This is so interesting, and I've been thinking about it a lot. Clearly, this is not a premise that came out of an AI even though the writing did.
On that level more than AI, the existence of this book is related to the absolute enormous explosion of weird erotica since the invention of the internet and women being able to put our erotic fantasies out into the world anonymously. As far as we can tell, from conventional male-directed porn vs what happens in women's erotic online writing: in general men like roughly ten different things, and women like an absolute infinity of incredibly polymorphously perverse stuff. (I say this with great pride and enjoyment.)
My earliest (anonymous) published works were in online slash fiction. My agent and I have actually had conversations about whether I could or should write erotica (which apparently we must call 'romantasy' for the time being), whether it's sufficiently in the mainstream now for it not to trash my reputation. It sort of sneaks into my literary work, but deniably. In the same way that it's sort of deniable (A Little Life) if your fantasy is all about men - "this isn't about me," one can say, "because I am a woman, how silly of you".
I would say, for me, it's certainly not a domesticated imagination, as much as it is an awareness of what is acceptable for a woman to write without slipping into the category of sex worker, which is, of course, a terribly stigmatised group.
(Wuthering Heights is also an example of the terrifying-to-society power of a woman writing the absolute filth of her daydreams.)
I find it a bit exciting that there might come a time where it would not trash my literary reputation?
It perhaps also feels relevant that I have never been able to read A Little Life. I think I would have felt much more comfortable with the idea of it if it had been presented as a sexual fantasy, which I could enjoy without placing myself in the mental position I'm in when reading realist or modernist fiction. Fantasy is a place of transgressive play. A realist novel about horrific abuse leading to suicide is an invitation into an abyss for me.
Love everything about this comment! You should write a post about it—a good way of soft-launching the idea of some sexier writing. I think you’d find that there would be a LOT of interest.
argh even this conversation has revealed to me that I do have an idea for a novel which is About Literary Themes and contemporary society but also would have to be full of utter filth
(I will say also that it was definitely evident to subs reading The Power that my domme imagination is one that they enjoy, and many of them have been in touch about this over the years. Sometimes in inappropriate ways which I have then told them off about, which I'm sure they also enjoyed and were certainly very obedient about 🤣)
I think — as someone who’s been involved in fandom for a good while, and who is taking cues from slashfic in some aspects — that your concerns about your reputation are legitimate, and also I’d say that the “oh but it’s not about me, it’s about men!” is not a perfect dodge. Unfortunately, I think if a woman both presents her erotic writing as sexual fantasy and is writing slash … her reputation will only remain intact if she’s writing fic.
I could be wrong though! I’m an outside observer to the core dynamics in slashfic circles (I’m a gay man and I’m old enough to accept that slashfic is a scene I can visit and engage with just fine but not a scene for me).
I agree with Naomi though — you should write a longer thing on this. There are too many thinkpieces on why women write this or that kind of erotica and not enough thinkpieces by women on anything else to do with the actual writing and editing and framing of any kind of smut.
(I agree with you about ALL — and especially, I’d be able to engage with a sexy fantasy of a crippled maybe ethnically ambiguous gay man who’s a survivor of various awful things and is so tragic and too good and will only be able to end up one way, as a tragic beautiful gay corpse. The same story framed as a serious novel might as well be telling me that my only real future is as a tragic beautiful gay corpse, ideally before I’m 50. I appreciate that ALL is a work of art but it’s one I prefer to read reviews of, not actually experience myself.)
yes "we are all utter sickos and enjoy hurt/comfort" is such a different mental space from "this is a serious engagement with the consequences of abuse".
I wonder whether (probably) those of us who have experienced abuse need those very clear boundary lines of "now you are entering a play space, nothing that happens here is real or serious" much more than people who have not.
We'll have to agree to disagree on A Little Life. But it did get me thinking about good writing that has felt like unshackled Id.
The two examples that come to mind immediately are from TV shows - NBC's Hannibal and Richard Gadd's ongoing Half Man. They both have that quality of feeling very personal, and very erotic.
In novels, weirdly I find myself thinking of Moby Dick. Yes, it's not explicitly sexual, but there's something deeply personal and deeply sensual in its treatment of whaling, community, whale anatomy, to say nothing of Queequeg.
For me a very fine erotic novel is James Salter’s A Sport and a Pastime. The Guardian critic called it “The only erotic novel to have been written where the prose is as good as the sex.” Salter I hope will not be forgotten and will continue to be read. The Paris Review critic: “The writers we love most are those who manage to capture something we ourselves have thought and rejected for being forbidden, dangerous, elusive…when I say James Salter is one of my heroes, that is what I mean.”
Yes but isn't it plausible, since AI was established in the process already, that the idea itself was something AI could have come up with? Like "what's an original, even salacious concept that has a 50 shades feel?"
