Home Economics: Love, Sex, and the Marriage Ending

I've been thinking out loud over at my own personal blog, about a new project I'm playing with, which I hope will be (as I say there):

[...a] thoughtful, highly literate and very smutty piece of writing, with[...] no monogamous ending; no ultimate sorting [of characters into happy coupledom]; no cozy, well-protected final retreat back behind the gates of Pemberley. And yet (I hope) no loose ends either[.... A] way of bringing together all the stuff I’ve been meditating on during my loopy journey from erotica to romance and now, perhaps, back.

A collaboration, as I see it, between Pam Rosenthal and Molly Weatherfield target="_blank" -- an exploration of mean(ing)s and end(ing)s, where we get to play close to the edge of the provocative margin between romantic and (if we must call it that) erotic (with a wink and a nod, here, to Celia May Hart and her funny recent post at this blog).

Is my collaborative idea saleable? I have no idea. I'm not far enough into it yet, and I'm not even going to try to shop it around to publishers until I know more about the shape it will take. So I'd be grateful for your comments about the distinctions between romance and that other thing -- and what role ultimate monogamy and the marriage ending plays in all of this.

And if you're interested in the topic, you might also want to go over to Tracy Grant's blog post about the popularity of courtesan themes in recent romance novels, which I think is related to this issue. What does the widespread recent interest in erotically experienced heroines tell us? Does it widen romance fiction's purview or does it ultimately domesticate the question of erotic experience? Also and always germane is anything our own Jane Lockwood has had to say on erotic pairings and happy endings (or not) in in Forbidden Shores. (What's a good post you did on this, Jane, from the vast archives of your web-hopping?)

Other examples from the huge mess o' online discussion would be appreciated as well... Links to other readers' and writers' cherished beliefs, prejudices, and finely (or even not-so-finely) drawn distinctions are all good. Monica McCarty's opinionated post about Romance and the One True Love a few months ago at the Fog City Diva blog is a great example of taking a position (not my position, but an enduring one), and stating it with impressive clarity.

Let me know what you think, if you've got a mind to.

And meanwhile, here are some closer-to-home messages from the material world.

• Sending my thanks first of all to Lacy, whose post on dildos a while back has evidently been inspiring some action in my back brain, to surface in the scene I'm writing right now in the new collaborative project (I'm stealing one of her fabulous illustrations, but there are more where that came from).

• And adding an update from my own real life and times. Because the little anniversary present my husband bought me at Good Vibrations last autumn (when I read there with Lacy, Eden Bradley, and Lillian Feisty) turned out to be of shoddy workmanship. No, I'm not going to tell you what he bought me, but I will say that -- for my birthday this month -- he replaced the shoddy original with a terrific little number from the Xandria Collection online. And that at least from our experience, Xandria seems like a pretty excellent site. Have you used it? Anybody else have some consumer info to share?

• And... oh, this old illustration? Well, some of you may know a certain sex toy scene from Safe Word. And some of you may not. I may post the scene on my website when I have time for that, but it's not there now, so you just may have to employ some lateral thinking to guess (though I couldn't have). I will tell you that it does work: unlike some of the more farouche stuff in my erotic books, I tried this one at home -- and so did a happy reader. It's subtle, though. You might just have to read my Molly Weatherfield books...

Happy consuming, everyone (the inner nerd insists that I tell you that the word "economics" comes from the Greek for "household"). And happy theorizing . And do tell me what you think about the erotics (or not) of the marriage ending.

Book Bottom II: Pornotopia and its Discontents

Warning: I'm in Theorygirl mode these days, trying to make a whole lot of interesting ideas fit together, which they don't quite yet.

But with Jane Lockwood's "have we lost our way?" post still in mind, and with my brain cells still wonderfully massaged by Katha Pollitt's fabulous wit and smarts, here are some further thoughts about erotica, pornography, and erotic romance.

