![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) sarahf has an interesting post over at Dear Author today. She's discussing the oneupmanship in sex acts in erotic romance, the trend to ever more exotic acts as a way of creating a charge by pushing boundaries and breaking taboos. And she's talking about something that is going to cause a problem for any author who thinks about their craft -- how do you make it feel organic to the story, rather than something tossed in as titillation?
( rambling about writing )
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Writing is intermittent at the moment (because of Stuff that's higher on the priority list for the next few weeks, not because of failure to write). Nevertheless I did 2000 words on Sunday, in the course of which I discovered that Google is not good for everything. I have a fairy who has been abducted by Bad Guys, and it occurred to me that they'd probably use a mix of modern pharmaceuticals and old herbal lore when they stick a syringe full of tranquillizer into him. My memory refused to cough up specifics of herbal lore relating to controlling fairies, and the books I might have skimmed through are mostly in storage. Alas, my Google-fu failed me, and I couldn't think of search terms that didn't result in hundreds of results in the class "twee modern nonsense" and no serious folklore research.
I think I'll have to go and hit the mythology section in BookBuyers this afternoon. And if that fails me, I'll have to do it the old-fashioned way, and go to a library...
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Well, that's cheered me up... I don't discuss most of my reviews, but I think I'll mention that I've just received my first ever Recommended Read from a review site:
http://www.joyfullyreviewed.com/reviews/RRs/June07RR/LordAndMaster.JJ.html
Of course, it would be for my first contemporary romance rather than one of the cross-genre books. :^)
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I should have asked "where's my contract?" sooner. It turns out that the editor *did* send the contract for the story I sold to a Haworth anthology -- but to the wrong address. It is alas too late to get the story back in the anthology, but he has apologised profusely and very decently said he will pay me anyway. So I'm not out the money, or technically the credit for the sale; but it would have been nice to have the exposure.
In fact, it would have been nice to have the anthology to wave at people. I wanted to be in this anthology because it was a science fiction market, and I've mostly sold to romance and erotica markets. I have never yet actually seen print in what is, when all's said and done, my home genre. I've *sold* things, yes -- but this isn't the first time I've been paid for something that then doesn't actually appear. I'm starting to feel jinxed.
In other anthology submission news, last month I got my annual "no, but please keep submitting" rejection from Maxim Jakobowski for the Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica. It arrived during Baycon, which is why I forgot to post about it at the time.
Back to http://ralan.com and http://www.erotica-readers.com/ERA/G/Call_For_Submissions.htm -- I have other stories I need to find a home for anyway...
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I missed this last time it came around as an LJ meme. But I'm frantically cat-vacuuming, and Making Light has a new thread on story openings. So here are a few of mine:
It took Allard precisely ten seconds to diagnose why "the screen thingy went all black."
"That's the fifth power-cable out of its socket I've seen today," he snarled gently. Time to go through the job ads. It could be very therapeutic to reassure himself that there was a vast market out there for sysadmins who had got tired of the current bunch of morons they were working with. He tried not to remember that the vast market was largely composed of other bunches of morons who had recently pushed their previous sysadmins beyond the point of tolerance. If nothing else, if he found a job on another planet, at least it would be a change of scenery.
-- The Syndicate
There's a village I live in for part of the year, one of those small villages where everyone knows everyone else and their genealogy, or so it seems. I'm not such a fool as to think that I’ve been accepted by the locals as one of them, but at least I've been classed as a useful resident rather than as a damned nuisance tourist -- or worse, a weekender. I’d rather keep that designation, so I'll not be naming the village in question.
-- Spindrift
"We surrender!"
Reeve thought for a second, then gave the ceasefire order and stared at the screen.
The prison transport lay before them, not just dropped into normal space, but stalled completely. Reeve chewed on his thumbnail, considering the screen. This was just a little too easy -- prison service ships weren't normally crewed by fight-to-the-last-man types, but they also weren't pushovers. And if any Protectorate prison transport was to be fitted with heavy armaments, it would be the one selected to carry a convicted Union spy to her punishment. He’d been lucky with the brief exchange of fire, the transport's shields going down at the first hit to give him free access to her engines, but still it seemed too lucky.
-- Mindscan
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I've been threatening for some time to do an essay that summarises the "why do girls like boys who do boys?" thread from rasfc in June/July 2003. This is a placeholder, with some notes as I go through the thread. Please feel free to comment and add further suggestions -- I'll work it up into something more coherent later. Possibly much later.
There was also discussion of the difference between graphic and explicit, whether it is possible to tell whether an erotica writer is male or female (often, but not always, yes), definitions of homosexuality through the ages, fanfic, and is there anyone in the known universe who doesn't want to shag Legolas...
[ETA: this was a discussion on a pro sf writers' group and was initially about profic, although we also drew on fanfic as the discussion progressed. I haven't explicitly identified most of the people involved, but as several of them read this LJ, if anyone wants to be credited, speak up. :-)]
( a) Why do women like m/m: )
( b) Why isn't more of it published: )
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The Vice President of SFWA has posted a somewhat intemperate suggestion that any sf writer who gives work away for free is a naughty person, and a Pixel-stained Technopeasant Wretch. This has caused a certain amount of free and frank discussion across the sfian blogosphere in the last couple of days. Now papersky suggests:
In honour of Dr Hendrix, I am declaring Monday 23rd April International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day. On this day, everyone who wants to should give away professional quality work online. It doesn't matter if it's a novel, a story or a poem, it doesn't matter if it's already been published or if it hasn't, the point is it should be disseminated online to celebrate our technopeasanthood.
