Sunday 18 September 2005

Pic of the day: In the anime Rizelmine, a horny main character is meant to be comic relief. Of course, he is not allowed to act on his impulses. And neither am I are my characters...

Horny fiction

No, don't worry; I won't show off my provocatively erotic prose here. I just want to document another facet of my unusual and oh so temporary life.

Regular readers will know that I like to write fiction, usually magic realism or somewhere on the spectrum from there to high fantasy. I also like to write romance, but alas, I suck at romance. Both in writing and in practice, which may be related. Still, there is usually at least some erotic tension.

Extremely regular readers will know that, despite being single since I grew up, I still have a sex drive. I don't make much out of that in my journal, and in fact I don't make much out of it in real life either. I am almost shockingly celibate, certainly by the local standards (Scandinavia). Probably by almost any standard. There are reasons for this, which are beyond the scope of this entry, although it can all be pieced together from my archive.

From the start of this month, I have upgraded my standards of sexual purity, to the point of not going out during lunch break on hot days (when the local women show off their bodies the most). And while I have long known that it is bad to look at women to desire them, I no longer look at them to admire them (which is very different). But if any of this new policy has any effect on my brain stem, it is rather moderate. For as the winds of time blows over my life, I still grow sexually excitable. With me being me, that doesn't mean I rush out to try to get some random girl drunk so I can have my way with her. But it does mean I have to put my fiction writing on hold if I want to come back to it later.

My poor fictional characters live in my brain, you know. They are usually already more interested than I in the opposite sex (or in a very few cases their own). But if I let them out to play while I am like this myself, may the Light have mercy on the critters. It is hard enough to restrain them on normal days. On days like this, they are likely to totally ruin their novel and do things they are going to regret later. So the best is to not write, not even plot, until the fever is over for this time.

From some of the writing I have seen online, this knowledge is not in everybody. In fact, once in a blue moon you can even find published novels where it is all too noticeable when the plot has been bent by horny characters, presumably exploiting the horny brain of a novelist with a deadline. Or I may be wrong, but certainly that's what it looks like. In fan fiction, I sometimes wonder if some people don't ever write unless they are horny. But that's their problem. I hold myself and my characters to different standards... although my characters are generally not as sexually repressed as I! Then again, characters need to be realistic. I do not.