Sharazade

I’m visiting virtually this week!

Today my post “The Accidental Brazilian” (by which I do not mean the nationality!) is up at Tracy Ames’ blog, Interracial Erotica. I love the pictures she added! (The first one is mine.) They captured the feeling perfectly…

M post on “Breathing” for Oh, Get a Grip has been posted here. Check out other top erotica writers’ take on the same topic, and other great topics in the archives.

If posts here have been sparse, it’s only because I’ve been traveling and unable to get into my home here much. But I’m back now!

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I would describe them as more travel-themed than travel stories… These are character stories, each uniquely told through a unique voice. They are characters going on journeys who happen to be going on trips.

A nice review of Transported: Erotic Travel Tales from erotica writer Gregory Allen. What I like even more than praise (and I do like praise, don’t get me wrong!) is the feeling that someone reading really “got” me, and he did. He also has the distinction of being the first reviewer to specifically call out “Sales Pitch,” my personal favorite in the collection.

Read the full review here (and then check out the other blog entries on writing. Good stuff!).

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One nice thing about working overseas on temporary assignments is how easy it is to meet other expats, at least on a superficial level. People who’ve been in the host country longer take you under their wing and invite you out to dinner and parties, take you shopping, and introduce you to people.

I’m currently in the Middle East, and was invited out to dinner a few nights ago by a woman I had met on previous trip. She also invited two Americans here on a short-term assignment. We were coming to the end of our meal, and the following transpired:

Woman: So, I’m having a small party tomorrow night, and you guys are of course invited.

Two Buff Guys: Thanks, we’d love to come.

Woman: And Shar, you’re invited too.

Me: Oh, thank you. I’ll be there.

Woman: Actually… Um…. Shar, we were thinking that maybe you could read a bit from your book, and we could brainstorm some ideas for your next one.

Me: [Total confusion. I write a rather specialized type of non-fiction, and while these were all nice people, they frankly weren’t qualified to help me with ideas.]

Me again: [Penny drops] Um… So… does the entire expat diplomatic community now know that I write smut?

Woman: Oh, no, not at all. I only told these guys so they’d know you’re cool.

Me: [I’m “cool”? Cool!]

Woman: And X knows, of course, and Y, and I think Z… maybe a few other people. But certainly not everybody. So will you do it?

Me: Um…. sure! I’d be happy to!

That was the right answer, as apparently X, Y, and Z had already been invited. We met at the woman’s apartment the following evening. One person brought his Kindle — in fact, he’d already bought my book. Some beers were opened, we chatted a bit… and somehow, I guess because no one was really in charge, the formal reading never really happened. But the brainstorming did.

First, I had a plot question for the group for one partially written story (I’ll spare you the question, but the answer was “a threesome”), and also some setting questions for the woman, because I want to set a story in a country I’ve only visited but she lived in for two years. Was this plausible? How could the characters do that? Would she read the story once I’d drafted it to make sure it sounded realistic? (Yes, she will!)

Then we talked a bit about the country we’re all in now, and what the erotic possibilities could be there. That was the most lively discussion, not surprisingly. I talked about my reluctance to write a story about a Westerner and a local person from, well, any of the Middle Eastern countries I’ve visited “getting it on,” just because the cultural implications are so complex. The others didn’t seem as bothered by the idea. “It’s just fantasy,” as one person put it.

However, the objections are my own personal ones, not something I’m picking up from publishers or readers, and there’s no reason to write something I’m not comfortable writing. For the record, I am not AT ALL opposed to bi-cultural relationships; however, they are (at least, in my opinion) more complex and layered than I care to investigate in a short erotic story. A novel, perhaps. 3000 words, no; not for me. I asked if the idea of one expat meeting another expat (or two travelers meeting) in an exotic locale was still hot, and the answer was a resounding “Yes!”

It was interesting to discuss things like story and setting and characters with people who were not writers. They didn’t give a hoot about “the markets” or what else might already be out there or what was currently popular. What they cared about, too, seemed not to be this sex act or that one. The strongest interest was in the story line gimmick. A tribal kidnapping! And then she’s rescued by a hot security guy! Or… there’s a flood, and their landrover is stuck!  They’re on a rooftop overlooking the old city, and there’s no one around…

It encouraged me because that too is what’s most interesting to me. Of course, it’s erotica; the sex counts. But what I really care about is why these two (or more) people came together (so to speak), and what they’re like. What does having sex accomplish for them? If I know those things, I can fill in the rest. If I don’t know those things, there is no story, and I can’t even get started.

It was just a bit surreal, I have to say, to sit down with a bunch of mostly strangers (and a few barely acquaintances) and talk about writing smut. But what a nice opportunity. If such ever comes up again, I’ll grab it.

