I just heard there's a rage club, but I'm too late to be a founding member.

[antennapedia]

Jolly me out of my current state of rage, please. Rage is not a usual state for me-- not honest-to-goodness grand-gesture-level fury-- and I find it unpleasant. I'm against continuing in this state. Therefore, distraction! On the theory that if there's anything as comforting as self-absorption, it's contemplating the characters I love, I propose

Comments

[seldomifever]

All righty, skip, I've been thinking about this all morning. The other day, I was reading some lovely btvs prawn when suddenly I felt completely weirded-out by the fact that fandom is mostly women sitting around writing erotica for one another's pleasure. The more I've gotten to know the authors on a personal level, the stranger the whole scene's become to me. I've been trying to sort out my thoughts on this. How do you feel about it? Both as the purveyor and purveyee, I mean.

[antennapedia]

Ha. A hard one, with many tangled answers in the tangled mess of fandom sexuality. But I'm going to stay away from that, and talk about what it is that I do when I write fiction for others to read.

Everything I write, whether prawny or not, is an attempt to manipulate the emotional state of my readers. You are willing accomplices in this manipulation, because it is a well-established form of entertainment for you. (As plotting the form of the manipulation, laboring over its means, and then watching the results is a complex form of entertainment for me. It's how we pass the time before the arrival of our inevitable mortality.) I take you all on a little trip, show you some characters experiencing something, and you have an emotional response. If I succeed, that emotional response bears some relation to the one I hoped you'd have.

Joy, grief, romantic love, anger, sympathy, relief, release, lots more-- all on the list of things I want you to feel. Sexual arousal isn't any different than the others in most ways. The only difference to

[antennapedia]

Hmm. I'd like to revise that answer if only to put the thoughts in some kind of sensible order. Bleah.

[seldomifever]

"I don't need to know the details"

*snickers*

Your response is well thought out and articulate. My feelings on this are still a bit jumbled. FF was different for me before I began chatting with the authors about tea. And cats. Still, the smut pleases me, so I am not complaining.

Was reading these fascinating articles on talking dirty this morning, which reminded me of how strange it sometimes is to have people turning each other on in this bizarre (and delightful) forum.

I haven't gotten much sleep in the past three days and it takes a toll on my thought processes. Hope I'm making at least a little bit of sense.

Oh, and speaking of sleep deprivation...I didn't really win the Tony Head phone call. Were we kidding about it last week? I was delirious at the time, and thought we were, but now I'm not so sure I made that clear. Sorry. It was 1:30am and I was fried.

God, now I sound completely off, don't I? I'll just stop chattering then. Right.

[antennapedia]

That was not clear from our discussion, but I am unsurprised to hear it now. You didn't seem like that kind of, er, enthusiast.

Talking dirty is difficult, I think. Repeating four-letter words only gets you so far.

[antennapedia]

There's money in the prawn. The only pro erotica I've read has been those Ann Rice books. Thanks to them I cannot read the word "succulent" and keep a straight face.

[seldomifever]

Loved this line: Pornographic fiction, erotica, "one-handed reading", call it what you will, is a publishing parallel universe.

Tells you what you really should be writing when you produce your original fic.

I loathed Ms. Rice's work. Feckin' vampires. Kept me from giving Buffy a chance when it was on the air.

[nemaihne]

I gave some thought to writing prawn for profit. I really think erotica and pure smut is less mind numbing to write than romance. But you've met Mr. N, so you know it would probably chafe his core values even though it does nothing to mine. Plus it would really, really amuse me to have a silencing answer to the 'what do you do?' question at parties.