MR James – One of My Favourite Short Story Writers
Montague Rhodes James (1 August 1862 – 12 June 1936), was a Medieval Scholar and provost at Cambridge. In his spare time, he wrote ghost stories. Although his prose wasn’t terribly poetic, I always thought his sense of place and character was. He was also just a wonderful structural story plotter. All his ghost stories tend […]
Offense – The New Second Hand Smoke
Recently, American Airlines refused to let a woman continue on her journey wearing a t-shirt that says ‘If I wanted the government in my womb, I’d fuck a senator.” You can read more about the incident here. It wasn’t in response to a passenger complaint. One of the flight attendants took offense to it and […]
Same Sex Marriage: Why Thumping Bibles at Bible Thumpers Doesn’t Work
I never really thought I needed to take a clear stance on this on my blog because I assumed that anyone reading my stories would intuitively know where I stood on the subject. It seems I was wrong. I received an email asking me to clearly state my position, so here it is: If you […]
Points of View: Gaijin and the Silence of Shindo
There is a very good, very fair review of my novella Gaijin, over on Dear Author. What marks it as a good review is not that it is wholly positive; there are some very pointed and legitimate criticisms of the story, both in the reviewer’s post and in the comments. One question posed in the […]
Gaijin Reviewed
There is a really excellent review of Gaijin up at Dear Author, by Janine Ballard. It isn’t a wholly positive review, as no thorough review should be. But it discusses the themes in the book in a way most reviews of erotica or erotic romance books never bother to do. And, for a writer, that’s […]
Sleeping Beauties of the 21st Century: Anastasia, Bella and the Rise of the Vapid Heroine
Some time ago, Laura Miller of Salon.com wrote a compelling critique of the Twilight series. She had a particularly insightful comment to make of Bella: Bella is not really the point of the Twilight series; she’s more of a place holder than a character. She is purposely made as featureless and ordinary as possible in […]
The Gaping Hole in the Suitcase
I flew into Luang Prabang, Laos, on a ATR prop plane in a violent thunderstorm. The plane wasn’t full, but a fair number of the passengers were being violently ill in the turbulence. The vomit didn’t stay neatly in the bags, but luckily there wasn’t all that much of it, because most people had wisely […]
Kinky States of Mind: An Erotica Writing Challenge
On my last post, Selena Kitt made a particularly insightful comment about the sex writing in Fifty Shades of Grey: “For me, the sex was incredibly vanilla for a BDSM novel.” I had to agree with her and then I went on to wonder why. It’s not that all the sex in the story was, […]
Fifty Shades of Twilight: a Fifty Shades of Grey Review
Over on the ERWA Blog, Donna George Storey commented that perhaps one positive aspect of the massive popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey was that women who liked it might then go and seek out books that actually fess up to being erotic fiction. My worry is that they’ll read Fifty Shades of Grey, identify […]
Quietude & Brewing Stuff
I’m sorry the blog has been quiet for a while. I have some projects on the boil I can’t tell you about yet, but will announce soon. In the meantime, my monthly post at the ERWA blog is up. This one is on The Voices of Others: Genders, Sexualities and Beyond