, the experience felt like
magic, a kind of liberation from my past self-image as nerdy,
socially awkward and unappealing. All at once, it seemed, I was
desirable. Potential lovers were everywhere. I could indulge myself.
If I wanted someone, I could act on that desire. If someone wanted
me, I could say yes, without hesitation or guilt.
Was
I over-sexed? I reject the judgmental tone of that question. Looking
back at those years, I feel a bit embarrassed, realizing how slutty I
must have seemed to anyone observing me, but indulgent. I was
learning, growing, changing—and
having a marvelous time, for the most part. Isn’t that what
youth is for?
I
wasn’t just scratching a physical itch. This wasn’t primarily
about getting off. My lovers weren’t faceless, interchangeable
bodies. I wrote page after page in my journal after each encounter,
poem after poem.
Here’s
one of them, a particularly detailed explication of one day in my
sex-drenched life. It’s not a very good poem at all—starts
out well, but degenerates into adolescent hyperbole by the end—but
I’m offering it as a historical document, not as a literary effort.
six-sixteen-seventy-nine
by Lisabet Sarai
1. greg
and when you,
firm, assured, proud,
began your vows
a summer cloud
misted my view
and I couldn't help
recalling you
between my legs.
but the spicy tears
and the hungering lump
in my throat passed
and I let you go
(will you ever know?)
I came to your wedding
dressed like a bride
in starched summer white
and with pity and pride
took both your hands,
wished you the best,
felt myself blest
by your chaste kiss.
2. matt
curiosity
and champagne...
excuses.
I chose
to follow my hormones
to your motel
knowing full well
your precocious mind.
another adventure
in technicolor,
in sun-burnished flesh,
in salty moans,
hunger, humor...
stranger,
strange but sweet
it was
if not for this
icy torrent of voices
(which one my own?)
drowning the moment.
in your nineteen years
have you known regret?
and why should I wonder?
3. bob
yes, yes!
so totally right for the time,
my fantasy
flourishing, blooming,
a porch-full of roses,
this june rejoicing
I'll press and save
till the end of my days.
bob, it was better
than ever imagined,
real and deep,
comfort and caring,
effortless sharing,
god-given fitting--
words cannot tell
my grateful wonder,
but hearts can
(and bodies as well --
or better)
man
from my dreams,
I thank you,
bless you,
release you,
but hold the memory,
holy-whole.
And
what’s the back story here? Greg was my housemate, the
good-looking, self-confident scion of a wealthy Connecticut family,
who teased and tempted me until one night, when my boyfriend (who
also lived in the house) was away for a week, I knocked on Greg’s
bedroom door. As I discussed in an earlier post here, that rash
action ultimately broke up my relationship with my boyfriend.
However, all the housemates, including my ex, traveled from
Pennsylvania to Darien for Greg’s wedding nine or ten months later.
Matt
was the nineteen year old brother of Greg’s bride, in town with his
family for the celebration. (I was twenty six.) Clever. Flirtatious. As the poem says,
precocious. Enough said.
And
Bob? (Who could possibly write a poem about someone named “Bob”?)
Given the poem’s assertions, I’m embarrassed to admit that I
barely remember him. A friend of Greg’s, I believe, who had shown
up at our house parties. There had always been strong attraction
between us, but he had a girlfriend. (And where was she that sunny
June day? That information is lost to posterity.)
As
I reconstruct things, Bob gave me a ride in the evening after the
reception, back to the Hartford apartment of the female friend with
whom I was staying. She was out. Bob and I shared a joint out on the
apartment balcony. One thing led to another.
At
the time, I clearly believed I’d experienced some sort of epiphany.
And perhaps I did—even
if the memory has faded.
My
older self wonders whether he deliberately gave me a ride home just
so he could get laid. I’d rather think his motives were less
selfish. Certainly our connection that night felt more than just
physical. But then, all my liaisons did.
I
wouldn’t say the day chronicled by this poem was typical. However,
it wasn’t some sort of fluke, either. There were other days during
that period when I had sex with more than one person.
I’m
not ashamed. I’m not sorry. And yes, I miss the breathless newness
of sex back in those days.
That’s
a big part of what I try to capture when I write erotica now.
Friday, May 8, 2015
Surviving Evidence
by Jean Roberta
Considering that I started writing stories as a child, I hope my writing has changed since then!
Here is the plot of a story I vaguely remember writing when I was about 7 or 8. (I also drew and colored the illustrations.)
A tough cowboy walks into a saloon, pounds his fist on the bar, and says, “Wine, please.” (I had seen my parents drinking wine, and they had taught me to say please when asking for something.)
An outlaw walks into the saloon. The cowboy sees him. They fight. The cowboy wins. The end.
I couldn’t understand why this saga of the Old West made my parents laugh so much. The rugged landscape of the television westerns I had watched, where cowboys rode past clumps of sagebrush and exposed rock, looked just like the landscape of southern Idaho, where I lived. If my parents could drink wine at their supper table within sight of the mountains that loomed beyond our picture windows, I didn’t see what was funny about my saloon scenario. I thought I was writing about the Real World of hard living and hard rocks.
For better or worse, I destroyed most of my childhood writing and drawing after it was all brought to me in several boxes by my two younger sisters in 2005. They had packed up everything in our parents’ house, to prepare the house for sale and our parents for their first “assisted-living” apartment in a residence for senior citizens. Our mother had faithfully saved everything that any of us produced. I was mortified that my sisters, who had already disapproved of me for many years, had seen my childish output in our parents’ attic.
I didn’t see what good purpose this material could ever serve. I was afraid it could be used as evidence against me, possibly to prove that I have always been emotionally immature, mentally ill, and out of touch with reality (the general opinion of my relatives). Ironically, I thought, my juvenilia could be used someday as evidence that I am too senile to take care of myself. I could imagine my sisters and my grown daughter saying that my age at the time of writing was no excuse. So I shredded page after yellowed page from my childhood, and stuffed it into the garbage bin behind my house.
I still have some poems and articles of mine that appeared in magazines in the 1970s (my twenties), but my fiction didn’t appear in public until the 1980s, so I’ll start there.
Egad. Here is the opening scene in a story I wrote in my early thirties:
“I’m sitting at my kitchen table, watching snowflakes drifting through the air outside my window. This whole house belongs to me since my husband Tom died five years ago. I wonder if that sounds heartless, or tragic. People die, and the living inherit what the dead no longer need. Everyone knows that, yet no one really thinks about death until they lose someone close to them, and then the survivors treat death like the villain in a movie. I thought of it that way myself. Black mustache, long cape and hollow laugh. I’m getting too old for such nonsense.
Next Thursday I’ll be sixty years old. I don’t expect this age to be a turning point in my life. Turning points only seem to exist in the past, never the present.”
- from “Snowflakes” (in More Saskatchewan Gold: 31 New Stories from the West, edited by Geoffrey Ursell, Coteau Books, 1984)
Reading this again, now that I am over 60, is both jarring and impressive. I’m not sure this story really deserved the award it won from the Saskatchewan Writers Guild, but I’m glad that my younger self was kind to the Older Woman I have since become.
