Fifty Writers on Fifty Shades of Grey Read online

  But she had to keep her hands away. Because he was telling her to. Because he was demanding she wait until he allowed her to have it. Because if she did, he told her, it was going to be better than she could conceive of. And she believed him. These promises he was making, here in the dark, in her private velvet and jasmine-scented secret garden were like no other promises she’d ever heard.

  If she obeyed … if she followed where he led … he pledged she would find that deepest purple answer she craved.

  There was sex and then there was ecstasy. There were orgasms and then there were orgiastic mind-numbing experiences. The kind that she disappeared into and got lost inside of. The kind that only he gave her. And only in this place and only in this way.

  Passion could obliterate reality. She’d learned that from him. She’d found out that whatever you thought you knew about yourself, you could learn more. That every pleasure could be heightened. And turned to pain that turned back into more intense pleasure. She’d discovered that just thinking about this man, about his desires, his yearnings, and his demands created waves inside of her. She’d learned she could think about what he wanted and the waves would build. He’d taught her to block out the world and ride those waves and travel to other worlds she’d never been to before.

  And no one could take any of it away from her. No one could interfere. No one could say she was wrong for giving into the fantasies he offered. No one could tell her she was dirty or pagan or that she was breaking her vows or hurting her children or abandoning her responsibilities or negating the teachings of her church or her temple. No one could stop her from the delight and joy and bliss that she now knew was her right—and such a simple right to claim at that.

  Now he was asking for more. Demanding it.

  As she gave him what he wanted, her own moans—throaty and raw—drowned out the music. Her own scent—the musky rich incense of her own heated cunt—overwhelmed the jasmine and orange blossom perfume. She was floating on the waves … waves he shaped by blowing gently on her ocean. Giving her the ride of her life. Again. And then, yes, again.

  This wasn’t about power or pain … not about risk or reward … not about fidelity … this was what she took for herself. She gave herself up to him and his fiery, arousing words. And in giving, she got. He gave her burning, roiling seas that grew and grew inside of her.

  Fingers moved on her lips. Teasing. Tickling. Rubbing in exactly the right way, in exactly the right rhythm. Slowing. Then hurrying. Slowing. Then hurrying. Inside, her seas burned hotter. His words were waves rising higher. Receding … bringing her to the brink. Receding. And then to the brink again. And then to the brink for the last time.

  Her gift to herself was him. His gift to her was freedom. And fantasy. The ability to be a wild and abandoned sexual adventurer in this safe place under the covers … between the covers … because this is what erotica is … this is what it does. This is the gift of it.

  Is there a secret? Yes. Anaïs Nin and Pauline Réage and Anne Rampling and Erica Jong all knew it. E. L. James knows it.

  It is the secret behind all of our writing. And our reading. Arousal starts in the mind. And grows in the mind. The brain is the most erogenous zone in a woman’s body. That is our secret. And it is what we share.

  M.J. ROSE has been reading erotica since she was eleven and found The Story of O on her mother’s bookshelves. Rose’s first novel, Lip Service, was chosen by Susie Bright for the Best American Erotica series. International bestselling author of a dozen novels, Rose continues to mix genres and include both the erotic and the suspenseful in her work. In addition to her fiction she has written three books on marketing for authors and is one of the founding board members of International Thriller Writers. Rose is also the founder and president of the first marketing company for authors, AuthorBuzz.com. Visit her online at www.MJRose.com.

  TIFFANY REISZ

  This Is the Story

  HER LOVER one day takes O for a walk in a section of the city they never go …

  This is the story. A woman, not young and physically unremarkable except in her stark plainness, writes a letter to the married man whom she loves. Not an ordinary love letter, it is instead a story, a fever dream put on paper, the story of a woman whose lover gives her over to another world where she is to be whipped and raped and possessed by others. Violent, brutal is the story she writes him, the story of a woman with only an initial O as her name. O for orifice? Or O for zero? Graphic and yet restrained, this letter is not pornography. It is far more dangerous than that. It is literature.

