I received a recent email from my friend Doreen deSalvo (romance writer and one of the founders of the erotic romance publisher Loose-Id Books -- that's their logo over on the left) with this parting quote embedded:
What do you have now, and what do you covet, that you would not gladly trade for, say, five extra years?
It's from the journalist Michael Kinsley (past and founding editor of Slate.com), who was diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease a few years ago, and who wrote about life expectancy and other related issues in a wonderful piece called "Mine is Longer than Yours." Kinsley's condition is controlled right now, and he continues to write beautifully and with great urgency.
As one always ought to do, with the end in view.
Inspiring me to try and do likewise (at least qua the urgency) at the end of the life of this blog, while bidding my bloggies -- Jane, Celia, Kate, Lacy, Colette, and Sharon -- a tearful and grateful farewell.
We never really stated our common theme, and I don't know if we'd even agree on one -- not to speak of what any of us meant by "erotic historical."
But my guess is that there has been a consistent concern pumping through the heart of this blog (pumping, mind you, do let's give throbbing a well-deserved rest, okay?) And this constant concern has probably been something like "how do you write from the heart of your obsessions and keep yourself real and grounded at the same time?"
Starting with the obsession thing. I loved the fact that on this blog we wondered out loud what caused us to look deep within our fantasy lives and not blink at the surprising things we found there. Things no one told us were sexy (isn't it weird to live during a period where erotic taste is always being dictated, as though it were fashion or politics or morality...-- though who knows, maybe it does reflect aspects of them).
We brought words and objects back from the past, we ventured into the paranormal, and we weren't afraid of that other p-word, the pornographic. (Pausing for a brief message from the sponsor: you knowI'm going to keep trying to understand where the boundaries of the erotic, the pornographic, and the romantic lie, and then do my best to confound them -- check my blog from time to time, and just about anything I'm likely ever to write for more wonkery on the subject).
While as for staying real and grounded: while we were testing boundaries, we were also trying to make deadlines, get kids to school, negotiate the erotic romance biz. We were distracted, exhausted, exasperated. Sometimes we were late to post.
We had fun -- well, I did anyway. But then, I've always believed that erotic writing is its own reward (which in the ups and downs of a career has to be a good thing), and that writing about erotic writing can be too.
And so now I'm tiptoeing away to turn off the lights.
My thirteen year old niece, aspiring writer and veterinarian, likes to ask me when I think she'll be old enough to read my books.
I shrug, demur, and tell her it's up to her moms...
Though in truth, I think the very best way to read a sexy book is as a teenage baby-sitter, finding it on the shelf after the kids are asleep and putting it back very very carefully in the exact same spot before the parents get home so that no one will ever ever know you were reading it... I certainly have no fonder hope for my books than that they be read by a generation (or two, if I'm lucky) of breathless baby-sitters.
But don't tell my niece's parents I said that, okay? Anyway, with or without me, one way or another, I have no doubt she'll read my stuff when she's ready for it.
What I really worry about is whether I'm ready for her.
By which I mean that I hope my books aren't too much of a letdown from some of the deeply, brilliantly romantic stuff she's read already.
I mean, how much more moving could any doomed passion be than Severus Snape's lifelong, tormented, ultimately sacrificial love for Harry Potter's mother, Lily?
And I may never have come up with any single detail as hot (in its squeaky-clean way) as the bit from Twilight, the first book in Stephanie Meyer's teen-age vampire series, where the dreamy good teen vampire Edward explains to our very human heroine Bella how he first became attracted to her, in biology class -- which was by her body's unique and particular smell.
In biology class. Of course. Meyer got it dead-on right. There's something wonderfully basic and biological about writing about smells -- it's the immediacy of them, the way that good and provocative smells are part of our animal nature, our preverbal, amoral attunement to what's safe -- or (even better) to what's so captivating and attractive that safety be damned.
And yet smells are also a deeply cultural link to memory and identity. Mothers and their babies can recognize each other's smells. As of course so can lovers.
Smells can be so overpowering that they seem to surround us. Imagine not wanting to lose any of those little atoms you and your lover's bodies are sloughing off, as though you want to short-cut the journey from desire to memory. And actually, if you don't change the sheets after a week or two... In the Japanese director Oshima's astonishing 1976 movie, In the Realm of the Senses, the sex-crazed couple don't allow the brothel housekeeper to clean the room they've spent some weeks in. It's as though they want to create an environment that's as much an extension of their own bodies as possible.
