Category Archives: Erotica

Charlie joins in with #Lippie: Plum Dandy

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At lunch yesterday, I mentioned #Lippie to a couple of trusted colleagues. ‘I might choose a lipstick for myself over the weekend,’ I said.

‘No,’ they insisted. ‘We’ll randomise one for you!’ And that’s how I got Plum Dandy.

Plum Dandy

The therapist gestures in the air. ‘This…’ she says, mimicking a spiky series of peaks and troughs, ‘…is happiness. Everyone aspires to happiness.’

She makes it sound like a bad thing.

‘And this…’ the line she draws with her hand is flatter now, like a bad dance move, ‘…is contentment.’

In my head, the first pattern is red, passionate, interesting. The second is flatlining, blue, cold, dead. That’s not what I want to be.

She can’t tell me he’s bad news, obviously. She can only parrot back the things I say, until I can say he’s bad news.

‘Contentment is peaceful,’ she says. ‘Imagine how good it would feel to be calm, to be able to sleep, to not worry about where he is, or who he’s with.’

While I can still imagine him, I can’t imagine peaceful.

‘Wouldn’t that be nice?’

Erm … no. 

I mean, yes, obviously, on some level it would be nice. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t miss sleeping well, or regular meals, or not feeling angry the whole damn time. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t already know this was unhealthy.

I like lots of unhealthy things.

I’m meeting him in the pub. He knows where I’ve been this evening, but he won’t ask for the details. He respects that I have a life separate from him. I resent that he has one separate from me.

We’re good, in public, at pretending we live by the flat line of contentment. We drink a bottle of Merlot, and he tries to wipe away the blue tint it leaves on my lips with something that looks a lot like tenderness. When that doesn’t work, he kisses it away instead, sinking his teeth into my bottom lip until the blood flows in and my mouth flushes pink again.

The wine is finished and the candle is soft and misshapen, spilling wax across the table.

‘Take me home and fuck me.’

‘I have to be up early for work.’

The therapist was wrong. The red line doesn’t just spike upwards. It forms stalactites too, lows that leave me breathless with the fear of losing him.

I like that I care that much. It’s who I am; what I value.

‘Please,’

‘Fine, but it’ll need to be quick.’

It’s lucky I get off on humiliation.

He holds me down as he pounds into me, my arms high above my head, his fingers imprinting him into my skin as he drives his cock deep. These are the moments that I live for, these twenty minute snapshots of violent passion. I struggle, pretending to want to get away. Not only because the idea of having to fight him turns me on, but also because the greater the struggle, the better the bruises.

‘Bite me,’

‘This isn’t about you.’

Oh, it is, my love, it is.

His sharp little teeth sink in just above my nipple. Bite marks are the best marks, somewhere between purple and scarlet, a million miles from the sickly, greenish-yellow bruises he leaves with his fingers. Both are good, but everybody has a favourite colour.

If I stay with him, I’ll never achieve blue calm, except in moments like this, snuggled in his arms after red hot sex, briefly able to forget that I’ll be on a night bus by twelve. And on that bus, I’ll slide my fingers under the neckline of my dress and press down on the flesh that is quietly turning violet. I’ll revel in those marks, and every time I catch sight of them I will feel plum dandy.

The Owl and the Lark

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She submits the essay at 6, and by half past she’s prowling the corridors. These are the dead hours: the clubs chucked out hours ago and even the scientists aren’t up yet. She’s strung out on a combination of coffee and ProPlus and the weird euphoria that comes from not having slept at all. She takes a kind of pride in her ability to stay up all night – when other people talk about all-nighters, they mean the nights they turn in at 3am, but, like everything, she likes to do it properly.

There’s a peace, a focus, that comes from working last minute, when everyone else is sleeping, and it appeals to her introverted side, too. Just music, a pile of books and the words accumulating: two weeks of study coming together on three sides of A4. But by morning she craves company. Company, and, well, cock.

He wakes early, usually, but not quite *this* early. She should let him sleep. But by 7 she’s practically scratching at his door and mewling like a lost kitten. And sure enough, as she checks her watch for the thousandth time, the door swings open and he’s standing there in his boxers, sleep-mussed and tired-eyed. He crawls back into his narrow single bed, holding the duvet so she can climb in next to him. For a moment, sleep is more of a temptation than sex, but as they spoon and his cock begins to swell in the small of her back she finds an untapped reserve of energy.