It's the people who have a problem with porn -- even a simple aesthetic revulsion at the shaved and implanted phoniness of it all -- who are suspect now, and who have to prove their normality by insisting that they "like sex," as if sex were all one thing, like oatmeal. Imagine if you said, Yes I like sex, with the right person, in the right place, in the right mood, preferably after a lovely meal cooked by someone else; otherwise, frankly, I'd rather get on with Daniel Deronda.

That's Pollitt again in Learning to Drive. Is she right? Certainly I do think that there's a certain you-go-girl giddiness in the hype for the romance erotica lines. It's interesting these days how we're nudged in the direction of a kind of tickle-me-Elmo giddiness about sexuality. Doubtless a necessary corrective to many still-current pruderies and hypocrisies, but perhaps not the best inducement to make a book hang together.

Pollitt continues that, "in porn no one takes a night off, no one even rejects one partner for another they like better; they just have them both at once, and the meter reader, too, should he happen to drop by" -- or (I hasten to add) the hunky gardner in the Marquis de Sade's Philosophy in the Bedroom. Rock critic Richard Goldstein once put it more succinctly. "In porn, everybody wants it. All the time."

Of course, Pollitt doesn't seem to have read much erotica since the very male-oriented porn from the 70s, but it's possible that (mostly)-by-women-(mostly)-for-women erotica from the romance publishers is going in that direction. At least I gather from Jane Lockwood's post that there is some sentiment that it's possible to have too much of a good, friendly, down and dirty thing -- and that what you risk is losing the romance.

I'm not sure. Partly because I haven't read enough dirty books lately. My current w.i.p. has taken a lot of effort: the draft's due Monday and after I hit the SEND key I'll find out what's actually happening in the world outside my study.

For now, tho, I only have my experience, and a word, "pornotopia" -- from Steven Marcus's 60s lit crit book The Other Victorians, which introduced books like The Pearl and My Secret Life to a general readership. I don't remember Marcus's exact definition, but I've kind of adopted the word to mean a kind of alternative fictional world -- sort of another kind of dimension, where the ground rules are different, and sometimes the laws of physics and biology. It's a fun, friendly, sort of prelapsarian world. Even when you impose the power strictures of BDSM, it's got a kind of amplitude. It lends itself to episodic writing and ensemble plots (I like the ensemble aspect, because I often find romance novels awfully thinly populated).

But as to plotting: If you're a Shakespeare, you can get the dizzy wonder of A Midsummer Night's Dream out of it. But if you're not a Shakespeare, it can be hard to fit a plot around what's potentially endlessly episodic.

What's interesting to me is that when I was writing erotica-that-at-that-time-called-itself-pornography, I found that I desperately wanted a plot. And so did my characters.

In the Carrie books, a perverse dynamic began to take over. The bigger and friendlier my orgies got, the more seriously I and my characters began wondering about who really liked who best (or even loved them). Relationships formed just below the surface of the action as characters began asking themselves what they really wanted. I began to imagine little offstage tragedies (what's going to happen to Susan when Andrew realizes she's really into Steve?). I loved giving tiny subplots having happy endings (poor neglected Stefan, happy at last as Mr. Constant's boytoy!). I wrote a sequel, Safe Word to figure out whether Carrie's Story had really been Carrie's story at all, or Jonathan's and Kate's.

Which was one of the ways I drifted toward erotic romance.

About which I'm blogging today, at Michelle Buonfiglio's RomanceBuyTheBlog at LifetimeTV, to cap off Erotic Romance Week there and in honor of the mass-market paperback release of Almost A Gentleman. Please come by and say hi.

And about which I'll also be yacking on a panel with romance academics (whom you can also check out online at the Teach Me Tonight blog) . I'll be chatting with them in person, though, at the Popular Culture Association Conference in San Francisco next March. My contribution (which I hope will be provocative) will be called "From BDSM to Erotic Romance: Observations of a Shy Pornographer." I hope to attend in Theorygirl mode, except that by then I hope to have figured out all this out (partly through posts and discussions here).

