One of my wettest experiences
Posted on: January 3, 2013
- In: Hot Stuff
- 2 Comments
Sun Strokes by Kojo Black
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I am writing this review after one of the wettest Decembers on record. I suppose that in itself might be a recommendation, especially if I told you that I was wet with this book in the mall, on the sofa, in the bath and in bed. But, although the erotic content of this book was as unrelenting as December’s rain, what I really loved about it was its language.
True, it wasn’t easy maintaining a reviewer’s perspective. More than once I lost my place, my objectivity and my decorum. I had to read certain passages twice. Oh, all right, three times. Once for the meaning, once for the language and once because I got distracted the first two times.
If you haven’t come across Sweetmeats Press before, you should know that Kojo Black is its presiding genius. And one of the reasons that Sweetmeats Press is fast becoming one of my favourite and most trusted imprints is that Kojo is a very gifted editor with a deep love of all things erotic. That love is very evident here in the finely crafted sentences that are as inventive as they are explicit.
There are four long stories in this collection and they are very varied in approach, so there is a lot I could say about them from a technical point of view. But let me just say that my favourite moment occurs at the climax of Beaches and Cream when shy, innocent Amanda is introduced to the pleasures of a smooth, glass, ornamental anal plug. It is beautifully done, let me assure you, and if Kojo can handle such a scene beautifully, just think of the endless possibilities!
Oh, but I know thinking is an effort sometimes, whether you are laid out on a beach soaking up the sun or stuck indoors watching the pounding rain. But that’s okay. Kojo has done all the thinking for you. So relax, lie back and luxuriate in some of the most imaginative erotic writing you will read this year.
An old-fashioned killing
Posted on: December 30, 2012
- In: Hot Stuff
- 7 Comments
Bang-bang You’re Dead by Muriel Spark
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Bang-Bang You’re Dead is a sophisticated story for sophisticated readers. At the beginning I was having to re-read each sentence three or four times. The English isn’t difficult but the context is. The narrator is at a friend’s house watching some old reels of film from her life in South Africa. Many questions played through my mind. How old is the person telling the story? Where is she? How old was she in that film? Who are these friends? Are they close friends or just acquaintances? Gradually, if you’re patient, the questions get answered. The reels of film trigger flashbacks and revive old memories. The watchers of the films get one story. We get another.
It’s an ambitious technical device and I was thinking that I was going to be very disappointed if the narrator didn’t do something special with it and repay the effort I was making to interpret the layers of meaning.
But as the story unfolded I realised before I got to the end that I actually was being treated to something very special indeed. I became engrossed in the story and in the searingly honest character of the narrator. As she began to dissect her emotions and the motivations behind her relationships, I became hooked.
The layered viewpoints and the indirectness of the storytelling are not gratuitous. There are poignant ironies in the story that the narrator couldn’t have conveyed any other way.
The tension builds. There is a climax. It’s beautifully done. It’s astonishingly economical storytelling. Thirty-eight succinct pages hold all the depth and range of a novel.
And then there is one final, crushing, heart-stopping revelation. Something she can’t tell her friends but which she has told us, the sophisticated readers, who have stayed with her story to the end. I was totally gripped by the last few pages. Nothing could have wrenched me from my seat.
Muriel Spark seems to be regarded as old-fashioned by some readers these days. That seems a great pity. This kind of narrative power should never go out of fashion. It is heartening to see, therefore that her complete stories have recently been published in a new edition by Canongate, one of the more enlightened of British independent publishers (another of their recent titles was Life of Pi).
More intimate than the internet
Posted on: December 25, 2012
This month I made an astounding discovery. All those WordPress blogs I’d followed throughout the year hadn’t fallen silent. WordPress had simply changed something so the default setting when I followed them was not to send me any updates by email. So those bloggers had been busy all year and I didn’t know. Instead I have been reading the words of just a few old friends.
Well, old friends are important and I don’t feel deprived. But I think this illustrates how hard it is to use social media when you are, at the same time, trying to write.
You might think I’ve not written much this year. When I look back I see I have published only a few short stories. But I’ve been writing constantly and hardly had time to so much as look on Facebook, which has a different layout and a different set of security features whenever I do.
Even without the handicapping hindrances of social media, the fruits of my work may still not appear next year. My two novels are progressing quite slowly and need quite a bit more loving yet. And it seems to me that it’s not very cost-effective to write novels when they are offered at $0.99 or $2.99. I just can’t seem to make the economics of it work for me, after tax and incidental costs are accounted for.
