Important information discovered today
Shih-aan (one of the fictional races in Wishbone) count in base nineteen.
The word for today is pleonasm. I have writers with a bad case of this.
Nice ‘art’
A friend pointed me to this site, Male Submission Art. The blog author’s goal is to collect images of male submission other than the typical femdom art where the male is a worthless worm. Traditional femdom art gets up my nose too. Is she wearing those 6″ heels for her pleasure? There’s always some that do, but I like the idea of men submitting to women or men out of strength and desire and…
Well, you should just look at the pictures. They are totally not safe for work.
I should have said in my Arisia post that a friend there mentioned to me that her FaceBook feed has become a lot more interesting since she friended me. Just doing my job here.
More sex from newspapers
The NYT has an essay on sex in mainstream novels from Updike to David Foster Wallace with interesting twists of observation. I can imagine my high-school senior English teacher getting a kick out of it.
The Word Fuck in Dictionaries
There’s a cute article in Slate about sex words in dictionaries. I remember my Latin 201 teacher patiently explaining the complex meanings of “irrumo” to counter the Victorian editors of our Catullus text. They had footnoted it as “bastard.” Compared to the Roman taxonomy of profanity, I’ve always felt that American profanity is pretty weak.
Not. Hot.
So now that I can type, I can complain.
I picked up a copy of Chaos Magic from Torquere Press, my publisher. I did so because I wanted something to read, and also because reading it vaguely qualifies as ‘research.’ There’s plenty about this book that lands it in the same marketing category as my writing. It’s considered (urban) fantasy, M/M, and fairly high up on the Torquere pepper scale. Supposedly people who like one book will like the other.
I hated it.
One obvious reason is that I’m a prose snob. Given the choice between reading something smutty with bad prose and something with no heat but rich, descriptive sentences full of moods, colors, and nuanced feelings, I’ll take the Patricia McKillip. Chaos Magic is weak in the prose department. Most paragraphs are two sentences long and the transitions between them are jumpy. Even the most intense sex and s/m is disposed of so fast that I kept going back looking for the parts I must have missed, but which aren’t there. Where I would prefer to read (and try to write) playful words with their own passion and texture, the author here has created joyless, starved words that deliver their burdens of plot and get out of the way as fast as possible before they mistakenly attract any attention from the reader.
But the real suck sink was that one of the characters was a domestic abuse survivor.
The more M/M fiction (particularly that written by W) I read, the more I run into this. I suspect that it’s even more common than I’ve noticed, and that it’s a subset of the famous fanfic hurt/comfort genre. The Fs who write M/M seem to like it because it makes stoic heroes vulnerable without any work on the part of the writer. Let’s be clear–I’m not immune from the dubious pleasures of h/c fiction. But the abuse survivor motif leaves me cold. Part of it is the annoying similarities of all the characters. Every one of them is a sub/bottom type who likes to be swept away by a stronger man, but who tried to satisfy that need with someone who turns out to have issues. The abusers mouth the same threats. Even the dialogue is suspicously similar, as if all the authors are cribbing from the same abuse survivor workbook.
And there we have one of the biggest problems. They’re clearly cribbing because they don’t know what they’re talking about.
M/M romance fiction with abuse survivor characters reads like anal sex fiction written by people who have never have any. There are lots of tipoffs for naive anal sex writing. The author fixates on the 1-2-3 finger stretch to get a character ready for their first fuck but don’t realize that if the warmup takes too long the character will be too sore for the main event; they obsess about whether or not it hurts but doesn’t grasp the feeling of needing it so desperately that you will do it even if you have only spit for lube; they know nothing of the primal sounds that come out of the mouth of someone getting assfucked.
Authors have no idea what domestic abuse is like. If they did, they wouldn’t write about it. They don’t grasp how a personality changes under the influence of abuse and what does or doesn’t change when the abuse goes away. They write about explosive emotional experiences (break-downs, fights) experienced by survivors and overlook the day-to-day grind of pervasive, monotonous guilt and confusion. They believe that the surivor’s next relationship will understand what he experienced before and what he feels presently, and that someone who loves him can somehow help him recover. Like alcoholism, no one ever recovers from abuse.
The really puzzling thing for me is that it seems obvious why people would find anal sex hot to write about, even if they are completely clueless about it. Learning more about it leads to more rewarding writing. But abuse can only represent some twisted sort of wish fullfilment for people who know nothing about it. I’m married to an abuse survivor, so you can trust me on this.
[Folks reading this on LJ may not realize, but it's reposted from my main blog site. It's possible to automatically resend stuff to LJ so my friends over there can read it, but no way to fold the comments in both places back together to the same place.]
Erotica? Pornography? Smut!
Every subject on the interwebz has as least one discussion that’s as worn out as the brush you use to scrub the cat box and twice as smelly. Hands-down the most tired of all is “what kind of music do you listen to when you do <subject of discussion group>,” but there is room for a couple more stinkers. In the world of erotica, it’s the erotica vs. porn debate.
The Rejection Note
I don’t like writing rejection letters.
In a perfect world, I wouldn’t need to reject anything. Ebooks don’t have the space limitations of print books. If I got so many stories that I couldn’t possibly fit them in one book, I’d put out two anthologies.
