Big Ed's Place

To the best of my knowledge, I’m one of only a few to have written an erotic story set at Easter (Dawn on the Third Day,the fourth Holiday Series story). Now I’m sure it’s been done by others, and I’m sure that if I could probably find a few stories with some judicious googling on the various erotic story sites. However, I’m pretty confident it’s not a regular topic.

This is largely, in my opinion, because Easter has resisted secularization. Easter Bunny aside, it hasn’t been converted like Christmas and so many other holidays into a non-religious excuse for celebration. It’s kind of hard to overlook the centrality of torture and death to the holiday too. As a rule, those don’t go well with erotica.

This is partially surprising to me, because the other theme of Easter is renewal. Hitting bottom and coming back stronger than ever. And surely renewal is a decent theme for fiction of all sorts including erotica.

I certainly hit a local bottom last week. It wasn’t sustained and it wasn’t as deep as some episodes in the past. But I just couldn’t bring myself to write. The headache from the previous week didn’t go away. There were several real life stresses to address. And I just couldn’t get through the scene in Unmasked.

So the doubts rolled in. I didn’t write for a handful of days. I blamed it on the headache, which lasted until Thursday morning, but it was as much my emotional dread of writing as anything else.

But then on Friday I turned the corner and started the upswing. I finally figured out how I wanted to do the sex scene in Unmasked, and managed to knock out 567 words, bringing it to 6,485. It’ll top out at 8-9kwords. Then on Saturday, I received a call for submissions in my in-box and it actually fit my style and preferred subject material. Since 80% of the calls out there don’t, it was a bit of a shocker. I also had an idea in the back of my head and at lunch the words just started tumbling out. I managed 773 before real life forced me to walk away from the computer.

So right now, I’m feeling revived. And perhaps a bit renewed. It’s all good.

Prior to Dawn on the Third Day, I’d pretty much established a ‘standard’ story length (4k to 6k words).  In my longer stories, that also ended up being the standard chapter length.  I pretty much think in chunks that big, which is why it’s a natural length for me  With Dawn on the Third Day, I wanted to emphasize the different times of day, without forcing each of those periods to be a full ‘chunk’ long.  The resulting story was about three times my normal length and I think the structure holds up well.

The holiday itself is subtle in this one.  It’s Easter, of course, but I didn’t want the story to have a strong religious focus.  The only deliberate religious allusion is the sharing of the cup on the morning of the third day.  It’s a bonding symbolism, much like sharing the cup on Good Friday was, but without the ‘this is my blood’ elements of Christianity.  For bonding is what I wanted to show–the friends drawing much closer together.

As for the storyline itself, the Japanese Spa in Santa Fe is really there, and a wonderful place to visit.  I left it unnamed because I wasn’t sure how they’d take a story that involved sexual activity on the premises.  All the other named locales exist as well.

The one major surprise for me in writing this one was the final sex scene.  I hadn’t intended the story to go that far when I’d laid out the plot, but the characters basically told me that that was how it had to end.  It’s not been the last time that a story took a turn I wasn’t expecting, but it was the first.

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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