  The letter isn’t sent out of love or perhaps not entirely out of love. The man to whom it is addressed is an editor of literature. And once he had said a woman couldn’t write an erotic novel. The woman, plain and not young, will try to prove him wrong. The letter is written in an odd style—third person but first person, present and past tense mingled … It is written in the manner of a bedtime story told to children. The girl meets a wolf on her walk through the forest and she is very afraid … Or in the style of words whispered in the dark between lovers in the act. It feels so good … I need this … I’m begging … The prose has the aura of a dream to it, as if the writer is dictating something she’s seeing from a distance and yet experiencing at the same time.

  Once sent, the letter proves her point—a woman can write an erotic book. But she miscalculated, wrote it far too well: her married lover thinks it should be published. She finishes it, though it is difficult for her. The plot meanders and the tortures of O increase. She finishes what she can and the book comes to a dark, abrupt ending as dreams often do—especially dreams of falling to one’s death and jerking awake.

  The book is published under the pen name Pauline Réage. A furor erupts. Many women hate it and say a man who loathes women must have written it. Other women adore it as it speaks to a part of them no one has ever before addressed. Some women burn the book. Other women read the book and burn. And the author stays silent and admits nothing. The book is brave but the author reticent. Is it the content of the story that makes her hide her identify? Or is it that the recipient of the first letter is married and her lover? Although this is Paris, it is still 1954.

  An erotic love letter never meant to be published for the masses—it is a story not unfamiliar to modern readers. Other women will follow in Réage’s footsteps. Often these women will be plain and unremarkable just as Réage was. Older, long past their sexual prime. Their beauty faded, if ever they were beauties at all, they will still have the longings of their youth. The world will see them merely as wives or mothers and not objects of sexual attention. They write, as Réage did, to prove someone wrong. A woman can write erotic fiction. A woman who is not beautiful can write something beautiful. A woman who is not the object of sexual desires is still shockingly sexual. A woman who is a wife or a mother or a nobody is, on paper, a goddess, a slut, a slave, a body to be taken and used for the pleasure of a man. Réage writes her letter to her lover for the same reason the mistress of any married man attires herself like a prostitute or a princess. It is her way of saying, “I am not your wife. I am not an ordinary woman. I am so much more.”

  • • • • •

  I SCOWL WITH FRUSTRATION at myself in the mirror …

  This is the story. Another version of the story, true perhaps or perhaps not, perhaps merely another fever dream … another woman, not young or physically remarkable, a woman with two children, a husband, nothing to distinguish her in a crowd, finds herself unable to stop dreaming about a man twenty years her junior. A beautiful man who is adored by women the world over, he is utterly unattainable. They have nothing in common. They will never cross paths. If they do by accident or whim of fate, he will not notice her. At most he’ll sign his name on a scrap of paper for her, and she will already be forgotten by him before he’s taken two steps from her. She will never have him. But in her mind, she is twenty-one years old, not forty-seven. In her mind she has no children and no husband. She is, in fact, an
untouched virgin, untouched even by her own hands. And the man is someone else. He has the same face, the same eyes, the same body she dreams of, but he is a darker version of himself. The real man leads a tame life and is devoted to one woman. The man she desires is damaged and distant. He has desires that inflame and terrify her. She wants him to be broken so she can heal him. She wants him to be lost so she can save him.

  And so she begins to write. Unlike Réage, who wrote in pencil in school exercise books in the dark, this woman writes on a BlackBerry during her commute. She has children and must steal the time from her everyday life to lose herself in this fantasy that will never come true. It is a child’s fantasy—a girl with nothing special about her except her incredible ordinariness captures the heart of a beautiful man flush with wealth and power. Like Réage’s, her story isn’t written to be published for profit. It’s put online, given away to others who, like her, love the same Unattainable. An editor finds the book, changes it, publishes it. The ordinary wife and mother has, without trying, become an author, garnered an audience, fame, millions of dollars, and the adoration of legions. Some women burn the book. Other women read it and burn.

