Who You Gonna Call? #ghosts #paranormal #vampires

Image by cocoparisienne from Pixabay

For some reason, today I’ve been thinking about ghosts.

Ghost tales are the poor cousin in the paranormal sub-genre. For every story of visitors from beyond the veil, you'll find dozens featuring vampires and werewolves. Ghosts are not nearly as trendy, at least not these days. That's one reason I enjoy writing about ghosts. An author has a great deal more freedom.

A long tradition constrains vampires and lycanthropes. Everyone knows how they behave, their strengths and their weaknesses, how they can be killed, and in the romance/erotica genre at least, why they're sexy. One can only tweak the conventions so far before readers will cry foul. I've actually read posts on discussion groups where readers complained that a vampire “couldn't really eat a steak” or “couldn't sire children on a human woman”. In “Vampires Limited”, published in the altruistic vampire erotica volume ComingTogether: In Vein, I have a member of the undead community who can walk about in daylight, as long as it's cloudy, and who is more endangered by electromagnetic radiation from a cell phone than by garlic or crosses. As I wrote that story, I really wondered if I was pushing things too far, whether I would incite angry protests from vampire-loving readers.

With ghosts, there are very few givens. A ghost represents some manifestation, in the physical world, of a person who has died. The author has fairly free rein in deciding the characteristics of that manifestation. A ghost may be ethereal, a permeable fog taking a human shape, or corporeal, able to interact physically with flesh and blood creatures. (The latter is perhaps more useful in erotica!) Specters may appear only in dreams, or only at night – in certain locations, or associated with specific natural phenomena. Some ghosts may not appear at all, making their presence known only through their effects on the environment, messages scrawled on mirrors, or clues leading to the discovery of secrets. Some of my favorite ghost tales, such as Henry James' The Turn of the Screw, are sufficiently subtle that they leave open the question of whether the ghosts actually exist at all, or whether they are projections of the character's imagination.

Ghosts' emotions and intentions can be at least as varied as their physical characteristics. They may be sorrowful, vengeful, compassionate or horny. A widely accepted belief is that ghosts hang around in the physical realm because of some sort of unfinished business: a murder to be avenged, a mystery to be revealed, a treasure to be guarded, a child to be guided and protected. On the other hand, some ghosts seem to exist purely for the sake of causing trouble, from simple mischief to genuine malevolence. A ghost can be a character as rich and full-bodied as a living being. The chains that tether a spirit to our world can provide a start on a riveting conflict.

In my ghost tales, the human character often doesn't understand that the ghost is a visitor from the grave until quite late in the story. “Twentieth Century”, which is included in my dark paranormal collection Fourth World: Erotic tales of monsters, myths and magic, is a tale of a woman more at home in the past than in a modern city, whose love of things antique draws her into an encounter with history. Only near the end of the tale does she realize that her lover is in fact long dead. 

 

Tomorrow's Gifts, part of Total-E-Bound's “Christmas Spirits” collection, draws on the Dickensian concept of the “ghost of Christmas future”. However, Michael really has no idea exactly who or what Thorne is, other than a hot stud who understands his submissive needs, until the last scenes.

“Twentieth Century” has a bittersweet conclusion. Beth loses her ghostly lover forever, though she learns something about herself. Tomorrow's Gifts, an erotic romance, has a happy ending, but it does not involve the ghost. This highlights a bit of a problem with using ghosts as main characters in romance. How, when a human loves a ghost, to you engineer a happily-ever-after? No matter how deliciously corporeal and carnal a spectral lover may be, a long-term relationship is not likely to be very satisfying. On the other hand, what are the options? One of my readers wrote, in response to a question I posed in a contest:

I hate endings where the ghost just disappears/goes to heaven/finds peace and the heroine then meets a guy who reminds her of/is the reincarnation of/is the great-grandson of the hero. It doesn't count if he is not the hero, I don't want a reincarnation or any substitute, I want her to find happiness with the hero. But there is one ending that is even worse, where the heroine dies too so they can be together forever.

Herein lies the rub. A romance author can ignore this problem by simply offering a “happy for now” ending, where the human protagonist(s) and the ghosts are busily getting it on and not worrying about the future. This is not likely to be effective in a longer work, though. If the reader cares at all about the characters, she is bound to be frustrated, wondering how things will turn out them in the future.

This may be a partial explanation for the popularity of vampires as opposed to ghosts, at least in the realm of erotic romance. The same reader above said:

Funny, it doesn't bother me when a vampire hero turns his heroine into a vampire, but I don't want to have two ghosts living happily ever after.

