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Hello again to all of my loyal readers (if any of you are still around). I've been working on another short story, a lesbian S&M romp called Sunday & Monday, and like a lot of my short stories recently, it's kind of blossomed into a novella-sized monster, no doubt in part due to my awkward attempts to shove "character development" and such things into my smut. At least it should be long enough to accomodate a good wank. I've only got another 1000 words or so to go, so expect it soon... maybe.
My sparse updates recently are due to being in the first year of my PhD program, which entails a lot of work and a surprising amount of social demands on my time as well. I do have some spare time, but I also have a lot of interests and hobbies all trying to claim part of it, and so writing porn has eked out a fairly small amount of my life. The schedule will hopefully get better when summer rolls around, although I do have to start the reading for my monstrous-sounding comps exam then.
Excuses, excuses. I don't really have anything meaningful to say here, just letting everyone know I'm still alive and more filthy stories are on the way. I'm still a bit undecided about the more ambitious plans for this blog that I've hinted at before -- I have a couple different blog ideas floating around my head, and realistically only enough time/effort to run one, if any. And there's the question of whether blogging about smut will take away from actually writing about it.
So yeah. There are too many pots on the stove right now, but everything will get served eventually.
One of the things I've decided to do with this space is to write up some appreciations for pornographers of all mediums and genres who have influenced my writing or simply deserve more recognition. Auteurs of Smut is an occasional series of criticism meant to do exactly that. Our first subject is the eloquent dr_mabeuse (published sometimes as Eliot Mabeuse, but I'm going with the moniker I'm more familiar with.)
If there's one work of smut that's influenced my writing style most, it'd have to be dr_mabeuse's A Good Student. On paper the story isn't anything special - an innocent but curious housewife is seduced into the world of BDSM by her poetry professor. But the trick is all in the telling. For one thing, the sex is paced perfectly, slowly escalating in intensity as both characters are drawn across their moral dividing lines and then some. And those characters are a part of what makes the story special as well. These are resolutely adult characters that are still not sure what to do with physical desire and struggle with their own feelings.
But mostly it was the prose. My old writing teacher once referred to moments of intense verbal glory as "sparkle", and mabeuse's writing is just about all sparkle. I mean, just look at this, what would be a functional transition paragraph in a sex scene but turns to poetry into mabeuse's hands:
Emma took my force and bent back like a willow in a gale. She knew the rules, that she wasn't allowed to touch me without my permission, and her arms hung nervously at her sides, but as my hands spread across her back and I pressed her to me she seemed to melt against my body like sugar in the rain and her mouth opened to my kiss in a total and instinctive surrender, offering all that she had. She inflamed me, and even as her body softened against mine her nipples seemed to harden and push into me with a sudden blind urgency. ("A Good Student", Ch. 3)
The additive, run-on nature of the second sentence is what really strikes me here. The use of "ands" suggests an infinite, subversive abundance that couples with the beautiful language (that sugar in the rain simile is just perfect) to create something that appeals to my senses of both the aesthetic and the erotic. It simultaneously shows a great amount of writerly control and conveys the feeling of an urgent, slightly frightening but intensely intriguing loss of control.
These days I'm not as enthusiastic about dr_mabeuse's writing. As I read more and more of his work, I start to wonder why so many stories have to involve a "strong" career woman discovering how deep down she just wants to be dominated by an older man. I don't want to kinkshame anyone, but there's a suggestion in much of his work that these kind of things are intrinsic to femininity -- "I was aware of her femaleness as something deep and profound and totally opposite to my own masculinity, something necessary and complementary" (from the same chapter as above). This strikes me as gender essentialist if not outright misogynist, and summaries like "Dressing like a slut for fun gets Vanessa in trouble" don't help matters any. Then again, he's also written stories like "Gender Issues", so maybe it's best not to generalize.
But no matter how much I furrow my brow at some of his plots, for me dr_mabeuse will always be associated with that revelatory moment, reading the first chapter of "A Good Student", in which I sat back and noted with amazement that yes, you could write porn like this. My amateur attempts at literary prose are perhaps an attempt to incite that same feeling in some young, impressionable reader of smut. And for that I'll always value dr_mabeuse.
Check out his work here
P. S. Progress on the upcoming short story is... slow. This semester has been pretty hectic, and it's taking a bit of time to find my voice with this one. But there will be more dirty stories to come, let me assure you.
My goal with the first "arc" of Saying Stay is to give each character a chapter to introduce themselves and let the reader know what they're all about. This time around it was Dawn's turn, which was a bit of a challenge, seeing as how she's seen quite a bit of action in the previous three chapters. As fun as it would be to write a chapter of athletic monkey sex between Mike and Dawn, my sex-writing-fu is not good enough to make that un-monotonous.
