Fifty Shades of Grey: A Response

Get your first instalment here 28-10-2015

So… The results are in. It’s true, there are only a couple of comments on my last blog about my proposal to share “Addled Kat” with the World, but I got responses on the social networks, too, and I got texts from people who seemed pretty excited by the idea, including some of my beta-readers, who, after all, have read the book before.

I also read “Addled Kat”, again, for the first time in a couple of years, and while it isn’t the kind of novel I would normally choose to write, I actually think it’s a bit of fun. I rather like Kat; she’s full of contradictions, but she’s also funny and feisty.

Honestly, when it comes to the sex, I still haven’t made up my mind. Writing sex scenes is technical, and, for me as a writer, it wasn’t sexy. It’s the same as choreographing any action sequence, like a fight scene, for example: I’m so busy remembering how bodies work, how they move, how weight and gravity affect outcomes… all that sort of stuff, that for me, fight scenes aren’t violent, they’re more like a dance… The sex scenes were a bit like that to write, too. 

I can tell you that the language for the sex scenes, like all of the language in this novel, is unambiguous. You won’t find any ‘throbbing members’ or ‘lady gardens’ in this book. 

All I was hoping for when reading back the sex scenes was that I wouldn’t laugh, and I didn’t. 

My beta-readers have told me that the sex scenes are sexy. I’m happy to take their words for that.

I was asked to write something that would appeal to the audience that had grown for "Fifty Shades of Grey", but I'm not that audience, and most of the people I know aren't that audience either. Yes, this is a love story, and, yes, there is sex... There is even the slightest hint at the kind of sex the 50 Shades audience seemed so titillated by, but there the similarities between that book and Kat end.

So, this is a full-length novel of about 90 thousand words. I call it Clit-Lit. It’s somewhere between Chick-Lit and Erotica. It’s set more-or-less in the present, in London and the surrounding counties. The porn isn’t just centered around the sex either, there’s house-porn, fashion-porn and art-porn in there too. I like a bit of culture, and I wanted a bit of balance.

The first episode of “Addled Kat” will be available to read here on Wednesday 28th October, and I will post subsequent chapters every Wednesday and Saturday until I’ve uploaded the entire novel. I’m not entirely sure how long that will take, because I haven’t carved up the book yet, but I won’t keep you all hanging around for weeks on end.

I will add warnings to sections that contain the explicit sex scenes, but I will upload them in their entireties and in single blocks, so that, if that’s your thing, you can read those sections in isolation, even though they weren't written that way, and they weren’t intended to be read that way.

See how generous I can be?

Right, I’m doing paperwork today, but there’ll be a new blog tomorrow. I’ve got stuff to say about… Well all kinds of things that the Sunday papers have thrown into my consciousness. Who’d have thought I’d feel equally snarky about the Pope and Germaine Greer? Go figure.