04 Friday Nov 2016
Posted in Novels, On Writing, Series
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I was so busy this week, I didn’t have a minute to post that I had an article in the LGBTQ publication Divine Magazine, where I wrote about my conflicted feelings about saying goodbye to the Sanctuary world.
04 Sunday Sep 2016
Posted in On Erotica, Uncategorized
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arcanium, call for blood, consent, demons, erotic romance, erotica, nocturnal creatures, sanctuary, sexy
There’s this common trope/assumption in romance, whether as a genre or as a side plot in a general story, that real romance is unspoken. That passion is a man grabbing a woman and kissing her mid-sentence, that sparks fly when everything emerges according to chemistry and hormones and instinct. That the touch comes first, and how the girl (or guy, but usually the girl) reacts is the answer: kissing back or a slap to the face. That asking for permission before you do something lacks spontaneity, and if there’s no spontaneity, there’s no sparkage.
One thing I’ve learned as I write erotic romance, it’s that consent is sexy.
Don’t get me wrong. I’ve written before on the value of ravishment fantasies within erotica. I love some good forced pleasure in fiction.
My point isn’t that fictional non-consent isn’t sexy. It’s that there is definitely chemistry in permission. And the reason why can be summed up in one word: respect.
It’s funny. I’m partial to erotic horror romance, and the things I tend to punish most in my stories is men’s lack of respect for women. It’s a mostly unconscious theme, but I notice it a lot in retrospect. You see it quite a bit in the Arcanium series, actually, which is fucking hilarious when you think about it.
My lovely villains will torture, maim, kill, damn, whatever. But consent is incredibly important to Bell. He has his own ethical code that flies in the face of most human codes, but if anyone touches his people without their permission, he takes revenge of biblical proportions. His incubus and succubus can’t feed from people in his circus, his sadistic Ringmaster can’t whip the people in the circus without cause, and those he tortures on a daily basis are usually that way because they broke his one rule of consent. It’s rooted in the whole vampire/demon idea of invitation and will to sin (although I’m not saying that what anyone is doing is sinful). But the result is a surprising respect among the demons and jinn of Arcanium for the lovers they choose, because when someone does choose the kind of things their kind offer, it means so much more.
Right now, I’m working on a long erotic novel—kind of an Old World gothic fantasy type thing with vampires and werewolves—Nocturnal Creatures. And while the monsters of this novel do some terrible things, they still value consent. My vampire king moves at my protagonist’s pace at every turn, pushing the boundaries to help her grow but not penetrating them. The wolves act on instinct and a certain level of sadism/masochism, but they still feel around the protagonist’s limits, checking periodically that what they’re doing is okay for her, asking what she likes, accepting what she doesn’t.
Bringing us to the Sanctuary trilogy. Call for Blood is coming out this month, in fact. And one of the themes that (again, unconsciously) runs through it is a deep value of consent. Renee wants her buttons pushed, but she needs the right to say no and have that ‘no’ respected. As soon as it’s not, she and her shifters have a problem.
I’m sure it’s not always perfect in my stories. The lines of consent are drawn differently between species. Incubi and succubi, in particular, blur the lines because they can’t help how much sexual energy they put out, and people certainly don’t consent to being consumed, whether by vampires, sex demons, or worse. And sometimes people are simply imperfect.
But asking for consent, gauging body language for continued permission, punishing non-consent while welcoming its illusion, the level of control necessary to restrain one’s non-human sexual desire… all of it is actually fucking hot.
Don’t let anyone tell you it isn’t.
15 Thursday Oct 2015
Posted in On Writing
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At this point, I’m finishing CALL FOR BLOOD on principle, but I’m not at all confident in it as the end of the Sanctuary trilogy. I might have to give up on that goal entirely, since I can’t imagine a different ending to their stories. It’s not awful, but I don’t feel it’s something I can put out there in good conscience.
I keep telling myself it’s not because my writing abilities have gone away. The first two Sanctuary novels were unique little things, with prominent bisexual characters and an established polyamorous mini-society. I also managed to churn out the still awesome Arcanium series, and I’m hoping the Meridian universe continues to yield just as good fruit.
Still, since mediocrity is all I’ve managed to write this year, I do wonder whether my time is over – burn bright, burn out. I wrote more books last year than most people write in a lifetime. Maybe I wrote the lifetime.
It’s hard to have any confidence in what I do, second- and third- and fourth-guessing my talents at every turn, sure that I’m doing so much wrong or so much worthless, or that it doesn’t matter anyway, because I’m just not going to be heard, even if I had value to hear.
To tell the truth, I’ve lost my light. It’s not the muse that’s gone – that’s still around, giving me ideas. It’s the light. Something – my job, my unchanging situation, my loneliness – something has sucked all the light and color and joy from everything I loved, leaving very little behind. And even that little is disappearing. If life is just living and no more, I have to wonder what the work is worth, whether I have to do it or not. I try to make my own joy, but it’s about as fleeting as creating new and unstable elements. Everything is dull, flat, not terribly bad, just… dun, and slightly unreal.
Writing used to be one of my havens, but without a spark – not of inspiration, but of drive, of life, of joy – it just isn’t the haven that it used to be. There’s only disappointment that my escapes are increasingly my world, but can never truly be the world. I’m disappointed that I need to escape so much at all, until the oases themselves lose their charm.
I want a change, but I’m notoriously bad at it, and there’s no certainty in that change – that I can have it or that the change will do me any good. I’ve lost what little optimism for the future I had.
I’ll continue trying, because I’m used to working without light. NaNoWriMo’s coming up, and that’s something I simply have to do. But I have little confidence that anything I manage to produce will be any better than what I’ve done this year.