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A recent thread on a writer’s list, about being busy and handling all of one’s projects, started by asking, “Do you write one story or book at a time, finish it, and then begin another; or do you have several concurrent projects?”

As is the way with such threads, the responses addressed the question but also various side topics, including multitasking and whether or not such a thing is truly possible. One person who said it wasn’t observed, “You can’t write and do laundry at the same time.”

That remark struck me because my immediate reaction was, “But I do that all the time.” I don’t actually handle many household chores, but laundry is one of them, and it takes some time, especially the folding and sorting and putting away, and it is one of my prime opportunities for writing fiction. When I said so, though, the person was confused. It simply wasn’t possible, she said. If you are picking up a shirt and folding it, you are not holding a pencil and moving it across paper, nor are you typing.

Well, I’m not going to argue with that. But I am going to argue that there is far, far more to “writing” than typing. Now, different people write in different ways, and I certainly can agree that for some people, writing is mostly (I can’t quite say entirely, but I can say mostly) a matter of sitting down at the keyboard and doing it. However, for me, most of my writing is not this stage of transcription.

First, I need an idea. It needn’t be a fully formed idea; it could be a plot line (or a piece of a plot line), it could be a compelling character, it could be an interesting setting, it could be a theme. Staring at a computer screen or a blank sheet of paper does not bring this idea to me. Ideas come when and where they will — but most often when I am doing something completely different. I could be talking to someone, or engaging in sport, or watching a movie, or listening to music, or wandering through a museum, or reading a call for submissions. Ideas are a bit like love, though, in that the harder you chase them, the faster they run; and it’s often best to simply live your life and wait for them to come and find you.

Once I have an idea, that idea must be expanded into a full story that includes a complete (or complete enough, if it’s a short story) plot, with characters, setting, and all that. That too is a mental stage, not a typing stage, and again, I carry out this planning while engaged in other things.

I also need language — each individual sentence. This, for me, is still a mental stage. I arrange words into sentences, and sentences into paragraphs, and I go back and change words and rearrange sentences all in my head. The shower is an excellent place to do this; I also do it while I’m walking, and of course while doing the laundry.

Now, I can’t do two mental things at the same time, or at least, not successfully. I can’t talk on the phone to a friend and revise a paragraph. I can’t be checking my Facebook, or singing a song, or answering email. It’s best if I’m not cooking dinner (best for the dinner, I mean, not for the writing). But a rote physical activity, like laundry, or weeding, I can certainly do while working on a paragraph or a page.

Once I have the story more or less written in my head, at that point I sit down with my laptop and type it out. Now, once it’s written, I still play with it; I’ll still go back and add sections and delete sentences and change words. I might show it to someone and revise it based on his or her comments. But really, the bulk of the work is done. From typing on, it’s more polishing than constructing.

Because I can’t possibly have a story unless I do all of the thinking — there simply wouldn’t be anything to type — I call this thinking “writing.”

Does it matter? I mean, does it matter if I call my thinking “writing”? Yes, I think it does, and here’s why. I don’t think I’m alone in this. Even if other writers do less of the writing in their heads, I’m pretty sure most writers do some planning in their heads.

The point of recognizing this is that you can then consciously plan this time, and you can respect this time.

For example, say you see a call for submissions with a due date a month away. Do you have a month in which you could write? Perhaps not, if you are looking only at typing time. But perhaps you do, if you are aware of how much of the work you can do even when you don’t have typing time.

The other side of that coin is someone who thinks perhaps that having a block of six hours in front of the computer is enough time to finish a certain amount of writing, and then feels frustrated when it isn’t — because the necessary groundwork wasn’t done. Without that idea-gathering, many writers stare at the screen and panic because they assume they must have “writer’s block” when the words don’t come.

I’ve seen writers beat themselves up over “not having done anything all week” because they don’t have a Word file or a printout; and yet, they have been writing, and furthermore, making progress. They don’t give themselves credit for the work because it’s mental.

For me, a turning point in how I view the creative process came when I took on a large editing project for a publisher that involved some significant re-writing. I negotiated an hourly rate for my work, and then the project manager said, “Don’t forget to charge us for the time you spend thinking.” Oh? Wow. Because if she hadn’t said that, no, I would not have billed for that. I would have spent hours on my own, solving problems and moving words and pages around in my head, and then billed for the time I spent sitting at the computer. Once someone offers you money for something, it must be “real work.” That, for me, was the moment when I accepted thinking as “real work,” and began to examine, and accept, the significance of this step in my writing.