In the tangle of bedlinen, she kicks off her clothes. He reaches into her bra to grope her tits, sniggering into the warmth of her neck when he finds toast crumbs in her cleavage. He loves her like this, mascara smeared from all the yawning, clothes creased and her mind still whirring at a hundred miles an hour.

‘Fuck me,’

He does, though she’s on top, bouncing like a Duracell bunny. He slaps her arse whenever her rhythm slows and it makes her giggle, the joyful sound of it setting his mood for the whole day ahead. He rests his knuckles against her clit and she comes hard, words pouring out of her that couldn’t be more different from the ones she wrote overnight.

‘Slut.’

‘You love it.’

‘I do.’  And his orgasm merges with the wake of hers.

*

She needs to stay awake. She has a tutorial at 9. A shower will help, she knows, but she wants nothing more than to stay here with him, his come sliding down her thighs and his leg entwined with hers.

‘Don’t you have an essay to finish?’ she asks, as he flings an arm around her waist and snuggles in for the long haul.

‘Nah,’ he mutters. ‘I finished it days ago.’

She envies him this discipline as much as she teases him for it. ‘Swot,’ she replies, and takes his hand, guiding it back to her wet folds. ‘Luckily, some things can be finished more than once.’

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King for the Day

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I figured I’ve written enough big stuff in recent weeks, so using ‘Epiphany’ to write about more big or sudden realisations didn’t really appeal. Instead, I took the religious meaning of the word and wrote this deeply unseasonal piece about sex, and, er, cake.

*

By the time it comes round, she’s ready for cake again. In the past few years she’s reconciled herself with the fact that she hates New Year’s Eve, and she lies low, not detoxing exactly, but, well, detoxing. Socially, as well as nutritionally.

He doesn’t even need prompting. He stops at the bakery on his way home and collects what he reserved days earlier. A square flat box, tied with narrow pink ribbon. Sometimes she lets the kids invite friends, but otherwise it’s family only.

She doesn’t believe in giving things up in January. It’s cold, dark. She wants to say it’s a comedown, but that would be untrue. She loves Christmas, but she loves this too – the putting away of gifts in their rightful places, replacing the tree with bright, hothoused tulips, the end of parties and people everywhere – finding him again, in the lazy mornings between Christmas and New Year, sneaking the odd mouthful of leftover brandy cream from the fridge, post late night fuck. Roaring fires, winter walks.

This is the climax of those moments: the golden, frangipane-filled disc already staining the accompanying crown with its buttery grease. It’s sickly as hell, and she’s never sure if she actually likes the taste that much. What she likes is her family round the table – her kids, the man she loves. The man who can still make her crazily horny with just a glance.

He cuts the cake into four. The rules say that none can be left – that’s how you ensure that someone gets the little ceramic figure buried in the almond paste, that someone has to wear the cardboard crown. As he serves his own slice, there’s the clink of china on china and he makes a lunge for the headgear that is rightfully his.

‘Not fair!’ the kids protest, and she realises that this is the first year they haven’t rigged it to make sure one of the children is king. Maybe she should feel guilty, but she doesn’t. She has plans, especially when she sees him wearing the too-small crown atop his dark curls. She has the plans, but she wants him to have the control.

Of course, because they’re parents, he doesn’t actually get to be king for the day. He still helps with the washing up and makes his own cup of tea when the youngest won’t settle and she’s upstairs for hours reading stories. By the time she makes it back downstairs, he’s raising his hands to take the damn thing off.

‘No!’ she cries, rushing over. ‘Not yet!’

He smiles, and kisses her, her hands still clamping the flimsy cardboard to his head. There are all kinds of games this could lend itself to: she could play the scared princess, the slutty maid, the evil queen, even, if she wanted.

But role-play is not their thing.

She sinks to her knees on the carpet, and unbuckles his belt in the glow of the fairy lights. Distantly, she remembers that she meant to take the tree down today. It can wait. Until after his cock in her mouth, his hands in her hair, his words in her ears and his come on her face.

She doesn’t care that she didn’t get the bit with the figure in. She doesn’t care that she wasn’t king. She doesn’t care because she’d rather have what she has right now: the king in her.

