Sunday Snog: Black Heart

I'm normally far too lazy, disorganized or otherwise engaged to join in the Sunday Snog but this weekend I just happen to be at home, awake, and reluctant to go anywhere, so I thought all those of you in the same boat might enjoy this little extract from Black Heart - two snogs for the price of one.

Feet padded along the hallway and Gary came back into the room; at a murmured command from Rosa he knelt beside Daniel. There was another prolonged moment of silence, and then she said, ‘Look at me.’

She stood before them, smiling, at her ease, holding a multi-tailed flogger in one hand, dangling it lazy by its little looped handle. Her leather trousers fitted her perfectly, caressing her long legs; her black shirt was unbuttoned low enough to reveal a black lacy bra and the upper curves of her breasts. Daniel had never wanted a woman so much in his life.

‘So much potential,’ she said, in the same soft, dreamy voice. ‘Pleasure and pain, and both together. Stand up, both of you.’ The last sentence was rapped out sharply, and they both scrambled to obey her. When they were both on their feet, she moved up close to them, close enough to touch, and Daniel struggled not to reach out for her, though he longed to do so. But it was Gary she went to first, lifting his chin with one finger and kissing him, lightly at first, then with greater intensity. Daniel was standing close enough to feel the tremor that ran through the drummer’s body, and he clenched his fists. Waiting his turn was exquisite torture: would she kiss him, too, or would she decide it was more fun not to? He thought of the night he’d seen her beating another man, how his blazing jealousy had mixed with a strange, compelling enjoyment of his own suffering.

Then she was in front of him, twining her fingers in his hair, holding him still, and her mouth was on his. The kiss was hard, demanding, sending tiny explosions of ecstasy throughout his whole body, and it was only with a great deal of effort that he managed not to wrap his arms round her and prolong it when she finally pulled away.

‘Face one another,’ she said. ‘Hands on each other’s shoulders, lean into one another, and stay still.’

Still dirty after all these years

Another year older and, yes, still in debt, but remaining optimistic. I do feel the need to mention that this year ended with a Significant Birthday, because such birthdays do make you stop and reconsider. I'm not living the life I thought I would be ten or twenty years ago, but in some ways it's better than anticipated. Though I'd prefer it to be like this with more money, of course.

As far as writing goes, it's been a nice, interesting year. Eroticon and Smut Manchester were both great fun, and I also got going on my own Dirty Sexy Words slam nights, which will be getting bigger and better in 2015.

My alter ego published a novella and a couple of short stories this year and I managed to get two short stories out into the world and begin on a hugely complicated new novel. Once again I am awed by the productivity of various pals who manage two novels, three novellas and fifteen shorts per annum. I should spend less time on Facebook and more time in front of Vintage TV with the little laptop, I really should.

And the wider world? Continues to be a fucking tricky place for everyone: austerity and inequality here and the most psychotically misogynistic terrorist group in the universe rampaging around elsewhere. Yet there are still daily acts of kindness, big and small. I wish you all luck in 2015 and hope for the best.

Three Stars is Undulating

OK, if you know what song** I stole that line from, you might actually win a small prize (just post a comment and if you are correct I will contact you for your address and stick something in the post to you). 
I've been doing some reviewing lately. Mostly just of stuff I happened to have bought off Amazon, or in a charity shop or acquired, which either appealed to me a lot or annoyed me a bit. It reminded me of the days when I actually used to get paid for writing reviews of things. I have tried to be both fair to the author or authors in question and entertaining to anyone reading the review who probably isn't going to buy the book. Just like I used to do when I was getting paid. And, while reviewing, I have been reading other people's reviews and thinking various exasperated thoughts about the virtual world in which everyone's a critic. 

Yes, there are some thoughtful, readable reviews, whether the reviewer loved the book or hated it. But there are also billions of 'reviews' which consist of retelling the plot and then moaning that there were no magic worms in the book, or that one of the characters was a bit boring. Or those which awarded the author five stars and then read 'tHIs booke FUxn SUCKSSSS!' Then there are all those well-meaning, painstaking, utterly tedious reviews posted by friends of the author trying really hard to be objective and saying things like 'I was given this book by the author who is my friend. It is a lovely book. My mummy taught me to wipe my feet and not fart at dinnertime. This book was interesting and reminded me of the only other book I read in my entire life. I like caterpillars and there was one on the book cover.'
I did indulge myself a little this evening in dissing some random piece of self-published crap that had been available to download for free, but I felt a bit dirty afterwards. I've read professionally published books that weren't much better.
Perhaps the skill of book reviewing is another one that's on its way out. Hopefully not, even though it won't do to underestimate the taste of the reading public.



