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....

New novels!

I've just put two new novels up on Smashwords - as well as a couple of free short stories.

A Grand Tour is based very loosely around the travels of Horace Walpole and Thomas Gray. These two young men met at Eton, and took the Grand Tour together; they were both fascinated by ancient Rome, and - unusually at that time - also by the Middle Ages. They were both literary, both art lovers, and, I think - though there's no proof - both in love.

Half way through their tour, they fell out of love, and didn't speak to each other for years afterwards.

I've rewritten the ending. Hell, I've rewritten pretty much everything. It's been fun.

The other novel, Natural Sympathies, follows the progress of a young-ish couple in the 1670s. Margot has married the rather older John Oldcastle in preference to two younger, rather unlovely suitors - but when he proves unable to consummate the marriage, she applies her scientific mind to finding a remedy. This being the early days of the Royal Society, the days of Newton and Sir Christopher Wren, science should provide a cure - but it doesn't, and it's only when a young scholar from Cambridge comes on the scene that things get moving...

They're all available on my author page at Smashwords.

Why? - some thoughts about historical erotica

All writers read. Sometimes they read for pleasure - I recently caught up with G.R.R. Martin's latest instalment in his epic Song of Ice and Fire - and sometimes for education.

I've recently been reading some French erotica - Gamiani, anonymous but possibly by de Musset; de Sade's Justine and 101 nights of Sodom, a bit of Restif de la Bretonne, and two little porn works by Apollinaire - The 11,000 Pricks and Exploits of a Young Don Juan.

All by French writers. And all, also, by men.

What intrigues me is that in almost all of them, there's a fascination with incest. de Sade, of course, has his two sisters, Justine and Juliette, virtue and vice - though they're not incestuous, many of the other characters in the novels are (including Saint-Fond, who fucks his own daughter). Restif de la Bretonne builds incest upon incest, with schemes of impregnating his mother or a sister and then bringing up the resultant children as future objects of his own lust. Apollinaire too keeps his desires in the family - not just the maidservants, but sisters and aunts, are objects of satisfied desire.

I'm bemused by this. Apollinaire's Don Juan and Restif de la Bretonne end up practically like roosters in a barnyard, surrounded by plump hens of ambiguous relationship to themselves. Why did incest have such appeal for the French writers?

In de Sade, it's easy to explain. His obsession with breaking down the structures of the Enlightenment, his antinomian cravings, make mere sex ineffective in its appeal. After all, it's only natural; and what de Sade is after is the sin against nature. For de Sade, incest is one pole of his erotic cravings, and murder the other (echoed by Apollinaire in the 11,000 pricks, which ends with the martyrdom of its hero by bludgeoning to death with cocks, and pretty much runs the gamut of sexual perversion - though without incest, unless I've missed something.)

But I wonder what was the pull for the other writers? I just can't get on their wavelength. Equally, I find it difficult, in the end, to read novels where the women are simply objects - counters in a game, interchangeable - and where the maidservants of the family are quite simply exploitable sexual resources (though that was, of course, the attitude of many men of the 18th and 19th centuries).

Which leaves me putting this reading firmly in the 'educational' camp. But also still puzzling on why incest had such an appeal for these writers.

Full of Holes

I've just read Nicholson Baker's House of Holes. I was rather hoping it would be an interesting book, given his previous intriguing work in Vox (a book which builds up a world through reports of phone sex conversations) and The Fermata (a man who is able to stop time uses it to take women's clothes off, but doesn't seem to know why he does it). It wasn't.

One of the problems is the language. Nicholson Baker can write wittily when he wants to - he makes up words, he uses the thesaurus with glittering abandon - but he doesn't do it here (with a few exceptions; I chuckled at the renaming of one man's John Thomas as his Malcolm Gladwell, and the idea of a Cock Ness Monster). Instead, the work seems almost to parody the threadbareness of porn narrative - fuck me fuck me, MWONGGGG!, clitty, jizm, and wank... It's all rather juvenile.

There's no real narrative structure. There are a couple of tiny amusing narrative threads - the silver couple who end up inside a little egg that we've already seen in someone's pocket, for instance (I imagine it as a kind of netsuke, like the ivory carvings of clams that open up to display a pornographic scene), but overall there's no plot, just a series of encounters.

Nor is there really any concept behind the work. There are occasional flashes of satire - the woman who wants to have sex with a man 'without being judged', and finds a headless man; the woman whose tattoos are removed, and public hair restored, to restore her to 'real nakedness', the nakedness of someone who isn't hiding behind anything - but overall, this is just a slippery, slimy fuckfest.

Oh, and the heterosexuality. Did I mention the heterosexuality? (Put it this way, I don't think I've ever written a full length erotic novel that doesn't at least play with bisexuality or cross-dressing; in fact one of the things I enjoy about using certain historical settings for my non-erotic work is that I'm able to show homosexual relationships as normal.)

In fact, apart from penis-trees, cunt-cradles, penis-sandals (er... what?), and separable genitalia, this is really a tedious, predictable romp through Penthouse fantasies. A line-up of men waiting to be sucked, a line-up of women waiting to be fucked, glory holes and orgy rooms.

And there are no characters. The figures are two-dimensional, just as they are in porn; the housewife, the policeman, the artist, the milkman, are just uniforms stuck on interchangeable bodies in any porn film, and so they are here. There's nothing invested in the characters - and there are no stakes to play for. It's all a bit aimless.

If this had been a shorter book, or if it had been a fake travel essay describing the House of Holes, it might have been amusing. But I just couldn't get the point. It wasn't even all that arousing. Oh dear.

Now if you want real sex, in my opinion, go to Iain M Banks and his Culture - the totally over the top scene of Sharrow having an orgasm to the accompaniment of a thermonuclear device exploding, the idea of changing sex slowly, through some kind of mutation. You don't read Banks for the sex scenes (two pages in three hundred), but because his characters and his worlds are such strong creations, when it happens, it really packs a punch.