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Team Sharpie

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I love the back to school feel of September. Because I’m neither a tidy person nor an organised/neat one, it’s one of the few times that I relish the chance to start afresh. And so I tried to capture that feeling in a story.

***

It’s become a tradition, taking their summer holiday in the last week of August, just before the kids go back to school. Traditional too, the way she waits with them in the Arrivals Hall while he nips into WHSmith and buys a three pack of black Sharpies.

They don’t celebrate Valentine’s, so this is their equivalent – when he leaves for work the next morning, the pens will be on the bedside table, along with a note in his bold, scrawling script, telling her how much he loves her, how good a mother she is, how proud he is of her. There’s no mention of all the things he plans to do to her, despite the fact that she’s the only one who will read these words. This is the public facing side of their marriage: the affection they have for each other which shimmers so brightly people still comment on it, even after ten years.

There are two days before the children go back to school, but this is deliberate – a kind of extended foreplay, although they don’t call it that. They don’t really talk about – or need – foreplay in the traditional sense. Even now she’s wet as soon as she thinks about fucking him. 

She jokes that she’s a slut in more ways than one – she knows other mothers who still buy old-fashioned name tags and spend hours sewing them into their children’s clothes, but that’s just not her. Instead, she uses one Sharpie to mark their names on the labels in block capitals  and then slips that pen into the kitchen drawer for the other day to day realities of her life – helping with school projects, dating containers of leftovers, making christmas cards. 

The second pen goes in her handbag, for book signings. This is new, this level of success. She’s always written and had a couple of short stories published long before she met him, but this, her first novel, has actually made the bestseller list (albeit the bottom of it) and brought her a certain level of fame in the book world. She credits him with creating a life in which that’s possible – before, she liked to write, but had little faith in her own ability. He loves her words and through him, she’s learned to love them too,

The third pen goes in her bedside drawer. On the first day of term, he takes holiday, and under her school run clothes she slides into her best underwear. For her, more than for him, although she loves that he always notices.

When she returns, there is tea on her bedside table, although the bed is snug, as if he’s been keeping it warm for her the whole time she’s been gone. He lays propped up against the pillows as she strips for him and then curls into the familiar planes of his chest and drinks her tea. This may be their return to routine but she’s never wanted the kind of scenes that begin with her kneeling by the bed, waiting for him. She likes it to start from a place of obvious attraction. 

He always marks her before anything else, the same way she was taught to do it at school. Always label your books (neatly) before writing inside them. Black ink, best handwriting. He does it on her ankle – a subtle enough spot that she can keep it there for a few days if she doesn’t scrub too hard in the shower, but also somewhere she’s always wanted a tattoo, but has never quite dared to get one. 

The words don’t change from year to year. Always his name and, underneath, the number of years they’ve been together. This year is double figures for the first time. She can hardly believe her luck. 

When the ink is dry, they fuck, in the way they haven’t really, all summer. Partly because of the kids always being around, partly because going vanilla for August means she knows this will always await her in September. He pushes his cock into her mouth as deep as she can take it, her eyes watering, the wet black smudginess around then contrasting with the crisp letters on her leg. He pulls her hair. Fucks her with her legs over his shoulder until she gushes everywhere, until she’s stunned by the intensity of it all. And then, when she’s lying there exhausted, his cock still buried inside her, he slaps her lazily across the face, just testing. Her cunt twitches instantly and she moans ‘Oh god, again, please do that again.’ 

He times the slaps to match his thrusts, not stopping until she comes apart underneath him, screaming his name. 

Later he takes her for lunch and, as she dresses and smooths foundation into her flushed cheeks, she marvels that always, with him, there is something new to learn.

Machine

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She glances at the dessert menu and then abandons it, despite the chocolate fondant.

He raises an eyebrow. ‘You don’t want anything?’

Her foot rests between his legs, caressing his stiffening cock through the fabric of his shorts. She smiles at him and draws her finger through the damp circle her wine glass has left on the table. She feels, for once, like she’s the one in control.

‘Not dessert.’

‘Oh?’

How does he do that? How does he flip the dynamic so quickly, so easily?

She holds his gaze. ‘I want you.’

This time, he’s the one to smile. ‘Likewise.’

*

He asks for the bill. The minutes seem endless. He only has a fifty, and the waiter takes an age to bring the change. She’s so wet she’s worried she’ll leave a mark on the canvas chair.