And if you want to read more from Safe Word, the clue to my current contest is in the excerpt from that book, posted on my web page. And the prize? An autographed copy of Forbidden Shores, by Jane Lockwood.

Oh and as for my question -- well, do you think there's a difference between male and female-oriented erotic fiction?

Crumpet Strumpets in NYC tonight!

Jane Lockwood (Forbidden Shores) and Colette Gale (Unmasqued) are reading from their books tonight at Virgins'* Night at the In the Flesh Reading Series hosted by Racher Kramer Bussell. It's free! There will be free books (Colette's) and cupcakes and all sorts of good naughty stuff:

8 PM
Happy Ending Lounge, 302 Broome St., NYC
Hope we'll see you there!





* Don't get too excited. It means writers who haven't read their work in public before.

Want to meet Jane and me masquerading as virgins?

Heh heh heh. Thought that would get your attention.

Now don't laugh, but it's true...Jane and I will be appearing at Virgin Night this month! (I know it's hard to believe, but it's true: we still do have some virginal aspects.)

What's Virgin Night, you ask? Well, it's an event in New York City at a club appropriately named Happy Endings Lounge.

Every month, on the third Thursday, erotic writer Rachel Kramer Bussel hosts an evening of erotic reading. Authors such as Jane and I attend and read from their published works.

We'll be two of the guests on October 18th, which is also Virgin Night--for erotic writers who haven't read their work in public before. (Which would be me.)

So, we'd love to see you there if you're in the NYC area and can come by. There might even be some free books and other prizes there!

For more info, check out Rachel Kramer Bussel's blog.

Come and Come and Come Again

"They're all rubbish really, aren't they? Read one and you've read them all...."

...Cheryl prattled on. "I mean, they're not really romances....They're just debased versions of the sentimental novel of courtship and marriage that started with Richardson's Pamela. A realistic setting, an ordinary heroine that the reader can identify with, a simple plot about finding a husband....Titillating but moral."

It's with some ambivalence that I confide to you that Cheryl's derisory take on what is referred to a "Bills and Moon type of romance" comes straight out of one of my all-time favorite comic novels. Small World, by David Lodge, is a wildly literate, wonderfully funny and humane book that I recommend with no ambivalence and no reservations (well, one caveat: don't read it if you're too p.c. re our genre to get past the Bills and Moon putdown -- which I will address, don't worry).

I almost called it "one of my favorite comic (non-romance) novels." But then I realized how weird it would be to do that, because the subtitle of Small World is "An Academic Romance." Its plot comprises perhaps half a dozen love stories. And most of them are "academic romances," because most of the characters (though not Cheryl whom I quoted) are academics who talk pretty much non-stop about literature and often about what Cheryl (and Lodge) call "real romance" -- of, you know, the Arthurian/Faerie Queen variety. The characters fall in and out of love and bed; losing and finding, chasing and following each other all over the world, on their way to and from a series of academic literature conferences.

Cheryl, who works in an airport, has only recently traded Bills and Moon in for The Faerie Queen and Orlando Furioso. But for most of the novel she functions as a "helper figure." (Lit crit is big on helper figures: all fairy tales have 'em, and I'd hazard that so do romances of all varieties; the ones I write certainly do). Anyway, not only does Cheryl help Small World's feckless lovers chase each another around the globe, but she helps us, its feckless readers, to make our way through the world of Lodge's novel -- by speaking his view of the early Western European romance tradition that Small World joins, comments upon, and generally has fun with:

"Real romance is a pre-novelistic kind of narrative. It's full of adventure and coincidence and surprises and marvels, and has lots of characters who are lost or enchanted or wandering about looking for each other, or for the Grail, or something like that. Of course, they're often in love too..."

And of course she's in love as well -- unrequitedly, until... but that would be a spoiler.

