November 7, 2008
This will be a long entry, because I need to catch up. I've got a lot to say about all of my stories posted so far. But first, I'm going to tell you something that you're not likely to hear from too many authors of erotica. I don't like writing sex scenes.
It's true. I enjoy writing about the buildup, the emotional struggles with forbidden love, the flirting, all of the things that go with them, but when it comes right down to the sex scenes themselves, I hit a kind of writer's block. After all, how many ways can you describe the same few actions without getting repetitive?
Perhaps that's why stories like New Daughter and Island For Three follow essentially the same progression. They start with an unexpected change in the first couple of chapters, continue the aforementioned emotional struggle and temptation through the middle, and finally end with the sex scenes after I've put it off for as long as I could. Both, by the way, started out as short stories that got out of hand. That's one of the joys of putting them up on ASSTR: if the initial project develops into something completely different from what was intended, I don't have to answer to a publisher or anyone else. I can just let them go and have the characters write them for me.
I was able to get past the writer's block in the sex scenes in my science fiction stories by interspersing the sex with hints of what was going on. In Empathic Twins, the hints are there but the reader doesn't know what's happening until late in the story. In Ghostly Consummation and The Chair, the reader is in on it from early in the story. The Chair was, in fact, an attempt to overcome the monotony of the sex scenes by making one of the participants something other than human. It worked, and I cranked it out in about two days, compared to weeks or even months for the other ones as I would leave them for a while and occasionally come back to them to write a few more paragraphs.
I guess the other reason why I don't like to write sex scenes is that I find the characters more interesting than the events. If I can create some characters and character dynamics that I enjoy writing about, the stories practically write themselves. I start with a basic idea of where I want to go, and let the characters drive the story from point A to point B. In the sex scenes, however, the characters devolve into their primal archetypes: just a man and a woman (or two or three women, with or without a man). I can add their thoughts as the events take shape, but in essence it's now just two or more people following the same sequence of steps as in just about every other story, with minimal variation.
I don't mean to imply that I don't enjoy reading a good sex scene; I just don't like writing them. There are many authors who are much better at it than I am, and I thoroughly enjoy reading their stories.
Okay, enough ranting. There's another point I'd like to make, a trend I've noticed in all of the stories I've finished so far that perhaps you may have noticed as well. The female characters tend to be weak. I'm not talking about weakly defined, or physically weak, or even unable to take care of themselves (except in Island For Three, but that's expected). I just mean that the girls are almost always dependent on the men in their lives. It ranges from a temporarily disability in Injured Cousin to the extreme subserviant attitude in Submissive Little Sister. Does that make me a sexist? Perhaps, although I'm planning some new stories with much stronger female characters which should hopefully provide a balance. In the mean time, I'd like to point out the irony in that the so-called weak characters are actually the driving force behind the story.
Read the last line in Submissive Little Sister, for instance, and then ask yourself who really was in control of the situation from the beginning? Then, in Island For Three you'll notice that although Lance is by far the strongest of the three in multiple ways, Autumn and later Cammy push the story to its eventual conclusion. In New Daughter, Michael Nelson progresses from an independent, strong-willed character to someone defined entirely by his relationship to Kimmy. And guess who finally gets what she always wanted in the end?
I mention the above because you need to understand my points in order to appreciate what I've tried to accomplish with my stories so far. I'd like to spend a moment on each of them.
Injured Cousin was the first story I started, several years ago in fact when I was first dabbling in erotica. I never finished it until this summer, though. You could say that my first writer's block about sex scenes lasted years, though a good portion of that was just me getting over my moral hangups. I wrote this story around a single true event that happened to me with my cousin, although that event is only briefly mentioned in the story. If you read it too fast, you might even miss it. It's the scene where Ashley snuggles with Bruce under his coat, and he takes it off and lets her wear it. I thought that that little incident (which my cousin probably doesn't even remember) would make a nice little detail in an erotic story, so I imagined a tale around a couple of characters in a similar situation to the two of us: an older and younger cousin who see each other about once a year. In real life, nothing developed from it, and in fact, other than thinking that my cousin was kind of cute and fun to be around, I've had no temptation to do anything with her. In fiction, however, I could project and multiply that simple event into a complete fantasy. Because Injured Cousin was my introduction to writing erotica, you could say that that minor incident is responsible for all of these stories. It also set the tone for the kind of detail I write in my stories, the little ambiguous flirting gestures eventually leading to the consummation of the relationship.
New Daughter was the next story I started, though I finished some of the others in the mean time. As I mentioned before, I originally intended it to be a short story, but I fell in love with the characters and couldn't bring myself to stop writing about them. I was inspired by another erotic story I read with much the same plot, but although I liked the concept, I didn't really like the characters themselves. So I decided to write one of my own with a similar plot. I wanted to keep the father relatively young and handsome so that it would be more likely for Kimmy to fall in love with him, but that meant I couldn't make Kimmy too old. I did the math and figured that if he got the mother pregnant when he was 13, that could allow her to be 13 herself and still have him in the prime of his life. That also presented another problem; I didn't want Kimmy to be a virgin because that would add complications to the story that I didn't want to address. It's supposed to have the feeling of a modern fairy tale. Her young age and innocent personality made that a challenge, but I came up with the idea of her mother's boyfriend abusing her. That also gave her a compelling motivation to cling to her real daddy. I think it turned out well, and so far it's my favorite of the stories I've written.
