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Screaming Underwater © 2001 Lucy Taylor
Sometimes I think God made me a writer so I wouldn't have to turn into a serial killer--and a writer of erotica so I wouldn't have to become a hooker. Writing gives me a legitimate way to relish and delight in the forbidden. It allows me to imagine down to the last gritty detail any number of things--from the lewd and lascivious to the outright homicidal--that I might otherwise be tempted to act out in real life. Hopefully, of course, moral scruples and fear of prison would prevail, but on a really bad day, who the hell knows?
Although much of my work includes an erotic element, more often than not, the sex takes a back seat to horror, for the simple reason that I prefer passion with a dash of derangement, lust with an undercurrent of malice and madness. Without the tang of terror, the threat of slice n'dice in the midst of fucking and sucking, my interest tends to flag--in fiction, anyway. Real life's another story. For a few years, I tried the Date-A-Psycho route and learned what I suppose most people already know, that nutcases are a lot more fun when they lurk in my imagination, not the bushes outside my house.
As far as writing erotica, though, I got my start in the mid-80's, working for mens' magazines like Cavalier and Magna. At first, I got a huge kick out of being paid what, at the time, seemed a large amount of money to write what basically amounted to porn. For a while I even had a monthly column called "Women in Lust: The Cutting Edge of Sex" in Penthouse Forum. Although I cringe to think of some of those articles now, they were fun. I remember the one about penises, when I polled my girlfriends and gay male friends for the most unusual dicks they'd ever encountered and got descriptions of all manner of penile oddities--strange colors, bizarre bumps, shafts with more kinks than a fetish orgy.
I soon discovered, though, that no matter how kinky the activity or how numerous the participants, the human body is limited to a finite number of limbs and orifices and even the most elaborate orgy allows for only so many possible combinations and permutations. I got bored with writing erotica and moved on to erotic horror, a genre which allowed me to combine the gore of splatterpunk with the kink of porn.
Since then, most of my work has been in the horror genre,
though on occasion, I still write erotica. "In Heat," for example, the story in this volume, was written a few years ago, shortly after I'd spent a 4th of July with a friend on Solano Beach near San Diego. I don't recall any fires raging, except the libidinous kind, nor were there any lost loves, deceased or otherwise, in the picture, but the physical appearance of the "runner" in the story is based loosely on the person in that encounter.
Having said that, I need to add that, in general, I tend to avoid writing about experiences and people taken from my own life. Whether writing erotica or any other kind of fiction, I've always thought that sticking too closely to the truth was a bad idea--just because I find something I've experienced to be fascinating doesn't mean the reader's going to share that enthusiasm. What I try to capture, though, is the tone of a situation, what I like to call the emotional landscape of something I've experienced and transfer that atmosphere to an imaginary plot.
I particularly like writing from a gay or lesbian viewpoint, since either offers a vicarious break from my normally hetero lifestyle, and I've done enough gay and lesbian pieces that I feel comfortable crossing the fictional border. Given the choice, I probably prefer writing gay male fiction to lesbian fiction simply because as a (more or less) straight female, the objects of my sexual interest are generally male. And though granted, nature has unfortunately denied me the opportunity to command some hot male slave to "get down and suck my dick!", nobody can prevent me from enjoying the fantasy.
Overall, the greatest challenge that I find in writing erotica is balancing out the sex scenes with plot and characterization. I hate it when a writer skimps on storyline and character and simply throws big chunks of fuck 'n suck into the story just for the sake of sex. In real life, fucking just for the joy of it is an excellent thing--it should be an Olympic event, as far as I'm concerned--but in fiction, "just sex" often bores me to the point where I find myself desperately hoping one of the participants will whip out a machete or chainsaw just to get the whole thing over with.
Why do I have such a penchant for mixing the erotic and the macabre? Well, you might say it's an inherited trait--bizarre perhaps, but one I've gotten so much fun out of over the years that I can't really complain too much.
Actually, I owe it all to my mother and grandmother, who regarded sex as only slightly more revolting than public puking or a hands-on tour of a leper colony.
In my family of origin, sex and violence were inextricably linked. Now I can hear my grandmother writhing in her grave right now (because God knows sex was never discussed outright, ever) but the aura of sex and fear was a subterranean text permeating the ice house of repression in which I grew up. Men weren't just vilified as boorish louts who (like my father) abandoned their wives and children or (like my grandfather) drank beer and sometimes couldn't hold down a job, they were vicious sexual predators, human-looking and acting (sort of) but really a form of sub-human beasts. Should a woman make an off-color remark or wear something slightly slutty, these brutish thugs would perpetrate all sorts of unspeakable horrors upon her. Since these abuses were never actually described, it was left to my imagination--with a little help from Webster's Dictionary--to try to figure out what the hell they were talking about and how I was going to get some of these dastardly male despoilers to practice their perversions on me.