So I decided to really put Dawn's happy-go-lucky hedonist lifestyle under scrutiny. It's easy to embrace free love and following your bodily passions, and I think it's a good principle -- it's kind of what the whole story is based around -- but sometimes these actions and passions have consequences, and sometimes the progressive, liberated thing to do isn't so clear-cut. Dawn lives in more or less a state of bliss (or so it seems), but that bliss is dependent on a daily regiment several bouts of rigorous sex and a cocktail of chemicals. What I tried to hint at in this chapter is that the blind pursuit of pleasure can sometimes lead to dark places. That doesn't mean that the pursuit isn't worth it, just that we should go into it with our eyes open.
The scrambled, nonlinear format of this chapter is designed to make it better paced and to reflect Dawn's moment-to-moment frame of mind. I'm not entirely sure about this, and there's a voice in the back of my mind that tells me it's a gimmick, but I went with it anyway. Every once in a while it's nice to try new ways of telling stories.
Next up: A nice short story about two girls getting to know each other. Expect it out before the heat death of the universe.
This chapter, much like Waiting for Aphrodite, ballooned in size as I wrote it. I think this is becoming a trend in my writing, and maybe even a good one. I've always thought my stories should be longer (or at least the sex scenes should be longer, as a scene needs to be of a decent length to properly masturbate to it.) I've always been attracted to long stories -- it's why I love television, and Tolstoy, and why in high school I was addicted to doorstopper fantasy novels that were usually not very good but were at least very long (in particular I was a Robert Jordan devotee). I suspect it's just because I'm afraid of endings. In any case, I hope that this is long because it's more detailed and not because I'm stretching things out. And even so, there are plenty of authors here who put out much longer chapters on a much quicker schedule.
As for the actual contents of the chapter, there was a lot to get to. Basically I had to introduce the setting and supporting characters for the next big chunk of story, hopefully without too much exposition. And of course I had to find room in there for sex, so that my faithful perverts wouldn't go home disappointed, as well as some character development.
The virtual-reality sex scene in this chapter was a bit of a challenge. The simulated brothel is basically an extreme version of the pornified sexuality that's become increasingly widespread in the past couple decades, and my goal with the scene was to demonstrate why this kind of sexuality is both seductive and ultimately dangerous. So the scene had to be both titillate and perhaps make you take a step back and question things -- not an easy thing to do in a genre that's almost entirely devoted to pleasing the reader. It's a tricky balance to strike. There was a scene in The House at the End of the Street that more or less does what I'm thinking of, when Richie has control of the house and imitates a porno lesbian scene, although I have no idea what chapter it's in. I hope I was able to convey that without making the sex totally unenjoyable. Because that's the tricky and important thing about patriarchy -- it can be insidiously fun, at least for hetero men.
The short Tom/Kayleigh scene was meant to contrast that. I don't mean to suggest that tender vanilla sex is better or more loving or "real" than any other kind of sex, although I'm worried the text implies that. I also don't want to condemn all pornography -- obviously, if I didn't I wouldn't be writing it. I'm just trying to acknowledge that sometimes sex isn't the best thing in the world and that some representations of sexuality are problematic. Hopefully this argument will be more coherent in the actual text than in this blog post.
I should probably end this before I spend any more time ragging on my stuff or going on about my politics. I hope everyone enjoyed the chapter. I'm working on Chapter 4 of Saying Stay right now, and it's looking like it might actually come out within a reasonable timeframe (e.g. less than two months). I'm not making any promises though.
I just discovered that this blog feature, which I thought was only open to premier authors, can in fact be accessed by the rest of us plebs. So I decided that I should use it to air some opinions on smut and maybe talk about my work.
As a writer I think my main project is envisioning some kind of utopian space for sexual and other interaction. Of course, I'm well aware that you can't just hit a button and say "bam, everyone's liberated". Both of my current serials are at least to some degree about the struggle for that kind of utopia, albeit on very different scales. I want to write erotica that's sex-positive and maybe even feminist -- whether or not I've achieved this goal is up to you. At the very least I hope I'm saying more about sex than "it's hot".
Updates are, as you already know, a bit slow -- I'm currently in graduate school, and have a bunch of other hobbies and interests besides this, so my time is pretty diluted. The ever-growing length of my chapters doesn't help matters any, although I think they're the better for it. Right now the fourth chapter of Not Alone is about halfway done, and with any luck I'll get it finished by the start of August. Or not much later than that. Certainly not September. Probably.
So thanks to my patient readership, and to everyone who's commented on my stories, even if it is just to point out the same typo that 3 other people have. I'll see you on this blog the next time it strikes my fancy.
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