KD Grace

Celebrating the Writing Obsession

By K D Grace

I’m just finishing up a major manuscript, a
labour of love that I’ve been working on for five years. That being the case, I
suppose I’m being more obsessive than usual because this manuscript is close to
my heart. Lately my routine has been pretty simple. I write. Actually I’m
editing in at this stage, but for me editing has never been a hardship. It’s a
part of writing and I love it as much as I do a first draft. I write all day
ignoring pretty much everything that doesn’t grab me by the ear and drag me
bodily, kicking and cursing, away from the laptop. My husband comes home in the
evenings and we have dinner together then catch up on the day’s events. After
that, I go back to work…writing. Several hours later, I shut down the computer
and shuffle off to bed already thinking about how soon tomorrow I can clear the
decks and get back to work…writing.

It hit me the other day that as this
manuscript has been a long time coming, and it’s something I’m extremely proud
of, maybe I should plan to celebrate its completion. Maybe we should go out for
dinner or have a nice bottle of fizz or go away for the weekend or something.
But then I think about the next project already tempting me like a bright red
cherry ready to be plucked off the Story Tree and devoured. Isn’t starting a
new novel celebration enough, I ask myself?

Celebrating can be so disruptive, and so
often not nearly as much fun as… well, writing. Okay, being on the final press
to finish a manuscript makes me even more obsessive than usual, but I’m just
having so damn much fun!

When I finish this manuscript, my husband
will, quick like a bunny, pack lunches into the rucksacks, make up a flask of
tea and prepare water bottles. He knows our window of opportunity is slim. He
has to get me slathered with sunscreen, dressed in walking clothes, and out the
door before I decide that next cherry of a novel just won’t wait to be plucked.
But he’s good. He’s really good. He has me kitted up and out the door before I
can give that novel a second thought. Of course by the end of the day, for the
last couple of miles, I’m thinking about… you know … writing!

I’ve been thinking a lot about the writing
obsession. People who don’t have it are always saying I should celebrate my
successes or I should take a break, or I shouldn’t work so hard. They just
don’t get it. Writing is NOT a means to an end. It IS the end. The story that
we writers are inspired to put down is never-ending. And it’s just as well
because what on earth would we do with our time if we couldn’t write? It isn’t
just important that I get on with the next project as soon as I get the last
one out the door; it’s essential. I get really twitchy, and very bad-tempered
if I don’t. It’s not about the destination. It’s about the journey, and the
journey is every word I write, every idea that pushes its way out of my head
onto the written page, every rewrite, every edit, ever improvement. The journey
is about all of my characters and the unfolding of their stories, which always
involve the unfolding of the stories of the characters who affect them. The
journey is about the on-going back-story that is forever being revealed in my
head. It’s about all the things I know about my characters and their lives that
no one else knows – no one else will ever know because it never gets on the
page. But I know. I know secrets,
and I wait with bated breath for even more secrets to be revealed, whether I’m
allowed to share them or not.

Is it an obsession? Oh yes. Do I want the
cure? Hell no! Am I afraid I’ll run out of stuff to write? Never! What I am
afraid of is that I’ll run out of time to write the stuff that’s already in my
head!

The truth of the matter is that what I do
to celebrate my writing successes is write. What I do for recreation is write,
what I do when I’m not writing is think about writing. Actually, you may not
know this, but you are all participating, right this very moment, in my
celebration party! So, grab a glass of wine, a pint, a Margarita, whatever the
drink of choice is and raise it with me as we toast, not the destination, but
the totally fabulous journey that is writing! On second thought, if you’re a
fellow writer, just grab a pen and paper or sit down with your laptop and write
something. If you’re an avid reader, grab the latest by your favourite author
and as you read, remember, you’re participating in their celebration, so cheers!

Could it be Magic?

By K D Grace

For those of you
who don’t know, I’ve been writing a new paranormal erotic series on my blog
called Demon
Interrupted
. It’s one of the many stories I wanted to explore when I
finished writing the Lakeland Heatwave
Trilogy
. I decided to try my hand with a serial and put the story out as a
freebie serial coming out every three weeks. Of course being back in the
magical Lake District, back with the Elemental Coven, got me thinking about sex
magic. Again. Still!

I’m always
struggling to get my head around why sex is magic, why human sexuality defies
the nature programme /Animal Planet biological tagging that seems to work for
other species that populate the planet. I don’t think I could write sex without
magic, and even if I could I wouldn’t want to. I’m not talking about airy-fairy
or woo-woo so much as the mystery that is sex. On a biological level we get it.
We’ve gotten it for a long time. We know all about baby-making and the sharing
of the genes and the next generation. It’s text book.

