Carol (Carol Schmidt Series) (21 page)

Lori Cook is a pen name, although you probably guessed that! I
believe that erotica is a healthy, inspiring and stimulating form of fiction.
Unfortunately not everybody agrees. I work for public institutions, and because
of this I’ve decided not to use my real name here.

With the CARDINAL series I’ve taken my first steps into the world of
erotic writing. They definitely won’t be my last though! I’ve written all sorts
of stuff over the years, and I’ve had a number of things published. But this
has been the most fun I’ve ever had with a pen! I dunno why, but it felt great
from the very start. Perhaps I just found my ideal genre... My only hope is
that you enjoy reading it half as much as I loved writing it.

You really want to know stuff about me? OK, I’m forty-one years old.
My career has been mainly in education. I studied languages at college, and
taught for years in various educational institutions, mainly adults. These days
I do consultancy work on a freelance basis, which allows me to dedicate some
time to writing.

Apart from work, I like dancing (any style) and walking, especially
in the National Parks or any kind of wilderness. I have traveled pretty widely,
in South America and Europe. I speak French and Spanish reasonably well, plus
five words of German. I love visiting art galleries, modern art particularly,
and I enjoy live music, jazz and classical on the whole, although I have on
occasion been dragged to heavy metal gigs (where I cower at the back, glancing
at my watch).

Lastly, I love reading. I’ll read absolutely anything, from the
classics to modern mysteries and women’s erotica. I own a Kindle Fire and
believe that ebooks have liberated writing and writers in ways that we are only
just beginning to understand. Look at me: suddenly I’m in my forties writing
full-on erotica. That wasn’t part of the life plan, I can assure you...

Happy reading!

Lori Cook

I have written fiction all my adult life. I’ve had several books
published (see below on anonymity), and my writing would probably be classified
as ‘literary’. But what does that mean? How do we even begin to define
‘literature’?

Well, what I mean by the term is the kind of writing that does not
take as its starting point a reasonably well-established plan or template. For
me, literary writing starts out from a totally blank page.
War and Peace
,
Wuthering Heights
,
1984
,
Catcher in the Rye
,
Slaughter
House Five
... The only thing that works such as these have in common is the
lack of any clear commonality with other works. The reader could not be
expected to know, at the outset, how the narrative was going to develop in
terms of its broad structure.

Or take Carver’s ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Love’, four
people sitting around a kitchen table, talking and drinking gin. For me, this
story is a work of genius because it takes the ordinary and makes it
extraordinary. It starts from nowhere special, but takes you to a place you’ve
never been before, and deeper into the lives of its characters than you thought
was possible in a short story. I love writing like this. It has enriched my
life immeasurably.

In defining literature as something that doesn’t conform immediately
to a template, I am by implication differentiating it from ‘genre’. However, we
should perhaps add a few hedges here. First, some writing generally considered
to be ‘literary’ does indeed rely on templates. Some literary novels, for
example, knowingly use the template of the mystery genre, and there are other
literary writers who draw on other genres. Margaret Atwood has won the Booker
Prize twice while writing in what we might very broadly call ‘genre’.

Second, some books written squarely within a template or genre, such
as the novels of Ray Chandler and James Elroy, are nevertheless held up to be
literature. For me, the term here slides into a use which is very close to
‘great writing’. A crime novel is, by definition, part of the genre of crime
writing. But few people, I think, would doubt that
White Jazz
transcends
that genre. None of these distinctions and definitions, perhaps, are either
useful or even interesting. Great writing is just that. Great.

However, I do think that ‘genre’ is different from ‘literature’.
Genre conforms to a template, to some form of narrative structure or to a
cluster of thematic expectations (or both). These are already established when
the writer sets out to draw the reader into the story. The writer knows this,
and so too does the reader. You don’t generally hit upon a ‘genre’ novel by
accident; you going seeking it out. Readers tend to prefer specific genres,
often reading voraciously, coming back again and again to the same kind of stories.

So, we might think of ‘genre’ as being what happens when a writer
and reader share a kind of implicit agreement as to how the fictive process is in
some way pre-established, and how it is likely to proceed, however loose this
arrangement. Crime mysteries illustrate this well. In a crime novel there is
typically a crime early on in the story, and toward the end the truth about
that crime is discovered. Taking it more structurally, you might say that there
is a specific legal-moral transgression (a crime) which isn’t understood (it’s
a mystery) and the plot revolves around uncovering (solving) the case. That’s
the template. And the template, repeated in many different works, is what
constitutes the genre.

