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My Writing Life
or Everything Old is New Again
© Laura Antoniou
I'm a pornographer, by choice, by trade, by political affiliation. Somewhat prolific, with porn of every variety having issued from my word processor at one time or another. You might have read my Marketplace series of novels, about a modern-day real-life slave market, or perhaps seen an anthology or two - or six - of mine. You've possibly read me having no idea it was me, in little digest-sized magazines full of 'true' letters and stories, or on the shelves in the gay men's erotica section or even in a publication intended for straight men. I was going through some of my work to prepare for writing this essay and found a few memorable moments in fiction. See if any of them sound familiar.
A young person brimming with destiny apprentices themself to an older, wiser, sardonic and mysterious teacher, whose demands often seem cruel, and whose history contains elements of suffering for the sake of a higher goal.
Two women meet at a bar, take a liking to one another, and for their first night together, the more dominant one teaches the other to polish her boots, the right way. Mention is made of lashes earned for boots polished the wrong way...
Two strong, hot-headed youths are matched against each other in battle for the idle entertainment of their master, who wages on them and murmurs, "I will have the winner," much to the amusement of his guests.
A low ranking trainee is set upon by her higher status roommates, who taunt her for failing to show proper respect and then leave her hogtied on her bed while they go laughing off to dinner.
A lengthy session with a 9 foot single tail, three pages to get through ten lashes, each of which draws blood, until the recipient staggers against the chains and slumps, only to hear, "Ten more..."
Recognize any yet? How about this excerpt?
"Garret put the finishing touches on his Lord's right boot, and his hands were shaking. When Renton had noticed the flaw in Garret's usually brilliant shine, the lad had received a vicious kick in the ribs. Although Renton had retired in a good mood, it seemed that his slave would bear a constant stream of abuse nonetheless. If Garret thought ill of such treatment, neither his face nor his eyes gave him away..."
Something from one of the Marketplace books, right? Or perhaps from one of my gay male SM novels or short stories? Actually, all of these situations and the excerpt are from a novel I started a little bit earlier than my more recent works. It's unpublished, actually, and will never be published. But then, how many works do you think survive rewrites starting at age 13?
Now, did I think this was porn when I was writing it? No, I thought of it as high fantasy, that sort of standard sword-and-sorcery, going on a quest to get the ancient relic kind of thing. In fact, its original title was The Sword of Truth, until I changed it to Where's the Magic? during a sudden fit of adolescent despair that lasted about 100 years. John Preston, in his essay "How Dare You Even Think of These Things", mentions a similar experience as a teenager, writing a fantasy about a handsome, manly lord type riding through the fields of his estate and gazing at the muscular bodies of the men who worked for him and deciding which will be chosen for his pleasure that night. I wrote that sort of stuff too, but probably at age 15 or later, and all of those stories are gone now, consigned to flames in a panic stricken night when I thought that when I ran away, someone would find them and...I don't know what. Know I was a pervert, I guess.
But my fantasy novel was different. It had a plot. (Albeit a convoluted, monstrously derivative and not very well thought out one.) It had character development. It had magical stuff! Somehow, all of these things added up to making something of greater merit than the sum of all the parts that would make my heart pound when I wrote them.