And though I hope you do read Small World, the real yes-I-do-have-one point of this post goes back to that original putdown of Bills and Moon romance (or what we on this blog would normally just call romance).

Because it's all very well to call Richardson's Pamela a "sentimental novel of courtship and marriage," as long as one remembers that it's usually also called the first novel. And although origins are always debatable, what's not debatable is that one of the great things that novels do is "valorize the ordinary" in "a realistic setting," -- as in Jane Austen's famous advice that "Three of four families in a country village are the very thing to work on." I'd argue that if romance as we know it is in that tradition, I don't think anyone need sneer about where it's coming from.

But I'd also argue that romance as we know it has a great deal to do with the other tradition, of the Arthurian legends and the grail and everything else. Because I'd argue that very few true-life love stories don't come equipped with their own adventures, coincidences, surprises, and marvels -- even if you didn't, as I did, fall in love with your spouse-to-be during the acid-saturated, tie-dyed sixties. I'd argue that there's something so dizzying and challenging about finding one's life partner and coming up against the secrets of one's own nature at the same time that marvels like twins (Eloisa James, anyone?) or spells (amnesia, anyone?) make a certain sense in telling this kind of story.

I'd argue for both sides. As Austen did in Sense and Sensibility.

And I'd argue that the romance as we know it draws upon both the quotidian and the marvelous, the reasonable need for companionship and comfort and the big crazy hungers for wild sexy excess. And that romance ought to do both. More. Bigger. Yes.

Hell, I've just only begun to argue, because my argument hasn't gotten around to sex, which it ought to, given what blog we're on. So here's another quote from Small World, this time from a character named Angelica (because, as you can see, women do a lot of the intellectual heavy lifting in this book). Anyhow, Angelica says, by way of an academic conference presentation:

Romance... has not one climax but many; the pleasure of this text comes and comes and comes again. No sooner is one crisis in the fortunes of the hero averted than a new one present itself; no sooner has one mystery been solved than another is raised; no sooner has one adventure been concluded than another begins. The narrative questions open and close, open and close, like the contractions of the vaginal muscles in intercourse, and this process is in principle endless.... Romance is a multiple orgasm.

And by the way, if you're a romance writer and you're coming to the RWA National Conference in Dallas next month, do check out the workshop Jane Lockwood and I will be giving, called "Writing the Hot Historical." I'm not promising multiple orgasms, but I think it'll be pretty good. It's scheduled for Friday morning at 9:45.

Any questions?

Sex Backwards

You won’t think that sex scene would still be a turn on if you read it backward, but lo and behold, that’s where I found myself while I worked on the copy-edits for ONE MORE TIME.

I am a believer in the saying that if the sex scene doesn’t turn me on, chances are it won’t turn the reader on either. So there are a couple of scenes in this book, which after a marathon session in writing them, I had to take matters into hand, as it were.

When I do copy-edits, I do a breeze through, reading the post-it notes and generally groan at the dumb mistakes I didn’t catch. Then I read forward, examining each of the copy-editor’s red pencil marks to see whether or not I agree with them. Then, I read it backward, sentence by sentence, looking to spot mistakes both I and the copy-editor have missed.

I always find some.

At any rate, you really wouldn’t think that a sex scene read backwards, starting with the climax, would get you all hot and bothered. But it does apparently.

Maybe its true what Pam and Jane have been saying about the erotic pay-off coming with the description of what leads up to the climax, rather than the climax itself.

So, fellow authors, do you review your copy-edits the way I do, and if so, is it still a turn-on?

And readers, anyone game to grab a book and take a crack at reading it backward? I wonder if part of the arousal is from remembering how I wrote the scene (in that I know what comes before).

Over to you!

(And there was going to be a picture by Rowlandson with a couple doing it "backward" as it were, although more truthfully from behind, but I ran out of time to scan it in.)