He leaves a tip, gathers up the rest, and deposits three euros on the table in front of her. ‘Your turn to buy condoms.’

‘But we have – ‘

‘I’d like you to buy them there.’

Next to the restaurant is a pharmacy. A pharmacy which is clearly open for business. A pharmacy whose flashing green sign indicates that the current temperature is 28°C. Her face feels at least ten degrees hotter. Because she knows he doesn’t mean her to buy them there. He wants her to use the machine.

It looks as if it hasn’t been used in years. Graffiti covers its rusting surface, along with the tacky remains of stickers long ripped off. There’s a lump of what she fears is chewing gum stuck to its side.

It looks dirty, nasty. Exactly how he likes her to feel.

She wouldn’t mind, late at night. Late at night, in a deserted street, she’d do it willingly. But it’s 14:24 on a sunny Saturday afternoon. People are watching, and that’s his thing, not hers.

She’s frozen to her seat. He reaches down, adjusts his cock in his shorts. She feels her cunt twitch in sympathy. She needs him inside her.

When she finally moves, the backs of her thighs are actually stuck to the canvas. The chair clatters against the concrete as she stands. A few people look up. He grins, half in amusement, half in malice.

In her clammy palm, the coins feel huge. She feels like she’s clutching something secret, or precious. Suddenly she’s reminded of her childhood: of begging to buy Minstrels from an equally tired machine.

‘No,’ her mum had said, dragging her away. ‘You don’t know how long they’ve been in there.’

She feeds the coins in as fast as she can. They clunk down into the depths of the machine and she glances round nervously, convinced the noise is echoing round the entire square. The maitre d’, who seated them a couple of hours earlier, catches her eye. He’s thinking about what she looks like in bed, she’s sure of it.

She presses a button, any button. It doesn’t matter what kind the machine dispenses, because the condoms aren’t the point. They probably won’t even use them. The point is making her burn hot with shame.

The machine doesn’t budge. She presses a different button. Still nothing. She tries the first one again, but to no avail. She turns to look at him, begs him with her eyes to come and help, or to tell her It’s ok, leave it. Instead, he stands with his hands shoved in the pockets of his shorts, visibly erect. He shrugs.

She turns back to the machine, and in frustration as much as desperation, she thumps the side of it. This time, people really do look up. She can hear titters, and somewhere in the crowd a man whistles.

She hates this. She loves it.

Finally, a packet falls down the chute, and she grabs it and scoots back to the table as fast as she can, eyes firmly on the ground.

He catches her arm, pulls her tight against him, grinds his cock into her stomach. He holds out a hand and she drops the packet into his palm, ridiculously proud of herself.

They kiss, all the heat and shame finally channelled. When they pull apart, and he takes her hand and leads her back in the direction of their hotel, she doesn’t notice him casually abandon the square packet on the table behind them.

Postcard Flash #03: Tender is the Night

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I finally stopped letting Fitzgerald intimidate me…

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She finds a copy of ‘Tender is the Night’ in a second-hand bookstore a few weeks after they end it for good. It makes her cry all over again. It was his favourite, and even though she has bad school memories of ‘The Great Gatsby,’ she’d read it anyway. More than the book itself, she likes the trivia around it – the way it was rewritten after Fitzgerald’s death to make it more acceptable, more palatable. She sympathises with that – the inability to tell the exact truth about something because nobody else quite *gets* it. From the very start the best bits were a series of occasional moments that she revisited time and time again in her head – sucking his cock in a dark alleyway after their first date; the flowers he bought her two weeks in; the butt plug he gave her after six.

You couldn’t share those moments with other people – they always wanted the chronology, the forward momentum (not to mention that the words ‘butt plug’ made them wince.) They wanted a proposal, marriage, babies – something they could relate to their own experience. Theirs wasn’t a story you could sell, and almost everyone was glad when he left her. But months later she still revisited those memories – dipping in at will. Treating them more like poetry than a novel.

The Fallen Woman

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‘I push open the door and stumble through, tripping over my own feet and falling head first into the office.

Double crap – me and my two left feet! I am on my hands and knees in the doorway to Mr Grey’s office, and gentle hands are around me helping me stand. I am so embarrassed, damn my clumsiness. I have to steel myself to glance up. Holy cow – he’s so young.’

– E L James, Fifty Shades of Grey

I didn’t get that worked up when Ana fell at the start of FSoG. According to a friend, that was as it should be.

