Emily Foster's Blog

Vice’s Broadly has a piece about the Literary Review’s annual Bad Sex in Fiction award, which includes the remarkable tidbit that another literary magazine is considering a GOOD sex writing award:

This year The Erotic Review, another U.K. literary review magazine, said they would start a good sex award, an initiative that various reviews and critics propose every few years. “We have laughed enough,” Lisa Moylett, the publisher of The Erotic Review, told The Times in October. “We are throwing down the gauntlet. No more ‘bad sex’ writing. That is not something we should be celebrating.”

 

But the article goes on,

 

But [award spokesperson] Brinkley doesn’t see the appeal of awarding good sex writing. “My feeling about a good sex award is that it would be a little bit like a ‘good description of sunsets’ award, a ‘good opening chapter’ award,” he says. “You hope any novel published has that, and actually pointing it out seems a bit strange. There are so many books where passages of sex are good. It’s not that the sex described is wonderful or athletic or satisfying to everyone involved; it’s because the writing is good. The bad sex award is bad writing rather than bad copulation.”

 

But of course writing well about sex isn’t even a little bit like writing about a sunset or writing a good opening chapter, because sunsets and first chapters don’t come with a a truckload of shame and guilt and stigma. As a person who has written about sex in both fiction and nonfiction, I know that doing it well is not the same as writing other things well.

 

Writing well about sex requires writing in a way that neutralizes the truckload of culturally learned guilt, shame, judgment, prejudices, and anxieties that the reader brings to the page.

 

Sunsets do not requires that of a writer. People aren’t walking around with a truckload of terror about the ways they might be failures at observing dusk, or about the ways that granting permission to people to watch the sunset any way they want to might lead to the destruction of civilization.

Fine writing about a sunset is difficult, of course, but it’s difficult because it’s been done to death, not because it has to vault over or blast through or sneak around the reader’s deep and often unexamined anxieties, in order to touch their hearts and minds and, yes, their genitals.

 

But it’s bigger than that, isn’t it?

Fine writing about sex is… well, just look at why the Bad Sex Writing award was created in the first place:

It was created by Rhoda Koenig, a literary critic, and Auberon Waugh, at that time editor of Literary Review, who felt that sex scenes were becoming increasingly gratuitous in literary fiction. “It was almost as if authors were being asked to add sex scenes by their editors because then there’d be a news story saying, ‘Have you read so-and-so’s new novel? It’s got a racy sex scene in it,'” says Brinkley. “They wanted to set up an award where they could make fun of awards and poke fun at that worrying trend in literary fiction.”

 

The idea of incorporating explicit writing about sex into “literary” writing has the taint of “commercial,” in a world where that word invokes “opposite of literary” and therefore inferior.

 

And I say: fuck that.

 

Fine writing about sex is art, and I think it deserves an award.

Filed under: amwriting, romance and feminism

For those of you who may be, for whatever reason, experiencing something like a pit of despair at the moment, I’d like to offer two things:

First, this thing I wrote on Medium called “Despair… and Its Cure.” The tl;dr is”

 

Grief, sadness, despair — this is the BAT SIGNAL of your emotional life. It is the beacon that calls for help. When you find yourself in the pit of despair, feeling helpless, like nothing you can do will make a difference, turn toward others, so that they can turn toward you.

 

And second, the books I turn to when I am myself, for whever reason, experiencing something like a pit of despair:

 

 

 

Flowers from the Storm, Laura Kinsale. “The Duke of Jervaulx was brilliant and dangerous. Considered dissolute, reckless, and extravagant, he was transparently referred to as the ′D of J′ in scandal sheets, where he and his various exploits featured with frequency. But sometimes the most womanising rake can be irresistible, and even his most casual attentions fascinated the sheltered Maddy Timms, quiet daughter of a simple mathematician.”
My Loving Vigil Keeping, Carla Kelly. “Della’s giving up all the comforts of bustling Salt Lake City to teach school in a rural coal mining camp. Little does she know, she may soon be giving up her heart as well. But when tragedy strikes in the Scofield Mine, Della’s life will be changed forever.”
Morning Glory, LaVyrle Spencer. “On the eve of World War II, two people are brought together by fate and discover an unexpected passion. Will drifts into Whitney, Georgia, one lazy afternoon in the summer of 1941, dragging his lonely past behind him. All he asks is for a chance to love. Then he sees Elly’s classified ad for a husband, and when he steps across Elly’s cluttered yard, Will knows he has come home at last.”
Untie My Heart, Judith Ivory. “Stuart Aysgarth, the new Viscount Mount Villiars, doesn’t know he’s playing with fire when he inadvertently runs afoul of Emma Hotchkiss. True, the exquisite Yorkshire lady is a mere sheep farmer, but she also guards a most colorful past that makes her only more appealing to the handsome, haunted lord. Emma has come to him seeking justice — and Stuart is determined that she will not leave until she has shared her secrets … and his bed. Her clever revenge scheme must fail in the face of his soft words and tender caress — and then he turns the tables on his bewitching adversary, seducing her into a daring deception of his own.”