It's difficult to piece together exactly what I thought when I was writing this stuff. The first draft, underneath the clumsy construction and awful dialog still shows signs of a measured build up of mystery and attraction to danger and power. Through two alter-ego characters, I made a case for both the "how can you live this way?" view of the outsider who sees black uniforms, strict discipline and a fetish for obedience as alien, and for the military leader who sees the world as a series of superiors who must be obeyed and inferiors who must be controlled. And, it's pretty clear whose point of view I favored, too. But in the rewrite, I see that I had started to both strip away some of the more blatant sexualized pieces of fetish behavior for a more subtle approach. I had always struggled with my erotic impulses. I couldn't deny them, and didn't really want to. But neither could I reveal them, and I knew that very early. I can see that I had started to imbed them deeper into the story, to not make a big deal out of - oh, for example, a scene where one character backhands another. I think I had begun to realize that if I set the rules of my fantasy world to include such things without comment, then no one would know how much it thrilled me to think about them. In later years, I took the world of this aborted novel - all 300 pages or so of it (even back then, I had a problem with length) - and I turned it into my world for an Advanced Dungeons and Dragons role playing game. As I read through these pages, I had wondered, was this world of mine always so shallow? Wasn't there more? Yes, indeed, there was...created for small groups of friends to help me in my erotic imaginings, whether they understood what they were doing or not. Through my college years, my simple world built up around a simple story became much richer and more...personally...fulfilling. With the help of other sexually maturing friends, my world began to fill with things I had dared not write about. Consensual adult incest, intergenerational sex. Group sex, and polyamorous relationships - long before I had ever heard that word. Pain play. Sex with professionals because they did it better, not because they were available at a tavern. And all of it packed into pretty standard action/adventure stories with a little bit of the 'kill the monster/take the treasure' thrown in to appease the traditionalists. It was during that time that I found a lover who also had as rich a fantasy world as I had made, and finally, I revealed the truth behind all this plotting and magic. It was an excuse to tell a story of an attraction to power, and the loneliness and hunger that comes when you get that power, the drive to serve one greater than yourself - and of course - every ritualized beating and boot polishing and whack across the face that brought us through the tale. We spoke porn to each other and acted it out, and I discovered that the real thing is ever so much more fun than just writing about it. Now, years later, I find myself 300 pages into the fifth book in a series about attraction to power, and the need to serve, etcetera, etcetera. And in an ironic twist, now I am over burdened with plot, which I must sometimes suspend in order to include the very scenes which were my excuse for plots when I first started writing! What has happened here? What was I always really writing about?
At first, it was easy to point at the obvious fetish pieces, ranging from my adolescent daring in suggesting that same gender attractions might actually be preferred in a military setting, especially one in a world without reliable birth control, to the multi-partner, bondage & SM inclusive, possibly incestuous groupings that popped up from time to time. But the real story that hooked these scenes together - or gave me an excuse to imagine them and write them - is also familiar. I see a main character bitter because of a lost opportunity who nonetheless excels in her field and dedicates herself to making someone to replace her. I see the confusion of someone who has been both drawn to and frightened of power, who struggles with both new concepts of right and wrong and embraces them with all the desperation of one of those 'gifted children' who will do just about anything to impress a distant parent. Power struggles abound, in every re-write, getting more and more subtle. Blatant threats in the early version become veiled, silky, dangerous in that understated way of someone who doesn't have to bluster to threaten. There are people sworn to service who hate the ones they are sworn to, yet serve nonetheless. There are slaves taken in battle and as war prizes who grow to have affection, respect and even love for their owners - much to the discomfort of those owners. (Was I unable to completely imagine such a thing? Or was I so sure that any moral person would not want to be loved by someone who could not freely choose to be with them?) Everyone who had power found that it came with a cost attached to it. The warrior-king who could not be slain by any weapon except one in the hand of his second in command was forbidden to love. The woman raised to believe she would be a champion found out that there would be another after her who would actually take on the task she was trained to do - and that she would have to make this person ready to do it. It was all a romance - a soap opera with elves and swords. Melodrama in the classic sense of the word, because what is a teenager if not melodramatic? Questions of good and evil came up, as they will when you are writing fantasy, and I delighted in making my evil characters honorable, my fun loving ones amoral - if not apathetic. Even back then, I didn't want things to be too easy. Honor and loyalty, pain and betrayal, deep love and hate that can't be mentioned out loud, quests and adventures, looking for the magical thing that will solve it all - romance. And what am I writing now? A soap opera, with whips and chains. About a character who misses a chance at becoming something he has always dreamed of, and instead finds himself training others to be that which he desires for himself. A lengthy quest adventure, through the modern SM/fetish world, as a woman searches for the magical solution to her identity and desires, looking for that perfect happy ending and finding it's not that simple. Master Trainers who look at the pain they cause and mutter things like "omelets and eggs..." and then get back to the work they have to do. Honor and loyalty, pain and betrayal...etcetera. And still, I am caught between wanting the sex and power and SM all spelled out because that's what turns me on (and, presumably, the other readers), and wanting it to be such a given, built into the structure of the world, that readers can understand that it will happen - but there is no need to read through 20 pages of it when 3 will do. Not unless it advances the plot and shows some of those wonderful character conflicts and resolutions.
OK, so I am writing the same story. (The lead character even has the same name, although the spelling and gender have changed.) But believe me, it's much better without the elves. © Laura Antoniou |
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