  • • • • •

  THIS IS THE STORY.

  TIFFANY REISZ’s books inhabit a sexy shadowy world where romance, erotica, and literature meet and do immoral and possibly illegal things to each other. A seminary dropout and semi-devout Catholic, Tiffany describes her genre as “literary friction,” a term she stole from her main character, who gets in trouble almost as often as the author herself. Reisz’s debut novel, The Siren, was published by Mira on July 24, 2012. Reisz describes it as “not your momma’s Thorn Birds,” and she means it. Reisz lives in Lexington, Kentucky.

  M. CHRISTIAN

  The Game Changer

  EXCUSE THE HYPERBOLE, but there really are moments when everything just … changes: the wheel, the internal combustion engine, antibiotics, the personal computer. It would just be nice that the paradigm shift in literature and publishing would have been better written.

  To be polite—at best—Fifty Shades of Grey has been called … well, let’s let Margot Sage-EL, co-owner of the Watchung Booksellers in Montclair, New Jersey, say it: “Our customers are very smart and they say it’s badly written, but they are in the middle of book three.”

  As with anything hugely popular, the trilogy has received just about an equal amount of scorn to match its sales. Even Susan Donaldson James called it “a cheese-ball narrative whose heroine is incapable of using adult language. She refers to her genitals euphemistically as my sex.” But popular Fifty Shades is—to a staggering degree: in March it reached the number-one spot on the national e-book fiction bestseller list. Naturally there’s going to be a film.

  Putting aside the mumbles and grumbles from the legions of hardworking, and unarguably more talented, erotica writers out there (ahem … M.Christian … ahem), Fifty Shades will, no doubt, be remembered as when everything changed.

  Okay, it may not be as big as the wheel, the internal combustion engine, antibiotics, or the personal computer, but it’s still a total and complete game changer. For one thing, it’s pretty much the final nail in the old-school world of print publishing. Sure, that model has been gasping and wheezing for a few years now but for a teeny-tiny—and badly written—little book to do what New York dreamt of doing shows once and for all that they need to burn down their old ways and finally begin to embrace the lean, mean, and cutting-edge world of e-books.

  It’s also the final shovel of dirt on another corpse: the concept of old-school marketing. Fifty Shades of Grey didn’t succeed because of its brilliant prose, its immense advertising budget, or inspired publicity: it scored that coveted number-one spot because “mom” E. L. James jumped right in, feetfirst, to social networking and viral marketing with a dogged persistence that’s, frankly, a bit scary. The only bad side of this is—sigh—that for the next five to ten years we’re gonna be bombarded not just with Fifty Shades knock-offs but all those authors trying the same tricks James did.

  Still, while a lot of them won’t succeed, Fifty Shades has proven that it’s time to bury what doesn’t work—like dead tree book printing—and try to really, completely rethink marketing and publicity.

  The bottom line is that the Fifty Shades trilogy is pure, unadulterated smut.

  Porn? PORN?! The mind boggles! Sure, anyone with two brain cells to rub together could see that the world of advertising and marketing was due for a major overhaul, and only people with some serious stock holdings in paper were holding onto the fantasy that print books weren’t dead, but no one could have seen that the book that would prove both would also haul our beloved pornography out of the shadows and into the mainstream—and on to the New York Times bestseller list as well.

  So while Fifty Shades may have shaken things up a bit, take heart in that, while a lot of old traditions are tumbling down, its success means that authors—especially erotica writers—may finally get to remind the world that there’s no gray area when it comes to popularity … and money.

  M.CHRISTIAN is an acknowledged master of erotica with more than four hundred stories in anthologies such as Best American Erotica, Best Gay Erotica, and Best Lesbian Erotica, as well as many other anthologies, magazines, and sites.

  He is the editor of twenty-five anthologies, including the Best S/M Erotica series, The Mammoth Book of Future Cops, and The Mammoth Book of Tales of the Road (with Maxim Jakubowksi) as well as many others.

