50 shades of opinion

Having been writing erotica for several years now, I'm rather annoyed that the media seem to represent 'Fifty Shades' as the first erotic book ever written, or written for women, or by a woman. ('Story of O', anyone? Anais Nin?)

Opinion seems to be polarised. On the one hand there are the nay-sayers. It's really badly written, it isn't Anna Karenina, there are some annoying verbal tics (like the way the heroine keeps saying 'Aargh', a vocalisation more usual in the esteemed pages of the Dandy and the Beano).

On the other hand there are the pro-Greys. They praise the plot, the sex, the fact that they get off on it. They don't (and this might be important) praise the writing or the characterisation, for the most part.

From what I've seen, the book is pretty competently written. It's not Ulysses, it's not Hamlet, it's not the Aeneid or Dante's Divine Comedy, and to be honest, what is? I don't hear people dissing Chuck Palaniuk because he's not Cormac McCarthy.

I just have two problems with the book.

First, the heroine. Argh! (you might say) - what a limp, characterless, dim little bimbo. I really hate this kind of erotica. (It seems quite widespread, perhaps along the lines that fat, plain, frumpish readers want to read about fat, plain, frumpish girls getting soundly fucked. Unfortunately they don't have the wit or the appealing eccentrities of the original, Miss Bridget Jones.)

And secondly, the fact that it's not really serious S&M. Cable ties? Surely not! And to my taste, it doesn't really explore the emotional territory that goes with bondage and domination - the feeling of danger blended with trust. You can get a lot closer to that just by putting on a blindfold and having a friend guide you around the house with it on - something actors often do as a trust exercise in the early stages of rehearsals. To be honest, I felt anyone who has done any sort of mask work as an actor, or used trust games of this sort, understands more about S&M than Mr Grey, who is just a pervy sort of Gordon Gecko.

Yes, I'm annoyed that the press thinks '50 Shades' is the be-all and end-all of erotica. And I do wish I made a bit more money at the writing game. Perhaps if I did a '50 shades of Agatha Christie's Mousetrap', with a murder mystery set in a dungeon, or '50 shades of pink' (the Lesbian version), I'd make a fortune... But heck, I'm going to carry on doing what I'm doing - writing my own imaginations and my own fantasies. Because that's what writers do.

Disclosure: No, I haven't read the whole series. But I have read quite a few chapters, and quite a lot of the comment on the books.

The Austen-Leigh Erotica Paradox

I came across a nice piece of writing by Anais Nin on Letters of Note, via 'The Millions' (an interesting literary RSS feed):

http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/06/sex-does-not-thrive-on-monotony.html

It's absolutely right. He-fucked-her-with-his-big-cock stories, and 'aaaah! fuck fuck fuck I'm coming' dialogue, are all very well for a quick wank if you really have to - but they're totally disposable. You have nothing invested in them.

• Nothing invested in the characters, because a 44 FFF blonde just isn't a character. She's a blow-up doll. (In fact, I rather liked a piece of erotica where the fuckee character was a blow-up doll: http://www.everynighterotica.com/breath-of-life-p-j-rosier/.)
• Nothing invested in the language. It's either Anglo-Saxon obscenities or - which personally I find worse, because it reminds me of visits to the gynaecologist - medically correct terminology. (On the other hand, witty use of language brings an erotic story to life; the wonderful pastiche of fantasy books in 'The Barbarian King' makes the story memorable and amusing. Steve Isaak's 'Blasphemos gamisia', marvellously, takes the deck of cards, cuts, shuffles, and makes an erotic fantasy out of a hand of poker.)
• Nothing invested in the setting. So the characters are, as it were, screwing in a vacuum. Just because you're writing erotica doesn't mean you can't evoke interesting settings, whether gritty urban streets or the canals and carnival masks of Venice, deep Russian forest or the genteel streets of Regency London. (I spent a lot of time getting my Red Shoes just right in this regard. I don't think it would be quite the same story if I transposed it to modern London or New York.)
• Nothing invested in the plot, because it's always the same; fuck, orgasm, and repeat ad infinitum. Monotonous as it is making a loaf of bread, at least after all the kneading and resting, kneading and resting, you finally get to put it in the oven and bake it. But even the most simple story can use wit, or a non-sexual obstacle, to create a plot that works. (At the extreme, my How not to have sex is almost all obstacle - though it packs quite a bit of sex in as well. Julius' story 'Second Serving' does it by introducing one couple actually doing it, and a third party getting excited by it... and has a neat surprise ending.)