I wonder how much the lack of literary abjection is just that it's pretty hard to sustain that kind of thing for so long without it just becoming totally absurd? I couldn't be bothered to finish A Little Life for exactly that reason, too tiring! I remember reading a few of the Badlands Unlimited New Lovers series back in the mid 2010s, the novella length felt better served for letting a writer rip through some auto-fictionalized perversion with just enough literary distance.
I'm glad a few other people have actually read it. As someone who originates from very similar online writing spaces that Ballard inhabits, what struck me on readthrough was actually the lack of conventional online "works of total authorial dedication to the modestly extreme premise" ethos to it. She spends so much time not a dog, not doglike, not aspiring or fearing to be doglike! The setup is the eros; Jude has to be saintlike in his beauty and goodness or his debasement is either un-horrific or un-erotic, depending on why you're reading ALL.
In the case of Shy Girl, the sheer amount of the book spent setting up perhaps authorially gratifying details (the friends, the dates with Nathan that really don't simmer with erotic tension, but hit fairly hollow beats in circular conversations; Gia isn't truly afraid of him, even when he puts her in a cage!) left me not distrusting of AI's capacity to write competent eros - it surely can be used for this - but in this case, IMO, the author's desire to legitimize her own erotic interest in the dog-noncon-imprisonment was the source of the weakness of the novel as much as the stylistic component. The first like two thirds read like a fairly vague litfic novel about a protagonist with OCD grappling with poverty and rejecting the lifeline of a job she wants out of a kind of ennui and magical thinking about Nathan. This sort of story though, to be compelling, really does require either very talented writing or the promise that she turns into a dog at the end. I think what 'broke it', in addition to the AI writing being uncompelling, was all the trappings that legitimized, literarily, but didn't interact with the intention.
Yeah but she just wasn’t interested in writing a book about being a dog. She was interested in writing a book that turned her on :) And she definitely seems to have succeeded in that aim.
I agree it could’ve been better, but I don’t know if she had the capacity to make it better than it is. What’s amazing is just that it’s somewhat compelling even with all its flaws.
To be honest, I found it hard on the readthrough to find anything particularly erotic in the writing beyond the premise itself (which clearly does turn her on in the abstract). My primary areas of disagreement with your take is that I don't think this is a particularly exceptional model for a self-published or even tradpub book in specific genres; this particular sort of "the premise is so transgressively hot to me that it must exist, but I have to veil it in the plausible deniability of literary horror/thriller/SFF featuring specific sexual menace or violence" is a very old model and often appears in trad published thriller and horror in particular.
What is exceptional about this book and situation in my view is that it did wind up marketed for young women in particular and with a "female rage" bent - this was really not sold as the sex slave dog book, but as the woman bites man book, and until it came under scrutiny by an audience not interested in playing along with the premise for the premise's sake, it was being called transgressive and violent feminist horror rather than erotica. I suspect the author would have recoiled and still might recoil at the suggestion that this book was about anything but Female Rage, based on a fair amount of writing she produced on the subject of her own novel.
I personally don't see it as filling a gap that isn't addressed by The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and a dozen other feminist-shaped horror/thriller novels that depict sexual peril and sexual violence as great acts of evil, but do a certain amount of reveling in their depiction in ways that emphasize the grotesquery of the act and the protagonist's strength in surviving it etc. These sorts of books have often gotten popular by way of their shock/depravity/darkness as much as through the talented writing. ALL is a good example of a queer literary installment in this canon, but it is a big canon in the crime/domestic thriller space. Behind Closed Doors, Still Missing, The Butterfly Garden... the main difference being the fantastical element (dog transformation, not really the selling point) and the marketing to twenties-to-thirties-peers in an indie context.
My sense in reading it was not one of gratuitous self-indulgence, but of a fairly long tradition of captivity horror/thriller in the tradpub and indie space, with speculative elements, marketed very skillfully. I was genuinely surprised and set off balance by how little of it seemed to be expression-of-psyche relative to other self-published works of fiction in which the author is very clearly writing from a place of being exceptionally turned on by their premise.
I agree with the underlying conclusion that it would be more interesting and better in many cases for tradpub authors to be more authentic to their desires and what moves them, emotionally and sexually and all the rest, but there's no shortage of this being produced by authors writing genuinely for fun rather than for something to promote on TikTok (uncharitable, I know, but my read on a lot of comparable books in the indie space is that they have been written to be promoted as much as many tradpub books have been written to be published).
The tell for me is that so much of the book was transparently not what turned her on. In this case, the AI assistance was facilitating the un-fun legitimizing part coming into existence more than the fun part, I suspect; it was doing the litfic dishes so she could write the dog sex into existence. Without AI, this would be a short story - in the vein of many like it, which accomplish the goal of expressing something that turns the writer on - and not nearly so saleable, even with a beautiful cover. I think it would probably be better, though, if this author, too, reflected and leaned in more into her authentic desires.