One More Time

So my cover arrived yesterday for ONE MORE TIME, my December Aphrodisia, release and I took one look at it and giggled. You may too.

MANTITTY!!!!


(yes, I need to Photoshop out the hole punched through it)

Yes, indeedy. And you probably can’t see it in this size picture, but he’s got goose bumps around his nipple.

But anyway, I am very happy and excited about it because a) it’s once again a beautiful cover; b) every person I’ve shown it to has been riveted; and c) mantitty sells, apparently.

We’ve talked about mantitty before (Pam here in “Covers and Consternation Controversy” and Jane here in “The Case Against Mantitty”), so I guess it’s now my turn to do so!

Mantitty should leave me cold. I mean, I prefer the studious, slender guy. Or the guy who isn’t so tall. Or the guy that when I say I think he’s hot, people look at me and go “huh?” (And usually, "who?")

Brad Pitt’s mantitties don’t do it for me, for instance.

But seeing a cover with mantitty. Well, I have to be honest. Before the giggle from remembering the word “mantitty”, there is this sucking intake of breath and a perking of interest.

The words “Mmmm. Mantitty,” may never cross my mind, but there is something primal and visceral about the response. Never mind that Anthony Stewart Head makes me weak at the knees, or that Spike did way more for me than Angel ever did. Seeing the slender Edward Fox taking his shirt off to repaint a stolen care in The Day of the Jackal, or at left in a not terribly good screencap at the end of the bath scene in Shaka Zulu (which is even in the Regency period, oh heavens!) was ditto, ditto, oh ditto.

(OK, so some of you are going, Edward who? Am I the only Edward Fox fan out there?)

And yet, seeing James Craig, the new James Bond, topless in Casino Royale had me drooling.

Eventually, that response gets dissolved by the giggling when “mantitty” comes through, but heck, I’ll still pick up the book and read what’s on the back cover because of it!

Actually, what I really like about my mantitty cover, is that it fits the story. You see, I have this Greek god statue come to life -- and you have to admit -- those statues depicted ideals!

Bacchus never bothered with a towel, though.

(The image to the right was an inspirational image while I was writing ONE MORE TIME. It's from a museum in Germany, from memory.)

PS. Spellcheck wants to replace “Mantitties” with “Mantises”. Discuss. *grin*

Progress report: Two orgasms down, ??? to go

Two orgasms into my current manuscript, I'm continuing to mull over Jane's Big Bang post, with its well-wrought orgasm and its equally thoughtful questions.

Which inspired me to revisit my copy of How to Write a Dirty Story, to see what the indispensible Susie Bright thinks about this. And to find that Susie's overriding advice is to be brief. Reading about an orgasm, she says, ought perhaps to be even quicker than having one. And she warns that:

Writers who insist on drawing it out for paragraphs, with detailed ocean metaphors and inner burst of karmic sunlight, are killing it. Because the orgasm scene is the final shoe-dropping from the prosy foreplay that you've been teasing us with all along. When that relief comes, it had better be exquisite, sweet -- and brief.

Which advice gave me pause, because I can well remember how enamored I was of ocean metaphors in The Bookseller's Daughter. And it made me wonder if I ought to check out what my characters and I have been doing in bed together these many years.

And suddenly, she was past caring what he could see. Let him see -- let him know -- every inch, every iota of her, let him hear the deep moans, the gasps, the greedy, bestial growls issuing from her lips, rising from the volcanic tremors (but he must be able to feel them too!) at her center. She threw back her head and cried out; she heard him cry out as well, before he pulled her down to his wet, salty-tasting chest, his heart (or was it her heart?) pounding wildly, his arms hard around her, both their bodies drenched, trembling, exhausted -- as if they’d been out together in a hurricane.

Hmmm...

What's interesting to me about reproducing this excerpt here is that I'm not sure I'm past caring what it lets you see about me.

