How do you feel about "The End"?

One of my few disappointments in the publication of Courting Her is the absence of The End at the end. It was in the final draft I sent. I mostly expected it to get edited out, but I was hopeful that, when I finally got the courage to open my copy, I’d find it there, at the end. I understand why it got cut. It’s essentially redundant to end a book and then type The End, but I think it has a certain charm.

I checked a few books on my bookshelf, mostly at random, and found very few that ended with The End. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway ended with The End. I thought of all the books on my shelf, David Copperfield by Charles Dickens would end with The End, but it didn’t. I was most disappointed to find that Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll did not end with The End. That seems like exactly the kind of book that should. Moby Dick didn’t end with The End, it ended with Finis.

I guess I get it. If I were hearing Beethoven’s seventh symphony and as the final notes had faded and were only still being savored in my mind, I would be annoyed if the conductor turned around and yelled, “The end!”

It can detract from the end of the book’s final line, which is where the end really is. Maybe there is an element of nostalgia for The End. I don’t have any children’s books on hand, but I would bet a larger portion of those end with The End. Even if it’s not printed, I’m sure many times my mom or my dad or a teacher finished reading a book to me and snapped it shut, smiling and calling out, “The End!” Maybe it’s about missing that.   

When does your book "get good"?

or How far would you let your mom read?

I was able to let my mom read the first chapter of Courting Her, believe it or not. The book is set up with Alex so enamored with Kimberly he doesn’t notice her subtle gain of control. By the time he puts his feet up on his coffee table in chapter two, after a dinner he prepares her in his home, it’s way too late for him. He’s a goner. ; )

Anyone who knows about female domination would pick up on it, and I think it builds to a nice payoff for people who stick around. But it is subtle enough that I got away with sharing it, even with my mom. The bad part is that the free read on amazon leads basically right up to just before Alex’s first punishment. Which would be annoying if you were debating buying it.

How long for your book? Or how long do you give a book you’re reading to “get good”? It’s a tough call to make because a sex scene needs a good build up, but you also want to start your readers off with a bang (that was intentional, sorry).

Review of Transported: Erotic Travel Tales by Sharazade

This collection of stories involving erotic encounters in exotic locales sounded like a great combination—enough that I made the purchase! What could be better escape than reading about interesting places where people have sex? But Sharazade had a more ambitious project in mind than the first conclusion my imagination jumped to. I realized this as I moved from the first story of a couple playing as strangers in an airport café before retiring to their motel room together, “Schiphol,” to the second story, “Flaws,” about a lone female traveler on a train. I was initially jostled from the first, a smooth, playful romp to the second, a more lurching narrative, reflective both of the locale, a trek across the country on an Amtrak train, and the journey of the character, a woman whose enjoyment of a sexy encounter with not one but two strangers on a train is interrupted by her insecurities with her self-image. Each of these stories is better savored read separately, and for me, that is the pleasure of a story collection.

These are character stories, each uniquely told through a unique voice. They are characters going on journeys who happen to be going on trips. The locales, from a hot springs in Japan to a travel store inside an airport, are described with insider details (I love the joke that everywhere in Japan takes three hours to get to) that gave me a feel for being in places I’ve never been, but these aren’t simply picturesque glimpses, postcard descriptions, we see what the character sees, and feel what they feel. In “Onsen,” the female character uses her relative familiarity with Japan—she has lived there and can read the menus and travel signs—to even the dynamic with her companion, who she feels hasn’t been very attentive to her, but we feel her discontent until the two of them are able to reconnect when they find seclusion in a Japanese hot springs.

I would describe them as more travel-themed than travel stories, and for me that was the most enjoyable part, not knowing from one story to the next if I would get to explore some foreign locale with the characters or get stuck laid over with them, making time in an empty part of an airport, risking getting seen. I’ve already touched on some of my favorites, but I have to mention, “Sales Pitch.” Sharazade sprinkles humor throughout her stories, but this I think of as the comic relief story dropped halfway through the collection. Her humor shines in this first person account told through the character of a cocky young man working in a travel gift shop, who shows an older woman all the advantages of a massage toy, but this humorous story ends up as one of the hottest of the bunch. I highly recommend this collection.  

Great Idea or Greatest Idea Ever?

I found someone on amazon who reviewed his or her (no hints, I’m not revealing who) own books and gave them all five stars, along with brief descriptions and promises of how happy people would be if they read. I admit, I’ve thought about it. I would like to attach a brief bio and personal description of my book to complement the one from my publisher in an amazon review. I wouldn’t be comfortable rating it, but if I had to rate it…yeah, I’d give it five stars. I love my book! Do I really think it could reach readers the way the great books I’ve read in my life have reached me? No. Do I kind of think that? Sure. I don’t think a writer can dedicate the time it takes to write a book, edit it, rewrite parts and edit again etc. without the thought that it has the potential to be great. A love story between a dominant woman and a submissive man isn’t going to win the Nobel prize, but for what it is, I think it’s a five star book. Otherwise, I’d have spent more time on it before I sent it to a publisher. I realize my opinion is extremely biased and I would stop short of promising anyone else would think the same. Everyone is entitled to form his or her opinion, just as the writer is entitled to his…or hers.  

Can Writers be Self-Indulgent?

I’m leery of reading books about writing, since the first time I opened one and read that you shouldn’t read books where the narrator has a strong voice because it might affect your writing style. Say what?? I hope so! I returned that book to the shelf and bought Catcher in the Rye.

Self Indulgence is the ultimate sin of a writer. I found this recently and thought it was an equally irresponsible line to put in a book beginning writers might be using for guidance. I indulge myself every time I sit down to write. I am embedded in every one of my characters. They think a lot of the things I think. In Courting Her, Alex drinks the same coffee I drink. Alex is different from me in numerous ways, but not in how we drink coffee! When I go back through my old fiction, I love that it reflects who I was then and who I am now. It is extremely self-indulgent, but that doesn’t necessarily make it bad fiction. Writers who force details about themselves in at the expense of their fiction are self-indulgent to a fault. Writers who are self-indulgent are just writers. Only the writer can decide where that line is. A reader is welcome to make that decision, as well, and stop reading, but that’s where personal taste comes into play. A writer who loves food might describe tastes and smells for pages every time characters sit down to eat. A reader who only eats when hungry and otherwise never thinks about food might find this self-indulgent. A reader who also loves food might read everything this author writes for the food descriptions that happen to lead to a story. No one is wrong here.

To make a statement like the one above is, at best, a useless generalization, and, at worst, an arrogant dismissal of the creative energy new writers bring to the act of writing. I am still writing today, after over ten years, largely because I found advice to counter the above like this from Kurt Vonnegut Jr., a writing instructor as well as popular writer: “There’s little I can do but tell people to read a lot and write a lot and figure it out for themselves”