Sometimes Sin's A Pleasure
Jan. 15th, 2013 01:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
julian_griffithProject: Goth geek chick-lit vampire thing Sometimes Sin's A Pleasure
I really, really wanted to get this up to 10K, because most anthology calls put that as a floor on their short stories.
But even after I went back and elaborated on the Built-In Designated Driver, and the Pet Bear, and the Potatoes and Vinegar, and added my rather conventional mother into the conclusion, it's still a little shy of that. And adding anything else feels like padding.
I don't think the conclusion's as strong as it can be, yet. It's a little more serious than the breezy intro. But it's decidedly HFN, not HEA, you know, because vampire, though there's a good chance of HFN being at LEAST twenty years... the vampire is a bit of an emo woobie, and lonely, though he is also very arch and wry and capable of cracking the narrator up as well as bringing the awesome sexytimes. So once he's found a willing human lover, he's not going to discard her lightly. He's the polar opposite of the fuck-drain-and-run vampire stereotype. Because, you know, if I see a trope, my next impulse is to subvert it.
There's also some serious rape culture stuff sitting in his backstory. I don't hammer on it, and, indeed, he doesn't want to dwell on it, and our narrator knows better than to make a giant focus of it, but it's a part of his origin story, and I think it lampshades the usual unexamined rapetastic vampire tropes. And it underscores why this vampire is so very, very punctilious about consent.
I think I also snuck in a jab at Edward The Sparklepire and the watching-while-you-sleep. It wasn't entirely intentional, but it was there. Noel ASKS, and is aware that Laura might not actually be cool with being watched while she slept. But he is also tender and wistful in the asking, and since his options are "stay awake and hold you while you sleep", "deliberately go to sleep with you and MISS this part of the experience", or, presumably, go in the other room and code or watch YouTube or something, she decides that she can accept having him awake and holding her while she's asleep, because what he'll get out of it is knowing how much she trusts him, and she does, so that's okay.
He really is kind of an emo woobie, but he tries very hard to hide that.
I wonder if I can find a way to slide in the fact that he doesn't want to reveal who he was because he had a TERRIBLE reputation and he doesn't think he's lived it down yet. That has the potential to hang a flashing neon sign on who he really is, if I use a certain tagline that will make him wince. It may be heavy-handed, but it could work.
Market: Your guess is as good as mine
Deadline: I'm calling this a draft
Wordcount: 9501
I really, really wanted to get this up to 10K, because most anthology calls put that as a floor on their short stories.
But even after I went back and elaborated on the Built-In Designated Driver, and the Pet Bear, and the Potatoes and Vinegar, and added my rather conventional mother into the conclusion, it's still a little shy of that. And adding anything else feels like padding.
I don't think the conclusion's as strong as it can be, yet. It's a little more serious than the breezy intro. But it's decidedly HFN, not HEA, you know, because vampire, though there's a good chance of HFN being at LEAST twenty years... the vampire is a bit of an emo woobie, and lonely, though he is also very arch and wry and capable of cracking the narrator up as well as bringing the awesome sexytimes. So once he's found a willing human lover, he's not going to discard her lightly. He's the polar opposite of the fuck-drain-and-run vampire stereotype. Because, you know, if I see a trope, my next impulse is to subvert it.
There's also some serious rape culture stuff sitting in his backstory. I don't hammer on it, and, indeed, he doesn't want to dwell on it, and our narrator knows better than to make a giant focus of it, but it's a part of his origin story, and I think it lampshades the usual unexamined rapetastic vampire tropes. And it underscores why this vampire is so very, very punctilious about consent.
I think I also snuck in a jab at Edward The Sparklepire and the watching-while-you-sleep. It wasn't entirely intentional, but it was there. Noel ASKS, and is aware that Laura might not actually be cool with being watched while she slept. But he is also tender and wistful in the asking, and since his options are "stay awake and hold you while you sleep", "deliberately go to sleep with you and MISS this part of the experience", or, presumably, go in the other room and code or watch YouTube or something, she decides that she can accept having him awake and holding her while she's asleep, because what he'll get out of it is knowing how much she trusts him, and she does, so that's okay.
He really is kind of an emo woobie, but he tries very hard to hide that.
I wonder if I can find a way to slide in the fact that he doesn't want to reveal who he was because he had a TERRIBLE reputation and he doesn't think he's lived it down yet. That has the potential to hang a flashing neon sign on who he really is, if I use a certain tagline that will make him wince. It may be heavy-handed, but it could work.
no subject
Date: 2013-01-15 05:15 pm (UTC)In my experience that's only been the case at Storm Moon -- the other publishers I've worked with have a much lower bound for short story collections (and some places start releasing works as individual novellas in a range that SMP still classes as a short -- Samhain's lower bound for novellas is 12k, Dreamspinner's and Carina's are 15k, etc.).
You might want to poke through the presses and calls listed here: http://www.erotica-readers.com/ERA/AR/Erotica_Authors_Resources.htm and see if any of them would be a good fit, with the caveat that you definitely want to check Absolute Write before you send off your sub -- off the top of my head, Silver Publishing is still listed on the ERA site and they're currently having huge issues with authors not getting paid.
no subject
Date: 2013-01-15 05:20 pm (UTC)On the bright side, if anyone thinks this needs trimming, it ought to be easy, right?