‘Bella is clumsy in Twilight. That’s the whole point.’

Maybe it is the whole point of Twilight. I don’t know. I haven’t read/seen it. What I do know, though, is that Ana’s clumsiness is completely fucking irrelevant to Fifty Shades.

I’m not sure that E L James thinks it is, however. I think E L James thinks it might be how Christian spots that Ana would make a good sub. After all, there’s lots about BDSM that confuses E L James – the fact that it’s not born out of a disturbed childhood, the fact that the love of a good woman can’t ‘cure’ somebody of it, and the way no fucking helicopter can make up for the fact that nowhere in the book does Ana suggest she might have submissive leanings.

Anyway. I wasn’t that bothered at the time because it was just a book. Not a book that had sold millions of copies. Not a book that had changed the landscape of erotica. Just a book. And then this happened:

He sank into an elegant crouch in front of me. Hit with all that exquisite masculinity at eye level, I could only stare. Stunned.

Then something shifted in the air between us.

As he stared back, he altered … as if a shield slid away from his eye, revealing a scorching force of will that sucked the air from my lungs. The intense magnetism he exuded grew in strength, becoming a near-tangible impression of vibrant and unrelenting power.

Reacting purely on instinct, I shifted backward. And sprawled flat on my ass.

– Sylvia Day, Bared to You

I’m a big believer in the power of chemistry. But I can honestly say I’ve never sprawled on my ass due to a guy’s ‘elegant crouch.’

I did a bit of Google research earlier this year, when I first started thinking about this. Surely, I reasoned, women falling must be an established trope in romantic literature. I couldn’t find anything. And then it occurred to me that maybe falling/injury is a modern update of this:

“MY DEAREST LIZZY,—

“I find myself very unwell this morning, which, I suppose, is to be imputed to my getting wet through yesterday. My kind friends will not hear of my returning till I am better. They insist also on my seeing Mr. Jones—therefore do not be alarmed if you should hear of his having been to me—and, excepting a sore throat and headache, there is not much the matter with me.—Yours, etc.”

“Well, my dear,” said Mr. Bennet, when Elizabeth had read the note aloud, “if your daughter should have a dangerous fit of illness—if she should die, it would be a comfort to know that it was all in pursuit of Mr. Bingley, and under your orders.”

– Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

Romance relies on a weak heroine almost as much as it does an alpha hero. In the past, illness was enough to create a situation in which the hero and heroine are thrown together. These days, it’s harder to convince the average reader that a woman ‘needs’ a man, and so romance does everything in its power to recreate that situation of old. There are various approaches – the heroine can be pregnant, sick, young, poor or just plain clumsy. Because if she doesn’t need rescuing, the author is (ostensibly) breaking the pact they have with the reader.

I’m a cynic, but I was a sucker for Mills & Boon in the past. I loved these women who needed saving so much, I didn’t just read them; I made some shoddy attempts at writing them, too:

He knelt beside her and kissed her gently. She opened her eyes and gave him a sleepy smile. “Bedtime?” he asked.

She nodded, but made no attempt to move. He stood up and gathered her into his arms. She kicked off her stilettos and snuggled up against his chest. He handed her the warm mug, and headed for the stairs.

In their bedroom, he sat down on the edge of the bed and set about undressing her. He slid the straps of her satin dress down and placed her briefly on her feet so that she could step out of it. He unsnapped her suspender belt, removed her stockings and unclipped her bra. As he pulled her white cotton nightdress over her head, she gave a contented sigh, still half asleep. He pulled back the duvet and laid her down.

I think I excelled myself with that particular piece (in my defence, I was eighteen when I wrote it). The FMC has a minor case of being a bit tired, but it affects her so badly that she gets carried upstairs by the hero, undressed by him, and even ‘laid down.’ She couldn’t be more passive if she tried.

Looking back, it wasn’t the passivity that attracted me to writing these kind of women. It was the bodies that they’d need for these kind of scenes even to work. Women who get carried up to bed must naturally be willowy and feather-like. Not only that, I think I thought they were also easy women – if you could simply scoop a woman up and literally put her exactly where you wanted her to be, she wasn’t exactly going to cause you many other problems. And god, I wanted to be that kind of girl.

Luckily, I’ve grown out of that. A bit, anyway. But I’m still writing women who fall.

