“Lucien was halfway up the steps to the garden tower when he glanced down and saw his very pregnant daughter bathing under the shower, shielded partially by a birch. Few used the shower anymore, not since the children had grown up. When they were young the whole family bathed there during the summer months. Lucien paused and watched the quick movement of Lucette’s hands as she soaped herself, and all at once, in that moment he became happy and was at ease. He accepted whatever the love was, and wherever it came from. He had at one time surely been as foolish as they were. What did it damage? There was in the end an order, even to this.

He was certain his daughter was pregnant by Pierre but things would be all right. A torch of desire sometimes sprang up in the strangest half-lit rooms, but a family could somehow envelope and contain that. He knew this from his own life. He continued up the steep iron stairs, looked down once more, and saw Lucette running her wet hands through her light brown hair, darkening it. Then she seemed to hear something and she turned back and bent over, and the slim naked body of Pierre La Cras stepped between Lucien and her.

What had been innocent – a celebration! – abruptly made him a voyeur. His daughter’s forearms and open palms were flat against the mildewed wall as Pierre tugged her white hips and shoulders towards him, his body digging into her again and again as if she were the very centre of the universe.”

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…

Unexpected moments, caught off guard. Very sexy.

{Credit}

Public, playful, real? Always sexy.

http://autumnsonnichsen.com

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.

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

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.

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