I avoid sexual topics on this blog, for reasons best encapsulated in the phrase “more trouble than it’s worth“. I’d love to live in a world where a conversation about the diversity of human experience need not be approached with trepidation, but sadly, in the real world it does tend to bring out the irrational in people.
Today I’d like to lift the veil ever so slightly and share a short story I wrote in 2009. It includes the only sex scene I’ve ever written, and I’m actually quite proud of it. If you know me at all, you’ll expect a twist.
I published the story on Ficly.com, which I’ve written about before. Ficly was a site where people wrote stories in 1000 characters or less, but it has recently closed its doors — the archive is still there but you can no longer publish anything new. A new site, Ficlatté, has succeeded it, but it’s not much to look at so far.
OK, here goes…
Vampire Women
They say that if a vampire bites you, you become one. My story is sort of like that.
It began with a walk by the lake, with calm water lit by the setting sun. She lay on the grassy bank, and as I approached she smiled and invited me to lie beside her for a while. One rarely meets a woman so incautious of a strange man’s company, and I liked the boldness in her character as much as the beauty of her form.
I’ve always enjoyed that sensation of being absorbed, of surrendering control, and without ever deciding to I lost myself in her body. All reality vanished from my mind, except for how perfectly she was shaped and how much pleasure she could give me. I don’t remember when we removed our clothes, but I remember how passionate we were, and how afterwards she whispered, in the sweetest possible tones, “You know, you don’t actually have a penis anymore. You’re like me now – beautiful, female, and not really human.”
I stroked my new breasts as the sun rose, wondering if I’d ever get used to being a woman.
What do you think? Should I take up writing erotic fiction? :-)
I won’t call it erotic fiction, though, because that would imply that its purpose is to arouse the reader. It might — and if it does that’s a happy bonus — but it is not the main point of the story. A more interesting criterion is whether it achieves what Terry Pratchett has said fantasy ought to do, which is to take something familiar and present it in a new way so that we’re almost seeing it for the first time.
(You might also infer that I have some opinions about the dangerous and offensive lie that there is something called “masculinity” which men should endeavour to acquire as much of as possible, and you would be correct in that inference. This doesn’t relate to the story directly, but I doubt someone with conservative views on gender differences could have written it.)
It received positive comments on Ficly, among them: “Well, that IS new!” and “Genderqueer powers activate!”
The fact that it was assigned the index number 6666 amused me considerably at the time. It simply means that it was approximately the 6666th story to be published on the site, but you can well imagine that the sort of person who might be superstitious about a row of sixes might also be the sort to consider the story morally depraved . . .
I wrote it in response to a challenge in which participants were prompted with the instruction that “your character wakes up one morning to find that his/her body has been significantly altered“. I wasn’t the only person to write about an involuntary sex change; here’s a link to a very different, more comic, take on the subject by a participant called Harry Hood, to which I wrote a sequel. (Let’s just say I sensed that Harry’s protagonist might be a touch misogynist, and so was inspired to write a sequel in which he gets called out for it. Follow the links to read.)