** If I have actually cocked the quote up and you still get the song right, you still get the prize.

Porn for men, erotica for women?

It’s one of the most persistent tropes there is: men like (disgusting, crude, blatant) porn while women like (softer, classier, more intelligent) erotica. Like most tropes, it’s mainly adhered to by people who don’t know an awful lot about either. It also props up another basic and unhelpful myth – that women want love and men want sex. While there are people more interested in one than the other – and a percentage of people with little or no interest in either – women can be driven by lust, keen to experiment with multiple partners, toys, roleplay and fetishwear and men can be romantic purists, interested only in the naked body of the beloved.

Sometimes, the boundaries get properly blurred, at least for a while – in the early 90s there was a small explosion in the provision of porn aimed at women. First came the magazines: Ludus, For Women, Women Only, Women On Top, Bite! And, running along in a panic and a little bit late to the parade, a UK relaunch of Playgirl, then the launch of Black Lace in 1993: a fiction imprint loudly and proudly touted as By Women For Women. Around the same time other publishers were busy launching or expanding erotica imprints that were not just female-friendly ‘Mills & Bonk’ as they were sometimes called – X Libris, Chimera and Nexus all provided homes for the work of a wide range of authors.

At present, even though it seems like the mighty wave of Mary-Sue-ish ‘virgin and billionaire’ cut-and-paste Erotic Romance is peaking and about to drown the whole genre, there is still interesting stuff going on if you know where to look for it, and it doesn’t divide strictly along gender lines. Authors like Peter Birch, Slave Nano and Charlie J Forrest produce interestingly filthy, but also well-written and empathetic works of fiction, and there is also a growing movement of  feminist porn, and female porn producers exemplified by the likes of Pandora Blake.

As with everything else, it doesn’t have to be Different For Girls.

Don't quote, just link...

Some things, while not actually unfair, are a bit fucking annoying. One of them is the matter of song lyrics and wanting to quote them in fiction.

Don't. Do. It. Not unless you are seriously minted and/or have a publisher who is. Song lyrics (unless the song was written before 1923) are copyrighted, and the normal concept of 'fair use' doesn't apply. So if you want to bung in a few lines by John Lennon or Madonna or these unjustly forgotten geniuses then you need to obtain permission from the copyright holder and pay whatever fee they ask. There's a pretty straightforward article on how to go about doing so here but it's obviously going to be a bigger problem for the little indie or self-publisher to find the money, let alone get an email answered by whoever deals with Justin Bieber's publishing rights.

It always used to nark me a bit, as I often find myself wanting to quote a line or two from either a favourite song or one I loathe, if it seems particularly apposite when I'm writing a key scene. But I do accept that people who have written a song deserve a share of the take when someone else makes use of their work
There are ways round it: the easiest is probably just to mention the song's title and say that the characters are listening to it, or have it on the brain, or even that they are singing/quoting it as long as you don't actually repeat the lyrics. At least these days the curious reader who isn't actually familiar with the song you've namechecked can usually go and find a version of it on Youtube and see how appropriate the chorus is to your story for themselves.

If that doesn't suit you, another option is to make it all up, just like the rest of the story. Invent a band or singer, scribble yourself a few lines that are at least rhythmic and maybe rhyme, and use those. Though if you are an old fart who is writing about pop music while not liking it much, this may not work at all: one or two novelists whose work is otherwise briliant turn embarrassingly awful when it comes to fictitious song lyrics.

The plan C I used in Black Heart is probably one that would only work once: a friend of mine was once in a band and I happened to be listening to his old demos around the time I was writing the middle section of the book. It then occurred to me that the band who feature in Black Heart ought to sound like my old pal's lot, and therefore it would be useful to quote the relevant lyrics - and all I had to do was email him and ask.

Probably the next move, for those of you who had actually wondered about the songs Daniel sings for Rosa, would be for me to work out a way of uploading the actual tracks to DoD so you can all have a listen for yourselves...

Eroticon 2014: Introduction

I've posted before that I will be attending Eroticon and, with just over a month to go, everyone's getting busy introducing themselves. So here's my introduction thread - to read the others (andfindout the schedules and, of course, buy yourselves tickets, hop off to theWriteSexRight site and check it all out.

What’s your name?
Zak Jane Keir
What are you most looking forward to about Eroticon 2014?
Catching up with some of the pals I've made over the past year, making some new ones, introducing myself to editors and finding out more about what's going on in general.
What are you most nervous of about Eroticon 2014?
Ballsing up my spot on the panel. At least it's an early morning one so I won't make the mistake of having one drink too many beforehand.
What do you hope to get from Eroticon 2014?
Contacts, friends, ideas, information.
What is your bad erotica writer’s pen name?
Depending which 'Me' I'm being, it's either Humpy Klungewizzle or Nymphella Wingwangle.

