Geek Love

I have several literary addictions that will quickly become clear when you read my writing, at least they will if you share them:

  1. I love Shakespeare: I have two published stories which were inspired by, and whose titles are based on, Shakespearean sonnets (Can you figure out which ones?),and Shakespearean quotes regularly escape from my characters mouths. I also have a third Shakespeare-laden erotic story that will hopefully be coming out in a few months. I just got edits back on it yesterday, but I don’t have contracts yet so I can’t talk about it. Shakespeare is my go-to guy. When I want to write something and need a place to start, I pull a phrase from one of my favorite sonnets and use it for inspiration. It’s always interesting to find out where it takes me.
  2. I also love Lewis Carroll. One of my stories, “Shattered Glass,” is in many ways an homage to Lewis Carroll. It’s also utopian erotica, which seems to mess with some people’s heads. They don’t expect erotica to go where that story goes, and I’m oddly happy with that. Lewis Carroll also pops up more subtly in a lot of my other stories, because he’s so greatly influenced the way I think. Alice in Wonderland has been one of my favorite books since I was a small child – and I’m a bit obsessive about it.

The truth is, I’m a literature geek. I love books, and I love words, so it’s only understandable that those passions show up in my writing – no matter what I’m writing. You should see some of the weird stuff that ends up in my non-fiction

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Consent in Romance

Preemptive disclaimer: I love both modern and historical romance and have read and adored many books and stories in which some of the following issues come up. In fact, I am often great fans of their authors, but I do think these are questions that it is useful to think about and discuss.

I have recently been seeing a number of posts either obliquely or directly discussing the issue of consent in BDSM and “regular” erotica and romance – something which I also touched on in the sticky post on my front page.

As most readers of romance will know, although they probably don’t think about it much, there’s a lot of coercive sex in romance novels – particularly certain types of “historical” romance novels. In such books, women are often taken captive and then either manipulated into having sex with their captor or outright raped. They generally end up enjoying the experience and often fall in love with their abuser (lets be frank, that’s what we’d call someone who did this in real life) and living happily ever after – although some books where this occurs do explore the trust and emotional issues that such forcible sexual experiences may cause.

Rape fantasies* can be incredibly hot, and I grew up adoring books where pirates and Indians tied up their female prisoners and ravished (we don’t say raped) them violently and ecstatically until the women were overcome by lust and start to reciprocate their affections. I still enjoy many of those books. It’s simply that I’m now sometimes troubled by the consent issues involved. Still, their historical settings allow me to tell myself that I’m not condoning coercive sex as a relationship building technique… and mostly I believe it.

The problem comes about more for me when I start reading modern erotic romance – and particularly modern BDSM romance/erotica – that contains dubious or absent consent. In the real world, most of the time, people who practice BDSM do so as informed, consenting adults. They set boundaries and limits, enforce those boundaries, and anyone who tries to coerce someone into a sexual experience in a BDSM space is likely to get bounced out on their behind.

However, as Dirty Birdies discusses in the post I also linked to above, there is a lot of BDSM erotica and erotic romance where the sex happens not because both people want to be there and have consented to what is going on but because the dominant partner is coercing the submissive partner (or the top is coercing the bottom) into doing what he or she wants. Generally the coerced partner ends up liking it, but that doesn’t necessarily make it any more comfortable for the concerned reader – are we reading about hot, consensually violent, encounter or are we reading about a rape?

I freely admit that sometimes it can be hard to make consent clear – particularly if you’re writing a scene where people are playing with apparent non-consent. I know that I came across this problem in my upcoming anthology of kinky fairy-tale erotica (more about that in my next post, since I just got back my contracts from the publisher.) However, I think that a lot of the time it really is a question of the author putting the victim in restraints, having the aggressor sexually violate them without their consent, and having them enjoy it. That disturbs me, because it makes me wonder if it encourages people who are uninformed about BDSM to assume that such forms of non-consent are the social norm. Plus — although these issues come up in gay, lesbian, and female dominant erotica as well — I really don’t like endorsing the sexual script where men are sexual aggressors and women are gatekeepers who need to be convinced.

Does it matter? I don’t know. As a sex educator it certainly gets stuck in my craw, but I’m not sure that it doesn’t just bother me as a reader because I think it should. Still, I thought about it a lot when I was writing my BDSM fairy tales. It became very important to me not to conflate rape and non-consensual force with hot sex in the world that I was writing – even if it made my work harder. Furthermore, I plan to continue to make a conscious effort to be certain that consent is very clear in my kinky (and not-so-kinky) stories and to not reward non-consensual aggressors. I know that I have previously walked a fine line in some of my stories, and I think that I’ve even occasionally crossed over to the questionable side of the tracks.

BDSM is not abuse, although it is easy to write a story that makes abuse look like BDSM. I think the bottom line is that I just want to know which I’m reading about.

*And if you haven’t read Margaret Atwood’s essay/story with that title, you should.

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Fun With Technology – Creating an Author Central Page

Today I created an Author Page on Amazon.com’s Author Central. It was an interesting process, primarily because the way you tell Amazon that you’re a contributor to an anthology is neither intuitive nor well documented. I am embarrassed to state that I therefore managed to do it incorrectly three times before I figured out what the heck I was doing. For those of you who want to try it for your own work, the proper sequence is:

  1. Log into amazon.com with the account linked to Author Central
  2. Go to https://authorcentral.amazon.com/gp/books (the books tab on your main Author Central page)
  3. Scroll down to the bottom of that page and click “Add More Books”
  4. Search for the book
  5. Select “Add This Book”
  6. Look for the text that says

    Need your name added?

    If you’re not listed as an author but should be, please contact us. We’ll work as quickly as possible to get the data corrected in our systems.

  7. Click on “Contact Us”
  8. Select “Add A Book” as your Issue
  9. Select “I am a different type of contributor” under Details
  10. Select “I wrote a chapter, story, or article in a collection of work”

Once you get down to that last option, it becomes clear that you have chosen the right pathway through the Author Central menu system, but since you don’t know that option exists until you hit it, it’s easy to do the wrong thing. Mind you, I’m assuming that what I’ve done will work, but it seems the most likely outcome – at least for the books I added following the process above.

Hopefully this advice will help other authors who have published short stories in a number of anthologies and want to list them on their Amazon.com author page. For the record, this is only necessary for books that don’t come up when you search for your name. With those, all you have to do is click “add this book” and wait a few days.

Next, I have to figure out what else I want to put on my page… Readers, what do you want to see?

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Sex Therapy

My story “The Sex of Therapy” — in the complicated-gender anthology Up For Grabs 2 — is about a sex therapist.

It came out a few months ago.

I was pretty happy with it. I thought the sex was hot, the concept was good, and that the kick-ass anthology editor Lauren Burka had polished off most of my rough edges to make it shine.

Then something unexpected occurred.

This morning I started a training course to become a sex therapist.

Now, I would like to state up front that I knew even before writing my story that sex therapy is not practiced as a hands on profession in the U.S. The main character in that story was more of a sexual surrogate than a sex therapist, and I never had any intention of that story reflecting sex therapy in real life.

On the other hand, I also never had any real intention of my life including a course in sex therapy.

Needless to say, there were quite a few moments during class when I thought about that story and felt more than a bit awkward.

I didn’t feel awkward because I’d written erotica, the class is very much in favor of things that help people think erotically. I felt awkward because I had gotten the mechanics of my potential future vocation so utterly and completely wrong.

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