I do not take drugs, I am drugs’. – Salvador Dali

From the cold perspective of subway tokens, couch covers and evening television, books don’t seem to have much in common with drugs. But a good book is nothing but a written virus that plays with your synapses and, hacking your mind with words, causes the release of the chemicals that make you feel attraction, excitement, suspense, tension, relief, lust, perhaps even love.

People who buy romance do so in copious amounts. My mother’s collection of old Mills and Boon books numbers in the many hundreds and I dare say she is not alone. All romance follows the same formula with little tweaks here and there – as does all genre fiction. Why would anyone want to read the same story not once, but thousands of times, always the same story told with slight and subtle variations? For the same reason people will consume hundreds or thousands of cups of coffee or cigarettes or other mind altering substances over their course of their lives – because it makes them feel good.

A genre is nothing more than a subset of mind virus, a particular family of specific tales that are designed to make the reader feel a certain way. And feelings are, on a base biological level, nothing more than the interplay of the chemicals upon which our minds rest. A skillful author is only different from a chemist in that instead of formulating a physical drug for you to ingest orally or otherwise,  he or she uses combinations of words to trigger the chemistry of your mind.

You’ve probably heard about sub drop before, but have you ever heard about book drop? It’s the sense of loss you feel once a book is done. It’s exacerbated when you finish writing one.

There’s a little period of mourning that seems to come at the end of every story. The only antidote I know is to start another one – or continue working on one that had to sit on the back-burner whilst you finished the one you’re now pining for.

I miss Tank. Which is weird because she’s not real, but I do miss her. I was feeling a little down and trying to work out why and it hit me that was probably it. I also miss Rigel. There’s this bit I just found when re-reading Operation Sadiemeister and it made me all kinds of excited:

It wasn’t until Sadie saw Kate sneaking into her room with a bag of chips because she was clearly too nervous to cook with Rigel there that she snapped. “Okay, that’s enough,” she said determinedly, walking in front of the television, picking up the remote and turning the tv off.

“What on earth are you doing?” Rigel frowned at her.
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In which the author gazes at her navel…

This might be a series of posts because I think I’ve accidentally stumbled onto something of a ‘deep’ topic. I recently released a book called ‘Over Loki’s Knee’. (This isn’t a book plug, seriously.) A reader asked why I’d called it that. Was it because I thought of my readers as being over my knee in some sense?

I replied vaguely, but mostly in the affirmative. After all, a book isn’t just some words on a page that people read and either find pleasing or displeasing – it is a means of connection. When you read these words, words that I have written, my voice speaks in your mind. If I write a top that makes you tingle or a brat that makes you want to giggle with glee, that is a collaboration between my mind and yours. The message and the reciever combine to create the experience. A reader coming to a story with a particular prejudice or interest is going to have a different experience from that of another reader with different interests and prejudices.

In spite of that, or perhaps because of that, there is an intimacy in all writing. Over the course of a story, a relationship between author and reader is formed. It can be distant and dysfunctional, it can be love / hate, it can be a great sweeping romance. After all, no matter how much we might try to separate the author from their story or the reader from their experience, the story is the expression of the author, interpreted through the mind of the reader.

There are many excellent writers of spanking fiction out there and each of them has their own style, or deeper than that, a feeling one gets when reading their works. Some feel like sensual liquid poetry, some feel like deep warmth and care, some are a tantalizing mixture of erotic tension and old fashioned propriety. I think readers get a very good and very real sense of authors through their works – because good writers are honest writers even when they’re concocting great and wonderful lies.

And in my writing? What is there for a reader to find? Read more