I’ve never lost a current husband, but in 2006, I was contacted out of the blue by an old friend who told me that my ex-husband had passed away in another town, apparently without leaving any next-of-kin to make burial arrangements (the reason for the phone call). He died penniless, many years after I escaped from him. Unlike the woman in my story, I haven’t been much affected by the conventions of heterosexual marriage.
Like her, however, I have a grown child by my ex-husband, and she will forever be the link between me and him.
That marriage, and my much-longer phase of being a single mother, inspired much of my writing in those days. Here is the opening scene from “Yellow Roses,” a story told by a white American woman who knows she has a tiny amount of African blood. (I don’t actually know this about myself, but I know enough about my ancestry to think it possible.) She goes to London, England, where she meets an “African prince,” and brings him back to her current home in Canada:
I have heard the sound of Bow bells, in the city of my ancestors. I have seen the sagebrush of the American West, the Northern Lights in Canada, and the green hills of England.
I went to the Old Country whence my ancestors had fled their poverty. There I met a handsome foreign prince, or so he seemed. We danced to the music of his people, and he told me tales of the Olden Days before the Europeans had come to his country. Unlike me, he could trace his ancestry in an unbroken line back to African kings and queens whose bronze images now sit in European museums. My ancestors left no image but me, and I am not considered valuable enough for others to claim. Neither do I live behind glass.
- from The Old Dance: Love Stories of One Kind or Another, edited by Bonnie Burnard, Coteau Books, 1986)
Note that these two stories were published under my actual birth-name. “Jean Roberta” was born later, when I began writing lesbian stories, then plunged deeper into the abyss by writing erotica in various flavours.
Here is the beginning of an emotionally overheated but sex-free story about a messy triangle among lesbians. Marguerite, the narrator, has a crush on Daria, a woman who lives with Eileen, a sexy singer-songwriter who borrows a poem from Marguerite and turns it into a song. (If you have ever watched The L-Word, that marvelous TV soap opera about lesbians in Los Angeles, you can guess the rest.) From here, things get better, and worse:
Sometimes I feel as if I’m drowning in the deep water of my own feelings. Years ago, before I knew the nature of them, I began dreaming about oceanscapes. The tide would surge onto wet sand where I stood waiting, excited and afraid. Or a school of mermaids would flash onto the horizon, but I hesitated to swim out to them, fearing that I would never find my way back to shore. No help ever seemed available. I would wake up with a wet face.
- From “The Ballad of the Deep Blue Sea” (in Dykeversions: Lesbian Short Fiction, collectively edited, The Women’s Press, 1986)
At this time, I wasn’t writing about sex, exactly. I was writing about my actual, unrequited crush on a woman I knew who didn’t seem available. And then she left her partner of several years to move away with a woman she had met while organizing a feminist conference. Oh, the irony.
Since then, I think my writing has become less autobiographical on the surface. Or maybe I’ve learned to translate the feelings I’ve actually felt into the feelings of characters who look much different from me. Some conditions that I could only imagine in the past have become real: what it feels like to be a post-menopausal, silver-haired woman and an “out” lesbian for so long that I no longer argue with myself about whether I’m going through a phase. (If so, it will probably end at death.)
I became a published writer of erotica just before the end of the last century, and I’ve kept going since then. My publications fill a shelf in my office in the English Department of the local university. Why this material doesn’t embarrass me is hard to explain. This, too, could be used as evidence against me, but for some reason, I’ve never felt a compulsion to pile up all the paperbacks and burn them. Maybe it’s because all my sex stories were written by a consenting adult. Or maybe because I’ve been given much more approval than I could imagine before I survived the 1980s and came out on the other side.
----------------
Considering that I started writing stories as a child, I hope my writing has changed since then!
Here is the plot of a story I vaguely remember writing when I was about 7 or 8. (I also drew and colored the illustrations.)
A tough cowboy walks into a saloon, pounds his fist on the bar, and says, “Wine, please.” (I had seen my parents drinking wine, and they had taught me to say please when asking for something.)
An outlaw walks into the saloon. The cowboy sees him. They fight. The cowboy wins. The end.
I couldn’t understand why this saga of the Old West made my parents laugh so much. The rugged landscape of the television westerns I had watched, where cowboys rode past clumps of sagebrush and exposed rock, looked just like the landscape of southern Idaho, where I lived. If my parents could drink wine at their supper table within sight of the mountains that loomed beyond our picture windows, I didn’t see what was funny about my saloon scenario. I thought I was writing about the Real World of hard living and hard rocks.
For better or worse, I destroyed most of my childhood writing and drawing after it was all brought to me in several boxes by my two younger sisters in 2005. They had packed up everything in our parents’ house, to prepare the house for sale and our parents for their first “assisted-living” apartment in a residence for senior citizens. Our mother had faithfully saved everything that any of us produced. I was mortified that my sisters, who had already disapproved of me for many years, had seen my childish output in our parents’ attic.
I didn’t see what good purpose this material could ever serve. I was afraid it could be used as evidence against me, possibly to prove that I have always been emotionally immature, mentally ill, and out of touch with reality (the general opinion of my relatives). Ironically, I thought, my juvenilia could be used someday as evidence that I am too senile to take care of myself. I could imagine my sisters and my grown daughter saying that my age at the time of writing was no excuse. So I shredded page after yellowed page from my childhood, and stuffed it into the garbage bin behind my house.
I still have some poems and articles of mine that appeared in magazines in the 1970s (my twenties), but my fiction didn’t appear in public until the 1980s, so I’ll start there.
Egad. Here is the opening scene in a story I wrote in my early thirties:
“I’m sitting at my kitchen table, watching snowflakes drifting through the air outside my window. This whole house belongs to me since my husband Tom died five years ago. I wonder if that sounds heartless, or tragic. People die, and the living inherit what the dead no longer need. Everyone knows that, yet no one really thinks about death until they lose someone close to them, and then the survivors treat death like the villain in a movie. I thought of it that way myself. Black mustache, long cape and hollow laugh. I’m getting too old for such nonsense.
Next Thursday I’ll be sixty years old. I don’t expect this age to be a turning point in my life. Turning points only seem to exist in the past, never the present.”
- from “Snowflakes” (in More Saskatchewan Gold: 31 New Stories from the West, edited by Geoffrey Ursell, Coteau Books, 1984)
Reading this again, now that I am over 60, is both jarring and impressive. I’m not sure this story really deserved the award it won from the Saskatchewan Writers Guild, but I’m glad that my younger self was kind to the Older Woman I have since become.
I’ve never lost a current husband, but in 2006, I was contacted out of the blue by an old friend who told me that my ex-husband had passed away in another town, apparently without leaving any next-of-kin to make burial arrangements (the reason for the phone call). He died penniless, many years after I escaped from him. Unlike the woman in my story, I haven’t been much affected by the conventions of heterosexual marriage.
Like her, however, I have a grown child by my ex-husband, and she will forever be the link between me and him.