I'm in, although it may be a case of applying a banner to the work that I already give away for free, Pixel-stained Technopeasant Wretch that I am.
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Mrs Giggles has raised the issue of how gay men feel about m/m romance written by women:
http://mrsgiggles.braveblog.com/entry/27031
Now, I know there are some gay men who are not only fine with it, but actively seek it out because it has an emotional dimension they have trouble finding in mainstream gay erotica, but if I comment I can only repeat what I've heard from friends and in fan mail. Any of you lot out there care to go over and comment?
(Of course, if you read sf&f, there's some good slashy stuff buried in the genre. I seem to have an example in the reading pile right now...)
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Today's post at Romancing the Blog, "The Proflicacy Problem", discusses the high output of some romance writers, and questions whether they can keep up the quality of their work when putting out finished work at the sort of speed being displayed by some. Now, I wouldn't completely disagree with the sentiment expressed, but something struck me as I read the article and the comment thread. Most of the people involved seemed to be measuring output purely in terms of titles per year. To which I went, "Huh?"
I think of output at least as much in terms of word count as in number of titles. That's partly a reflection of my being a writer, and therefore having a very strong interest in word counts, and how well the word count in my manuscript matches up to the word count in the submission guidelines. But it's also something I did even when my interest in books was purely as a reader. You can do a lot of fiddling with the words per page, but even so, it's pretty obvious that (picking a couple of examples from the bookcase next to me) Tanith Lee's Kill the Dead and Mary Gentle's 1610: A Sundial in a Grave have somewhat different word counts. And both are the length they need to be for the story contained therein.
I could start a long and entertaining flame war by enquiring whether length is of itself an indicator of quality, with reference to Extruded Fantasy Product; the death of the novella; and what happens when a market decides at two minutes' notice that it wants sleek 100 kword novels instead of doorstops, and that includes anything turned in but not actually in the printing press at this very moment. However, I know someone with far more experience of kicking beehives, and I'll leave that one to him. I'm more interested in this one:
If four writers each produce 200,000 words of finished book product per year, who has the highest production rate -- the one turning out one EFP doorstop, the one turning out two of "standard length for first sf novel", the one turning out three category romances, or the one turning out several novellas?
Now, I have a personal interest in this, because I'm actually named in that comment thread as an example of a fast but good writer. Which boggled me slightly, because while I'm pleased enough with the compliment and the free publicity, I am not what I think of as a fast writer. I'm actually a pretty slow writer compared with some of my friends.
But I'm also a natural novella writer, and I've managed to get two to three titles a year out by dint of writing things that are only 25-50 kwords long. And since I'm epublished, it's a lot less obvious that the books are quite short. That's a large part of why I'm epublished, in fact -- as far as sf genre markets are concerned, my natural length is too long for the print magazine market and too short for the print novel market. So presumably people are seeing the title count, and not realising that much of the time the combined length is about the same as or even less than a single title from one of the people whose natural length is doorstop.
So is an emphasis on word count vs title count a difference between the sf and romance genres, or is it a difference between writers and readers? Or perhaps it's both, because as has been discussed repeatedly and noisily of late, it's not easy to draw a solid line between pro and fan in the sf genre.
Any thoughts?
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Just in case any of the authors and/or review writers reading this are not yet aware of the latest way to make a fool of yourself in public, Amazon have a new facility. It is now possible to comment on other people's reviews, at least on amazon.com (.co.uk doesn't seem to have it -- yet).
I have one word of advice. Don't. If you'd like that expanded, the long version is "Anne Rice". :-)
Which leads me into a related topic. I would just like to say "thank you" to various beta-readers and editors who've prodded my prose over the years. However good a writer you may be, it is a really good idea to have a couple of people cast their beady little eyes over your stuff before it goes before the public at large, the better that you may not make a fool of yourself in public. Now, I have been known to argue with my editors about various points, as watervole will doubtless confirm. But that's because I find it helpful in trying to work out what I was actually trying to do with that there bit of prose. If I ever show signs of arguing because I think I don't need a second opinion on my work, do feel free to kick me before the attitude becomes entrenched.
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So the other man in the WIP is an intelligent felinoid. There are some distinct resemblances with earth cats. Do I really want to get involved with the os penis, the supporting bone found in the penis of most mammal species? It would be accurate, it would be another way of playing up the fact that this guy is an alien -- but do I *really* want to get into the level of detail that would be involved in finding out the practicalities of having missionary position anal intercourse with a species that has an os penis?
And will the readers think that they don't want that level of detail?
Oh, the joys of writing paranormal erotic romance...
Anyway, 1500 words today, and the lads are shagging again. This is good, it helps get the word count on the sex scenes up. This matters when it's supposed ot be an erotic romance, and it took them 16,000 words to get around to shagging the *first* time.
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