Sharazade

My publisher, Fanny Press, is seeking manuscripts for erotic literature and non-fiction. In their words:

EROTICA AUTHORS: Fanny Press wants to see your manuscripts! We consider all types of erotica: gay, straight or polyamorous, memoirs, BDSM … We’re fine with pushing boundaries, but we also consider the less edgy stuff, as long as you can keep the pages turning and the steam rising. Contact us at info@fannypress.com. Best length: between 35,000 and 70,000 words. Include a short bio and synopsis.

I’ve been very happy with them; specifically, I liked the attention my book got from the editor, and how easy it was to communicate with the editor. She was happy to go back and forth with me on this comma and that vocabulary until things were right. When the book first came out, there was a formatting error that took out the margin indents in the final story; when I let Fanny Press know, they updated the file on Amazon and the problem was fixed. It wasn’t a huge thing, but it mattered to me, and I was pleased that it mattered to them. As an author, I like a publisher who cares about my book!

Not only that, but they have a fun name. In American English, fanny is a slang term for one’s posterior, rear end, booty, ass. However, to speakers of British and Australian English, a fanny is a woman’s … lady business (a term that will always remind me of the hilarious Woomba commercial). For erotica, though, either meaning works, doesn’t it? I have no idea what it means to Canadians… can anyone enlighten me?

NOTE: If I do not post anything new before November, this post explains why.

“Do you have any flash drives that don’t look like flash drives?” I asked the sales clerk.

“Um… what?”

I guess he was just stalling for time, to mentally run through his inventory, because the question seemed perfectly clear to me. I said it again anyway, though.

“Maybe… um… what do you want it for?”

“Smuggling porn,” I said, and then we both laughed.

Except I wasn’t kidding. Well, OK, except about the “smuggling” part. I’m not looking to sell anything, I just want to transport a few things, like e-books. Given that more countries, such as Australia, are now sometimes scanning laptops for “pornography,” I didn’t want to have to explain anything questionable. Would the cover of an erotica e-book be considered pornographic? Well, probably not in Australia. But how about in the Middle East? At the border is not the best time to find out!

For short trips, I’d just leave anything questionable at home. But for a longer stay, well… the e-books are ones I’ve promised to review. It’s work (albeit pleasurable work). And I would like to be able to take my work with me.

His selection of flash-drives-that-don’t-look-like-flash-drives was limited to skateboards and snowboards (and not in very “me” colors), and they were on the expensive side for the amount of storage space they were offering. In the end, I decided to use my Dropbox instead; that way, I’m not carrying anything on my person, and I can pick up my files anywhere I can get an Internet connection (which always sounds easy…). If I create new documents, I can post them there as well, and pick them up again at home on my return.

I’m not sure I’ll be able to access this blog while I’m away, especially since it’s tagged as containing mature content. If I can post, I will (with at least one review of a very interesting collection!). If I can’t, then you’ll just have to wait for November.

Traveling to places with very different cultures is a good time to think about abstract issues as well as very practical ones like carrying computer files. Is erotica “wrong”? Clearly I don’t think so, or I wouldn’t read it, write it, and write about it. But do I want to aggressively parade that stance around the world? Well, no, no I don’t. Certainly not on a personal level — I have no wish to be deported or jailed. Do I think though that some societies are too sexually repressed? Well… yes, I do (including my own). As to how that can change, and whether a non-member of that society has any part to play in such a change, that is a subject for a longer conversation, and my opinion on it shifts around all the time. For this trip, though, I know that any good I could do would be more than undone by my offending people around me. I write erotica to please and entertain, not to shock and upset.

The final thing I did here on this blog before leaving on my trip was to empty my spam folder. As usual, there were lists of links to pharmaceuticals and sexual aids; one to linoleum flooring; a few for meeting hot girls; a sprinkling of the kind that make me laugh the most, that say that they’ve found the article “very useful for my college class” (except they never manage to spell “college” correctly); and one that contained just this line, with a few links to shopping sites:

For me I am a fan of online shopping for the reason that we need not to go anywhere.

