dorli hat pics! malta!curls!

( Dorli hat pics! Sekrit message, or what? )

( Paris! Hector! Curls! The Mediterranean! Oh happy sighs. This must surely have been taken on the same day as the Sneak pics? )

dom, sub and authorship

thejennabides's recent snippets have made me think about whether the role of the author is more dommy or more subby.

I joked to Jenn that I didn't want to hem her in in her authorial, dominatricial role. But then I immediately thought, 'Hm. Is the authorial role of necessity a dom role?'

How it's dom: I the Author control the story and the plot. I invent the characters, put words and cocks in their mouths, make them move and walk and fuck. I manipulate reader response, make readers weak at the knees or hoot with laughter or die with suspense.

It's why I love writing. I can control fic in a way I cannot control rl.

How it's sub: Characters take over. They demand to be written in a certain way. The muses or whatever they are come to transport me away. I've had times where I've written in a swoon, as if something else was writing through me. I've had times where I've tried to make the story go one way but it just wouldn't; I needed to let go and allow the story to find its own riverbed to flow along.

It's why I love writing. The characters and situations I invent come alive and take me places I had not imagined.

why i like writing desert prince

I know that it seems as if I'm not writing DP because I post so rarely but for a few weeks, I actually have been writing as well as thinking very hard about the story of DP. It's moved in all sorts of directions I never thought it would; it's branched out in a way that I'm starting to suspect only an AU will (and perhaps origfic will be like that? Because what is origfic but AU?).

Some authors post a lot of snippets and musings about where they're currently at with a story. I don't do that with DP, partly because I'm superstitious and believe that once talked about the fragile dream will fade away. But I will muse about my own feelings about it, in a shamelessly self-indulgent way. And to memory it so that I can refer to it in future days.

There are several things that keep me going with DP. One is the fact that the fic's germ is a dream I had as a 16-year old girl. I can still conjure up the setting and emotions of that dream; the vividness of that oneiric snippet, as it were, helps to keep the fic grounded, and because it makes the fic so very personal (so very Mary Sueish!), that keeps me interested.

Another is the setting. For decades, I have loved Arab aesthetics. Not the politics, not the patriarchy, not even the real life (although that feeds it) but a dream aesthetics of Orientalist proportions (in Edward Said's sense -- and again, I indulge shamelessly and without pc regrets). Minarets, desert sands, men in galabiahs, the sound of the muezzin calling people to prayer, the whole Arabian Nights atmosphere conjured up for me by words like ambergris, pomegranate and grand vizier -- which brings me to the words of DP.

One of the reasons I find DP fragile is my experience with the karl/dom epic which was so woeful. That, also, was very MarySueish but in a bad way. It had no scaffolding for the Mary Sue to be contained. DP has the scaffolding of the prose style which limits what I can do and by limiting me, liberates me. Sometimes the prose flows, sometimes I help it along by reading Arabian Nights or Nizami or Abu Nuwas, sometimes it stalls and sometimes it gets too much and *too* baroque. Sometimes I feel it should be more pastichy, sometimes I feel as if the prose has become my own so much that it ceases to be anchored in Oriental tales.

Another reason is that I can immerse myself in the aesthetics I like by doing 'research'. I had never heard of Firdausi and Nizami two months ago but they are famous mediaeval Persian poets and my icon illustrates a Firdausi manuscript and on Friday I read Nizami's Tale of the Seven Princesses (in their seven pavilions). I read the Grove Dictionary of Music to find out about Arabic musical instruments. I read the Grove Dictionary of Art to find out about Islamic calligraphy and about the art of textiles (for I thought I should know at least as much as my protagonist who is, after all, a cloth merchant). Then I had to stop myself because what does a cloth merchant know of Classical Arabic metre or court music? But then I solved that problem by making someone else know about these things.

And all the time the story grows. It now has a backstory with characters that are starting to interest me almost as much and possibly more than the ones in my actual fic. It has an ending and a story beyond the ending with another set of characters that pull me towards them and want me to spin their tales. It has a cast of characters, each one of whom is starting to have their own lives and backstories and things they do while my main first-person protagonist isn't looking. It's all so interesting and all so much more than my original dream. It's got love and lust and power and politics and superstition and science and art and pride and hate and intrigue and moral choice.

It's a much more complicated story than I've ever written. Sometimes I don't feel quite up to it (which is when thinking of the prose limitations helps me, and thinking of the fact that this is not beyond me, but belongs to me and is based on my own *dream*), and most times I have my other book to write these days so don't have the peace of mind (or desk space) to devote to DP.

And no LJ cut, either. I was pondering whether to put one in. But a) that makes this post seem more important than it really is (to anyone but me); b) thamiris posts mile-long posts without cutting; and c) I just feel like inflicting this on everyone and you, my longsuffering Friends, must simply scroll on by.

FIC: k/d epic amnesty chapters

Title: (untitled karl/dom epic)
Pairing: Karl/Dominic
Rating: NC-17
Spoilers: None
Finished: 20 May 2003
Posted: 7 February 2004
Warnings: Long. Angsty sex. Psycho problems. Dodgy formatting (sorry).

Author's Notes: As some of you know, a very long Karl/Dom epic haunted me for about nine months from 2002-03. I never posted it: too much angst, too much Mary Sue, too much psycho cathexis. I will never revise it in its current form. I started to but ended up writing a new fic. But let me be free of it! Let me use this wip amnesty week to inflict selected chapters on the hapless public.

Many heartfelt thanks to eyebrowofdoom and to lazlet who read it and commented so seriously. For this amnesty, I took none of their advice and revised nothing; they are not culpable for anything herein.

These are the chapters I am least embarrassed by. The fic is very bitsy so cutting chapters out actually improves reading (I think). Some of them I found very sexy to write at the time.

Anyway, here it is:

FIC at my site as it proved too long to fit into one LJ post

Feel free to post comments and/or abuse below. :-)