 

Why these four? I wasn’t sure – they’re set in different eras, on different continents, with different kinds of heroines and heroines…until I thought about what these stories actually share. It’s this:

 

They are all stories about what it means to be a good man and a good woman. We find (and earn) deep, lasting love when we find (and earn) respect and compassion for ourselves. When we believe we are good and worthy.

 

And it turns out when I am, for whatever reason, in something like a pit of despair, that is the kind of story that taps into my reserves of hope and renews my belief in humanity.

You guys have “desperate measures” recommendations?

Filed under: How Not to Fall

Jo Eberhardt writes at WriterUnboxed about the “trouble with female protagonists” – spoiler: the trouble is “There aren’t enough of them.”

Indeed, even though she had made a concerted effort to include books with girl heroes in her sons’ collection, when she actually made an inventory, she found that just 27% of them had girls or women as the protagonist. She followed up by investigating her own shelves, and found that just 24% had women protagonists.

That’s not enough. I couldn’t agree more.

She concludes,

I don’t know how to fix any of this. It’s a huge issue, and goes beyond everyday sexism and into our ability to even perceive everyday sexism. All I can do is be aware of it, and actively seek out books with female protagonists. And, of course, write books with female protagonists.

 

which is when I thought, “… And you could read more romance.”

For example, allow me to introduce you to my keeper shelf:

 

Plenty of women protagonists to go around – not to mention women secondary characters and women’s friendships, all front and center. (Plus Sherlock Holmes.)

I’m not sure why romance isn’t represented on Jo’s shelf. Romance isn’t for everyone, certainly. But it seems to me that a woman writer who wants to create space for women characters might at least CONSIDER the possibility of reading more in a genre written primarily by women, primarily about women.

Or not. I mean, even Diana Gabaldon, author of Outlander[image error], one of the most successful romance stories of this generation, says that her time travel romance isn’t romance. And why wouldn’t she want her story to be considered a romance? Now that I’m a romance novelist myself, I’ve experienced the gasp and sneer of the non-romance reader in response to the phrase, “romance novel,” and honestly it still surprises me, especially when it comes from folks who’ve faced similar marginalization.

Somewhere deep down, our culture tells us that women, love, and sex – in that order – are a waste of our time and attention. They aren’t “real” subjects for storytelling. War and spies and cheating on your spouse – those are real. (Never mind that you can find them aplenty in romance.)

The internet is already laden with think pieces and interviews dating back to 1986 at least, about how feminist romance is, and how it is dismissed because it written by and about women, because it prioritizes women’s sexual pleasure,  because it (increasingly) portrays a diversity of women’s stories, because it dares to present us with the idea that love matters, without irony or cynicism, and the books bring readers  (mostly women) pleasure and joy.  So I won’t bore you by recounting all of that.

The internet is also laden with lists of great feminist books – here are just a few:

9 Surprisingly Feminist Romance Novels
10 Feminist Romance Novels to Hop in Bed with
11 Romance Novels for Clever Ladies
A whole blog about feminist fantasy, including romance.
A sparse but excellent blog specifically about feminist romance
Jessica Luther’s list of favorite romances
More recommended feminist romance novels
Sarah MacLean’s list of 100 recommended romances

 

So I won’t add a list of my own – maybe in the future I will.

My friends, August is Read a Romance Novel Month. Pick a list. Pick a book. Pick a friend. Read together. Talk about it. It’s okay to read for fun, it’s okay to love a happy ending, it’s okay to read hot, highly consensual, multi-orgasmic sex.

Read a romance novel. Read about women living complicated lives and finding partners who love them in all their complication. The world will not end if you dare to have some damn fun with your feminism.