Which is not so surprising, because for me and my heroines, the relief of orgasm is always a relief from exaggerated, wordy self-awareness. Orgasm's the blankness wherein, (as another of my heroines, describes it, in Carrie's Story):

I had lost a kind of authority, a defense, both against the world and my own gleeful, brute body.

Orgasm is the ultimate defenseless gotcha moment. Your human words turn to bestial growls (hmm, the Marquis de Sade has a mechanical device to make this happen) -- and, anyway (excuse the digression), for the moment you don't even care.

For someone like my self and my talkiest heroines (Carrie, Marie-Laure, Mary Stancell) the inarticulate moment may be precious but it's sure as hell gonna be brief.

So it turns out I don't have to worry about that Susie's proscription. Whatever I or you may think of Marie-Laure's orgasm, most of what I wrote was lead-up. The actual event takes no more than the time-space of a semi-colon. The rest - as a wise old guy once said, about something else entirely - is commentary.

Marie-Laure's orgasm is the eye of the hurricane, the moment of silence between her cry and Joseph's, before the chatter of her consciousness starts up again, before she gets enough in control to create the metaphor of the hurricane. She thinks therefore she is (well, she's French). But while she comes, she isn't thinking, she isn't commenting, she isn't quite herself or even quite present.

I love that paradox of erotic writing. All that chatter surrounding the brief, precious moment of release, of submission, of the open mouth, the open cunt, the round, blank pre-verbal O.

And it’s that same paradox that leads me to write about smart girls who try (and gloriously fail and try again) to control, to organize themselves and their world through words and wit. And why I fall in love with them in books and movies and TV, from Jo March to Lizzy Bennet to my new pop culture goddess, Liz Lemon of Tina Fey’s brilliant TV show 30 Rock.

And why my sex scenes get rewritten the most of anything in my books -- sentences turned about until I can get a rhythm that at least for a moment lets me move with it. A pattern of stresses and rests, advances and releases, words and the spaces between the words. Because that's where it happens, in the spaces -- if only for the length of a semi-colon.

Erotic Reading Right Out Loud

I’m veering away from the historical discussion (although after a recent post, I’m ready to chant “nub, nub, nub!” just to get Jane going) and into another erotic realm.

Last week, Lacy and I (and some others) participated in an erotic reading at Babeland in Seattle. It was the second time I’ve ever written my work aloud, and the first time it’s been the erotic stuff. It was a lot of fun, listening to the readings and looking around the store at the toys available. (If you haven’t guessed, Babeland is an adult store.) Drinkies afterward was fun too but if I shared any of that, Lacy and the others would have to kill me, I’m sure.

(Yes, that's me, reading in front of floggers and harnesses and blindfolds, oh my!)


And yes, I did buy a toy -- the iBuddy, in fact, which you can plug your iPod or other mp3 player and vibrate in time to the music. I haven’t tried it out yet. I mean, I can’t call it an excuse for research, as I’ve already written the book where the modern-day heroine takes bag of toys back to the Regency period. (ONE MORE TIME, out in December.)

So I won’t. *wicked grin*

Back to the erotic reading. There were six of us rotating through the evening and it made me realize some things that are incredibly important to reading something erotic aloud.

For one thing, you can’t get off on what you’re reading because you’re in a room packed with people.

I glanced up occasionally to gauge response, but really couldn’t tell. One guy left during my reading and came back later, but I’ve no idea if that means his cell phone went off or... well, something else.

So here are some tips to reading erotica aloud and in public:

1. It is a story, like any other, and should be read as if you were telling it, not reading it: with interest and intensity. Vary the cadences of your voice. I found when I practiced at home, I was in a monotone, so I made an effort to brighten it up a bit. (No idea whether this worked.)
   
2. Use slightly different voices for different characters: for example, I went slightly higher for the heroine, and slightly lower for the hero.
   
3. Remember to breathe. (Almost forgot that one the second time up.) Pause between sentences, paragraphs and so on.
   
4. Given the language, treat explicit words as any other garden variety word -- unless its in dialogue and then say the dialogue how your character says it.
   
