Stop the presses! Scientist says "erotica has its place"

File this under “No Duh!” Reporter interviews scientist from the Kinsey Institute, gets a story out of it that says there’s nothing inherently wrong with erotica.

Give the newspaper credit—because in Salt Lake, otherwise known as Mormon Central, printing anything even debatably pro- free sexual expression takes courage. But I couldn’t help reading this article with a more than slightly jaundiced eye. “Nothing wrong with erotica!” it proclaims, citing cave art and the Kama Sutra, among other things.

I’m a card-carrying erotic writer, myself. Obviously, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with erotica. “Every man thinks he’s righteous,” as the saying goes; if I didn’t approve, I wouldn’t create the stuff, nor consume it.

But, seriously. This merits column inches in a major metropolitan daily? And on a rather more serious note—there is a difference between erotica and pornography, which this reporter apparently does not grasp.

The article is headed “Kinsey scientist says erotica has its place,” and the first line references “erotic imagery.” But the word “erotica” appears only once in the brief story, as opposed to eight appearances of “porn” or “pornography,” with no clear delineation between the two—it actually ends with a defense of porn as “...a more innocent outlet than adultery.” No mention at all of erotica’s place in a healthy psyche or sex life!

Sigh. Erotica does, indeed, have its place. So does porn. I’d argue that they’re different places, but...baby steps, right?

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Can You Sue Yourself for Plagiarism?

Over the years, I've had more than one pen name. Too, as a sometime ghost writer I've occasionally had to pretend to be someone else entirely, to the point that I've been known to describe myself as "professionally schizophrenic." pxj to pxj: Who am I being today?

Earlier, I seem to have been Echo. And I am not amused. (Nor am I! ...or I!)

Rex Stout's most famous character Nero Wolfe, in Plot It Yourself, avered that a writer's punctuation was as identifiable as his choice of words or his paragraphing. I certainly won't argue that point (remind me some day, and I'll rant about tin-eared editors who so materially change an author's technical style as to make the resulting work unreadable by that author's fans), but it's not my punctuation that I'm worried about today. After all, semicolons aren't copyrightable. And commas are cheap.

It's names that got me started on this particular rant, but on reflection, plotlines and phrasings are the real concern: I'm repeating myself today, writing things I've already written. Not "revisiting familiar territory," not even "making twists on favorite themes,"but writing the same thing, nearly word for word! Not intentionally, of course.

Had some time to kill, so, being me, I reached for the keyboard. WIP of choice is a short paranormal with enough of the details set that I can focus on getting some words down, though not too settled for fascinating twists to come out of left fiend and right brain and make me giggle as I type. Lovely way to spend a misty grey morning, playing in one's imagination.

Except...my characters have no names yet. Not real names, names that will communicate something to the reader. Can't just leave blank spaces in the text, so I picked a couple of placeholders, names I use all the time but can't include in submitted stories again. And maybe that was part of the problem--I have used those names before, so they look familiar--but it quickly turned into more than that.

Elizabeth Lowell uses "doubled and redoubled" in pretty nearly all of her stories. I use "susurration" about once a text. That's fine; I know I do it, I make sure it's only once, and beyond that, I don't worry. But today, it wasn't just feeling as though I'd written some word or phrase before. I'm sure I have! English has a lot of words, and I use more of them than many people, but there are ten thousand or so that compose most of everyone's writing. Today, it was the sequence that felt done and re-done.

No, not one of those scenes. I expect those to feel fairly familiar in certain aspects (there's some basic anatomical constants, and certain required elements). This was a scene I could have set practically anywhere, but for all my semi-exotic locale, it was just so easy to write...

Because I'd done it before.

Every scene has a natural rhythm. Every writer has favorite details that will quite naturally find their way into many if not all of her books. I am perhaps overfond of caffeine, plus, I really like men's hands, so it's not a rare thing to find the men in my stories holding coffee cups. I was actually sort of proud of myself when I realized this one was drinking tea, at just past dawn when my heroine sees him. It was different!

It really wasn't. I'd intended this scene to have a very specific tone, and planned a specific mid-point to set up the characters' interpersonal conflict--but what my fingers in their keyboard-rattling produced felt a lot like that last contemporary romance sale. Down to my heroine's incredulous, italicized thought.

Oh, hell and basketweaving. No, that's not the character's reaction; it's mine.

First time in a long time I've actually deleted pages worth of text. (Usually, I move it to another file, just in case. Hey, text memory is cheap!) Started the scene again, my turning points in mind, and this time, I wrote the thing from the hero's point of view just to make sure I couldn't write the same thing yet again; the hero would notice different details, have different reactions to them. I don't think I like it as much--his confusion plays better from outside than in--but at least it doesn't now feel like repetition.

Strange experience, though, repeating myself this way. I really thought my imagination was better than that. Different stories, different characters with different goals and attributes, so the similiarities are purely my perceptions and preferences--that's what they have in common, after all. (I know, some readers are thinking: Well, duh! All your stories do. You made them up. But my characters often have opinions I don't share. I'm not a very controlling creator. It's part of the fun!)

