Hello, and welcome to the mini blog tour for There Will Be Phlogiston (released: 8^th December), a free novella set in the Prosperityverse. Many thanks to Dani at Love Bytes for hosting me today!

To celebrate the release of Phlogiston, I’m also doing a little giveaway of any book from my backlist, which you can enter by entering the Rafflecopter blow:
a Rafflecopter giveaway

I’ve also got a scant handful of cover postcards left, so if you’d like one of those, I’d be really happy to post one to you wherever you are in the world. Send me a message via Facebook or Twitter, you can email me at alexisjhall@gmail.com.

And I’ll be hanging the Steampunk Flashgroup on Facebook for the next couple of days, talking about the book in more depth, and answering any questions. I hope to see you there.

Penetration Politics

I feel very lucky since I first got into this writing lark, in that I have a small group of very trusted friends who are kind enough to read the comma-less mess that is one of my unpublished manuscripts. They’re all quite different people, so they give me quite different feedback. At the risk of making her self-conscious, one of them is a very traditional het-romance reader, so we often take each other by surprise (in a good way) with our perspectives. Anyway, this piece is going to involve some spoilers about sexual … configurations … so if you prefer not to know who puts what in whom this might not be the post for you.

My friend liked Phlogiston, I think, but she did mention being concerned that the triad wasn’t complete – in that Jones doesn’t have PIV (penis-in-vagina) sex with Rosamond – and that this could potentially be perceived as unbalanced, since he does have penetrative sex with Lord Mercury. She was, of course, quite right—at least insofar as genre expectations around sex are concerned. One never likes to disappoint one’s readers, and while I am troubled by the emphasis on Where The Penis Goes in romance in general, I do understand that it’s more than thoughtless phallocentricism. For me, an effectively written sexual encounter communicates character just as much as conversation or internal monologue does. It makes sense that, as readers, we want to see these people in whose happiness we are currently invested interacting together in certain ways. We want to see them kiss, argue, make up, confide in each other, have sex, say ‘I love you’,  etc. These are all markers of intimacy.

But I think what I struggle with, both when I’m writing and when I’m reading, is the sense that some sexual acts are ‘worth’ more than others. Or, more worryingly still, that only sexual acts that involve quite limited forms of penetration count as real sex. And, to put it very bluntly, this is basically why Jones doesn’t at any point put his dick in Rosamond. I didn’t want to support the idea, either explicitly or implicitly, that this was an event that had to take place for their relationship to be real. They have a couple of sexual encounters – orgasms on both sides – but the book doesn’t cover a particularly long period of time, Rosamond is seventeen years old, and has essentially committed herself to a being 33.3% of a scandalous triad. I kind of thought maybe she’d want to deal with PIV sex some other time.  And, to be honest, I wanted not having PIV sex to be as legitimate a sexual and romantic choice as, well, having it. As far as I’m concerned, they’ve already had sex. PIV sex is just a particular sexual configuration they haven’t as yet explored – although I’m sure it’s one they will explore, and explore vigorously, at some point beyond the closing pages of the book.

Of course, there is penetrative anal sex between the two men (something Rosamond, incidentally, enjoys very much), which probably seems a bit odd considering I just made a big deal out of there not being penetrative vaginal sex between a man and a woman. To be honest, something that mildly irritates me about writing m/m is the necessity to stop what you’re doing and – in my case – have an angsty conversation with my partner about what broader political or social points I might be making, depending on who penetrates whom. It’s possible I over-think things (no, really?), but in m/m the presumed power dynamics of this stuff drive me up a wall. My view is, who penetrates whom comes down to who wants to be penetrated by whom – and sometimes the answer might entirely reasonably be “nobody, we’d rather do this other thing instead.” But because the tropes of m/m – to some degree – derive from the tropes of het—and PIV-sex is usually the epitome of sexual intimacy on Team Het … it tends to mean that anal sex becomes this weirdly equivalent activity.  And, while I think we’re just about enlightened enough to have left behind the assumption that the, uh, penetratee is the weaker partner, the act may often be about power and submission in ways in which are not always – to my mind – entirely helpful.

Sex, however you do it, is about whatever you want it to be about.

It’s really that simple.

And that’s why there’s penetrative anal sex in Phlogiston. To make just that point. Lord Mercury spends most of the book resisting the possibility that two men can have a fulfilling and loving relationship. He’s the product of a repressive, homophobic world—how else would he think? So while I did consider having the, ahem, configuration go differently, in the end I decided it was important for Lord Mercury to accept that it was possible to be with another man in a way that was not about power or submission or shame or sin.

In short: that sex is sex and love is love. And what you to do with a penis is kind of neither here nor there.

About There Will Be Phlogiston

An instructive story in which vice receives its just reward.

Inspired by true and scandalous tales of the Gaslight aristocracy, we present the most moral and improving tale of Lady Rosamond Wolfram.

Weep, reader, for the plight of our heroine as she descends into piteous ruin in the clutches of the notorious Phlogiston Baron, Anstruther Jones. Witness the horrors of feminine rebellion when this headstrong young lady defies her father, breaks an advantageous engagement, and slips into depravity with a social inferior. Before the last page is turned, you will have seen our heroine molested by carnival folk, snubbed at a dance, and drawn into a sinful ménage a trois by an unrepentant sodomite, the wicked and licentious Lord Mercury.

Reader, take heed. No aspect of our unfortunate heroine’s life, adventures, or conduct is at all admirable, desirable, exciting, thrilling, glamorous, or filled with heady passion and gay romance.

You can get a copy, and read an excerpt, over at Riptide Publishing.

About AJH

Alexis Hall was born in the early 1980s and still thinks the twenty-first century is the future. To this day, he feels cheated that he lived through a fin de siècle but inexplicably failed to drink a single glass of absinthe, dance with a single courtesan, or stay in a single garret. He can neither cook nor sing, but he can handle a seventeenth century smallsword, punts from the proper end, and knows how to hotwire a car. He lives in southeast England, with no cats and no children, and fully intends to keep it that way.

You can also find him all over the internet, on his website, Facebook, Twitter, BookLikes, and Goodreads.