Month: August 2018

How to Write an Asexual Love Story—and Why

Posted on by Kai Raine

I’m trying to write an asexual’s love story right now. No, I don’t mean a non-sexual love story. There will in fact be a bit of sexual content, because the protagonist has to learn that not wanting to have sex, not enjoying the rush of hormones, is not the same thing as either prudishness or some sort of virtue.

That said, this is a complicated thing to write, and I want to talk a bit about it.

The Manuscript That Demands to Be Written

Let me back up. I just wrote a quarter of a novel manuscript in half a week.

This wasn’t something that I had on my list of planned projects. I’m not even sure that this is something that will ever see the light of day, beyond a handful of carefully selected beta readers. But it is something close to my heart, that I feel strongly compelled to write.

My biggest challenge in the writing of this story is attempting to create a compelling love story narrative where the love interest—as well as the reader, perhaps—writes off the protagonist as a potential romantic partner very early on because of her sheer disinterest in sex.

This novel is about many things, but one of those things is the story of a woman who tells herself that she is simply picky about partners—who comes to accept that no, it’s not the partners that she’s disinterested in, but the sex and the hormones. She is capable of experiencing attraction, but finds it deeply unpleasant. The rush of hormones, the way it turns her head, the giddiness, the blind dedication—these things that make the start of a relationship the best part to many people are what make her averse to it. She would rather just skip to the part where the attraction is muted and the relationship is characterized by comfortable familiarity.

Is this proper “Asexuality”, as per the LGBTQA+ label? Does it matter? Not to me.

Because this is my sexuality that I’m trying to portray. I label it asexuality. I used to label it demisexuality. At the end of the day, you can call it whatever you want. I’m contemplating the idea of throwing all the labels into the story at different points, to highlight all the possible angles I’ve considered it from, or just dropping them all and letting the readers decide for themselves.

Other Asexual Love Stories

Here’s the thing—fan fiction is the only place where I’ve ever read love stories of the asexual/aromantic/demisexual variety. Oh, certainly, I’ve read books or seen movies where you could interpret a character to be one or more of the above, but these aspects are subtle, and possible to ignore. Not so in my story.

Well, the fan fiction template is not much use going into writing an original novel. Fan fiction can do these things for a few reasons:

  • When reading fan fiction, people tend to search for the pairing that they want to see. If you post an asexual Harry Potter/Draco Malfoy fic —and just to be clear, I’m making this up, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it exists—then some Harry/Draco shippers will read it. You don’t have to go through the trouble of investing your readers in the characters and their relationship. Their interest comes pre-packaged the moment they click on your story.
  • Thanks to the advent of Archive of Our Own, people also search fan fiction by tags. So if you write, for example, a Monkey D. Luffy/Trafalgar Law fic where they are asexual and aromantic respectively, people interested in asexuality and aromanticism will find it by searching those tags. And even though the reader may not necessarily be a Luffy/Law shipper, they might go, “Huh, I know and like those characters, and this is an intriguing idea. Let me take a look.” And once again, you’ve hooked them purely through premise and knowledge of a fandom.
    • And this one is a real fic that I liked very much—it gave me a lot to think about. You can read here if you’re interested.

It’s harder to try and build this from the ground up. I have to get the reader deeply invested in the characters, as well as a developing relationship—which is challenging enough in ordinary circumstances. But I need the reader to be invested in a relationship where the two characters in questions are of “incompatible orientation” according to conventional wisdom. And I don’t want to do this by deliberately tricking the reader. I hope that the protagonist’s emotions, and her lack of self-awareness will effectively obfuscate her…unusual feelings about sexuality for long enough that the reader has time to get to know her and become invested in the main relationship.

But I’m not counting on it.

“But Asexuality Is Just Self-Denial”: Proving a Negative Through Story

When I talk about my asexual characters—because this isn’t the first—I get a lot of flack for it. I’m cashing in on a trend, I’ve been told. It doesn’t really exist, people have said to me. That asexuality is a temporary state of people who simply haven’t yet met “The One”; that asexuals are simply deluding themselves due to society’s brainwashing; that asexuality runs contrary to biology—these are all views that have been shared with me. Not necessarily with regards to my character, mind you. Some of these have been said to me, about me, even before I adopted the label of asexuality and applied it to myself.

Obviously, they are wrong about me, and so I disregard these opinions with regards to my character, too.

Here’s the problem, though.

I’m trying to tell an asexual’s love story—a story where, through falling deeply in love with one person, the protagonist comes to realize and accept how deeply she doesn’t care for romance or sex. This love interest is an exception to how she has always been, and how she realizes that she continues to be underneath the attraction.

If this doesn’t seem paradoxical, let me reframe it for a second.

What I’m trying to do is basically like trying to tell the story of a female character realizing she’s a lesbian by falling really and truly in love with a man for the first time, and recognizing how he is the exception to her experience of her feelings with men.

