Ancilla's Awards and Reviews

INTERVIEW: Guy Rinzema, EIN Presswire

GUY:

Ancilla presents a unique blend of magical elements with themes of sexuality and identity. What inspired you to intertwine these themes within the narrative, and how do you believe they complement each other in the development of the story?

Me:

"Unique" - I suppose that's one word for it. "Bonkers" might be another good word for it.

When I started the rough draft in 2013, I had a much less ambitious agenda: make E L James eat my dust. Back then, you will recall, the Fifty Shades series was at the height of its popularity. I take the Fifty Shades stuff as a personal insult. It badly misrepresents BDSM. The main character's love interest, Christian Grey, is portrayed not as hard-wired with a somewhat unusual sexual orientation, but as someone who was warped into being a sadist by his abusive childhood. Well, we know that's not how things work... The book also relies heavily on romanticized rape and domestic abuse, which does both BDSM and romance, in general, a disservice, and the sex scenes that involve BDSM would, if used as a how-to guide, put people in the emergency room seeking treatment for ripped tendons, pulverized genitals, and other injuries. In short, it's a mess. Then there's the prose. A troop of drunken baboons randomly banging away on broken Smith-Corona typewriters would produce better writing. And yet Fifty Shades of Absolute Drek became a bestselling series, apparently because it was something called "mommy porn" and women had no erotica to read until that time that catered to their fantasies of submission and surrender?

Oh, no, that just wouldn't do.

So I decided to write a book.

When I was outlining the plot, the first book of the trilogy featured a romantic relationship between my 21-year-old protagonist and an older man who she approaches because she is attracted both to his kink and to his studying magic, and she wants to learn from him. I'm not entirely sure where I came up with the idea for combining the study of sex with the study of magic. It just popped into my head when I was outlining, rather the way the way the mentor figure's profession (librarian in a public library) did. I think I was being guided by my intuition.

The plot itself is very, very structured - I started out by deciding that I was going to use Campbell's monomyth as a plot arc, and C S Lewis' concept of the Four Loves as one of the structural devices. The first book in the trilogy, Ancilla, explores Eros (romantic love), Soror Mystica, which I'm starting to outline now, will explore Philia (friendship), and the third book, Adept, will explore Storge (familial love). All three look at Agape (unconditional love), and since I am after all writing erotica, they make liberal use of what Lewis called "Venus" (lust and desire). To add even more structure, I decided that the first book would theme its chapters on the Kabbalah (as interpreted by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and by Aleister Crowley's Thelemic approach, not by the original medieval Jewish mysticism), the second book would have chapters themed by alchemical processes, and the third would have its chapters themed by the bardos of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Initially, it started as a conceit - I thought it would be interesting to try to stick to themes, and I was hoping they would give me ideas for sex scenes because there are only so many ways you can write about sex, even kinky sex.

Once I threw myself into the writing, though, the esotericism asserted itself as more than just a structural device. Writing became an act of meditation.

My original intent to simply write something better than what E L James had written - and let's face it, that's a very low bar to clear - was still there, but my writing project was now more than just that.