bits and pieces

papersky on POV

Online Etymological Dictionary gacked from meltor_et_al.

*Semi-gratuitous mention of damned_colonial to make her feel all warm and fuzzy. IN HER PANTS.*

So, meh. The net is down. The Wife is moving. iclysdale has hurt his foot. Nothing is getting done, except that my room is clean. Well, cleaner. It's peeing rain out there.

The National Post's otherwise largely pointless review of Hitchhiker's Guide describes the 1981 TV series as "having been made on the leftover change from the Dr Who catering budget", a phrase which pleased me out of all proportion.

*aimless (or AIM-less, where ARE all you people who are supposed to amuse me and save me from my own brane?!) pondering*

So, my friend K., who shall remain K. in this discussion unless or until she signals a desire to talk about this in public, doesn't, as a general thing, read explicit fiction. AFAIK, this isn't especially a slash/het distinction or anything, just a preference for staying on the gen side, with perhaps the odd side of non-explicit.

She recently commented that if I ever wrote anything she could keep the thread of while skipping over the sex, she'd like to read it.

Which was enormously flattering, because she's a tough judge of a story. And deeply interesting, because it caused me to revisit and rethink why I write explicit fiction. Didn't cause any real crisis of faith, just a sort of state-of-the-Marna introspection on the subject, set off by me trying to discover if anything in me would object to the notion of a PG version of my stuff. Assuming such a thing to be possible, which with ATKM at least I'm entirely certain it is not.

(While I was chewing on this, unbeknownst to her, she went and read one of the explicit stories, unbeknownst to me. Liked it, too, apparently, yay! This sort of mutual flexibility and willingness to wander around on the edges of our comfort zones with each other is one of the best bits of being friends with K; ours is a friendship built as much on differences as on similarities, and it's a rare and precious thing to me.)

So. Now I have all these thinky thoughts, and clearly, I may as well inflict them on you all.

I/we take a certain pride, actually, in the fact while there is a whole lot of explicit sex in ATKM, little or none of it could POSSIBLY be peeled back out again and still have the stories work. We joke that we suck at Plot What Plot, and I like to think that we truly, deeply, tragically suck at gratuitous PWP.

And that's the way to go, I tend to think, if one is going to write sexually explicit fiction, unless one is setting out to write 'just porn' and possibly not even then. I know that there are people who read and enjoy plotless porn; I also suspect that the very proliferation of explicit fanfic suggests that they are rarer than we think, especially among women. We'd like some people attached to those things, please, and possibly some plot attached to those people.

So, sexually explicit fiction. And in fiction, if it doesn't matter, it shouldn't be there. Whatever is in the story has to serve the story, so if there is sex in the story it serves the story too.

So far, all clear. I think. But why do I write that sort of story to start with?

Partly on the MFK Fisher Principle:

When asked why she chose to write mostly about food and not loftier subjects, Fisher would reply, "The easiest answer is to say that, like most other humans, I am hungry. But there is more than that. It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it...and then it is all one." Quoted in Clean Sheets

She was interested in what feeds us, and wrote about food. I am interested, ditto, and I write about love and sex.

Ok, so. Love. Sure. That's why I call what I write romance, that's what I'm doing over here in that unloved and unrespectable genre that is forever cluttering up stories about adventure and danger and politics and all sorts of things with ridiculous, unimportant questions about who might accompany who on these journeys, and why, and how they might sort that whole partnership thing out.

But why do I write sexually explicit romantic fiction? What's wrong with asterisks, UST and Pure Platonic Love?

Well, nothing. It just isn't what I do.

I don't believe, especially, in pure love, or possibly I don't believe in impure love. I don't think people's stories end when they get married, or engaged, or even when they close their doors and take their clothes off. I think that who people are in bed is part of who they are.

Or at least, I believe these things matter in stories, in writing characters; as a person I'm a sex radical (by some standards), an activist, an incessant loudmouth, a writer of sexually explicit fiction -- and yet a very private person. So this is about the stories. For stories, yes, I think it does matter to the stories that I want to tell, or that want me to tell them.

And damn. I am out of time, according to the little clock at the internet cafe. I shall ponder, and read any comments that appear here, and see if I can come up with a part two, sometime.