  He is the author of the collections Dirty Words, The Bachelor Machine, Filthy Boys, Love Without Gun Control, Rude Mechanicals, and How To Write And Sell Erotica, and of the novels The Very Bloody Marys, Me2, Brushes, Finger’s Breadth, and Painted Doll.

  LOUISE FURY

  Fifty Shades of Change

  I STARTED WORKING as a literary agent two years ago, and one of the first books I signed was a self-published erotic steampunk novel. I discovered it on Twitter, seduced by its gorgeous cover. I emailed the author and read the book in a single sitting. The writing drew me in with seductive phrases and beautiful storytelling. I was hooked. Addicted. I took it into our office and everyone read it. Everyone loved it.

  “This is a six-figure book,” said one agent.

  “This will go to auction,” said another.

  Both agents had been in the industry for many years. One of them didn’t even read erotica, but like me, in reading this book, had been drawn into a world she couldn’t forget.

  Determined to break the stereotype of self-published books, I sent it out on submission. A good book is a good book, I figured. This one just happened to be erotic. The editors offered praise. One at a Big Six house emailed me halfway through and said she loved it. Some editors took it to their boards. But in the end the content was too scandalous, too controversial for their publishers. The main character was a man who liked to have sex—lots of sex—and the story was told in first-person from the male point of view. Because of that, we knew exactly how much he liked sex. A little rough sex even appeared. It was delicious. One editor emailed me several times to let me know it was fantastic and that she thought it would be perfect for her list.

  Then her publisher canceled her erotic line, killing the potential deal.

  For two years I shopped this amazing book, determined to find it a home. I felt frustrated by the market’s limitations. Was the book too erotic? Was self-publishing its downfall? Those issues played a role. But an even bigger factor? The book was simply too kinky. Most publishers believed readers weren’t ready for that.

  But readers were ready for some kink, and they didn’t care if the book was traditionally published. They just needed to be able to find it. They just needed to be able to buy it. And then they just wanted to read it and enjoy it—in the car, on the train, on the couch, or in the bedroom.

  My struggle to find a publisher for that self-published book—which, months after Fifty Shades of Grey burst onto the scene, started receiving offers, both foreign and
domestic—wasn’t the last time our agency battled to break through the prejudices about erotica and BDSM writing. At the 2011 Romance Writers of America Conference, I sat down with a traditional, female-owned publisher and pitched them an exclusive erotica line. They said they didn’t do erotica. However, after we revealed book sales and royalty statements for writers who were publishing in the digital marketplace they got excited. They thought it could work, especially because at that time a large book retailer was looking to fill a void left after the closing of an erotic publishing imprint.

  Then they wanted the dirty details.

  Exactly what kind of books were these, they wondered. Well, BDSM, male-male, and ménage. For starters. Those are the digital bestsellers, the genres readers crave. But when we sent one of their romance editors some erotic manuscripts, she passed on the entire line and said it didn’t fit into their list. We knew it didn’t fit into their list; that’s why we approached them. It was something new and different. In the end, it was simply too different—too erotic.

  Now? Just one year later, it’s all changed, and it’s all because of one English author, E. L. James, and her three naughty books. Foreign agents call wanting more erotica. Scouts approach us wanting to talk about erotic publishing. I have an exclusive erotic imprint now at Coliloquy, a digital publisher that delivers customized erotic adventures to their readers, and created an erotic audio imprint with Audio Realms just for my clients at royalty rates that beat all competitors. (Customers don’t just want to read about spankings and bondage and dominance and submission—they want to listen to it, the better, I think, to free their hands.) A famous book packager approached me, searching for erotic authors.

  The changes are obvious throughout the industry, marked by headline-grabbing sales. Berkley snapped up veteran romance writer Sylvia Day’s self-published erotic romance in a major deal and later bought author Sylvain Renard’s Gabriel’s Inferno and Gabriel’s Rapture from a small digital publisher for seven figures.