Writing About Faeries, Spirits and Ghosts
A lot of my stories feature naughty and mostly horny supernaturals
Following in from my post Demons Incubi and Succubae another group of naughty and often horny supernaturals are spirits, faeries and ghosts.
Tending to be more mischievous and less malevolent than demons, spirits and faeries are ideal subjects for the writer of erotica, although researching tales and fables will reveal that they can also reek a certain amount of mayhem.
I have included ghosts in this post as the entities I write about may or may not fall into this category. I love to leave the reader with the question was that character just fucked by a real person, a ghost or a supernatural being?
I love the idea of the living interacting with the transcendent and since what I write here is erotica a lot of that interaction is going to involve sex. When your characters are not bound by the constraints of the physical world it gives the writer freedom to let their mind wander into a myriad of, ‘what ifs’.
I have included ghosts in this article because it is often difficult to distinguish between what is a spirit, a faerie or a ghost. In Release Me, is Celia submitting to a ghost, a spirit, a real person or is her lover just in her imagination?
In The Girl in the Green Dress is he lured into the woods by a real girl or a spirit?
We all see or experience events in life that, initially, appear as unexplained. There is usually a rational explanation but, by the time you or I have worked this out our imaginations running riot.
For example: I once felt myself falling into a painting - the rational explanation was that the guide had just told us that people were rumoured to see a ghost in the painting. I am not going to let the rational explanation get in the way of a good story and some arousing sex and my experience inspired The Bride Was A Picture (a paid subscriber story)
Painted Stripes (read episode 1 free) also features a magical painting, although this one owes more to Oscar Wilde’s A Picture of Dorian Gray than personal experience. Jocelyne finds her life spirals into a series of evermore erotic adventures after she commissions a nude painting of herself.
In Demons Incubi and Succubae I mentioned that some might argue that sex is about procreation so why would preternatural beings indulge in it? Who is to say that is not possible? Human sex is often about the power dynamic, especially when domination and submission are involved. Why would not preternatural beings use it as a way to exercise their power?
Sex is also fun, that is one of the reasons we continue to do it in later years after the chances of reproducing our genes have faded. I like my ghosts and spirits to have characters and motivations - why shouldn’t they lust after a bit of fun?
Read my Dark, Supernatural Erotica Series on Substack. Many of the stories are free to read some are open only to the more daring - paid subscribers.
My new series On the Edge of Dreams looks at faeries from another angle. What if they do exist, but they are beings from another dimension?
Kate Mason is a successful business woman, queen of her empire. Hiding away in a remote cottage she finds herself having strange, erotic dreams. When she follows an ethereal girl into a wood near the cottage she finds her dreams, fantasies and reality blurring as she slips between worlds.
At the Edge of Dreams was partially inspired by William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I love the chaos of this play generated by the interaction between earthly and ethereal characters. The use of love spells and the blurring of the boundaries between reality and dreams is all woven into my story.
In my writing I differentiate between demons and spirits; demons deliberately interact with humans, often in a predatory manner; spirits and faeries live in a different dimension, sometimes their world bumps into ours, when it does their interaction is more mischievous. Much like humans, spirits and faeries, can be out to have some fun with other lifeforms and hang the consequences.
See the full list of my free and paid subscriber supernatural stories on SimoneFrancis.com
Simone--I love reading these "behind the scenes" pieces about what influences your work. I'm on record as a fan of your preternatural/demonic stuff, which I addressed at length before. The realm of the faeries, ghosts and such is another grouping of beings rooted in myth and folklore, but I submit their link with literature--and the erotic specifically--is far more pronounced and accessible to modern audiences via the Great Romantics and traditional Gothic Horror and Romance (which are often so intertwined within the same work that they can't be distinguished--"Dracula" was considered a pornographic novel when Stoker released it (and I'm sure there are Philistines today--most likely here in the God-Fearing USA--who still think so), though that doesn't touch upon these creatures per se. As for Faeries having an erotic, seductive quality--to my mind, Yeats' immortal "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" fits the bill--the seductive being is actually some sort of vampiric being who has lured him with her charms, while sucking his life and soul from him, which he learns when he's crossed into her deadly realm, seeing the wilted shades of fellow victims. There's actually not much distance between the "faery" and the vampire as far as modus operandi when you get to the Romantics--they pretty much do the same thing--trick/seduce, lead to ruin. The vampiric faery is usually interchangeable with a female, the vampire with a male. Coleridge's "Christabel" comes to mind here.
But going back to the traditional folklore, you really wanted to stay on the good side of the "wee folk." The term "stroke" for a cerebro-vascular accident is rooted in the old folk belief of the "fairy stroke," the notion that if you were involved with fairies, elves, or similar beings, and crossed them--by deceit, or denying them rights to use your water or land, or even just being unkind to them when they were totally kind to you, these beings--chthonian and hence total masters of the magic and infernal arts (maybe because they were closer to the netherworld?)--could "strike" you with a wasting or sudden paralysis--taking away your speech and movement (which, obviously, happens in stroke victims)--or even your life. And of course, they could just screw with your crops, kill your cattle, or take your newborn child and exchange one of their own--the old "changeling" tale.
Your going back to traditional myth and folklore for some of your work--to find erotic foils for your human characters, is a brilliant take on the genre. I'm also grateful that you haven't used space aliens--please don't! You're one of the most polished and elegant purveyors of erotica out there, Simone, and it's because of workmanship and your distinctive, "otherwordly" style, which pierces the veil between the visible and invisible realms, and I think that stylistic choices like yours represent is a revival of storytelling that's intrinsically human--an archetypal belief that the erotic and spiritual realms are neither mutually exclusive, nor adversarial moral "teams" representative of Good and Evil locked in and eternal dualistic struggle of neurotic fear. Just another way of viewing "Being," as only creatives can do.