But it’s the ravenousness of the human animal
that shocks us, surprises us, turns us on in ways that we didn’t see coming.
It’s the nearly out of body experience we have when we are the deepest into our
body we can possibly be. It’s the skin on skin intimacy with another human
being in a world where more personal space is always in demand.

When we come together with another human
being, for a brief moment, our worlds entwine in ways that defy description. We
do it for the intimacy of it, the pleasure of it, the naughtiness of it, the
dark animal possessiveness of it. Sex is the barely acceptable disturbance in
the regimented scrubbed-up proper world of a species that has evolved to have
sex for reasons other than procreation. Is that magical? It certainly seems
impractical. And yet we can’t get enough.

We touch each other because it feels good.
We slip inside each other because it’s an intimate act that scratches an itch
nothing else in the whole universe can scratch. During sex, we are ensconced in
the mindless present, by the driving force of our individual needs, needs that
we could easily satisfy alone, but it wouldn’t be the same. Add love to the
mix, add a little bit of romance, add a little bit of chemistry and the magic
soup thickens and heats up and gets complicated. I don’t think it’s any
surprise at all that sex is a prime ingredient in story. But at the same time,
I don’t think it’s any surprise that it is also an ingredient much avoided in
some story.

Sex is a power centre of the human
experience. It’s not stable. It’s not safe. It’s volatile. It exposes people,
makes them vulnerable, reduces them to their lowest common denominator even as
it raises them to the level of the divine. Is it any wonder the gods covet
flesh? The powerful fragility of human flesh is the ability to interact with
the world around us, the ability to interact with each other, the ability to
penetrate and be penetrated.

So as I mull through it, trying for the
zillionth time to get my head around it, I conclude – at least for the moment –
that the true magic of sex is that it takes place in the flesh, and it elevates
the flesh to something even the gods lust after. It’s a total in-the-body,
in-the-moment experience, a celebration of the carnal, the ultimate penetrative
act of intimacy of the human animal. I don’t know if that gives you goose bumps,
but it certainly does me.

http://kdgrace.co.uk

Reading Like a Writer

by K D Grace

There are few things I enjoy as much as a
good read. I don’t read like I used to. I now read like a writer. I realized
this after reading a short story that completely enthralled me for the course
of several thousand words. When I came back to the real world, I found myself
not only analyzing what made the story so amazing, but analyzing how I as a
writer read it differently than I would if I didn’t write.

I always think back over the story after
the fact and try to figure out what made it work for me or not. That process
within itself can’t keep from changing the story making it a story of multiple
plots and constructs the writer never intended, but my mind can’t keep from
creating. If in my analysis there are lots of changes I would make, things I
would have done differently as the author, at some point it becomes my story, the one I’m writing in my head,
and no longer the story the author intended.

For me, the big clue to how I esteem the
story is the point at which I begin to analyze. If I’m analyzing the story as I
read it, then it’s clearly not going to get five stars on the K D story
critique scale. The sooner I begin my analysis while I’m reading, the fewer stars
the story rates from me, until at some point it becomes an exercise in editing
and recreating it as my own story rather than reading for pleasure. When that
happens, the whole process becomes a different experience than the one the
writer intended.

If, however, I get totally lost in the
story, then my whole internal landscape changes. The writer in me is temporarily
replaced by the ravenous reader who simply loves a good story. When I am pulled
in, rough and tumble, to the world the author created, the story becomes multi-dimensional
and experienced twice, sometimes thrice over, sometimes even more. When I’m in
the queue at the supermarket, or in bed waiting to fall asleep, when I’m
waiting for the bus, I can have the secret pleasure of reliving that story over
and over.

Being pulled in is the first part of
experiencing a great story. The second part, the analysis part, happens after
the fact. When the story moves me, excites me, changes me, then my analysis of
it is a different process. Because I don’t feel I can improve on it, analysis
then becomes taking the story into myself from a write’s point of view. In
other words, what is it that makes this story so fantastic, and how can I
incorporate some of that fantastic-ness into my own writing?

A perfect story, a story that pulls me in
and devours me whole is a lingering experience. I’m a firm believer that a good
story should somehow change the reader. But a good story should change a writer
even more so. A good story should be like discovering a view from a mountaintop
that we didn’t know was there before, a view that changes everything, the
waterfall we didn’t see, the storm we never expected, the castle that dominates
the landscape. A really great story has the potential to make me a better
writer, a better weaver of story, a better seer of nuance, a better wielder of
my craft.