Folks of a certain age (and nationality) might remember the snarky comment of US President Lyndon Johnson, who said of Congressman Gerald Ford that he was so dumb he couldn’t fart and chew gum at the same time (this remark made it to the popular press in the milder form of his not being able to walk down the street and chew gum at the same time). Clearly, not everyone can multitask, and some tasks go better together than others. I’m curious, though, about how others write. Do you consider planning a part of “writing”? How do you do your brainstorming and drafting — in your head? on paper? At what point do you move to the computer (or paper)? How well do you know (and respect) your own writing process?

Free image courtesy of graur razvan ionu.

Image: graur razvan ionut / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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This was a hard book for me to pick up. I mean that literally, because I lost it for a few weeks — in my own house. It arrived in December, with its attractive cover and enticing contents, just a few days before my conservative parents arrived for the holidays. I tucked it into a concealing brown fabric cover and tucked it unobtrusively, spine inwards, into a shelf of books somewhere. Somewhere. But I have a lot of books in a lot of bookshelves, and upon my parents’ departure, I couldn’t find it again.

If I’m waiting for a book to arrive in the mail, I don’t really think about it until it arrives. But searching for this volume (a bit frantically, because it would be rather embarrassing to have to buy myself another copy), I found myself considering its possible contents.

I hope it doesn’t mean something bad about me that I was thinking about what I didn’t want. For one thing, I didn’t want to read about bondage practices that were distractingly unsafe or unrealistic. Master Marchand looped the rope around his slave’s neck, tightened the slipknot, and then tossed the other end of the lasso around the horn of his nervous stallion’s saddle. No, that wouldn’t do. But neither did I want a safety lecture: Having earned his EMT license, Lester carefully adjusted the wide flat strap against Felicity’s skin. “Notice how I can slip two fingers under the bond, assuring me that circulation is not cut off?” he asked the paramedic watching in the corner. I also didn’t want a how-to demo: Domme Dominique leaned in and breathed into Sam’s ear, “Now, the right end of the rope is a good three inches longer than the left. I take that right end in my hand, and then the rabbit goes around the tree, down the hole…”

Oh, joy! There was the book, sandwiched between Tahar Ben Jelloun’s L’Enfant de sable and L’Écrivain publique. I guess I’d figured my parents weren’t going to be poking around that shelf since they don’t speak French.

I know you probably saw this line coming from the beginning, but I’m going to say it anyway: a hard book to pick up, but then a hard one to put down. One nice thing about short stories is that you can read them one at a time, so if you only have a few moments you can still slip a little reading in — which is what I had been intending to do, actually, but I wound up reading it in three sittings. Oh well! The stories are all good enough to go back and re-read, so I will still be able to stretch it out.

This volume contains 20 short stories, all linked by the theme of bondage. Not a medium-quality story in the whole lot. Truly. This is an excellent collection. I had my favorites, sure (and not necessarily the ones I would have predicted if I’d read a summary first), but every single one was good. What I especially liked was the level of insight in each story. They’re not how-to manuals; they’re more how-it-feels and why-I’d-want-this stories, and they felt true to me. And they are, above all, stories, with plots and compelling characters and settings you can picture.

If I fully reviewed all 20 stories, my parents would be back again before I could finish, so I’ll just give a few sentences about each one and some representative phrases.

The Long Way Home, Elizabeth Coldwell. This was one of my favorites. A great premise, and extra credit for descriptions with just the right amount of details: a laburnum tree; a nonchalant click. Very hot and  and very loving, two qualities I especially appreciate in erotica.

His Little Apprentice, Jacqueline Applebee. Usually stories have the dominant partner the more experienced, so this was a nice twist, where the person to be bound lures the … binder? bondager? guy-who-does-the-tying, whatever he’s called. “Mine.” Yeah, that says it all.

Foreign Exchange, Evan Mora. I loved the concept behind this title — first of all, it’s about a Canadian couple in New York; sometimes culture shock is the stronger for being unexpected (as when you move from one country to another that you think is quite similar); then this couple meets another with different ways. It’s the way she says it: that perfect tone that implies my permission is not being sought and that compels my immediate compliance.

The Ingénue, Janine Ashbless. A historical! (At least, that’s how it read to me.) She wanted to prick the bladder of his arrogance… Many books and sites on writing bang on and on about the need for a punchy, clever beginning, but I have a weakness for a strong ending, like this story had.

Reasoning, Tenille Brown. The point was, Ray was trying to fuck her to death. This story was such fun. The only way the heroine could get her guy to shut up and listen was to force him. So, Carlotta had said “No,” just like that, and it hadn’t really felt bad at all. It had felt damned good, in fact.