 

Filed under: romance and feminism

Today is the day that How Not to Fall is available (a | bn | ib | iB | gp), and I am genuinely thrilled.

I am also profoundly Feelsy, because I know not everyone will love it, and some of the people who don’t love it will take delight in explaining to the internet how much they hated it.

This is true for pretty much every book that has ever been written. I am not special; I did not write a book that people will hate so much more than any other book they’ve ever read that it will stand as a monument in their minds to bad books. I just wrote a book, a regular book, with sex in it and a cliffhanger ending and a heroine who is both a genius and says, “Dude” a lot, because that’s what college students do, even the brilliant ones. And so some people will not love it. Which is fine.

Other people will love it. They will cry in a good way. They will say nice things on Twitter. And, because I’m a person, a regular person – or not; maybe I am especially neurotic and sick – I’ll hear those nice things and feel ashamed, as if someone telling me they liked my book is the “I Try My Best” ribbon at an elementary school Field Day.

My sister, my brother, and my mother are all professional musicians, and I’m married to a guy with a fine arts degree in design. They learned to cope with public criticism of their work DECADES ago. And then there’s me. The scientist. The nerd who uses data to explain why she’s right and the other guy is wrong and LOOK HERE IS THE EVIDENCE THAT SAYS SO.

So I’m not good at receiving criticism of my creative work – not yet, anyway. Here’s hoping I have more chances to practice.

Because I have now lived through this day, I can offer these two strategies that I found effective for coping with the day a book leaves the nest and joins the great, wide world:

Yardwork. Physical labor of any kind, really, but I find yardwork especially fulfilling because you can see the difference you’ve made. Housework will work too – cleaning is magnificant. “Look at that!” you can say. “I accomplished something today!”
Work on your next book. Assuming you’re not totes famous and in demand for pub-day interviews and stuff, forget about the thing you finished. It’s finished. It doesn’t belong to you anymore. It’s in the world’s hands now, and they’re allowed to do whatever they want to it. So get back to work on your next thing.

 

Me, I printed out my entire 130,000 word manuscript and reversed the entire order of events.

Because coping.

Filed under: amwriting

It comes out June 28, and I just want to make sure we’re all clear on these things, before you even read the first word.

The sequel, HOW NOT TO LET GO, comes out in December, and it contains Charles and Annie’s happy ending. Please feel free to wait until then and read them both together, if the cliffhanger will make you like

 

Also? HNTF has, like, a BUNCH of sex. LOTS of sex. Some of it is not strictly vanilla. If that’s not your thing, I’m gonna say HNTF might make you like

 

And you can maybe feel free to skip it. That’s cool.

 

And finally… look, Annie and Charles are NERDS. They’re not just geeks – geeks are cool compared to nerds. They are science-loving, evidence-driven, hard-core NERDS. I have a friend who’s a naturalist; he loves birds and biology A LOT. He read HNTF, despite not being a reader of romance, just because I wrote it and he’s my friend, and when Charles gives Annie a first edition of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, my biologist buddy totes got misty. He dug it.

Not everyone will feel misty about On the Origin of Species.

 

 

That is fine.

 

Back away slowly from the cliffhanger sexbook about science nerds.

 

On the other hand, some people sort of really, really love it. Like…

 

@theemilyfoster OMG. You’re amazing. We’re all losing it over How Not To Fall. So good.

— Come As You Are (@ComeAsYouAreCo) June 25, 2016

 

And

 

@emilynagoski Finished my ARC of How Not To Fall this morning. SO GOOD!!! And now I’m dying to read the follow up. 2017 is too far away!

— Leigh Kramer (@hopefulleigh) June 24, 2016

 

So, I mean, ya know.

It’s up to you.

Filed under: How Not to Fall

There is a secret hidden in the Belhaven series, and that is that every single major character is a GIANT fan of Douglas Adams.

Arrite, maybe it’s not that secret or hidden. Maybe I named my hero – Charles Douglas – after Charles Darwin and Douglas Adams.

May 25 is “Towel Day,” a day when fans like me carry towels around with us.

In honor of the day, and of Douglas Adams, my very favorite author, I would like to share this with you:

 

There is a scene I cut from the sequel, for reasons of pacing – you know the old saw, “Kill your darlings.” I loved this scene, but it wasn’t moving the story forward, so it got chopped. But  (don’t worry – there’s no spoilers involved)

 

BACKGROUND: When Annie tells Charles she feels like she’s drowning, he tells her she can breathe underwater.

