Sunday, June 26, 2011

Fetish Story and Fairy Story

Following my last blog, I decided to put the fetish story I wrote for Skin Two magazine on a separate blog, with an adult content warning. There's a link to it from the stories page of my website.

I also put another new story on my site, Rainith the Red. This is a tale about a fairy in London. It's quite a long story. I was commissioned to write it for an anthology, Wicked Pretty Things. However, this anthology proved to be rather ill-fated, and ended up not being published. So I've just decided to put the story on my site.

I used to have more stories on my website but I became bored with them long ago. I'll leave these two stories on there for a while.

I'm currently writing a third book about Kalix, troubled werewolf, which is coming along quite slowly.

Thursday, June 16, 2011

Help Me With My Household problems. And Story Problems.

Current problems - Old TV - Sex story needing a home.

1) My television. This works perfectly well. But it's an old wide-screen TV, which means it is really huge and unwieldy. Not that I would generally be wielding it, I suppose. But it looks so old-fashioned compared to modern flat-screen TVs. Everyone else's TV is more modern than mine. People might be laughing at me behind my back.

Should I buy a new one? Or wait till mine goes wrong? If some old household appliance is working well, should you replace it just because you'd like a newer one? I've been puzzling about this for some time.

2) Sex story. I was looking at two stories I wrote for Skin Two, a fetish magazine. (Which closed for a while but has re-launched) I thought I like these stories but not many people had the chance to read them.

I used to have stories on my website, before I got bored with them all and removed them. So I thought I could just put these Skin Two stories on my website for people to read. Well, one of them anyway, which is better than the other. However, they were written for a fetish magazine and they're quite explicit. It was my intention, after receiving the commission for Skin Two, to write something that didn't avoid the subject of fetish and BDSM, but was quite cheerful. As opposed to gothic, gloomy or horrible. I thought I succeeded quite well. For stories which contain a lot of spanking, whipping and fucking, they're both rather cheerful. (to be fair to Skin Two, it also contained other good fiction, which wasn't gothic, gloomy or horrible.)

But I'm not sure about putting these stories on my website because having written Lonely Werewolf Girl and Curse of the Wolf Girl I seem to have become a teen or young adult author - which I never meant to do, it just happened by accident, though I'm not complaining because it's worked out well - and if young teenagers are visiting my website, maybe I shouldn't be putting explicit sex stories there. Might get complaints from outraged parents. I suppose I could post them somewhere else, but I have a low opinion of sites I've seen with sex stories on them. And who's going to read them there anyway?

Perhaps I'm worrying about nothing. There is so much pornography easily available on the internet, maybe no one would care at all about my cheerful fetish stories. But I'm not sure about that.

Comments and suggestions welcome.

Monday, June 06, 2011

Evelyn Waugh / K-On

I just finished re-reading Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies, his first two novels, published in 1928 and 1930. I read these a long time ago and wondered if they were as good as I remembered them. They were, particularly Vile Bodies, Waugh's account of the bright young things who occupied the pages of London gossip columnists in the aftermath of the First World War.

I enjoyed reading this again. It's funny, quite cutting in places and it moves along rapidly in a series of short scenes. I like the lack of emotion shown by the central character when his life threatens to fall apart. Soon after it was published, the book became well-known for the language used by the bright young things; Agatha describing something as 'too, too sick-making' being the most obvious example.

I must have read Vile Bodies before I wrote my first book, so I wonder why I didn't steal from it, which is the sort of thing I would expect myself to do. But I didn't, as far as I remember.

I like this paragraph, at the heart of the novel -

…Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as somebody else, almost naked parties in St John’s Wood, parties in flats and studios and houses and ships and hotels and night clubs, in windmills and swimming-baths, tea parties at school where one ate muffins and meringues and tinned crab, parties at Oxford where one drank brown sherry and smoked Turkish cigarettes, dull dances in London and comic dances in Scotland and disgusting dances in Paris - all that succession and repetition of massed humanity… Those vile bodies…

My own piece of Evelyn Waugh trivia - A character in Lost in Translation uses Evelyn Waugh as her pseudonym for checking in anonymously at a hotel, not realising that Evelyn Waugh was male. The incongruity is pointed out by the character played by Scarlet Johansson. Then Scarlet's husband derides her for being smart. The cad.

K-On

However, the effort of reading two actual novels did take it out of me. I was fatigued afterwards, and could only slump in front of the TV for several days. I recovered gradually with anime, and watched many episodes of K-On. (Target Demographic - Japanese Schoolchildren age 8 - 14, and Scottish authors unable to rise from the couch.)

Hmm. I wish I had a job writing this anime. It's all about a band called Ho-kago Tea Time, which translates to After School Tea Time. Despite this being set in a present-day Japanese School, there's one scene where, to sort of signify great rock music, they show a picture of Led Zeppelin. Ah, their appeal is eternal.