Same shit, different way?

I was thinking about the Beatles the other day. Bear with me, it's probably a bit of an age thing; I'm nearly 50 and the Beatles were just... there all the way through my life. Up to and including that time when Paul McCartney seriously narked me by stealing the news coverage I had planned for my dance team (if you want that story, say so. It involves the Evening Standard, some undignified scuffling and a prat in a box).

The thing about the Beatles - and the Stones, as well, really - is that, in the course of their artistic careers, they were allowed to change, and change dramatically. If you listen to something like She Loves You and follow it almost immediately with Blue Jay Way or Within You Without You (or, for the Stones fan, compare Satisfaction with Emotional Rescue) you struggle a bit to remember that you're listening to the same band. Whereas if you took the first Oasis album and the last one and stuck the two on shuffle, anyone who wasn't fairly dedicated to the band would probably struggle to say which track came from which album and not from any of the ones in between.

Nowadays, nearly any band that gets listened to widely for more than a couple of years' worth of music-producing seems to produce nothing more than slightly-twiddled versions of the hit single and the not-quite-such-a-hit single, over and over again. If you started out as Goths, Goths you must remain - coming up with a bit of ska or Britpop or classic disco will get you nothing more than a smack on the head from the record company. If you want to do something a bit different to the Thing You Do, you have to run off and do it in your own time, usually with someone other than your regular bandmates, and you often have to give yourself a different name.

Similar restrictions seem to apply to writers, as this blogpost from erotic writer Janine Ashbless shows. It seems to apply in particular to writers of erotic material - as recently as 1996 a how-to manual was advising authors to have a 'separate pen name' for their filth, though this was more on the grounds that writing about sex in an enjoyable, arousing way was something you were supposed to fence off from your 'proper' writing. But the current trend seems to be that if you write erotica, you're supposed to stay in a little tiny box appropriate to the type of erotica you write. So if your first widely-read book featured predominantly BDSM, or LGBT, if you want to write about spanking or polyamory, you need to change your pen name. And if you have sold a few books under the branding banner of 'hot romance' and you want to add a bit more group sex or fisting to your next one, it's better to give yourself a new identity, or your regular readers will shit the bed and pass out.

What irritates me is that I don't actually think the majority of people who like to read books *are* this stupid and stubborn. I think that (again, particularly with regard to erotica) a lot of the publishers are the ones who think the readers are dimwits who have to be peddled the same thing over and over again, and that people who read books - and come on, readers are basically the top of the food chain - are quite capable of enjoying something that isn't just the same as the last thing they read.

Bonk The Dinosaur - well, why not?

You've probably heard, by now, that the 'latest thing' is dinosaur porn.

 

 

Yes, we can start with a good laugh at the spectacularly shit photoshopping on the cover, even though, conceptually, the cover is a work of genius in that it signals exactly what you're going to get from the book. We can, if we've looked into it in the slightest, have a bit of a mutter about the fact that the 'authors' of this genre (apparently two American students) are charging upwards of three quid for very, very short stories about shagging extinct reptiles while wearing some sort of brass bra, and quite probably lipstick and suspenders as well. We could maybe quote and mock the admittedly bloody awful prose style - yup, you thought EL James made Dan Brown look like Stephen King; Christie Sims and Alara Branwen make EL James look like at least the average Sun leader writer.

 

My own immediate, personal reaction is, of course, furious jealousy that these two utterly terrible writers, are getting worldwide publicity when I am not. I doubt that there are many erotic writers who don't feel at least a flicker of it. But there is something quite interesting about the way this concept has suddenly exploded all over the media. It's being treated as something amusing, a bit strange and maybe a little bit icky, but so far no one is screaming and shitting the bed about it being an Awful Threat To Our Young People, and no one is demanding it be classified as Extreme Porn and banned.

 

Of course, a lot of people would say that it's only a story, and therefore there is no need to worry about real women (or indeed real dinosaurs) having been coerced into performing sex acts for entertainment or other people's financial gain. But Darryn Walker's piece of equally badly-written and entirely preposterous fiction, Girls (Scream) Aloud led to him being arrested, charged and prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act, though he was eventually acquitted. While it's likely that Walker got into trouble because his story was about real, named individuals even though there is a longstanding tradition of fanfic about both copyrighted fictional characters and actual living celebrities, there's also the possibility that erotic fiction that is written, aimed at and consumed by women rather than men is perceived as silly and unimportant. The concept of mythic-beast-shaggery was dealt with in a male-oriented, male-created film, The Beast (Walerian Borowczyk) which basically features a bloke in a monkey suit with  a giant willy being wanked off by some woman's feet. Oh and a girl sticking a rose up her chuff and some horses having genuine horse sex. The film is variously described as subversive, dangerous, beautiful and truthful, and was banned for decades: having seen it at some 'transgressive' film festival years ago, my verdict is more along the lines of 'unintentionally hilarious'.