Just wanted to chime in and say that this post, and the conversation between the two of you here, got me thinking about how the (alleged) AI assistance probably affected at least my perception of this book's genre. As I mentioned in my post, to me Shy Girl feels very disembodied, often like it's trying to stretch out scenes with abstraction rather than the characters' physicality. I think that kept me from seeing it as erotica even though structurally it does take the form of an author-insert fantasy. It would be interesting for an openly AI-assisted author to do multiple versions of the same story with maybe different "spiciness" levels for different audiences.
(Also, I'm super fascinated by Naomi's larger idea that AI might embolden more writers to explore taboos in their fiction! So much to mull over here.)
I've noticed that for some reason this dog kink stuff has become a trend in the past year? Like I've never really seen any of it before, but then there was that awful scene inserted into the Wuthering Heights adaptation of Isabella collared & canine, and in the latest season of Euphoria Sydney Sweeney wears a dog costume while making OF content (also coincidentally—or not—both of these characters are wives of characters played by Jacob Elordi)
I wonder why this has become such a thing in mainstream portrayals of kink/bdsm? Maybe for the shock value? It's always done in a very icky cringey gross totally unerotic way that's both baffling and off-putting.
I don't think "good taste" and "bad taste" have to do with embracing or avoiding the sexual. It's the way it's done that matters, and lately we've been getting lots of sexual content and very little actual eroticism.
Petplay is an ever-present side alley of BDSM, especially (in my very subjective estimation) in like, kinda medium-protocol lifestyle-ish circles? A niche within a niche within a subculture of a subculture.
I have no idea why it’s going mainstream suddenly. But then again, I have no idea why heterosexual high-protocol 24/7 D/s went mainstream with “Fifty Shades of Grey”. That’s an equally niche shtik. Fandom probably has something to do with it. But that’s a boring answer, because within SFFH, fandom often has something to do with it.
I also agree that most portrayals of kink are kind of cringey and unserious. But I think that’s kinda unsurprising, because a lot of kink stuff is deeply unerotic or even kinda gross when it’s not your thing. I have no real idea how to square the circle of writing that kind of niche theme (as in, any kind of specific sex act or erotic premise) and making it appealing to people who are neither already into it or are going to be discovering they would be into it. Maybe I’m just not skilled or imaginative enough yet, though!
I have complex thoughts on A Little Life, maybe because I read it as less of a sexual fantasy and more as the author probably working through some serious trauma. I've read her other books, which are fairly different in terms of genre/style, but they all feature CSA stuff--to an extent that I find hard to explain otherwise. I guess it just makes me feel for her a little (even though I have mixed feelings about the extent of the depiction in A Little Life). I think it's pretty common for people struggling with trauma to find it coming up over and over again in their works (see Richard Gadd, who another commenter mentioned). Anyway, sorry, I don't mean this as a serious disagreement; I just mean to say I feel very hesitant about assuming her motives to be sexual fantasies.
The premise makes me think of the song 24hr Dog by FKA twigs. It's a sub anthem that has to be listened to on headphones. The chorus is:
"Please don't call my name when I submit to you this way / I'm a dog for you"
Of course there's an audience for this kind of thing. It makes me a little sad to hear that literary writers feel like they can't go there.
Is that really true though? Maybe it's just the mainstream presses that won't go there? Rebecca Fishow (my wife) has written some pretty dark sexual work, but in the literary small press space. Also, now that I think about it, Tony Tulathimutte's Ahegao, published by William Morrow in Rejection, is in this zone. In it a gay man writes about his own dom fantasy in excruciating, over-the-top detail. Although it's played more for laughs maybe.
Have you seen anybody go through and make the case for why shy girl was A.I. assisted?
The hackneyed syntactic tells, like X/Y flip and three-beat cadences, are easy to spot, although sometimes people don't pay enough attention to the fact that these are also legitimate craft tools. It's just that the AI is so moronic and repetitive about its OVER-use.
Some unskilled human writers are also thoughtless and repetitive about their use of X/Y flips, which is especially disappointing when there is no discernable underlying meaning in the relevant sentences! They use syntax to imply profundity where none exists.
Thanks again for asking, Brian. And I was really taken by surprise by your pledge of support. I haven't turned the money thing on yet. It's really a compliment, and I thank you. What follows is an epic over-answer to your question.
Here are some permutations of what some people call the “X/Y flip.” It's complicated, but the pattern here is one that sets up a term or concept (often an abstract one) and then reverses or replaces it with another. It draws a contrast to create new meaning, I think. I'm not a linguist, just a language teacher who's studied a little bit of linguistics. I'm still figuring all this out.
Not X, but Y.
X isn’t Y; Y is X.
The problem isn’t X. The problem is Y.
It looks/sounds like X, but functions as Y.
Here are some examples:
“Presence was a field, not a figure.”
“If not spectacle, then stewardship”
“Not because the answer was secret, but because the answer was a room, not a word.”
I would say the biggest telltale, more than anything, is just seeing it over and over and over in the same text. The overuse.