So it is with breathless admiration that I pick up a well-written book by a contemporary writer and immerse myself in its extraordinary depths. How do writers do it? Aren’t they amazing? Much more intimate than the internet, a novel is like a warm hug from someone you thought was a stranger but who turns out to be someone you have known and loved all your life.
So I have been immersing myself in books this Christmas and in the New Year I’ll be sharing some of them with you.
I was going to tease you with some tantalising titles and some links to titillating blogs. But I think I have over-reached myself and I’m going on too long. In fact, I’m desperate to curl up (and stretch out) with a fabulous Italian novel, that ought to make me want to slash my wrists but instead makes me want to listen to Björk and mop the kitchen floor with ripped up pages of Twilight.
Oh, the joys of Literature with a capital L!
This novel and many more will be reviewed on my blog in 2013. See you then, I hope!
And merry Christmas to all of you!
Kiss, kiss!
Vanessa Wu
Raw lesbian stories
Posted on: December 16, 2012
Lucy Faulkner sent me a message on Twitter asking me to review her slim novella about a lesbian army captain and her raw recruits. I don’t know why she chose me. Perhaps she had seen my military story Captain Sun. Or perhaps she was aware of my forthcoming lesbian anthology Lure of the Feminine. In any case, the theme caught my fancy and I decided to dive in immediately.
And immediately I was aware of an intriguing tension. The author has a well-educated voice and in a preface, which is in itself quite rare in books of this kind, she writes:
“As author of this book, I am, in effect, its main character.”
It’s autobiography, we are told. And then we are told it’s not.
“It’s a sincere interaction between me as fantasist and you as reader.”
Autobiography, then, but as fantasy. This slightly muddled thinking unfortunately continues throughout the story. That word sincere is puzzling. Are other fictions and fantasies insincere? The author appears to be setting herself apart as a writer of ‘good lesbian stories’ which, she adds on her blog, are ‘few and far between.’
Perhaps good lesbian stories are relatively rare. I don’t know. I’ve read quite a lot of them. And I’d venture to say that Lucy Faulkner should follow my example and read quite a lot of them too, preferably by women who actually are lesbians and can truly write from experience. Her writing would be far better for it.
The narrative structure of Raw Recruits is actually quite complex. There are flash backs, flash forwards and multiple points of view. In this respect it’s almost as ambitious as Nostromo or As I Lay Dying, two of the towering masterpieces of twentieth century literature. But I would not advise a raw recruit in the art of fiction to aim so high on her first literary foray.
Here is a typical paragraph:
“Meanwhile Private Lomax who had spent the whole secondary school getting off on the cat-fights she had had in school turned the corner of her own climax when her was pulled and she felt the warm spongy sensation of the orgasm seeping through the Captain’s panties.”
It’s a whole paragraph and I have typed it accurately. How many times did you read it before you understood what it meant? After the second or third reading you have probably read it more times than the author. Can you guess the missing word? What effect do these sort of mental gymnastics have on your sexual response? In my case the warm spongy sensation completely fails to materialise.
My philosophy of fiction is very simple. The writer should do all the work and the reader should have all the fun. In the case of Raw Recruits, I think the author is having more fun than the reader, which isn’t fair.
It’s a shame because the book is bursting with good ideas. It has the potential to be a really rollicking read. There is a lot of sex in it and the sexual positions, if you can figure them out, appear to be very imaginative. I’m afraid my imagination faltered frequently and the technical descriptions of the action didn’t quite work for me. But I would encourage you to check out this book for yourself. If you’re a writer, you can learn a lot from it. There is good material here even though the execution could be improved. I wonder how much more effort it would be to turn it from something rough and ready into something top-notch.
But perhaps that’s a question only the author, who appears to be quite busy with her day job, can answer.
My next big thing
Posted on: December 5, 2012
Ooh, I saw some of my favourite writers doing a blog about My Next Big Thing, so imagine my excitement when I was tagged to do one myself. The generous tagger was Sarah R. Yoffa, who is also known as Webbiegrrl and writes science fiction under the pen name of Marjorie F. Baldwin.
The point of this is to interview myself about my next book. Gulp! So … onto the questions!
1) What is the working title of your current/next book?
Lure of the Feminine
It’s called Lure of the Feminine. Here is a sneak preview of the cover.
2) Where did you get the idea for that book?
The idea for the book came to me from someone I met online who asked me for some advice about her love life. She had a very powerful way of expressing herself and she really fired up my imagination. So I didn’t give her any advice at all. Instead I asked her if I could put her in one of my stories. Well, it turned into three stories. One has already been published. It’s called Taste of Her. The other two appear alongside it in this new book. They’re called Alexanderplatz and Appointment With Pleasure. Since these are stories about love between women, I’ve also included another story that I wrote on this theme called The Swimming Pool.
