A quick update.

This may not mean anything to anyone who didn't follow the original soul-searching about Come The Revolution a while ago, but to anyone who did and remembers vaguely what I was on about - I seem to have won the fight. Give or take a few explicit details in the sex-scenes, which I can live with. I love my editor.

I thought about making this post less mysterious, but if I did that I would have to kill you. And the Internet is a very populous place...

In other news, I am in She Stoops To Conquer at my local theatre next week (wigs, corsets, West Country accents, lots and lots of knob gags), am recovering (I hope) from a cold, doing well on my New Year's Resolutions (except for the one about punctuation), and haven't read Fifty Shades of Grey yet. (One of my friends is going to lend it to me. I suspect that as a big fan of The Story of O I will be disappointed. But watch this space. It strikes me as the sort of thing I might want to blog about.)

Anyway. Right now, my main feeling is: hurrah!

It's summer. Which means you must BUY...

 Hurrah! It's summer!

But when summer arrives, we all have responsibilities. Especially if we are planning to wear summer clothes. I love it that Boots is supporting us through this difficult time, and is giving us so much generous help. God forbid that we should embarrass ourselves by not living up to society's high standards.

We all know that if you are a woman, you have a duty to be:

- entirely hairless (except for head-hair, see below).
- bronzed.
- sweet-smelling (ideally of something edible, because that means the Men In Our Lives will find us mouth-wateringly attractive).
- smooth-skinned.
- smooth-footed (those pesky rough bits on our feet can really rub against his virilely hairy legs in bed).
- bright-eyed (those vitamins are really important for our appearance).
- glossy-haired (except for body hair, see above).
- beautifully made-up (but take it off at night, girls, otherwise you might get spots).
- young (the rest of us will have to fake it).
- wearing something strapless, backless and skimpy (ideally, of course, naked).
- dazzling (or as Boots puts it, "outshining the sun". Let's gloss over the slight logical problem there, and just take note that, as we're doing the dazzling, sunglasses aren't included. Those are for the men).

So go out, girls, and BUY BUY BUY! "Say 'YES'." How life-affirming. God forbid you should say 'NO'. Then you might end up ugly and no one will like you. Let alone fancy you, which is (after all) the Purpose Of Our Lives. Not fancying, being fancied.

If you're a man, you have a duty to be:

Oh, no. Wait.

Thanks, Boots. And FUCK OFF.

Fanfiction, slash, and the Female Gaze

I'm taking a pause in the middle of Mazecheat edits, which are slow, boring work (mainly adding in technical/plot points so that the end actually works - which is complicated, requires close reading and is highly unrewarding). And it's lunchtime and there's nothing on BBC iPlayer I feel like watching, so...

...so I thought I would write this.

I've been meaning to write about fanfiction/slash fiction for a while - ever since, in fact, I read one of the first ever online reviews of The Traitor Game, which said: "the one thing I'm curious about is whether B R Collins cut her writing teeth online, as there are elements in it which are closer to fanfiction than to professional fiction - and this is in no way a criticism!" Later she added that it was "something to do with the quality of the emotions. Like I said - definitely NOT a crit!"

Ri-ight, I thought.

I didn't get it at all. I knew nothing about fanfic at that point - and when I looked at some it still didn't make sense. Fanfic, I thought, is when a writer takes SOMEONE ELSE'S CHARACTERS and SOMEONE ELSE'S WORLD and writes their own story about them and it. (Those caps aren't emotional, by the way, they're supposed to imply a kind of slightly bemused emphasis. Imagine me talking to myself in a very slow and confused sort of way.) So if you're writing with your OWN characters and your OWN world... er... well - fic possibly, but where does the fan bit come in? (Unless you're your own fan, of course, which I suppose, in my case, possibly... but that's presumably not quite what she was driving at. She'd never met me, after all.)

It bugged me. Because deep down - and the more I read fanfic, the stronger it was - I had a conviction that she was on to something. And that felt... weird. As if I'd revealed more of myself than I meant to.

And I kept reading. I read lots and lots of fanfiction, most of it slash fiction. And slowly, slowly it started to dawn on me. She wasn't really talking about fanfiction in general. No, she was talking about slash. Slash is - and I'm mainly talking about M/M slash, just so you know - a form, or let's say a subspecies, or maybe a kind of daughter-species, of fanfiction. But here's the crucial thing: 'original' slash can (and does) exist, when 'original' fanfic (presumably) doesn't.

For anyone who isn't familiar with slash, let me give you the basic rundown. Slash fiction is (generally, see above) fanfiction which involves a non-canonical pairing of two (generally) male characters. It is (generally*) written by women for women. And most of them (generally**) are straight or bi. I.e., they find their male characters sexually attractive.

(For more details, plus endless, endlessly enticing links - this time I got distracted through here and here to, er, here - go to TVTropes. Actually The Traitor Game has its own TVTropes entry, where the troper has obligingly joined in on this debate...)

So what's the difference between slash fiction and gay fiction? Surely gay men (for example) writing about gay men will have the same basic approach? And they don't get labelled slash, do they? (And whether or not you think "slashy" is pejorative, it's certainly more marginalising and easily dismissible than "gay".) I'm happy to acknowledge slash as a genre, but I'm not prepared to define it simply by the gender of the author (M/M fiction by woman = slash, by man = gay). No. So what is it about? The believability of the Ms as Ms? The transparency (or otherwise) of the convention that these are, actually, Fs, rewritten and encoded in order to explore something about them in the real world?