So to some extent, the more you write about sex, the less exciting it gets; whereas the more you write about other things - whether that's cards, ballet, weightless environments in space, painting, or blackmail, whatever it is - the more exciting the sex becomes. And that, dear readers, is the Austen-Leigh Erotica Paradox.

Fabrics

Fabrics are incredibly erotic things.

Naturally, anything you wear close to your body can be erotic. But many fabrics are sensuous, inviting - how many times do we hear the rustle of petticoats in a Regecy romance? Herrick's poetry, which I love, is full of the sound and movement of fabric - 'the liquefaction of her clothes', he says of one of his mistresses' silks. (And underlines it by extending his rhymed couplet into a three-line epigram which flows smoothly to its conclusion.)

One striking encounter - being shown a superb shawl from the early nineteenth century, still with its paisley patterns vibrant and even lurid in colour. You don't realise the sheer size of one of these Norwich shawls till you see them - they're not little scarves, but massive shawls that were intended to almost cover your dress; they are almost unmanageably huge, flowing over your fingers, soft, the colours glowing and the patterns changing as you feel them. Woven on a jacquard loom, they have incredibly intricate patterns. I must do something with a shawl like this, I think... a story starts to emerge!

Another experience, seeing a pashmina drawn through a ring to demonstrate its fineness. If you've ever been in a souk or a bazaar in Turkey, the Middle East, Morocco, India, you'll have seen this done - it's a cliche, but it's still impressive. The wonder of such fine materials is their softness, their thinness - sometimes their transparency, too. They are silent - they don't rustle, or scratch, they simply flow.

So there's a lot for me to think about there. Perhaps, also, some silken rope...

By the way, I was rather pleased recently to find a new (at least to me) review of the Diligence de Lyon - http://www.twolipsreviews.com/content/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=4123&Itemid=36. Someone liked it! And I do like the no-spoilers reticence of the reviewer, too.

Where do ideas come from?

One of the questions I most dread as a writer is 'where do you get your ideas from?'

It's like my turning round to you in the pub and saying 'How come you decided to talk about...' [the FA Cup Final, how David Cameron is getting fatter and fatter the longer he lasts as Prime Minister, the death of Princess Diana, Peter Greenaway films]. The fact is, there are so many ideas out there that it's impossible to move for falling over them - they're in the newspaper, in other books, in conversations that I'm participating in (or sometimes eavesdropping on), in observations of daily life (the little girl so absorbed in a book her mother can't get her attention, the toy monkey someone left sitting on a wall in the next street). It's like shooting fish in a goldfish bowl.

It's not where the ideas come from that's the problem. It's recognising the good ones (and knowing why they're good for me, which is quite a specific thing), and developing them from the status of a good idea to a fully worked up story.

So, for instance; 'How not to have sex'. I'd been watching a film - some eighteenth century costume drama, I seem to remember - where the lead characters came so very close to kissing so many times, but never quite did - someone else always came into the room, or someone called for one of them, or something happened... and I thought it was an interesting idea, but how could I make it work in erotica? Then I thought well, instead of gently touching like the film, let's have it quite comic - and then I thought of all the ways a planned quickie just might not happen, and it went on from there.

Sometimes it's just an image, and you worry it round your brain for a few weeks before it catches fire. The red shoes... that's a title with a lot of hinterland, and the image of a little pair of shoes was rattling around my head. Then I thought the cobbler, rather than the wearer of the shoes, would be an interesting focus. But where? Then Hampi in India came to my mind - the bazaar, the backpackers, the clash of cultures - and I adapted it slightly but tried to keep that atmosphere. By then I'd got the main characters, the setting and the rough story - the rest was refinement. (That story's at http://www.everynighterotica.com/red-shoes-anna-austen-leigh/.)

Then sometimes a novel gives you a chance to rewrite history. I've always been convinced that Horace Walpole and Thomas Gray had an affair. They went off on the grand tour together, and came back not speaking to each other... Well, in A grand tour I had a chance to write history the way I wish it had happened; I did change one of the names, as history is only the setting-off point.

So... ideas are everywhere. It's what you do with them that counts!

Another story: Red shoes

I've just had another story published on Every Night Erotica - "Red shoes".