That marriage, and my much-longer phase of being a single mother, inspired much of my writing in those days. Here is the opening scene from “Yellow Roses,” a story told by a white American woman who knows she has a tiny amount of African blood. (I don’t actually know this about myself, but I know enough about my ancestry to think it possible.) She goes to London, England, where she meets an “African prince,” and brings him back to her current home in Canada:
I have heard the sound of Bow bells, in the city of my ancestors. I have seen the sagebrush of the American West, the Northern Lights in Canada, and the green hills of England.
I went to the Old Country whence my ancestors had fled their poverty. There I met a handsome foreign prince, or so he seemed. We danced to the music of his people, and he told me tales of the Olden Days before the Europeans had come to his country. Unlike me, he could trace his ancestry in an unbroken line back to African kings and queens whose bronze images now sit in European museums. My ancestors left no image but me, and I am not considered valuable enough for others to claim. Neither do I live behind glass.
- from The Old Dance: Love Stories of One Kind or Another, edited by Bonnie Burnard, Coteau Books, 1986)
Note that these two stories were published under my actual birth-name. “Jean Roberta” was born later, when I began writing lesbian stories, then plunged deeper into the abyss by writing erotica in various flavours.
Here is the beginning of an emotionally overheated but sex-free story about a messy triangle among lesbians. Marguerite, the narrator, has a crush on Daria, a woman who lives with Eileen, a sexy singer-songwriter who borrows a poem from Marguerite and turns it into a song. (If you have ever watched The L-Word, that marvelous TV soap opera about lesbians in Los Angeles, you can guess the rest.) From here, things get better, and worse:
Sometimes I feel as if I’m drowning in the deep water of my own feelings. Years ago, before I knew the nature of them, I began dreaming about oceanscapes. The tide would surge onto wet sand where I stood waiting, excited and afraid. Or a school of mermaids would flash onto the horizon, but I hesitated to swim out to them, fearing that I would never find my way back to shore. No help ever seemed available. I would wake up with a wet face.
- From “The Ballad of the Deep Blue Sea” (in Dykeversions: Lesbian Short Fiction, collectively edited, The Women’s Press, 1986)
At this time, I wasn’t writing about sex, exactly. I was writing about my actual, unrequited crush on a woman I knew who didn’t seem available. And then she left her partner of several years to move away with a woman she had met while organizing a feminist conference. Oh, the irony.
Since then, I think my writing has become less autobiographical on the surface. Or maybe I’ve learned to translate the feelings I’ve actually felt into the feelings of characters who look much different from me. Some conditions that I could only imagine in the past have become real: what it feels like to be a post-menopausal, silver-haired woman and an “out” lesbian for so long that I no longer argue with myself about whether I’m going through a phase. (If so, it will probably end at death.)
I became a published writer of erotica just before the end of the last century, and I’ve kept going since then. My publications fill a shelf in my office in the English Department of the local university. Why this material doesn’t embarrass me is hard to explain. This, too, could be used as evidence against me, but for some reason, I’ve never felt a compulsion to pile up all the paperbacks and burn them. Maybe it’s because all my sex stories were written by a consenting adult. Or maybe because I’ve been given much more approval than I could imagine before I survived the 1980s and came out on the other side.
----------------
Thursday, May 7, 2015
Letting Go of the Girl
by Annabeth Leong
To find out if my writing has changed over the years, I went to my first published erotic story, which I wrote in December 2008. (Not as far back as Giselle's, and not as charming as the tale of the lovely Sophie, I'm afraid.) The story was called "Make It Last," and it appeared in the now defunct Oysters and Chocolate.
I wrote those words huddled on the loveseat in the living room of the apartment I shared with my first husband (now my ex). Lisa was entirely made up, but the longing in the writing about her is still palpable to me. And the story—"I had this lover"—and the wish that comes with it, is entirely true. (Alert readers will remember the girl I kissed while on top of a rundown train car.)
Lisabet has talked about how she poured all her desires into her first novel, and I've said that I played my cards closer to the chest. But when I read this story in its entirety (I'd give you a link, but it's no longer available online), I see the themes that have shredded me for years now. I may have danced away from this, but it was at the heart of things always. The girl I couldn't forget, the hopeless longing, the fear of revealing desire, and the fear of keeping it hidden.
There is a sort of fantasizing that I've always been able to do to get myself off, but it is cruel, faceless, and nameless. A few years ago, I started wondering: If I could see a face, whose would it be? It turned out to be hers, but when I pictured her and really let myself remember, I couldn't get myself off anymore because I would start to cry.
This is from Untouched, which I wrote from 2013-2014:
That's still me writing about that girl. I dedicated the book to her, too, with the line, "I should have taken you to prom." And then I wrote another book last fall, under a different name, that is even more about her. So maybe my writing hasn't changed at all. I've done a lot of things, but I've also spent upwards of six years working out my feelings about a girl from my past, one tiny bit at a time. It's embarrassing to admit that, especially with my stated preference for making up characters. I never meant, for example, for Marie to become her, but she did.
Perhaps it's too soon to say, but I think I've finally put it to bed. Something in that last book I wrote felt final. I can talk about her now or think about her without crying. Her face is no longer waiting to ambush me in every secret corner of my mind. I see other faces in my fantasies. They are the same constellation of fantasies, but they feel wider and more possible. I wonder if more hope will come into my writing—I would like that.
I thought about that reading the last paragraph of that story from long ago. I wrote:
That's the voice of a cynic, someone who knows there's no going back, there's no tomorrow, there is no such thing as later. And yet recently I've been learning to trust that I'm worth coming back to. I don't have to snatch every scrap of pleasure in every moment because I can see a person again. I can have another chance. I can't yet declare that my writing has changed because of this realization, but I want it to.
(In an unrelated note, I'm doing an online chat tonight in support of my new book Liquid Longing: An Erotic Anthology of the Sacred and Profane. I'll be available from 7-9 p.m. EST at this link: http://www.chatzy.com/FFP-Chat I would love to see any of you there!)
To find out if my writing has changed over the years, I went to my first published erotic story, which I wrote in December 2008. (Not as far back as Giselle's, and not as charming as the tale of the lovely Sophie, I'm afraid.) The story was called "Make It Last," and it appeared in the now defunct Oysters and Chocolate.
“Come on,” Lisa laughed. “You must have done something at some point with someone.” I wanted to kiss the corners of her mouth, at the spots where her lips went from thin to full.
Letting myself lie back, I took a deep breath and resolved to finish what I’d started. “I had this lover,” I began. Lisa made an encouraging sound in her throat. “Every time I got her close to coming, she would push my head away. The muscles in her legs would tighten up, and her clit would be this little rock under my tongue, and I would know she was about to do it. I’d wrap my arms around her waist and hold on hard, thinking maybe this time I’d get in that one extra lick, and she would be screaming and pushing at the top of my head with both her hands.”
I paused, trying to gauge how Lisa was reacting. Her breathing sounded a little faster than normal. My own breathing had certainly sped up. I struggled up onto my elbow and looked down at her. For once, I let myself drink in every lovely curve. I openly admired her long neck and the jawline that traced from a soft, round ear down to a dainty pointed chin, the red-brown lips above that, the wide nose that quivered delicately with each breath. I looked in her eyes again.