Falling is seriously grim. I know that not only from my own extensive experience, but also because I’m hyper-alert to other people falling. When I did the Moonwalk back in May, I witnessed a horrific one – an elderly lady tripped over a tree root and gained momentum as she attempted to right herself. Just as I thought she’d regained her balance, she went absolutely flying. And the smack of body hitting concrete, of other people’s gasps, they bring back every fall I’ve ever suffered. I hate seeing it almost as much as I hate doing it.

So we have to stop writing falls as though they’re romantic. They’re not. They’re painful, humiliating, scary. But those things can all be sexy. There’s one particular scene that’s stuck with me from Unfaithful with Richard Gere and Diane Lane, where she falls and we see the aftermath as a series of vignettes designed to foreshadow the risks and pain inherent in the affair she’s embarking on. She eases her tights away from an oozing graze. There’s a flashback to a boiling kettle hissing as she does. It’s all a bit predictable, perhaps, but it turned me on.

I’m fascinated by cuts, grazes, bruises. And not just the ones caused by kink, either. Watching skin knit back together, or blood bead, waiting to spill. The stickiness of it as it clots. The metallic, iron-rich taste of it. I completely accept that these things won’t work for everyone, though. They’re fairly dark, I guess.

Essentially I feel much the same about falling as I do about disability. We need to write it, to see it in the media, to acknowledge that it’s part of many people’s reality. It’s not kooky, or adorable, or cute. What it could be though, if we wrote it well, is really, really fucking hot.

Flash fiction: Testa rossa

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Disclaimer: I know nothing about cars. When I saw the Wicked Wednesday prompt this week, I was tempted to skip this one. But I like a challenge, so I scoured Wikipedia until I found a single detail I could hang a story on. Probably though, the Ferrari Testarossa looks nothing like the car in Back to the Future. I’m bad at film, too.

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The Ferrari stopped and the tinted window opened to reveal a man. Just not the one she wanted. He reached out, folded the wing mirror in, and the tinted glass slid back into place.

She came here to escape. There was, she’d discovered, little difference between being at the end of a relationship and right at its heart. Everywhere she went, everything she saw, it all reminded her of him. In the supermarket, she noticed the guys who used the same brand of toothpaste. In their favourite bar, the ones who ordered the wine he preferred. Suddenly, an abnormal proportion of the men she encountered wore his aftershave.

Thank god he wasn’t a coffee drinker.

Every Saturday she wiled hours away in coffee shops. They hadn’t even been together that long and she’d forgotten what to do with weekends spent alone. She read the paper, or tried to. She emptied sugar packets onto the table and drew patterns in the snowy grains. She tried, really tried, not to think about him.

The car door opened. The man stepped out. He was good looking, without a doubt. He was wearing beige tailored shorts and a pale blue shirt. Good legs, great arse. And he had a nice car. What was wrong with her? Why couldn’t she feel anything?

She’d noticed the car for the wrong reason when he’d pulled up to the kerb. Some women, she knew, would be drawn in just by the sight of a 1980s style Ferrari that looked like something out of Back to the Future. Most would never even have spotted the branding above the brake light.

Testarossa.

She watched the man as he queued for his coffee. How would his thick leather belt look hanging open? How would his fingers feel inside her? Would he taste like the espresso the waitress was pushing across the counter towards him?

She willed herself to imagine his cock, to think about the way the head of it would feel spreading her open, to picture the veins running like tributaries under the skin. And amazingly, the willpower worked. She was wet; thinking of somebody new.

He downed his coffee and walked back to his car. If he noticed her sat there, by the door, he didn’t show it.

For six months, the only man she’d thought of, the only one she’d wanted, was the man who was now her ex: fiery, passionate, red-headed. Her very own testa rossa. It was those words on the back of the car that drew her to it, another sign, another reminder of her loss.

But as its driver fired the engine and pulled off into traffic, she knew something inside her had shifted.

She would fuck other men. Men who drank different wine, used different toothpaste, wore all kinds of aftershave. Her testa rossa would become one of many, loved and lost, but fondly remembered. She would be ok, more than ok, in fact. One day, not too far from now, she’d remember how it felt to be happy.

