All this month on the Logical-Lust blog we will have interviews from the authors of The Cougar Book, edited by Jolie du Pre. Today is Jeremy Edwards, author of “Boston. Breasts. Bohemian.”
The erotic fiction of Jeremy Edwards has appeared in over thirty-five anthologies, including several volumes in the Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica series. He is a frequent contributor to print and online magazines, and a live-reading alumnus of New York’s In the Flesh and Philadelphia’s Erotic Literary Salon.
What made you decide to submit your work for inclusion in The Cougar Book?
I’d previously been published by Jolie and Logical-Lust in Swing! I was very proud to be in that collection with so many authors I admire. I appreciated the care the editor and publisher took in producing and promoting the book, and so I was eager to repeat the experience.
Tell us about your story. Give us a little teaser.
For this piece, I turned to a setting I once briefly inhabited, in real life—the small-publisher world of mid-1980s Boston. Though the male character is not me (nor is the story substantially derived from any real-life experiences of mine), he is about the age I was at that time and is a point of contact with my past in some general ways.
In developing the piece, I was intent on getting inside the mind of the female protagonist—showing what makes her tick, her passion, and her vulnerability. Though the young man in the story could have been my peer in real life at that time, in revisiting this world for the purposes of fiction, I wanted to visualize everything from the perspective of the woman (who would now be the one who is my present-day peer in terms of age and culture).
Here’s an excerpt:
The first thing Ned did when he’d been assigned a cubicle was put a cartoon up on the wall. I winced—tape marks!—but when I read it over his shoulder, and he volunteered that he’d created it himself, I got a squishy sensation in my belly. The cartoon showed a woman declining, as I inferred from the bubbles, champagne (served in what Ned presumably didn’t realize was the wrong kind of glass), and saying to her male companion, “Yes, Frank, I *know* that was a good year. It’s just that I’m not ready to relive it yet.” Frank. If I’d encountered this in the New Yorker, I might not even have lingered to bemoan their sagging standards. But standing almost on top of the boy who’d taken the trouble to draw this slim idea—smelling the youthful, citrusy essence of this kid who’d risked ruining a cubicle wall his first day on the job in order to display his work—all I could feel was admiration. Admiration and a warm tingling between my legs. Suddenly, I was very interested in Ned.
“Sorry about the breasts,” he said nervously, stepping to the side so he could face me. I took a peek at the cartoon lady’s cleavage, which I hadn’t noticed before. “I didn’t mean to draw them so large. I don’t want people to decide I’m one of those guys who thinks a woman amounts to a set of breasts.”
I felt a flush in my own, relatively generous, chest. “It’s okay, Ned. Hey, women have breasts. And breasts are nice, right?” I laughed, more self-consciously than I was used to in my workplace. In my time, a parade of seasoned men, my peers, had tried to flirt and banter and grope me into losing my cool at the office—had tried to make the always-in-control goddess blush or stammer or run off to change her panties. They had all failed. But poor Ned was nearly succeeding, without even intending to. The sincere way he both cared and didn’t care about the size of his cartoon character’s bust seemed to tug at my nipples and tickle my clit.
“Some of us have larger ones than others,” I continued, masking my flutteriness with a reassuring, didactically matriarchal tone, and trusting that my injection of self-referential language wouldn’t completely give away my agenda—yet. “You happened to draw one such woman.”
He gave me a sensitive, tentative-looking smile, and that’s when I understood that his face was capable of more complexity than silently framing the question, “What time is lunch?” I was about to ask him—I don’t know—about his life, what he’d liked best in college, about his family … but he spoke again before the words formed.
“What time is lunch?”
Does your writing turn you on?
Yes—but not by the seventeenth draft.
What do you find difficult about writing? What comes easy for you?
The most difficult part for me is figuring out what’s going to happen in a scene or a story. Once I know that—even if it’s only in a roughed-out way—then actually laying out the narrative and dialogue is relatively easy, for the most part. That is, it’s still hard work, but it tends to flow smoothly—at that stage I’m unlikely to get “stuck.”
You’re stranded on a desert island and you can only have one book, one album/CD, and one person with you—what would they be?
The last part is easy—my wife! The choice is based on my personal feelings for her…but, incidentally, she’s also the kind of person who would make the most of desert-island life—she loves nature, learning, building things, etc. Think the Professor and Mary Ann, rolled into one.
For book and CD, I might go with a complete collection of Wodehouse’s Jeeves novels and stories, accompanied by Milt Jackson’s Statements album.
What are you working on now? Do you have a current release or a new release coming soon?
Glad you asked! My erotocomedic novel, Rock My Socks Off ,was recently released (in the UK; U.S. release will be later in the year). It’s available all sorts of places, from brick-and-mortar bookstores to online vendors, and it has both print and e-book incarnations. Much more info is available at my website.
Meanwhile, as for what I’m working on…stories, always stories!
Where can we find you on the Web? Do you have a website or blog(s)? Any social networks?
My website:
http://www.jeremyedwardserotica.com/
My blog:
http://jerotic.blogspot.com/
I’m also on Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/jeremy.edwards.erotica?ref=profile
And Twitter:
http://twitter.com/jerotic
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