Subdue, Dusty Horn. Another favorite. Fantastic descriptions (rich even alto; morsels of orders), hot lines (“This is not your collar. It’s mine, for you to wear.”), and, as I mentioned above, insights into the mind of the person submitting (“I don’t always know how to be good.” / “I guess I just don’t want to go down without a fight.”).

Relative Anonymity, Emerald. An ex-husband who parted on good terms returns — with a surprise. At that moment, she would have sworn he had just watched the same movie of their lives together with her, some connection in their look allowing them to share the same memory.

Closeted, Emily Bingham. What really goes through the mind of a submissive being punished? …I’m supposed to be thinking about something important while I’m in here. Like the true nature of my submission. Screw that, I’m going to piss in his closet — that will show him. Yeah, but later, she gets hers: Apparently, I am a whore and loving it.

Vegas Treat, Rachel Kramer Bussel. A nice treatment of a girl’s first time being tied; not the innocent who needs to be pressured, but a natural who just needed the opportunity: I wasn’t a virgin, or anything, obviously, but maybe I’d been meeting the wrong men because none had ever proposed so much as a threesome, let alone bondage and sex toys. I loved this sentence: His voice was so sensual, so smoky and intense, the aural equivalent of rich Texas barbecue, that I melted into it the way barbecue melts on my tongue.

The Cartographer, Angela Caperton. This one blew me away. I actually teared up a little in the middle of reading it. The man is tattooing a map onto his lover’s body; but what will he do when his canvas is completed? From the opening: My body is a map. The continents are accurate and bold, the oceans pale peach. Arching shoals rise in the curves of flesh, and muscles cradle the gentle bend of bay shores. Beautiful, throughout.

The Apiary, Megan Butcher. I want her to spin a story, a fairy tale of our time together, not this story with no happy ending. Sweet and deep, a look at how a couple recovers from an encounter gone wrong.

Wired, Lisabet Sarai. Geek love! Computers and online shenanigans and a “mysterious foreigner” programmer. A timely update on the “office sex” theme. I rocked back and forth on Krishna’s ergonomic chair… I liked too the willingness of the protagonist to try whatever her crush was into. It’s hot if the object of your desire finds it hot.

How the Little Mermaid Got Her Tail Back, Andrea Dale. You know the original story, right, not just the Disney version — the mermaid trades her tail for legs, so that she can live on land with the man she loves, but she must also give up her voice; and because she can’t talk to him, he falls for another, and as her penalty for not winning his love, she dies (or becomes sea foam, in gentler versions). Not exactly my idea of a happy ending. Finally! A story to put things right again. She teetered on the knife edge of honesty and terror, and that’s what made her come so hard, time after time.

The Lady or the Tiger, Bill Kte’pi. A nod to the classic Frank Stockton short story. “Our only choice is to stride through the door with dignity.”

Sealed for Freshness, Jennifer Peters. One of the few stories told from the Dominant’s point of view. For a moment I contemplated berating him for the obvious show of pleasure, but I knew his punishment would teach him a lesson, even if he happened to enjoy parts of it a little too much.

Stocks and Bonds, Rita Winchester. No, not that kind of stocks, the other kind; you know, like from historical Williamsburg. Roleplaying after a Renaissance Festival. He knows I love the dirty words. Whore and slut and trollop: all of them, they make me crazy and wet. Just plain fun, this one.

Helen Lay Bound, Suzanne V. Slate. The contrast of an old-fashioned corset, laced tight, under regular clothes. For school we dress in what we call “academic drag”: jeans, boots, thick baggy sweaters. The corset is our secret. A long, sensual tease, with historical and philosophical reflections on bondage.

The Rainmaker, Elizabeth Daniels. Hope brought Amy to her knees, head bowed, cuffed hands outstretched. … After five months of sexual drought, there wasn’t anything she wouldn’t do for an orgasm. A couple deals ingeniously with one partner’s loss of sexual desire.

Do You See What I Feel? Teresa Noelle Roberts. My husband is evil and perverted and I love him for it. And he’s set up a literal blind date for his wife.

Truss Issues, Lux Zakari. And trust issues as well. “I guess I’ve seen too many instances where people have put their faith in the wrong lovers.” Isn’t that one of the ultimate fantasies? Someone who knows you better than you know yourself — and uses that knowledge for good.

If you don’t have young children in the house, and you’re quite sure my parents aren’t planning to visit you, you might want to display this handsome book on your shelf. The paper copy can be bought here. For the more discreet, there’s a Kindle edition. Or, like me, you can take the middle road, and get a paper copy that you disguise. Just don’t forget where you put it.

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