Coding by Candlelight: Analysis (Part 2)
Coding by Candlelight: Analysis (Part 2)
Read the first part of the story analysis here:
There are three main characters in my “first love” triangle:
Clooney, nerdy teenage semi-virgin
Erin, fellow teenager
Chandra, teacher
… and Frank, another teenager.
To be perfectly Frank
The character of Frank was a bit of fun. He seems to be the only one doing any actual hands-on computer coding and Erin’s leadership skills are put to the test to restrain his hackerish tendencies.
He’s a possible alternate sexual partner but - spoiler alert - that doesn’t come off. He provides mild tension and someone for both Clooney and Erin to bounce conversation off as we the reader learn of the background and emotional landscape.
I had a lot of fun with Frank, to be honest:
“Oh boy! Look who is going to be our tutor!” Clooney said. This might turn out to be the best Easter coding camp ever.
“Mrs C. Parvati,” Frank read out, mispronouncing it Par-vaity. “So?”
“Parwa-tea,” Clooney automatically corrected. “I had her for a few sessions last year. You’ll see.”
“Is it a secret? What’s so special about her?”
“You’ll see. Just wait. If you’d come last time, you’d know.”
“I didn’t have a choice,” Frank moaned. “When the parentals say we’re going on a cruise, well, we’re going on a cruise.”
“You’re eighteen now. You can do whatever you like.”
“Sure. If I can afford it. The way things are, I have to save up for weeks just to impulse buy a Big Mac.”
I had a lot of fun with all three teenagers, to be honest.
If the reader is paying close attention, Frank is the way that Erin manages to get into Clooney’s bed while he’s off on a date with Chandra by reprogramming a keycard. That pretty much ends any possibility of a Frank/Erin hookup and he begins to slide into the background from that point.
Frank provides some modest amount of tension and red-herringness but he is really there to give a flavour of computer coding and as a foil for the other characters to bounce comments about the sexual undercurrents of the environment off.
His interest in bending or even breaking rules in a computing environment helps normalise what the other characters are doing. Chandra, in particular, is stepping outside the usual student-teacher relationship.
These three teenagers are learning. As adults with driving licences, new permissions and abilities, a whole exciting world opening up, important choices need to be made.
Frank could go big or go bad - like most tech billionaires, I guess - and the reader shares some of the excitement at the possibilities and dangers facing him and his associates.
Likewise for the sex. It’s exciting and everybody involved enjoys it - except for Frank, I suppose - but there are dangers.
Like driving too fast on a dusty country road, things could go sideways very quickly.
Diving deeper
In what is becoming an enjoyable and ego-boosting ritual, I fed the story - and TehBen’s review - into Google’s NotebookLM so as to generate a podcast conversation.
Wow! It revealed all sorts of hidden depths to the story I hadn’t noticed while actually writing it. All delivered with pleasing comments on my skill as a writer and storyteller.
I cannot say that I go along with all of it. Honestly, I was just having fun writing the story but maybe there were subconscious motivations at work I wasn’t aware of.
She: Yeah, [those details] are not just there to set the scene. It feels like Pepper uses them almost like metaphors.
He: Oh, metaphors for what?
She: Well, take that massage scene again, for example. It's not just about the physical sensations, right? It becomes this whole thing about Clooney learning to give pleasure, to be attentive to someone else's needs, and that ties into his emotional journey too.
He: Whoa. I see what you mean about the metaphors.
She: It's like she's saying that intimacy, whether it's physical or emotional, it requires a certain level of skill, of attention.
He: And practice. Lots of practice.
She: Well, yeah, but the point is she manages to weave these different elements together in a way that feels really thought-provoking and honestly pretty hot.
He: So it's more than just a steamy read. It's got layers.
She: Layers, metaphors, and enough technical jargon to make your head spin.
He: Alright, you've definitely piqued my curiosity. I have to check this Coding by Candlelight out for myself.
She: You should. It's definitely a unique experience. And speaking of unique, we've got to talk about Clooney's friend, Frank.
He: Oh yeah. What's his deal? Is he a coding whiz too?
She: Oh, totally. But he's also got this whole side hustle going on.
He: A side hustle? Like what?
She: Well, let's just say he's got a knack for hacking, and he brings this device to the camp that can read magnetic stripes, credit cards, key cards, you name it.
He: Hold on, is that even legal?
She: That's a good question. And to be honest, Pepper doesn't shy away from those ethical questions. It's like she's using Frank to explore the whole knowledge is power thing and how that power can be used for good or for well not so good.
He: So it's a commentary on technology and ethics, and oh yeah, don't forget the steamy romance. Man this book has got it all.
She: Right. It's a lot to unpack, but somehow Pepper makes it work.
Right. Somehow she makes it work.
I think that, right here, I may have stumbled across a great way to make my stories work better. Simply write my first draft, feed it into this podcast generator, and see what sort of insights it picks up.
And then refine anything that sounds like a good idea.
It’s like having my own set of beta readers!
Going into detail
Actual computer coding overloads my resources, I have to say. I’m okay with a bit of scripting, Excel formulas and so on but anything beyond a “Hello World!” program is more than I can handle.
