Carol (Carol Schmidt Series)

by Cook, Lori

  It wasn’t just one long video, either. It was dozens of short ones: Strange getting blown, Strange barking orders at two compliant lesbians, Strange forcing himself into a woman’s mouth, Strange boasting about how he’d ripped coders off, jacking off as he did so...

  Within twenty-four hours, Alex Strange was an Internet star, the object of amazement and revulsion across the globe. And that included Wall Street.

  His girlfriend had disappeared. But he didn’t give a shit about that. He went into overdrive, immediately denying everything, claiming that the whole thing was a foolish sex game that had gone wrong. His lawyers publically stressed the legality of all his previous dealings with coders, and threatened litigation against anyone stating otherwise. Strange, then, came out fighting, and the floatation of his company was set to go ahead as planned.

  In the days that followed, however, the allegations of the theft of intellectual property by Strange forced its way onto mainstream news channels, initially as a “bizarre” human interest story. Then a handful of former Strange Tech employees began to speak out, and the nature of how his software had in fact been written came under detailed media scrutiny. Government departments and private corporations now began to suspend their contracts with the company, pending their own inquiries into the matter.

  The floatation of Strange Tech was finally suspended just hours before it was slated to go ahead. It wasn’t just the growing scandal; the estimated value of the company had slipped to such an extent that he was advised that a floatation of any kind was no longer feasible.

  With his company in rapid decline, Strange could content himself with the fact that he was still a rich man, and that the legal position regarding his “theft” of code was complex and difficult to prove. However, a class action by former coders was threatened, and to protect against the possibility of losing his personal wealth in fighting a long, drawn out case, Strange quietly began to settle with individual programmers.

  Alex Strange himself would survive the ignominy. Attempts to resurrect his company as a small, specialized media software provider failed, and though his personal wealth was much depleted, he didn’t starve.

  Eventually, with funds running low, he would turn that night of shame at the Trump International to his advantage. The slim, white-haired young man from that sex video was instantly recognizable wherever he went, so he began to accept invitations to appear on chat shows and play poker on celebrity gaming sites. He even managed to smile through it all, becoming a parody of himself, bearing the laughter and derision that his appearances provoked with seeming good humor.

  Alex Strange, in other words, finally become a media star. The reason why interest in him persisted, though, was not that night in a New York hotel. It was because he was the guy who had lost several billion dollars. When the TV docu-drama of his life was inevitably made, it was called The Nearly Man.

  Meanwhile, Jason got his payoff, enough to retire from teaching and establish himself in the tech business. The fact that his ideas had been behind some of Strange Tech’s best known streaming software opened many doors for him, and though he no longer needed to work, he did it for the love of coding, like most coders do.

  Less than six months after first seeing that extraordinary video on his iPhone, Jason had his own offices in Palo Alto and a staff of six. A regime of fruit smoothies and a new love of life had turned him back into something resembling that skinny postgrad who’d walked into the Marriot on Times Square, the whole world ahead of him. He also had his wife and kids back, which meant far more to him than all the money in the world.

  The demise of Strange Tech was, even half a year later, the talk of Silicon Valley. Just why had Strange been so dumb to blurt it all out like that? Why on earth had he gotten himself into that kind of situation in the first place? The monk-like, incorruptible Alex Strange? It made no sense.

  Jason did not share in such speculation. He had watched the clips hundreds of times, fascinated and horrified, over and over again. But unlike the rest of the world, he was not confused as to what had happened in that bedroom. Because he knew the blond woman with Strange in the video, and he knew that she, despite being humiliated by a rampant, megalomaniacal Strange, had been totally in control. It had been a while, and her hair was different, but he would have known Carol anywhere.

  And he knew exactly why Strange had done it.

  Carol, quite simply, was irresistible.

  *

  So where is she now, the mysterious woman who brought Alex Strange down and stole his girlfriend? That’s what everybody is asking, from journalists to TV and movie producers. Everyone is asking the same thing.

  But nobody knows the answer. She has disappeared into thin air, along with Sai Boynes. There is a surveillance video of the two women walking out of the Trump International just minutes after Strange’s live performance had ended. Since then, nothing.

  The seductress in the hotel room is nowhere to be seen.

  But she’ll be back.

  Just as soon as she’s ready.

  END

  About Lori Cook

  Lori Cook is a pen name, although you probably guessed that! I believe that erotica is a healthy, inspiring and stimulating form of fiction. Unfortunately not everybody agrees. I work for public institutions, and because of this I’ve decided not to use my real name here.

  With the CARDINAL series I’ve taken my first steps into the world of erotic writing. They definitely won’t be my last though! I’ve written all sorts of stuff over the years, and I’ve had a number of things published. But this has been the most fun I’ve ever had with a pen! I dunno why, but it felt great from the very start. Perhaps I just found my ideal genre... My only hope is that you enjoy reading it half as much as I loved writing it.

  You really want to know stuff about me? OK, I’m forty-one years old. My career has been mainly in education. I studied languages at college, and taught for years in various educational institutions, mainly adults. These days I do consultancy work on a freelance basis, which allows me to dedicate some time to writing.

  Apart from work, I like dancing (any style) and walking, especially in the National Parks or any kind of wilderness. I have traveled pretty widely, in South America and Europe. I speak French and Spanish reasonably well, plus five words of German. I love visiting art galleries, modern art particularly, and I enjoy live music, jazz and classical on the whole, although I have on occasion been dragged to heavy metal gigs (where I cower at the back, glancing at my watch).