“What I wanted to do,” I said, “was tie her to the bed so she couldn’t push me away, and then see how long I could go. I wanted to lick her until the bed under us both was soaked and my tongue got cramped from exhaustion. But I never got to do that.”
I watched Lisa’s chest rapidly rising and falling. Her shirt rode up, exposing her belly button and the very beginning of the fuzz leading down between her thighs. She trembled, and her eyes followed my eyes to the top button of her jeans.
“You never told me you liked girls,” she said in a strained voice.
Another deep breath for me. It felt strange that all the lights in my room were on so late at night. It felt strange to look at her without disguising my lust. I bent over her and pressed my lips to the strip of bare skin between her jeans and her shirt. She jumped. I did it again. “It would have been awkward,” I murmured.
I wrote those words huddled on the loveseat in the living room of the apartment I shared with my first husband (now my ex). Lisa was entirely made up, but the longing in the writing about her is still palpable to me. And the story—"I had this lover"—and the wish that comes with it, is entirely true. (Alert readers will remember the girl I kissed while on top of a rundown train car.)
Lisabet has talked about how she poured all her desires into her first novel, and I've said that I played my cards closer to the chest. But when I read this story in its entirety (I'd give you a link, but it's no longer available online), I see the themes that have shredded me for years now. I may have danced away from this, but it was at the heart of things always. The girl I couldn't forget, the hopeless longing, the fear of revealing desire, and the fear of keeping it hidden.
There is a sort of fantasizing that I've always been able to do to get myself off, but it is cruel, faceless, and nameless. A few years ago, I started wondering: If I could see a face, whose would it be? It turned out to be hers, but when I pictured her and really let myself remember, I couldn't get myself off anymore because I would start to cry.
This is from Untouched, which I wrote from 2013-2014:
Slowly, Marie sat back down on the chair. "Tell me how you wish it had been. Tell me what you need me to do."
Celia sucked a breath in through her teeth and closed her eyes, trying to envision the alternate reality in which things could have worked out between them.
"We would have explored things together. We wouldn't have made such a big deal about prom, and we wouldn't have put so much expectation on that one night. Maybe we would have met at the hotel first so we could spend some time alone together before the dance. We would have ordered room service and I would have watched you eat. I could never stop watching you, Marie. All this time it's been the other way around, but I can still remember how fascinated I was by the way you moved, by every little glimpse I got of your skin. When your cardigan would slip off your shoulder in class, I would stare at the sliver of your bra strap that was peeking out and just drink in the sight of your skin beside it. In the hotel room the night of prom, eating with you, it would have been too much for me. I would have been so turned on by your lips opening and closing, sucking at your fingertips, that I wouldn't have been able to chew my own food—let alone swallow."
Marie laughed, delight on her face. "I'd forgotten that you used to want me, too. It's been so long."
That's still me writing about that girl. I dedicated the book to her, too, with the line, "I should have taken you to prom." And then I wrote another book last fall, under a different name, that is even more about her. So maybe my writing hasn't changed at all. I've done a lot of things, but I've also spent upwards of six years working out my feelings about a girl from my past, one tiny bit at a time. It's embarrassing to admit that, especially with my stated preference for making up characters. I never meant, for example, for Marie to become her, but she did.
Perhaps it's too soon to say, but I think I've finally put it to bed. Something in that last book I wrote felt final. I can talk about her now or think about her without crying. Her face is no longer waiting to ambush me in every secret corner of my mind. I see other faces in my fantasies. They are the same constellation of fantasies, but they feel wider and more possible. I wonder if more hope will come into my writing—I would like that.
I thought about that reading the last paragraph of that story from long ago. I wrote:
If this had happened ten years ago, I might have stopped and held her then. I might have placed my faith in the sex that we would have tomorrow. The years had taught me better. I wound my arms around her thighs and buried my face between her legs, sighing as I tasted her and breathed her in. I pushed my tongue into her again. I had to get enough to make it last.
That's the voice of a cynic, someone who knows there's no going back, there's no tomorrow, there is no such thing as later. And yet recently I've been learning to trust that I'm worth coming back to. I don't have to snatch every scrap of pleasure in every moment because I can see a person again. I can have another chance. I can't yet declare that my writing has changed because of this realization, but I want it to.
(In an unrelated note, I'm doing an online chat tonight in support of my new book Liquid Longing: An Erotic Anthology of the Sacred and Profane. I'll be available from 7-9 p.m. EST at this link: http://www.chatzy.com/FFP-Chat I would love to see any of you there!)
Wednesday, May 6, 2015
Before the Smut
My blogmates have already covered how their writing has
changed over the years. We probably have similar stories, or at least stories
that sound familiar. I thought to give an example of a proposal for a column I
sent to a prestigious ethnographic arts quarterly back in 1996.
Here it is with all its warts, scabs, commas and exclamation
points!!!
1/25/96
WHIMSEY; THE LAST WORD; FINAL THOUGHTS; FOOD FOR THOUGHT
I still fondly recall sitting by the radio, waiting for the
latest episode of “Bring ‘em Back Alive with Clyde Beatty” to be aired. His
escapades in the deepest, darkest jungles of exotic lands held a special
fascination for children, and the absence of television allowed our
imaginations to roam without visual boundaries. I decided I wanted to be a
“Jungle Man” early on.
Also on our listening lists were: “Straight Arrow”, “Red
Rider & Little Beaver”, “The Lone Ranger & Tonto”. I would ask Mom to
buy Nabisco Shredded Wheat, not because I preferred it to other breakfast
cereals, but because the boxes contained Straight Arrow’s ‘Indian lore’ cards,
which made it feel like a kid brought up in Trenton, New Jersey could actually
think and do things like a native American!
Later, with the advent of television, came “Ramar of the
Jungle”, the adventures of an American doctor, practicing in the remote jungles
of Africa and India. They kept rerunning the same twenty or so episodes in order
which I memorized, so that I could predict which one would be shown on any
given day. Still later came Disney’s “Davy Crockett” miniseries. Its popularity
became an American Phenomenon, with children (including myself) running around
in coonskin caps with powder horns over their shoulders, singing Davy’s theme
song which actually made the hit record charts!
During all this time, I collected stamps and coins of the
world, further sparking the imagination which took me to the far off lands I
encountered. My only regret is wishing I had saved those nostalgic collections,
or at least could still get stamps and coins for those early 1950’s prices!
They must have been cheap for me to be able to afford them!
Of course, I also read Donald Duck, Batman, and Superman
comic books, like any other kid of the times, but I COLLECTED “Tarzan” comics,
as well as “Classics Illustrated” versions of “Green Mansions”, “The Last of
the Mohicans”, “Around the World in Eighty Days” and “The Deerslayer”. I even
admit to being a fan of “Mickey Mouse Club” too, but the TV show that impressed
me the most, was one where a group of experts would examine an ancient or
esoteric object and each would give an educated guess as to what the object was.
