Trick or Treat

"It was the most boringest Halloween ever!" I think Yamaraashi-chan has outgrown the whole Trick-or-Treat thing, putting her into that awkward age between getting candy and going to peer-ready Halloween parties.

Kouryou-chan, on the other hand, was thrilled to come home with a huge stash of stuff. By the time we had finished going around our block her hands were so cold she was having trouble holding her pumpkin, but she continued to insist that her costume was warm enough. It was hovering around forty out there.

We got home and I did the parental thing, going through the candy for suspicious items. There were none. Apparently, "Halloween tampering" is about as urban-legend as it gets. "Police say tampering is rare," go most of the reports. I'd say it's damn near non-existent.

The pathogen of the Journal Entries

Once upon a time (say, August, 1989) I had a couple of stories in a folder on my Amiga and no intention of ever letting the wider world read them. And then I read a story, posted to the Internet, that was so bad that the only reasonable reply was to write something better. I thought I had forgotten that monstrosity, that sad, disgusting pastiche of Brady Bunch porn.

Someone found it.

How appropriate!

So, the week in which I released my new Journal Entries and updated the website and all turned that out to be National Pornography Awareness Week. I hope I did my part by contributing to your awareness.

LFC: Do I worry that I'm repeating myself?

In a recent exchange I had, someone mentioned that he had given up writing erotica because after a few stories he felt that he could just copy the original love scene and plug in the new names. He felt he was just repeating himself over and over.

Oddly enough, I don't get this feeling. This may come as a surprise to some of you since I have so far what is unquestionably the biggest number of stories ever posted by a single author to alt.sex.stories: The Journal Entries is up to 288 episodes and will probably pass 300 in the next couple of months-- and that's not counting the 30-odd love scenes scattered through my two fantasy novels, the pirate romance, and miscellaneous short stories.

I used to worry about it-- was I just repeating myself? I've worried about it a little since starting in on the Polly & Tau arc: I was starting to feel like I was writing romances with sex, rather than sex with romance, so I decided to go gonzo and write an arc where there's almost nothing but lots of fucking going on. (Since the Journal Entries are a universe, I tend to call plots focusing on one collection of characters an arc.) There are two or three sex scenes per episode, and the episode run about four thousand words each.

But I don't worry that I'm repeating myself too much. The characters are different: Polly is jerking zirself around with zir own fears, and Tau is a really unusual character for me: extremely self-contained, focused and objective, but also obsessed with zir own pleasure, to the point where almost six weeks goes by before they have their first kiss (they've been fucking up a storm all this time) and months before they start using "the L-word."

If your characters, settings, and circumstances aren't interesting, there's no point to writing the sex scene. If they are unique people in unique places under unique settings, then your readers will want to know how the sex scene either advances each character towards a goal or pushes her away from the goal: and that's what you should be writing.

Best advice I ever got: "If the scene is about what the scene is about, then the scene sucks."