At this level of abstraction it is clear that if a writer decides to
write a crime mystery, then she has something to work with, even before she
begins planning the story. She might subvert the basic structure of the genre,
side-step it to some extent, or in other ways turn it to her own ends. But if
her story is going to attract the interest of crime fiction readers, and thus
be embraced by fans of the genre, there must be some broad conformity to the
template.

Let me say, right off, that I also love genre writing. For me it can
be a different reading experience, sometimes swifter, less concentrated, and
often involving bolder narrative strokes. You might not stop and admire the
sentences so often, and what sticks in your mind (in mine, at least) is more
likely to be character, setting and plot, and less likely to be the artistry of
the prose itself or the uniqueness of the atmosphere. Of course, this depends on
both the way you read and the quality of the writing; we’re dealing in huge
generalizations here, nothing more.

I believe that genre writing fulfils a very urgent need in us all
for pure story telling, and offers us the chance to jump with relative ease
into narrative situations which are both familiar (the template) yet distant
from out own experiences (we tend not to go about investigating murders, for
example). Whereas I love literary fiction, I often find myself being drawn into
genre fiction more easily, and reading it more readily.

Over the years I have read quite a lot of genre fiction, especially
crime mysteries, thrillers and sci-fi. As far as other genres are concerned, I
have read almost nothing. These include horror, supernatural, romance... and
erotica. So why, you might ask, did I decide to write an erotic novel?

Well, initially I had no intention of writing a novel. I know from
experience how much work a book-length piece of fiction takes to finish, and I
had absolutely no intention of going through that process with a sex story!
When I started to think about writing erotica, my initial plan was to write a
handful of short stories, first to see whether I could do it, and second to see
whether anyone would enjoy them.

If you are a keen student of Lori Cook, and I am sure you are, you
will know that I produced two short stories featuring Carol Schmidt, both
self-published on Amazon (but now withdrawn). They were called
Bad Daddy’s Last
Post
and
Communing with the Devil
, and they correspond pretty much
to the ‘Bad Daddy’ and ‘Irina Lescheva’ sequences in
Carol
,
respectively. They were little more than sex scenes with a plot hanging around
on the breeze nearby. I enjoyed writing them.

The seductress character, Carol Schmidt, was central to both
stories, and so was the set-up, featuring the mysterious Cardinal. I loved
writing the sex scenes, but I also realized that without a larger canvas to
work on, the whole nature of the Cardinal’s work, and especially Carol’s role
within it, couldn’t really be developed. Neither could her backstory.

So, I decided to put all this together in a longer work. Thus did my
life as an erotic novelist begin. It was a slightly crazy idea, the kind of
thing you say to yourself when you’ve had too much wine, because even at this
stage, after penning a couple of shorts, I really knew nothing about erotica.
Yet before long I had convinced myself that I had a fairly pressing reason to
embark on a full novel. Like I said, at that stage I was not much of a reader
of erotica. But I now had the makings of a decent setting, a couple of
intriguing characters, and I had the bit between my teeth. Things, as they say,
had just gotten serious.

As I got more serious about the project, I also began to read
erotica. As I did so, I started to think about my own responses to the genre.
Well, just to get things clear in my mind, I worked up a list of my own
preferences in the realm of erotica. They are the following:

1. I enjoy graphic depictions of sex, with scenes described in quite
a bit of detail.

2. I like either male-female or female-female. Either partner can
dominate.

3. I really don’t like über-alpha-male characters.

3. In the case of male-female scenes, I like the woman to be in
control to some extent.

4. I am not turned on by anything ‘kinky’, especially bondage or any
sort of sado-masochism.

5. Narratives told from the point of view of the woman in the action
feel most natural to me.

So, you see, pretty much vanilla with sprinkles! If you have read
the present book,
Carol
, you will notice that there are no sex toys and
no particularly unusual sexual practices; just human bodies and minds living in
the sexual moment. In other words, I mainly like scenes involving the simple
intimacy of two people enjoying each other’s bodies in a natural way. These
preferences might change radically tomorrow. I have a fairly open mind.