I forget if there was a prize beyond personal satisfaction for the one with the
closest guess. In fact, I forgot the name of the show itself, but if anyone out
there remembers, please write me in care of this magazine and maybe we can talk
about it in another issue.
These influences all dealt peripherally with indigenous
peoples, albeit, usually in a condescending and unrealistic manner. The seeds
were sown in my generation nonetheless, and may have led inadvertently to a
later focus on modern, more objective studies and appreciation of ancient
and/or primitive societies. Our popular music, for instance, has now taken on
“primitive” rhythms and melodies, but primitive does not imply a lack of
complexity or sophistication; far from it. In incorporating African, Latin, Asian
and other styles, we now enjoy music that is more evocative, universal, and
which speaks to what it means to be human.
Our appreciation of fine arts has been enriched by a new
understanding of form and function, in part attributable to the study of
ancient, primitive, and tribal societies. The paintings and sculpture of
Picasso, (if not the entire modern art movement) are a prime example of this
bridge between cultures in our search for pure art and emotion.
As I grew into and entered puberty, the romance of far off
lands gave way to pursuits involving personal romance. So, the habits of
primitive cultures took a back seat to my own mating habits in the back seat of
the car.
(Momma) and I, after 31 years of marriage, still laugh about
those formative years. During the ensuing time, a lot of water has gone under
the bridge, and we are enjoying a very rich and varied life indeed, from stints
in the restaurant business, to antiques, to publishing, to a year in remote
northern California without electricity, nine miles from the closest pay phone.
Along the way, I was able to find the time and means to
resume collecting coins. beginning with
19th and 20th century pieces. Not very far down the road,
I became interested in early U.S. large cents, then further back to colonial
coinage, and soon to ancient Greek and Roman issues. I started to be exposed to
ancient sculpture and artifacts! To make a long story short, I rejuvenated the
antique business I had begun years before, specializing this time in ancient
coins and antiquities.
Some years later, at an antique show in….We’ll just call
it…Obscure, USA., a woman who ran a
second hand shop, spotted a small Seljuk bronze bird I had and declared that
she had “A whole box of things that looked something like that”. She said she’d
“had them in the shop for years” for $5 each and couldn’t sell them.
When she returned, she opened a cigar box with what I now
know were 75 Ashanti goldweights. I had seen reproductions of these in flea
markets and bazaars around the world, selling for the equivalent of a few
dollars apiece. I was vaguely aware they were African. One piece stood out from
the rest, however, and I had the feeling that it was quite special. It was a
fine casting with deep black surfaces that, as numismatist, I knew, was very
old. She asked a price for the whole box that I was sure was too much, but I
just HAD to have that one piece. I guess she saw that in my eye because she
never wavered in price! So, I bought them.
The Sana Fe Ethnographic was my next show, and I had time in
motels on the road to look more closely at the other intriguing pieces in that
box, soon determining that these pieces were ALL rather old, not ancient, but
not reproductions either! There were animated castings of people, of fish,
stools, tools and insects, good luck knots, tiny shields, and animals which
were obviously African.
That old, childish intrigue poked itself back into my psyche
and rekindled the fire of imagination. Like listening to “Clyde Beatty”, I was
transported, once again, to deepest, darkest Africa. This time the stimuli were
tiny pieces of brass, not a radio. I once again felt like a “Jungle Man”.
It often seems that we are all on a quest for our human
roots. The paths we take define us as individuals. We would like to explore
these individualities in this column, as we do on a larger scale in the rest of
the magazine. The column is likely to be shaped by the whims and expectations
of our readers. We hope to provide a dialogue of greater scope and lighthearted
sensitivity than is possible within a “Letters to the Editors” format.
What we need now is input from you, the reader. I can ramble
on forever about things that are of interest to me, but this is YOUR magazine.
Beginners, send us your questions. We’ll get the answers from the experts!
Veteran collectors, send us your anecdotes, your collector’s stories. Although
countless, they are singular and often priceless bits of humanness. Gripers, if
you have a gripe, and if your gripe is outside the realm of a letter to the
editor, you can complain in this column. While we would like to maintain a
light touch, we will not shy away from difficult subjects, but will still try
to leave you with a smile!
---
They didn’t bite on the column. Sigh… :>)
Tuesday, May 5, 2015
Ch-ch-ch-changes...good ones, I hope
Writing, like, everything else in this universe, changes. Once we become accustomed to the way things are... POOF! something changes, and the butterfly effect assures that everything else will change also.
Maybe creative endeavors charge more than anything else. I don't know, but I know my writing certainly has changed, as has my process.
Initially, ideas and their attendant words spilled out of me like a spring waterfall. That was back in late 1996, when I started to write my first novel. Walk Like A Man was rapidly followed by The Wilder Brother, Lord Devere's Ward and Fashion Victim.
 |
| Note the old pen name |
Each of these books was different from the next. I wanted to write to the market, but didn't know much about it, as shown by my selection of a football quarterback as the hero of Walk. Though one author, Susan Elizabeth Phillips, wrote very popular sports heroes, they were generally frowned upon by publishers. Even so, Walk was a very mainstream romance--boy and girl meet; boy gets girl; boy loses girl; boy gets girl back and to top it off, they marry and have a baby--the normal Happily Ever After in romances novels these days.
The Wilder Brother went through a number of incarnations until it finally became erotic romance. It was first a traditional romance, no sex, centering around two sets of twins and a wedding. It became very different, with Colt and Dana banging in a glass-walled elevator in the first few pages. That comedic elevator scene remains a fan favorite.
Lord Devere's Ward was first Hopelessly Compromised, a romantic suspense set in the Regency. It
still sells very well, evidence of the enduring popularity of the Regency romance.
Fashion Victim is a contemporary romantic suspense. I like weaving in a suspense or mystery in with the romance--gives my hero and heroine something to do while falling in love.
Those books were followed by four Silhouette Romances--traditional, or sweet romance. Then Silhouette stopped buying my work. I don't know why--my critique partner and then-agent thought I was still writing great books. Then
 |
| This book is still selling, ten years after first publication |
Harlequin closed the SilRom line and a few years later, shuttered down Silhouette entirely. In the meantime, death and divorce had ripped my life apart, and I encountered writers' block so severe that most days writing were like digging ditches with my teeth.
My career was somewhat revitalized by writing erotic romance, which I started perhaps ten years ago. Not only did I wrote original works, but converted unsold sweet romances to erotic ones--the fate of The Wilder Brother and several other books.
Over time, my process changed as well. I started writing when I was also practicing law as a trial attorney. I was an insomniac, so most of my first four or five manuscripts were written mostly between 2 and 4 in the morning. That was tough. After I sold two manuscripts to Silhouette, I closed my law practice and started writing full-time.
Ah, the golden years. Sort of. Be careful of what you wish for should be my maxim. My productivity didn't exactly crash, but I definitely enjoyed being a housewife. My then-husband got perfect meals delivered on time. But I didn't see my output increase.
Remember when I mentioned death and divorce? Along with writers' block came
As for process, I wrote by computer. I do occasionally write in longhand in a notebook, but wanted to get out of the habit of needing to compose with pen on paper. In Thailand, I wrote mostly in the afternoons--I'd go out in the cool morning to eat, shop, work out, then back to my little room during the heat of the day to shower, rest and write. Out again in the evening to get a bite to eat.