I like online shopping too — that’s the best way for me to buy only the item that I really need, and not get distracted by extraneous things on shelves. But! It doesn’t at all override my need to go anywhere. I love traveling. I travel mostly for work these days, yes, but I love it all the same. New people, unfamiliar languages, suspicious food, surprising schedule changes, breathtaking sights, shoddy facilities/palatial facilities, I love it all. My next collection of erotic stories will also be centered around a travel theme, but this time with more of a focus on settings.

So sucks to you, Mr. Online Shopper Spam Man, I deleted your comment with double the usual satisfaction!

I’ve always been a bit suspicious of those guys (and gals) who say, in their personal ads or their earnest conversations, “I’m not into playing games.” Really? I think. Then you’re possibly not much fun. It has been pointed out to me that what they might really mean is that they don’t like deception. OK, fair enough, but then why not say that? To me, games are not deceptions, they are fun; and I like fun with my sex. Games (especially verbal ones), and laughter, and tickling, and just general having-a-good-time-together.

I was delighted then to be sent a whole book of fun sex. Spark My Moment (Xcite, 2010) is a Jeremy Edwards extravaganza — 25 short stories, and 13 “moments,” or pieces of flash fiction. I guess it’s the presence of the “moments” that suggested the title, which had me kind of confused at first. It seems, I don’t know, too tepid somehow, for a book of explicit fun. It reminded me of that song Light My Fire, the Doors’ ode to bad rhymes, only weaker (yeah, yeah, I like that song too, but come on! “You know that I would a liar / If I was to say to you / Girl, we couldn’t get much higher”? In college we’d drink a few beers and play this game where we’d sing along but have to make up our own ridiculous lines to rhyme with “fire,” like, oh, “A horse has got a dam and sire,” “I can’t decide which guy to hire,” “The hobbits all came from the Shire”) (well, it’s more fun with beer, that’s all the more I’m going to say about that).

Sorry. That digression rather ran away with me. What I was trying to say is, here is a nice thick collection of stories that are all fun. They’re intelligent. They’re clever. Some of them made me laugh out loud; a lot of them made me wet. They’re mostly (but not exclusively) written from a male point of view, with frank appreciation for the woman (or women!) involved. There’s nothing dark here—no revenge sex, no jealous sex, no “I’m doing this because I can’t think of a way to get out of it without a fuss, but I really wish I weren’t” sex. No self-punishing sex, no sad sex. And yet there is still plenty of variety. There are new lovers and married couples. There are brazen lovers and shy lovers, confident lovers and clueless lovers. But every story is uplifting in some way.

I think the best way to explain why I like these stories is to show some excerpts. I can’t really excerpt from the “moments,” though, because it would ruin them, I think, to take out a small piece. So you will just have to trust me when I say they’re excellent.

From the stories, then.

One thing I like is the lush descriptions, like this one from Mom-and-Pop Enterprise: Mom wanted it both ways: she wanted the intense, dark-chocolate rush of secret satisfactions; and she wanted the frothy strawberry milkshake of showing off – and even, perhaps, the caramel drizzle of being discovered.

From Cordelia’s Significance: Her hair, which was the colour of an oak bookcase, curved to a couple of adorable points in the vicinity of her chin, and her smile was a smidgen off-centre. “Oak bookcase.” I just love that! I know that color, everyone does, but it’s not the same old description you’ve read before (that would be “honey”).

I was impressed with the character insights. They’re not overdone, you’re not hit over the head with psychoanalysis, and these parts don’t take over the stories, but—they gave me pause, they made me remember people I know who are (or at least were) just like that. From Passive Vocabulary: In the course of our four months together, Penny had unconsciously tried to become more like me, while I had unconsciously tried to become more like her. In retrospect, I knew that we‘d been jointly drifting into an artificial identity that was somewhat alien to each of us. And by the end of it, though the idiom and rhythm of our speech, the sound of our laughter, and even some of our body language showed great similarity, both of us had become people we couldn’t stand to be in the room with. The chap in Being Myself muses about his sense of self: I think identity is a lot like hit-or-miss photography. We keep taking pictures of ourselves, in different outfits and lighting and contexts, hoping for a likeness that resonates … and of course the actual person is infinitely kinetic and complex, and can never quite be captured as a concept, even by himself.

