Thirty Days of Fanfiction: Day Fourteen

14 – Ratings – how high are you comfortable with going? Have you ever written higher? If you're comfortable with NC-17, have you ever been shocked by finding that the story you're writing is G-rated instead?

Most of the time I'm working around PG 13. (Incidentally: getting used to American or British rating systems was something else again.) It comes with the gen territory. However, I think it's silly to use a high rating for sex and/or swearing but not for violence, either physical or emotional, and I have some twisted stuff in some of my stories. On the other hand, that's hard to rate. I picked the PC 13 rating by my own dim memory of being a teenager, and what I would and wouldn't have understood.

(You never know with kids, though. When I discovered Edgar Allen Poe at 13 I had nightmares about being buried alive for eons, whereas when given a novel by accident earlier the same year which had some pretty explicit passages about oral sex I just thought "ew", asked my mother whether people really liked to do that and wasn't that dreadfully unhygienic, was told it was pleasurable and considered fun, shrugged and thought the novel was boring and full of crazy people anyway. The only reason why I even remember is that the person who gave me that novel by accident was my grandmother, who hadn't read it but had been given it by a friend of hers and wanted to pretend she'd read it, so she handed it over to the fast reader in the family, yours truly, and expected a summary. I kept teasing her about having given her granddaughter soft porn till the end of her life, poor woman.)

I don't think I'll ever make it to NC-17 as a writer, for the simple truth that I suck at sex scenes, no pun intended. I can do UST, I can do the aftermath, but when it comes to the act itself I struggled horribly the few times I tried, and I'm always painfully aware of the inherent danger of the result reading like the description of an improbable gymnastic exercise. The most successful things I ever did in this regard were co-written back in my theatrical_muse days, and I maintain that the result reading erotic instead of, well, a failure, is due to my co-writers, plus it only turned into actual sex in the last quarter, and I'm reasonably good with foreplay, especially by scheming dialogue. Alas, the most succesful of these, an Irina/Jack/Arvin interaction which leads to a threesome, did not survive the time lj purged inactive journals. (Mine for Sloane was saved but that particular rp was in Jack's journal, and it is gone.) I still wouldn't rate the result NC-17 - we were never that graphic. My other favourite rp which I thought made for a genuinenly sexy reading was all UST between two people who already had sex once but were determined not to have it anymore, except neither of them could resist flirting a little and messing with each other's minds. Which turned into a competition as to who could drive whom crazier without actually doing anything or saying/admitting anything direct, and that was great fun to write. Had it been a story for an archive with a rating, though, it probably would have been filed under PG 13 as well.




( The rest of the questions )

Three Memoirs, Three Reviews

More leftover from my Brückenau days: book reviews. One of the books in question I’d browsed through before but hadn’t read it properly, the other two were new to me. What the three have in common is, aren’t you surprised, a Beatles connection; otherwise they’re widely different, though each struggling with the opening sentence ofDavid Copperfield in their way: Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.

( Pattie Boyd: Wonderful Tonight )

The other two books are in German and were written by two Beatles’ friends from the Hamburg days, Horst Fascher and Klaus Voormann. They make for a fascinating compare and contrast, not least because these two come from completely different corners of German society, take a completely different approach in telling their stories, and come to widely different conclusions (and some similar ones.) Horst Fascher starts out the son of a cleaning woman and a POW (his father was one of the long term POW in Russia who didn’t return to Germany until many years after the war), started a career as a boxer, which rapidly ended when he killed someone in a (non-professional, private) fight with a punch, became a bouncer in various clubs in Hamburg’s red light district, the Reeperbahn, at which point he meets not just the young Beatles but practically every rock musician of the era other than Elvis and the Stones, after some delayed stints in prison goes to the very place most people of the era couldn’t wait to get away from, Vietnam, as Tony Sheridan’s manager via Tony entertaining the troops, and spends the next decades promoting and managing anything from musicians to football stars; he’s what is often referred to as “a colourful character”.

Meanwhile, Klaus Voormann, son of a rich dentist and a banker’s daughter from Berlin, hails from what we call in German Großbürgertum (I think the English equivalent is upper class), studies art in Hamburg, discovers certain musicians in a night club after a quarrel with his girlfriend Astrid Kirchherr, becomes a musician himself in addition to being a graphic artist (as a bassist, he played most famously with Manfred Mann and the Plastic Ono Band, among many others, and the cover he drew for Revolver won him a Grammy, the first to go to a German artist) and after twenty years abroad returns to Germany at some point during the 80s. Not to kill the suspense, but his book is my favourite of the lot, not least because the combination of self-drawn illustrations (and he’s really, really good at that) and the ability to narrate his and other stories very well makes for a compelling whole. Something he and Horst Fascher do have in common, though? Don’t look to either of them for accurate chronology, date or record wise. Horst puts Billy Preston into the White Album when Billy actually plays on Let it Be, while Klaus thinks Magic Alex didn’t become a hanger-on with the Beatles until after India, instead of half a year before). But that’s okay; neither of them claims to be a biographer. They tell their own memories.

( Horst Fascher: Let the good times roll )

( Klaus Voormann: Warum spielst du Imagine nicht auf dem weißen Klavier, John? )