Wicked Fairy Tales Month

August is Wicked Fairy Tales Month at Forbidden Fiction, and there's still time to get involved. Head over to the home page and tell the editors which fairy tale you'd most like to see redone as erotica -- you'll be entered in a drawing to win a free e-book at the end of the month.

You can also check out interviews with authors whose stories are featured in the Wicked Fairy Tales collection, including yours truly:

The unknown is erotic, and fairy tales are all about the unknown. What's in the cave? What's beyond the edge of the forest? What happens if you break the rules? What happens if people aren't who they seem to be? What would you be if you could be something else, or if you were forced to be? These questions become very sexual very easily. Beyond that sense of magical roleplay, however, fairy tales in their original form have a deep sense of eroticism. Many of them are about marriage, which means they're about sex. They're about risk. People do strange things, and some of those are sexual. In the original version of The Six Swans, for example, the mute princess for some reason climbs a tree and throws her clothes down to the king's servant a garment at a time. I've never understood quite what she was up to, but it's an undeniably erotic action, and it's there in the original version.

You can read the full interview here.

Be sure to check out other interviews while you're over there, and enter the drawing (the main post is here).

The Wicked Fairy Tales anthology is available here. Enjoy!

Music Mondays: "Picking Up The Pieces" by The Milk feat. Idris Elba

"You're looking at a fighter." -- Idris Elba



Yet again, I'm relying on the fundamental sex appeal of the blues. Idris Elba also makes the video easy to watch...

Repeated viewings helped me get through the rough final stages of a recent project, so I owe the song a debt of gratitude.

Fighting Spirit: "New Low" by Middle Class Rut

"I did my time in a windowless box, like it or not. All I got now is today; tomorrow ain't here, and yesterday has gone dead on me anyway." -- Middle Class Rut



This isn't one of my usual "sexy music" posts, hence the mid-week appearance. I like this song's fighting spirit, and have been listening to it a lot lately.

Despite the song's title ("New Low"), I feel hope and defiance from this song. The quote I posted above feels like a punked up version of the day at a time cliche. The song's narrator has been through a lot, but he hasn't given up. The failures of the past don't matter, and he's determined to make use of the resources he does have.

When I learned a little background on the band, the song's sense of struggle took on a deeper meaning for me. These guys are far from an overnight success. They've been pounding away in pursuit of their art for well over a decade. I can't help but hear the song as an anthem to continued commitment, which I really respect.

Music Mondays: "Paradise Circus" by Massive Attack

"The devil makes us sin, but we like it when we're spinning in his grip."
--Massive Attack



(Warning: Video NSFW)

This is, of course, a great song -- and it's been in scenes on True Blood, as well as in the recent movie Savages. But I just discovered how much I love this video, perhaps most of all for the added interview with the old woman. I'll confess that when I was searching for the official music video and saw the old woman's face, I thought, "That can't be the right video." But that turned out to be wrong -- and evidence of my internal prejudice that sexuality is the province of the young. Watch the video for the old woman even more than for the song.

Here, for example, is her definition of orgasm:

An orgasm is that point in time that can't be measured. A mystical instant that can't really be measured in this dimension.

I like that. Enjoy!

Modern-Day Sexy Bibliographies

If you're into the stuff I've been blogging about the last few days -- the mysteries of old forbidden books -- I must draw your attention to Scissors and Paste Bibliographies, which compiles information about old erotic books, such as a catalog of books published by the German Olympia Press.

You can pick up a lot of interesting detail there on the history of erotic publishing. See, for example, the fascinating page on Brandon House Library Editions, where you can see covers for books with excellent titles such as Clit Clique and Maidenhead Stories, as well as pick up some interesting historical notes on "the effective collapse of censorship [in the United States] in 1967."

A hat tip, as usual, to Geoff Nicholson's Sex Collectors, for alerting me to the work of Patrick J. Kearney, who maintains the site.

And An Index Can Be Sexy, Too

Did you think it was just bibliographies? Geoff Nicholson's Sex Collectors presses the case of the sex appeal of the index as well:

Actually, there are times when I think the book's index is the best part of, and possibly even an excuse for, the whole enterprise [referring to the Victorian sex history, My Secret Life]. You might, for instance, look up "Spending" and find the following citations:

my first
involuntary
on writing paper
on a silk dress
on silk stockings
against a looking glass
against a door
in a woman's hand
copiously
baudy ejaculations when
is the most ecstatic moment of life
happiness of dying whilst

This makes me think fiction ought to have the index, too. I suppose there's something similar going on with tags -- which I have certainly used to explore sites such as Oysters and Chocolate. On the other hand, the list puts things in a much funnier format. I'd love to see one of the erotic novels I love gifted with an index like this.

The Sexy Trail of Ownership

One thing I appreciate about Geoff Nicholson's book Sex Collectors is that it reminds me of the thrill of the chase of erotic objects -- the way it is when they have to be physical and they have to be found. With the exception of a few serendipitous volumes (such as a copy of Best American Erotica 1996 that I found at a library book sale when I was, ahem, probably a little too young for it), I started reading erotica online because I could actually handle buying it online.

It still makes me nervous to buy a physical copy of a Harlequin romance novel, or to be seen in public with it, though I force myself to do these things occasionally as a sort of private political statement. A lot of my erotica is electronic, partly because a lot of it is published in e-book only form, but also because it's a lot easier to buy Women Who Love Wearing Leashes Volume Three (*) when only me, my credit card company, Google and whichever technology companies are currently tracking me are likely to know about it.

But Nicholson is reminding me of how cool a physical object can be -- not just because it's nice to have something you can manhandle a little, but also because it can be sexy to think about who else has manhandled that very item.

See, for example, his discussion of My Secret Life (**):

published between 1888 and 1894, the great Victorian eleven-volume, two-and-a-half-thousand page, infinitely obsessive and detailed account of one man's genuinely extraordinary sex life.

Patrick J. Kearney ... says that My Secret Life "is probably the most collectible and desirable of erotic texts, but certainly not the rarest." It was first published in Amsterdam, though the book itself claims to have been published in Belgium. ... Previous owners of examples from that first edition are said to have included the Satanist Aleister Crowley, silent comedian Harold Lloyd, movie director Josef von Sternberg, and George Mountbatten, the second Marquess of Milford Haven. It's perfectly possible that some of these people, especially the Hollywood crowd, owned the same copy at different times. Today I believe there are copies in the British Library, in the Kinsey Institute, in the private hands of Karl-Ludwig Leonhardt, and in the library of the late Gerard Nordmann.

While it can be kind of disgusting to think of who might have pleasured him or herself with whatever sex book or object you're holding, in this case I find the trail of ownership pretty sexy, mysterious, glamorous, and so on. The forbidden nature of the object makes knowing about it or owning it feel like being part of an exciting secret society.

I don't think this is just about anonymously written Victorian literature. I once moved into an apartment that came with a stack of sexy romance novels left by the previous tenant -- the kind that, at the time, I'd never have had the courage to go buy at the store, but was very interested in reading. The mystery of the discovery, and the physicality of the experience, added to the appeal of the books. I've often wondered about that previous owner, who in my head was a knowing teenager with some idea of how much those books would be appreciated by a fellow.

I love e-books, not least for their convenience and the publishing possibilities they've opened for many writers today. However, passages like the one I quoted make me remember why the smell of paper can be so exciting.

(*) Not an actual book, as far as I know. Though go ahead and write or publish it if you want, because I probably would buy it.
(**) For those with a healthy sense of irony, My Secret Life is available for the Kindle, here. I also found a few copies of the paperback Grove Press edition of the book.