Of course—of course, of course—I like the sexy stuff. This excerpt from Vacation Plans describes the man catching the scent of his lover in her bedroom: It smells like the essential, private you. En route, I have passed the appetizing, fruity scent of your hair; the refined, floral scent of your cologne; and the clean, tangy scent of your deodorant. But the scent I have tracked down is completely distinct from all of these. It is incomparably richer and grander … and more genuine. It is your most intimate scent – the familiar, intoxicating aroma of your sopping, aroused cunt, a sharp, earthy, ultra-feminine essence that almost defies description but which connects directly to my most primal urges. It is a scent that, when you are present, unabashedly cries, “Fuck me!”

In contrast is this sweet description of a man with a very shy, almost silent woman (most women in erotica, if you hadn’t noticed, tend to orgasm at a neighbor-awakening volume), in Why Georgina?: She enjoyed being kissed there, more than licked. So he kissed and kissed and kissed and kissed it, while her one-time whispered utterance of the phrase “kiss it” repeated in his head to the beat of a fox-trot. … Georgina was a woman who even came quietly, shuddering soft “oohs” into the armrest of the couch.

There’s a wonderful little story, From Tip to Toe, about a woman who doesn’t show her feet at first, because she prefers to keep just a little part of herself hidden until she is fully ready to give herself. Her lover never pushes her, but wondering about what her feet must look like eroticizes her feet over time, and the descriptions of how he comes to think of her feet are just lovely.

And I like the cleverness, the fun of it all. Some of it is in short descriptions: Monica’s mouth was as dry as the Economist while she awaited clarification (Mom-and-Pop Enterprise); some of it in longer repartée:

Kirsten guffawed. “You’re thinking she might dash over here and eat me now?” How wonderful it was, Glen reflected, that Kirsten had so quickly embraced the scenario that her only concern was as to its timing. Clearly – and, after a decade of marriage, not surprisingly – she liked the idea.

“No, I was thinking tonight. But we might want to catch her ASAP, before she makes other dinner plans. I thought I could try a recipe from that new fusion cookbook.”

“What if she says no?”

“Then I’ll make something more conventional. I’m sure she likes pasta.”

(Becky Holds the Floor)

There was even one story all done as a mock Rudyard Kipling tale, of the Just-So Stories variety. I think Mr. Edwards and I must share a similar streak of humor; if he came over, he might ask me, “Do you like Kipling?” and I’d say, “I don’t know; I’ve never kippled,” and he’d know just what I meant. And then he might let me review another story collection.

My favorite story in the collection was the second one, Passive Vocabulary (well, it was kind of a tie with Ironic Lingerie), about a man who loves a woman who loves words. The man is intellectual, but not used to expressing himself in the same way she does.

“My lust for you is buttressed by our intimacy.” Buttressed. She was always using words that I found too beautiful to say aloud, words that I was afraid I wasn’t handsome enough to use. It was as if she could reach in and pluck all the finest nuggets from my passive vocabulary.

In any event, the gist of it now was that she wanted me inside her. And since I wanted to be all over her, it seemed we could cut a mutually satisfactory deal.

She opted to cut, flipping over and sliding her thighs apart like two glistening chunks of plastic-coated playing cards – revealing an ace.

I, of course, dealt.

It is not the fault of the stories, of course, that I would have preferred a hard copy—unfortunately, this collection, at least so far, is available only as an e-book or for the Kindle. Especially with the sprinkling of the “moments” throughout, I often found myself wanting to flip back to something, and (for me) that’s just more awkward with an electronic file. Also, you know how it is with a .pdf file—the pages on the right, the little thumbnails, are numbered by what page they actually are. But the pages in the book, those start from 1 on the first page of stories—which is page 7 of the actual document. But it’s the thumbnails on the right whose page #s you can see, which makes it awkward to try to find a story that starts on page 131; you have to keep mentally adding seven.

However, it’s a minor annoyance, and certainly not worth forgoing the book for! Buy the e-book version here, and the Kindle version here.

[Note: The publisher, Xcite, is British, and so therefore is the language. I left in the British spellings in the excerpts, but—oh, forgive me—I had to Americanize the quotation marks. I hope that’s not illegal or something. They do take payment in dollars, by the way.]

Author J.E. Taylor interviewed me for her blog on reading, writing, and publishing.

Paper or plastic? Leather or lace? Beach or mountains? Zombies or demons? I spill it all…

(We also talked about writing and publishing.)