3) What’s the genre of the book?
Lesbian erotica.
4) If you could pick actors to play the lead characters in your story, who would you pick?
That’s very hard. If I were to pick just Alexanderplatz, which is my favourite of the four stories, I would choose Ziyi Zhang and Rachel Ann McAdams.
Ziyi Zhang
5) How would you describe your book in one sentence (10 words or less)?
Four sexy stories about women expressing their heartfelt desires.
6) (a) How will your book be published, submitted through the traditional route to a traditional publisher or will you be handling it yourself through Indie Publishing methods?
I’ll be publishing it myself on Amazon.
(b) If you’re an Indie Author, will you be publishing through your own Indie Publishing company or in a collective with other Indie Authors?
I’m not part of any collective. I’m too difficult to get along with.
7) How long did it take you to write the first draft of this book?
Rachel Ann McAdams
Oh, ages. These stories have taken about six months to mature. That’s why I had to publish two earlier as single stories. My fans simply can’t wait six months! They’ve been begging me for more. Sometimes I write very fast but these were written very slowly with much soul-searching.
8) What other books within your genre are similar to yours?
Well, I haven’t read any lesbian erotica like this. I have filched this material directly from life. Perhaps it’s similar in spirit to Colette’s Claudine stories but much more realistic and heartfelt. But see below for a list of links to some authors I like.
9) Who or what inspired you to write this book?
I’ve already answered that question. I’m not going to tell you her name. She’d die if I blurted it out in an interview.
10) What about your book will pique the reader’s interest?
The person telling the stories in this collection is always called Vanessa (or Ness). Readers may wonder if I just ran out of girls’ names or if some of these stories actually happened to me. I’ve written an introduction saying all I’m going to say on that point! But Alexanderplatz is my favourite story here for a very good reason!
11) Do you know any other fab authors who might like to tell the world about about their next big thing?
Oh that’s easy. Try these for starters:
Guilie Castillo-Oriard
Beware social asphyxia
Posted on: November 28, 2012
- In: Hot Stuff
- 6 Comments
Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
If I were being totally honest I’d say I don’t want you to even think about reading this book. It’s too big. I’m worried that you’ll ignore Twitter and forget to update Facebook. You might even switch off the internet entirely. Worst of all, you won’t have time to read my slim, svelte, economical masterpieces. Seriously, you could fit my entire oeuvre into Hugo’s first few chapters.
It may be free on Kindle, but think of the human cost. Think of the – in Hugo’s own words – “social asphyxia.” Yes, I’m serious. Rather than saving the world from social asphyxia, this book could cause it.
Look, there’s a film version that has just been released. Save your time. Watch the film. It has songs in it. It’s been tipped to win at least eight oscars already.
Besides, the book is a mess. It’s impossible to summarise. The plot is bursting at the seams with minor characters. It’s a bloated melodrama that hopes, by bringing a tear to your eye, to change the world.
We all know that’s not going to happen. Wars, greed, corruption, poverty and the degradation of our fellows will go on just the same. Literature can’t solve the world’s problems. Certainly, hiding away in your bedroom and immersing yourself in this sentimental, rambling epic for three months won’t help anybody.
Watch the film. And if you still crave literature, try Muriel Spark.
How to write hot erotica
Posted on: November 22, 2012
- In: Hot Stuff
- 5 Comments
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I’m feeling altruistic today so I’ve decided to share a secret.
Oh, all right, that’s a lie. I’m not altruistic I’m big-headed. Someone just wrote this comment on my blog:
Vanessa is the greatest writer of this sort of contemporary genre.
It’s in reference to my story Black Silk Blindfold.
What, you might wonder, has this to do with Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence?
I’ll tell you. If you want to become a great writer in any genre, you have to read great books and this is one of the greatest books ever. Can you believe there are people reviewing this book on Goodreads and not giving it 5 stars?
This book is sheer genius from beginning to end. It’s one of the books that inspired me to become a writer. The dialogue is simply thrilling. I’ve always wanted to have conversations like the ones in this book. I try, God knows I try, but I keep ending up with the wrong sort of men.
In addition to having great dialogue, this book has Edith Wharton’s precise, polished, beautifully understated prose. She has one of the finest minds in the universe but she pays you the tribute of letting you draw your own conclusions. She never hits you over the head with her ideas. They emerge, clear, compelling and irresistible from her brilliantly constructed scenes.
So throw away all those how-to books. If you want to write hot erotica, this is the book you need.
