|
Crisis of Content (III)
Sorry I didn't post this last night. When I got home, I spent a lot of time trying to scan photos from this weekend, then realized that I wasn't going to be able to get by with scanning them at 72 dpi - the photos are too good for half-measures. I'll have to scan them at 300 dpi and then let Painter shrink them, which does a better job. That'll take twice as long, of course, but oh well.
Anyway, so not only are there no photos for you to look at, but by the time I finished, it was too late for me to write this entry. All I had the energy to do at that point was read smut instead.
Which brings us to the final installment of this little trilogy: sexual obsession. (I'm surprised no one wrote me that I misspelled that word, two entries ago!)
I've said before that I felt like I hit puberty about ten years later than I was supposed to. I think that theory's got a few holes in it. Puberty subsides after a while. This just keeps getting worse. I don't know if this is a by-product of my getting more comfortable with my brain and my gender and my body, or of being in a stable long-term relationship (with both its attendant pros and cons), or simply because I have a whacked-out hormonal system ... but I just keep fantasizing more and more!
My brain has gotten to the point now where, if it's idling, it immediately begins to spin into fantasies - not even necessarily apropos of anything in the environment; just random sexual woolgathering.
This has several effects on my personal habits which I won't discuss here (let's just say I'm a lot more excitable and leave it at that), but these effects don't seem to be causing any major damage and therefore don't worry me very much.
It has a certain effect on my sex life as well; since my fantasies are not the sort of things that can play out in a bedroom (they always involve transformations and weird things like that), there is a widening gap between my mental sex activities and my physical ones. But that's an old problem and there are solutions for it, and that also doesn't worry me very much.
Here's what does worry me: The idle time in my brain, when it's just spinning around woolgathering, is the time when new stories get composed. That's where all my ideas come from, that idle loop. And all the idle loop wants to do these days is make smut.
Every piece of fiction I've written for the last few months has either been outright pornography or has had very obvious sexual themes imbedded into it. The last major thing I posted around these parts was The Tale of the Forbidden Pearl, and if you reread that you can see me struggling to keep it clean.
This is a potential disaster for me.
No, it's not that I'm a prude (duh - look at the historical record), nor is it that I dislike writing sex stuff. The problem is that I'm lousy at it. I am notorious for writing some of the least arousing sex scenes known to mankind. Part of it is a lack of ability, and part of it is my personal tastes.
Y'see, if I gave you the list of the ten stories I considered the hottest, sweatiest, most arousing things I'd read - the ones I've downloaded and kept because I know they'll work for me no matter how many times I read them - you'd look at them and most of you would be ... rather puzzled. (Okay, well, some of you would never read them at all ... and some of you are kinda put off by this whole discussion in the first place ... and at least one of you shares my tastes very closely and has already jumped to the punch line. But let's continue with this line of thought as if you're all playing along, okay?)
None of my favoritest stories has much actual sex in it. Sometimes they don't have any. To me, once the sex happens, the story is basically over - or, if it involves multiple bouts of sexual activity, the author can safely put a pause there and let me fill in the blank. "Sex happened."
This (in my opinion) is actually the best way to do it - to let the reader fill in the blanks - because I can imagine a nice vivid bed-wrestling match much better than any author on earth can describe one. The language isn't up to it. Every time an author (and, yes, that includes me when writing) tries to describe actual intercourse, it always sounds flat or clinical or dull or silly, not because it is or because the writer is untalented, but because our language simply isn't up to the task. There is no proper way to write an orgasm, for example.
One wonders if the French have this problem in their smut.
Anyway, the point is, I tend to write stories where all of the activity is in buildup, anticipation, or - most importantly - psychological play. I don't like to say I write and favor dom/sub stories because to most people that implies someone in boots with a whip. What I mean is, in most of the stories I love, someone is very clearly in charge and someone is helpless. Making that person helpless, or demonstrating that person's helplessness, is where the charge in the story lies. The sex is the coda.
So - at best, I write smut that only people who share my peculiar tastes could love. At worst, I write smut that doesn't titillate anyone, including me. Either way, this is not what I consider a productive use of my creative time.
And I don't know how to turn it off.
© Columbine
|
|