And now--I'm back in California, still suffering with writers' block but not as badly. I take care of my elderly mother, which means I write when she's out with her significant other (the word "boyfriend" seems odd when applied to a 90-year-old man). Or I write after she goes to sleep or when she's napping, like right now.
But I'm a lady of leisure. In fact, a nap sounds great!
Another aspect that's changes is my frantic desire to get published. I no longer care much about writing to the market. I've had enough lousy experiences that I don't care whether my work is every purchased by another publisher--I'm indie these days to a great extent. I've separated myself from any fixation on royalties. They're nice, but I've accepted that I am a marketing ignoramus and will never sell a gazillion books.
Soooo...when I nap sounds great, I go take that nap. Ciao!
Monday, May 4, 2015
Over the Hill on the Slippery Slope
Sacchi Green
When I was in college, very long ago, a respected professor said that my work was a “tour de force” even though it didn’t really have anything to say. That was perfectly true. It was many years before I got down to serious attempts at writing for publication (well, not counting that one early sale to a “true confessions” magazine, and that time I did have something to say, however mundane.)
Even though it sometimes seems as though I only began writing yesterday, I was, in fact, writing for publication so long ago that I had to use a typewriter, and mail my submissions on paper, including a stamped, self-addressed envelope so that the editor/publisher could mail back a rejection or rare acceptance. If we wanted our actual manuscripts returned, we had to send a bigger envelope with the proper postage. It’s a good thing we’d progressed a bit past the chiseling words in stone era, or the cost of postage would have been astronomical.
In any case, my early stories were mostly fantasy, with a little science fiction tossed in, and here we discuss erotica, so it makes the most sense to consider how my erotica writing has changed over the years.
My general feeling is that I plateaued several years ago, and may even be sliding downhill. My best ideas may have been used up, or even overused. When I see a market I’d like to write for, I find myself going back to characters from previous stories and giving them sequels of sorts, or even prequels. In a couple of cases I’ve even written entire stories that filled in parts of previous stories that I’d just mentioned in passing the first time because I had so much more to say. Maybe that’s my subconscious trying to make up for the fact that I don’t write novels, but mostly it’s laziness, or, even worse, a failure of the imagination.
I do think my writing has changed over the years. The technical changes came pretty early, as feedback from editors pointed out my beginner’s faults such as overuse of ellipses, and repeating words too often—“Do you really need to say ‘I’ five time in one paragraph?” and such glaring lapses. As an editor now myself, I pass along this acquired wisdom. But I’ve changed in other less definable ways. When I made my first sale to Best Lesbian Erotica, very nearly my first foray into erotica, the editor phoned me and told me that she loved my story because it was so different from what she usually saw. She was actually calling me about making some major changes, which were justified, but for a couple of years I kept getting the “so different” reaction from other editors. I think this was mostly because I’d started out in fantasy and science fiction, where story structure and plot were absolutely necessary. These days, as an editor, I look for the “different” work, too, but so much more erotica has been written by now, and so many good writers have been doing it, that the bar is set much higher. On the other hand, so many not-yet-good writers have been flooding the genre with work that seems intent on perpetuating the worst banalities of what they read that the bar seems to be set lower, as well. A conundrum.
In any case, (uh oh, I used that phrase three paragraphs upstream!) I think my best writing, or at least my best ideas, may be in the past. Once in a while sparks will fly, but they may not be as bright. Or original.
I’ve been puzzling over what examples to use. It’s not that I can’t juggle the words well enough to keep them spinning in the air, but that they don’t say anything new. Well, the best thing I can think of the moment is to show you a bit of a story I wrote back in, oh, 2001, fourteen years ago, and then a bit of one I wrote just last year that filled in a part I’d passed over in the first one.
__________
Bull Rider [This first part is just included because it’s my very favorite piece to read out loud for an audience.]
Amsterdam.
Am-ster-god-fucking-damn!
Sin City of the 70's, still sizzling in the 80's. Cheap pot you could smoke in the coffeehouses, but that's not what lit my fire. Sex shows and leather-toy shops? Coming a whole lot closer; but what really ignited a slow burn low in my Levis were stories of the working girls displaying their wares behind lace-curtained windows. Something about the dissonance between elegance and raunch struck a chord. "Fine old buildings," ice-maiden Anneke had told some of the Australian riders, with her slight, Mona Lisa smile and a sidelong glance at me. "Many visitors tour the Red Light district just to view the...architecture."
[Quite a bit snipped]
"On the house, Honey." Her nametag said "Margaretha," but her accent said New York. "You look like you might liven this place up. Ever ride one of those?"
I followed the jerk of her head. Through a wide archway I saw, rising above the sawdust on the floor like some futuristic mushroom, a mechanical bull just like the one Travolta and Winger rode in Urban Cowboy.
I wiped beer foam from my mouth. "You mean, does my ass live up to the advertising of my Levis? Lady, you have no idea."
"Don't bet on it, darlin'." Her assessing look assured me that one way or another, a good time could definitely be had. Much as I appreciate older women, though—hell, one saved me from fratricide—my hopes for something else grew. If it wasn't the police she'd called, who on this continent but Anneke would have described me to her?
"Yeah," I said, "I've ridden those, and the snorting, stomping, shitting versions too. For another beer and some of those hefty pretzels, I'd be glad to demonstrate."
"Wait a while." She refilled my stein and slid me a bowl of pretzels and cheese-flavored breadsticks, and I did my best not to stuff myself. Some things are better on a less-than-full stomach. Bull riding is only one of them.
"So, where are you from, Toby?" she asked, chatting me up while keeping a close eye on the door.
"Montana." I definitely hadn't told her my name.
"They let women ride bulls in rodeos there?"
"Not yet. Not officially. Except at small local shindigs where anything goes." I paid close attention to my beer and pretzels, not wanting to talk much about it. But there was no way I could keep from remembering the surge of wild triumph when I outrode them all, even my brother Ted. The pounding of my blood—the pressure building until I had to explode or die—and the revelation that, to achieve explosion, I needed to wrap myself around Cindy's full, smooth curves.
Back when we were twelve, Cindy hadn't minded a little mutual exploration. She'd been away for a few years, though, and this time, as I tried to pull her close, she twisted loose and ran around the grandstand to throw herself on Ted. Another revelation, that life was a bitch, seared me. No matter how much I could work like a man, even beat the men at their own games, their rewards were officially off-limits to me.
I was young and naive, and the shock filled me with rage. I leapt for my brother, and only the intervention of Miss Violet Montez, sultry lead singer for the intermission entertainment act, kept me from killing him.
"Hey, Tigrina, come with me." She pressed herself against me as Ted struggled to get up. "I have what you need. And what you don't even know you need." And she surely did, or close enough.
When I rode back to the ranch at daybreak, too drained to sort out the remnants of pleasure and pain and smoldering resentment, Daddy was waiting in the barn. He couldn't quite meet my eyes. "Looks like maybe you'd better go East to school the way your Mama always wanted."
