Eyecandy Monday

And this is me. No, it's not really (I wish I were that athletic!) but it feels like it should be: the huge dark cliff, the gaping void below, the hanging on by her fingertips.

I think the images originated at this awesome site here.

Anyway, I'm back from London - pictures to be posted this week - and ready to start work again. Oh, and though I've never done any rock climbing, I did climb (and leap out of) a few trees on Saturday. If you ever get a chance to try this, I recommend it as the most exhilerating £25 I ever spent. But you've got to be able to hang on...

Kew

I'm in London this week. On Wednesday I spent 2 hours in a pub with Adam Nevill (yeah, I surprised myself too) getting the low-down on Random House and Black Lace - but I can't pass on any of the gossip for legal reasons, not right now anyway. Sorry!

In the meantime, although I can't compete with Nikki's Tree PrOn, here are some pictures of some suggestively phallic plants from Kew Gardens.

It's getting steamy!

Wasps

I'm having a week of blog posts inspired by Nikki Magennis!

A while back she was thinking about bees. I've been worrying about wasps. Every year when the weather warms up I have to launch a capture-and-release program from my kitchen, as the windowsill fills up with wasps and bees. There's at least a couple every day. But not this year. Not a single one.

Where have my wasps gone? They didn't appear even when I made chocolate fudge.
:-(

(Some day I will share my fudge recipe, and the world will bow before me.)

Eyecandy Monday

This picture because I feel rather like I've been shagged up the ass by yesterday's news. Only not in a good way.

But enough feeling sorry for myself. Last week Nikki Magennis nominated me for the Kreativ Blogger Award as one of "the blogs that I enjoy and are often full of unexpected pleasures". What a fantastic compliment, Nikki!

It's a meme thing: The Kreativ Blogger Award meme works like this: if you accept it, you are supposed to list seven of your favorite things and nominate seven blogs that deserve this award.

So here goes with seven of my favourite things (but I'm not going to be poetic like Nikki!):

1) Internet erotica ... like the picture at the top of this post.
2) My greyhounds, and the way they love to settle down with me when I write.


3) This ghost story.
4) This comic.
5) Pirates.
6) This TV series. I swear, I know these guys.
7) Travel. It does broaden the mind, sometimes forcibly. I took this picture in the Rat Temple near Bikhanir, India. and then I cried because these scabby wild rats are sacred and somebody recognises the divine even in them.


(Then I threw my socks away.)

And here are seven creative, inspirational blogs (some lovely, some silly, some awesome):

1) The Faces of Us - campaign for equal marriage rights in the USA
2) Violet Blue - goddess of erotica bloggers
3) Goths in Hot Weather - one of life's simple joys
4) Craig J Sorensen - erotica writer
5) P.S. Haven - erotica writer , but just check out his incredible NSFW artwork
6) Male Submission Art - so much more than a collection of pictures
7) H is for Harlot - Alison Tyler's new showcase blog of erotica short stories

Oh fuck.

Not having a good day:

http://www.thebookseller.com/news/90338-erotica-on-hold-for-black-lace-and-nexus-at-virgin.html.rss

My thoughts are with our editor Adam Nevill.

Boy/Girl Name/Game

As a writer of erotica, my life is filled with profound questions. Like: Why is most of my spam in dodgy French?* Why, if it takes the average man 2 minutes to masturbate to orgasm, are the individual scenes in porn films so interminably long? And what the hell is it with NAMES in fiction?

Here I go reading a mainstream novel. The first female character we meet is called, say, Liz or Jan or Zoe. The first male character ... will he be called Paul or Rob or Ed? Will he hell. He'll be called something like Corso or Flashman, Poirot or Bennet.

The convention seems to be: women are indentified by their forenames, men by the surnames**. In ER we have have Carter and Pratt, but Abby and Neela. In Jurassic Park the two main male characters are Malcolm and Grant (both surnames) but the female scientist with a doctorate all of her own is called Ellie.

