Another story!

I've just had a story accepted by Every Night Erotica, a site which publishes short erotic stories (and does pay for them - not a lot, but it pays).

I quite enjoy penning the occasional short story. However I find the process rather different from a novel. In a novel, I've got the space to explore characters and their world at leisure. I can build in various subplots, little obsessions or coincidences, journeys, all kinds of stuff. In a short story, on the other hand, I have to get one single neat concept to work. It's a bit like writing metaphysical poetry - the kind of conceit/concetto that Marino, or Donne, or Crashaw or Marvell uses. I need that conceit to turn the story from 'what we did on our holidays' into something satisfying. For me, 'reader's wives' isn't satisfying in a literary way.

So that conceit might be, let's say, a painting which someone sees and which sets off a memory... returning to the picture at the end (the birth of Venus... 'and yes, she smelt of the sea'...), or a neat revenge, or a sort of amorous duel or challenge. And it still has to be sexy (while the 120 days of Sodom might be a fascinating literary or metaphysical concept, I'm afraid de Sade turns it into a scabrous anarchist-atheist tract rather than an erotic novel).

That means the challenge is to pack the tiny suitcase neatly. As opposed to the novel, which is a kind of unpacking, throwing clothes all over the hotel floor before we get to jump into bed in the final scene, so to speak.

Oh yes, the story. Here it is:
http://www.everynighterotica.com/revenge-is-sweet-anna-austen-leigh/