I've used smell in all my books, but perhaps most consciously in The Slightest Provocation, the story of a couple who've been separated for nine years, and who journey back to where they first fell in love. It's a book where memory and desire are intertwined as tightly as I could make them, as in passages like this one, where Mary, my angry, overwrought and very horny heroine, can only get to sleep by means of a combination of masturbation and laudanum (that ubiquitous 19th century remedy of opium dissolved in alcohol):
She swallowed it down, threw off the rest of her clothes, slipped naked below the quilt, and -- quickly and coldly, skillfully and purposefully -- touched herself until she cried out. Until the aching became a burning, a hard white light easing to a warm orange glow, until the trembling stopped and the candle guttered and died and the visions faded, of blazing eyes and strong tapering hands, of pain and anger, disillusionment and rivalry -- oh, and other visions, memories, from youth, of things they’d done and things they hadn’t dared to try. The smell of lemon oil, warm smooth cherrywood surface of a desktop, her face and breasts crushed against it. All subsiding now, to a dull dark red, as though dimly painted upon the velvet insides of her eyelids. Ebbing, waning, flickering. Until she slept.
Or this passage, no doubt unconsciously influenced by Oshima's movie, where my hero Kit thinks happily of sex and song and smells and dirty sheets:
Come live with me and be my love -- an old lyric she’d liked to sing -- words and cadence coming echoing back now, from behind his thoughts. Pastoral, a shepherd’s love song: giddy swain wooing his lady with promises of beds of roses, food served al fresco on silver plates, and absolutely no messes to worry about. Poetry, in a word.
While reality was quite a different matter, especially if you were accustomed to having servants clean up after you. Astonishing, Kit thought, how smelly a linen sheet could become and in how short a time, at least when subjected to such excellent usage as this one had been getting. The odor had been piquant at first; at this moment one might call it “earthy.” Give him and Mary an additional sweaty day or so of pounding each other so delightfully, and the only thing one could honestly call it would be “stinking.”
Come live with me and be my love And we will all the pleasures prove On stinking sheet in chilly air . . .
I do smells differently in my forthcoming book, The Edge of Impropriety. And -- finally tired of roses and sweat, of leather and lemon and of the Provencal lavender and rosemary that wafted through my French-set Bookseller's Daughter, I found a new scent. Or a very old one.
But since this post's quite long enough already, you'll just have to come back for my next to find out about this most interesting, evocative, exotic, and ancient of scents.
While right now, I'll turn the discussion over back over to you readers and writers.
What role do you think the portrayal of smells plays in erotic writing? Writers, how have you used it? And readers, got any favorite examples you'd like to share?
I mentioned on a prior post that my husband Michael and I recently celebrated our 38th anniversary with a very recherche product (which shall remain nameless) from Good Vibrations.
Amazing.
But mostly when we amaze each other, it's on a more everyday level, like still finding things to talk about and rediscovering ourselves along the way. Like a few nights ago when we were talking at dinner about the Big Serious Book I'm trying to find time to get into, Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared Diamond. Actually, I've read about 100 pages, and it's pretty great -- kind of a history of almost everything around us, by examining how different societies around the world developed different survival characteristics at different rates, and how this helped them develop hegemonies over each other and bash each other around.
Anyway, I was telling Michael about how much more reliable sharpened steel weapons were than stuff that's mostly good for bludgeoning -- when both of us realized we didn't know anything about the technology of making steel, except for the word "tempering." And that actually, the only thing we knew about tempering was from the theme song of a 1950s TV western series called "Jim Bowie," about the guy who invented some kind of steel knife. Which led us into an effortless, word-perfect chorus of:
Jim Bowie, Jim Bowie, he was a bold adventurin' man Jim Bowie Jim Bowie, battled for right with a powerful hand His blade was tempered and so was he Indestructible steel was he Jim Bowie Jim Bowie He was a fighter, a fearless and mighty adventurin' man (no pix, but if you want to hear the tune, here 's the Youtube link)
Amazing what a person remembers. And more amazing what a couple of people remember together. But then, those Jim Bowie verses were really pretty good: clever to take the simple "bold adventurin' man" and then expand it so elegantly in the last line -- alliteration and slant rhyme both).
