Tag Archives: erotica

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.

Postcard Flash #01: New Biology

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I’m blogging more than I have in recent weeks, because I think writing breeds writing, and I miss it. I have a box of postcards depicting vintage Penguin book covers and I had no idea what to do with them – I’m not a big sender of old school mail. And then I remembered F Dot Leonora’s Sticky Note fiction, and wondered if I could do something similar. Pick a postcard at random and then write a piece of erotic flash inspired by the title on the card. By linking it to Kayla Lord’s great meme Masturbation Monday, I hope i’ll be inspired to do it on a fairly regular basis. This is my first attempt. I hope you enjoy.

Semen was to High School what strangers were to Primary: *the* thing to be afraid of. After all, you could get pregnant even if he didn’t come inside you. So at first she made the mistake of thinking she craved his come because it was transgressive, the same way she craved unknown sex in dark alleyways. The sex was good, even with condoms – he knew how to tilt her hips just so, and she came more easily than she ever had with anyone else. But her own wetness coating her skin afterwards wasn’t enough – she wanted to know what it would feel like mixed with his. ‘How long?’ she wondered. How long did you have to have been fucking before you could talk STD testing and alternative methods? He seemed to know what she wanted, asked if she’d like him to come in her mouth, on her tits, her face. And it was close to what she’d hoped, but not quite there. So she got tested, without telling him, went on the pill. When she told him, he had a surprise for her too: his own clean results. In the weeks that followed they fucked bareback time and again, and with the trace of him inside her, she learnt something new. Semen was indeed the source of new life – it made *her* feel alive.

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More Masturbation Monday here…

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My Biggest Fan

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There’s been a post about talking to my dad about sex on my to-write list for a while, now. But, although I find it weirdly easy to talk to my dad about sex, it’s less easy for me to work out why. So bear with me.

What prompted this post today is, well, Father’s Day, obviously, but also this tweet by @Juniper3Glasgow, and her blog post about her dad, too.

https://twitter.com/Juniper3Glasgow/status/612714928051515392

My parents know I write erotica. They know I have a sex blog. My mum says: ‘Do you think one day you’ll write a different genre?’

My dad says: ‘I went for a drink with N the other night. I told him you’ve just had an erotic story published. He asked if he could read it?’

No. Not this time.

There are two problems with the story I’ve just had published. One is that it’s deeply personal. The other is that my bio has a link to my blog, and thus not only the details of my sex life, but also my Sinful Sunday pictures. They *definitely* don’t need to see those.

If I ever get something published that’s less personal, would I let my dad read it? I don’t know. It’s not the sex that I think he might judge, but at the moment he thinks everything I do is great, and he’s the fussiest audience I’ve ever met. Whether it’s film, TV or books, he prefers indie, European, generally pretty bleak stuff. Would my writing match up to the quality of what he’s used to reading? I doubt it.

But, there’s a benefit to that, too. If he thinks something is good, he’s always shared it, with little concern for age-appropriateness. He let me watch 9 1/2 weeks at age 15, and I, in turn, a year later, lent him my copy of Marie Darrieussecq’s Pig Tales, which is pretty filthy. Sex is not a topic that’s off limits. I’ve explained sex positivity to him, and the pull for me of writing erotica, which is best captured by Guy New York’s book Write ’till You’re Hard:

‘Sex is a natural way to look at self-discovery, and it’s one that is often overlooked or ignored. Mostly because we’re afraid of sex, and there’s a giant stigma against erotica as being a non-serious genre. Which is a load of shit. Sex and relationships are at the center of all our lives…’

My dad’s family shy away from physical affection and touch, as well as talking about feelings. He couldn’t really be more different. I grew up believing it was ok to ask for hugs when you wanted or needed them, that it was ok to cry (whether you’re male or female) and that men suffer from anxiety and fear too, and that doesn’t make them any less of a man. It was a good grounding for a feminist take on the world.

I have a box in the cupboard stuffed full of letters from my dad. He writes every couple of months, always on headed paper, only ever writing on one side, always asking more questions about my life than he tells me stuff about his own. We speak too, regularly, but there’s something about those letters. A lesson about writing, perhaps. That it’s worth it, that it matters, that it’s not a waste of time. Whatever genre you choose.

Disabled characters: who do I really write them for?

