A few thoughts about slash

Maybe this is something very common among slash writers, but I usually feel that there are people I don’t want to read my stories, at all. It may be old-fashioned, immature or even unnecessary or it could be completely understandable – I don’t know that many slash writers personally.

Anyway, here goes:

I don’t want guys to read my stories. There. I’ve said it. A few actually have, and I haven’t had any negative reaction so far, but also not a very positive one. Tactful is probably the word. They were curious, they were allowed to read a story. They probably didn’t like it, but knew they’d asked for it and were polite. Fair enough. It just doesn’t encourage me to show them any more stories.

One guy I know would probably like to read everything I’ve written eventually. He’s nice. I like him. He is a graduate of gender studies. That probably means he has an interest beyond that of most ‘ordinary’ straight guys. I still don’t want him to read them all, because you know, that would show him a pattern. Me writing slash stories more than 50 % of the time. It would feel a bit embarrassing. But as Janet Evanovich says about writing sex stories and letting someone know you read them: “Yes, it is embarrassing, get over it.”

In fact, I try not to tell any guys I write slash stories, because you know – they usually wouldn’t be interested. I had a gay friend who was slightly interested – he was mainly interested in his own business – not mine – but slash stories were at least mildly interesting to him, even written by a straight female. I suspect most gay guys wouldn’t be, because we write slash ‘by women for women’ and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. With a close friend who’s gay, I’d like to expect an understanding. “Sure, it’s cool that you write those stories, for other women. Great idea, but it’s not for me.” You know, that sort of thing. More than that, just wouldn’t be fair to expect.

This one may be so natural that everyone agrees with it: I don’t want my mom to read any of my more ‘adult’ stories. Not that she’s the least bit curious. If I’ve written a ‘serious’ story (that is, not adult) I will have to ask her nicely if she wants to read it, and then she usually does. That is, if she’s not afraid it might be too upsetting, which of course is possible, even with a ‘non-adult’ story.

This reminds me of someone I got to know online, in fan fiction/slash circles. She worked as a web designer, that is made web pages for clients. That meant some clients wanted to see her own personal page (this was a long time ago). Also, her husband was very proud of her and told everyone he knew about his clever wife and her wonderful web pages and entusiastically handed out her URL to all his friends, without having read the stories on the page himself… So I told her we have another ‘big’ home page (the vegan one, but back then there was also a lot about many other things, that were totally unrelated). She thought that was a good idea, so maybe she made another web page, one that she could show to anyone, without being embarrassed. Not that anyone ever asks to see my homepages these days.

Of course, deep down, I’m not ashamed or really embarrassed. I don’t see anything wrong with writing (good) stories about slash and/or straight sex. It’s just like everything else – if you’re interested in it and you do it reasonably well, why not? (Because you know, writing anything really badly, would be embarrassing in itself). But superficially, it does tend to get embarrassing when you run into people who don’t understand at all.

If you write slash stories and/or ‘het adult’ stories, how do you feel about this? Would you show your stories to anyone who’s interested? Or do you have a preference?