(Eros, illicit love and erotic literature.)
Part One: Erotic or not?
As an author I’m often asked what genre of fiction I write, at which point my mind goes completely blank. It’s my own genre but like my erotic novel The Red Dragon Bed there is always a strong element of erotica in every book I write. If we take a look at the Archetype, Eros was the primordial Greek God of Love, a sexually powerful male figure, a profound artist whose task seems to have been to go around creating trouble by making people fall in love, often illicitly.
“He [Eros] smites maids’ breasts with unknown heat, and bids the very gods leave heaven and dwell on earth in borrowed forms.”
“Eros drove Dionysos mad for the girl [Aura] with the delicious wound of his arrow, then curving his wings flew lightly to Olympus. And the god roamed over the hills scourged with a greater fire.” (Nonnus Dionysia – a Greek epic of the 5th century AD)
He still seems very busy creating havoc especially (we hope) on TBW, where there is a certain sense of eroticism in the age gap romance. So for me eroticism has something of the “Nectar of the Gods” in it, which is why 50 Shades doesn’t do it for me, although it might for you. Erotic writing is not the same as fantasy, nor is it something that caters to niche sexual tastes. To write it properly I think it has to have a rather other-worldly feeling about it.
The Chinese were busy writing The Pillow Book thousands of years ago which was the marriage guide book of the bedroom, the Japanese had their Shunga: look it up it will leave you amazed in one sense of another. Then of course there is the Karma Sutra… more recently DH Lawrence Lady Chatterley’s Lover, The Story of O , some of Simon de Beauvoir’s stuff, the list goes on…
So if we think of eroticism as sexuality, powerfully and compelling, containing a morsel of the illicit, often socially taboo and of course totally irrational I had a starting point for my “Dragon Lord”, the main figure of my erotic novel who seduces the women who sleep in the golden bed he created at the beginning of time from drops of his own blood. I went to town on the fairy-tale aspect of eroticism, the strong link between Eros and Thanatos, the equal and opposite Gods of love and death and then just let my imagination do the rest. Let me know what you think, take a dip in the book and let me know… is it erotic or not?
Prologue
The Dragon Lord
China
Deep beneath the grey green waters of the lake he sleeps and dreams the dreams of a thousand days or a thousand years, he has no perception of the tricks and trials of time.
His long cold fingers twitch and stir remembering the places where they have travelled to touch, to stroke to coax, to burn their ecstasy into the body of a woman like an ecstatic branding. His tongue flicks the limits of his lips and he longs to suckle at the cradle of desire, the firm hard point of a nipple suck the sweetness of the hot moist flesh within. Feel its throbbing awakening buck beneath him. Yes he needs to see the look in the eyes of the beloved as she waits in anticipation for the love that he can bring her. He is a lover that no mortal man can ever hope to compete with.
All that he will ask in return is the gift of everything, body heart and soul and the coil of mortal life cast off like a moulted skin. He yearns to bring their essence to rest deep down in his watery cave with him and keep the loneliness of eternity at bay.
For the time has come again to venture into the world of the above beings; and someone is lying in the bed he fashioned from a drop of his golden blood and that person is to become once more his precious forever love.
Victoria Mosley is a poet, spoken word artist and author of The Red Dragon Bed.