But a good story should change more than
just my views of my writing world. It should touch and stimulate in ways I
would not have expected. It should open up the landscapes in my unconscious and
my imagination. In some ways, a good story acts as a Muse, and that is the
pinnacle of what a writer can glean from a story. I won’t say that doesn’t
happen with badly written stories as well, after all the Muse chooses her own
time and place. But with a good story, somehow the appearance of the Muse seems
more numinous, more dressed for the occasion.

For me, the most powerful element of any
story is the key relationship and how it expresses itself. That expression is
often sexual, and a well-written sex scene carries with it the weight of human
emotion. It carries with it the drive to reach that magical point where two
become one, where we are as close to being in the skin of ‘the other’ as it is
possible to be. The power of sex and relationship in story can hardly be
overstated. Even in mediocre stories, the power of love and relationship can
still pull me outside of the editor-me and into the roil of the archetypal
story of human need. To me, that means we erotica writers wield one of the most
powerful tools in the writing craft; sex in story. Use it poorly and it just
sounds stupid and crass. But use it well and it’ll be the moment in the story
that the reader remembers while in the queue at the grocery store, while
drifting off to sleep, while waiting for the bus. And it’ll be remembered with
that ache of commonality of all humanity, the driving force within us all.
Keeping that in mind, I don’t think it’s any wonder that so many writers fear
writing sex. 

Heroes and Villains

by K D Grace

Confession time! I’ve been totally
gorging on J. R. Ward’s dark and sexy Black Dagger Brotherhood novels.
Honestly, I’m totally addicted! These seriously delish novels along with the
fact that I’m working on the final rewrite of an epic fantasy novel got me
thinking about heroes and villains. First of all, I want to be almost as afraid
of the hero and I am of the villain. Secondly I want to be almost as attracted
to the villain as I am the hero. Oh the angst! I honestly can’t think that
anyone could really fall for a vampire or a werewolf or a ghost or a powerful
witch, or any other paranormal or fantasy hottie and not be terrified at the
same time. For that matter, even in just a really good erotic romance, the hero
is so much hotter if he’s dark and dangerous.

A part of what makes good story that has
even an inkling of romance in it, work for me is knowing that the hero could
easily turn and destroy the very thing he loves and longs to possess. More
often than not, the best heroes are really antiheroes, striving, or being
forced by circumstances, to be greater than their nature, and the more
difficult the struggle, the more endearing I find them to be.

In fact, there
are times when the only separation between the hero and the villain is how
willing he is to do battle with his own flaws. The fact that the lover is not
safe raises the level of the tension and the excitement. And yet that danger
makes the sex all the hotter and the angst all the angstier.

I remember
seeing Frank Langella’s Dracula back in the day and thinking, as I watched the
horribly delicious scene in which he takes Lucy, even with the terrible truth
of what the end result of his sexy attentiveness to her would be, who could
possibly refuse even if they had not been under his thrall? He was a gentleman,
he was charming and mysterious, he was hypnotic, he was gorgeous, he was
terrifying. And I wanted him!

NBC’s new
steam-punkish re-think of Dracula
with Jonathan Rhys Meyers blurs the lines between the hero and the villain still
further in the battle with flaws. I want him too! In fact I want him much more
than I do Jonathan Harker, but then Jonathan Harker has always taken a sad
backseat to Dracula in his full glory.

Dangerous heroes and seductive villains
aren’t just for paranormalsies though. Writing as Grace Marshall, I found that
the villain in The
Exhibition
, the third of the Executive Decisions novels was an
evil nasty piece of work, and yet oh so fuckable, even though, like Dracula,
the chances of surviving such a shagging intact weren’t good. And yet …

It’s not so much that evil is sexy as it
is that nothing is really all that black and white. It’s the contradictions
that make for a good, chaotic story, and it’s the shades of grey (Oh please
tell me I didn’t just say that!) where the story takes place. If I want to shag
the villain and run from the hero, then how can I trust my own heart, and how
can I possibly keep from turning the pages? Those flaws are oh so sexy and oh
so scary and those endearing character traits in a truly delicious villain make
us squirm, makes us uncomfortable in our fantasies, and from a fictional point
of view, what the perfect place to be.