In a sense, though, Michael and I grew up together. We didn't actually meet until we were 20 (almost children, it now seems to me), but thanks to TV and mass culture we already shared an erotic and artistic imagination.
At 11 or so, we each, separately, spent large amounts of time staring at this cover on the paperback book racks that were springing up everywhere. Staring and having funny feelings. Yes, I know her button says "anti-sex league." But to each of us (and maybe a lot of kids like us) it screamed SEX!! We found an old copy in Michael's parents' bookshelves, and have the cover framed in our hallway, as a reminder who we were "before we loved," as John Donne put it.
Of course, sometimes we saw the same stuff entirely from opposite points of view. As a kid, Michael found the chorus of the TV show "Maverick" theme song a bit confusing.
Riverboat ring your bell Fare thee well Annabelle Luck is the lady that he loves the best Natchez to New Orleans Livin' on jacks and queens Maverick is the legend of the west.
Why are the two apostrophes jammed up together, Michael asked me -- one to the riverboat and one to Annabelle -- and then why does the lyric hurry back to 3rd person? It seems a little disjointed, he said.
Really? I said. You mean you don't get the brilliant, romantic immediacy of the "fare thee well" jammed in like that? I was genuinely surprised he didn't love it as much as I did.
I think it's a girly thing -- that for the instant in time it took to sing or hear that line of the verse I and every little girl who heard it was poor, spurned Annabelle. Years later, I didn't have to learn how to write the quick emotional changes of deep third person pov (as it's called in Romancelandia). The riverboat gambler Brett Maverick taught me how fast and flexible, how headlong, precipitous, and shifting love can be. There you are with Brett, and before you know it the riverboat's sailing and he's off to follow his life quest. Evidently not the same heartbreaker for little boys (though I'll have to ask the gay guys in my book group).
At which point the other night, Michael and I went to YouTube, to explore a few more of those boy/girl (or Michael/Pam) differences. An early favorite of his being the noirish "Have Gun, Will Travel," which was a little dark for me back then, but which probably had a lot to do with making Michael the brooding, pretentious young existentialist I was ready to fall in love with at 20.
Or for me, with this cross-dressing sequence from one of my childhood favorite movies, "Calamity Jane," which I saw when I was 8 and which thrilled me with its image of a girl doing stuff a girl wasn't supposed to. It probably had as much as anything to do with my writing a cross-dressing romance, Almost a Gentleman a gazillion years later. A romance (I have to add) whose new mass market cover is hardly about to cause any shy, word-drunk, imaginative eleven-year-olds to stare and sweat and have funny feelings in their stomachs. I doubt it will prepare anyone to fall in love. But then, Almost a Gentleman's no 1984, so fair's fair.
Great popular art of your childhood?
Romantic or erotic intimations from words or images?
Stuff that made you who you are before you quite knew what hit you?
Sheesh, you crumpets write fast. Huge, envious, admiring congrats to all of you who have new books coming out soon -- I won't have one until Fall 2008.
But there will be re-issue of Almost a Gentleman before that. Which was my first published romance novel, an erotic Regency about Phoebe, who's spent three years in successful male masquerade, and David, Earl of Linsley, who's the first man to make her want to be a woman again.
It'll be out December 4. It's already on Amazon, and I'm happy to be able to tell you that it'll cost half the price of the old, trade paperback edition. So I'm hoping that I might get some new readers -- up until now my stuff has been in trade (read bigger, more expensive) paperback only.
No male torsos on the cover, sorry to report, just some pretty people done in nice hot purple, the lettering in gold foil.
The prose is less purple but just as hot.
Here's the book's first undressing scene, in which Phoebe protests David's "lordly" behavior.
"Well [David replies], I am a lord, don't forget. I try to be a good, honest, and decent one, but the fact of the matter is that I own rather a lot of land. And I’m afraid that the habit of being lord over all that I survey is a hard one to break.
"Now go stand there by the fireplace." This time his slap on her rump carried a little more force with it. "You know the spot. It’s where the lamplight meets the light from the flames and makes you look so bewitching."