Next thing you know, I'm going to turn into one of those hacks who changes names and hair-colors and releases the result as a completely new piece. And when I do, I really will take myself to court. Only the charge might be criminal defacement of my own work. Or murder, if I snap completely, and that schizophrenia becomes rather more than a joke. Hmm. If personality A kills personality B, completely though non-corporeally...

Ooh, imagine the trial!

As always, wishing you (and you, and you!)
peace and x-rated joy

pxj

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Who said you could pave my Moon?

A little background, for those of you who don’t semi-obsessively follow NASA’s doings: assuming the agency’s funding isn’t cut, the Space Shuttles are due to be retired in a few years (2010) with a lunar orbiter going up sometime next year (2008) and serviced during a couple of the last Shuttle missions. Their next planned lunar landing isn’t until 2020, but the Lunar Airborne Dust Toxicity Advisory Group is racing to find a way to keep those astronauts who do get up and out from inhaling.

Wait, that didn’t come out right. Lunar dust, it seems, is toxic to humans—they’ve known that at least since Apollo 17. And as technology improves, they keep finding more evidence of just how toxic it is, to the point that they’re considering some things I, for one, find rather excessive.

Like “paving” parts of my favorite satellite. Technically, the proposal is to use microwaves to melt particles into lunar glass and then using those paved areas as landing pads and foundations for structures. It’s an idea that actually sounds pretty neat, as in SF, but that I don’t think I appreciate in real life. Too, it wouldn’t prevent dust from being stirred up, as anyone whose ever driven through dry country can tell you. While the moon doesn’t have much in the way of wind to do that stirring, vehicles do a fine job of that, and even suited people can kick up more than a bit.

I’m no rocket scientist, but...it’s the finer particles that would tend to move most, isn’t it—those same ones they’re most concerned with? With reason, I hasten to say. Breathing tiny little mineral particles is never a good idea, as any number of black-lung sufferers would tell you if they were around to do so. Plus, many of those tiny particles have jagged edges which cling to lung tissue worse than mine-dust or asbestos ever could, and they’re so small a person might not actually be able to tell when they were present. And it’s not only the lungs that are vulnerable; some lunar dust particles have the rather appalling property of being able to displace iron in the bloodstream, with effects I don’t care to contemplate. Not to mention all the usual SF-nal concerns about substances to which humans have no natural defenses... So, yes, it’s a real concern. But paving the moon?

Some of the Group’s other plans, like the giant magnetic vacuum cleaner, seem more reasonable to me. (Okay, so it’s more like an industrial air filtration system. Once they get to the bits about tubes sucking up dust...) At least it would be inside the modules, instead of messing with a perfectly innocent celestial body that was just minding its own business!

I vote we send the whitecoats and their engineer compatriots back to the drawing board. Not, of course, that anyone asked me. They didn’t even invite me to their lunar dust workshop this spring, and I was just up the road. But they did have the kindness to put a bunch of their results up on their website (nasa.gov), during the reading of which, I came up with a new official job title for a character in my perennially unsubbed SF series: I think I’ll make someone a Regolith Disposal Engineer. So much classier than Space Janitor, no?

Of course, if they paved over the all the celestial bodies, there wouldn’t be any extra-terrestrial soil to be disposed of. And all those wonderful SF classic titles with Stardust and so on would have to be changed.

Nope, can't have that.

In this activist society of ours, surely there’s a group out there somewhere protesting the industrialization of our nearest extra-terrestrial resource? Not that I have any objection to NASA—or their equivalents in other governments, or the private space exploration societies—landing, exploring, running tests. I just think they should leave the land unspoiled for the next visitor.

Who knows? It might be me.

pxj

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Help! The Blogosphere has sucked me in

I never wanted a blog. Or maybe it’s that I wanted one too much. A place to air my frustrations, to share my thoughts, to be part of the world without having to leave my comfortable space? Sounds great! Only...who would keep me from saying the wrong things? Remind me that cyberspace is forever, that one cannot unsay the words one has sent out into the aether once one has hit Send?

No, no blog for me.

So, what’s changed?

Let’s see.

*I’ve sold a few books and disappointed several publishers—I don’t promote much, so people don’t always hear about my work. Including people who know and enjoy my writing, and would buy the books if they knew they were there to be bought.

*I’ve started ranting in themes, and am running out of places to put the resulting texts. There’s a small but delightful reader’s community called Realms of Love that takes the occasional short piece of mine, if it’s at least tenuously related to romance or eroticism. And a Yahoo group run by a fellow author where I post the odd science rambling. A few other places for stand-alone works, now and then. But there are limits, and I’m pushing them.

*Health issues have sidelined me recently, sometimes for as much as two months at a time. I can always manage one message, or two, but those don’t always get passed along, so people complain I’ve disappeared. Again. With a blog, I can post a message for anyone to find.

There it is: my reasons for putting up a blog. The title’s a reference to my lifestyle—I’m a self-described hermit and an old-fashioned sort of writer, despite the very modern lack of euphemism my writing may contain. This presents some problems. With e-books especially, publishers expect authors to promote slightly more than is humanly possible, but all I want is to sit in my garret and daydream, preferably with my fingers resting lightly on a keyboard until moved by some muse.

And, ideally, one or several living models of various heroes within reach, in case I should need to do some research.

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