So, this is my first blog post.
On Valentine's Day of all days.
I am not a romance writer but I will eventually write about situations in which love is at stake. Desperate, overwhelming love. These scenes have been outlined already. The trick is deciding on how to deal with them. For now, they are rough drafts and ideas that I hope to include in my Beauty (Un)Bound story. Lust and forbidden desires are more prominent elements in my writing so far, but you cannot sustain a story this way if you want your main character to have depth. Lust is perhaps a gateway emotion but there must be other feelings, emotions and impulses supporting it.
Shortly before last Christmas, I remembered having read Justine by the Marquis de Sade when I was a teenager. I loved it back then, seriously. I still do. The opening lines, about the pointlessness of being good, are still among my favourite opening lines in a book ever. I do not necessarily agree with them, but I don't disagree either, if you get my drift. They have a lovely flow, regardless, they glide off the page and trap you, compel you to keep reading.
Liking a book does not mean that you are blind to problematic themes within it. Justine is evidently an example of this. In The Catholic School, Edoardo Albinati paints a rather grim picture of de Sade's writing. He states that the old Marquis favours the establishment: the world is just fine the way it is, the ruling order is all right. Those dirty abusive men in power must have the upper hand, and that is just the way it should be. I can partially see that in the Marquis' work, but I would like to point out that it was this very establishment that imprisoned and alienated him as well. He was indeed fine with men ruling, and women and young people being subjected to their every whim. His freedom, though, was also in the hands of the powers that be more times than he would have wanted.
Nevertheless, I appreciate de Sade's writing. The darkness of it. And I have tried to subvert the formula a few times. I have created my male Justine. He is not virtuous, but he revels in punishment somehow.
By the way, exactly a year ago, I contacted an artist regarding an illustration for the cover of the story I was working on. His final version was the image above, which is lovely, but I chose to use the preliminary sketch instead, simply because it was not as polished and I preferred Conrad's expression in the earlier version.
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