He loosened his legs from around her hips. Slowly, she backed away from him toward the warm pool of golden light. One walked backwards, she thought, after having made one's curtsies at court. In respect, in humility . . . but hardly with the slow, lustful, provocative movements she felt herself employing. Lord of all that you survey, are you, sir? Well, we shall have to see about that.
...The light flowed over her as she reached the spot he’d described.... Her skirt blew softly about her legs; she could feel warm currents of air from the fireplace even as her naked breasts lifted and tightened under his eyes.
His gaze traveled slowly downward. She raised her chin, preening for him, slowly arching her back as a cat might do. Peering at him through her eyelashes, she watched the corners of his mouth twitch.
...[and a little later] She hadn’t expected to flaunt her naked quim quite as readily as it seemed she was doing. Perhaps she’d taken encouragement from the sigh that had forced his mouth open as he stared at the triangle of chestnut curls on the plump mound rising below her belly.Oh yes, she’d enjoyed both the sigh and the intensity of his eyes upon her.
She rubbed her thighs together to try to control her excitement.
"Keep them parted," he growled. He winced immediately after, embarrassed at having revealed the extent of his impatient desire.
But she was beginning to feel rather impatient herself. Although this game of displaying herself for his pleasure was a most provocative one, perhaps it was time to move on.Well, she had only the corset and the shoes and stockings to remove now. Frowning, she tugged at the laces at her back.
"My lord."
"Ummm."
"There seems to be a knot that I can’t untie. Would you help me . . ."
"Well, hurry on over here, then."
But now he was becoming careless, too. For if he’d really wanted to continue with this game, she thought, he would have turned her around and concentrated upon the corset laces, instead of fumbling absently with them while he nuzzled her breasts.
It didn’t matter. There hadn’t been a knot. The corset fell to the floor at his first tug on the strings, as she took advantage of his momentary surprise to unknot his cravat.
He shook his head. "You’re headstrong, disobedient."
"I’ve been a man for three years," she told him. "It engenders habits that are hard to break."
Hope you liked it, and -- if it's new to you -- that you'd like to buy the new purple version.
Though if you'd prefer a free copy of the old version (with larger print and decorous cover), you can enter the contest on my website to try to win one (and read another excerpt as well).
I have no idea...well actually now I do but only because Pam mentioned something on our blog a while back that absolutely stuck with me and secondly I was answering questions for an interview today and actually had to think about my 'process'.
Here's what Pam said:
"The thing is, the specifics of my erotic books are made up or taken from things other people made up. But there's a way in which they're the truest books I've ever written, because I had those fantasies and that's the truth. I think the act of giving it literary form was a way of making something tellable that would otherwise be entirely secret and untellable."
And I thought yes that's absolutely how I feel and Pam has put it so eloquently that I don't need to. I know a lot of writers of erotica and erotic romance do actually live lives that bear a striking resemblance to their written work. And then there's me...happily married, mother of four, frumpy soccer mom. And I'm cool with that, usually, although occasionally when I hear tales of other authors' wild lifestyles I wonder whether I'm a big fraud who if she stuck to writing what she knew would write very short books.
Pam reminded me that being a voracious reader and having a deep fantasy life are just as valuable resources in a writers toolbox as being out there living the artistic life. I also realized that my ability to be quiet, to listen and to watch were other skills that helped me write the books I wanted to.
Thank you Pam :)
And now onto the whole 'process' question, which is linked to the above, because I get uncomfortable with the whole idea that I have a 'process' which sounds like something I might have to produce a spreadsheet for or present at a board meeting, or god forbid, a writer's workshop.
For some people having a process obviously works. Sometimes I wish I knew their secret. One of the interview questions asked what came first for me, character, plot, setting etc and it made me think. Luckily for me, I've just started musing about a new book and so for the first time, I'm able to tell you my process.
Although, when I write it down it sounds crazy! What happens is this. I get a sense of a person, usually at a critical emotional moment in his or her life, (for me, usually its the hero.)
In this instance, I got a glimpse of a man, sitting on his bunk, behind bars. He's in a crowded space and yet he is completely alone and apart, all his emotions so finely banked down that no one looking at him would be able to tell how intensely he hates his present situation, how every muscle is quivering from the effort to stop himself from throwing himself at those bars and screaming until he is hoarse. Only I see it because I 'know' him.
