Kevin Whately and Laurence Fox promo shot for ITV’s ‘Lewis’ series.
Sometimes, you want to give someone a gift to cheer them, but you don’t have the right thing.
So you make them something. Or you give them something that you have already made.
I wanted to cheer up my friend, WitchRavenFox, but I didn’t have the right thing handy. But I had this fic. I hope you like it, my dear.
Read The Luscombe Dilemma here at A03, or here at FF.net.
Happy reading,
EF
A second addition to the ‘Departures’ series.
I was humming and hahing about publishing this one, but then my lovely fangirl niece Amelia said I shouldn’t bottle out because I’m afraid of criticism, so, having honestly accepted that I am rubbish at the vulnerability required to receive crit, I slapped this one on AO3 and am hoping for the best.
Light blue touch paper and retire, as the firework instructions go.
A little taster:
“For two days he carried the man in his heart, the letter in his backpack, trudging along the Way across the mountains and ravines of north eastern Spain, trying to pray, trying to concentrate on God.
God never had a look-in when He was up against Robert Lewis.”
You can read the full story here on AO3.
Happy Creating,
luv EF
One day, I woke up and felt like writing again.
It was wonderful, like standing under a waterfall after a long, hot hike up a tropical mountainside.
And then I couldn’t stop.
Its fun again. I can’t tell you how much of a relief that is. My imagination is dancing around the campfire like a stoned hippie, happily tripping. Which is my idea of bliss.
I don’t care if the stories I am producing are my best work. The point is that I am working.
So I have written a bunch of Lewis fics, and as I was looking at them today, I realised there was a theme amongst them, so I have batched them together, and put the first of the batch up on AO3 this afternoon.
A little taster:
‘Right,’ he says, turning to Lewis with a big, deep breath, hoping it will give him courage to finally say goodbye. ‘No sense in you waiting. It’ll be ages before I get to the front of that queue.
Lewis shrugs. He looks somehow smaller, older, a little wizened by his unspoken sadness and the impersonal scale of the check-in hall.
‘Don’t mind,’ he says, and manages a gentle smile. ‘I’ll keep you company.’
No, don’t do that, James thinks. Don’t make it harder. Please? But he can’t say it, of course, because he is still desperate for the tiniest morsel, the minutest sliver of time he can get with this man, this beautiful, brave, honourable man who has saved his skin and his soul, and probably his sanity, more times than is fair to remember.’
You can read the rest here at AO3.
Happy Creating,
EF
Kevin Whately and Laurence Fox in ITV’s ‘Lewis’
I promised myself I would never do it again, but I just can’t seem to help myself.
I made a new quick fic. A Lewis one. I made it for Lee, because she was kind to me when I needed it. Thank you Lee. I’m grateful. You gave me faith. I hope you enjoy it.
” ‘I said,’ James repeats with slightly slurred emphasis. ‘What if you threw a love affair and nobody came? Like throwing a party? That’s my life. That’s exactly how my life has been.’”
You can find it exclusively here at AO3.
Happy Creating,
EF
Kevin Whately and Laurence Fox promo shot for ITV’s ‘Lewis’ series.
Last week, I gave you ‘Cooking Breakfast’, a little insight into the intimacy between Robbie Lewis and James Hathaway. This week, I have finished the companion piece to that – told from James’ point of view:
“I’m chopping mushrooms, dancing between hob and chopping board, cha-cha-cha. Paper white flesh of fungus. He says mushrooms have no place in a fry-up, but I haven’t noticed him complaining much these days when I put his plate in front of him. Just looks up at me with those twinkling eyes, and I melt. Bastard knows it, too. He can do anything, and then look at me like that, and I’m putty in his hands.
I’m not complaining.”
You can read it here at AO3.
Happy Creating, And a Happy Valentine’s Day to you all,
love,
EF
Kevin Whately and Laurence Fox in ITV’s ‘Lewis’
Its been a long time since I conjured up a quickfic for you. I wrote this little morsel while I was on my writers retreat last weekend. My fellow writers liked it, and I hope you will too. Just a little bit of Lewis romance to start your weekend off with a smile. Here’s a taste:
” He is in the kitchen, dancing his Sunday morning sarabande amongst the pans.
You stand in the shadows of the hall, take a moment, watch him lit up by the morning sun, count your blessings. Because it wasn’t supposed to be like this. You weren’t supposed to get this lucky twice in one lifetime. If you believed in God, you’d thank Him. (Never mind, leave all the thanking God to James.)”
You can read it here at AO3, or if you prefer, here at FF.net.
