Fifty Shade of Grey. And Life Imitates Freedom.

Writing News.

I have been catching up on my newspaper reading and I have read some interesting articles relevant to writing and books.

Shades of Twilight.

A few blog posts ago, I postulated that based on the success of Fifty Shades of Grey, publishers would now be bracing themselves for an influx of erotic manuscripts. I thought that this rush of erotica might make up for publishers having to wade through thousands of Twilight like manuscripts about vampires who couldn’t  bring themselves to have sex with their human girlfriends.

Little did I know, Fifty Shades of Grey grew out of Twilight fan fiction. I only found out about this link between the two series of books when reading an article in the AGE by Helen Razer.  It seems the author of Fifty Shades of Grey really wanted the vampire to impose his manhood on Belle.

As a result of expected Fifty Shades of Grey fan fiction wanted the female character to be more assertive, I predict the next big flood of manuscripts will be about witches using there charms to turn their werewolf boyfriends into obedient lap dogs.

Speaking of Awful Sex Scenes.

If like me your brain becomes impotent at the thought of writing a sex scene, it seems we are not alone. In an article titled The earth doesn’t move for men writing sex scenes, Jojo Moyes suggests that blokes have a real disadvantage writing sex scenes as they tend to forget about all their bedroom failures. Woman are supposedly better at writing sex scenes because they are more sincere.

In the article Martin Amis is quoted saying “sex is almost impossible to write about and no one has done it very well”.  It seems that most writers acknowledge this as they close the door on their characters sexual antics and leave it to the reader to imagine what gymnastics the characters performed.

Freedom to Sell-out.

I recently read Freedom, by Jonathon Frazen, and found one particular character stretched credibility. The character was a radical environmentalist, who wanted to save a particular species of bird, the warbler, by creating nature reserves for it throughout the US. In order to do this he made a deal with a mining company that allowed them to mine a section of forest that they said would be  rehabilitate as a nature reserve for the warbler. The character did eventually wake up to his delusions.

But last week I read an article about an Australian environmentalist, Dorjee Sun, who seems to suffer from similar, but real life, delusions to the character in Frazen’s novel. In May last year Sun sold half his share in a big area of forest to a mining company who plan to mine its $5 billion worth of gold. Sun says he sold it to the miners in the hope they would preserve some of the forest around the mine. Unlike the character in the book, Sun got $700,000 plus $3,000,000 worth of shares. If I was delusional enough to accept Sun’s explanation, Frazen’s character would have a little more credibility. Perhaps Sun read Freedom before coming up with his reason for selling the land to the mining company.