By
Sam Thorne (Guest Blogger)
Hot
fantasies often evolve from daydreams based on hot men from various
TV series. As I got older, I started developing characters of my own
to fantasise about. I had to, because all these hotties were in
endless series, matching themselves up with female leads and making
themselves ‘unavailable’.
I
could never pretend that those female leads didn’t exist. My inner
realist is just too noisy and nosy. I had to write those female leads
out—get them out of my way. If they were cool characters, they’d
depart the scene after an amicable split, in a nice safe taxi.
Naturally the newly-single hottie would be left distraught on the
pavement, in urgent need of succour/hot sex.
Having
said that, I’ve also mentally written out appalling female leads by
making them evil and unfaithful, embarking on wild sex in the back of
a car with some virile youth. Said car would immediately plunge into
a mile-deep sinkhole. It’s a bit hard on the youth, but hey! He
should’ve had better taste. The bereaved hottie is, of course, left
distraught in a chapel of rest and in urgent need of succour/hot sex.
I’m
sure you can spot a trend developing, here. And it’s been suggested
to me that I might have not quite grasped the meaning of ‘FANTASY’.
I’ve
tried cutting loose, but my inner realist won’t go on strike. She’s
remarkably resistant to a sinkhole, won’t be sent away on enforced
leave, be shoved off a cliff, married off to a Siberian tyrant, or
silenced with gags. As a writer, I’ve learnt to accommodate her. I
love reading about hard-ass women who remain mysteriously
oblivious to their own beauty, but when I try to create them, they
stagger rigid and two-dimensional across the page. Since I started
writing heroes and heroines a little closer to home, the imaginative
juices started flowing again. Just to be clear—I don’t write
doormats. I just don’t see why my good-lookin’ characters should
evade the trials that most readers put up with.
My
heroes have that alpha streak, but it’s not prominent until they’re
balls-to-the-wall. My heroines awake at two in the morning, their
heads full of all those one-liners that would’ve been of some use
during the argument they’d had hours ago. Celeste, the heroine of
Single-Syllable Steve, has many things she’d like to say to
bully-boss Ian, but she still needs to earn a wage.
She
crept past his door. His chair was angled towards the window and he
sat with his legs crossed, fingers steepled in front of his chest.
She’d actually fancied him when he’d first swaggered in with his
transatlantic drawl, his animated conversation, and Nordic blend of
bronze and blond hair. The soft yellow light of the angle-poise lamp
picked out the strong lines of his cheekbones and jaw in blurred
shades of primrose and burnt orange. The image would make a good
Rembrandt masterpiece. ‘Dickhead in Repose’, perhaps.
As
the accountant in a nightclub, Celeste’s job becomes much more
challenging when temporary bouncer Steve is forced to change in the
staffroom (where she works) because Ian won’t fund the men’s room
re-fit. The taciturn giant’s as silent as he is gorgeous, and
while falling for him, Celeste wonders how the hell she’s going to
get him to notice her with so many stunning barmaids and dancers
around. Like a lot of us, Celeste is crap at flirting. But she knows
what she wants. And when she makes her feelings clear, Steve more
than rises to the occasion:
Two
gentle fingers slipped into her from behind, making her whole body
tingle as they pressed lightly in and then pulled out. He stroked her
like that until she was reaching out to grip the corners of the
mattress and unable to stop whimpering into her pillow. His fingers
pulled away and when he pressed into her again, she barely felt the
snag of rubber.
His
left hand cupped her hip as he entered her, squeezing gently in
reassurance as his huge cock broke through her slick but small gap.
Steve was huge to the point that she snatched her face off her pillow
in erotic shock as he started a slow but insistent dipping rhythm
with his hips, filling her one careful, hard inch at a time. She’d
never felt penetration like it. She felt herself clamping around him,
juicing, even without him touching her clit.
Because
I set a lot of stories in places I’ve lived in and which I know
well, I’m asked whether I use a lot of my ‘real life’ for
ideas. To some extent… yes. When I’m on an imaginative roll, I
don’t want to have to stop to research the street layout of a town
I’ve never been to so that things remain authentic. And like most
writers, I sometimes lend my characters (male and female) some of my
personal traits. However, I do have one personal characteristic which
is relatively unique to me, and which will make a more prominent
appearance in future stories. Like Steve, I’m deaf.
Deafness
shapes the way people observe things. I’ve been severely deaf most
of my life, depending upon hearing aids and lip-reading, and in the
last couple of years progressed to profound deafness (pesky ear
infections!). I was brought up ‘hearing’, which means I don’t
sign, apart from a rudimentary knowledge of Sign-Supported English
which I picked up from Deaf flatmates at University. People in my
position don’t make much of an appearance in popular culture.
Deafness is either presented as the curse of the elderly, or the form
of a character who is deafened, and has to both learn to sign and
deal with that huge chip that’s just appeared on their shoulder. Or
the character is a member of the Deaf community (observe the caps!)
and signs.
In
the past, I’ve been asked by other writers whether my coverage of
deafness is my way of being semi-autobiographical. I’ve been
tempted to answer: “So, your blue, three-boobed alien from
Snarg—the one with the massive libido and perfect hearing—that’s
obviously you, isn’t it?” I could’ve made more of Steve’s
hearing loss in Single-Syllable Steve, but elected not to,
because it wasn’t there to form a plot point. He just happens to be
a vast, sexy guy who doesn’t join in on what’s going on around
him, giving him time and mental space to get to know Celeste.
