A NIGHT IN WITH E.L. JAMES, BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©


 

A NIGHT IN WITH E.L. JAMES, BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

I recently paid a couple of quid for the privilege of spending ‘a night in’ with billion-selling author and creator of the FIFTY SHADES OF GREY book and film trilogy, E.L. James, real name Erika Mitchell.

In reality, this didn’t bestow an actual night with the author on me; it only gave me access to an hour-long conversation between E.L. James and former X FACTOR presenter Kate Thornton, but this was still really enjoyable and entertaining and well worth the couple-a bucks I spent on it.

British writer E.L. James is the author I most admire. What she managed to achieve was quite simply phenomenal. I first heard of her in 2012, when suddenly everyone was talking about a book trilogy entitled FIFTY SHADES OF GREY. This was the first book; the other two were entitled FIFTY SHADES DARKER and FIFTY SHADES FREED.

I was bemused to see that all three books seemed to materialise in the bookshops all at once. What gives, I wondered? Normally an author releases a book, then a year later releases its sequel, and so forth. The FIFTY SHADES books seemed to literally explode out of nowhere in a complete, already fully-formed trilogy, and everybody was talking about them.

And they were doing more than just talking. They were buying the books in their hundreds of thousands, making E.L. James the most successful author in history and her books the fastest-selling since HARRY POTTER and the Bible. In a publishing sense, the likes of the FIFTY SHADES trilogy of books was in a class of its own. It turned the world of publishing on its head.

There was this thing at the time where people, as well as buying the physical books, would be downloading the story onto their kindles or e-readers; that way they could read the scandalous ‘mummy porn’ anywhere they liked in public without anyone else seeing what they were reading and judging them for reading filth, lol.

I didn’t mind being seen with my copies, which I bought immediately the storm broke. And the chances were that, every time I walked into a coffee shop carrying one or other of the books, there would be at least one other woman already there with her nose in one of them as well. Talk about kinky readers of the world unite…

The books are about sex, sadomasochism, BDSM and control in a male-female relationship. The heroine, Anastasia Steele, is a beautiful young American college student of literature who works in a hardware shop to make a few quid on the side.

Almost by accident, she meets Seattle entrepreneur and bazillionaire, twenty-seven-year-old Christian Grey, who, not to put too fine a point on it, introduces her to his ‘Red Room of Pain’ and his BDSM lifestyle of ‘kinky fuckery,’ but Anastasia, as much as she loves him, is not at all sure that she is cut out for this kind of shenanigans. Their relationship ups-and-downs form the subject of the three books.

When I read them myself, I mentally howled and kicked myself throughout. Why had I not written these books, or books like them, first? I love sex, I love spanking, I love writing about dominant males and submissive females! Why hadn’t I pipped E.L. James to the post?

Because she got there first, that’s why, and she actually sat down and did the thing without just endlessly talking about doing it and thinking about doing it, so fair play to her. She reaped the most fantastic rewards, but then, she put the work in too, so she definitely deserved these rewards.

She then re-wrote the three books, which started out as TWILIGHT fan-fiction because E.L. James adored those books by Stephanie Meyer, from the point of view of Christian Grey, whereas first they were all written from Anastasia’s. That’s no mean feat, you know, as writing even one book takes forever and puts years on you.

I’m sure there’s probably been FIFTY SHADES merchandise over the years as well, lingerie, wine, chocolates, perfume, toiletries, bath stuff, maybe even the requisite sweatshirts, T-shirts, baseball caps and keychains, lol. It’s a multi-million selling franchise and it’s one that would be really hard to out-do. We can of course try, but very few of us will ever scale those dizzying heights, sad to say.

To those who bitchily bemoan the quality of the writing, I say they’re jealous that they didn’t write these books themselves. I know I am! To those who say that E.L. James inaccurately depicted BDSM practices and tenets, I say I’m not qualified to comment on that, as I only like bits and pieces of the lifestyle here and there and am not committed to it as a whole. I don't live it on a day-to-day basis.

To the folks who say that Anastasia’s relationship with Christian is abusive, with him controlling her and running her life for her, I say, hmmm, yes, maybe a tad. But then some women like that, don’t they, and back then in 2012, ‘the year of the madness,’ as E.L. James puts it herself, there were millions and millions of us who wanted to read about it too.

Films were even made of all three books, starring Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan as Anastasia and Christian, and there weren’t too many empty seats in the theatres where they were playing. I myself have the DVDs, lol.

The books paved the way for millions- literally!- of authors of erotica to write and publish their books freely. Spanking, whipping and bondage in book-form suddenly became the hottest thing since sliced bread. 

Were people ripping off FIFTY SHADES, or did that many people genuinely have novels and novellas in them that they’d heretofore been repressing out of fear, shame or embarrassment? FIFTY SHADES changed all that.

My own debut novel, THE DEVIANTS, which went up on Amazon in 2014, was described by one reviewer as a bad FIFTY SHADES knock-off, which I hotly dispute because it was a fictionalised account of a real life relationship, so there, harrumph.

I did, however, begin writing my erotic Dracula fan-fiction in 2014, and I’ve been writing it on and off ever since, with no end currently in sight. I love writing it and get endless pleasure and enjoyment out of it, the way E.L. James says she loved writing her own books. You have to truly love your subject if you write that kind of thing…!

  And, now that I think about it, really, the only difference between me and E.L. James as writers is about a gazillion dollars, that’s all, otherwise we’re practically sisters of erotic writing under the skin. So I’d like to think, anyway…

Erika Mitchell herself is an attractive, warm, dark-haired woman of fifty-eight who laughs a lot, and especially at how mad the whole FIFTY SHADES phenomenon was and still is. She was able to buy her gorgeous family home on the dosh she made from the books, and she shares it with her screenwriter husband, two sons and little doggie.

She seems like a really down-to-earth, good-humoured woman as well as being the most best-selling author of all time, and, being the only woman in a household of men, I’m sure she does her share of picking up dirty socks and cleaning round the toilet bowl after the lads have mis-fired yet again.

Now that she’s finally finished the last book from the point of view of Christian, she’s free- or FREED, haha- to work on the two or three new projects she’s been mulling over for the last while.

I wish her the best of luck in anything she attempts, though I hope her new books will be a little more exciting than J.K Rowling’s non-Harry Potter books under her pseudonym of Robert Galbraith, miaow miaow.

Anyway, I loved my night in with E.L. James, although my own main thoughts on the FIFTY SHADES books/films/phenomenon still are and probably will always remain: ‘Why wasn’t it me? It should have been meeeeeeeee…!’ You snooze, you lose…

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.

 Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, poet, short story writer and film and book blogger. She has studied Creative Writing and Vampirology. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, women's fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra's books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO

Her debut romantic fiction novel, 'THIRTEEN STOPS,' is out now from Poolbeg Books:

https://www.amazon.com/Thirteen-Stops-Sandra-Harris-ebook/dp/B089DJMH64

The sequel, ‘THIRTEEN STOPS LATER,’ is out now from Poolbeg Books:

 https://www.amazon.com/dp/1781994234

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