Mostly the sentences sound like classic Deepak Chopra. They sound true and deep, but when you stare at it, it’s hard to pin down exactly what it’s saying. This type of thing has been labeled "pseudo-profound bullshit." Philosophers have studied it. The language seems intended only to sound profound, rather than just being profound, insightful, or clarifying.
It is very important to keep in mind that, by itself, these rhetorical moves and syntax are perfectly legitimate tools. We humans use them all the time. But I find that when I see this pattern used at a frequency or level of abstraction that most careful writers would avoid (because it starts to sound awkward, vague, and repetitive), it starts to look like AI (to me).
This is very complicated, and I am trying to understand it thoroughly before I start writing essays and bringing a shitstorm down on myself.
Or should I say, "It's not the meaning, it's the trying." But what the hell does that mean?
Thanks so much. Fascinating stuff. I have come across it—now I have a whole new understanding of what it is. Like how you put it: sounds true and deep, but hard to pin down what it means. I want to read your stories because I want to check out more fiction that people are publishing on Substack. Am considering that for my second novel.
Your post made me think: AI can act as a “collaborator” for erotica writers, and maybe talking with AI can heighten the fantasy for the author or make it more real, since it doesn’t just live in their head but is receiving a kind of outside feedback.
Anyway, enjoyed reading something about AI that doesn’t simply boil down to “AI bad.”
Your conclusion about the potential for AI to expand access to erotic writing is an interesting addition to the AI art discourse! Really enjoyed reading this. Another example of self-published to trad-published lit that feels basically like erotic fantasy is Dorley Hall. I’ve only read it in trad-published form and the first one isn’t very explicity sexual but the premise is clearly based around a forced femme fantasy. Maybe especially interesting because there are a good amount of self published erotica novels in that vein(check out amazons trans literature section and you’ll find sissy forced feminization erotica mixed in with all the top trans authors, yikes!), so it can pass almost as a satire of the genre rather than part of it.
Oh my. I hit LIKE, but it hardly reflects the gut-wrenched Gordion Knot of my entangled, alive and writhing engagement with these issues and/or all this. Brett Hart once wrote--says the spongiform encephalitis of the smelly, briny, Great Barrier Reef of my memory, and I've tried, but never could find and/or confirm it, so possibly a throbbing, enflamed bagel hole, or hopelessly folded, protean, cereberal cell within my traditionally porcelain skull which will never heal--on that note, Nietzsche also wrote somewhere, but don't trust me, that the mind is a vagina (the obverse also obviously, unverifiably true)--but Brett Hart, in a story called THE OUTCASTS OF POKER FLAT, set outwest in someplace called Maryville, California, I TAKE NO HAND IN THIS HERE YOUR GAME. C'est moi. The business of business is to monetize aspiration. Technology monetizes and empowers the hoi polloi. What century was Grey's ELEGY IN A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD, 18th, 19th? Lamenting, anyhow, THE HUNGRY SHEEP LOOK UP BUT ARE NOT FED? Thanks to AI, in the 21st, now they're fed. TICK-TOCK enticements, Facebook's infinite faceless reels, means the AI-herded wooly horde is getting fed and warming the nerve-ends, tickling the prickles, of they that aspire. So glad I'm a poet, sort of a solipsist on a highwire without a net, even without a wire. The soul, wrote Wallace Stevens, being lonely flies. The late R.V. Cassill warned us in writing class, IF YOU WRITE FOR YOURSELF, YOU'D BETTER BE ABLE TO PAY YOURSELF, growling impatiently. Naomi Kanaki so wisely advises that writing tends to domesticate. Stevens wrote of the SUBLIME FICTION that IT MUST GIVE PLEASURE. So far Substack allows me to be a freeloader, a streetwalker who strives to appease needs without charge. Poet as gutter-slut, writing for the joy of the making. Shameful, I assure, not shameless. Enough. Over and out. I hope AI corrected enough of my misspellings that I'm intelligible. Joy is the blind hope of being endured.
This post reminds me of a novel that I admittedly haven't read (Leash) by an author whose other work I've read and loved (Jane DeLynn). I believe it was published about 20 years ago and has a somewhat similar premise; the narrator enters a dom-sub relationship where she acts as the dom's dog full-time. She does it willingly, it's more a recreation of the real-life experience than a full-on fantast as in Shy Girl, but the similarities are there.
DeLynn has written pretty frankly about sex in all of her books, so I don't know how reputationally damaging Leash was to her career. And crucially, she was writing about gay life and gay sex in a literary way when that was further outside the norm than it is now, so she was already more of a counterculture figure.
This is so interesting, and I've been thinking about it a lot. Clearly, this is not a premise that came out of an AI even though the writing did.
On that level more than AI, the existence of this book is related to the absolute enormous explosion of weird erotica since the invention of the internet and women being able to put our erotic fantasies out into the world anonymously. As far as we can tell, from conventional male-directed porn vs what happens in women's erotic online writing: in general men like roughly ten different things, and women like an absolute infinity of incredibly polymorphously perverse stuff. (I say this with great pride and enjoyment.)
