Getting into character

Simon Neil, Biffy Clyro

Ok, so having said that I like writing shorts, I am now trying to make progress on the long, the novel, the proper book. The first-person narrator is Jeremy, a normal working-class bloke who's a natural dom. I'm having to write a character profile, because I'm struggling to get into his head. I have no trouble writing from a male viewpoint, but male and straight and naturally dominant is fucking with my brain. 

So I've written him a little confessional-type history and then I thought, I could do with some visuals of what this guy looks like. Now, he can't be the besuited, billionaire business type currently beloved of erotic romance, because I can't stand a man in a suit and if I was a man I certainly wouldn't be one who dressed smartly. I'd be one who favoured jeans and t-shirts but had probably mellowed from his younger days as a messy-haired, grungy kind of dude. So I looked up some hunky rockers. And what did I find? Not one from my list of fanciables who has a dominant look in his eyes, damnit. This probably says more about my taste than it does about hunky rockers in general. But it's also useful in its own way, because, as I've probably said a million times before, I hate stereotypes. And what could be more delicious than a dominant man who's confident enough in himself to show a little vulnerability on occasion?

Anyway, here's the start of the character profile:

Jared Leto, 30 Seconds to Mars

Hi, my name’s Jeremy and I like to hurt women.

That’s how I imagine it would start, my confessional at some kind of Sadists’ Anonymous.

And how long have you had these feelings, Jeremy?

This is more like how I imagine the psychiatrist’s consultation would go. As long as I can remember, I’d say. I used to tie up my sister’s dolls and dangle them over the steam from the kettle spout by their luscious blonde hair. She had so many, she didn’t notice when I took one, stripped off its wide, pink princess dress and buried it upside down in the soil at the bottom of the garden so just its legs were sticking out. Well, its legs and bum, which was about the extent of my anatomical knowledge back then.

I vividly remember the Saturday teatime programmes in which someone was most likely to get captured and threatened with all manner of devious tortures. Only threatened, mind you, this was family viewing. I was the Sheriff of Nottingham, the bad guy who snatched Daisy Duke, Indie gone bad when he locks Willie in the cage in The Temple of Doom. I drew the line at being Jabba the Hutt...

Review: Kinky by Justine Elyot

First of all, I just have to say that I want a Dimitri. In fact, I think everyone deserves a Dimitri of their very own. Maybe a pocket-sized version so you can keep him with you at all times. He’s such a sweetie. He’s also the hero of this fabulous tale. A tale which has joined the ranks of books that kept me up past 11pm. And you should know that strange things involving pumpkins happen when I’m still up past 11pm.

It’s a beautifully well-written story of an office worker and a Russian wannabe actor brought together by their clandestine spying on an S&M club. But not as strange and circuitous as that sentence makes it sound. Anyway, Rosie and Dimitri watch a little schoolroom spanking scene and then manage to wangle an invitation to said club. As complete novices, they set about trying out its various rooms and items of equipment while Dimitri considers working as a professional Dom to beat the restaurant kitchen drudgery he’s ended up with.

So Dimitri = Dom. But he’s a million miles from the stereotype. Sure, he can be a little unpredictable and succeeds in embarrassing poor Rosie, but he’s also attentive, caring, funny and sweet. The sort of guy you think you can trust and you actually turn out to be right. And did I mention sweet? The other thing that really struck me about Kinky was that it manages to successfully negotiate that very narrow track of being both hot and humorous. It made me snigger, particularly where Rosie and Dimitri battle the language barrier and in Rosie’s increasingly preposterous bastardisations of another character’s name – Trixietots.

Elyot has managed to write a book about ‘the scene’ that steers an original and compelling path away from leather trousers and leashes. But it’s also a heart-warming romance between Rosie and Dimitri that leaves you genuinely wishing them well. 

Kinky is published by Mischief Books. I bought it at amazon.co.uk, here.

And for the love of gods, someone please tell me how to get rid of the white background from my first paragraph...

Thoughts: The long and the short of it.

I’ve been polishing off a fair few short stories since I had my first couple of acceptances from Xcite Books a few months ago. They’re fun to write. I was going to say quick, but with all the rereading and rewriting I do they actually take quite a while. What they provide is the chance to play around, try different perspectives, quirky scenarios. I’m never short (forgive the pun) of ideas for shorts. And finishing them brings fairly quick gratification.

But I also have a longer work in progress, begun a couple of years ago and lying stagnant in my ‘stuff to work on’ file. I’m starting to think I should set aside a regular slot or two in my week for making progress on this. In terms of pure wordage, I have 15,000. I’m aiming for about 80,000. This is going to take a lot more stamina than a few short stories.

I had started to think at the back of my mind that the whole thing was a bit silly. I guess many writers will empathise with this. You leave a work for a while and your inner critic starts to tell you it’s terrible. Then you reread it with the benefit of a bit of distance and perspective and think, wow, this is hot stuff. 

So now I have to research life on board an eighteenth-century ship. How many people would it take to crew various sizes of vessel? What is the correct terminology for all those masts, sails, bits of rope? How long would journeys to various exotic destinations take from Europe? What would the crew eat and drink? It’s surprising how many facts I seem to know already from some unknown source, but I don’t think I can blag the rest by just reading Hornblower and watching Johnny Depp. That's Ioan Gruffudd above as Hornblower in the telly series, by the way.