Here’s a press release!
*
Death Train: It’s Fifty Shades of Grey for Grownups*
E.L. James based the Fifty Shades series on her well-known Twilight fanfiction. Now, popular Harry Potter fanfiction writer Anise has upped the ante with Death Train: A Novel of Obsession. Over half a million online readers have enjoyed her fanfictions, which inspired this dark, erotic love story.
Watch for it on Amazon in December 2012! A perfect gift for Grandma.
(Okay, that last sentence wouldn’t actually be included. )
And just to prove that I don’t only pimp my own porn (although it is hard out there for a pimp):
after seeing Julie Powell, the blogger of Julie and Julia (played by Amy Adams in the film) as a judge for a cooking gameshow on GSN, I was wondering what she had done since the film was released, and I had no idea she wrote an unpopular sequel called Cleaving in 2009. Why did I put it in this thread? Folks complained the book was full of S&M, smut-filled travails of a glorious affair (and a doormat husband) and nothing endearing as her cooking blog.
I read interview of where her next plan was to write a novel, and then this Fifty Shades author beat her to it. Too bad Julie used her own life and not a fictionalized creation.
I’ve written a blog post that seems very germane to this thread, I’ve cleaned it up a bit and posted it here, FYI.
I’ve found a really interesting analysis of 50 Shades of Gray on the Feministing Community site, entitled “Unconventional Sex Ed Lessons from 50 Shades of Gray”. It’s written by Mimi Arbeit, a feminist educator who teaches sex education to teens. She says she expected to find the book a huge disappointment because of all that she’d heard about it, but was pleasantly surprised by it, finding it a welcome change from the dominant themes about sex and romance in the media.
By that she means the book covers a lot of things that other books do not. Most importantly, Ana and Christian communicate clearly and honestly with one another about sex throughout their relationship. Christian is always careful to get Ana’s informed consent before he has any kind of sex with her. They discuss and plan for contraception before they have sex. And the book directly and powerfully portrays Ana’s experiences of sexual pleasure and desire. As I’ve noted repeatedly, James does a REALLY good job of conveying how much Ana and Christian enjoy their sex play.
Wildly popular books about sex read by teens NEVER have any of this stuff, says Arbeit, so she is enormously grateful to see an erotic romance that mentions all of the lessons she is trying to instill in her teen students, whose media experience does not include ANY of it.
Arbeit’s opinion of the book is not wholly positive – she says she could just as easily write a list of ten things she finds problematical about the book, and I believe her. But she is glad of the book as a chance to open up a dialog which allows her to convey the importance of some of these themes to her teen students. And I think that’s what opens her up to the positive aspects of the books that other readers (looks significantly at some of the other posters in this thread) missed. She saw what was there because her experience teaching teens had sharpened her eye to it.
Other readers have so many prejudices about the book (and I suspect the kinky sex that it contains) that they will do any horrible stupid thing they can think of to make it look bad.
Theo didn’t read it, so of course he makes a completely wrong comparison of 50 Shades with the Gor novels, which as a guy who read 20 or so of the Gor novels, the kink was of the distinctly nonconsensual kind (the Gorean slaves just loved it because they were natural born slavegirls) which makes it WAAAAAY different than 50 Shades, which is all about the consensual and had nothing to do with sex slavery.
But then Theo goes and accuses 50 Shades of being stealth pedophilia, based on the accusations of an anonymous poster on another message board who relates the story of an unnamed purported child psychologist who read the book and decided that Ana is written as a 12-year-old for some reason, possibly the "oh my!"s “Inner goddesses” and suchlike.
It smells like one of those classic put-up jobs with a made-up friend who is an authority (child psychologist) is used to attack something to make it seem awful (pedophile porn) with vague evidence (even though Ana is identified as a twenty-one year old college grad, she’s “written as a child”) hoping it will stick.
Fortunately, a couple of posters on the Black Gate board who responded to Theo’s post saw it for the piece of shit it was and gave it a thorough going-over, a very Doper-like drubbing that was well deserved. It’s always kind of heartening to see some good, hard Doper-like analysis occurring elsewhere on the Web, wish it happened a lot more often.
To be honest, the Black Gate post is about an order of magnitude worse than any of the other posts which have dissed the book. But I’ve been following 50 Shades of Gray in the media, and I’ve found plenty of others who have dissed 50 Shades based on nothing but a verbal description of it and a lot of social prejudice.
Well, there really is no “beating her to it.” Several zillion similar books have been published before, and several zillion more will be published afterwards. It depends on whether or not Powell can actually write that novel, but the idea of being “beaten to” writing a smut-filled book really isn’t relevant one way or another. Now, it’s true that she would not have the additional hook of being a very well-known fanfic author. But there aren’t too many of us out there!
(waves the ten years of work fanfic flag!)
Slightly off topic, but on a recent Bill Maher show, he showed a photo of Mitt Romney reading the book, “50 Shades Of White.”
Stupid visual, but it made me laugh.
Seriously,though, I was thinking about this issue some more while lying in bed with a fever and flu. (Yes, that might have affected things… why do you ask?
