Closure in Erotic Fiction
“The Happily Ever After, while often decried as one of the most limiting aspects of a romance novel, provides a secure anchor to the reader and allows a romance author considerable leeway in the sorts of conflict she can present, as long as she doesn’t cross a reader’s personal line in the sand, beyond which […]
Graves’ Cool Web, Foucault’s Sexual Discourse and the Erotics of the Unnamed
” …But we have speech, to chill the angry day, And speech, to dull the rose’s cruel scent. We spell away the overhanging night, We spell away the soldiers and the fright. There’s a cool web of language winds us in, Retreat from too much joy or too much fear…” The Cool Web, Robert Graves […]
Foucault, Death and the Happily Ever After.
Thinking about the metanarrative possibilities of the Happily Ever After trope, it has occured to me, in re-reading Foucault’s “What is an Author?” that there is a kernel of something here to be explored. In examining the relationship between writing and death, Foucault gives us two examples: the hero in the Greek epic and case […]
Interrogating the Happily Ever After: research approaches
For those of you who are actually reading these posts on my ‘Happily Ever After’ exploration, I thank you for coming along for the ride and I do hope I’m not boring you to tears. One of my sneaky reasons for posting these blog posts is in the hope that I can encourage some of […]
How to Approach the Question
I’ve been giving a lot of thought to approaching the subject of happily ever after endings. I have a deep prejudice against any form of literature which prescribes plotlines. As a writer, I’ve been deeply influenced by theoreticians like Eco who view formula driven fiction as a lesser form of literature. As a creative – […]
Moving, Standing Still
“Don’t ever leave me.” And even as I tucked the last of my things into the suitcase, brutalizing my own molars and smearing away the tears with the heel of my hand, even as I sat on the stubborn thing to get it closed, even as I noticed the overlooked and recently hand-washed pair of […]
Today is Fantasy Pride Day
[poll id=’1′]I’m proclaiming today ‘fantasy pride day‘. And I’m doing a very informal poll to find out how many of my readers have have sexual fantasies that include non-consensual elements. Furthermore, I’m going to challenge you, if you do, to write one out. I figure that one of the best ways to get rid of […]
The Pale Beyond the Pale: Transgressive Erotica
It sounds like a joke: transgressive erotica. Isn’t all erotica transgressive? Well, it used to be. Historically speaking, the West has gone through periods of almost shocking acceptance of explicit erotic literature. It has also gone through periods of extreme repression. But, on the whole, they have been periods that imposed blanket restrictions on writing […]
Writing Erotica on Empty
I often compare erotica to other genres. But there is one way in which I am pretty sure it differs quite dramatically. Most erotica writers I talk to agree – you have to feel sexually charged to write really good sex scenes. That doesn’t mean you have to be so horny you type with one […]
Words like Sand & Turbulent Stories: Readers’ Experience of Shifting Narrative
Electronic text, especially text on the web in HTML form, has fundamentally changed our understanding of the ‘printed word’. On the web, text can change constantly and readers do not have the same surety that, like the words they read yesterday in a book, they will be the same words today. Of course, the meaning […]