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

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.

De Sade and the enlightenment

I've been reading the Wicked Marquis. And I'm intrigued.

In The Marquise de Theleme he spends the firstparagraph building up a picture of happiness - an enlightened marriage of confidence between two equals, tender sentiments, rationality, equableness. It's a delightful vision. Then, in a couple of sentences, he destroys it - kills the husband, reduces the wife to penury, and starts a train of debaucheries and cruelties.

I'm intrigued by the way he sets up and casts down this image of happiness. Partly, I think, he does so out of a distaste for conventional pieties. A distaste for the kind of reasonableness and 'getting along nicely' that suffices instead of passion. I can share that - I always find the world of Jane Austen tempts me to rip the curtains, to throw ink at the wallpaper, to shout 'fuck!' - anything to bring a bit of real passion to her closeted texts. (Yes, I can read Austen, and I love her style - but God, I would hate to live in her world.) De Sade sees the reasonable and 'good enough' as inauthentic - in which he's an early Existentialist, demanding we live authentic lives, as Sartre does.

And de Sade can use the language of the Enlightenment just as well as any 'enlightened' writer.

But I think that there's a second urge, too. He really does want to destroy. It's not just an urge to cruelty, but also the sheer delight of the child who has built a sandcastle only to smash it, watch it crumble as the tide comes in, jump on the remains till there's only a hump of sand to show where the castle stood. It's a primal urge.

And like any rebellious child, he wants dirt. This isn't erotica - it's not written to delight; he wants dirt, excreta, flabby old bodies, the disgusting rather than arousing. Nobody loves him, everybody hates him, he's going in the garden to eat worms, and dirt, and shit, and look, nobody loves him. But few children devote themselves to writing about it, to smashing their childhood Edens in that way. The marquis de Sade's erotic is an erotic of rebellion.

There's something else that intrigues me. It's the utterly cool, scientific way that de Sade is proceeding here. Later on, in 120 days of Sodom, he actually tries to reduce sexual activity to painting-by-numbers; 120 days, 120 different tortures. (It makes it tedious reading.)

Now this isn't unprecedented in French literature -- particularly when the subject of the experiment is female. (That's an intriguing insight on its own, of course.) Rousseau for instance sees a young woman as something to be experimented with, taught, moulded. In a horrible way, de Sade is actually proceeding in a typically Enlightened way - despite the fact that he's trying to destroy the Enlightenment.

I find de Sade quite intriguing. Some works are more readable than others; at the end, I suspect, he was as mad as the other inhabitants of the Charenton lunatic asylum. But he has his points - and though I may not be following his example in my writing, he's certainly made me think.

Working on the next one

Being a writer is about writing. And keeping on writing. And keeping on...

So I have my second erotic novel submitted (it's been rejected by one publisher and is now with another), and am working on the third, at the same time as working on a historic 'straight' novel (by which you'll gather I don't mean heterosexual. It's got ancient Greeks in it, anyway).

It's a bit different for me as I'm writing in first person for the first time. Alys has already had five husbands - some good, some bad - and is looking for number six. Her father wants to run her life - but she has other ideas, and abetted by her friendly and tolerant priest Father Peter, she decided a pilgrimage to Santiago would do her good.

On the way, she finds a number of rather lovely men... and a sweet young squire for whom she develops a certain affection. But no husband... as yet.

What I love about Alys is that she's very, very smart. She notices little things like the quality of the stitching on a man's clothes. She notices everything going on. But she can't help bragging about it a bit. Getting adjusted to her voice took me a while and I'm still not always sure I've got it.

And she does have the most marvellously generous spirit. Her maternal feelings for the young squire are a case in point - though he can show her a thing or two. (He's imported some spices from the East which can make even the most dreadful cooking edible... what did you think I meant?)

So she's coming along nicely. 10,000 words nicely to be precise, so she's about a quarter of the way to Santiago, and enjoying herself all the way.

Ah, but is she authentically medieval? you might ask.

Two answers to that I think. First, does it really matter? (Heresy I know to some.) This is a merry romp, it's not intended to be completely realistic. Actually, it's quite realistic because I've put in enough hours as a medieval re-enactor, not to mention on Chaucer*, Gower and Lydgate, to get quite a lot of it right.

But secondly, I'm quite sure that many women in the Middle Ages did break out of the narrow constraints their society put on them. Margery Kempe for instance decided to become a celibate and dress in white, told her husband in no uncertain terms he wasn't having any more of that, and went off to visit Rome and Jerusalem. Other women no doubt welcomed the onset of menopause as a great opportunity for consequence-free sex - possibly not with their husbands.

We usually only hear about this from the mouths of men, of course, usually telling us just how wicked these women were. Sometimes from legislators or judges.

'Reclaiming' Alys has been fun. And continues to be fun. I wish I had her healthy, robust approach to life!




* Those of you who know your Chaucer may recognise Alys.
"Why should men elles in their bookes set,
That man shall yield unto his wife her debt?
Now wherewith should he make his payement,
If he us'd not his silly instrument?"

Why I write what I do

I don't like being asked what I do.

"What do you do, Anna?"

"I'm a writer."

"Oh. What do you write?"

I usually say "Whatever pays." Last week it was an e-book on stock trading, a couple of articles on Istanbul, and three chapters of a book based on the life of Emma Hamilton. Come out with that little lot and I can see I'm losing my audience...

And also, I write erotica.

That gives many people the wrong idea. An awful lot of men seem to think that writing erotica means I'm 'available'. (Judging by the average attractiveness of the men who think this, they also seem to believe that erotica writers are blind ...)

So, why do I write erotica?

Well, as above; it pays. That's one reason.

Secondly, I find it an interesting arena in which to play slightly naughtily with different concepts. For instance, a voyage through the senses, each one taken separately. Or the idea that through acting, we're able to access different parts of ourselves. I like to be naughty and introduce historical characters in cameo roles (I'm just researching Daniel Solander, a Swedish botanist who worked in London in the late eighteenth century). For me, this 'naughtiness' as a writer is profoundly satisfying.

If you like this kind of writer's naughtiness, by the way, may I recommend Kingsley Amis's 'The Alteration' - a marvellous work of alternate history that is artful, arch, and thoroughly entertaining?

I write historical erotica and it's an interesting challenge to immerse myself in the life of a period, whether that's eighteenth century Europe, the Camino de Santiago in Chaucer's time, or Ottoman Istanbul. (By the way, one of the most challenging aspects is getting the clothes right; did eighteenth century ladies wear knickers? Do men's shirts unbutton down the front or did they have to be taken off over the head? Just how do you get a man out of his braies? It does help if you know some re-enactors.)

I enjoy writing strong female characters. It's actually highly enjoyable to lead your heroine along a path of sexual self-discovery. There's certainly more than a little feminism in what I write.

Erotica has less pressure than 'literary' fiction. I don't have the mind-freezingly oppressive thought that I'm not matching up to Shakespeare, Milton, John Updike, Jane Austen. They didn't write erotica. I do also write other genres, but I enjoy erotica because it's an open field - I can be inventive in my plotting or narrative structure, I can enjoy a little escapade.

And lastly... I was relieved to find that the late lamented John Updike found writing sex scenes something of a turn-on. It's not just me, then!