Arguably, I feel like given the widespread acceptance of the Kinsey scale, that would make slightly more sense—in this situation, it would be a story of a woman who rates perhaps a 5 on the Kinsey scale.

Just like it’s impossible to scientifically prove a negative, it’s hard to tell a story about something that’s totally absent. But an exceptional situation that creates feelings that the protagonist has never experienced before or after, despite the contradictory stories she tells herself and everyone else about who she is? That’s something I can do.

That’s what I’m writing.

(I just have to figure out how to structure it. Just, indeed…)

Route 2: The Highway That Was My Personal Obstacle Course

Posted on by Kai Raine

It’s been a long time since I blogged a travel story. All my Murphy’s Law of Transportation stories so far have been about public transportation, so today I’d like to talk about the

This coming week my sister’s moving out of the apartment in Amherst, Massachusetts where she lived for her college career. I spent a large chunk of the last two years living with our aunt and grandparents in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, so I got to visit her semi-regularly. The trip between the two towns was pretty straightforward, but typically took about an hour and a half, though it could be longer with traffic. Most of that trip was spent driving on Route 2.

How I loathed Route 2.

For some reason, for the first year, one of every two ventures I made out to Amherst featured nerve-wracking moments. On Route 2, where the speed limit is 55mph, but everyone typically seems to drive at 70-75mph.

Random tangent: I’m guessing that traffic slows down when the weather is bad. My trips were always voluntary, so I never made the drive when the weather looked like it might make things difficult. After leaving Route 2, there was another 30+ minutes of driving on windy, hilly roads in the middle of nowhere. The prospect of ice and rain was not a welcoming one on these roads. I have made the trip out of Amherst in bad weather, but not the trip to Amherst. Which is what this post is about.

The stress of these events—3 of which I remember vividly—contributed to my stress at the prospect of making the drive, making my trips out to Amherst less frequent than I had expected them to be.

Incident #1

The first incident happened during maybe my second or third drive to Amherst, when I was still not quite sure of the roads. There was a lot of traffic that day, but going quite fast. I was in the row of cars in the left lane.

(Route 2 is a 2-lane highway for most of this trip, except the last stretch where it became a 1-lane highway. Yes, the left lane is supposed to be for overtaking, but when there are people stubbornly doing the speed limit, the left lane becomes the 70mph travel lane, while the right lane is the 55mph travel lane.)

The car in front of me was a bigger car than mine. (Not unusual. I drove a 2-door VW GTI.)

In front of that car was a big truck. You know, one of those gigantic things.

So that’s the scene: me in my little car, on an unfamiliar highway that goes on forever. I just have time to see something red by the truck’s tires when the car in front of me swerves.

Now, I learned to drive in Germany, where it was strictly drilled into me to never swerve when startled. I was taught to break.

So I don’t swerve. But I can’t break suddenly either, because the car behind me is quite close. I break, but slowly. I just have time to register that it was one of those bright red plastic fuel containers, and then I’ve driven over it. (Between the wheels, at least.) I hear it dragging for a few seconds, then I hear it release. In the rearview mirror, I see the car behind me swerve, but not enough, and catch the container under itself, too.

When I got back to my grandparents’, I took the car to a local mechanic just to check that I hadn’t hurt anything. He was very nice, checking the car and reassuring me that there was no damage at no charge.

Incident #2

This time, I was relatively accustomed to the drive. But the gas container incident hadn’t quite faded from my memory on the day that I was driving down Route 2, again in the left lane, again in traffic.

Around the same place where the gas container incident had happened, again I encountered an obstacle! This time, it was a white plastic trash bin, lying across the left half of the lane.

Luckily, everyone was swerving around it so it was visible a good few seconds beforehand, rather than coming out of nowhere. The cars in the right lane were spaced far enough apart that this was not too difficult.

Incident #3

By this point, the it had become a bit on an inside joke among my friends that Route 2 was my personal obstacle course.

I was also growing more confident in my driving. After all, if I’d managed not to get into an accident so far, I was doing pretty well. So my guard was perhaps a little bit lowered one sunny day.

I drove without incident past the areas where I’d formerly encountered obstacles. Traffic was sparser than usual, but both lanes were moving fast: probably 65-70mph.

I was more than half way through my course on Route 2 when I rounded a corner and saw, just a split second before I had to react…

A couch.

Sitting there blocking off 2/3 of the left side of the right lane was a couch. Not lying sideways or anything, no. It was upright, looking perfectly comfy and innocent.

Fortunately, being in the left lane (as usual), I only had to veer to the leftmost side of my lane to avoid the couch.

People in the right lane were swerving into the shoulder, and I’ve never been so relieved to see that there was a shoulder to the highway. (Sections of this highway don’t have a shoulder; had this happened in any of those places, this would have undoubtably resulted in a massive pile-up.)

In summary: driving is dangerous, but I’ve somehow been extremely lucky.