Death Rides a Pale Cow
I love the Dead Milkmen. I do. They have some of the most fantastic politically and socially satirical lyrics in the universe. Truly fantastic.
Why am I telling you this?
Because I recently began a little thingamajig on Twitter (#eroticsatireOMG) wherein we (by we I mean whoever the heck wants to, but mainly a core group of about five of us) endeavor to parody really awful erotic romance. And we’ve been having a lot of fun with it. How can you not have fun when your hero (a billionaire Greek vampire) is named Shaftos? And he has a dread vampire plague. That can only be cured by the love-juice of a virgin vampire slayer. Come on. That’s comic gold right there. You’re laughing, aren’t you?
So, to the point of this little exercise. I started calling it satire, but satire implies political or social purpose that isn’t extant in this fun little romp. It’s a parody, the joyous poking of fun and lampooning of a genre. But over the course of the discussion, it’s pointed up some interesting stereotypes in romance writing. The persistence of some tropes is truly astonishing (we’re trying to figure out how to manage a secret baby even if she’s a virgin. we’ll figure it out eventually….). And it’s been interesting what we don’t think we can do. How there are lines that just don’t want to be crossed. Things that make the characters too far from human to be pallatable, I suppose.
How far can you let your imagination take you in your writing? Have you written things and then gone “Oh, hell, no, I can’t use that. That’s just going to far.”? I don’t think I have. But I think that’s more because I censor it before it hits the page. I have this idea – an idea that keeps popping up – that is so far beyond the pale that I simply cannot commit it to the screen. But I think one day I’ll give in and write it. Then what will I do?
