Unadulterated Wintersong

You asked for it, you got it.

author’s note, or: a confession

IN WHICH THE AUTHOR COMES TO UNDERSTAND THAT KINKY SEX IS PROBABLY NOT GERMANE TO THE YOUNG ADULT CATEGORY

Late in the winter of my twenty-ninth year, I decided to write 50 Shades of Labyrinth.

Yes.

50 Shades of Labyrinth.

Let me explain (not that I need to justify either erotica or fanfic to anyone): in the summer of 2013, I moved from New York City down to North Carolina with my partner of 10 years. It was a bit of an unexpected move for us; he is a doctor and New Jersey native, while I was a YA editor at a Big 5 imprint and (I assumed) a lifelong New Yorker. Bear had just matched in a residency program down South and was contractually obligated to attend, leaving me in a bit of a bind. Leave behind the career I loved to join the man I loved, or maintain an even longer distance relationship than we had in the past five years?

Truth be told, leaving publishing behind was easier than I thought. If any of you have listened to me on the Pub(lishing) Crawl podcast, you’ll know that my hypothetical memoir about my time as an editor is titled Required Drinking, or Every Step of This Process is the Worst. It’s not that I didn’t love being an editor; I did. But publishing is emotionally exhausting, and while I still believe that the highs of the industry outweigh the lows, I was looking forward to a little rest and some space to write.

I wrote the entire time I worked in publishing, but I didn’t devote any time or energy toward publication myself. Part of it was because I knew how hard it was (and boy, was it hard), and the other part was

because I simply did not have the extra emotional space to pursue it. But I could no more stop writing than I could stop breathing. I’ve been writing ever since I was a child: practically plagiarized versions of Anne of Green Gables, Sailor Moon fanfiction with the serial numbers filed off, Regency romances, Tolkien-esque high fantasies, pretentious thinly-veiled autobiographies intended to be the next Great American Novel, graphic novels, short stories, poems, song lyrics, et al. I wrote because I enjoyed it, not because I necessarily wanted to see my name on the spine of a book.

So perhaps it was serendipity that brought me to North Carolina. North Carolina gave the space to write. Not literal, physical space, but the emotional, creative space. It was the perfect opportunity to take my writing seriously. There was only one small wrinkle in that plan: money.

Medical residents make pennies, and while living in North Carolina is considerably cheaper than living up North, I wasn’t comfortable not contributing to the household. I grew up with two working parents, plus I like having my own money to spend. Unfortunately, while living in North Carolina is cheaper than living up North, so are the job prospects.

The first job I found was working customer service at a soda conglomerate. Thankfully, the job wasn’t consumer relations, but it did involve me talking with irate customers who were having difficulties paying what they owed the company or couldn’t understand the website or otherwise needed financial assistance. It wasn’t a particularly hard gig, but neither was it especially stimulating. I worked the late shift from 10:30pm to 7:00pm, and after 5:00pm, the call volume died down, which usually left me alone in the call center with nothing to do but write.

As I’ve written at length elsewhere, I was working on a retelling of Mozart’s The Magic Flute that was failing utterly. It was failing for a number of reasons, but I think the chiefest of them was the fact that the story simply didn’t excite me the wayI thought it would. I love The Magic Flute, but in hindsight, I think I wanted to stage a production of it rather than write a retelling. Another reason the work was failing was because I think I was trying too hard.

Anyone who knows me will tell you that I am Ravenclaw to the bone, someone who prefers to live a life of the mind. Yet despite all this, I am a Cancer, and I have to connect to things on an emotional level. The tricky part is finding a balance between writing that will give me Feels and writing that will tickle me intellectually. I think my mistake with The Magic Flutewas trying to find a way to make a story that didn’t satisfy me emotionally into something intellectually engaging. I was 60,000 words into the manuscript before I finally cried “Uncle!” and gave up.

So what to work on next? If The Magic Flute was intellectually engaging but emotionally barren, then I wanted to write the opposite: mindless fluff. A palette cleanser, if you will. I liked fanfiction. I liked erotica. I thought, Why not combine the two?

I wrote 50 Shades of Labyrinth.

To be fair, I don’t think fanfiction or erotica is mindless fluff. (Although they can be.) But what I like about both forms of writing is their focus on emotions and sensation. If anything is designed to give you Feels, it is fanfiction. Fanfiction can also be where character and relationships are explored through explicit sex. I grew up in fandoms: The X-Files, Sailor Moon, Harry Potter, etc. I am familiar with it. It is—in many ways—easy. Not to write, necessarily, but to engage emotionally. I know the characters, I know their relationships, and most of all, I know their power dynamics.

For Wintersong, I actually started with their power dynamic. As I laid out in the book’s “origin story,” I have always been drawn to the dark, the gothic, the fucked up. Underworld narratives and the trope of Death and the Maiden are my catnip. I can’t resist a seductive, possibly dangerous lover (on the page). But I also wanted to explore that danger through a heroine’s coming-of-age. And for many heroines, sexual awakening is part and parcel of that coming-of-age. Death, and the Maiden.

So I wrote and I wrote and I wrote 50 Shades of Labyrinth for NaNoWriMo 2013. I won that year (and it remains the only year I’ve ever won it), and finished the draft by the end of the year.

The thing is, the manuscript I intended to be a mindless palette cleanser didn’t exactly turn into 50 Shades of Labyrinth.There was considerably less sex than I intended, for one thing. My two characters didn’t even share a kiss until halfway through the story. Something else happened during the writing of this project: it took a life of its own. And I thought, Maybe now it’s time to pursue publication.

I’ve mentioned elsewhere that I initially queried Wintersong as a YA novel with crossover appeal. Crossover is hard to do right, so my agent and I decided that going out with Wintersong as an adult novel might better serve it. Besides, as an adult novel, Wintersong could keep its sex scenes as is. After six months on submission, the manuscript was acquired by Thomas Dunne Books, which publishes both adult and YA.

My editor and I worked together to make Wintersong the best book it could be and didn’t think twice about its place on the bookshelves. But as we got further along in the publishing process, it became clear that Wintersong might have a better chance in the teen market. I was fine with the category change; after all, I had been a YA editor. My friends are YA authors. It was my milieu, as it were.

But I knew then that the sex scenes could not stay as is. They were too explicit, too long, too . . . kinky. I’m not talking about BDSM, but the themes of domination, submission, and control that were in the text were too adult for a teen audience. Not that we thought teenagers couldn’t handle the material; it was just that the approach Liesl had to sex was more adult and mature than what you typically see in other young adult books. YA is a category of “firsts” and jumping headlong into your first time with a fully actualized sense of control and self confidence was perhaps a bit far-fetched.

So editing Wintersong for the YA audience took some re-writing. Not a lot, but enough to shift the dynamic a little. Liesl is still young, after all. I rewrote the sex scenes with the newer dynamic in mind, and then my editor and I were ruthless with the red pen, cutting and slash- ing all but the most necessary and evocative sentences.

I’m proud of the sex scenes in Wintersong in their current form. I’m proud my editor did not make me cut them altogether. I’m proud that there is sex on the page. There was a little twinge in both our hearts when we had to let the original versions go, but we wanted to make them available to you, my readers, in their unadulterated form, as it were.

The scenes have been slightly edited to better fit and flow with the published text of Wintersong, but are otherwise untouched. Enjoy, you filthy, filthy fiends.