But what happens when I write the baddies? Why do I love
being in their presence so much? And even more to the point, what does it say
about me that I find them so easy to write? Am I all of those people, the
heroes, the victims, the incidentals and the baddies all rolled into one
neurotic, twitchy woman? Do I have all of those traits somewhere hidden inside
me — the fantasies about being the evil tyrant as well as the fantasies about shagging
him? I doubt there’s any way to peek into the strange depths of my own
psychology that’s quite as revealing as writing a baddie. I shiver at the
thought.

On some level we writers live on the page in all the
characters we create, whether they’re hot and gorgeous and deliciously flawed
in sexy ways or whether they’re evil and twisted and scary as hell. The darker
parts of me are kept in check and held in balance by all of the other parts of
me, all of the other parts that participate in the tenuous semi-democracy of my
inner workings so that the evil demon in me and the potential sociopathic
tyrant in me and the petty back biter in me are all channeled in full bloom onto
the written page. Instant therapy? Am I scaring you yet? I promise, I’m
harmless –ish.

Insights from a Roman Holiday

K D Grace

To me, Rome has always been synonymous with romance and sex. My husband and I spent our honeymoon there and have gone there for several anniversary trips since, and this year’s trip was another reminder of the erotic romantic nature of the city. A week amid the ruins and the busy Christmas hubbub was another reminder that there’s nothing new under the sun. Our first night in Rome we walked beneath the wonderful rainbow wave of Christmas lights strung from one end of the Via del Corso to the other. All through our trip, we caught plenty of glimpses of couples embracing and caressing and sneaking kisses in wonderfully public places. The atmosphere was perfect for love.

With the overwhelming glut of virgin and billionaire novels out there at the moment, it’s interesting to take virgin power back a couple thousand years. One of the highlights of the Roman Forum was the time we spent in the quiet ruins of the House of the Vestal Virgins. We were there early and even though the sun was bright, the shadowy reflecting ponds had the thinnest skin of ice across their mirrored surfaces. The commitment of a Vestal Virgin was thirty years in return for money, power and position. Afterward she was free to marry or not. It was a pretty damn good proposition for a woman back in Roman times.

With the Christmas season in full swing, there were crèches and images of the Madonna and Child everywhere. It’s hardly possible to overstate the importance of fertility and the birthing of the next generation. The need to see ourselves and our world reborn, the need to feel that sense of continuity is as old as humanity. We were never more reminded of that than when we stood in the gardens at the Villa d’Este in front of the powerful image of the fountain of Ephesian Airtimes with her many breasts and her cloak providing shelter for birds and beasts.

In the Vatican Museums it was interesting to note that all of the male Roman and Greek sculptures either had penises broken off or hastily covered up with plaster of Paris fig leaves. You can imagine how refreshing it was to find ourselves at the Temple of Hercules in the ruins of Ostia Antica gazing upon a very ancient, very manly statue which no longer had head nor hands but had all of his bits still proudly displayed in a lovely sculpted nest of marble pubes. I have to admit I felt a bit naughty taking lots of pics of marble genitalia, and yet I felt the power of the temple ruins was right there in the muscular torso proudly sporting maleness. At the risk of sounding either pervy or flakey, it did something to me. The power of the human body, the power of human sexuality captured in stone several thousand years ago still moves me, maybe even more so because that power is still the same, no matter how many fig leaf coverings are hastily plastered.

Near the Temple of Hercules is the Domus of Amour and Psyche. This truly was Mecca for the erotic romantic in me. Psyche and Eros has long been my very favourite story from Greek Mythology. How could I not be drawn to this testament to the power of love – a mortal woman fighting her way to godhood to be with the man she loves. Yup, I think that’s a powerful metaphor for romantic love – at least it is in my head. But Psyche (soul, mind, spirit) is joined to Eros. Nope! This is NOT platonic love! This is throw-you-down-on-the-bed, ride-‘em-cowboy erotic love. It always excites me to think of what happens when the erotic meets the spiritual, so it’s not surprising that I found this place the goose bump raising highlight of my week in Rome. We were lucky to nab a very kind Australian tourist to take a picture of us paying homage to Psyche and Eros. I took dozens of pictures of Hercules and of Psyche and Eros because the places, in their quiet off the main path site are powerful reminders of what I do as a writer and why.

Now, sitting home in my living room, looking back to that sunny week in Rome, I can’t help thinking that while there’s nothing new under the sun, there’s everything always new under the sun. There’s newness in the inspiration, the penetration, the conception, the birthing, the nurturing, the seeing ourselves reborn again and again, not only in the next generation, but in the places we create inside our heads, the stories we, as writers birth into
the world. There’s comfort in the continuity of thousands of years while there’s excitement in bringing it all around again fresh and new and re-envisioned.

