Of Writing, Sex Tapes and Elections

 Twitter was atwitter with this news: 400 s*xtapes of an Equatorial Guinea business man released

 Every man on there was quite admiring of Baltasar and his ability to sleep with everyone from his brother's wife to the president's sister. (Do you notice how the women are referenced by whatever man they're adjacent to?)

Anyways it got me thinking about sex tapes and sex in general. 

I write romance for a living and so, I know how boring it can be...to write about. You have the same things happening. Lots of canting hips, moaning, groaning, the occasional kissing, flesh slapping together...by the third book you've seen it all.

As a writer, I know that what jazzes up the sex scene is the emotion behind it. Is it angry sex? They're scratching and biting, he's telling her how he wants to split her in two, she's digging her nails into his shoulders while thinking about him going so deep inside of her that she can taste him in her mouth...Is it tender sex? Do they cry as the hold each other, softly, warmly, gently. Their kisses painful in intensity, their hearts, beating in sync...

You get my drift right?

But watching a sex tape  has none of that. It's just sitting there watching a man stick his dick continuously into a woman. They might not even be that attractive to you. If you're the man or woman in question, you were there, why do you need to watch the playback?

So, my question is, what is the point of a sex tape? 

Is it like when an athlete records themselves at work so they can go home, re-watch and see what they did wrong? Or is it like a memory you get to relive? Your idea of home videos or such.

Also, if this guy and his various sex mates were not ready for the tapes to be made public - so much so that one of the women killed herself - why consent to be taped in the first place? This man was a government official, slept with the wives, sisters, daughters and girlfriends of basically his whole family and fellow government officials. 

And put it on tape. 

Why?

What was the reason?

I sometimes wonder if people subconsciously wish to embarrass themselves because that's the only thing that makes sense.

Anyway, y'all be crazy. 

It's difficult to write fiction these days because competing with reality is just hard.

In other news, Presidential election this week in the US. These last four years have been eye opening on who people really are and these last two years have been especially illuminating about who is valued and who is not by imperialism.

It started with Ukraine. No actually it started with the politicizing of COVID and the proliferation of misinformation. People who I assumed knew how to reason like adults turned out to be...disappointing. Then the war in Ukraine happened and Africans fleeing that same war were STILL discriminated against. We were forced to fund raise to get them out and even then, a simple thing like getting on a train or across a border was harder for Africans than the Caucasians. 

It boggled my mind that even in extreme duress, white people always have time and space for racism. But not as much as it boggles my mind today that there are African supporters of Imperialism. We truly are colonized. 

Anyway, Ukraine happened and they were afforded all and any kind of help available from Westerners. Then October 7th 2023 happened and Palestine was back in the news - as the villains of course. Even when Israeli lies were debunked, Palestinians remained the villains. Even when Palestinian babies died, the babies were blamed for providing 'human shields' for khhhamas. 

Even the darkest cloud has a silver lining. The eyes of the world were opened to what constitutes a "terrorist". 

American propaganda came crashing down.

So, as people go into voting for the next US president, for me, as the grass underneath which elephants are fighting, I don't care which elephant wins, we'll still continue to be crushed. 

Whoever wins, I only know one thing: Ruto Must Go.

Annemarie lives in Nairobi Kenya. Find out more on her work here. And visit her author page here.

Evolving In Your Craft

"You're just another brick and I'm a sledgehammer"
- Rihanna
It's the way she says it. There is some contempt there, tiredness, warning, matter of factness...It tells me a story; or causes me to superimpose my own story on the words. And in my mind, she's telling some guy (okay +Chris Brown ) who thinks he's the shit that he's actually not. He's just a brick and she's the sledgehammer.
SMASH! BURN!
GirlPower!Rihanna rocks.

Believe it or not, that extract actually does have something to do with evolving in your craft. Rihanna's just happens to be singing rather than writing. The point is, her way of singing has evolved to the point where you can pick up nuances without having them spelt out for you.
As a writer, I'm a great admirer of writers who can do that. I'm not sure I'm one of them yet. I do hope that there is visible evolution in my writing. I can see it in my fanfic on the Winchesters. The way I wrote it when I started out is definitely not how I write now. I'm not sure if it's because of greater understanding about how the Winchesters work or just me getting better. And for the record, writing about characters developed by someone else or even real person fan fiction is a whole different kettle of fish than writing original characters. It's a good way to get one's feet wet though. My first ever story I wrote for public consumption was a real person fanfic featuring +Rihanna and Chris Brown. It was immensely popular on tumblr I must say; even people who didn't like me personally stopped by to read it. And by not like me personally I mean they used to talk about me on other tumblr pages about how they REALLY don't like me but they just visit my page to read my fanfic. It gave me confidence. Let me know that my writing abilities weren't all just in my head.
Maybe.

sidebar; I'm at this hotel near my house and they're straight up playing +Dolly Parton...Like, I don't even know.

The most challenging thing to write, in fan fic or fiction is the 'sex scene'. People take for granted that since everyone (or close enough) does it, then it must be the simplest thing to write.
Right?
Wrong.
Most people write sex scenes where:
1. The foreplay is like interminable. IRL nobody has that kind of time. You're afraid one of your kids will wake up any minute, or you have to get up and go to work or +Empire is coming on any minute now. Ain't nobody got time to 'tease her nipple for hours'. And really, hands up if you want your nipple teased for hours. No seriously. hands up.
2. There is all this explanation of whose limbs go where in a very mechanical way that loses me about three limbs in; I can't keep all that in my head at the same time. In fact a lot of people write very mechanical sex; he inserted his member into her hot leaking mount of venus and thrust hurriedly/leisurely/forcefully/desperately in and out until his vision whited out...if I had a nickel.
Thank you. Very much, for reminding us how sex works.
My sister's friend and I were chatting at my nephew's birthday party and she told me that she doesn't read novels anymore because she's unable to can with all the descriptive passages. An example of one would be the one I read last night where 'Jared' had been asked by 'Sandy' to take her to town and he didn't want to because it was a busy time on the ranch and he had a lot of work. See how I summarised that in one sentence? It was in three. bloody. paragraphs. I call them the 'who cares' sections of the story. Talking to my sister's friend caused me to have an epiphany.
Imagine you don't have to read through that crap.
Just go straight to the next pertinent part of the story.
I do that a lot even if I never realised it before it was verbalised by someone else. Especially with the so-called saucy parts. In my head, as I skim I'm thinking 'sex sex sex sex, uh huh, more sex, the end'.
Diana Gabaldon writes a mean sex scene though. I read through every word. There was this one thing Jamie did to Claire called 'girdling' where he was literally seducing her ass. It was epic. I wrote a whole piece about it on +EzineArticles. It's still one of my most popular articles. I'm grateful that at least one thing the Outlander Series gets right is the sex scenes. Because they've taken my Jamie and made him into this foolish typical male that he absolutely isn't. I had to stop watching. End of rant. Plus they made Claire bitchy. No really, end of rant.

Another writer who has absolutely impressed me, is compo67 on Archive on Our Own. This one sex scene she wrote was written as if they were composing music. I died with admiration, jealousy and envy.
In my own writing, the sex scene I'm really so proud of that I wrote it twice was the dub con at the beginning of Child of Destiny. That was some crazy shit that just wrote itself. My editor said it was too much. I said fuck you very much, it stays as is. It was raw, sometimes painful; but it was honest. And that's what I was going for.
Anyway, I need to get back to my day job. I had another breakthrough on the loo this morning and I'm yet to implement it in the story. Get Child of Destiny here and let me know if I should have listened to my editor.