For a long time now, I’ve been trying to come up with a regular blog post topic that really defined my thoughts on the erotica genre and was pretty descriptive of who I am as an erotica writer. I don’t do romance, no straight up sci-fi or fantasy. My erotica is not simply stories of sex scenes between two or more people. I write weird stuff to be honest; stories about plants having sex, and aliens discussing gender roles, etc. During a discussion with Nobilis Reed and Ann Regentin on our joint podcast The Good Parts, I realized that I get a lot of my best story ideas from scientific articles in newspapers and magazines, like National Geographic or Psychology Today. And this got me to thinking. If I were going to teach someone what I know about writing erotica, it would be to look at science for intriguing story ideas.
For instance, a couple of months ago, National Geographic ran an article on orchids, including one particular species familiarly called the “prostitute orchid?” This particular species of orchid cross dresses as a female bee in order to lure male bees in to mate with it. While the male bee is busy getting his insectile rocks off on the fake femme, the orchid gets busy securing pollen to the bee’s nether regions. By the time the bee finally figures out he’s been duped into humping a flower, he’s already been coated in pollen (or as I like to call it, orchid sperm). The poor bee flies off in search of a real female bee, only to run into another cross dressing flower where he ends up depositing the pollen from the first orchid, thus becoming an unwitting courier in the mating rituals of flowers.
Bizarre story, isn’t it? And yet fascinating too. Imagine being the flower, trying to lure the bee in so you could hose him down with your seed. Or better yet, imagine being the bee, looking for LUV in all the wrong places. What if there were a society of sentient beings where this sort of mating was carried out as a ritual? The males and females of the species would have to rely on a member of a separate species to carry out an important and very intimate transaction in order to breed. Would the courier species charge money for their services? And how would humans react to encountering an intelligent alien species in which this sort of activity was the sexual norm?
These are the sort of ideas I love to sink my teeth into and write about. And since I think this is something that makes me a bit unique among erotica writers, I’ve decided to work on a semi-regular post that I’ll put up on Fridays called The Science of Sex. Some weeks, I’ll post links to articles I’ve come across on the web about sex and scientific discoveries in the news. Other times, I’ll give my thoughts on what I’ve read or researched recently, and how I might spin a particular bit of science news into a story idea. And folks are free to run with any ideas I come up with. I don’t mind discussing my thoughts or inspiring people to write stories of their own.
For this week, here’s a link to the National Geographic article on orchids that I mentioned above, entitled Love and Lies – http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/09/orchids/pollan-text/1.
And if that isn’t enough for you, here’s an article from Web MD on the health benefits sof sex – http://www.webmd.com/sex-relationships/features/10-surprising-health-benefits-of-sex. Interesting stuff to know, and could be the basis of some intriguing story ideas. I know I’ve got one brewing in the back of my head even now!
Read it and enjoy and I’ll keep my eye out for more Science of Sex topics for future posts!