May the old and comforting be infused with the new and exciting in 2014. And may your journey be full of love and joy.

The Beautiful Experiment

By K D Grace

I was bored. My flight had been delayed.
I’d already been traveling forever, and I’d reached that point at which I was
too tired to read, too tired to concentrate on writing, too tired to sit still
without being twitchy. I didn’t want to drink, I didn’t want to eat. I just
wanted to be done travelling. That’s when I began The Beautiful Experiment. I
was seated off one of the main concourses, which was a constant hive of
activity, of people coming and going, popping in and out of shops and scurrying
to make tight connections. It was the ideal place to people watch. But with a
twist. I decided to watch the masses to see just how many truly beautiful people
I could spot.

Okay, I know everyone has a slightly
different ideal when it comes to beauty, but we all know it when we see it. We
all know that look that turns heads, that look that makes us want to stare, to
take in all that loveliness just a little longer. I didn’t care if the real
lookers were men or women. I mean if we’re honest, we look at both, whether we
admire it, want it or envy it. So I sat and I watched. … and I watched … and I
watched. Since that time I’ve carried out my little experiment in pubs, in
museums, on the tube, in busy parks, and the results are always the same. There
just aren’t that many real stunners out there!

I was struck by that fact in the airport
that day, so I decided to add another dimension to my experiment. I decided to
look for people who were interesting. It didn’t necessarily have to be their
looks that were interesting, it could just as easily be their behaviour, their
dress, something, anything that made them worth a surreptitious stare. And wow!
Being delayed in an airport suddenly became a fascinating grist mill for story
ideas and intriguing speculation.

I’ve carried out this experiment lots of
time now, and the results are always the same. There are very few stunners out
there, and even when I spot one, even when I find myself sneaking glances at a
beautiful person, my eyes, and my attention, can always be drawn away by the
interesting people.

In erotica and, in particular erotic
romance, the characters are usually voluptuous, sculpted beauties and broad shouldered,
wash-boarded hunks. It’s fantasy after all. But how long can a story focus the
reader’s attention on washboard abs or perfect tits? Descriptions give us a handle.
Descriptions are like the label on a file. They might attract us to the file,
but if the file is empty, it won’t hold our attention. It’s what makes the
described beautiful person interesting that makes the story.

In our genre, sex is a large part of
what makes our beautiful people intriguing; how they think about sex, their
kinks, their quirks, their neuroses, their baggage – all of those things make
the fact that our beautiful people are interesting way more important than the
fact that they’re beautiful.  Add to that
some seriously delicious consequences for that sex, some chaos and mayhem, a
few character flaws that catch us off our guard, that draw us in and voila! A
gripping story is born!

Perfection in a story, in characters, is
the equivalent of a literary air brushing. No flaws = no story; no rough spots
= nothing to hold our attention. Our characters’ beauty is only their handle.
Their flaws and their intriguing quirks are what catapult us into the plot,
what make us want to stay on for more than just a look-see and to dig a little
deeper, to really know those characters and become emotionally involved with
them.

Last night on the tube in London, I
tried my little experiment again, just to make sure. More data is always a good
idea, and good science has to be repeatable, doesn’t it? Taking into account my
own preferences and prejudices, the results were the same. I can remember a
half a dozen really interesting people, people I could very easily write a
story about. There wasn’t a single stunner among them, which leads me to the
conclusion that we’re more interesting in our flaws than in our perfections.
We’re more interesting in our experiences and the way they manifest than in the
static beauty of the moment. It also excites me to think that I’m surrounded by
interesting people all the time. A story is never farther away than the next
intriguing person. Is this an ordinary-looking person’s version of sour grapes?
I don’t think so; I hope not. Truth is there’s an astonishing transformation
that takes place in the company of truly interesting people. Before long, right
before my eyes, those truly intriguing people become the beautiful people.
There’s always a story in that.

Things that Go Bump in the Night (Why Paranormal is Sexy)

By K D Grace

Once, in a blog interview about my paranormal Lakeland Heatwave
trilogy, I was asked if I believed that sex magic is real. My answer was
something along the lines that I believe sex is the only kind of magic, and certainly the only kind of magic we all
have access to. But the question itself got me thinking about why the
paranormal and the erotic work so well together.

