Big Ed's Place

So… what defines erotica? What defines porn? Is something “erotic” if it’s sexually explicit but doesn’t attempt to arouse? And when is it art?

I’ve seen discussions and arguments on these in a handful of places, most recently in The Fishtank. I suspect the arguments will continue probably for some time, because they’re definitely personal definitions. John Ashcroft (George W. Bush’s first Attorney General) had the nude statues in the Justice Building covered up. His “porn” was what his predecessors called art. Similarly, one reader may find a long drawn out bondage scene to be very erotic and arousing, where another may consider it a waste of words. The ‘different tastes’ make it hard to define erotica.

So I’m going to resist the temptation to walk in and tell you my definitions or make an argument for “this is what it means.” I write both “porn” and “erotica” and you can read my stories and decide for yourself when I’m doing which. I’ll also let you decide when something is art and when it’s just fluff.

I will say that I really loved the way Warhol and others turned the concept of Art on its head. There is an “art” to making something popular, even if it’s pure sugar. Someone has to construct it, fine tune it, and shape it into something good. Now crap is still crap, regardless of whether it’s an attempt to make art that fell short, or an attempt to make something purely for popular/commercial reasons that was done slapdash. But “art” can cover more than what’s classically put in museums.

I’ve noticed this most in music. When I was a teen, I thought certain genres (Country, Heavy Metal, Pop) were crap. Now, much older and wiser, I’ve gone back and listened to the same songs and found that some of them are far more creative and well crafted and “artistic” than much of what I thought was good back then. The best example is Michael Jackson. I did the “I’m too cool to listen to his stuff” when I was in high school. But going back, now that he’s died–wow. There really is more craft in his music than a lot of the “alternative” stuff I thought was so cool.

So it’s the craft (and vision) that differentiates “crap” from “art.” I am trying to get that craft and vision into my stories, regardless of whether they have deep themes or are simply an amusing idea I want to play out. And as a result, sometimes I think I write stuff that isn’t erotic at all. I wasn’t aiming to arouse the reader, but trying for a different reaction entirely. See my short story Eye of the Hurricane as an example. But who knows? Maybe somewhere there’s a reader that gets kicked off into his own fantasies, and so sees my story as erotic anyway,despite my intentions.

In the end, I’d prefer to not define terms at all. The main reason I use “erotica” to describe my work is simple marketing. More readers are likely to associate my work with that term than any of the others that might fit. So if I want readers to be able to find me, I have to give them some guidance on what I’ve got. It’s not perfect, and it’s not going to work for everyone, but it’s better than most of the alternatives.

A Good Christmas was my first story under this identity. I’d done some writing in the early 90′s and posted two stories to alt.sex.stories. The comments were… unkind. While I continued to write for more personal audiences, I quit publishing my stuff anywhere.

Of course, that didn’t mean I’d been offline. In 2003, I lurked in several yahoogroups devoted to erotica or hosted by erotica authors. Frank Downey decided to throw a storyfest for Halloween that year, inviting anyone who was interested to post a story on Halloween. It looked like fun, but I continued to lurk.

Then Frank announced a storyfest for Christmas. This story showed up in the back of my mind and kept pushing its way forward. At the same time, some friends of mine were pushing me to start releasing my stories again. So I decided to give it a shot and released this story into Frank’s group, and then later into other locales. I’ve kept writing since then.

This story was inspired by a friend of mine who’d gotten asked for a divorce around Thanksgiving the year before. He’d ended up in a memorable relationship with an exhibitionistic redhead just before Christmas, so I swiped the premise and then changed the characters around. Ironically, he actually did recognize himself when he stumbled on my work years later. Fortunately, he was amused rather than pissed.

I had no idea this would turn into an extended series when I wrote it, and it does contain one major regret. I intentionally chose to have the two female leads have similar first names on a whim, not realizing how hard it would make keeping them separate down the line. At the time I’d written the story, I’d dated four Jen’s or Jennifers, including two that were physically similar. I thought it would be cute, then to do the same. Needless to say, nowadays I am wary of anything that seems “cute.”

It all too often seems that the need for money just gets in the way of the writing. This was another week when I wished I could quit the day job and write full time. That is, alas, infeasible, and some day I’ll do a post on the economics of writing.

The hardest part of a pounding work week isn’t the time, but the mental exhaustion. If the day’s not too heavy, I can often get in twenty to thirty minutes of writing over lunch and then something in the evening after my son goes to bed. But if I’m mentally wiped out, that’s just not gonna happen. I might still have the time, but I’m not good for much. Maybe editing, but not original work.

This week was one of those weeks. I basically accomplished nothing until Thursday, when my work deadline passed. Fortunately it’s been a light weekend, though I’m probably neglecting way too many chores (why do chores seem to multiply like rabbits? Is it just entropy? Or is it something more complex?)