__________
Now for the newer story, filling in that particular interlude.
The Bull Rider and the Bull Whip
“Let me handle her, boys. This calls for a woman’s touch.”
The calloused cowboy hands trying to hold me back dropped away. Slender satin-clad arms wrapped around me, long dark hair smelling of sweet lemons brushed my cheeks, and my face was pressed against a scarlet blouse that barely covered the peaks of a magnificent pair of breasts. I had the sense to stop struggling.
“Come along with me now, Tigrina,” Miss Violet Montez, lead singer of the intermission entertainment act, murmured into my ear. “I know what you need. And what you don't even know you need."
And, as it turned out, she surely did.
Her trailer was dented and cramped, but I saw right away that it had a narrow built-in bed. She saw me eyeing it.
“Not yet.” Her voice turned stern. “Wrangling a bull is one thing. Treating a lady right is something else. Especially your first time.”
Well, there wasn’t much I could say to that. In fact, I couldn’t think of anything to say, and, while I surely knew some things I’d like to do, I didn’t know how to go about them with a gorgeous worldly woman like Miss Violet Montez. I’d seen her before at rodeos and such-like gatherings, and fantasized a bit like I did about movie stars and photos in the kind of magazines cowboys tucked under their mattresses in the bunkhouse, but never imagined I’d get this close. “Yes Ma’am,” I said, trying to sound polite with just a hint of cocky, but it didn’t come out right.
“You sit down in that folding chair and don’t stir while I change into something more comfortable.” I perked right up at that, but then she added, “and while you wait, give some thought as to whether you want things sweet, spicy, or downright nasty.”
I knew my preference, even though I wasn’t exactly sure what she meant, but I’d got my brain working enough to know the right answer. “Whatever a lovely lady like you wants is what I want, too.”
“We’ll just see about that.” She scooped up some clothes from the foot of the bed and edged into the tiny bathroom, leaving the door open. I knew better than to get up from my chair, but I did crane my neck to see what I could see. It wasn’t much.
The low-necked satin blouse sailed out through the bathroom door, followed by her voice. “Never came across a girl bull rider before in a regular rodeo. Things must be changing for the better.”
"Not yet,” I admitted. “Not officially. Except at small local shindigs where anything goes." And where my dad was the biggest rancher around and chief sponsor of the rodeo association, but I didn’t say that.
Her short black satin skirt with rows of gold spangles followed the blouse, and so did her high-heeled sparkly cowgirl boots and a pair of nylon pantyhose. I wriggled in the chair to see if I could hook that last with my foot, with no luck, but I did get a glimpse of a bare shoulder through the door.
“Well, you can sure handle a bucking bull, but you need to work on self-control, ” she said over that shoulder. “And it remains to be seen how much else you can handle.”
“Yes, Ma’am.” It seemed like the safest thing to say. Now I could see that she was shrugging into a blue-checked shirt, which didn’t fit much with my hopeful notions of “something more comfortable.”
I looked idly around the trailer. It was dented and shabby, but with colorful pictures on the walls, mostly old rodeo posters, and some fancy duds hanging on hooks, along with…
I only just caught myself from bolting straight up. On one hook, coiled neat as a rattlesnake, hung one of the longest bullwhips I’d ever seen. I looked wildly around again at the posters, and there it was, in a corner of what looked like the oldest one: “Miss Violet Montez, Queen of the Bullwhip.”
__________
Well, I don’t think I made any particular point here. The character from the first story is strong enough to carry the last one, and in both cases I did have quite a bit to say. The idea carries through, but it was born a long time ago. It’s harder these days to come up with new ones.
Or maybe I should just buckle down and write novels with my favorite characters.
[Bull Rider was originally published in the anthology Body Check from Alyson Books in about 2002, reprinted in Best Lesbian Erotica 2003 from Cleis Press, and reprinted a few more times. The Bull Rider and the Bull Whip was originally published in She Who Must Be Obeyed from Lethe Press and reprinted in Best Lesbian Erotica 2015.]
When I was in college, very long ago, a respected professor said that my work was a “tour de force” even though it didn’t really have anything to say. That was perfectly true. It was many years before I got down to serious attempts at writing for publication (well, not counting that one early sale to a “true confessions” magazine, and that time I did have something to say, however mundane.)
Even though it sometimes seems as though I only began writing yesterday, I was, in fact, writing for publication so long ago that I had to use a typewriter, and mail my submissions on paper, including a stamped, self-addressed envelope so that the editor/publisher could mail back a rejection or rare acceptance. If we wanted our actual manuscripts returned, we had to send a bigger envelope with the proper postage. It’s a good thing we’d progressed a bit past the chiseling words in stone era, or the cost of postage would have been astronomical.
In any case, my early stories were mostly fantasy, with a little science fiction tossed in, and here we discuss erotica, so it makes the most sense to consider how my erotica writing has changed over the years.
My general feeling is that I plateaued several years ago, and may even be sliding downhill. My best ideas may have been used up, or even overused. When I see a market I’d like to write for, I find myself going back to characters from previous stories and giving them sequels of sorts, or even prequels. In a couple of cases I’ve even written entire stories that filled in parts of previous stories that I’d just mentioned in passing the first time because I had so much more to say. Maybe that’s my subconscious trying to make up for the fact that I don’t write novels, but mostly it’s laziness, or, even worse, a failure of the imagination.
I do think my writing has changed over the years. The technical changes came pretty early, as feedback from editors pointed out my beginner’s faults such as overuse of ellipses, and repeating words too often—“Do you really need to say ‘I’ five time in one paragraph?” and such glaring lapses. As an editor now myself, I pass along this acquired wisdom. But I’ve changed in other less definable ways. When I made my first sale to Best Lesbian Erotica, very nearly my first foray into erotica, the editor phoned me and told me that she loved my story because it was so different from what she usually saw. She was actually calling me about making some major changes, which were justified, but for a couple of years I kept getting the “so different” reaction from other editors. I think this was mostly because I’d started out in fantasy and science fiction, where story structure and plot were absolutely necessary. These days, as an editor, I look for the “different” work, too, but so much more erotica has been written by now, and so many good writers have been doing it, that the bar is set much higher. On the other hand, so many not-yet-good writers have been flooding the genre with work that seems intent on perpetuating the worst banalities of what they read that the bar seems to be set lower, as well. A conundrum.
In any case, (uh oh, I used that phrase three paragraphs upstream!) I think my best writing, or at least my best ideas, may be in the past. Once in a while sparks will fly, but they may not be as bright. Or original.
I’ve been puzzling over what examples to use. It’s not that I can’t juggle the words well enough to keep them spinning in the air, but that they don’t say anything new. Well, the best thing I can think of the moment is to show you a bit of a story I wrote back in, oh, 2001, fourteen years ago, and then a bit of one I wrote just last year that filled in a part I’d passed over in the first one.
__________
Bull Rider [This first part is just included because it’s my very favorite piece to read out loud for an audience.]
Amsterdam.
Am-ster-god-fucking-damn!