It's nothing to do with the ballet story of the same name! In fact it grew out of some of my travels in Asia, as you may be able to guess when you read it. And no, I'm not the girl in the story.

http://www.everynighterotica.com/red-shoes-anna-austen-leigh/

I've also now got a good few of my books available on Amazon.com, for Kindle -

http://www.amazon.com/Anna-Austen-Leigh/e/B0076PJXYG/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1

Two great sex scenes

I've just been reading Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy - a massive undertaking, roughly similar in pagination to Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, only with vastly more ambition in terms of both parts of the space/time continuum. It's an intriguing mix of hard SF (cryptogams, genetic modification, terraforming) with a number of very human stories; very much not 'blokey' space opera with characters about as sophisticated and interesting as Tarzan running around with ray guns.

Anyway... the reason for posting on it here is a remarkable couple of sex scenes in 'Blue Mars', both relating to Zo, a fourth or fifth generation Martian woman. In the first, she accompanies her friends to the bath house. It's an interesting introduction to the mores of this society - sexual adventure with "scarcely visible strangers", mass orgies ("tabling" and "being tabled"), and relates back to the easy sensuality of the baths in Zygote colony mentioned in the previous book (and I seem to remember also a mention of sex in the baths at some other point, but it was a little mention dropped in passing and apparently, back then, not important... that's the way these books are, something you read a couple of hundred pages ago comes back to you later, when you'd nearly but not quite forgotten in).

But besides all this, I think KSR gets a little bit deeper.

"Sex, sex, there was nothing like sex, except for flying,
which it much resembled: the rapture of the body,
yet another echo of the Big Bang, that first orgasm."

That's really fascinating, and I think lifts the passage out of the prurient and into the poetic; a sense that these Martians are pursuing group sex not because they're decadent, or frivolous, or perverted, but because they think it's important.

Not so much later, Zo meets Saxifrage Russell, one of the original colonisers of the planet, and at this point in the trilogy what, a couple of hundred years old? After a swim, she makes her desires quite obvious, he's slow on the uptake, but they do get it together.

"And though his handling of her was basic, he did not
exhibit any of that hankering for simultaneous affection which
so many of the old ones had, a sentimentality which interfered
with the much more acute pleasures
that could be achieved one person at a time."

That needs some unpacking. There's a certain tetchy lack of tolerance - that's Zo all over, great characterisation; there's the characterisation of somewhat autistic Sax, as "basic" but efficient, a typical scientist of a certain sort; and there's that same idea of sex not involving any personal relationship, just being a sort of a game.

It reminds me of an episode in Edmund White's States of Desire which stuck in my mind for a similar reason, when he meets a Catholic who is a great frequenter of the bath houses, and says his spirituality is intimately related to his decision to have sex with strangers; sex is a wonderful gift, he says, which he wishes to give to as many people as possible. Sex with strangers is pure sex, White says - and I think there's quite a lot of truth in that.

Now I don't necessarily think that's the only kind of sex to have, but I've always had a problem when I hear sex advice that says "the best sex you can ever have is sex with someone you love." It ain't necessarily so, and really we ought to be honest and admit it. There are so many other agendas in a relationship (Did you lock up? Did you put the cat out? do you still love me? is the fact that we only had sex once last month proof that this marriage is on its way out? are you going to be shocked if I ask for anal sex?) that sometimes, the sex really isn't that great. And when you know you don't ever have to talk to this person again, you can lose a remarkable load of inhibitions.

The pity for me is that so many erotica publishers for women are stuck in a Regency Romance view of the world. It's Jane Austen with willies. The heroine can have lots and lots and lots of sex but it's all got to be for lurrrrve. With one man. For ever.

That can be a nice way to write. And quite a few of my books do, pretty much, follow that pattern. Heck, I've even written the tart-with-a-heart-of-gold-meets-the-right-man novel (Emma), which has to be the poster-girl plot for monogamy.

But I do find myself wanting to reclaim the erotic for its own sake.

And I also find myself with only a hundred pages of Blue Mars left to read, and wondering what I'll do with myself when I've finished it.

Postscript.... whether music is like sex.

Listening to Wagner with my other half is wonderful; we reminisce about great productions we've seen; me - Jones; him - Chereau; but sometimes I want Wagner to myself. Particularly if we're talking about the Liebestod.

Men versus women

Men are strange creatures. Sometimes their sexuality makes me rather uncomfortable.

For instance willy-dancing. It's just weird. The idea of using a (flaccid) penis like a belly dancer's tit tassels... Men seem to find this remarkably fascinating. Er, I don't. Funny, but not sexy.

I don't know if it's a cultural thing, or if it's wired into them just by having genitalia that stick out rather than in.

Which makes me wonder; can you tell the gender of the writer when you read a sex scene?

And which also makes me wonder whether I could develop a rather nice little story of a man and a woman actually exploring these differences... despite having been married for five years....