When I was in high school, I found this Valentine’s Day card. On the cover, it said, “Kiss me, stranger!” and then inside it said, “Aw, come on… you can kiss stranger than that!” I thought it was hilarious (I was easily amused in high school) (well, I’m easily amused now too!), so I bought it for my boyfriend.

He was less amused. “You think I kiss strangely?” he asked, a bit worried. No, no, no. OK, not everyone appreciates every joke. But his questioning it did make me consider just why I found it funny. It’s not that odd kissing is humorous to me — no, it was the verbal play, the confusion between the adjective and the (wrongly formed) adverb. And indeed, I still enjoy that sort of linguistic humor today.

One of the stories in Transported, “Just Browsing,” was entered in the online 2009 Erotic Writing contest at bettersex.com, and made it to the final round. Stories are judged by reader votes, which means that authors are motivated to spread word of the contest to their friends and their friends’ friends and so on (which I’m sure is the point). I have a few friends who are not shocked by my erotica writing, so I let them know about the contest.

One friend emailed to say she had voted for me and loved the story, and her friend had voted for me too, even though she hadn’t liked the story (so thanks? I think?) because she doesn’t like “stranger sex.”

My first impulse was to say, “Oh, I can write about much stranger sex than that!”, remembering that old Valentine. Though I’m glad I didn’t.

I’m also glad that I didn’t say the second thing that popped into my head, which was, “But they weren’t strangers.”

Now, why would I have even thought that? In the story, a woman traveler visiting an unfamiliar city stops into a used bookstore. While perusing a coffee table art book of erotic Japanese woodblock prints, a man comes up behind her, looks at the book over her shoulder, and dot dot dot. They exchange a few words, and even their names at the end, but no, they hadn’t met before.

They weren’t friends. They weren’t colleagues, or roommates, or acquaintances. They were strangers. I see that, yes, I do. There is no way for them to have been more strangers to each other unless one of them hadn’t come into the bookstore.

So what was I thinking?

What I did say to my friend in response, to pass on to her friend, was “Think of them as friends who just hadn’t met yet.” Which is really how it was, in my mind. I was making a distinction, even without really being conscious of it, between “strangers who remain strangers” and “strangers who really belong together but have not met yet, who are so compatible that skipping a few weeks of dating and going straight to the sex is entirely appropriate.” That kind of stranger.

Certainly we have lots of examples of that kind of stranger in fairy tales. (Digression: For some reason, fairy tales have been getting a lot of attention recently in the world of erotic writing — check out Alison’s Wonderland, for example, an anthology of erotic versions of classic fairy tales.) There’s no sex in traditional fairy tales, at least not the versions I had as a child, but people certainly do fall so deeply in love that they marry on the basis of first meetings. Sleeping Beauty was asleep when the prince fell for her, and upon waking, felt the same. Snow White was actually mistaken for dead when her prince fell in love — he wasn’t smitten by her vivid conversation. It’s not just Western fairy tales; you see similar instances of instant attraction, or even attraction before the two have met, just based on “he heard word of the king’s youngest daughter” in Russian tales, Chinese ones, and so on.

Some people see one of the messages of tales like that as “What men really value in women is physical beauty.” I don’t deny that that message is there, but it’s not the one I found. What I believed was more along the lines of, “When two people are right for each other, they’ll know it instantly, and they’ll be ready to act on it.” I’m not defending that as a fine philosophy, I’m only saying it’s the message I got. And I think there must be some of that in many of my stories. I believe it’s OK for these characters to have sex with each other on the spot because I do see them as compatible. They’re not making the wrong choice. They’re just… cutting through some red tape. Skipping a few traditionally preliminary steps.

I don’t recommend moving with that sort of speed in real life (or not all the time, at least). But I’m not writing dating manuals, I’m writing fantasies. Fairy tales couldn’t be acted out either — it wouldn’t be the Princess and the Pea or even the Princess and the Penis, but the Princess and the Restraining Order. Snow White and the Seven Felony Charges. But — I do like the idea of instantly recognizable compatibility, whether at a party or on a plane or in a bookstore.

I’ll close with a photo of a little fairy tale book I picked up at an English bookstore in the Middle East recently. I’m afraid that inside, the story is just the traditional one. But I do like its cover!