For more Wicked Wednesday, click the image below…

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Anal, WHY???: On contemporary, literary, semi-autobiographical, women’s mainstream (erotic) fiction

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And I told you that the main reason I didn’t see you, was because I was lost in my thoughts of you. This pleased you immensely. You had guessed as much. You could tell, you said, by the way my eyes stared, the thoughtful set of my mouth, that I was thinking about what we had done in the Chapel in the Crypt. The arrogance of this assumption annoyed me then and I rolled on my back on the bed, away from you, and tried to back-track, claiming I wasn’t thinking about you that day in the cafe after all, that I was thinking about the introduction I had to write to a new university textbook, a collection of essays taking a wide-ranging approach to molecular biology. You knew I was lying. You rolled on top of me, pinned my arms above my head with one hand and dug your fingers into the soft part of my waist with the other until I admitted I had been thinking about you, you, you …

Louise Doughty, Apple Tree Yard

What have I read so far this year? Lots, I think, or certainly more than in the last few years. Or maybe it’s just that I’ve read more that has stuck with me. Apple Tree Yard, by Louise Doughty, Hausfrau by Jill Essbaum, The Beautiful Indifference by Sarah Hall, In the Unlikely Event, by Judy Blume.

All have sex scenes. None are erotica. Truth be told, I’ve never really *read* erotica, I skip to the good bits and use them purely to get off. These days I might read more erotic short stories from end to end, as a way of learning the craft, but full (novel) length erotic fiction that holds my attention and brings me to orgasm? It’s harder and harder to find.

My earliest memory of getting off to words is not tied in with erotica, or even with a classic erotic scene such as the ones you find in anthologies like this. My earliest memory is of being aged around twelve, and of being allowed to stay up in my parents hotel room while they went for dinner and my sister slept in our shared room. I can’t remember what the book was called: it was a typical holiday paperback belonging to my mum – white glossy cover, ridiculously middle class protagonists – and the bit that I remember most is that when the FMC had her first child, a girl, her husband bought her pearls, when she had her second, a boy, she got diamonds. It was a sexist, dated, pretty crappy read, no doubt. None of the details of its (one) sex scene have stayed with me. But I do remember lying on the bed on my stomach, reading it over and over again. Of course, you could argue that what gets a twelve year old girl off is unlikely to titillate a grown woman. I think there’s some truth in that, although there have been plenty of mainstream novels with sex that both drives the plot and tries to be sexy. Sebastian Faulks’ Birdsong; Ian McEwan’s Atonement. I’ve not wanked over either of these, but if I wanted something to wank over, I could just go to Literotica.

I class my own work as erotica because it has sex in almost every chapter. But it has sex in almost every chapter because endless publishers’ guidelines and other successful erotic novels have led me to believe that that’s what the reader wants. My natural inclination would probably be to include more sex than in the average non-erotic novel, but less than in the erotic fiction that’s out there on the shelves. I didn’t start out writing erotica, but I did start out writing sex: my first novel, which currently lies abandoned, opens like this:

Hope turns her head, hoping for a kiss. Her lips part eagerly and in the puddle of milky light from the street lights outside he can see her pupils are huge with desire.  He traces a tender finger across her lips and over her soft cheek and then bends to kiss the delicate valley of her collarbone, breathing in the faint scent of patchouli and rose oil that lingers on her skin.

He loves how everything about her feels so familiar.  Her breasts, small and pert enough to fit exactly into the palms of his hands, her tiny waist, the way the silver ankle bracelet that she always wears jangles as she moves.  Coaxed by his fingers, she grows wetter and wetter for him, but for the first time in their relationship, he feels nothing but cool detachment as her knuckles whiten, grasping the sheet as the heel of his palm presses firmly against her clitoris.

I’m a big believer in the school of thought that says that sex can reveal a lot about character, that it can change the relationship between people, that it can drive the plot forward. I’ve never wanted to write sex for the sake of sex, and I’ve never thought that my own writing was particularly hot. As a result, I agonise over what each sex scene is *telling* the reader about the characters, rather than whether I think it will turn them on. Right now, I have a post-it stuck to my desk which says ‘Anal. WHY???’ Not because I don’t enjoy anal sex, but because it’s currently in the story purely because I *do* enjoy it – it doesn’t develop or change the relationship between the characters or move the plot forward in any way. I, as a writer, think that’s a problem. Judging by the mood among erotica writers, the average reader doesn’t.