Anthony McGowan (great YA writer and altogether Good Thing) once said to me that he was astonished at how male he thought the characters in The Traitor Game were. And it was one of the nicest compliments I've ever had. (My mother, on the other hand, told me they were far too female. I like to think that Tony knows more about male experience than my mother... but you never know.) I really wanted TTG to be authentic; I didn't want the characters to be some female fantasy of adolescent boys. (There's a place for that... but possibly only in my head.) And I do think, truly, that I succeeded. "Gay", then, rather than "slash"?

And yet... it is a bit slashy. I mean... What was it the review said? "Something in the quality of the emotion"? Well. There's a lot of sexual attraction. There's a lot of boys looking at each other. There's a fair amount of sublimated eroticism which focuses on eyes and hands and voice, rather than - well, breasts or arses or cocks or... Maybe there really is something in the quality of the gaze, not just its object, which can imply or subvert the gender of the gazer. Maybe there's something female in how you look, not just who you're looking at. Maybe the implied gender of the gazer is more important, in the end, than the gender of the gazee.

But no. I don't like that conclusion, and I don't trust it, either. My gut tells me that fancying someone is fancying someone. Sexual attraction is sexual attraction. Men don't automatically fall for big tits, any more than women fall for a lovely personality. The Female Gaze, as Our Friend TVTropes says, 'may overlap with Homosexual Male Gaze'. Think we're back where we started.

And yet... and yet...

I am playing around at the moment with a slash novel. Yes, deliberately slashy, deliberately self-indulgent - not one for the publishers, more to remind myself of the onanistic pleasure of writing, to drive away the I-must-make-a-living-demons that prey on creativity. I started it yesterday. It's from a male character's POV, and on the first page I reread the sentence: "Behind him there was a young man - his own age, but taller, with a clear, cold look in his eyes, as though the mountain air had got between his irises and the outside world."

Bingo, I thought. That is so slashy.

And I don't even know why.



*OK, I'm going to stop doing this now. You get the idea.
** No, I'm sorry, I can't.

A Strange Juxtaposition

I don't have much time to read at the moment as I'm working really hard, but I never stop reading completely, and in the last few days I found myself reading two completely different books at once.

The books were A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu by Marcel Proust, and The Rules, by Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider.

A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu (OK, who'm I trying to kid? Let's call it Remembrance of Things Past. I'm reading it in English, obviously) is a masterpiece. It's probably best-known for being extremely long: it's somewhere around a million words, I think - I'm on page 829, which is near the end of the first volume of three... But it's also well-known for being brilliant. Proust is an amazing observer, dry and quietly witty and beautifully incisive, saying things about human behaviour and emotions that are true, and surprising, and surprising because they are surprising. There's more wisdom about memory and friendship and pleasure and unrequited love than you can shake a stick at. Not to mention writing and success and failure and... well, you get the idea. All the subjects that are close to my heart. I would recommend it to everyone. (Or at least the first 829 pages. I don't know about the rest yet.)

The Rules, on the other hand, is an abomination. I requested it from the library because I'd come across it on Wikipedia and thought it sounded interesting in a distasteful sort of way. I now feel - literally - dirty.

The Rules is a "self-help" (I'm sorry, but those quotation marks are necessary) book which, by its own admission, is designed to help women capture the heart - sorry, the engagement ring - of "Mr. Right". It is a guide to "playing hard to get" and consists entirely of gems like "always hang up first", "never accept a date for Saturday after Wednesday" and "don't sleep with him on the first date". I started off by feeling amused and superior. As I persevered I started to feel queasy. "We are feminists," the introduction announces, "but men and women are biologically and emotionally different. Men are the aggressors." There is so much wrong with this statement that I don't know where to start. (Here might be good, actually.)

The authors of The Rules are deeply smug about their "success stories". Cherry and Marilyn and Paige have all, apparently, done really well in their quest to get married (notice the lack of indirect object in that phrase). Thanks to The Rules. And you know what? I can see why, if you're already the sort of person who would do The Rules, doing The Rules might help you. If you need The Rules, you are probably the kind of person who will do better in the "quest for Mr. Right" if you hide the real you. (Actually, I think I feel sorrier for the "Mr. Right"s.)

I also couldn't help posing the question of what happens when, having got that all-important engagement ring, you finally let your fiance see the real you. This had obviously occurred to the previous readers of The Rules, since in this new updated edition the authors had explained that you don't stop doing The Rules just because you're married! Oh no! You go on with The Rules, because if you don't want to be single or divorced you have to make sure your man feels good about himself and goes on feeling that he's the aggressor he naturally, biologically is.

I wonder what Proust would have made of all this. Unlike Fein and Schneider, he probably wouldn't have claimed to be a feminist. And he might well have acknowledged the power that delay and frustration have on desire. But I like to think that he would have been quietly contemptuous of their sexual politics, their smugness, their evangelical desperation. And, indeed, their prose style.

Then again, I haven't finished Remembrance of Things Past yet. For all I know, the next 2,200 pages could be filled entirely with dating advice.