5. Explain the scene set up before you start. (Hmm, maybe I should’ve listed that one first.) It helps the listeners get more involved with the story if they know what’s at stake.
   
6. Revel in the wit. Relish telling the story. Grin at appropriate moments and pause for laughter.
   
7. (And I learned this from observing one of the other authors) Schmooze your audience during the breaks.
   

I’ve written a scene in SHOW ME (which also has a fair amount of “historical” sex toys in it) where the heroine reads aloud to the hero. But he’s touching her at the same time, so it was definitely a different demographic, reading aloud to a room filled with people.

Jane juggles.

How did I know I was a filthmonger? Well, I've always been interested in that sort of thing, and when I started writing romance, I found my characters were too. So, there I was with my new critique group, and they were letting me have it on my first attempt at writing a ... romance?... something. In chapter two, my heroine, an apprentice actress with an eighteenth-century theater company, had been propositioned by a young man at a party. Their assignment is in the orangerie, and the first thing she notices is that he's squeezed the huge spot on his chin as preparation. How sweet, I thought (they were both quite young).
They then proceed to have clumsy, fast, first-time sex, buttons flying, with the occasional cry of "Ouch!"
Question from critique partner: Is he the hero?
Me: I don't know yet. I think she might just be learning how to, uh, do it.
Critique partner (very firmly): If you're writing a romance, the hero gets the cherry.
Me: Why?
My heroine then picks oranges and juggles with them.
And that's pretty much the pattern of my writing: there are no rules and I and my characters can fool around in whatever way we choose.
My first book, like Celia's, was a traditional Regency, with no juggling but rather a lot of sex, and some quite grown up sex, too (mature protagonists who'd learned how to do it).
I have a book coming out in October, from Signet Eclipse, called Forbidden Shores. No juggling, but lots of the other. Lots. It's about a woman in 1800 who is in a triangle with two men, where each of them is in love with the wrong person--the one who can't possibly return their love. There are lots of references to The Tempest (it's set on a Caribbean island) and The Merchant of Venice.
First the sex, then the juggling.
I'm so glad to be here with everyone. Milk and sugar?
Jane

Night time sharpens...heightens each sensation...

by Colette Gale

I love Webber's Phantom of the Opera. It's rich, it's lush, it's sensual and erotic...but Christine ends up with the wrong guy!

After watching the play and movie umpteen times, I decided to take matters into my own...er, hands (considering the to-die-for appeal of Gerard Butler in the movie, however, I must admit there were other things I would have liked to take. In hand.).

It was obvious to me, and to every other woman I've talked to, that the passion, the attachment, the sex between Christine and Erik (the Phantom) is beyond belief--and how she could throw it away just because he has to hide half his face is beyond me!

(Well, okay, he might have accidentally killed a few people...but that was in a different version of the story. Definitely not mine.)

Plus, I couldn't stop wondering what actually happened during the "Music of the Night" scene. I mean, that bed!--not to mention the way Erik's hands were all over her body while he was seducing her with song. But, alas, it was a family production (or at least PG-13), so Webber had to close the door on that scene...

...but that didn't mean I had to leave it shut when I wrote my version.

So, by way of introduction (since this is supposed to be an introductory blog post, according to dear Jane Lockwood, the woman who really wields the whip around here--and quite handily, might I add), let me just say that, come August 2007, you'll be able to read my extremely hot, quite dirty version of The Phantom of the Opera...and, believe me, I leave nothing to the imagination. Even Madame Giry and the two managers get in on the act!

The book is titled Unmasqued: An Erotic Novel of the Phantom of the Opera, and it will be published by Signet Eclipse.

As for me? Well, you'll get to know me a little better once I have my website up (in progress), and after a few posts here on Spiced Tea Party.

(Blog posts, Jane. Not...whippping posts. Okay?)