I don’t think anyone knows exactly how many books have ever been written, but the Library of Congress has a total of 134,517,714 items in the collections. That obviously doesn’t count articles, essays, short fics, internet fics, etc etc etc… So we KNOW that there have been literally tens of millions of smutty published works in the history of the world, and that may even be an underestimation. (If anyone really wants to read unbelievable BDSM porn, nothing can ever beat the Victorian journal The Pearl.) There has been women’s erotica for a long time. Bertrice Small, Robin Schone, and Thea Devine are the ones that immediately leap to my mind when thinking of historicals, but even that market probably constitutes around a million works of some kind. For that matter, there is lots and lots and LOTS of NC-17 fanfic porn out there written by women for women, and a tremendous amount of it is so much better than 50 Shades in just about every way possible.
So here’s why 50 Shades succeeded as it did, and it’s the only reason why: It’s a Twilight fanfic which fills the needs of people who read the original series and were furious with all the teasing. They wanted the explicit BDSM sex that is constantly hinted at and never really followed through on. And they definitely got it. Clearly, this audience is not limited to people who actually know anything about the fact that it originally was MoTU. Another thing is that MoTU was not a very canon-compliant fic at all, to say the least. It was firmly AU from the very beginning. The point is that the power dynamic and relationships in FS are so very similar to what we saw between Bella and Edward in the Twilight series; it’s just a slightly different version of both characters, in both MoTU and FS.
A lot of women seem to want to explore that dynamic in fantasy and imagination. It’s a very specific version of that dynamic which was already set up in an insanely popular published series. We can all think whatever we want about that relationship dynamic, whether our opinions are positive or negative, but still, it’s what some people want in the context of fiction. And I just don’t think there’s any doubt about the book being fair use (although some do not agree.)
Still, it all kind of reminds me of that old Dennis Miller sketch on SNL about 2LiveCrew: “But the song’s so BAD!! Couldn’t we have gone to the wall for Layla?”
I know that it’s hard to catch everything in an original post-- trust me, I’ve done that too (reacted to a post based on something that I misread.) So I’m not criticizing you… but that point was in my original post.
I know! That’s the first thing I thought of, too.
You’d think that after 10 years here I’d know how to post images, but I don’t think I post often enough… anyway… He-Man and Cringer.
And here’s something else to think about. The entire reason why FS was ever picked up by a publisher in the first place was precisely because it had been MoTU. The fanbase was huge; it had 40,000 reviews on ff.net. (And as much as I loathe the sheer dreckitude of it, I do think that it was perfectly written in order to fit into the Twilight-related zeitgeist. Perfect place, perfect time, perfect hook into the current collective fantasy life of the public.) The squeeing and free promotion from fans was not to be believed. It would have been a stupid decision on the part of any major publisher to not decide to take MoTU and put a considerable publicity machine behind it. But if it had not been a fanfic, that would never, ever, ever, ever have happened.
(I’ll include cites to everything if people really want to see them. But I 'm ALREADY nauseous from the flu. :p)
For those who are tired of discussing erotica, here’s a much better “Shades of Grey” book.
I brought it up because I seriously checked to make sure I wasn’t going to wind up reading the subject of this thread. Yeah, I forgot about the 50 in front of the title.
I had no idea it was originally a Twilight fanfic. I’d only heard about it from that SNL mother’s day skit.
I checked it out on Amazon. It does look interesting! Only available from 3rd party sellers, though.
The thing about FS isn’t that a lot of people who bought it knew it was a fanfic. It never would have gotten published in the* first *place if it wasn’t a fanfic. Then, it got all the advantages of major marketing and distribution available only in that way. I wonder if (in a weird way) people actually trust the quality of books put out by large publishers more than ever before. Anyone can publish on Kindle et al, and it’s even easy to make covers look good (although a lot of them are still hellishly bad.) How does the public know that they’ll be getting their money’s worth? Traditional publishing does act as a gatekeeper, and while it can fail spectacularly at that job, at least the most amateur efforts are almost always weeded out (unless the publishing house has a pretty good idea that other factors will lead to large sales.) I’d love to know what others think about this.
Yes, it did succeed EXPRESSLY because it started out as Twilight fanfic. The thing that got the big publishers all hot and bothered about 50 Shades is that it was selling HUGE numbers as an ebook, long before they found it. And that was because the Twilight fans who had followed Master of the Universe were buying it in droves. It was a bestseller BEFORE Viking go their grubby little paws on it, because of the Twilight fans.
This quote should make things very clear:
Source (an excellent read, BTW, on the way the Twilight fan community nursed MOTU, and by extension, 50 Shades, into being.
On edit, I see I got one of those cites Anise mentioned.
Thanks for posting that! I really, REALLY did not want to find those sources again (brain hurts just thinking about it.)
You know, here’s what makes me angry. (And I won’t pretend not to be angry. And I won’t apologize for it, either! Well, I don’t think that anybody here would care.) When Cassie Claire got published based on her HP fandom, I was happy for her. I’ve spoken at more than one HP conference with her. She’s a good writer, and she deserved it. But FS is such utter garbage. (Yes, I know; I need to learn how to speak my mind.)
There is infinitely more NC-17 fanfic out there that is infinitely better. Recension’s *Use Me, *Sugarbear’s Smoking in the Head Boy’s room, Madeline’s *Winning the Cup *Series, Sarea and Jade Okelani’s Portkey Party, La Rubinata’s greatly superior BDSM series… and these are just the ones I thought of off the top of my head, and just in the D/G fandom. (And I’m not EVEN pimping my own fics here! Every one of them blows FS away in terms of smut, characterization, theme, plot, and everything else, really. People do not realize how substandard FS really is, and it’s because they have not read what else is out there. It’s sad.
I really, REALLY did not want to find those sources again (brain hurts just thinking about it.)