Sin City of the 70's, still sizzling in the 80's. Cheap pot you could smoke in the coffeehouses, but that's not what lit my fire. Sex shows and leather-toy shops? Coming a whole lot closer; but what really ignited a slow burn low in my Levis were stories of the working girls displaying their wares behind lace-curtained windows. Something about the dissonance between elegance and raunch struck a chord. "Fine old buildings," ice-maiden Anneke had told some of the Australian riders, with her slight, Mona Lisa smile and a sidelong glance at me. "Many visitors tour the Red Light district just to view the...architecture."
[Quite a bit snipped]
"On the house, Honey." Her nametag said "Margaretha," but her accent said New York. "You look like you might liven this place up. Ever ride one of those?"
I followed the jerk of her head. Through a wide archway I saw, rising above the sawdust on the floor like some futuristic mushroom, a mechanical bull just like the one Travolta and Winger rode in Urban Cowboy.
I wiped beer foam from my mouth. "You mean, does my ass live up to the advertising of my Levis? Lady, you have no idea."
"Don't bet on it, darlin'." Her assessing look assured me that one way or another, a good time could definitely be had. Much as I appreciate older women, though—hell, one saved me from fratricide—my hopes for something else grew. If it wasn't the police she'd called, who on this continent but Anneke would have described me to her?
"Yeah," I said, "I've ridden those, and the snorting, stomping, shitting versions too. For another beer and some of those hefty pretzels, I'd be glad to demonstrate."
"Wait a while." She refilled my stein and slid me a bowl of pretzels and cheese-flavored breadsticks, and I did my best not to stuff myself. Some things are better on a less-than-full stomach. Bull riding is only one of them.
"So, where are you from, Toby?" she asked, chatting me up while keeping a close eye on the door.
"Montana." I definitely hadn't told her my name.
"They let women ride bulls in rodeos there?"
"Not yet. Not officially. Except at small local shindigs where anything goes." I paid close attention to my beer and pretzels, not wanting to talk much about it. But there was no way I could keep from remembering the surge of wild triumph when I outrode them all, even my brother Ted. The pounding of my blood—the pressure building until I had to explode or die—and the revelation that, to achieve explosion, I needed to wrap myself around Cindy's full, smooth curves.
Back when we were twelve, Cindy hadn't minded a little mutual exploration. She'd been away for a few years, though, and this time, as I tried to pull her close, she twisted loose and ran around the grandstand to throw herself on Ted. Another revelation, that life was a bitch, seared me. No matter how much I could work like a man, even beat the men at their own games, their rewards were officially off-limits to me.
I was young and naive, and the shock filled me with rage. I leapt for my brother, and only the intervention of Miss Violet Montez, sultry lead singer for the intermission entertainment act, kept me from killing him.
"Hey, Tigrina, come with me." She pressed herself against me as Ted struggled to get up. "I have what you need. And what you don't even know you need." And she surely did, or close enough.
When I rode back to the ranch at daybreak, too drained to sort out the remnants of pleasure and pain and smoldering resentment, Daddy was waiting in the barn. He couldn't quite meet my eyes. "Looks like maybe you'd better go East to school the way your Mama always wanted."
__________
Now for the newer story, filling in that particular interlude.
The Bull Rider and the Bull Whip
“Let me handle her, boys. This calls for a woman’s touch.”
The calloused cowboy hands trying to hold me back dropped away. Slender satin-clad arms wrapped around me, long dark hair smelling of sweet lemons brushed my cheeks, and my face was pressed against a scarlet blouse that barely covered the peaks of a magnificent pair of breasts. I had the sense to stop struggling.
“Come along with me now, Tigrina,” Miss Violet Montez, lead singer of the intermission entertainment act, murmured into my ear. “I know what you need. And what you don't even know you need."
And, as it turned out, she surely did.
Her trailer was dented and cramped, but I saw right away that it had a narrow built-in bed. She saw me eyeing it.
“Not yet.” Her voice turned stern. “Wrangling a bull is one thing. Treating a lady right is something else. Especially your first time.”
Well, there wasn’t much I could say to that. In fact, I couldn’t think of anything to say, and, while I surely knew some things I’d like to do, I didn’t know how to go about them with a gorgeous worldly woman like Miss Violet Montez. I’d seen her before at rodeos and such-like gatherings, and fantasized a bit like I did about movie stars and photos in the kind of magazines cowboys tucked under their mattresses in the bunkhouse, but never imagined I’d get this close. “Yes Ma’am,” I said, trying to sound polite with just a hint of cocky, but it didn’t come out right.
“You sit down in that folding chair and don’t stir while I change into something more comfortable.” I perked right up at that, but then she added, “and while you wait, give some thought as to whether you want things sweet, spicy, or downright nasty.”
I knew my preference, even though I wasn’t exactly sure what she meant, but I’d got my brain working enough to know the right answer. “Whatever a lovely lady like you wants is what I want, too.”
“We’ll just see about that.” She scooped up some clothes from the foot of the bed and edged into the tiny bathroom, leaving the door open. I knew better than to get up from my chair, but I did crane my neck to see what I could see. It wasn’t much.
The low-necked satin blouse sailed out through the bathroom door, followed by her voice. “Never came across a girl bull rider before in a regular rodeo. Things must be changing for the better.”
"Not yet,” I admitted. “Not officially. Except at small local shindigs where anything goes." And where my dad was the biggest rancher around and chief sponsor of the rodeo association, but I didn’t say that.
Her short black satin skirt with rows of gold spangles followed the blouse, and so did her high-heeled sparkly cowgirl boots and a pair of nylon pantyhose. I wriggled in the chair to see if I could hook that last with my foot, with no luck, but I did get a glimpse of a bare shoulder through the door.
“Well, you can sure handle a bucking bull, but you need to work on self-control, ” she said over that shoulder. “And it remains to be seen how much else you can handle.”
“Yes, Ma’am.” It seemed like the safest thing to say. Now I could see that she was shrugging into a blue-checked shirt, which didn’t fit much with my hopeful notions of “something more comfortable.”
I looked idly around the trailer. It was dented and shabby, but with colorful pictures on the walls, mostly old rodeo posters, and some fancy duds hanging on hooks, along with…
I only just caught myself from bolting straight up. On one hook, coiled neat as a rattlesnake, hung one of the longest bullwhips I’d ever seen. I looked wildly around again at the posters, and there it was, in a corner of what looked like the oldest one: “Miss Violet Montez, Queen of the Bullwhip.”
__________
Well, I don’t think I made any particular point here. The character from the first story is strong enough to carry the last one, and in both cases I did have quite a bit to say. The idea carries through, but it was born a long time ago. It’s harder these days to come up with new ones.
Or maybe I should just buckle down and write novels with my favorite characters.
[Bull Rider was originally published in the anthology Body Check from Alyson Books in about 2002, reprinted in Best Lesbian Erotica 2003 from Cleis Press, and reprinted a few more times. The Bull Rider and the Bull Whip was originally published in She Who Must Be Obeyed from Lethe Press and reprinted in Best Lesbian Erotica 2015.]
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