Like Malin James, I write to understand the human (or at least my own) experience. And because in RL, sex has taught me a lot about human experience, I write about sex. I’m struggling with my current novel for a number of reasons. Firstly, because like the other writers who’ve written on this topic – Tamsin Flowers, Remittance Girl, Sessha Batto – I struggle to see where my work slots in to the market. Secondly, because it’s so strongly autobiographical – it’s me trying to understand the relationships I’ve had and the sex I’ve had within them. On my blog, that seems to work for people. Whether it would work for them in print is a whole other matter. The third reason is the one I gave above – that I’ve spent a lot of time learning how to structure and build a satisfying novel and that’s not a hallmark of most erotic fiction out there at the moment. And lastly because I’m wondering if I only started writing erotica because I’m lazy.

What do I mean by that? Obviously it’s an over-exaggeration – I care about plot, about character, about language – so I can’t be *that* lazy. Or maybe by ‘lazy’ I mean under-ambitious or just plain scared. I’ve always wanted to have at least one book published and when I started writing, Black Lace were still commissioning the old-style way: with a page at the back of their books inviting potential authors to send off for their submission guidelines and to submit their work. They made it sound easy, especially in a world where for almost every other genre (category romance aside) submitting direct to the publisher was a no-no: you’d need an agent first and finding that sounded hard enough, without even contemplating the fact that they’d then have to sell your novel on.

I think I was also scared off by the limitations (or not) of other genres: the book world seemed a true Goldilocks arena. Writing literary fiction allowed me to write the way I wanted to write, but I worried that it wasn’t intelligent enough, or conversely that it was too intelligent and therefore self-indulgent. Women’s fiction, when I started out, meant chick-lit, which I’d grown to hate, and although I think things have improved a bit, I still hear authors like Helen Walsh complaining that the publisher slapped a ‘chick-lit cover’ on their work, against their wishes, because it allows them to target the right audience. Chick lit, erotica, and romance all want the HEA. I don’t write HEA. Mainstream, contemporary fiction, which is probably where I should be aiming, just seems impossible: everyone, whether they’ve been published or not, seems to be talking about how ‘no one is buying anything right now.’

The benefits of erotica not requiring an agent have been totally lost: submission guidelines are no longer guidelines in anything but name: they’re requirements, and strict ones at that. Erotica has gone the same way as category romance: there’s undoubtedly a skill in being able to write to a tight brief, but building that skill is my day job, not the reason why I write fiction.

I’ve been contemplating these questions for weeks now and the more I contemplate them, the more the writers’ block sets in: I don’t know who I’m writing for any more, or what they want: we’re all taught that convincing plot and well-rounded characters are what matter to the reader, and I think we’re all trying to do our best for them, but honestly? That’s not what they want any more, or not from smut, at least.

And so for now, I’m trying to get back to writing for me. I like hanging out in the erotica community, so that’s where I’ll stay, but I doubt it’s where I’ll publish. But essentially, I think we need to stop worrying: there is a (big) market for well-written fiction with the bedroom door open, we just need to stop thinking we’re not good, or mainstream, enough to be part of it.

Postcard Flash #02: Music at night

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Too late for Masturbation Monday this time, but here’s another piece of postcard flash.IMG_5242IMG_5243

She agreed that it was rude of the neighbours to hold a party on a stifling Wednesday night in summer when everyone was sleeping with their windows open. It made her giggle, though, the way the bass from the disco drowned out her cries when he fucked her leaning against the windowsill, her hands splayed on the tired paintwork and her skin revelling in the cool breeze from outside. 

He spun her round eventually and pushed her to her knees, not letting her suck his cock until he’d teased her with it, wiping her juices and his precome across her lips and cheeks. When he did let her swallow his length, it pushed it deep immediately, so the smeared juice on her chin mixed with her free flowing saliva. Tangled in her hair, his fingers grazed her sweat-slicked scalp. She was, quite literally, a hot mess. 

His breathing quickened and she knew he was close. Suddenly, he pulled his cock free and came *everywhere* – she was covered from her fringe to her tits. The music went on – louder, it seemed, now the two of them were sated. He got up, threw her dress at her and muttered ‘Back in a sec.’

When he returned, he was grinning. ‘We’re welcome to join the party.’

‘But I’m covered in…’

‘Dare you.’

And sticky and contented, they danced till dawn.