Ghostly Consummation was just the opposite of some of the other stories. I had originally planned to write this one as a novella, involving a haunted house and an entire family. I found, however, that the basic idea (ghosts possessing a couple of family members in order to have sex) really wasn't deep enough for more than a short story, so I discarded most of the ideas I had in mind and cut it down to just the essentials. I wanted the story to have an overall cheerful tone and happy ending, so I didn't want the ghosts to be evil. I came up with the idea of them being two newlyweds who died before they could consummate their marriage. That gave them a motivation to possess the father and daughter that moved into their house. I chose to write the sex scene from the point of view of the father so that I could describe the feelings of a man who didn't know he was possessed, and just thought he was giving in to his desires. Bringing the mother into the story at the end was an afterthought to relieve some of the gloominess in the first scene due the mentioning of her death, and I hope it doesn't sound too tacky.
Submissive Little Sister is probably my second favorite of my stories I've written. I've always loved exploring the relationships between brother and sister, maybe because I grew up with several sisters of my own. With parents and children, the relationship is mostly already defined. Children may be loyal or rebellious, cold or affectionate, subordinate or independent, but basically the parent always takes the role of protector to the child. With brother and sister, there's much more room for variation. Sometimes they fight. Sometimes they're best friends. Sometimes there's even a bit of sexual chemistry between them. Little brothers sometimes tease big sisters. Little sisters sometimes look up to big brothers. In this story, there's an uneven relationship. She adores him to the point of being jealous whenever he shows interest in other girls, but he wants nothing to do with her. I broke my own rule of keeping the characters thirteen or over because I wanted the girl's infatuation to be a childhood crush, an inexperienced love for a boy that she knows intimately but always views through rose-colored glasses. She needed to be at an age where she had never been in love before, so it's not clear even to her just what her feelings are toward him. By thirteen, girls aren't necessarily sexually experienced, but at least they're somewhat familiar with their own sexuality. This story was also inspired by one that I read, although in that one the boy was a little nastier and the young girl who had a crush on him wasn't related. I wanted a lighter tone to this one, so I made Rick somewhat nicer, although still with a bit of a selfish streak. I'm particularly happy with the last line because until that point it's hard to judge the tone of the story. Is Amy going to be disappointed by how mean her brother is to her? Is Rick going to just use his little sister, or will he instead return her love? It's only in the last line that the story finally takes a stand.
Empathic Twins is much like Ghostly Consummation in that it was an idea that had potential, but not enough for a novel or novella. Originally I meant to have just two characters instead of three, but then I realized I couldn't really develop the girl's link with her brother without giving him a focus for his sexual desires. Masturbation just seemed too boring of a way to do it, so I added Tina as the brother's love interest. That brought up the obvious need for a scene with the girls exploring a lesbian relationship. I had written several lesbian scenes before (in a major project that I'm undertaking that probably won't be finished for six months to a year), so that didn't bother me; in fact, I enjoy writing lesbian scenes much more than heterosexual love scenes because sex between two girls, by its very nature, has to be creative. The parts just don't fit together, so you have to come up with alternatives. Bye bye writer's block. This one didn't turn out as well as I had hoped; in particular, the ending seemed a little bit rushed. I would suggest, however, that anyone who reads it read it a second time, now that you know what was going on, and what was happening to Debbie. You can get more out of it the second time through.
The Chair is less a story and more an introduction to a device. I tried to think of the ultimate sex toy for women, and this is what I came up with. I'll admit, this is a little far-fetched compared to my other stories, which is why I label it borderline science fiction. No, a device like this wouldn't have a remote control without also having some kind of panic button to shut it down (or maybe it did, but Laurie didn't realize it was there). No, I doubt even this device could give a girl over 40 orgasms in just a few hours. More likely it would cause some serious bruising and maybe even friction burns or lacerations. But I don't write that kind of story, so I went with the less realistic but more amusing option. Again, the last line defines the tone of the story; it takes the edge off of the quasi-rape and instead adds a bit of humor. I like the idea of this device, and I may use similar Chairs in other stories. Unfortunately, the nature of this story doesn't leave much room for character development, since there's only one character. I have an idea for a sequel involving a sexy foreign-exchange student who comes to stay at Laurie's house. It will have to wait until I finish some of my other projects though.
Finally we come to my newest addition, Island For Three. This one's a pretty basic stranded-on-a-tropical-island-with-a-pretty-girl story, but with a couple of twists. First, there are two pretty girls, and second, one of them is the man's sister. Since this was supposed to be a kind of tropical paradise, I tried to imagine some of the most erotic things I could think of and throw them into the story. First, the nudity. If you're going to be marooned on an island with a couple of beautiful women, wouldn't you want everyone to go naked? And of course, I really can't think of anything more erotic than the sight of two young, naked, lesbian girls kissing under a waterfall. Except maybe three. Dang! I missed my chance. But seriously, this is meant to be a very visual story. I made Lance an adventurer in order to avoid the obvious issues of survival. He's in his element here, so the characters can stop worrying about survival and spend more time thinking about each other. Cammy was recovering from cancer because I needed a reason for him to be particularly close to a sister who's ten years younger than him, so that he would be motivated to take her, but not the brothers in between, on a sailing trip. I added Autumn as a means of deflecting the sexual tension between brother and sister, so that in the end when Cammy confesses her love, it catches the reader off guard without really being all that unexpected. I don't remember the original reason why I made Autumn such a shy girl, other than the fact that I thought it would be particularly appealing in this story. The role reversal between Cammy and her makes her character a lot more interesting. I'm particularly pleased with how well this one turned out, considering the research I put into it. Before I started it, I didn't know anything about yachts, I didn't know how to create a rabbit snare, I had never heard of EPIRB, and I had no idea what "lithic reduction" meant. I'm still no expert on any of these, but at least I'm no longer a complete moron.
So that's it for now. I'm still writing, and hope to have some more stories finished soon.
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