Fan Fiction for Beginners (or for snobs)

Years back (in June 2006, actually), I wrote a piece on my own blog called The Snape Theory, finally, wherein I correctly asserted before it was revealed at the end of the series that Snape was a double agent working for good, and that it was for the love of Harry's mother Lily.

Of course, getting the Snape Theory right by the end of the fifth Harry Potter (The Order of the Phoenix) was hardly a stretch for a romance writer, it being our business to discern and delineate secret smoldering passions. Still, it got me much cred with my then-eleven-year-old niece, who could horcrux me under the table when it came to minor Harry Potter details and characters, but hadn't figured out the Snape thing yet.

And it also got me a fascinating piece of fanmail, directing me to some down-and-dirty and really rather well-written Harry Potter BDSM fan fiction -- about an intellectual relationship that (just as she becomes chronologically old enough) becomes an erotic one between Snape and Hermione.

I kinda enjoyed it, and was grateful to be pointed to it. I liked the idea of Snape wearing tight black jeans under his robes (not what Rowling intended, of course, but certainly a compassionate compensation for that heart-rending scene in the pensieve at the end of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix). And everybody who plays for the smart girl team will be gladdened by Hermione having an erotic partner who matches her in intellect. And then there's the strange point, which I have never quite understood, but which I feel to be absolutely true -- that BDSM is a kink often preferred by wonky types (I'll write more on this someday, I promise, but if anybody has any ideas I'd love to hear them now).

Anyway, I searched around in this fan fiction site, and followed links for a while... but then I went back to the book I was trying to write at the time and didn't think of fan fiction again until recently. Partly I was reminded of it when I read this quip from the supersmart lit-and-culture blogger Caleb Crain, who said he couldn't claim "to have read much fan fiction, but I feel as if I've been reading academic papers about it since I was an undergrad."

It's true -- particularly in the 90s, hip lit critics adored fan fiction, because it seemed to point to new and interesting aspects of the reading-writing continuum -- and perhaps also to point to a truth not generally acknowledged about a certain kind of reading, the adoring fans' desire to imagine characters' untold stories. We like to give them the breaks their authors never gave them (for Snape, something a whole lot better under his robes than the "skinny, pallid legs" and "graying underpants" Rowling gave him in the pensieve scene).

Sometimes, in the romance world, minor characters get their own books (sometimes this is sincere, sometimes market-driven, c'est la vie capitaliste, I guess). Sometimes, perhaps, it's the urge to continue a job well begun -- read the tough-love justice meted out on the final page of Pride and Prejudice: perhaps (I suppose this series assumes) England would be a better place if Mr. and Mrs. Darcy were solving all the unsolved crimes and dispensing rewards and punishments a la Lord and Lady Peter Wimsey. (I haven't read any of those Darcy mysteries -- have any of you? -- but I'll confess to a real adolescent wonky romantic thing for Peter Wimsey.)

And sometimes, as in the case of our own Colette Gale, the ending of The Phantom of the Opera just can't hold without the real lovers getting together. Colette, of course, writes in a "classics retold" subgenre. Retold and re-eroticized. Or perhaps (this is the fan fiction connection, I think) picking up on hints of eroticism in the original...?

Sometimes the eroticism really is there in the original -- or almost. The first time I read about fan fiction, it was (possibly like Caleb Crain) in the 90s, in the work of literary scholar Constance Penley. I think the word was slash fiction -- though I'm not sure what that meant. But in any case, Penley was gaga (her word) over stories of sex between Kirk and Spock by Star Trek fans. And whereas I don't believe that Gene Roddenberry had intended a sexual relationship, certainly there's an erotic vibe between two polar modes of macho -- Kirk the impetuous and Spock the remote, repressed, and contemplative. Which probably has something to do with the popularity of m-m couplings today (crumpet strumpets who mine this vein, please comment!)

Which brings me to the real reason I'm writing about fan fiction, because what I'm playing with right now is my own retelling of a classic novel -- to tell the "real" story that it's my pleasure to propose that the author was too proper to reveal. Perhaps like Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead -- well, that's a literary and hifalutin example. Or perhaps more like fan fiction. Where are the boundaries?

Boundaries or not, right now for me it's a journey and a challenge. The sex parts are pure pleasure. Righting injustices that I perceive in the original is a delight. Knowing how much to reveal about the "original," ostensible plot is a headache -- because some readers will have read the original and others will not have. I want it to work for everybody.

And I also want to know what you think about this farrago of partially digested ideas. I know that at least one of the crumpets (Celia) has written fan fiction. And that others of you have written m-m erotica and classics retold stories. Readers, what do you think? Writers, what have been your experiences?

Scents and Sexuality, Roses and Sweat

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?