If you like it, you’ll be glad to know that I am working on a companion piece, told from James’ POV. Watch this space!
Happy Creating,
EF
Following mature and thoughtful discussion in the comments section of my last post, I’ve decided to take ‘Not So Innocent’ off AO3. The whole thing has upset me too much, especially since we are now facing a new personal crisis in RL. Its just not worth it.
Right now, I don’t want to publish a fanfic ever again. I just can’t face it. I’ll get over that, I suppose. I always do. I certainly don’t want to spend today writing, as I had planned.
I want to say something erudite about the way women are treated by society, but I just don’t think I can. I’ll just say this:
Jimmy Saville’s victims number in the hundreds. More come out every day.
Accusations are now filtering out about not just sexual and physical abuse, but children being killed as part of sex parties by a ring centred in Westminster in the 70s and 80s.
Bill Cosby’s career is in freefall after accusations of rape.
Rotherham.
Birmingham.
Rochdale
Oxford
Telford
Syria and Iraq
Boko Haram
Women being executed for bringing ‘shame on their families’ by being the victim of rape.
Just about every photoshopped photograph in every glossy magazine published anywhere in the world.
Every diet company that preys on women’s poor self image.
Gala Darling’s recent revelations
Every girl who’s afraid to walk down her own street at night, but thinks the only way to be acceptible to her peers is to go out scantily dressed on a Friday night and get so drunk she can’t even stand, let alone take care of herself and keep herself safe.
Every boy who thinks that when a girl says no, she means ‘yes’ because she’s ‘playing hard to get’.
Every person who judges me because I don’t have children, or because I let my hair grow grey, because I’m not behaving like a ‘proper’ woman.
My husband’s 86 year old aunt, who weighs no more than 6 stone, telling me her thighs are fat.
And the fact that the acceptance of abuse is so ingrained in both my mind and yours that often we don’t even notice it. Because I certainly didn’t.
EF
*Prammage: noun, colloquial. The act of throwing one’s toys out of the pram; going off in a flounce or a sulk; a passive-aggressive act of self-harm or self-sabotage in response to not getting one’s own way; see also ‘cutting off your nose to spite your face’.
I was going to write you a lovely blog post about playing with language today, but events have taken an interesting turn, and I wanted to share them with you.
On Monday 17th November I posted a Lewis fanfic called ‘Not So Innocent’ that I’d had hanging around on my hard disk for a while. It was written as a quickfic, and I found it again, and thought it was funny, so I decided to post it as a quickie and didn’t think much about it. Being a Lewis fic, it didn’t get masses of attention, because the fandom is relatively small, but the person I posted it for as a gift liked it, and that seemed all that mattered.
This morning, Wednesday 19th November, I woke up to vicious criticism on both FF.net and AO3 for the story. The reviewer basically accused me of condoning and inciting sexual harrassment and rape.
Hmm.
This didn’t go down too well with me, since I have been victim of both sexual harrassment and abuse.
I am also not in a good place at the moment, and my response to this unexpected attack was to delete the story on both AO3 and FF.net. I have never written a dub-con or non-con story and I wouldn’t. It disgusts me. I have written quite aggressively dark stories that include child abuse and public humiliation sex, but which explore the psychological wounds that underly and result from them. For anyone to accuse me of condoning sexually abusive behaviour was just too much.
I can’t be arsed. I’ve got too much other shit going on in my life to bother with making myself a target for such oversensitive extreme-feminist bull.
As far as I was concerned, the reader had simply not identified the subtext which runs through the story, which is that all participants know exactly what is going on, and are party to it, an irony from which the humour is supposed to arise.
Obviously I didn’t make that subtext clear enough, I realised, as I stomped off to the bathroom to shower. (I do most of my thinking and story planning in the shower.) And then I really got to thinking:
Was my own experience of sexual harrassment at work being a ‘normal’ part of a woman’s career colouring my work?
FULL DISCLOSURE: I have been on the receiving end of some serious acts of sexual harrassment in my younger days (before I lost my looks, haha!). It was regarded with a shrug as something that went on. Indeed, at some level, ‘Not So Innocent’ must draw on the experiences I had as a young academic at a number of conferences.
At one, I allowed myself to be seduced by an older man who was also the leader of a rival project. He was charming and intelligent, and I was lonely and desperate for comfort. It later transpired that he was only interested in me because he thought he could extract from me details of what our project was doing.
And this is where the question of consent comes in. We had fully consensual sex that night, but it turned out that we were consenting to two different things. I thought I was consenting to beginning an intimate relationship with long term prospects. He thought I was consenting to being exploited for information. The question of consent between two people having sex turns out to be a lot more complicated than just ‘do you want to, or not’.
