New stories

I've got a new story up call Angel at ERWA. I've also got a flasher which is a bit of fun (scroll down).

And I've got a longer flasher at Flashing in the Gutters. There are some great short, noir/crime pieces here worth having a browse through.

Except for the flasher at ERWA both of these stories are dark. Prisons and the illegal sex trade. No romance to be seen.

By contrast, I read Loretta Chase's Lord Perfect during the week and thought it wonderful. She does witty and yearning so well. Pity about the silly cover.

I was thinking the other day why it is that I love dark, gritty, spare writing that can be difficult and intellectual, as well as unashamed happily-ever-after frivolity (and want to write both).

When I was about six or seven, my mother took me and my sisters into Town to see a movie. The Sound of Music had just been released so that was our aim. But the queues where impossible so in desperation she took as to see another movie that she though would be suitable. It turned out to be Zorba the Greek. She realised it wasn't suitable at all, but I think was to exhausted to worry and in the end enjoyed seeing an intelligent movie with her four children in tow.

It was full of what they now call "adult themes." I was bored through most of it but came awake with a start when Irene Papas and Alan Bates started doing something very erotic involving no clothes and him grasping her around the hips.

Later on in the movie she got stoned (the rock variety not the green vegetable matter variety). You couldn't have a woman enjoying herself after all. But I was aroused and fascinated.

Eventually I got to see the Sound of Music and loved that too. It inspired a whole series of amateur dramatics in my family and I got to play Maria.

I guess I learned early on that the pleasure of reading, viewing and listening can be experienced in so many different ways and fulfill so many different needs. And I was lucky that, on the whole, my family wasn't bigoted and anti-intellectual. I was bought up a Catholic and had a standard Catholic education, but it wasn't too rigid. While as a family we had lots of problems, at least we weren't discouraged from thinking and talking.

So I'm happy to read and write as the mood takes me. Sometimes it's about paedophiles and sometimes it's about aristocratic Lords. A nice, good balance.