A couple months later, over Skype, they have this conversation:

 

Charles asks what I’m doing to breathe underwater.

“To – what? Oh.” I remember his metaphor from the London pub. “Um…” I think about it.

I realize that I’m not. I’m drowning. It’s only seven weeks – just long enough to complete the data collection – and in the last two weeks the only way I’m getting through it is to know that I will be released by this particular sea monster, swim to the surface, and break through to bright, sunlit air soon.

I sink dramatically into my chair and groan. “I guess we’re both a mess.”

“Well. I’ll be waiting on the boat with a warm, dry towel.”

I laugh out loud and say, “Hey that Charles is one hoopy frood who really knows where his towel is,” and at last, at long last, we’ve found a shared pop culture reference!

He giggles – giggles! – and says, “Don’t panic,” and everything inside me swells with joy.

“You got my joke!” I exclaim at my computer screen. “You never get my jokes!”

“Of course I got it!” he says with a grin. “At any rate, I’ll be there in ten days. I’ll wear protective gear. It’ll be fun.”

 

Happy Towel Day everybody.

Don’t Panic.

We Apologise for the Inconvenience.

Filed under: How Not to Fall

Just a quickie post, y’all –

I’m thrilled to say that Kensington is running a giveaway on Goodreads, giving away TWENTY-FIVE COPIES of How Not to Fall!

Click here to enter to win a copy between now and May 18. Share and enjoy!

Filed under: How Not to Fall

I had a very great pleasure of talking with Sarah and Amanda on the DBSA podcast – you can hear it here. They tell me I’m the first guest ever to use the phrase “submissive pain slut” on the podcast!

 

Being such a fan of the podcast myself, when they asked if I’d be willing to go on again and answer listeners’ questions about sex I was, “Heck yeah!”

So. Listen to the podcast, then email your sex question to sbjpodcast@gmail.com  with “Emily Nagoski” in the subject heading, with whatever degree of anonymity you like!

Filed under: amwriting, How Not to Fall

I’m in the home stretch on the story I’ve been working on for… since… like… a while. Long time.

In my fiction writing experience so far, I tend to write really fast for the first half of the book (that’s half by word count; I don’t write chronologically), and then gradually get slower and slower, so that I spend about half my writing time on the last 15% of the book. This is stage at which your story options are winnowed down and you’re searching and searching for the most satisfying ways to tie together all the elements you’ve strung across the story.

And there comes a point when it gets so slow that it feels like it comes… to a complete… halt.

That’s where I am now.

It would be easy to call the experience something like “writer’s block.”

Here is what I do when I don’t have any idea what the hell to write:

 

STRATEGY 1:

I write something terrible – by which I mean I type whatever the hell comes to my fingers.

And then I go, “No, no, no, that’s all wrong, that’s not how it should happen! It should be more like this…”

And then I’m off to the races.

This almost always works. If it doesn’t…

 

STRATEGY 2:

Sometimes I’m just burnt out on a particular story, problem, character, whatever, so I switch to a different project for a while. It’s like cross-training one set of muscles, while the other set gets a break.

This could be disastrous, of course – I could wind up down a rabbit hole. This has not happened to me yet. I am blessed/cursed with a brain that resists stopping until it gets to the end of something, so rather than disappearing into the new project, the original project beckons me from the distance.

The result is that I have a number of projects anywhere from a few hundred words to tens of thousands of words along, ready and waiting for me when I get done with this project.

Another version of this strategy is to work on the query, synopsis, or pitch to go with the particular story. This story I’m writing now is not under contract, I’m just writing because… I’m a person who has to write. (See below.)

Or I write a blog post about writer’s block.

 

STRATEGY 3:

I decide I’m not allowed to write.

Counting only the words that have ended up actually published in books, I’ve averaged 275 words per day – that’s about one page a day, every single day – for the last 3 years. If you include all the stuff I chopped, it’s easily double that.  In short, I am a person who has to write. If I were forced to choose between writing and eating, I’d choose writing. I can live off my fat stores for WEEKS; but just a few days without writing would probably make me batshit.

