A Touch of the Strange

I've been writing all this time, but nothing I wanted to show except to a select few. I've been missing writing for a goal, of producing something I'd want to keep. Hence the sudden return to activity on this account. 

I admit I am struggling to write now, even the things that have been making me happy in the meanwhile. I am spending more time worrying about not writing than I have been actually writing. There will be a crossroads coming up in my life. Either I commit to writing in a new way or give it up more completely than ever before... or continue to languish in the crossroads, unable to move in either direction. 

I can't even promise I will keep you posted. We'll see how things turn out.

I'd forgotten I'd even submitted to this thing.

Rejections do, at least, function as reminders to try harder. Publishers are not going to be lenient about loose plotting, characterization without context, or a profusion of unnecessary minor characters in a short story.

Perhaps I should try a few more sex stories. There has to be some way to write a happy one that also has plot and a genre element, and satisfies my contrary muse, which will always try to write the opposite of what is expected.

I don't want to put them up for free yet, but it's not so easy to find a publishing venue fit for

- a horror-ish story about a woman who dates her own clone
- a pulp-detectivey modern-day erotic short story
- an slice-of-life erotic short story - no real content beyond the characters, the sex and its negotiation
 

I've written some pieces specifically for publication in erotic collections, with little luck so far, and in all cases I felt I should make my lead beautiful in the conventional sense. It's always a bit of a challenge. I'd like to start by creating a character I can connect with, not a character that's coded desirable. It throws a crink; makes it difficult to write a good character rather than a sexy lamp, or a sexy inspiration/reward vending machine. It means your character isn't allowed to be themselves unless that's somehow sexy.

Happily there is a lot you can still do to differentiate your character within the steel cage of minimum requirements for attractiveness: thin, able-bodied, with few really unusual features (unless they're beauty cliches such as "startling emerald eyes"). The one thing that's usually missing from stories with conventionally attractive leads is their own awareness of their attractiveness.

I think the cliche of the "ordinary-looking girl" who ends up being desired by every hunk in the vicinity arises from the desire to write a desirable lead, but not wanting to deal with the negative traits associated with being aware of one's own good looks. The gorgeous bitch is a stereotype, from high school cheerleaders to platinum blonde femme fatales. They're vain, selfish, and expect to be catered to. They're villains.

And that negative (misogynistic?) stereotype, coupled with our cultural insistence that women be effortlessly beautiful and never vain, is stopping us writing attractive female characters whose attractiveness (whether lucky or hard-won) has influenced the formation of their personalities. And then here I am, struggling to find something to latch on to, and that becomes one of those things. I would be dishonest if I tried to write an attractive character just the same as an unattractive or ordinary-looking one.

I could go on about what "attractive" means, anyway. Attraction is not about attractiveness. If I was writing erotica just for myself, you can bet the characters would be all sorts of chubby or bony, pockmarked or crooked-toothed, with cataracts or wrinkles or splashes of birthmarks down their backs.

"Conventional attractiveness" has its rewards and trials. A woman who works hard to look good and takes joy in her beauty gets attention, including attention she might not like. She gets told to wear less make-up, to smile, gets catcalled by men who find her beauty intimidating, smarmed up by men who think they've got a shot, lied to, manipulated; she becomes the object of unwarranted jealousy and gets painted with the "vain bitch" brush, or called a whore just for looking the way she does. Less gorgeous and made-up women might not want to talk to her because they, too, find her glamour intimidating.

A woman who just "happens to be" beautiful but doesn't work on it gets told to wear more make-up, to smile; gets targeted by men who think she lacks self-esteem, and gets called frigid and a lesbian when she won't cater to their hungry gaze.

When you think about all of that, it becomes kind of easier to be "ugly", even if it means you'll never get that job. At least you're not a lightning rod for other people's desires and insecurities.

Of course your life is never made up entirely of reactions to your looks. That doesn't change the fact that these things help form your self-esteem and what you base your self-esteem on - what you're proud of and what you're ashamed of, and what kind of reactions you've had to learn to steel yourself against. Did you get that nose-ring to enforce your own aesthetic over the sexiness narrative? Did you stop relaxing your hair because you reject the idea that kinks aren't beautiful? Is your make-up your shield against the world? 