"Oh, yechhhh!"--I can hear my grandmother exclaim at the sight of a bare-chested man on t.v. Her disgust and revulsion made an impression, all right, but not in the way that she wanted--those half-naked men, especially if they happened to be endowed with an abundance of body hair, came to seem not only hopelessly unattainable, but more desirable than my next breath of air.
So what does this have to do with writing erotica? Or writing anything for that matter?
Well, like many people whose childhoods were something less than sane, I started escaping into my imagination early in life and have kept the world of fantasy as a sort of second residence ever since. I like to think of it as an endless attic, full of strange, bizarre and fascinating things, always offering up new nooks and crannies to be explored. It's scary, too, but as is also often the case with sex partners, a dash of danger only adds to their allure. And since it's my attic, the place where my psyche stores its darker, more disturbing treasures, it's full of all manner of decadent and erotic inclinations.
My family of origin did not intend me to embark on sexual adventures as an adult, much less make money writing about them, (under my real name, no less!), but by treating sex like the proverbial rhinocerous in the living room that YOU ARE NEVER SUPPOSED TO THINK ABOUT OR NOTICE, they pretty much insured that I would think about it all the time and, for many years, indulged in sexual excess with the addictive zeal of one who naively believes that in sex lies a form of salvation: I fuck, therefore I am.
But before I took up writing, (or fucking, for that matter), I was trying other forms of self-expression. Back in the 50's and 60's my mother and grandmother and I spent countless stultifying summer days by the pool of a pseudo-elite establishment known as the Westwood Club. The isolation was as unrelenting as the heat, the embarrassment of being dragged around by these two embittered and eccentric Southern "belles" was ghastly, but I'll spare you the details. What I discovered, though, was that I could take a deep breath and dive down beneath the cool, chlorinated water and scream at the top of my lungs, scream my fury and frustration and adolescent rage, and no one could hear me or punish me for my feelings. Underwater was my place for self-expression when no other place wa safe or possible, the place where I discovered primal scream therapy before it was ever in vogue.
Far better than screaming underwater, though, I later found that writing opens the door, not just to the release of angst, but to a cornucopia of vicarious pleasures, unimpeded by age, gender, lack of opportunity, absence of a penis, or deficiency of moral scruples. If I'd like to kill the people up the street, I can do so on paper. If I'd like to fuck them first (or after) that's okay, too. And there's an exhibitionistic quality to writing erotica, a legitimization of the relentlessly carnal mind, that I enjoy immensely. Everyone thinks about sex--that's a given. But the people who think about sex and then write it down, they're not only admitting it, they're inviting the reader to wallow in the same, lush, primal bogs that most other people keep private.
The reader may never know if the author is writing from imagination or memory or some combination of the two, but you now know, irrevocably, that those thought percolated in this person's mind, that this story, novel, or whatever was among the items in their psychic "attic."
And, although it may seem incongruous to some, the fictional avenue that I find most compelling at this stage of my life is the exploration of the erotic and the spiritual. I've touched on this in some of my work, "Thief of Names" from The Mammoth Book of Short Erotic Novels being one example, but not nearly as deeply and certainly not as competently as I would hope to in the future. It seems to me that a great misconception in our society lies in the polarization of these two--sex is relegated to the tawdriest of sideshows or mechanical exercises--insert member A into slot B, shake well and thrust--but too often bereft of real
sensuality or passion, while spirituality is conceived of in the driest and dreariest of terms--the image of the castigating and castrating Puritan God or the asexual holy person, narrow-minded and carnally-stunted.
Spirituality or sexuality, the right arm or the left, is what the choice seems to come down to, but no God I can imagine would ever demand such a soul-withering sacrifice. Rather, I think the erotic and the spiritual are not mutually exclusive, but as intimately linked as shakti and shiva, as the yoni and lingam. Only because of the Puritanism inherent in the Judeo-Chrstian tradition have the two been so often and regrettably polarized.
Now whether or not I ever achieve the merger of the erotic and the spiritual, either on paper or in the bedroom, I don't know. What I do know is I will continue to write about sex and horror, because both fascinate and intrigue me.
In a sense then, every time I sit down at the computer, every time I write something that another person might find shockingly decadent or someone else might find to be a forbidden turn-on, I'm still screaming.
But I'm not underwater anymore. © 2001 Lucy Taylor |
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