Writing always exposes us, though that exposure is
sometimes more obvious than others. As I thought about the question, I realized
that the choices I’d made when I wrote the Lakeland trilogy were very much my psyche’s
way of doing the full Monte. I’ve written lots of blog posts about the magic of
sex, about what happens when we cross that final barrier and get inside the
skin of another person, about what happens when we make ourselves vulnerable.
Though it certainly wasn’t a conscious part of my decision, choosing to make
the witches of the Elemental Coven practitioners of sex magic speaks very
powerfully of my writing credo and of my own psyche and what I believe is
important.

    

I started writing erotica mostly to see
if I could, and because I had always enjoyed writing sex scenes. But it was the
magic of sex that kept me writing. It was what the act of sex revealed about my
characters and how it exposed them, all of them, in one way or another to the
magic of sex that kept me writing. Somehow sex brought them closer to their
humanity while at the same time increasing the chance they would experience
their own divinity, and that of their beloved. And, with any luck, my readers
would experience the same, vicariously. There’s something exciting in knowing
that the very act of sex between two people can completely change the course of
a novel. All of these elements of sex kept me writing erotica. And all of these
elements are the reason I believe sex is magic.

There are few
parts of our human nature we struggle more fiercely to control than sexuality.
How miserably we fail in that struggle is a testament to the biological drive
and even more importantly the archetypal power of sex. And that’s a whole other
area, the place within the sex act that borders on the mystical, the magical.
That’s why paranormal tales partner so beautifully with the erotic. Once that
boundary between the magical and the sexual is breached anything can happen.

Ultimately, sex
makes people uncomfortable, and anything that makes people uncomfortable is a
fabulous tool for fiction. On some level sex is all about biological urges,
experiences of a much more visceral nature than the sanitized, well defined,
well ordered way we like our world to be. But the power of sex reaches way
beyond the procreative. I know of no other act that can connect us to our
animal nature while at the same time lifting us outside ourselves to the realm
of the gods. I also know of no other act in which we become physically one with
another human being, in which we literally get inside the skin of another human
being, in which there is the possibility of literally creating new life. The
human sex act is about as close to magic as we can get, and we’re not all that
comfortable with anything we can’t explain away and dress up for polite
company.

Sex is that one
little sliver of our life in which real magic happens. It’s the place where our
boundaries are most permeable. So it’s not surprising that we like to team up
the erotic with things that go bump in the night, things we can safely
experience on the written page, where those things are free to scare us and
titillate us and take away our human control thus allowing demons and vampires,
ghosts and witches, werewolves and succubae to dance the tango with our libidos
while we all perform our own personal versions of sex magic.

Whether you
celebrate Halloween, Samhain, Day of the Dead, All Saints, or whether you just
like to enjoy the season, I wish you much sexy magic! 

Lip Service

by K D Grace

Auguste Rodin's The Kiss

Auguste Rodin’s The Kiss

On the 22nd of September, Grace Marshall and I helped Victoria Blisse celebrate the 100th Sunday of her weekly Sunday Snog posts by posting sexy kissing scenes from a couple of our novels. The proceeds went to help Médecins Sans Frontières, and a lot of filthy writers had a lot of fun sharing sizzling kisses on their sites. That got me seriously thinking about kissing and what an important part of our sexuality and our culture it is.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t feel like it’s a proper sex scene, or even a proper PG love scene, unless there’s some serious lip action. Here are a few fun factoids about the lip lock that I discovered while I was writing my post for my Sunday Snog. They are from Psychology Today , How Stuff Works and Random Facts:

  • The science of kissing is called philematology.
  • Lips are 100 times more sensitive than the tips of the fingers. They’re even more sensitive that the genitals!
  • The most important muscle in kissing is the orbicularis oris, whichallows the lips to “pucker.”
  • French kissing involves 34 muscles in the face, while a pucker kiss involves just two.
  • A nice romantic kiss burns 2-3 calories, while a hot sizzler can burn off five or even more.
  • The mucus membranes inside the mouth are permeable to hormones. Through open-mouth kissing, men introduced testosterone into a woman’s mouth, the absorption of which increases arousal and the likelihood of rumpy pumpy.
  • Apparently men like it wet and sloppy while women like it long and lingering.
  • While we Western folk do lip service, some cultures do nose service, smelling for that romantic, sexual connection. Very mammalian, if you ask me, and who doesn’t love a good dose of pheromonal yumminess?
  • Then there’s good old fashion bonding. It’s no secret that kissing someone you like increases closeness.
Jean-Léon Gérôme’s 1890 painting of Pygmalion and Galatea

Jean-Léon Gérôme’s 1890 painting
of Pygmalion and Galatea

While all that’s interesting to know, what really intrigues me about kisses is how something seemingly so fragile can become so mind-blowingly powerful when lips, tongue, a whisp of breath, perhaps a nip of teeth are applied in the right proportion at the right time on the right part of the anatomy. And with the size of the human body in proportion to the mouth, the possibilities for a delicious outcome are only as limited as the imagination.