So: No progress on Love’s Labor Found. It’s still sitting at 910 words. I did get some energy into One Eyed Dick and added 966 words, bringing it to 3106. All of that’s been since Thursday. We’ll have to see what next week’s work distractions bring.

I recently caught an old movie showing on television–the Running Man, with Arnold Schwarzenegger.  There’s a ‘kick the dog’ scene early on, and it reminded me how much I get irked at poorly drawn villains.

A ‘kick the dog’ scene is one where the villain does something nasty or evil simply to demonstrate how nasty or evil they are.  In the Running Man, the villain fired a janitor for the sin of spilling water on the villain’s shoes.  After accepting the janitor’s apology, of course.  It’s a trope (a scene used so often in fiction/film/TV that the audience knows what it means) and so I’m sure y’all can come up with your favorite examples.

The thing is, it’s gotten to the point where it irritates me enough to take me out of the story.  Because no one’s a villain in their own mind.  Despite Iago’s protestations and despite the skulking of countess Hedleys tying women to the railroad tracks, that’s just not the way people think.

Hitler wanted to make the world a better place for the Germans and the Aryan Race.  Osama bin Laden wants to re-establish a Muslim based world, without the ‘evil’ of the West.   Even your petty crook often sees himself as a daring bandit, demonstrating how clever or powerful he is by ripping of “those chumps” or “those people who deserve it.”  Think about how we romanticize pirates.  Isn’t it cool to call out yar har! and “avast ye matey” and talk of booty and plunder, and gloss over the murders committed by the same pirates?  I’m sure the pirates downplayed that end of it as well.  We romanticize Westley from The Princess Bride, when, as the Dread Pirate Roberts who never lets any of his prisoners live, he has to have murdered a great number of people.

I think it’s partially the nature of being human.  We have no choice but to be the protagonists in our own stories.  There’s also some good psychological literature on how people justify bullying or being prejudiced (and some day I’ll post about it).  The point is, people find some rationalization or some belief system that allows them to be the hero, and not the villain, in their own mind.

So, back to fiction–why take the trope shortcut?  It doesn’t take that many more words to give the villain a more realistic motivation and improve the piece.  Taking an example from my own work–Hayley in Dealing with the Devil.  Hayley’s a freaking sociopath, who manipulates and abuses those around her.  But what’s going on in her mind?

When I wrote her, I imagined that her dominant mental conversation was all about how great she was and how much fun it was to show how great she was.  She was a ‘hero’ by being so clever and so ‘powerful.’  And she was even doing a favor by passing on some of her skills and attitudes to her ‘little sister’ (Regan).  She’s even sees herself as generous for the favors (well, she calls them that) she does for her friends.  I think it comes across well, making her far nasty than someone who’d just kick the dog.

There are some other good examples.  I love Silence of the Lambs, because you see how both villains think and operate.  I like the movie Heat, which also gives you both the villains and the cops point of view.  I haven’t seen the Sopranos, but from what I’ve heard, it does the same.

Which makes it so annoying when I do encounter the ‘kick the dog’ trope.  Take The Running Man–c’mon.  Can’t you have simply replaced that 30 second scene with a discussion about how the death of Arnie would be so spectacular to see?  Show the lust for ratings.  Show the complete disregard for the humanity or the innocence/guilt of the condemned.  Hell, throw in a dialogue line like “Burn, baby burn!” which demonstrated how evil some Enron folks were and are.  It wouldn’t have been than much harder, and it wouldn’t have taken more screen time.

And so I’m irked at the writer, completely losing the fun of an escapist old movie, replaying on TV.

If you carefully check the dates of posts, you’ll spot that this status post, along with many before or after, are written before the website is done. This is for two reasons. For one, it creates a backlog of posts when I do officially announce the website, giving new visitors more to read. The second reason is that it prevents me from focusing solely on the coding.

This is a challenge, because I am more driven by the coding right now, but I’m very inexperienced in it. I abandoned writing software in 1991, when it took me 40 hours to find a misplaced comma. I just couldn’t take the frustration anymore.

A similar flaw shows up in my writing. I’m not a good proofreader. Sure, like everyone I catch my share of typos, but I’m still finding many in stories that have been proofread by others many times and posted for years (readers often send typo comments). I’m much much better in plot and other writing elements.

So for coding, I learned that I was better off paying someone else. Unfortunately, that would become quite expensive for this website, so I get to do it myself, with some advice when I can get it from a volunteer. The net result is many an evening trying to figure out how to do some aspect of the layout or another.

But in the meantime, I do continue to write. I added 200 words to Love’s Labor Lost this past week, bringing it to 910. The queue jumper One Eyed-Dick got more love, getting 1419 words, bringing it to 2106. I suspect it’ll get some more love this week–the words are flowing when I make the time to write. Which unfortunately, might be awfully dear this week due to a work deadline.