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A few months ago, I tweeted about the huge disparity in follower numbers between the @EverydaySexism and @EverydayAbleism Twitter accounts. And somebody random came back to me and said something like ‘Well, there are lots more women than there are disabled people.’

I accept that that’s true to an extent, but probably less so than you imagine. Factor in all the people with invisible disabilities, who tend to get ignored, and I bet the number shoots right up. Plus, it’s a pretty fucking limited view of who can care about these issues, isn’t it? Only women give a damn about sexism and only disabled people fight against ableism. And yeah, sometimes it feels like that. Which is a good enough reason, in my book, to pepper my erotica with my own experiences of disability. So that other people, able-bodied or otherwise, get it. That they see the challenges, the unexpected triggers, the psychological battles. I’d like to say ‘so they see that disability can be hot,’ but if I’m being totally honest, I often don’t care whether readers think what I write is hot or not – I just desperately want to share my own experiences.

I’m currently writing a short story featuring a disabled female character, with the intention of submitting it to an anthology. The character in question is freaked out by a physical challenge that would seem relatively insignificant to anyone able-bodied, but it’s a big deal to her. In this particular case, she overcomes her fear, but I don’t want that to be the narrative of every story about disability that I write. It’s just not realistic. But my biggest problem with this story is that she overcomes the fear with the help of a man, she doesn’t manage it all by herself. And in today’s climate of sex-positive, strong women, that feels like a failing.

The pressure I feel to write strong women, a pressure that causes writer’s block like nothing else, is equally applicable to characters with disabilities. In the story I’ve just had published in the For Book’s Sake anthology Tongue in Cheek, the (able-bodied) FMC cries during sex:

He’s losing me, and he knows it. Neither of us can gain enough purchase here on the cushions for him to up the tempo of his thrusts and re-centre me in the moment. So he takes me upstairs, and we fuck like we’re fucking, not kissing, and I give up the pretence completely and start to cry.

Until recently, I’d have found it hard to write a disabled character who cried during sex and not feel like I was perpetuating myths about disabled people being weak. But the truth is, if we write disabled people who are all happy and cool about their disabilities, who’ve dealt with all their issues, and are basically disabled only in a physical sense, we’re doing people who identify as disabled a massive disservice. I think the able-bodied world is often guilty of holding up as role models disabled people who’ve achieved way more than the majority of us could ever hope to – Paralympic athletes for example. While I find what they do hugely impressive, I can’t relate. Partly, it’s about finding it easier to relate to people whose condition is very similar to my own and whose strengths are similar too (Conservative MP Robert Halfon, for example, who mouths off about anything he feels strongly about). But it’s also about feeling immense pressure to be above average – I’ve done it in some areas of my life, and it frustrates me hugely that my body prevents me achieving what I’d like to physically. I want to write erotica that shows it’s ok to be weak, to be scared, to be angry. Because I think those are universal emotions – felt by able-bodied people as much as disabled people, men as much as women.

But universal though the emotions I’m writing may be, the writer’s block on the novel continues. Weak, scared and angry might be ok in a 3k short, but they’re pretty relentless in a full length piece. When I posted an extract on here, I got detailed feedback from several people who I like and whose opinion I trust. One pointed out that the female lead was clearly me, and that that was a risk – no one expects to get 100% positive feedback on a novel and I’d have to be prepared for readers to potentially criticise or dislike a character who is a barely veiled version of myself. And because she’s a barely veiled version of me, she spends the majority of the novel beating herself up. I’m not always sure I like her: how can I possibly expect readers to?

Perhaps readers won’t like her, but if the novel does get published, it should be a pretty good sign that some, at least, do. All my hang-ups when it comes to writing are not caused by other people’s opinions. They’re caused by my own. *I* worry that to turn to a man for support when I’m scared makes me weak. *I* worry that a heroine with a disability that she hasn’t fully come to terms with can never be sexy.

I write to make disability less scary. I write to reduce the stigma that surrounds it. I write to show that you can be disabled and still be sexy.

But right now, it’s not readers I’m trying to convince. It’s myself.

Erotic Fiction: Bite Me

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So, a few weeks ago, the lovely Jade A. Waters posted on Twitter a list of her favourite words that she’s been keeping for years and years. She’s clearly a woman after my own heart, only much better organised and with the ability to actually stick to a project. Anyway, Exhibit A turned her list into a challenge, and allocated me the word ‘Alligator.’ It’s taken me weeks, but finally…

Bite me

Opposite her, the wolf chuckles softly. The gazelle gives her a smile loaded with fake empathy, and, sensing perhaps that she’s about to lose her shit, the hostess (panther) slides the box of after dinner mints towards her.

