Rationally, now; not very emotionally, not in the depths of depression, I am asking myself if I should quit writing. It wouldn’t be easy, I know, but I do have the capacity to ‘walk away’ from things if they become too great a threat to my peace of mind. It’s a habit I learned, apparently, from the father who walked away from me more than half a century ago.
The odds of winning the UK national lottery are, I’m informed, about 1 in 14 million. Not good odds. But then, it seems that Amazon hosts some four million e-books and, to me, 1 in 4 million doesn’t actually sound all that good either.
I’ve had two books published, of course. “Aphrodite Overboard” and “Islands”. Both have had some excellent reviews, in fairness, but it’s a long time since I heard anything about “Aphrodite” from her publishers, so it’s pretty clear she’s not selling, and the publishers of “Islands” have just offered to return the rights of the book to me. Seems it sold a whole two copies in 2015.
Writing in support of a particular Weltanschauung, or world view, my books have not stuck to one theme and nor, indeed, do my works-in-putative-progress. To the heterosexual castaway Aphrodite, the Lady Susanna, elevated to the status of goddess, comes routine cunnilingus from male and female worshippers, and endless intimacy with her lovely female acolytes and the man she ultimately marries. To the hetero Tom Carton, of “Islands” comes the affection of a co-castaway, a young, gay sailor, in a gentle touch of m/m, and an equally deep and profound affection for a liberated, black, female slave. MF/FF in the first, MMLite and MF in the second.
If my WIPP “Sword” novel comes to fruition it will be a historical action adventure, set in the early 1700s, with intimate MF and FF interaction, whilst that which I shall for now call merely “Angel” is a mid-19th century Victorian story with a fundamentally FF base.
So they don’t really hang together. Even if one of the few who had read “Aphrodite Overboard” were motivated by it to look for something else of mine, they would not necessarily look in the direction of “Islands”.
Where, then, from here? I could take the highly recommended Indie road, of course, but it’s a fact that I haven’t a snowball-in-Hell’s chance of being able to pay an editor or anyone else to write with me. And if I go it alone the fundamental facts remain the same. I have two novels which, given my own impostor syndrome, may not actually be that much good and which may, anyway, if various kind folks who have referred to them as ‘literary’ are correct may be too literary for the bulk of an audience which – according to one of my publishers – is quite content to settle routinely for work she describes as ‘sub literate’.
It doesn’t matter that my Weltanschauung is Feminist, pro-LGBT, pro sex, pro intimacy, pro kindness and all the rest.
So, is there really any point?
An Autobiography
Introduction
I’m going to begin with a metaphor that first came to me a decade or two ago when looking at autobiography as a project.
Looking upon my history is, for me, to climb a slope in the darkness, under an unillumined sky. From my vantage point what I survey is a battlefield, a pitted no-man’s land where, here and there, the smouldering remains of a wreck, a campfire, the fleeting luminescence of a descending star-shell, cast light and shadow on ground long fought and struggled over. Very rarely, too, a star blinks where the omnipresent smoke cloud briefly thins.
A dramatic image, perhaps, but a fair one. A lot of dead lie on this field and the struggle is not over yet, whilst the sporadic, piecemeal illumination illustrates the scattered fragments of my memory. I have no clear view with which to present you. I have forgotten – often have chosen to forget – too much to see my history as a whole landscape.
The dead I will come to in time – and the lost too – but they include my mother, my twice dead father, the daughter who was the love and purpose of my life, ‘George’ the low-rent paedophile who took his own life under persecution, ‘Hannah’, who died in my presence of a wasting disease, hallucinating little red men pursuing her, her husband gripping the foot-rail of her bed and torn between awe at the event and his eagerness to have her gone so that nothing would stand between him and his beloved bottle. Dead dreams too.
And I am war weary. Approaching my mid sixties it occurs to me that if I die tomorrow I shall scarcely have ‘lived’ at all, leaving me so weary that the thought of a keen Swann Morton blade and a final superheated bath flits into and out of my head like some kind of tormenting sprite. It is not a choice that I can make – I have too many obligations. And even in my embattled, embittered state it is my obligations to others which over-rule my choices. It is, I suppose, my choice to allow it.
An Autobiography
Introduction
I will begin, if I begin at all, with a fragment of my early past, with a boy-child born in 1951 in the army hospital at Catterick, North Yorkshire, England. My mother shared two memories of this event: the first that her ward was visited by an eminent female Personage and that my mother and the other women in their beds were ordered to ‘lie at attention’. The second was that my father had to be prevailed upon by a mutual friend before he would come and look at me. ‘Afraid of sex’, she too soon told me, he wasn’t terribly keen to see its living consequences.
More may follow.
The bottom line with this, I guess, is that it has Sacchi Green’s name on it as editor, and really that should be guide enough to the quality of the contents. It is certainly more than enough for me.
As a straight male who has merely written some ‘f/f’ material and who entirely accepts that gay and lesbian love is right and natural, I have to visit the minds of lesbian ladies – as revealed in their writing and reading – with the same quiet respect I would visit any other temple.
I came away from this visit quite awed.
There is some very hot material in this, including Cheyenne Blue’s ‘Nurse Joan’ and Danielle Mignon’s ‘Are You My Mommy’, some very warm and touching – such as Anna Watson’s ‘Tamago’. There is humour here, and perceptiveness, and a very real sense of the truth behind the stories and the courage of the writers in revealing it.
It would take too long to commend each of the writers individually. All I can do is to commend, very sincerely, the book as a whole. I do so without any hesitation.