Well, I don't really know him -yet-but gradually as I let my subconscious play with the image and his feelings, I'll get to know more and more about what time period he exists in and what is going on around him to have put him in this position. I suppose it's a bit like the small pebble thrown into the silent pond and the ripples radiating out from it. I kind of like that image. By the way, I think his name is Constantin, but I could be wrong.
Does the above count as a process? I'm not sure, but it works for me. As Pam says, it's pure fantasy. I've never been to jail, I have no idea how it would feel to be there but, trust me, I know how Constantin feels.
So you know what I'm going to ask you-Writers, where do you get your ideas from? And if you are a reader, do you like to know how a writer gets his/her ideas and do you feel cheated if he/she hasn't actually done everything in their books?
Pam Rosenthal and I gave our presentation at National, Writing the Hot Historical (aka Pam & Janet Evening), and as is the way with such things, we started making exciting discoveries hours before we were to speak. It started with a bit of cross-pollination from my workshop on servants that I gave to the Beau Monde a couple of days before and one of the illustrations I had of a lady's maid, painted by James Morland.
Seems this portrait, and this particular subgenre, of female servants at work, was very popular in the long eighteenth century, reproduced in the form of engravings; and this particular picture proved so popular that Morland did another version, this time of the servant ironing. There's also another one that I couldn't hunt down online of a woman wringing out wet laundry, straight out of the window.
I used it in my servant presentation, of course, to show how very well-dressed lady's maids typically were--they were given their mistress's cast-off clothes in addition to wages. But what struck me also about these paintings were their voyeuristic aspect (and also the fact that the subject's bosom is smack-dab in the center of the painting, which I'm sure added to their popularity). Lady's maids washed their mistress's linen--stockings and shifts that were next to their skin, so Ms. Washing is caught in an intimate situation; not only that, but she's looking into your eyes, as though daring you to guess which intimate garment she's handling. Ms. Ironing, however, has her eyes modestly lowered as she irons (stockings? help me out here!)--but she's inviting the viewer to watch as blatantly as Ms. Washing.
One of the puzzling and difficult things about writing sexy historicals is trying to reconcile what we find sexy now with what we think--or guess--people found sexy then. Why the allure of women doing things with their hands?--it's not just handling stockings; there's another subgenre, or sub subgenre, of erotic art featuring kitchen maids (bosoms exposed) plucking game (babes with large dead birds).
My explanation is that these were private moments when a viewer was not expected. When the woman, engaged in her fairly monotonous work, would let her mind drift off, and then feel that prickle at the back of the neck you get when someone is watching. And because what she's doing is completely innocent (isn't it?) she might pretend not to notice. She'd continue her pleasant reverie, the slow, careful movements of her hands, with the additional pleasure of performing unaware. She might even let the watcher know, somehow, that she's aware of his presence; or, she might choose, brazenly, to look into his eyes, and dare him to think that anything out of the ordinary is happening at all.
A month or so ago, I talked about Theresa Berkeley, known brothel madam and specialist in the birch discipline. One of the items I’d read about was the Berkeley Horse, an invented device but all my sources said that the image was lost.
Not so! While doing research on my upcoming and oft-mentioned talk about Sex During the Regency, I came across an article loaded with images. And the Berkeley Horse was one of them!
According to the author’s article, this image appeared in the collection of the Victorian “Society for the Promotion of the Arts, Manufacture and Commerce at the Adelphi”. The man who donated the item was a member of the Adelphi Society (amazingly, I might add, since by this point he was well known as a publisher of erotic work), and a friend of Theresa Berkeley.
His name was George Cannon and he’s a fascinating man, at least according to Iain McCalman’s accounts. He not only appears in this article “Unrespectable Radicalism: Infidels and Pornography in Early Nineteenth Century London” (Past and Present, No. 104, 1984, pp74-110), but in his book “Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London, 1795-1840”.
And if those titles alone don’t salivate the creative tastebuds as to the kinds of characters that might be found for future works, well, then maybe you haven’t read Pam Rosenthal’s “The Bookseller’s Daughter”, although her bookseller is a lot more respectable.