‘Alligator, Sarah?’ she says. ‘Don’t be so silly. You’re so much prettier than that.’

‘I like alligators.’ She tries to hide the ‘This is a crap game’ undertone.

It’s not that dinner parties aren’t her thing. She’s a fan, really, in the ‘platters of food piled high in the middle of the table, Jamie Oliver fashion, washed down with bottle after bottle of wine, and proper, meaningful chat,’ way.

What she doesn’t like is all this small talk and organised fun. Plus, she suspects she’s being set up.

The guy sitting next to her is unassuming and cute. She can’t even remember what animal he is, only that he’s David, and he’s an engineer. He doesn’t make her feel stupid for being an alligator.

She was dumped a week ago, for being, apparently, scary. Weird that he’d never mentioned that before she met his mates. Perhaps some girls would respond to an accusation of being scary by reining it in, toning it down, but not Sarah. Sarah wants to be scarier. 

Here, she’s surrounded by a gazelle, a panther, a tigress and a unicorn. A unicorn, for fuck’s sake. Of all the things she’s ever fantasised about, being a unicorn is not one of them. She doesn’t have the sleekness, the elegance of any of these (fake) animals. She is independent, and fierce and suspicious, and an alligator strikes her as being all those things.

The other guests have lost interest in the stupid questions now, thankfully. In the light of low-burning candles, they turn to their partners and absorb themselves in chatter, leaving Sarah and David to rely on each other.

‘Interesting choice,’ he says, leaning over to top up her glass. ‘Why’d you pick it?’

Perhaps she’s had one glass too many. Perhaps she’s still hurting. Either way, she’s had it with the bastard alligator.

‘Because I fucking bite when people piss me off!’

Heads turn. Mouths drop open. David just laughs. She loves him a little bit for that.

‘Do you need to escape?’ he whispers, when the attention has shifted away from them. ‘Do you feel like an alligator *in captivity*?’

She nods, frantically. ‘Get me out of here. Please.’

He drops his napkin (Ironed linen. Seriously.) onto the table, and announces ‘Sorry, guys. I have to go. Early start tomorrow. Dinner was delightful.’

And then he turns to her. ‘I’ll walk you home if you want, Sarah.’

Nobody buys it. Everyone thinks they’re going home to fuck. Except Sarah. Sarah *hopes* they’re going home to fuck.

It’s a nice night, and so they do walk, falling into step beside one another, until eventually his hand brushes hers and their fingers interweave. On the way, he tells her about alligators.

‘I thought you were being serious,’ he says. ‘Because alligators are cool.’

‘Oh?’

‘They do that thing where they can walk on their hind legs. And they like to be alone.’

He’s teasing her now, she can tell from the way his finger is gently stroking her thumb.

‘There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be alone.’

‘I never said there was.’

They tumble through her front door and kiss against the bare wall. She’s taken down the print of Paris that Ben bought her at Christmas. David nips at her bottom lip, goading her, making her desperate.

Upstairs, she fumbles urgently with his belt. She needs the solidity, the realness of his cock, the reassurance that not all of life is as fake as dinner.

He places a hand on her shoulder, pushes her to her knees. Once she’s down, he takes a few paces back. He unbuckles; takes out his cock.

‘If you want it, crawl for it.’

‘You’re not serious.’

‘Totally serious.’

And she does crawl, floorboards stinging her knees, shame and lust duelling for dominance.

He stops her again, as she draws close, hand on her forehead this time.

‘Beg for it.’

‘No,’ she says, and tries to break away; to get to his dick. She wants to taste him so badly.

His hand flies from her forehead to her jaw so quickly, she doesn’t have time to react. He holds her mouth tightly shut, fingers biting into her tender flesh. It feels incredible.

‘Will you ask nicely?’

She’s impassive. She doesn’t give in that easily. But his grip is unrelenting.

‘You want my cock in your mouth?’

She nods.

‘Then say “Please.’’’

Christ, she can’t bear it. She wrests her head free. ‘Please. God, please.’

She lunges forward. He slides his length deep. Saliva spills freely to the floor and down the front of her dress, leaving dark stains on the silk. She gags, gets lightheaded. It’s bliss.