One theory is that kissing evolved from the act of mothers premasticating food for their infants, back in the pre-baby food days, and then literally kissing it into their mouths. Birds still do that. The sharing of food mouth to mouth is also a courtship ritual, and birds aren’t the only critters who do that. Even with no food involved the tasting, touching and sniffing of mouths of possible mates, or even as an act of submission, is very much a part of the animal kingdom.

The sharing of food is one of the most basic functions, the function that kept us all alive when we were too small to care for ourselves. The mouth is that magical place where something from the outside world is ingested and becomes a part of our inside world, giving us energy and strength. Not only is the mouth the receptacle for food, it’s the passage for oxygen. Pretty much all that has to pass into the body to sustain life passes through the mouth. I find it fascinating that the kiss, one of the most basic elements in Western mating ritual and romance, should involve such a live-giving part of our anatomy.

But the mouth does more than just allow for the intake of the sustenance we need. The mouth allows us voice. I doubt there are many people who appreciate that quite as much as we writers, who love words and the power they give us. And how can I think about the power of words without thinking about the power of words in song and poetry? Our mouths connect us in language, in thought, in the courtship of words that allow us to know and understand each other before those mouths take us to that intimate place of the kiss. And when that kiss becomes a part of our sexual experience, it’s that mouth, that tongue, those lips that allow us to say what we like and how we like it; that allow us to talk dirty; that allow vocalise our arousal; that allow us to laugh or tease our way to deeper intimacy.

The fact that the mouth offers all those wonderful, life-giving, life enhancing things, AND can kiss, makes it one of my very favourite parts of the body.

“If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle fine is this:
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.”

Romeo and Juliet Act 1 Scene 5
William Shakespeare

Sex, Chaos and Story

By K D Grace

Happy Birthday to me! Well ERWA birthday at least!
As of today I’ve been writing for ERWA for a whole year. Where has the time
gone? So much has happened in a year, and yet it seems like only yesterday I
wrote my first post about inspiration and mythology. Traditionally birthdays
are a time to celebrate, let your hair down, wreak a little havoc and raise a
little hell. Oh wait a minute … That’s writing I’m talking about, not birthdays.
Writing, plot, story — there’s no place better to raise a little hell, and we
writers know it’s the perfect place to let our hair down vicariously.

In my opinion, there are few things a writer can do
to a story that will kick-start it quite as much as creating a little chaos. A
calm and happy life in the real world might be just the ticket, but in story,
there’s one word for it – BORING! A story is all about upsetting the apple
cart, breaking the eggs, turning the bull loose in the china cupboard and —
heart racing, palms sweating – seeing what happens, while we’re safely
ensconced on the other side of the keyboard/Kindle/book.  Oh yes we do love that adrenaline rush — at
someone else’s expense!

One of the best tools for dropping the character
smack-dab into the middle of the chaos  –
and the reader vicariously – is sex. And the more inconvenient, the more
inappropriate, the more confusing, the more SO not what the character was
expecting, the more delicious the chaos will be.

The thing about those big brains that I spoke of a
few posts back is that they like to make us think we can control all the
variables. The thing about the biological housing for those big brains is that
it doesn’t always want to be controlled. Oh and that big brain, well that means
there’s all sorts of stuff going on up there that can lead us down the
havoc-wreaking road to sex and chaos. It wants what it wants. And the ole grey
matter can be so damned stubborn at times. Oooh! I get goose bumps just
thinking about what happens when the big brain gets a hankering and the
biological soup starts overheating and sex happens.

If we look at Western history from the point of view
of religion and its effects on culture, there are few things the religious
powers that be have made more of an effort to control than sex. And in story,
in myth, there are few things that have caused more chaos than a little rough
and tumble in the wrong place at the wrong time. Troy lost war and was
destroyed over it, King Arthur’s realm fell because of it, David had
Bathsheba’s husband, Uriah, killed because of it.

The resulting chaos that sex unleashes in a story
can be nothing more than to create self-doubt in a cock-sure character, which
is always a delight to see. Or the resulting chaos can be world-destroying, and
anything in between. Sex can cause the kind of chaos that will make the reader
laugh, or the kind of chaos that will make the reader say, ‘if only they hadn’t
done that.’  However, the one thing sex
should never do in a story is leave things the way they were before it
happened. Can it be used for bonding? Of course! But the tighter the bond, the
more chaos can be caused if that bond is tested or broken. I shiver with
delight at the thought.