01 Thursday Jan 2015
Posted in Novels, On Writing, Series
Tags
call for blood, erotic romance, erotica, novel, renee, sanctuary, series, shapeshifters, supernatural, vampires, werewolves, work in progress, writing
Title: Call for Blood
Series: Sanctuary
Word Count: 50,025/90,000 words
Summary: I’ll come up with something later. Both Arcanium and Meridian already had series synopses written up before I started them, but I changed Call for Blood from what I’d originally set it up to be.
Notes:
I took several breaks, ones I didn’t necessary want to take but had to take. I did my baking. I made many cookies, lots of fudge, and lots of cake balls. They were a rousing success. I took Christmas Eve and Christmas off to have family time, too much socialization to come back and write.
Then the next day a cold hit and almost knocked me on my ass through NYE. But I was determined to make at least 50k before the end of the year, even though I would have rather finished CFB before the end of the year. The last few days have been difficult, fighting against the fatigue and the interruptions for many tissues or coughs. Fortunately, it wasn’t the flu – no fever. Just a persistent, ugly cold.
I’m still convinced that CFB is going to need some serious reworking during the second draft, not least because I realized that I’d forgotten a character that still lived in the sanctuary at the end of Cry Wolf. I’m going to have to add him in later. For now, he’s jumping in out of nowhere in the middle.
CFB has been difficult to write in the sense that it hasn’t felt exactly right from the very beginning. I think here in the middle, I’m finally figuring out where I want to go with it so that it feels right and moves the characters forward, but that means a lot of rewriting in the beginning, which had been built to go another direction. I’m still not a hundred percent sure I’m not going to have to scrap the whole thing and start from scratch. I’m crossing my fingers it’s only the beginning I have to rework. I keep telling myself Winter Howl needed some serious work in the beginning too between the first and second drafts.
I think part of the problem is that I’ve written these stories so spread out, I feel done after every one. I’m mentally beyond Sanctuary, ensconced in Meridian and Arcanium and other things, so it’s hard to move back to an older series that felt over (even though it wasn’t).
I’ve learned from that kind of writing, of course. I’ve learned that I need to write the novels close together when I’m working on a series. Arcanium needs that more than Meridian, but it really helps that both series consist of standalones. When writing Arcanium, I need to be conscious of the timeline and characters as I go from book to book, but you’d be surprised how self-contained each story is. A few of them are enhanced from being read with the others, but it’s not necessary. And Meridian’s even better. They just exist in the same large city. There’s little to no cross-characterization. They’re truly standalones. Sanctuary, on the other hand, is a definite trilogy arc, and I should have written them back to back instead of more than a year after the last. Hindsight, retrospect, so on and so forth.
It’s my hope that I can finish CFB in less than 31 days. We’ll see how that goes. I’m much happier with it in the middle. The characters are shining, they’re going directions I never expected (they’re not derailing the story, just making it richer), and I’ve been able to do all that while feeling like sludge from the dreaded lurgy. I may take today off if this headache doesn’t let up, but I’ll be going right back into the 5k a day quota tomorrow at the latest until I get Red Queen edits.
22 Monday Dec 2014
Posted in Novels, On Writing, Series
Tags
call for blood, canine, erotica, f/f, femmeslash, m/f, polyamory, renee, sanctuary, series, shapeshifters, trilogy, vampires, werewolf, work in progress, writing
Title: Call for Blood
Series: Sanctuary
Word Count: 26,027/80,000 words
Summary: I’ll come up with something later. Both Arcanium and Meridian already had series synopses written up before I started them, but I changed Call for Blood from what I’d originally set it up to be.
Notes:
There’s something about this one, and not in a good way.
I get the feeling I might have to rewrite it entirely. The characterization feels good, but the plot threads feel loose, and I suspect I’m burnt out and in denial about it. But I feel like I have to get this first draft written, even if I have to overhaul it all over again like I did the first plot. I’ve taken days off. I’ve vegged. I’ve not thought about writing until I reached the point where I needed to write again. But the plot still feels insecure. It’s taken me far longer than it should have to reach my first quarter, and I’m not happy on many levels. I’m just not sure what to change, because Sanctuary needs finishing.
The words are coming. That’s what’s confusing. Is it that I’m just on autopilot now, cranking things out without any soul? Or am I just in a seasonal-affective state that’s getting in the way of my seeing the novel in a more objective light? Or perhaps that plus Christmas and end-of-year stress is finally getting to me. I’m hoping that’s all it is. If so, that’s a lot less work for me later.
Seriously, we haven’t had sunlight around here since Day 1 of writing this novel. It’s been clouds and rain and no Vitamin D except in supplements. It’s done terrible things to my sleep schedule.
One thing I do like is that I can write all the femmeslash that I want in this. It’s not the most popular kind of pairing, but Renee’s relationship with Britt and her propensity for further sexual attraction with women is already an established part of the Sanctuary canon. So I can get some of it out of my system before diving back into Hetsville. Nocturnal Creatures, of course, will be full femmeslash rather than bifemmeslash, but that one won’t be for a while.
There’s also plenty of wonderful polyamory in my little hippie commune sanctuary, but I write a lot of multiple partner romances, so that’s not quite as uncommon for me. I still love it.
Sinking back into Renee was easier than I’d expected it to me, but again, not in a good way. Many of Renee’s qualities are the ones that I try to pretend don’t exist in me, but I have to confront them again when I write her, view them through an unforgiving magnifying glass.
I just hope I can get my hands on the slippery rope of this plot, or else this whole stressful time would have been an exercise in futility mixed with baking powder, chocolate chips, and too much eggnog.
I’ve made lots of cookies, in case you can’t tell.