As my followers have probably realized, I don't necessarily require all my stories to end happily, so this structural problem with ghosts doesn't really bother me. I love the other-worldliness of a ghost tale. There's not much mystery left in vampires. I also appreciate the fact that ghosts are not necessarily monsters. They may have supernatural powers, but fundamentally, they are as human as my living characters – heroes, villains, creeps and clowns. Ghosts offer a wide scope for the creative imagination.

Writing Commando -- #amwriting #freedom #genres

When I was in my mid-twenties – during my sex goddess period – I sometimes went out without panties. Walking around bare beneath my skirt, every current of air caressing my naked flesh, was thrilling to the point of addiction. It's not that I'm an exhibitionist (although perhaps we erotic authors all share a desire to expose ourselves). I wasn't interested in treating strangers to a flash of my pussy. Indeed, I would have been mortified if I'd accidentally revealed my bottomless state.

The appeal had more to do with a sense of freedom and a consciousness of risk, a heady appreciation of my own delightful recklessness. Most of my life I'd hewed close to the rules, an overachiever always trying to please others. I'd been shy and timid, dutiful and diligent, the quintessential good girl. When my hormones took over the helm, that changed. I found that I was far braver and more brazen than I (or anyone else who knew me) would have believed. And I loved that feeling, the notion that I was treading the edge rather than keeping to the straight and narrow.

My panty-less state focused my attention on the sensual. I became acutely aware of temperature and texture. Arousal simmered through me, ready to be sparked into flame by a chance encounter with a kindred spirit. Erotic possibilities waited around every corner, and, bare-bottomed and moist with anticipatory desire, I was ready to take advantage of them.

Writing my first novel felt very similar to “going commando”, though it came more than a decade later. I didn't worry about markets or reader sensibilities. I wrote what turned me on: wild, kinky, transgressive scenes, every assortment of genders, twosomes, threesomes and foursomes, floggers and spankings, nipple clamps and butt plugs, public sex, pony sex, anal sex, even golden showers. I pushed the limits of acceptability to the point that my editor actually made me tone down a couple of scenes (and this was back when Black Lace was billed as “erotica”, not “erotic romance”). My personal fantasies provided the energy to move the book forward. Craft issues were secondary. The book had already been accepted on spec, and I wasn't really thinking about what happened after it was published. The writing process itself was arousing.

I didn't know anything about genres back then., though reading Raw Silk now, I realize that it follows many of the conventions of modern erotic romance – except, of course, for its omnisexuality. The inclusion of F/F and M/M in a book that is mostly M/F will evoke criticism from many romance readers, who seem to want a sort of genre purity. They'd probably judge my heroine as promiscuous too, for having simultaneous sexual relationships with three different men, although in the end, in typical romance fashion, she chooses to commit to just one.

None of this concerned me back then. I wasn't so swept away that I lost sight of the story. Indeed, even now the novel's plot strikes me as quite tight and well-paced. I guess that was instinct, though, because my focus was squarely on the sex. Like those days when I eschewed undergarments and opened myself to adventure, I wasn't concerned with what others thought. I was free, writing for the pure joy of vicarious experience. I was in my heroine's mind and body, living my dreams through her. If others disapproved, so be it.

If you think catch a hint of wistfulness in my description of those times, you're not wrong. I don't go commando anymore. The notion embarrasses me – a sexagenarian exposing her graying pubic hair to the world? But I remember that intoxicating feeling of lightness and power. I miss it.

And my writing? I've had nineteen years of education on the tyranny of genres, what sells and what doesn't, what you can and cannot include in a book aimed at a particular market niche. I'm constantly tempted, for instance, to let my straight heroines indulge their occasional Sapphic inclinations, but I know that will be the kiss of death for any book aimed at the erotic romance market. Meanwhile, I have a difficult time keeping my erotica from becoming to “mushy”. Although I've had my share of zipless fucks, I've never found sex without some emotional connection – love, tenderness, loneliness, shared kink, whatever – to be at all arousing.

I yearn for the freedom – the innocence – of my first years writing erotica. I've started to realize I'll never be a best seller (and I'm not even sure I want to be). So why should I care about pleasing a mass of readers? I know there are some people who'll appreciate my particular approach, my personal blend of romanticism and filth. I should strip off my official author's uniform and just write to please myself, and them.

I can already feel the breeze.