I faked all the coding stuff. I think that the ideas for coding projects would work and maybe there’s a market for the “JustFriends” app I describe but I’ll leave it to a bunch of energised teens to make it work.
I was more interested in giving background to make the plot seem more credible than my model which was pretty short on detail and long on unbelievable sex. Details of the landscape, the animals, and the physical camp are reasonably reliable.
Of course, I’m always going to describe stories of travel in some atmospheric detail. I reasoned that my readership would be unlikely to be completely familiar with Australian landscapes and setting the scene would add interest to the relationships.
The “Deep Dive” podcast raised their cyber eyebrows at some of the details of the massage scene, saying it was almost like an instruction manual.
The huge problem with the story
I won’t say that it’s a fatal flaw but at heart, the idea of an erotic story as an instruction manual for sex manners is way out of kilter with the genre.
It doesn’t fit.
It’s preachy.
It’s a good story - in my unbiased opinion! - but readers don’t like to be preached at. If it’s overt, it rankles. If it’s hidden in some way the reader will feel that something isn’t quite right.
I also made a mistake - and remember, this was my first time publishing erotica at all - in tagging it. Because the story I modelled this one on was labelled as interracial sex. I did the same.
I’m not sure that there’s that big a market for Indian woman/white guy erotica.
Certainly not as big as student/teacher sex. How many high school students don’t regard at least a few teachers with sexual interest? And of those, how many keep alive the memories of a teenage crush long afterwards?
Yes, but …
I’m not comfortable about writing student-teacher erotica in a normal school setting. That behaviour is illegal, and even if all involved are over the age of consent it is seen as unprofessional and grounds for dismissal. That sort of power imbalance raises questions of consent and exploitation.
Sure, I can dress it up and skirt around the edges in the same way that Amazon Kindle Direct allows stories about sex with extinct species, or “incest-like” stories about sex with step-siblings or step-parents.
In this story, there’s a definite student-teacher relationship happening and even if it’s not school, all parties are over eighteen, and my teacher figure is driven by more than sex, it’s still pretty tacky.
Like the story I used as a model.
Even genuine literature like Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, widely praised and never out of print, attracts strident criticism from those who see it as a story about an adult man and a minor. A stepchild, no less. High on the list of banned books.
Up to the individual writer and their target audience, really. Tick all the boxes for Kindle Direct Publishing, tell the story well, and you’ll clean up. You can write a string of such stories.
Not me, though. I turned to other fields.
My first time
This was my first attempt at self-publishing, before I moved to Medium and long before I discovered Substack. Twitter was still worthwhile and I was making friends with a community of like-minded writers, working out how to write and publish fiction on Amazon.
I found a beta-reader site - Booksprout - and sent out copies for review. The feedback was great and I particularly relished a review by TehBen in their “Smut Vault”.
All put together, you can tell a bunch of time and research went into adding depth to this story. Sure, the basis of the antics of a few horny teenagers and their teachers in a secluded camp has all of the necessary pieces on their own to be a fine piece of erotica, but the depth in the non-sexual parts rounds out the story. In regard to those sexual moments, there is a ton of foreplay and build-up to the climaxes. It’s the kind of thing you could really “play along” with, if you catch my drift. This is a part of Pepper’s self-proclaimed style of One Handed ReadingTM. So if you didn’t catch my euphemism, you should definitely get it now that I’ve spelled it out for you.
One aspect that I hadn’t considered. The reviewer noted that this story would probably work better with female readers than male. The original story I had used as a model was firmly aimed at male readers with its graphic and unromantic encounters. I just followed along, making the sex more of a teaching experience for the supposedly male readership.
The sex might be plain and vanilla - teacher/student and interracial aspects aside - but I think it works well in the context of the story. There’s a fair bit of it and a nice teasing build-up in the first few chapters.
There’s also a lot more emotional background than you’d expect in something quick and sexy. Erin, of course, is the character I most identified with and the awkwardness and uncertainty of first love is a key part of her character. In this story she, unlike most, gets a second bite of the cherry.
Mostly, I enjoyed writing it and I demonstrated to myself that I could write sex a lot better than some of those already in the genre.
Summing up
Coding by Candlelight was my first piece of published erotica. I was driven to this by my perception of mainstream smut as misogynist and unromantic. I also found a dismal piece of written porn about a teacher/student relationship at a coding camp that was so very bad that I had a go at writing something better.
I think I easily succeeded but the novella-length story has some major problems. Apart from being too long.
There are four main characters - and the odd kangaroo - and they all have different parts to play in how I tell the story. In my definition of erotica, sex is also a character. Here sex is a teacher and that’s appropriate given the nature of the story but how attractive is that to readers who just want some straightforward teenager sex?
My story gained some traction and was a lot of fun to write but I never took the characters, setting, or theme any further. I started writing another story where Chandra, at home now, seduced a young security consultant but I never got more than a few pages.
Instead, I turned to travel erotica and in the months to come we’ll look closer at these stories and more.
Britni
Great insights into how you wrote your story and the lessons you learned along the way.
Fascinating! Self Help or Erotica?