My earliest (anonymous) published works were in online slash fiction. My agent and I have actually had conversations about whether I could or should write erotica (which apparently we must call 'romantasy' for the time being), whether it's sufficiently in the mainstream now for it not to trash my reputation. It sort of sneaks into my literary work, but deniably. In the same way that it's sort of deniable (A Little Life) if your fantasy is all about men - "this isn't about me," one can say, "because I am a woman, how silly of you".
I would say, for me, it's certainly not a domesticated imagination, as much as it is an awareness of what is acceptable for a woman to write without slipping into the category of sex worker, which is, of course, a terribly stigmatised group.
(Wuthering Heights is also an example of the terrifying-to-society power of a woman writing the absolute filth of her daydreams.)
I find it a bit exciting that there might come a time where it would not trash my literary reputation?
It perhaps also feels relevant that I have never been able to read A Little Life. I think I would have felt much more comfortable with the idea of it if it had been presented as a sexual fantasy, which I could enjoy without placing myself in the mental position I'm in when reading realist or modernist fiction. Fantasy is a place of transgressive play. A realist novel about horrific abuse leading to suicide is an invitation into an abyss for me.
Love everything about this comment! You should write a post about it—a good way of soft-launching the idea of some sexier writing. I think you’d find that there would be a LOT of interest.
argh even this conversation has revealed to me that I do have an idea for a novel which is About Literary Themes and contemporary society but also would have to be full of utter filth
(I will say also that it was definitely evident to subs reading The Power that my domme imagination is one that they enjoy, and many of them have been in touch about this over the years. Sometimes in inappropriate ways which I have then told them off about, which I'm sure they also enjoyed and were certainly very obedient about 🤣)
OK I'm on board let's see it ;)
I think — as someone who’s been involved in fandom for a good while, and who is taking cues from slashfic in some aspects — that your concerns about your reputation are legitimate, and also I’d say that the “oh but it’s not about me, it’s about men!” is not a perfect dodge. Unfortunately, I think if a woman both presents her erotic writing as sexual fantasy and is writing slash … her reputation will only remain intact if she’s writing fic.
I could be wrong though! I’m an outside observer to the core dynamics in slashfic circles (I’m a gay man and I’m old enough to accept that slashfic is a scene I can visit and engage with just fine but not a scene for me).
I agree with Naomi though — you should write a longer thing on this. There are too many thinkpieces on why women write this or that kind of erotica and not enough thinkpieces by women on anything else to do with the actual writing and editing and framing of any kind of smut.
(I agree with you about ALL — and especially, I’d be able to engage with a sexy fantasy of a crippled maybe ethnically ambiguous gay man who’s a survivor of various awful things and is so tragic and too good and will only be able to end up one way, as a tragic beautiful gay corpse. The same story framed as a serious novel might as well be telling me that my only real future is as a tragic beautiful gay corpse, ideally before I’m 50. I appreciate that ALL is a work of art but it’s one I prefer to read reviews of, not actually experience myself.)
yes "we are all utter sickos and enjoy hurt/comfort" is such a different mental space from "this is a serious engagement with the consequences of abuse".
I wonder whether (probably) those of us who have experienced abuse need those very clear boundary lines of "now you are entering a play space, nothing that happens here is real or serious" much more than people who have not.
Men actually like 10 things? Wow — so generous! And here I thought you were going to say five.
We'll have to agree to disagree on A Little Life. But it did get me thinking about good writing that has felt like unshackled Id.
The two examples that come to mind immediately are from TV shows - NBC's Hannibal and Richard Gadd's ongoing Half Man. They both have that quality of feeling very personal, and very erotic.
In novels, weirdly I find myself thinking of Moby Dick. Yes, it's not explicitly sexual, but there's something deeply personal and deeply sensual in its treatment of whaling, community, whale anatomy, to say nothing of Queequeg.
For me a very fine erotic novel is James Salter’s A Sport and a Pastime. The Guardian critic called it “The only erotic novel to have been written where the prose is as good as the sex.” Salter I hope will not be forgotten and will continue to be read. The Paris Review critic: “The writers we love most are those who manage to capture something we ourselves have thought and rejected for being forbidden, dangerous, elusive…when I say James Salter is one of my heroes, that is what I mean.”
Yes but isn't it plausible, since AI was established in the process already, that the idea itself was something AI could have come up with? Like "what's an original, even salacious concept that has a 50 shades feel?"
I wonder how much the lack of literary abjection is just that it's pretty hard to sustain that kind of thing for so long without it just becoming totally absurd? I couldn't be bothered to finish A Little Life for exactly that reason, too tiring! I remember reading a few of the Badlands Unlimited New Lovers series back in the mid 2010s, the novella length felt better served for letting a writer rip through some auto-fictionalized perversion with just enough literary distance.