Still–any progress is good progress, and I’m continuing to move forward.

This story arose from a discussion on Nick Scipio’s Yahoo forum about ‘the truth’ of what happened in Vermont. I suggested Nick write that “lost chapter” from the point a view of a different character. Nick challenged me to write it, and, in a moment of foolishness, I agreed.

For this was a significant challenge. Thirteen of the fourteen characters in Devil make at least brief appearances in Book 3 of Summer Camp. I’ve had to be consistent with how these characters talked and behaved, even though they were now seen through the eyes of a different narrator. Some were brief enough, like Patricia who isn’t even named in Summer Camp, to give me lots of room to work. Some were so complex, like Gina, that I knew every word would be scrutinized for consistency.

Additionally, my plot was very constrained. I had to match events that happened before and after the trip, again to a level that would survive scrutiny. In the end, with the generous help of Nick and his reality team, I think it all worked out.

However, the challenge was not my only interest in this story. I wanted to examine the struggle to remain moral and ‘good’ in an amoral environment. All too often our behavior changes to conform with our peer group; something heavily documented by psychologists and in literature elsewhere (ex: Lord of the Flies). How would someone who is fairly normal like Jessica handle being in a microcosm controlled by someone like Hayley? How would she ‘deal with the devil’? The answer to that question is the story that you’ve just read.

I know that not all the loose ends have been wrapped up. I can only say that they weren’t part of the trip. Someday, Paul or Jessica may tell us what happened after Jess and Patricia and Hayley returned to campus, but then again, they may not. In the immortal words of Nick Scipio: “You’ll have to read to find out.”

Story ideas are cheap. Time to write stories is dear. The result is a queue. Sometimes stories grab ahold of my imagination and jump the queue.

Of course, that’s a pretty simplistic statement, that hides a lot of details…

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9 Songs is a sexually explicit Indie Film, released in 2004.  Not a porn film, nor one that fades to black, it captures the mood of its characters through the music of the concerts they attend…

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I’m amused to write this post, knowing that blogs are read in reverse chronological order. Can it really be an “introduction” when you’ve already read the more current posts?

I keep a weekly status largely for motivation. By forcing myself to talk about my writing each week, it stays in my mind. Otherwise, it’s too easy for the crush of other life responsibilities to take over and for me to get out of the habit of writing. It doesn’t take too many days away for it to become a drudge to return to the keyboard.

Unfortunately, the crush of life is very real. My job is more than a 40 hour a week job. I have a wife and a young child, and the usual assortment of projects and commitments that come to anyone engaged in maintaining a home and living in a community. There are weeks when I can write every night. More often, it’s a godsend if I can find a lunch hour when I have both the energy and sufficient time.

Now I know some authors set goals–a number of words a day, or a set number of minutes a day. I’ve tried that, but the result was usually that I felt worse. The pressure was greater and I kept feeling I needed to “make up” lost days. I have enough stress without adding to it, particularly when none of my writing has any true deadline. The story’s done when it’s done, not “it’ll be done by Friday.”

So the weekly reminder provides more of a gentle push. Not enough to stress me out, but enough to keep me moving. And by posting it publicly, I’m even more accountable. There’s always the risk that someone will email me and say, “hey, you didn’t post you’re status last week–you okay?” and it’s embarrassing to reply that I was just feeling lazy.

It also gives you, the reader, some insight into what I’m doing and when I might publish next. I certainly know I’m happier when I have a sense of when my favorite authors are likely to release something new, instead of just wondering, day in and day out. I may even talk about works in progress, as long as I can do so without spoiling them. We’ll see how it goes.

So–what’s the current status? I’ve got two stories I’m working on right now. The first is “Love’s Labor Found,” which is the seventh Holiday Series story, set over Labor Day weekend. I’m guessing it’s going to come in at ~12kwords, but that’s a big guess. Several of the mid-story scenes are still vague in my head and I keep vacillating about which of two final scenes I want to use. But since the first two scenes were crystal clear in my mind, I dived in. I’ve got 701 words of the Crappy First Draft (CFD) done, and I’m mostly through the first scene.

The second story showed up as a Queue Jumper today. The idea’d been brewing a while, but I hit the point where paragraphs were starting to flow. It’s “One Eyed Dick, Nellie the Whore, and the Spring of Perpetual Wood.” I’ve knocked off 687 words of the Crappy First Draft, and I’m guessing this one will finish between 3500 and 7000 words. Right now, I think it’s a Ruthie’s Club submission when it’s done, but I’ll get the CFD finished before I make that decision.

There’s more in the queue, of course. However, I think my active writing will be just on those two for the next couple of weeks.

My political philosophy starts with the belief, and frequent statement, that “what one or more consenting adults do in the privacy of their bedroom is no one else’s goddamn business.”

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