Two wonderful books, thanks for reminding me of them in your link to Urban Fantasy.

Right now, aside from DeLint, too much of it is just erotic fiction with a different background, which is not my cup of tea.

I guess becuase we clean things up so much? Faith based fiction can be soooo clean, but when you do that, you lose the power of the transformation. You take the magnificence out of the miracle. You– 🙂 you get it.

And anyway, I’ve made up my mind that God doesn’t despise vibrator manufacturers. 😉

I’m not writing my story to appeal to Christians who won’t read anything BUT Steeple Hill. They don’t need it-they have their …whatever it is they have. I’m going to cozy myself up to everything those good and righteous people are afraid of and light a Bic.

How does that manifest for you? Are you really trying to force the same poles of two magnets together, like I am? (That’s what I understood you to mean in your Romancing the Blog comment.)

Man, I can’t wait to read that.

Oy vey.

And here I was up reading in bed, thinking about how my story was going to bring me backlash. But of course, that’s half the attraction… Yes, I am a troubled child.

Something I’ve been thinking tho. Light belongs in the darkness. I’m not writing my story to appeal to Christians who won’t read anything BUT Steeple Hill. They don’t need it-they have their …whatever it is they have. I’m going to cozy myself up to everything those good and righteous people are afraid of and light a Bic.

“Put a collar on Bella and make it official. Pauline Reage would be proud.” *snerk* that one was great.

First: My friend Carole, who is familiar with some vampire literature but doesn’t get into erotica, immediately responded (negatively) to the domination/submission issues in the Twilight books: you can read her in-depth analysis on my blog :).

Second: Our LDS book club read Twilight (I never finished), and my mother, who reads NO vampire literature or erotica, immediately reacted, with distaste, to the “petting” scenes. This is not a hypersensitive woman, but she is a very moral one (read Eugene’s first post about AFS’s controversy). She thought the petting scenes were, to put it mildly, disingenuous.

Last comment: I had a BYU Creative Writing professor who said, “Well, sex and vampirism is kind of an automatic link” although he thought it was overused. Still, absent any background in vampirism, I think readers who don’t see it coming are being willfully blind, looking for trees instead of forest and, in the case of AFS, completely missing the point.

“A Mormon Writer Looks at the Problem of Evil in Fiction”
by Orson Scott Card

I’m guessing not many steadfast members have read erotica; otherwise, they might be better equipped to recognize it when they see it disguised as a “squeaky clean” story about teen vampires.

I was talking to my visiting teacher today and she said she read the books before she let her daughter read them. She understood the subtext completely and she explained the in-your-face dominant- submissive overtones, explained it to her daughter, and they had a nice chat. Way to be!

Put a collar on Bella and make it official. Pauline Reage would be proud.

Where’s the outrage over the eroticism in “Twilight” series?

Doesn’t exist. I cull these 2 choice comments from another of the blogs that is in the hub of this brouhaha:

I must be out of the loop because I have never equated vampires with sex. So I would not have made that jump for this book.

and

Re: the vampire lore–for millions and millions of people (and thousands of LDS readers), the ONLY vampire story they’ve ever read to this point is Twilight, so they’ll take along assumptions they got from that and apply them other LDS authors. These readers are going to be unfamiliar with all the sexual nuances that go with Dracula et al.

I am not going to link those comments, again, because I am not making fun and I don’t want anyone else to make fun, either.

I don’t believe the claim is true for millions and millions. I am disgusted with the fact that the alarm bells in the back blurb and the warning on the publisher’s website were missed and then blamed on the publisher and, further, that some feel the need to stone the man.