This peek at the underbelly of London -- where respectable folk (Cannon started out as either a solicitor or a solicitor’s clerk) gradually become “unrespectable” and really don’t give a damn about it. Cannon was also clever, avoiding arrest for the longest time. And after he died, his wife ran the business, which was not uncommon among these folk. As you can see, I’ve included a picture of the infamous Berkeley Horse, although I can see from the sketch that it would be quite impossible to whip someone on any part of the body, as a few of them are covered by the boards. But I imagine you would be positioned face forward, as there’s room for your face to stick through and, er, other parts.
I haven’t been able to answer everyone’s questions, although I do wonder if the pet names that sneak through in correspondence come out of bed-talk, but who knows...
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.)
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.
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*
After posting my own face as avatar in my first responses to Celia's post, I’ve beaten a hasty retreat, back behind the ambiguous smile of my cover girl for The Slightest Provocation. Because I’ve rather belatedly realized that I’m the only author on this group blog to be posting under my erotic-romance-writing name, which is also my own, everyday name of Pam Rosenthal. All of which, in the context of this frank, clever, trash-talking blog, makes me want to reach for the nearest mask or figleaf.
Funny how all that works.
And, no - in case there might be any doubt - I didn’t choose to publish erotic romance as “Pam Rosenthal” because I thought the name conveyed that sexy Brit resonance so often coveted for romance writer pseuds.
The story's simpler. By the time I got published in writing erotic romance I’d been writing my down and dirty literate smut as Molly Weatherfield, and it felt like time to get a little credit under my own name. (Or, more correctly, the name I'd come by via Michael Rosenthal, after meeting several eons ago, during the summer of Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde and the Grove Press translation of Story of O.)
I’m a slow reader, a slow writer, and a slow learner. Unlike some of you precocious young things, I was well past adolescence when I turned to erotic writing. In fact, by the time of my first story, Michael and I were ourselves the parents of an adolescent much given to rolling his eyes in extravagant, desperate humiliation whenever I'd sing along with the girl groups on oldies radio.
More than two decades had drifted or hurtled by since the hot Manhattan summer of Michael and I reading Story of O together in that hard single bed we found so roomy and comfy. By now we had a bigger bed, jobs, responsibilities, a big mortgage on a tiny San Francisco Victorian, and that eye-rolling offspring. But that morning had been a particularly lazy, sexy, sunny Sunday. Michael hadn't gone off to work at his bookselling job until eleven. After which I had decided that it might be fun, interesting, at least therapeutic and certainly better than housework, to curl up in a chair in the bay window and jot down a few of the secret, outré, long-cherished S/M fantasies that had passed through my head in the prior hours.
Several hours passed, quite imperceptibly. Sunday morning became Sunday afternoon and I was still in my ratty old pink terrycloth bathrobe. The only time I’d gotten up was to consult the bookshelves, to check the punctuation of COMMA CLOSE QUOTE HE SAID PERIOD. Because there were real characters speaking real dialog on the page before me. I felt like God. There was no going back.
I finished the story and sent it to a local zine I admired, “Frighten the Horses,” which had recently published a hot and beautifully crafted poem by Kim Addonizio (check her out if you don’t know her work).
Maybe six months later I received what I now recognize as a wondrously generous, helpful, and encouraging page-long rejection letter from the zine’s editor, erotic writer Mark Pritchard (also a fine writer, and now a friend – check him out too). Mark wrote that while I’d produced an unusually well written first attempt at a story, I clearly didn't understand much about what a story actually was; patiently, he suggested that something - perhaps transformative or revelatory - usually happens in a story. I, of course, thought he was a fatuous idiot, cried a lot, and tried to forget the whole thing.
Except that I didn’t. Couldn’t. Partly because I was lucky enough to be living in San Francisco’s Mission District during a wonderfully creative queer and feminist-inspired efflorescence of erotic culture (this was the early 90s – more about all that in my next post). And partly, simply (simply!) because erotic fiction-writing had been so much fun (it was never very therapeutic; the first thing I learned is that it shouldn't be).
But the fun is what I hope will always remain. Which makes me think I’ve come to the right tea party. I like my tea green, by the way. As green as I was when I started that first story. May I always be able to find my way back to that moment of innocent bravery.