I'm glad a few other people have actually read it. As someone who originates from very similar online writing spaces that Ballard inhabits, what struck me on readthrough was actually the lack of conventional online "works of total authorial dedication to the modestly extreme premise" ethos to it. She spends so much time not a dog, not doglike, not aspiring or fearing to be doglike! The setup is the eros; Jude has to be saintlike in his beauty and goodness or his debasement is either un-horrific or un-erotic, depending on why you're reading ALL.
In the case of Shy Girl, the sheer amount of the book spent setting up perhaps authorially gratifying details (the friends, the dates with Nathan that really don't simmer with erotic tension, but hit fairly hollow beats in circular conversations; Gia isn't truly afraid of him, even when he puts her in a cage!) left me not distrusting of AI's capacity to write competent eros - it surely can be used for this - but in this case, IMO, the author's desire to legitimize her own erotic interest in the dog-noncon-imprisonment was the source of the weakness of the novel as much as the stylistic component. The first like two thirds read like a fairly vague litfic novel about a protagonist with OCD grappling with poverty and rejecting the lifeline of a job she wants out of a kind of ennui and magical thinking about Nathan. This sort of story though, to be compelling, really does require either very talented writing or the promise that she turns into a dog at the end. I think what 'broke it', in addition to the AI writing being uncompelling, was all the trappings that legitimized, literarily, but didn't interact with the intention.
Yeah but she just wasn’t interested in writing a book about being a dog. She was interested in writing a book that turned her on :) And she definitely seems to have succeeded in that aim.
I agree it could’ve been better, but I don’t know if she had the capacity to make it better than it is. What’s amazing is just that it’s somewhat compelling even with all its flaws.
To be honest, I found it hard on the readthrough to find anything particularly erotic in the writing beyond the premise itself (which clearly does turn her on in the abstract). My primary areas of disagreement with your take is that I don't think this is a particularly exceptional model for a self-published or even tradpub book in specific genres; this particular sort of "the premise is so transgressively hot to me that it must exist, but I have to veil it in the plausible deniability of literary horror/thriller/SFF featuring specific sexual menace or violence" is a very old model and often appears in trad published thriller and horror in particular.
What is exceptional about this book and situation in my view is that it did wind up marketed for young women in particular and with a "female rage" bent - this was really not sold as the sex slave dog book, but as the woman bites man book, and until it came under scrutiny by an audience not interested in playing along with the premise for the premise's sake, it was being called transgressive and violent feminist horror rather than erotica. I suspect the author would have recoiled and still might recoil at the suggestion that this book was about anything but Female Rage, based on a fair amount of writing she produced on the subject of her own novel.
I personally don't see it as filling a gap that isn't addressed by The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and a dozen other feminist-shaped horror/thriller novels that depict sexual peril and sexual violence as great acts of evil, but do a certain amount of reveling in their depiction in ways that emphasize the grotesquery of the act and the protagonist's strength in surviving it etc. These sorts of books have often gotten popular by way of their shock/depravity/darkness as much as through the talented writing. ALL is a good example of a queer literary installment in this canon, but it is a big canon in the crime/domestic thriller space. Behind Closed Doors, Still Missing, The Butterfly Garden... the main difference being the fantastical element (dog transformation, not really the selling point) and the marketing to twenties-to-thirties-peers in an indie context.
My sense in reading it was not one of gratuitous self-indulgence, but of a fairly long tradition of captivity horror/thriller in the tradpub and indie space, with speculative elements, marketed very skillfully. I was genuinely surprised and set off balance by how little of it seemed to be expression-of-psyche relative to other self-published works of fiction in which the author is very clearly writing from a place of being exceptionally turned on by their premise.
I agree with the underlying conclusion that it would be more interesting and better in many cases for tradpub authors to be more authentic to their desires and what moves them, emotionally and sexually and all the rest, but there's no shortage of this being produced by authors writing genuinely for fun rather than for something to promote on TikTok (uncharitable, I know, but my read on a lot of comparable books in the indie space is that they have been written to be promoted as much as many tradpub books have been written to be published).
The tell for me is that so much of the book was transparently not what turned her on. In this case, the AI assistance was facilitating the un-fun legitimizing part coming into existence more than the fun part, I suspect; it was doing the litfic dishes so she could write the dog sex into existence. Without AI, this would be a short story - in the vein of many like it, which accomplish the goal of expressing something that turns the writer on - and not nearly so saleable, even with a beautiful cover. I think it would probably be better, though, if this author, too, reflected and leaned in more into her authentic desires.
Just wanted to chime in and say that this post, and the conversation between the two of you here, got me thinking about how the (alleged) AI assistance probably affected at least my perception of this book's genre. As I mentioned in my post, to me Shy Girl feels very disembodied, often like it's trying to stretch out scenes with abstraction rather than the characters' physicality. I think that kept me from seeing it as erotica even though structurally it does take the form of an author-insert fantasy. It would be interesting for an openly AI-assisted author to do multiple versions of the same story with maybe different "spiciness" levels for different audiences.
