New post on Mrshawking.com -- "Our heroes' chosen family"

"Our heroes' chosen family"

It takes a few stories to get there, but I want to make it clear that the relationship that is building between our three leads is one of chosen family. This is a concept that a lot of our audience finds very resonant, as the ability to choose to surround oneself with those people one loves gives many people a lot of strength. That’s the feeling I want to capture between Mary, Mrs. Hawking, and Nathaniel as their relationships form and grow.



Family in the traditional sense is a contentious concept for these characters. Mary’s mother and father were too wrapped up in their own problems to pay much attention to her beyond expecting her to make herself useful. She tries not to hold it against them, but she they never made her feel like she mattered. For Mrs. Hawking, family is the chain that keeps her tied to her husband's people, between whom there is a mutual disapproval and dislike. And her father, the only blood relation she ever knew, is probably the person she hated most in the world. Nathaniel is the only one among them with a positive relationship to his family, but because of it, it is important to him that he can extend the definition of that world to include all the people he cares for most.

Read the rest of the entry at Mrshawking.com!

Mrs. Hawking by Phoebe Roberts will be performed on May 8th at 2PM and 6PM at the Center for Digital Arts at 274 Moody Street, Waltham, MA as part of the Watch City Steampunk Festival.

Writing weird sex scenes

Sex scenes are really hard to write.

Not that drama, my usual medium, requires it very often. Even screenplays aren’t supposed to have so much detail about such things, beyond what you need to convey the feel of the scene. So even Adonis, the only major work I’ve written to date of which eroticism is a significant part, shouldn’t need a blow-by-blow, if you’ll pardon that unfortunate pun. As I’ve mentioned, I still feel a bit awkward trying to write sexy stuff, partially out of a lingering prudishness and partially for fear of it not coming off the way I want it to. But it’s important for this story, so I want to get it right. And, despite the mandate to not do the director or cinematographer’s job by writing a novel in the descriptions, the setting of this story makes it tough to convey the feel without some specificity.

So as I've been thinking about writing the sequels, the challenge presented by this story in this regard is complex. The world of it is a matriarchy, with all the attendant socialization that would entail. But our audience is socialized by patriarchy, and view our story with all its baggage. So our characters and our audience have different cultural backgrounds coloring how they perceive things.

We know we cannot overcome our audience’s baggage completely, so we have to present things that will read to them, given the context they bring to it, if we want them to get it. Still, we want to present a world that is believably shaped by the fact that it’s a matriarchy. So we have the huge challenge to present the matriarchal cultural influences and practices that still have the correct implication to viewers with their real-world, patriarchally-influenced outlook.

How does that relate to designing sex scenes? In short, we need to make ours fit the standards of the world but don’t come off as weird rather than sexy to the audience.

For example. While by no means the rule, or present in every case, in general I think it’s fair to say that there’s an assumption in a straight couple that the man takes the active/dominant role. In our matriarchal setting, we flip that assumption so that role is assigned to the woman. But to modern American eyes, there’s a lot about the man being the passive partner— and I don’t even mean penetrated, just passive —that reads as unmasculine, or even gay. And that is not what we’re going for. We’re trying to present that gender expression is not the same as power dynamics, and that would undermine it, implying that there is an equivalence between masculinity and dominance.

Our culture does have imagery we associate with hetero female sexual dominance, but they tend to be of aggressive, BDSM-oriented dominatrices. Since Aidan is a victim of violent rape, we’re leery of making his consensual sexual experiences read in any way as violent. It totally wouldn’t be fair, but it might make people question what was different before to make the non-consensual events so traumatizing. I don’t want to evoke any unfortunate parallels.

So I need to figure out a scene that is female-dominant, not emasculating, not violent, and despite its unconventionality, is still hot to the audience. Jesus, that’s a tall order.

I have some ideas, but as I said, it can be tough to figure out if something’s going to be sexy, especially if it’s something unusual. I haven’t exactly written a ton of these, especially nothing under such particular parameters. And I know it seems I’m being weirdly narrow, but so much of the script is challenging enough without balancing it with something more conventional.