Everyone Has a Perfectly Carved Ass

I am blessed.

Perhaps not with a perfectly carved ass, depending on your definition of 'perfectly.' And 'carved.'

But I am blessed.

With a wonderful Writer's Group. We formed perhaps nine years ago. It was one of those wonderful happenstance kind of creations that later you look back upon and say, "How did I get so lucky?" All women and all wonderful.

I love you all: Darcy, Joan, Marcella, Katherine, Kristina, Karla and Laura. The last two of which have gone another direction for a while but whom I still hold in my Writer's Group Heart.

At one of our magic meetings in Joan's Mother of all Sanctuary Garden Gatherings, quite a few years ago, the subject of what we don't write came up. Subjects or genres with which we are uncomfortable or in which we suck. We all have our areas of comfort and expertise.

But yet, less spoken of, we all have our areas of avoidance and perhaps fear.
I won't launder everyone else's confessions here. Just my own. We spoke that night about challenging ourselves. Perhaps a homework assignment that required us to come to the next meeting with a piece of work that was beyond our precious perimeters of preference. There was a lot of 'Well. now, I don't knows' muttered and a few toes stubbed into the dirt. So it was never agreed upon and therefore never happened.

Except that I went home wondering about the two things I mentioned. My preference is definitely fiction. But within that predilection, there were two things I had never written. Never been brave enough to try.
Sex and violence.

"Elle, do you think I've never been published because I don't write about sex or violence?"
"Spencer, have you ever submitted any of your writing for publication?"
"No, I haven't."
"That's why you've never been published."

Excuse me.

I looked back on my fiction up to that point and found no sign of sex or violence. In fact, even in my reading choices, I'd skim over the violence. (I never skimmed over the sex scenes however, I totally dog-eared those pages.) Even in a book I was otherwise enjoying thoroughly, the violence made me uncomfortable.

With this new realization in my system, I decided to push the Barbie Envelope. I sat down specifically to write a sex scene. I'm trying now to remember what that first story was but am not sure. Doesn't matter.

I loved it. It was the most playful, lively, energized writing I'd done in ages. I loved it. My mind started having little plot planning parties in my head as I drove to the store. As I balanced my check book. As I did all kinds of 'other' things, my mind was starting little wild fires. It was great. Still is. I love writing erotica. The imagination center of my brain goes a little crazy sometimes.

This being true, it is also a fact that I can be quite chicken at the same time. I might be a little bit afraid to write what really comes to mind. I have that chronic and contagious writer's curse: What will people THINK?? I picture the reaction of my co-workers, my extended family, MY CHILDREN!

As brave as I like to think I am, I might also be a big baby. (Oh wait, I just remembered that first erotic story: guy and a girl alone on the second floor of an antique store. Title: "How Brave Are You?" Then when they go down stairs to leave they see the bank of TVs recording all corners of the store. Makes me blush thinking about it even now. And it was a very mild, tame start.)

As erotica goes, my stuff could be quite soft. Or so Midge said. She said maybe I should not be allowed to call it Erotica, that I could surely do better. (Can't you just hear her saying this. Loud and in front of the entire IT department?)

Feeling like I'd come up against the wall of fear, that I'd written as brazenly as I could, I decided to read some of the library's erotic material and challenge myself again. Boy, that stuff is the shit! Vocabulary up your every orifice. Orifices that are named and nicknamed and renamed. Words I had to go look up on Urbandictionary.com

Excuse me, I'm easily distracted.

So I was reading up on my craft, right? A bit of research. And expanding what comes natural to me, I was reading lesbian erotica, gay erotica, group stuff, extremely extreme stuff. Okay, not extremely extreme, just moderately extreme but still. It tested my sensibilities. And my other things. I wanted to learn what I didn't know of first hand.

I confess I liked it. I looked forward to it. I had to ILL some of it because many of 'our' copies were missing and non-existent but I gathered, none the less.

I transferred some to a Nook. Not the coziest reading experience but even so.

Like any genre, there's good stuff and wretched stuff. What I didn't find a slew of was GREAT stuff.

I found it was just over the top too often. Writers trying to see how far they could go. Edgy for the sake of edgy. They lost me with this style.

Then it was sometimes just TOO MUCH. Not believable. I need to be able to buy into it. To relate. To potentially insert myself into the story if I feel so inclined. I swear the ass in every story was perfectly carved. Every cock HUGE! Every boob was full and perky and...and...and other things that 'perfect' boobs are. (In my experience, it's unusual to have REAL tits that are full AND perky. Either they are full and weighty in your hand OR they are light-hearted and perky. Ergo, if they are both full and perky they are probably Man-Made breasts, and I cannot emphasize the word MAN here strongly enough.)

This is not real, people. Bodies are imperfect. That is what we love about them, isn't it? We fall for the details, the imperfections. The mole on Marilyn Monroe's cheek was an 'imperfection' that made her face perfect!

I need erotic story lines that breathe truth. How erotic is a scenario that you KNOW can never happen. For me, as it turns out, not erotic at all. I'll see what I can do about this.