Relentlessly, he butts against the back of her throat. She swallows away her gag reflex the best she can. She wants him to flood her mouth.

Instead, he yanks his cock free, pulls her to her feet, shoves her towards the bed. He seems to know what she needs even better than she does.

He holds her down as he fucks her, pinning her forearms so tightly to the bed that she knows there’ll be bruises in the morning. It doesn’t tame her; it makes her wilder still. Her hips thrust violently back against his every downstroke, her cries are throaty and raw. And when he comes, with a sudden cry, she sinks her teeth into his bicep, remembering something he told her on the walk back. Alligators only attack humans if provoked. And he’s provoked her, without a doubt.

*

She wakes in the early hours, thirsty. It takes her a moment to orientate herself and once she has, she wishes she’d stayed asleep. David has vanished. Her heart is pounding. How could he slope off after something so perfect?

She pads downstairs, fills a glass and drains it. Fills it again. Her jaw aches. This can’t be a one off.  She couldn’t bear it.

Sipping her water, she turns. There’s a bill on the table, and on the back, a scribbled note: ‘I really do have an early start. Drinks tonight? See you later, Alligator! xxx’

Content, she crawls back to bed. And wonders: ‘Do alligators mate for life?’

Giving It Up Competition: The Results

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I’m late with these – I’d have extended the deadline for another week or so, but I figured that after the whole of Lent, it was time for you to stop writing and get back to morel important things like chocolate, booze and wanking (oh, wait, that’s just me…)

Anyway, as ever when I run competitions, the calibre of the entries was pretty damn high, which makes making a decision about the winner difficult, to say the least.

Let’s start with Innocent Loverboy’s entry, seeing as he was quick off the mark to send it in. I really like the way he’s added extra elements of challenge to the prompt, and that he’s been inspired by music (he wrote it in 05.42 minutes, which is the length of the James track that inspired him. I love the short sentences at the start as well, which do indeed give a real sense of build up.

Jane at Jane’s Little Secrets is also a recent discovery, and one who shares the same problem as me: struggling to give up control. It’s totally worth it in this case, though, because the description of being fingered by someone who’s driving feels risky in more ways than one. And who isn’t turned on by an element of risk?

Absolutely Ruby’s gorgeous post imagines the day that she’ll have to give up a lover who’s both bad and good for her all at the same time. The remembered details in this – her first champagne cocktail, a much needed hug – enrich the piece and create a situation we’re almost all certain to relate to. My heart aches for her reading this, but at the same time, when she says ‘I will look back on our time and boy will I smile because it really has been fantastic’ it makes me smile too. A proper emotional rollercoaster of an entry, this one.

Lent by Strained Voices is a piece where the characters end up breaking the rules of Lent, and isn’t that always the most fun? It was the line ‘I can do whatever the fuck I want,” he said, holding her hips and plunging himself inside her,’ that really got me. Hot stuff.

TheShingleBeach is the third entrant to include a song lyric – it’s as if when we’re forced to give up the good stuff in life we turn to music to see us through. Loss appears as a theme here too, and heartbreakingly sadly, once again, especially because, fuck me, this couple have chemistry. We know they’ve been intimate for a while, because of the way she is pulled into the bedroom in ‘a practised tango,’ and it makes the end, with its lonely walk home and suitcase to be packed, even more poignant than it might otherwise be.

Collared Mom’s Lent is Rough was definitely the piece that made me smile the most – i could totally see myself wondering if tiramisu was fair game if I’d given up coffee – and here the main character still can’t stop her mind wandering to tiramisu even once she has a hot man on the scene! The descriptions, such as ‘I was grinning like a school girl that had just been given a pony for her birthday.’ are great too.

@Mandapen‘s Take It All is sadly not available for reading online, as she emailed it to me. It’s a great tale of a woman domming her partner for the first time. There’s no fear here of painting flawed characters – we learn that he is ‘an unreliable servant’ who often goes AWOL for ‘weeks, sometimes months’ or of viscerality: ‘great salty mouthfuls of her juice,’ both of which are things that i massively appreciate in fiction.

In the end though, I was torn between two pieces: An Older Man’s Breaking Conditioning and Euclidean Point‘s Giving Up Kink (which again, was sent to me via email.) The draw of the former is how fearlessly it eroticises something that I still think of as a relatively niche kink – water sports. Innate shame duels with the desire to please, and I love the way that the subtle tension of the piece dwindles to deep affection as it draws to a close.