It’s still my intention to review books here and I will return to reviews shortly. I apologize for the delay. I have a list on-going and am currently working through ‘Love Burns Bright: A Lifetime of Lesbian Romance’. More of that later, but thus far it’s an excellent read.
“Islands” a novel of sexual discovery.
If you see it, ignore the blurb about ‘two straight men’. I’ve asked the publisher to correct this. One man begins the adventure as a homophobic straight, the other begins as a gay man who believes he is the worst of sinners and an aberration of nature. Joined later in the story by a special African lady (who looks neither special nor African on the cover), these men and she begin a voyage of understanding that perhaps contains some important lessons for the world as it is today.
I thought reviewing books would be easier and perhaps more fun than critiquing first drafts. Just read a book that seemed to me to have so many errors and typos in it that it might have been a first draft. So now what do I do? Potentially upset the author/publisher? Leave other readers to be potentially disappointed? For all I know this might be the standard they’re used to.
I hope not. Guess time will tell
Since anybody can comment on/review a book, why should you read my reviews?
Your choice of course, but I’d like to set out a little of the background:
Recently returned to ERWA, the Erotica Readers and Writers Association (www.erotica–readers.com/), after a long absence, I’m hoping to get back to reading and critiquing the work of writers and aspiring writers. ERWA has always been the place to go to learn and to improve your writing – a writing community where members are supportive, where many members have extensive experience and knowledge – often having started their writing careers with ERWA – where newcomers are welcome and kindly received.
Without ERWA my own “Aphrodite Overboard” – a book which I am endlessly proud to have written – might never have come into existence. Without the confidence some of the readers and writers there gave to me a number of anthologies might well have been published without my contributions, and my up-coming new book, ‘Islands’ might never have been written.
ERWA helped me to discover that I knew a good story when I saw one and, before my life became both hectic and difficult there was a time when authors there were very glad of my critical input. When I began to host other writers’ work on my website some years ago, in a section called ‘Velvet Tongues’ (Les Langues de Velours) I was happily able to help one writer transform a story that didn’t quite work into a story nominated for an erotica award.
I want, now, to take the art of constructive criticism one logical step further.
I write – and read accordingly – with an agenda. I will not pretend otherwise. That agenda is informed by the fact that I believe human society, by and large, has ‘got sex wrong’ and the effects are sometimes just sad, sometimes catastrophic. There is little more catastrophic than a child being driven to suicide because of the fixed and unquestioning prejudices of those around him (or her or whatever), than an individual being scourged, imprisoned, executed, for no more than being different to what the perceived majority thinks they should be, than a human being suffering rape and abuse, physical and mental, because fundamental and stupid prejudices are insufficiently challenged.
Like others I have my own definition of erotica and pornography. Pornography cynically exploits, metaphorically sends its children to beg on the streets in order that it may itself live in comfort. Erotica collaborates affectionately, facilitates fantasy that oppresses no-one.
On such bases, then, and time permitting, I hope to critique more books and stories and to respond genuinely to what I find. I hope it will prove useful.
All works by RV Raiment appearing on RV Raiment | Erotic fiction and images are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at rvraiment.wordpress.com.
50 Shades… one shade too dark?
If it works the link above is to a documentary, ‘The Price of Pleasure; Pornography, Sexuality and Relationships’.
I watched it today. I didn’t like it. It troubles me.
When I first encountered ‘porn’ I was about 15 years old and the censor’s rule was that pubic hair could not be shown. I’ve never thought of this before but the ban must have been on showing the genitalia also, since otherwise the practice of shaving (to eliminate pubes from the picture) would have begun the sooner.
Anyway, on account of that rule my ‘exposure’ to the female body was all bottoms and breasts. Whether or not that has something to do with my growing very much into a ‘bottoms’ man I can’t be sure. It is rumored that a granny of mine kept a bakeshop and I may have been besotted with pretty buns ever since. Who knows?
A confession, now. I have never attended a strip club and I have never watched a porn movie. The closest I got to the latter was on Tumblr and a site that shows animated gifs of various aspects of sex. The mammoth scale of so many of the penises mechanically pumping into stretched orifices would have contributed nothing to my self-confidence, had I been at a more uncertain stage of mental development, but I couldn’t, either, get past a sense that the recipient females either faked their responses or just didn’t like it.
Too much of a sense that it was actually the latter killed my interest and I neglected the site until it automatically, it appears, disconnected me. It is only in later years, too, that I began to read erotica at all.
I have never wanted to do anything to or with a woman that she would not want me to do and would not take pleasure in – taking that to the extreme as some would see it – even fantasizing about real women (mainstream actresses, people who were friends, acquaintances, colleagues) because they de facto did not give me permission to do it.
Without complete consent it feels, to me, offensive.
It’s true that I did fantasize, if that’s the right word, about the bodies in the breast and bottom pictures, and it is true that they were not ‘people’ to me, only a stimulant source. And I suspect the real source was a kind of fantasy anyway, a re-imaging of what was there that was drawn in my mind.
So I watched the video and I didn’t like it, didn’t like being perhaps even a tiny part of the issue as I saw it depicted. Writing stories and novels which are intended to be read by and to give pleasure to women (that even includes ‘Islands’), the economic profits are not going to enable early retirement from my day job. Yet still I am part of the market, and the market reflected in that video seems pretty appalling.
The question I’m asking myself, and you in case you’re interested, is whether I am part of this market, whether that which I write for the pleasure of women may act in some way, however small, to the detriment of women.
You could help me make that decision?