Character introductions

Have you ever wondered what happens once the carnival lights go down? How a sex addict really feels? What goes on in an open marriage? What it’s like to work at a brothel?

Each character-driven series will follow the compelling, complex and sometimes disturbing lives and experiences of everyday people who find themselves being tempted into deep corners of the human sexual psyche.

Meet the characters…

This is Sexy: Seen in Public

Unexpected moments, caught off guard. Very sexy.

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Cat Power: Colors and the Kids

This is Sexy: Skin & Branches

Public, playful, real? Always sexy.

http://autumnsonnichsen.com

On Multiple Senses of Self, Part I: Aidan

I can’t be the only who’s spent 10 or 12 or 40 hours on character point-of-view decisions in short fiction. Can I? This happens to everybody…right?

Oh.

This has been a kink in the flow of these four unique story lines since I started chiseling them out earlier this year. The right perspective (first person, third person) can have such an impact on character clarity and empathy, and I’ve been so obsessive about it that I feel like a mad scientist. But I think I’ve come out the other side. An example:

When you’ve got a character whose behavior is incongruous with his or her values, with no explanation, the reader’s tension diverts to all the wrong places. Aidan – single male, mid-30s, and the main character in one of my story lines – is a guy that’s hard not to like. He’s not overtly charming, not terribly charismatic. In fact, he’s pretty reserved and unsure of himself. But he’s genuine and intelligent and engaged with his surroundings, and he’s plagued with some very human issues that many of us can relate to. Female readers want to like him. So much so, in fact, that they find themselves forgiving him for his otherwise crass, detached approach to women and sex.

That would be hard to achieve without the intimacy that comes with a first person point of view. On the surface, Aidan’s willingness to handcuff a sex worker in a dungeon (and then leave her there for him to play with later), his interest in turning on a soon-to-be 18-year-old, his refusal to promise fidelity to a girl he begins falling in love with…all smack of detached, insensitive, misogynistic, sex-obsessed male. But while it’s true that Aidan is addicted to sexual attention and experimenting, this is new territory for him and his thought process throughout these scenes reveals his unexpected respect for women – though clearly not all women – and the self-doubt, shyness, quiet decency and cocktail of other complicated emotions and perceptions that share a room in his sexual psyche.

The self-talk of a first person point of view is necessary, then, to pull out the nuances that build that distinction. And with that inside look, Aidan becomes delightful to dig into.

Next: Nadiya’s effect on her surroundings (organic and inorganic) made a strong case for third person.

This is Sexy: Natural swimming ponds

Chemical-free swimming holes you can build yourself? That’s sexy. Read more at Inhabitat.

Under the Influence: My Night with Larry Clark, Robert Mapplethorpe and Other Provacative Photographers

From Larry Clark’s “Teenage Lust”

In the fall of 1998 I sat in the university art department, awkward, shifting in my chair, backlit by the shadowy flash of dozens of black and white images that flicked by in staccato on the dark walls. Robert Mapplethorpe, David Levinthal, Edward Weston, Larry Clark. Teenage runaways in filthy motel rooms. Boys with thick, flacid penises sharing needles and sex with girls with plump tits in dim corners, in bathtubs, on the edge of a worked-over bed. My art history professor, stoic and expressionless, pressed her thumb hard on the forward button after long stretches of uncomfortable seconds to call up the next slide.

That thumb pressed each of those images hard into my sexual psyche, where they – despite how quiet with guilt I kept about them and my reactions to them – overturned a rock under which a great many curiosities had started to grow. Years later I would realize that it wasn’t about the nudity, the sex, not even the taboo, and it wasn’t about the social commentary or the awkward shared experience with the rest of the art department. It was about the lack of apology. Larry Clark shot photographs that would give generations of mothers and fathers nightmares about their own children. He knew the controversy that was coming, but he never sought to soften that blow. Disturbing as it was, it was raw, unedited, unscripted, powerful and real.

My reaction to that changed everything about how I would grow to view sex and sexuality, and, later, how I would write about it.

Updates to the new site coming soon!

Thanks for hanging in there while I make the switch to the new site format. When we’re finished next week, we’ll have plenty of space and flexibility for an active blog, book teasers and a shop for downloading e-books without visiting an external site. Check back again soon to see the progress!

Psst…in the meatime, you can also find updates on Twitter and Facebook.