Maybe Euclidean Point’s entry taps strongly into my kinks (and by ‘maybe’ I mean ‘definitely), but it also covers such ground so concisely. For example, ‘On our first date he opened doors for me and I lowered my eyes for him. The first time we were alone, in a hotel room, he spanked me and I sucked his cock while he pulled my hair,’ tells us everything we need to know about the characters in two perfectly composed sentences. And then, the final paragraph which captures both the strength and peacefulness in submission, and well as the sense it can give you of coming home. All these things combined to leave me with little choice but to declare this piece the winner, which means you can read it in full below. Congratulations, Euclidean Point – I’ll be in touch about your prize.

Charlie xx

Here is what happens when you give up your kink. 

It was his idea, to live as a vanilla couple for a month. Since meeting online we had each been entrenched in our defined roles – he was a dominant and I was a submissive. On our first date he opened doors for me and I lowered my eyes for him. The first time we were alone, in a hotel room, he spanked me and I sucked his cock while he pulled my hair.

We’ve been living together for two years now, and I want to be with him forever. His issue with this is my experience. I’ve had flings and half-hearted love affairs, but never a relationship like this. How can I know that it’s the submission I love, not just the fact that I can cuddle up to someone after a hard day at work?

He removed my collar on a Sunday morning. The sun was shining into our bedroom as I knelt at his feet. He carefully laid the collar in his bedside drawer, and then returned to me and helped me to stand up. The rest of the day was mine.

We cooked breakfast together, as we had done a hundred times before. I decided I wanted to go shopping, and I remembered to inform rather than ask him before I left the house. I managed a few hours of pleasant but directionless wandering before returning home. He’d brought me flowers. That night he gently took me into his arms and caressed my body. We fucked slowly and kissed passionately. I moaned in all the right places, and smiled at him afterwards. It felt empty and soulless, but perhaps it was just unfamiliar.

For the next few weeks he hugged me, kissed me, and asked about my day. Gone were the affectionate slaps on my arse. For the first time in years my pale skin was entirely without a mark or a bruise. All of our toys were sealed in a box in the corner of our bedroom, a box that I couldn’t stop glancing at out of the corner of my eye.

One day when he was out, I opened the box. Three weeks after sealing it all away, it was strange to see the neatly packed rope, a selection of clamps, canes, floggers and my favourite riding crop. I took out two lengths of rope and re-sealed the box. When he came home, I led him to the bed and almost had one of his wrists tied to the headboard before he even realised what I was doing.

He allowed himself to be tied, for his nipples to be pinched. I brought him to the brink of orgasm with my mouth and then stopped. He laughed when I asked him to beg. I teased him some more. He pulled experimentally on his bonds but having been tied to that headboard so much myself I knew exactly how to ensure there would be no escape. Eventually he persuaded me to give him his release. He never told me that I was in trouble, or that I would pay for this once the month came to an end. The next morning I packed the rope back into the box and it has been there ever since.

The last week of the month was difficult. I was really busy at work, and came home stressed and tense every evening. He cooked dinner, and rubbed my shoulders. Some nights he massaged my feet as I sat drinking wine in front of the TV.

Today is the last day of my freedom from submission. As I enter the bedroom he’s standing waiting for me.

‘You’re happy.’ He sounds resigned.

‘I am.’ I respond, smiling at him.

He steels himself before responding. ’You know I can’t give up for good, don’t you? But maybe we could just do it on weekends or…’

My grin stops him in his tracks and he searches my face for meaning. ‘I’m happy because the month is over.’

It’s only when the tension visibly leaves his body that I can see how much he has suffered. How careful he has been, how studiously he has denied himself to give me this choice. That he loves me so much he would be prepared to let me go rather than risk pressuring me into a submissive lifestyle that I didn’t want.

But I need it as much as he does. As I lean in to kiss him, he takes my wrists and pushes them behind my back. Then using one hand to keep my wrists pinned, his free hand roughly grabs my breast and pinches my nipple hard. We’re both smiling as we press our foreheads together in a moment of shared relief.

Tonight we will open the box in the corner of our bedroom and resume our familiar roles. The blank canvas of my flesh will once again carry the evidence of our shared passion, the lines and bruises that mark me as his. This is my freedom. This is my home. And I will never give it up again.