In
some ways, writing a character with a hearing loss does keep my
fantasies ‘within reach’, but quite honestly, I include the
deafness issue occasionally because it’s a nice mental holiday from
the effort of remembering that my character can hear. What does this
mean in practice, as a writer? Well, I have to keep an eye on my
plots, remembering that that some situations can be sorted out with a
simple phone call (not an option for me). I have to remind myself
that conversations can be carried out while someone’s got their
back turned, or an odd accent (or huge beard), and I need edit
carefully to strip out the huge number of action-tags related to
reading body language. It’s fun… but tiring!
In
one upcoming story, Purer Than The Driven Snow, my hero Adam
is a paramedic and mountain rescue volunteer at an Austrian Ski
resort. An unabashed Casanova, all his senses are in perfect working
order… but he’s still completely blind to the fact that Rosie—one
of the girls with whom he shares an apartment—has fallen for him.
She disguises her feelings well, venting her frustration at his
louche behaviour through constant criticism of his housekeeping, his
morals, and his wealthy background. Their domestic arrangements
threaten to go up in flames when Adam sleeps with Marisol, their
third housemate, but then he gets the rescue call that changes
everything. His injuries give him more rest and recuperation time
than any man would wish for, but the unwanted opportunity for
self-appraisal reveals a few interesting truths about his own
desires… and Rosie’s.
Adam’s
fun to write. Superficially, he’s a lad with very little sexual
self-control, and he’d typically be described as a ‘piece of
work’. On the other hand, he genuinely cares about the people he
rescues and the girls that he lives with, and he’s capable of great
protectiveness and kindness. I enjoy putting my male characters
through the mill, seeing them emerge stronger and more sensible on
the other side of their ordeal.
Adam’s
ordeal is physically extreme, but in Irrepressible, another
WIP, my male lead Andy has to contend with a great deal of snobbery.
Andy is supposedly Maria’s ‘bit of rough’, some temporary fun
to remind her what it’s like to have a sex life while she brings up
her young family as a single parent. Dr Maria Sansom is the daughter
of wealthy parents; Andy’s a buff, ‘oafish’ carpenter who likes
his nookie and beer. But as Andy’s place in Maria’s life expands
beyond the bedroom door, she sees him dealing with her toddler like
an expert and thriving throughout his trial-by-five-year-old. She
comes to realise that there’s no way that Andy can be ‘temporary’,
even though everyone else in her life seems to disapprove of him.
“She
wants you.”
Maria
barely heard Andy’s words for the howling overlaying them and
snatched Livvy from his hands as he stood at the kitchen doorway,
holding the tot out in front of him like a cop delivering a suspect
package. From Livvy’s general aroma, she could understand Andy’s
urge to delegate the costume-change moment, but she was genuinely
curious to know why he’d collapsed into the nearest kitchen chair,
his head and arms flung back, his entire body coated in sweat.
The
view wasn’t unappealing. The ‘Ria’ in her wanted to lick every
dewy bead of that sweat off his toned, tanned body, streak by streak.
She shook her head clear of the temptation and shot him a sweet grin.
“You ok?”
“Your
boy’s… a terror.”
“I
know.” There was no point in denying Ethan’s inbuilt villainy.
“What’s he been doing to you?”
“Unfair-rules
football!”
Her
giggles broke free even before she reached the kitchen door to take
Livvy for her nappy change. “Did Ethan keep changing the
goalposts?”
“The
goalposts were the least of my bloody worries! It was me versus about
thirty small people, most of them apparently playing rugby rather
than football, and every time I got near their goal they either
invented a new version of ‘off-side’, or awarded themselves a
penalty for me picking my nose or scratching my leg!”
Maria
set Livvy down and nudged her gently towards her bedroom. As Livvy
took off happily, in expectation of clean pants, Maria took a few
steps back into the kitchen and claimed Andy’s mouth in a long,
hair-raking kiss that left them both as breathless as Andy had been
when staggering through the kitchen door.
He
shot her a brilliant grin, even as he pulled away. “That was nice.
Not great for my oxygen supply, but really, really nice.”
I
like touching on emotional themes that most readers can relate to,
like being close to two people who can’t stand each other, or
having to stand one’s ground against someone who will always have
the upper hand. But I try to do so in a light-hearted way, not
distracting too much from the hot sex that takes place when my
characters’ passions ignite.
I
don’t think I’ll ever get rid of my inner realist. So I’m going
to make the best of her and write about men who’d I’d happily
tackle into bed, and women who deserve their place alongside them. No
sinkholes for Celeste and company!
Single-Syllable
Steve
has been released into the digital wilds. You can get a copy through
Amazon,
or download a copy from eXcessica.com.
If you’d like to join a mailing list to get details of upcoming
releases from Sam Thorne, please contact samthorne100
[at] outlook [dot] com
About Sam
Sam Thorne is an editor, occasional feller of trees and new author from West Sussex, England. After nearly a decade of editing within the civil service (and helping fiction-writing friends get to get published in the meantime), she’s branching out from editing and working on her romcom novel to give free rein to her hotter fantasies.
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100009105805605
About Sam
Sam Thorne is an editor, occasional feller of trees and new author from West Sussex, England. After nearly a decade of editing within the civil service (and helping fiction-writing friends get to get published in the meantime), she’s branching out from editing and working on her romcom novel to give free rein to her hotter fantasies.
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100009105805605
