Remittance Girl's Blog
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Mar.06.2012
Let me offer you a scene.
A small bank in any town. Morning. The light slants through the front windows and splashes over the polished granite flooring. A conservatively dressed woman stands at the front of the line, waiting for the next available teller. A place becomes free and she steps up to...
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Jun.16.2009
Or so says Kate Copstick, the new owner of the U.K's Erotic Review.
Erotic Review is a sometimes published, always struggling erotic magazine that has been described by some as 'middle-class porn.' Their tag line is: "Entertainment for people who can still think with their clothes off......
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3 comments
Feb.14.2009
I posted a writing challenge over at my blog (http://www.remittancegirl.com) and thought I'd offer it here too. It's an informal challenge, so please take it in the spirit it's offered:
Over the next two weeks, write a piece about an erotic library/bookstore experience.
It can, but doesn't have...
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3 comments
Jan.31.2009
I'm in the UK for less than a week and it seems that every daily newspaper is having a go at erotica as a genre. The problem is, they're all reading print erotica - most of which is pretty dreadful.
The Telegraph's Bryony Gordon reviews "In Bed With...", a collection of short erotic...
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Jan.29.2009
20th Century literature is full of sex scenes. Some are cursory, some are metaphors for coming of age, breaching veils, self-realization, metamorphosis, and some are just meant to be sexy.
If you're writing a sex scene as a metaphor, I can't offer much help. But if you want your sex scene to sizzle...
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Jan.22.2009
I've always balked when I read that some writer or other has found a 'fabulous' new method, piece of software, or hardware, that makes the writing process easier, better, etc. For the most part, I find that writers find their individual ways to practice their craft and that it's usually pretty...
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3 comments
Jan.21.2009
In the last few weeks I've been puzzling out a defence for the latest thing I've written. It's not bad writing. But it's BAD writing. For erotica writers, there are rules within rules for what you aren't supposed to write, what you shouldn't eroticize, subjects that you shouldn't touch with a ten-...
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11 comments
Dec.19.2008
I’ve been having some very stimulating back and forth discussions with an extremely erudite web-acquaintance of mine. What makes these discussions so good is that they nudge me into the analytical process in a way, which, left to my own devices, I might not get around to.
The essay which I linked...
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Nov.24.2008
In my story, 'The Splinter', my main character states her reason for her practice of 'mortification of the flesh'. Initially, at a young age, she tells her priest:
"I'm atoning for my sins, Father. I'm paying for them with pain. Just like Jesus."
Later, when confronted on what the priest...
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Nov.24.2008
One of the topics I am very interested in investigating in The Splinter is the use of pain as a tool for religious transcendence and as a vehicle to achieving "ecstatic union with God" (Flynn).
The Christian use of self-flagellation seems to be seen as achieving a number of different...
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Mar.31.2008
I just finished reading "The Good Women of China" by Xinran Xue.
It got me thinking down a not, I admit, very original path, but a thorny one.
"The Good Women" is an autobiographical account of Xue's time working on a call-in radio show in China. The book is a collection of...
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3 comments
Mar.31.2008
Looking for examples of digital collage for my students, I ran across this delightful work by a Russian woman who goes by the name of Seriykotik:
Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt?
This artist has done a series of digital collages using old photographs, written tiny narratives to go along with...
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1 comment
Mar.30.2008
Reading Jessica Inclan's post about shopping, I could really relate. I was going to do a post on genre, but I'll save it for when I'm feeling less brain dead. In the meantime:
Every year I go back to the UK to visit my mother. It's okay for the first few days and then she gets a look on her face...
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5 comments
Mar.29.2008
I wake up at about five-thirty this morning because the neighbor is watering her orchids and pumping up the Cai Luong
(Vietnamese opera. If, in an attempt to provide yourself with atmosphere, you click the link and try to listen while you read this post, your concentration will go for shit...
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8 comments
Mar.28.2008
For the past two weeks, I've been in a kind of writing hell. I've been writing a very long short story called "The Splinter."
It's really the first time in any story that I have gone back, deleted over 1,000 word chunks and re-written. I had to do this because I kept reverting back to...
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3 comments
About Remittance
Remittance Girl is my pen name. I'm a Canadian-born writer living in Vietnam. I mostly write erotic fiction of a literary bent, but stray from it at times to write the occassional piece with absolutely no sex in it. I teach narrative at a university here,...
Causes Remittance Girl Supports
Coalition Against the Trafficking of Women The Pleasure Project: A sex-positive organization working in the HIV prevention field.
Amnesty International...
Remittance’s Favorite Books
Although I don't write speculative fiction, I love to read it. I'm also enjoying two very interesting works of non-fiction: "The Lucifer Effect" by Philip...