My own experience of conference ‘pursuits’ is not something I have examined much before, except to realise that its pretty exploitative, but I can see that in writing ‘No So Innocent’, I’ve displayed some attitudes that I had internalised without thinking. Instead of thinking: ‘this is what happens’, maybe I should have realised: ‘this isn’t something that should happen.’
I began to reflect on ‘Not So Innocent’ in a different way, by considering what both James and Lewis are consenting to, and what Innocent is implying. Would she really go through with her threat? I think not. I think she’d sit James down on the end of her bed and give him a good talking-to about how much he loves Lewis, and how much Lewis clearly loves him. I think I knew that when I was writing it. I think James knows it too.
And even if they did have sex because he chickened out with Lewis, I think it would be lovely, passionate, and above all, uncoerced.
There was intended to be a sexual frisson between James and Jean. I wanted him to be torn to a certain extent, attracted by the prospect of Innocent’s considerable charms. I happen to think she’s a very sexy woman, and I think James sees that, just as she finds him attractive. I realised I underwrote the irony because while I was writing, I wasn’t sure how the thing was going to end – and I secretly wanted James and Innocent to end up in bed together. That is the danger of publishing an unpolished quickfic.
As for the scene where James gets into bed with Robbie, I honestly don’t think there is a consent issue there. Robbie is clearly consenting, and if he wasn’t, he’s quite capable, both in terms of physical strength, and authority, of ejecting James. In my opinion, it is clear that they are also both consenting to the same thing, and they both know it: the start of a loving relationship, and the end of their unrequited yearning for each other.
And yes, it would be different if it were a man getting into a woman’s bed uninvited, or a man threatening a woman with seduction, but that isn’t what is happening. These are two people who are in love, finally being pushed through their inhibitions by a fond friend. The fact that they happen to be co-workers, with the ensuing power-politics, becomes irrelevant in the face of love.
I wish I hadn’t deleted the story, because I have deleted the comments of the readers as a result. I wish I had left it so that people can make up their own minds. Because, if nothing else, this story might make people rethink attitudes at work that they have previously taken for granted as normal, as I have.
I also think its a work I have clearly under-written in terms of subtext, and all the participants’ complicity, but I’m not going to rewrite it, or change it in any way. I want it to stand as a testament to the fact that I will no longer throw my toys out of the pram because someone doesn’t like my work.
So I’ve decided to republish ‘Not So Innocent’ on AO3, so that you can make up your own mind. I’d love to have a discussion with you on the subjects raised, either in the comments here, or on AO3.
I’ll look forward to hearing from you,
love EF
Kevin Whately as Robbie Lewis and Laurence Fox as James Hathaway in ITV’s ‘Lewis’.
I’m off on the annual summer tour of the family over the next week, and I’m not sure if I’ll be able to post as often as usual – you’ll no doubt still find me on Instagram, though!
In the meantime, here’s a little Lewis schmaltz to make you smile. Get it here on AO3 or here on FF.net. Virtual cookies for anyone who can pick out all the movie references.
Here’s a little taster:
‘Right, you two. This-‘ She held up a key. ‘-is the key to my office door. And I am going to walk out and lock it behind me. And you two are going to stay in here until you’ve sorted this out. One way or another. Because I cannot stand another bloody minute of it, do you hear? Oh, and Hathaway?
‘Yes, Ma’am?’ James’s head snapped up.
‘Try not to make too much of a mess of my desk, please?’
Happy Creating everyone,
EF
Laurence Fox as James Hathaway and Kevin Whately as Robbie Lewis in ITV’s ‘Lewis’.
I’ve been struggling all week to recover from my looking after the wrinklies last weekend, so you can imagine my amazement when this little number boiled out of my head yesterday afternoon! A little Lewis angst for a Friday afternoon. I seem to be big on cuddles these days again. Maybe that augers well for other works. But don’t quote me on that.
A taster:
“Suddenly its dark. Not the kind of dark you get in his flat at night, that eerie apricot glow from the street lamps filtering through the curtains. Not even the kind of dark you get on dark nights, shadows catching at the edges of your vision. No, this is the utter absence of light. Blackness in all its soul-crushing emptiness.
He hears James cry out.
‘No!’
And then some metallic thumping. Angry fists on a rusty blast door.
‘Bloody hell!’ There is real fury in that shout. And something else Lewis can’t put a name to yet, something hovering in the tone. No, can’t be. He dismisses it.”
You can find it here on A03, and here at FF.net.
Happy reading,
EF
evenlodesfriend 