So a writing fast restores my appetite, so that I’m longing to go back to work on that intractable problem. Sometimes I even come up with a solution to the problem! More often, I circle back to STRATEGY 1 – I write something terrible, and then I fix it.

 

So that’s what I do. I strongly identify with Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED talk about the nature of genius – that there is some outside something-or-other that occasionally descends upon you and transforms what you’re writing from craftsmanship to art, and it all flows beautifully. I imagine it, actually, like the teacher coming around a class. For just a few minutes, she leans over your shoulder and talks to you, gives you a boost… and then she’s gone again, off to help the next student.

But most of the time, you sit there and you do the work. You do your best. You don’t wait for the thing to show up – if today is not your day to meet with the genius, you do your work anyway. Because you have to be at your desk when the teacher comes by, and you don’t know when it will happen.

 

 

Filed under: amwriting

I flew six times last year. I’ll be flying four more times between now and May.

To say, “I do not fly well” would be like saying, “I do not fall off cliffs well.” It’s not so much that I’m not good at it or that I don’t enjoy it, as it is that everything about it is inherently painful, designed to leave me lying, broken and helpless, in a heap.

But over the course of last year, I learned a lot about how to get through it, and I will gladly share you my hard-gleaned wisdom, such as it is. Here, in no particular order, are my top 10 things to have with you when you fly, if you’re an author on a book tour:

Medication, obviously. I have vestibular migraines, which make me prone not just to headaches but to overwhelming motion sickness – like, I can’t go 15 feet as a passenger in a car without wanting to die. I’ve found that the only solution to this a well-timed blend of low-dose benzodiazepines and high-dose hyoscine hydrobromide. I only need to re-medicate mid-flight if it’s more than four or five hours or if I have to take a shuttle from the airport to wherever. (Usually I rent cars, to avoid said shuttle.)
Sunglasses. These serve two purposes: (1) The vestibular migraines mentioned above make me sensitive to light, so sunglasses help me avoid light-triggered headaches/dizziness in a sunny airport or plane; and (2) People leave you the fuck alone when you’re wearing sunglasses. #introvert
A huge, soft scarf. Mine is 30″ x 80″ and cashmere. I can wear it untied around my neck and it’s long and drapey. I can wrap it around my head and shoulders and it is warmer than a tauntaun. I can bunch it up and use it as a pillow, resting my head against the wall of the plane.
Jeggings. Honestly. Knit denim that looks vaguely like jeans but feels exactly like leggings. A body swells during a flight, so stretchiness is a necessity, but wearing clothes that look like clothes, rather than like pajamas, both helps me to feel (and thus behave) more like a responsible adult, and results in people treating me a little more like I’m a human being and a little less like I’m cargo.
Wool socks. My feet always get cold, so.
Tall zip-up boots. Most places, I need tall boots with me, and of course it makes more sense to wear them than pack them, but also it turns out to be no more of a hassle of to take them off and put them back on at security than would a pair of sneakers or Merrells. Plus they help make the jeggings look more like actual pants.
A soft bra. No underwires. Fuck shapeliness – my boobs are covered by the scarf anyway – I just want enough support to stop the girls bouncing painfully if I have to run somewhere.
Layers. Everyone knows this. The temperatures in your departure city, in the airport, on the plane, and at your destination city probably have nothing in common. So: layers. Bra, base layer, midlayer, outer layer, just like if you were going hiking.
Headphones and audiobooks. When I fly, I listen to (mostly romance) novels that I’ve already read and, indeed, have already listened to. This is comfort noise, as well as a barrier that says, “Don’t talk to me.” (#introvert) May I recommend Juliet Stevenson reading Jane Austen? Winner every time. Also Nicholas Boulton reading literally anything. If Audible sold 500 hours of Nicholas Boulton reading the Library of Congress card catalog, I would buy it. And if you haven’t heard Richard Armitage reading Georgette Heyer… you really should. You really, really should.
Surrender. Be a docile member of the herd. When shit goes wrong, stand in line patiently, wait your turn, don’t try to jostle for a better position or flight or anything. Just. Do. As. You’re told. You are cargo. You can be a person again when you’re in your hotel.

 

With these defenses in place, no one makes small talk with me, no one gives me the stinkeye, and no one even notices me. And for a woman with blue hair, that is a remarkable accomplishment.

It doesn’t make flying a joy. But it does make flying totally bearable.

Filed under: amwriting