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....