15 Years apart
No not my posts to my blogs, but my novels Alexandra and Justine. 15 years separate the two novels and yet the themes I explore in both are remarkably similar.
They both deal with love, and finding true love, and knowing whether what you have is really true love. They both end in happy endings. And, yes, I know I am just a big, old, soft romantic. But I guess the concept of love is an important one to me.
The main difference is that Justine will be more overtly explicitly erotic, with BDSM themes coming in chapter 3 and beyond.
Of course I am in danger of doing the same thing with Justine as with Alexandra. With Alexandra I started out to write an explicit, erotic novel, but ended up with too much plot and not enough sex for the novel to be considered as mainstream erotica.
But I guess this literary streak runs deep within me and I feel the need to show my characters as real three dimensional people, who happen also to have sex with each other.
Take “Seducing a Girl”(the first chapter in Justine), there are 7,225 words in the chapter, but only one sexual act.
Of course I like to think of the whole chapter as being just one long sex scene, rather than just the part where Justine and John are physically “making love” to the girl at the party. I want to make the reader as aroused as John is throughout the chapter.
But I also like to leave questions in the readers mind. The title of the chapter is “Seducing a girl” but …
- Is John seducing Justine?
- Are Justine and John seducing the (unnamed)girl?
- Is Justine simply using John to seduce the girl?
- Or is it in fact John that is being seduced, and perhaps even corrupted, by Justine, and hence is Justine being seduced by John’s corruption?
And why is the girl unnamed, while a throw-away character like Barry gets a name(and a birthday party)? Is she just another throw-away character, a girl to have fun with and then discard without a second thought?
I have another unnamed character, who appears in chapter 3, who will be central to reveling Justine’s past and her true feelings towards John.
I know that my unique take on erotic fiction does not fit a traditional market. I get comments both that there is too much explicit sex and comments that there is not enough sex in my novels.
And that is one of the reasons that I have started this blog. I want to find an audience that shares my taste in erotic literature.
The great thing about the Web is things that are not mainstream can still find an audience, the worst thing about the web is that so many things, both mainstream and not, are competing for attention.
But my fist, faltering steps at marketing must be working, because you are reading this post.