 

Some people's sexual tastes are, well, weird. They are not shared by the minority. That doesn't mean they are necessarily wrong. There is one faulty brand of cod-feminism which insists that any kind of paraphilia (sexual interest in something other than a partner's erogenous zones) is exclusive to men, and that women want 'love', but there's plenty of evidence that women can be just as sexually interested in objects, concepts and physical impossibilities as men might be. Just grab yourself a copy of My Secret Garden - the huge range of women's fantasies in that book include all sorts of BDSM, bestiality, supernatural stuff. The truth that if you can think of a thing, someone, somewhere, is wanking over it applies just as much to women as to men. Mostly, though, niche smut tends to be screamingly amateurish. Back in the Guild Of Erotic Writers era, we often had to try to explain to would-be authors that very, very few people are going to be as thrilled as they are by 3000 words on the precise flavour of the thirty different cheeses that your protagonist shoves up his ringpiece, and you really don't need to do a drawing in the margin of the specific brand-name box with a hole in it that is the object of your desire.

 

Author Aishling Morgan, aka Peter Birch, achieved well-deserved success by being the first - and is quite possibly still the only - author to combine an interest in fairly out-there filth (nappies, pony play, lactation, mutation) with an ability to write well, and Googling for 'dinosaur porn' doesn't lead you to any product that isn't by these two particular authors - or is just yet another Eek Boo Hoo Tee Hee opinion piece on the 'phenomenon' - which consists of about seven short stories and nothing else.

 

The authors have, apparently produced a lot of other stories which they describe as 'beast sex... designed to unlock your darkest fantasies' and which apparently feature orcs and weretigers as well as giant lizards. I'm ever so slightly inclined to get in touch and ask them what they could do with the concept of the Illuminati and a story of Prince Philip and Peter Mandelson turning into giant lizards while bonking some picturesque pauper.

 

Actually, maybe I should write that one myself. Two pages and £3.99 on Amazon. That will do. Or maybe what I need is, you know, some really filthy thoughts about...

 

 

 

 

 

Writers' gigs, my new favourite thing

Erotica writers are really lovely people. Not just 'normal' people, as the slightly condescending Women Behind Erotic Fiction project insists - Ooo, look! They're not all actually running around with their fannies out and doing strange things with the contents of the bathroom cabinet! - but friendly, witty, kind and thoroughly supportive of one another. I've only met two absolute whangers over the couple of decades since I started getting involved in the erotic fiction business, and one was a walking advert for why Twelve Step programmes are useless, the other a self-aggrandizing silly moo who has long since disappeared.

But over the past few months, as I've been exploring the world of erotic fiction reading events, I've found nothing but fabulous new friends, and I'm remembering and rediscovering all sorts of things I had totally forgotten about.

(pic from the SH! website)

Last night I went along to the Sh! Erotic Poetry and Reading Slam in Hoxton Square, and had a most excellent time, as I had sort of expected. OK, anything involving free drinks and cakes and smut is going to appeal to me, but there was something else going on as well and when I got home I was full of ecstatic tipsy jabbering and sat up till about 4pm telling my long-suffering co-parent about All This Stuff Is So Exciting. Because it is. Way way back - in 1995 as it happens, I was involved in setting up the Guild of Erotic Writers. This was pretty much pre-Internet (yes, I know that there were dial-up bulletin boards and the Net existed, but it was still mainly used by geeks and freaks - I actually devoted about three pages of a book I wrote in '96 to describing the arcane and complex process of going to a Special Internet Café and Sending Someone An Email), and one of the reasons the Guild was begun was in recognition that erotic writers were a slightly lonely lot, and would jump at the chance to meet others of their kind. We held conferences, with panel discussions on a set theme, and there would always be drinks and a buffet afterwards (the fact that these often ended up with me shagging a publisher is quite another matter). The mid-90s was a reasonably good era for erotica, particularly stuff aimed at a female audience: it seemed as though a new imprint was being launched practically every month.

Over the years, though, the whole thing seemed to fizzle out: Headline Liasons, Idol, Sapphire, Nexus all bit the dust, and the Guild had faded away around the turn of the century for various reasons. But now there seems to be a whole lot of new life in the erotica genre, and it's not just down to EL James; the momentum's been gathering for a while. And these days, there's so much more opportunity for people to get their fantasies and feelings and filth out there to a wider audience.

I'm looking forward to whatever's going to happen next.