Recently I've written several beautiful leads and exactly one character whose job in the story was to be sexy. It was a story for a romance collection in which the sexiness of the male lead was very explicitly required. I tried to do him justice, but I have no interest in him as a character. He is, regretfully, a sexy lamp. The female lead, though, with her shallow attraction to him and the flippant and brusque manner of her sexuality, became really interesting to me. This is someone who has chosen to make herself as physically "attractive" as possible and steeled herself against whatever negative reactions that nets her while gleefully sampling the benefits. There is no core of self-doubt, no self-hatred to drive her desire to look perfect. She knows she's attractive. She knows that's no guarantee of a lay, or of preferential treatment, and she will not take any shit from anyone who thinks it means they're somehow entitled to her. That kind of strength intrigues me.

I can't promise it won't happen again.

This is the thought that brought me back:

I've been feeling insecure about a short story I wrote where two women jump into bed after a slight two-day acquaintance. It's not realistic, I thought - it doesn't sound believable. But just now as I was reviewing the story I remembered just how many highly acclaimed novels, movies and short stories I've come across where a beautiful woman and an average man have a brief conversation which culminates in her asking him up to her bedroom, as if this was always the unspoken intent of their conversation on the weather/cutlery/art. So I can also damn well have two love-starved women fall into bed, and I don't need to explain it any further than that.

Monica Nolan answered my question on GoodReads, and I'm all a-twitter with excitement. I'm a big fan of her books. She's not against the idea of Beverly as the lead of a future novel, which is another thing I'm excited about. :) 

I have no qualms rating Dolly Dingle, Lesbian Landlady the same five stars I gave Mrs Dalloway and The Lord of the Rings.

So, I self-published an older story, Me and Susannah (a love story between a girl and a cerebral parasite) on Smashwords, partly to find out how it works. Result!

If it passes their vetting system, it should be going up on sale in the Kobo and Kindle stores. Amazing. There's a special tingle in your fingertips when you get the first ISBN that's all your own.

They say Smashwords publishing is easy, but if you want to try this, do it when you have a few hours to spend. They have an extensive formatting guide, and it is not that easy if you're not great friends with Word (or Write) already. I ended up uploading a few times before I had all errors smoothed out. Not to mention that I knocked a cover together only today, too. I know they say not to, but I don't think I'm a complete doofus when it comes to image editing (she said, sure to regret it later).

But, like Lulu, Smashwords offers a free ISBN and forwards your e-book out to the big e-stores. If it works, it's still an enormous time-saver compared to having to figure out Amazon CreateSpace and whatever upload systems Kobo might have. I like their pricing options too, which include an option to have the reader pay whatever they think the story is worth, which is definitely something I'd want to try if I was publishing for charity.

All very exciting! But now I must hurry home and make dinner. I haven't eaten since breakfast.

I have received my inspiration artwork, and it's absolutely gorgeous. It's also turned me away from the idea of writing about encantados to writing about the uturunco or were-pumas in Patagonia. Of which there should be more sources online, gosh darnit! I always have to pick the research-heavy subjects.

Encantados might have been more of a Humboldt thing anyway, and I'm writing about Darwin. :)

The library where I go to write has a book recycling box. I picked up a novel called Ancient Evenings by Norman Mailer, and since the back cover failed to provide a description, I turned to the first page. The first sentence was "Crude thoughts and fierce forces are my state." I put it back down.

The novel won the Pulitzer Price, but I rejected it based on the projections my mind came up with from that first sentence; well, that, and the fact that a person whose state is crude thoughts and fierce forces probably would not be able to construct that sentence. Apart from the latter, the first sentence might have been a hook as well as the turn-off, and that depended on my own tastes and personality, but it does go to show the importance of the first sentence.

It turns out that I don't know enough English words relating to mires.

What do you call a small patch of bog that cannot support weight, surrounded by bog that can? What is the English word for a pine wood mire? Does anyone use the word slough in this context? What's the difference between a bog and a morass? Dictionaries only get you so far, since they tend to equate different types of mires.

Edit: Found it on Wikipedia under "Fen". The classification is fens, marshes, bogs and swamps. Good! "Swamp" was the word I needed. Still don't know what to call the swamp's eye, or what precisely is a morass.