On a more general level, what I found when I started getting into
the erotica genre was that there was just an enormous range of stuff out there.
Much more, I think, than in the case of crime mysteries, where if you go for a
new writer, odds-on it’s a renegade cop with a failed marriage and a bad habit
of some sort... I exaggerate! Yet even if it’s not exactly like a typical crime
mystery, for a book to be considered a crime mystery, it’s likely to be fairly
close to established parameters of that genre.

Erotica embraces a more varied repertoire of scenarios, styles,
atmospheres, characterization and plots. And I think it does this for one very
clear reason: whereas thriller readers will expect a steady diet of action, and
mystery readers will enjoy the details of the case as they are carried along by
it, readers of erotica essentially want to read about people having sex with
each other, which is, by definition, the most universal trope of them all, both
in fiction and in life.

The plot which carries you from one sex scene to the next in an
erotic novel can be almost anything, because the template for this genre is not
in fact to do with pillars of the narrative structure or plot points; it is
simply
that there will be quite a lot of sex
. With an erotic novel,
then, the plot might be absolutely essential, and very prominent in the
narrative, but it is not in and of itself part of the genre. Indeed, there is
no standard template for the broader plot structure of erotic fiction. It’s a
blank page. With someone having sex on it.

For this reason, erotica can more easily crossover into other
genres. I’m thinking, for example, that subsequent Carol Schmidt might well
involve more espionage; perhaps one day Carol will become a spy, or will add to
her repertoire of skills in some other way (cowgirl? sex-ninja?). As long as
she still provides the fireworks, I don’t see that it would stop it being
erotica.

I think this essay, so far, has in fact been one very long-winded
way of saying that erotic fiction opens up new frontiers for the writer. It
gives the writer an amazing buzz, and part of the reason for this is that it
offers boundless scope, an infinity of avenues to explore and probe. Erotica is
a ‘genre’, but not as we know it. Erotica is something different, kind of
narrative free-reign, a new territory, somewhere fantastical yet very much a
reflection of human desires and needs.

There is one final, and slightly less glorious, aspect of my journey
as an erotic novelist that I would like to discuss. It is the question of
author anonymity.

As you will know if you have read my bio, Lori Cook is not my real
name. My true identity is hidden, and I do not intend to make it public any
time soon. Why? I adopted this pseudonym for reasons which are both regrettable
and practical. I really enjoy writing and reading erotic fiction, but I do not
want this to become a problem for me in my everyday life.

Let’s start by saying that everyone is allowed to hold true to their
own values. You might love depictions of erotic acts, or you might hate the
very thought of them. You might believe that an open attitude to sex is
evidence of social progress, or a symptom of society’s decay. These are simply
a matter of one’s own beliefs. Even those opposed on principle to the idea of
erotic fiction would, I think, accept that
given appropriate warnings and
age-restrictions
the things that one person reads and writes should be a
matter for her own personal choice.

I am also quite happy to discuss my own preferences with anyone who
cares to ask. On a personal level I have no hang-ups about expressing what I
like and dislike, and that includes the kind of erotica I enjoy. Catch me on a
good day and I might even draw you a diagram. However, I work in the education
sector. I have done so for most of my working life (I am forty-one), after
studying languages at college. For the last few years I have been freelancing.
I enjoy the work and the freedom of being able to decide where and when I work.
I have always taught adults (if you can call college students adults).

I work on and off for a handful of colleges, and the departments I
deal with are pretty liberal in general. However, no institution exists without
some kind of ‘moral’ atmosphere, and issues here can arise in strange and
unpredictable ways. A couple of years ago, for example, there was a bit of a
problem in a department of ESL (English as a Second Language) in the same
building as my own department. One of its tutors posted some photos of himself
and his girlfriend on a popular image sharing site. They were in the ‘adult
protected’ section, tagged as containing sexual content, and were in fact quite
artistic; just two people naked, absolutely nothing more.

However, word got out, and someone lodged a complaint with the
department, a student who, although not actually in one of his classes, was
studying English. The complaint was not very specific, in that clearly no laws
had been broken, and the department did not uphold the complaint. Yet when
contracts (temporary ones) were up for renewal, he didn’t get one.