The sexy unknown

and the story in the gaps.

Quite a lot of hand-wringing these days over why women are so into Heated Rivalry.

The Guardian ran a piece the other day. What could women be getting out of softcore gay porn? Are they confused? Are they horny? (I mean, yes, and yes. Who isn’t?)

Indulging in no hand-wringing over here. To me, the answer’s so obvious.

Why are women into Heated Rivalry, a tale of two beautiful men playing sports and humping in hotel rooms?

Exactly the same reason men are obsessed with lesbians and everything they do.

Because this is not a world to which we have access. It is not a world to which we will ever have access.

And everyone wants to experience the lives they don’t get to live.

Onism is real: everyone wants what they can’t have. (I don’t mean onanism, that is a different thing, though not irrelevant in the context).

Basically? Heated Rivalry is fascinating, in the same way reading and voyeuring the lives of others that we never get to experience is fascinating.

Also it is very, very hot.

—

Had a real lightbulb moment the other day in a mandatory work training. I know. I’m as surprised as you are.

It was a training on house writing style—because, for the first time in my life, I am being paid to write for a living—and the trainer casually noted that the key to writing content online is ABSORPTION.

Unlike reading hard copy, she said, where the reader thinks and immerses, reading online is about quick absorption. A reader’s eyes dart, they rove the screen, looking for key words. You can’t make them hunt for things, she stressed. You have to lay it all out there, using simple language. No friction: fluid absorption. Osmosis.

They don’t want to immerse, they want to absorb.

And I thought: aha!

This makes so much sense.

ABSORPTION.

Does it demand focus, a quiet room and a certain quietness of the soul, to sit with and perhaps do battle with and parse and puzzle and emerge eventually, if not victorious, at least more considered?

Or can it be quickly and easily absorbed, asking little to no effort on the part of the reader?

Ding ding ding, we have a winner.

Play it on 1.5 speed. Spreed. What’s your per minute reading word count? Write it shorter. Edit it to nothing. Just leave it blank! Nothing to see here.

Leave gaps. White space is key.

I’m not blaming anyone. Hell, we all do it. It’s the nature of reading off a screen. I do it. You’re doing it right now. Skim, scan, scroll. Done. Next.

But it is NOT the same as writing for hard copy. A book—especially, a novel—feels dead, empty, when it’s skimmable, when there’s just nothing much to it. It’s white bread, disintegrates in the brain and leaves behind nothing but a filmy, sugar-y residue.

If you can absorb it all, it leaves behind nothing of substance.

You cannot write for hard copy the same way you write online. It seems so obvious, like all great truths, as soon as you say it out loud. I didn’t get it before. I do now.

Nuanced essays that you have to sit down and focus to read? That’s not what Substack is for. It’s not in the nature of online reading or “digital content”.

It’s why Substack has so lightly given up the fight to be the home of great writing and just become a nebulous “culture” monger.

Because it was never going to happen. Everyone knows great writing lives offline.

So, where does this leave me, a person who likes to write things? Well, I’m not really sure to be honest except that I have made my peace with Substack and understand it has a light newsletter-y kind of place—but only a place. It is not the be-all and end-all. That’s ok.

Luckily, I have written quite a lot offline lately.

I’d really like to start sharing more about the book.

If you haven’t been following for the last two years, I’ve written my debut historical fiction novel and secured an agent, which is extraordinarily exciting.

While I’d love to get arse-deep (like, Heated Rivalry deep) in the details with you, I also have to protect my proprietary IP (whatever the hell that means in these GPT-ified days).

Things I have but can’t share yet include:

• Maps

• Bibliography

• Timelines

• Cast lists

• Family trees

• Images

For those, I’m afraid you will have to buy the book, when it comes.

Instead, what I do have is a blow-by-blow account of the writing and research process.

This was captured in real time in my weekly essays from September 2023 (when the first whispery premonitions of this novel arrived) and my silly little writing LOG 📊, which I thought was ridiculous at the time and just did to keep myself honest and plugging away but which is now quite a valuable reminder of how far this book has come. Draft manuscript is currently back with my agent and word count sits at a squeak over 117k: still too long but it’s easy to cut down, right? (Wrong, cutting one’s darlings is so hard.)

So, I’ve pulled together a new section of my site: the B O O K 📖 that charts, in chronological order, the writing of my novel. It will require sitting down and focusing, but what emerges if you read from the start is a preoccupation with things left behind: the residue of stories in unspoken spaces and the murky ethics of fictionalising historical lives. For reference, I highly recommend listening (and re-listening) to Hilary Mantel’s Reith Lectures, which informed so much of my thinking about this book.

“… the crack in the teacup opens a lane to the land of the dead …”

While I’m giving nothing away (yet), something happened in September 2023.

I saw something and couldn’t unsee it. I had to know more about it. When I couldn’t find anything, I started digging. I’m a trained lawyer and historian so I’m good at digging. I’ve been learning to do it my whole life.

What I found is that there is a significant gap in the historical record: things stolen, hidden, vanished. The remains tell a story, through what is missing.

The story hides in the white space.

Kind of like in Heated Rivalry, what you don’t see and can’t know? That is the real story. It lives behind closed doors, in whispered conversations and burned letters.

My novel builds in the gaps where nothing is known but much can be deduced.

Basically? I couldn’t find the story I wanted to read, so I wrote it myself.