(Also, I'm super fascinated by Naomi's larger idea that AI might embolden more writers to explore taboos in their fiction! So much to mull over here.)
I've noticed that for some reason this dog kink stuff has become a trend in the past year? Like I've never really seen any of it before, but then there was that awful scene inserted into the Wuthering Heights adaptation of Isabella collared & canine, and in the latest season of Euphoria Sydney Sweeney wears a dog costume while making OF content (also coincidentally—or not—both of these characters are wives of characters played by Jacob Elordi)
I wonder why this has become such a thing in mainstream portrayals of kink/bdsm? Maybe for the shock value? It's always done in a very icky cringey gross totally unerotic way that's both baffling and off-putting.
I don't think "good taste" and "bad taste" have to do with embracing or avoiding the sexual. It's the way it's done that matters, and lately we've been getting lots of sexual content and very little actual eroticism.
Petplay is an ever-present side alley of BDSM, especially (in my very subjective estimation) in like, kinda medium-protocol lifestyle-ish circles? A niche within a niche within a subculture of a subculture.
I have no idea why it’s going mainstream suddenly. But then again, I have no idea why heterosexual high-protocol 24/7 D/s went mainstream with “Fifty Shades of Grey”. That’s an equally niche shtik. Fandom probably has something to do with it. But that’s a boring answer, because within SFFH, fandom often has something to do with it.
I also agree that most portrayals of kink are kind of cringey and unserious. But I think that’s kinda unsurprising, because a lot of kink stuff is deeply unerotic or even kinda gross when it’s not your thing. I have no real idea how to square the circle of writing that kind of niche theme (as in, any kind of specific sex act or erotic premise) and making it appealing to people who are neither already into it or are going to be discovering they would be into it. Maybe I’m just not skilled or imaginative enough yet, though!
I have complex thoughts on A Little Life, maybe because I read it as less of a sexual fantasy and more as the author probably working through some serious trauma. I've read her other books, which are fairly different in terms of genre/style, but they all feature CSA stuff--to an extent that I find hard to explain otherwise. I guess it just makes me feel for her a little (even though I have mixed feelings about the extent of the depiction in A Little Life). I think it's pretty common for people struggling with trauma to find it coming up over and over again in their works (see Richard Gadd, who another commenter mentioned). Anyway, sorry, I don't mean this as a serious disagreement; I just mean to say I feel very hesitant about assuming her motives to be sexual fantasies.
The premise makes me think of the song 24hr Dog by FKA twigs. It's a sub anthem that has to be listened to on headphones. The chorus is:
"Please don't call my name when I submit to you this way / I'm a dog for you"
Of course there's an audience for this kind of thing. It makes me a little sad to hear that literary writers feel like they can't go there.
Is that really true though? Maybe it's just the mainstream presses that won't go there? Rebecca Fishow (my wife) has written some pretty dark sexual work, but in the literary small press space. Also, now that I think about it, Tony Tulathimutte's Ahegao, published by William Morrow in Rejection, is in this zone. In it a gay man writes about his own dom fantasy in excruciating, over-the-top detail. Although it's played more for laughs maybe.
Your take on this is very interesting, as usual.
Have you seen anybody go through and make the case for why shy girl was A.I. assisted?
The hackneyed syntactic tells, like X/Y flip and three-beat cadences, are easy to spot, although sometimes people don't pay enough attention to the fact that these are also legitimate craft tools. It's just that the AI is so moronic and repetitive about its OVER-use.
Some unskilled human writers are also thoughtless and repetitive about their use of X/Y flips, which is especially disappointing when there is no discernable underlying meaning in the relevant sentences! They use syntax to imply profundity where none exists.
You mean you want to publish the novel on Substack?
Would you kindly give me an example of the x/y flip in writing? I recall it vaguely as a math term but not sure what it means as a writing technique.
Thanks again for asking, Brian. And I was really taken by surprise by your pledge of support. I haven't turned the money thing on yet. It's really a compliment, and I thank you. What follows is an epic over-answer to your question.
Here are some permutations of what some people call the “X/Y flip.” It's complicated, but the pattern here is one that sets up a term or concept (often an abstract one) and then reverses or replaces it with another. It draws a contrast to create new meaning, I think. I'm not a linguist, just a language teacher who's studied a little bit of linguistics. I'm still figuring all this out.
Not X, but Y.
X isn’t Y; Y is X.
The problem isn’t X. The problem is Y.
It looks/sounds like X, but functions as Y.
Here are some examples:
“Presence was a field, not a figure.”
“If not spectacle, then stewardship”
“Not because the answer was secret, but because the answer was a room, not a word.”
I would say the biggest telltale, more than anything, is just seeing it over and over and over in the same text. The overuse.