And because our big brains don’t give a damn if our
sexual thoughts and fantasies are ‘socially acceptable,’ nor is it
discriminating about who we might have those thoughts and fantasies about, the
resulting internal chaos can be almost as delicious as the external – maybe
even more so. That lovely mix of guilt and desire and self-loathing and arousal
and denial and shear over-heated lust. OMG! It’s a total writer’s paradise
there for the taking.

I’m sure I’m like most writers in that I analyse
what I read for pleasure in terms of what worked and what didn’t, what I would
have done if I’d written it, and what I’ve learned from the author’s writing
skills that can be used to make my own writing better. I have to say one of the
biggies for me is how well the author uses chaos to move the story forward at a
good pace; and especially how effectively sex is used to create chaos.  I’m sure I pay a lot more attention to how
sex is used in a story (or not) now that I write erotica, but it’s the
resulting chaos that fascinates me and keeps me reading in almost any kind of novel.
The world is not a static place, and especially the world of story should not
be static. Happy endings are called happy endings because they are at the end.
They follow the chaos and happen when the story is finished. There is no more
story, or at least none the reader wants to follow. It’s the chaos that pulls
us in and keeps us turning the pages, and when that chaos is directly tied to
sex, hold on to your hat!

Sex and the Big Brain

By K D Grace

I had a sex blogger ask me once how I could possibly write
about things I hadn’t experienced. My answer at the time, though accurate, was
a bit flippant I suppose. I said that it’s fiction. It’s no more difficult for
me to write about sex that I’ve not experienced than it is for Thomas Harris to
write about serial killers when he certainly isn’t one.

I think I can write about sex I’ve never experienced, would
never even want to experience in the real world because I have a big brain. Oh,
not my brain in particular. All humans have ‘em, and we use them in sex even
when we’re not having sex. The thing about having a big brain is that it adds a
new dimension to a biological act. In the hormonal, pheromonal soup that drives
us to fuck, we get the added pleasure of making it up as we go along. In our
heads — anyway we like it. And this, we can do completely and totally without
the help of anyone else.

Which leads me to wonder how much of fiction writing – any
genre of fiction writing – is really our big brain masturbating – first for our
own pleasure, and if we get lucky and our work gets published, then we get to
be exhibitionists and do it for an audience. Is that yet another layer of our
sexuality? There’ve been countless of books and essays written on the
connection between sexuality and creativity, and I’ve experienced it myself.
When it’s right, when I’m in the zone, the rush, the high, the incredible buzz
of getting characters and plot to move together in just the right tango of conflict
and passion and drive, the experience from a writer’s point of view is
extremely sexual, and yet somehow better than sex. It’s sex on steroids, it’s
free-falling, it’s roller coaster riding, it’s fast cars, mountain tops and
touching the tiger all rolled into one. And it all happens in some nebulous
part of our brains that only a neurosurgeon might be able to pin-point for us.
And who cares? Who cares as long as it gets us there!

Those moments don’t happen often, but it doesn’t matter.
They happen often enough to push us forward, to keep us going and writing and
longing and digging deep for the next wild brain-gasm. I just came off of one
of those experiences while racing to finish the draft of The Exhibition. It was a late-night write, a dark, dangerous sex
scene in which the characters staged a coup and completely took control of the
action. I came away staggering, looking down at my hands, wondering how the
hell I wrote that. I was too hyped to sleep, too creeped out to think about who
might be waiting for me in my dreams after what I’d just written. And yet … And
yet I felt stretched, expanded, like for a second I’d seen sex at the core
where the dark and light meet and swallow each other up. And what’s left is a
wild, crazy pull to translate what just happened into some kind of written
account that will convey that feeling, that sense of being beyond myself, yet
deeper into the dark recess of myself than I felt really comfortable going. And
as any writer would, longing to drag my reader right in there with me, into the
dark, into the fire.

It was a long time before I could sleep. It was a long time
before I felt quite like myself again. And that’s what got me thinking about my
big brain, which at times, seems so much bigger than just the space in my head.
And I guess maybe I do have to experience something in order to write about it.
But the big brain creates that experience in the privacy of my own head. That
being the case, how could I not keep going back for more? How could I not want
desperately to write what my big brain allows me to experience? How could I not
want to bring it out and flaunt it for the reader’s full participation?

Hot Chilli Erotica

Hot Chilli Erotica

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