Huh? Where does this come from? (It can't all be Michael Crichton's fault, can it?) Is it a military/police thing or just a literary conceit? Does it reflect genuine US usage, do guys all over America routinely address each other by their surnames ("Hey there Armstrong!" "Hi Tchaikovsky!"). Because in my entire working life I have NEVER called a man by his surname and would consider it spectacularly rude to do so; if my working relationship with a man is that formal and hierarchical then I'd call him Mr Rillington-Humperdink, but in actuality in almost every case what I'd use would be his forename.

So why is the literary convention so strong that when I'm writing a character named, say, Joe Bloggs, I genuinely cringe from calling him Joe when narrating? Why do I want to name my men Grissom or Taggart, or at a push a forename that sounds like it should be a surname, like Tyler? Why does it feel slightly wrong to call a man by his given name in writing? Can't we take Pauls seriously? Is "Andy" too intimate? Is Nigel not cool enough?***

Anyone know?

---

* "Le plus grand penis du monde" "Pour faire votre plaisir."
** Yes, of course this is a generalisation and there are plenty of exceptions.It just seems to be the default literary setting. In Silence of the Lambs, Clarice Starling is refered to throughout as Starling by the author, but that's quite striking.
*** Okay, fair enough in that case.

Misty

Does anyone but me remember Misty comic?

When I was but a bitty girl, me and my brother would be taken down every week to our judo class at the YMCA and afterwards we would have a drink in the cafe and be allowed to buy a comic each in the shop. My comic of choice was Misty, which was a horror/supernatural title aimed at girls (This was in the days before photo-stories killed all the imagination and art in girls' comics stone dead). The protagonists of the stories were usually in the 14-18 range (so I'm guessing the intended readership was kids around 10-12) and were usually lonely girls - there were a disproportionate number of orphans - who had to go to a new school or move to a new home or (if it had a Victorian setting) go live with a vile and scary male relative. Then something BAD and SPOOKY would happen: if the girl was innocent and nice she'd survive the supernatural onslaught, but if she was a nasty piece of work she'd end up HORRIBLY PUNISHED.

It scared the living crap out me, and I loved it. For years I couldn't turn the light off at night for fear of those stories replaying themselves in my head.


I've been buying the annuals recently on eBay. They're not nearly as scary as I remember, funnily enough - but fascinating and fun. There's a big emphasis on bullying at school, I notice these days (and they're single-sex schools: boys barely feature, so the villains are inevitably female). In between the graphic and text stories are articles on superstition, folklore, horror actors, mythic creatures and witches. Witches are cool. It's occultism for tweenagers.

Here's a couple of pages that illustrate Misty at its best. Sorry for the crap quality of the photos - we did spend an hour last night failing to get the scanner to work - but they should expand if clicked.

This one above epitomises everything that I found so fascinating at that age. It's gloriously moral - the wicked vivisector meets with an uncanny vengeful death. It's got a macabre wit ("Right now ... he's feeding the birds."). And hey - look at that bum!

I think we're spotting a major influence on the Ashbless career right here.

Eyecandy Monday

By special request, a woman today. And since the weather has turned warm... [click to expand, then imagine brushing off the sand]

BTW ... I have got the Letter of the Week slot in 2000AD comic! Fangirl goes "Squeeee!"

The Teaser of the Narghile

It's our old friend Jean-Leon Gerome back with us today. This picture is also titled The Pipe Lighter and doesn't have any particular story, it's just a nice piece of Orientalism and a fine ass painting. I hope he didn't get his model to pose like that for too long, because it looks a little uncomfortable.

The narghile (sheesha in Egypt) or waterpipe does take a bit of effort to get lit, but it's worth it. He he ... after all that nude puffing, here's one being smoked in a restaurant in Damascus. Apologies for the bad Hat Hair.

My mother said: "Is that opium?!"

No, it's strawberry-flavoured tobacco. Although it's still not very good for you, but I only smoke a water-pipe about once a year. I am still working on the Gandalf-style smoke rings.