Mostly the sentences sound like classic Deepak Chopra. They sound true and deep, but when you stare at it, it’s hard to pin down exactly what it’s saying. This type of thing has been labeled "pseudo-profound bullshit." Philosophers have studied it. The language seems intended only to sound profound, rather than just being profound, insightful, or clarifying.
It is very important to keep in mind that, by itself, these rhetorical moves and syntax are perfectly legitimate tools. We humans use them all the time. But I find that when I see this pattern used at a frequency or level of abstraction that most careful writers would avoid (because it starts to sound awkward, vague, and repetitive), it starts to look like AI (to me).
This is very complicated, and I am trying to understand it thoroughly before I start writing essays and bringing a shitstorm down on myself.
Or should I say, "It's not the meaning, it's the trying." But what the hell does that mean?
Thanks so much. Fascinating stuff. I have come across it—now I have a whole new understanding of what it is. Like how you put it: sounds true and deep, but hard to pin down what it means. I want to read your stories because I want to check out more fiction that people are publishing on Substack. Am considering that for my second novel.
Is this the written equivalent of how, if you want to make money drawing, there is literally nothing you can do that pays as well as furry porn?
Your post made me think: AI can act as a “collaborator” for erotica writers, and maybe talking with AI can heighten the fantasy for the author or make it more real, since it doesn’t just live in their head but is receiving a kind of outside feedback.
Anyway, enjoyed reading something about AI that doesn’t simply boil down to “AI bad.”
Your conclusion about the potential for AI to expand access to erotic writing is an interesting addition to the AI art discourse! Really enjoyed reading this. Another example of self-published to trad-published lit that feels basically like erotic fantasy is Dorley Hall. I’ve only read it in trad-published form and the first one isn’t very explicity sexual but the premise is clearly based around a forced femme fantasy. Maybe especially interesting because there are a good amount of self published erotica novels in that vein(check out amazons trans literature section and you’ll find sissy forced feminization erotica mixed in with all the top trans authors, yikes!), so it can pass almost as a satire of the genre rather than part of it.
Yes! I will. Thanks for asking. Give me until later today. I want to make sure I give you the good stuff.
Cool! Thank you!
Just wondering, thinking out loud here: is “human authored” the next evolution of “certified organic?”
Oh my. I hit LIKE, but it hardly reflects the gut-wrenched Gordion Knot of my entangled, alive and writhing engagement with these issues and/or all this. Brett Hart once wrote--says the spongiform encephalitis of the smelly, briny, Great Barrier Reef of my memory, and I've tried, but never could find and/or confirm it, so possibly a throbbing, enflamed bagel hole, or hopelessly folded, protean, cereberal cell within my traditionally porcelain skull which will never heal--on that note, Nietzsche also wrote somewhere, but don't trust me, that the mind is a vagina (the obverse also obviously, unverifiably true)--but Brett Hart, in a story called THE OUTCASTS OF POKER FLAT, set outwest in someplace called Maryville, California, I TAKE NO HAND IN THIS HERE YOUR GAME. C'est moi. The business of business is to monetize aspiration. Technology monetizes and empowers the hoi polloi. What century was Grey's ELEGY IN A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD, 18th, 19th? Lamenting, anyhow, THE HUNGRY SHEEP LOOK UP BUT ARE NOT FED? Thanks to AI, in the 21st, now they're fed. TICK-TOCK enticements, Facebook's infinite faceless reels, means the AI-herded wooly horde is getting fed and warming the nerve-ends, tickling the prickles, of they that aspire. So glad I'm a poet, sort of a solipsist on a highwire without a net, even without a wire. The soul, wrote Wallace Stevens, being lonely flies. The late R.V. Cassill warned us in writing class, IF YOU WRITE FOR YOURSELF, YOU'D BETTER BE ABLE TO PAY YOURSELF, growling impatiently. Naomi Kanaki so wisely advises that writing tends to domesticate. Stevens wrote of the SUBLIME FICTION that IT MUST GIVE PLEASURE. So far Substack allows me to be a freeloader, a streetwalker who strives to appease needs without charge. Poet as gutter-slut, writing for the joy of the making. Shameful, I assure, not shameless. Enough. Over and out. I hope AI corrected enough of my misspellings that I'm intelligible. Joy is the blind hope of being endured.
This post reminds me of a novel that I admittedly haven't read (Leash) by an author whose other work I've read and loved (Jane DeLynn). I believe it was published about 20 years ago and has a somewhat similar premise; the narrator enters a dom-sub relationship where she acts as the dom's dog full-time. She does it willingly, it's more a recreation of the real-life experience than a full-on fantast as in Shy Girl, but the similarities are there.
DeLynn has written pretty frankly about sex in all of her books, so I don't know how reputationally damaging Leash was to her career. And crucially, she was writing about gay life and gay sex in a literary way when that was further outside the norm than it is now, so she was already more of a counterculture figure.