  Lastly, I love reading. I’ll read absolutely anything, from the classics to modern mysteries and women’s erotica. I own a Kindle Fire and believe that ebooks have liberated writing and writers in ways that we are only just beginning to understand. Look at me: suddenly I’m in my forties writing full-on erotica. That wasn’t part of the life plan, I can assure you...

  Happy reading!

  Lori Cook

  A short essay on genre, erotica and anonymity

  I have written fiction all my adult life. I’ve had several books published (see below on anonymity), and my writing would probably be classified as ‘literary’. But what does that mean? How do we even begin to define ‘literature’?

  Well, what I mean by the term is the kind of writing that does not take as its starting point a reasonably well-established plan or template. For me, literary writing starts out from a totally blank page. War and Peace, Wuthering Heights, 1984, Catcher in the Rye, Slaughter House Five... The only thing that works such as these have in common is the lack of any clear commonality with other works. The reader could not be expected to know, at the outset, how the narrative was going to develop in terms of its broad structure.

  Or take Carver’s ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Love’, four people sitting around a kitchen table, talking and drinking gin. For me, this story is a work of genius because it takes the ordinary and makes it extraordinary. It starts from nowhere special, but takes you to a place you’ve never been before, and deep
er into the lives of its characters than you thought was possible in a short story. I love writing like this. It has enriched my life immeasurably.

  In defining literature as something that doesn’t conform immediately to a template, I am by implication differentiating it from ‘genre’. However, we should perhaps add a few hedges here. First, some writing generally considered to be ‘literary’ does indeed rely on templates. Some literary novels, for example, knowingly use the template of the mystery genre, and there are other literary writers who draw on other genres. Margaret Atwood has won the Booker Prize twice while writing in what we might very broadly call ‘genre’.

  Second, some books written squarely within a template or genre, such as the novels of Ray Chandler and James Elroy, are nevertheless held up to be literature. For me, the term here slides into a use which is very close to ‘great writing’. A crime novel is, by definition, part of the genre of crime writing. But few people, I think, would doubt that White Jazz transcends that genre. None of these distinctions and definitions, perhaps, are either useful or even interesting. Great writing is just that. Great.

  However, I do think that ‘genre’ is different from ‘literature’. Genre conforms to a template, to some form of narrative structure or to a cluster of thematic expectations (or both). These are already established when the writer sets out to draw the reader into the story. The writer knows this, and so too does the reader. You don’t generally hit upon a ‘genre’ novel by accident; you going seeking it out. Readers tend to prefer specific genres, often reading voraciously, coming back again and again to the same kind of stories.

  So, we might think of ‘genre’ as being what happens when a writer and reader share a kind of implicit agreement as to how the fictive process is in some way pre-established, and how it is likely to proceed, however loose this arrangement. Crime mysteries illustrate this well. In a crime novel there is typically a crime early on in the story, and toward the end the truth about that crime is discovered. Taking it more structurally, you might say that there is a specific legal-moral transgression (a crime) which isn’t understood (it’s a mystery) and the plot revolves around uncovering (solving) the case. That’s the template. And the template, repeated in many different works, is what constitutes the genre.

  At this level of abstraction it is clear that if a writer decides to write a crime mystery, then she has something to work with, even before she begins planning the story. She might subvert the basic structure of the genre, side-step it to some extent, or in other ways turn it to her own ends. But if her story is going to attract the interest of crime fiction readers, and thus be embraced by fans of the genre, there must be some broad conformity to the template.

  Let me say, right off, that I also love genre writing. For me it can be a different reading experience, sometimes swifter, less concentrated, and often involving bolder narrative strokes. You might not stop and admire the sentences so often, and what sticks in your mind (in mine, at least) is more likely to be character, setting and plot, and less likely to be the artistry of the prose itself or the uniqueness of the atmosphere. Of course, this depends on both the way you read and the quality of the writing; we’re dealing in huge generalizations here, nothing more.

  I believe that genre writing fulfils a very urgent need in us all for pure story telling, and offers us the chance to jump with relative ease into narrative situations which are both familiar (the template) yet distant from out own experiences (we tend not to go about investigating murders, for example). Whereas I love literary fiction, I often find myself being drawn into genre fiction more easily, and reading it more readily.

  Over the years I have read quite a lot of genre fiction, especially crime mysteries, thrillers and sci-fi. As far as other genres are concerned, I have read almost nothing. These include horror, supernatural, romance... and erotica. So why, you might ask, did I decide to write an erotic novel?

  Well, initially I had no intention of writing a novel. I know from experience how much work a book-length piece of fiction takes to finish, and I had absolutely no intention of going through that process with a sex story! When I started to think about writing erotica, my initial plan was to write a handful of short stories, first to see whether I could do it, and second to see whether anyone would enjoy them.

  If you are a keen student of Lori Cook, and I am sure you are, you will know that I produced two short stories featuring Carol Schmidt, both self-published on Amazon (but now withdrawn). They were called Bad Daddy’s Last Post and Communing with the Devil, and they correspond pretty much to the ‘Bad Daddy’ and ‘Irina Lescheva’ sequences in Carol, respectively. They were little more than sex scenes with a plot hanging around on the breeze nearby. I enjoyed writing them.

  The seductress character, Carol Schmidt, was central to both stories, and so was the set-up, featuring the mysterious Cardinal. I loved writing the sex scenes, but I also realized that without a larger canvas to work on, the whole nature of the Cardinal’s work, and especially Carol’s role within it, couldn’t really be developed. Neither could her backstory.

  So, I decided to put all this together in a longer work. Thus did my life as an erotic novelist begin. It was a slightly crazy idea, the kind of thing you say to yourself when you’ve had too much wine, because even at this stage, after penning a couple of shorts, I really knew nothing about erotica. Yet before long I had convinced myself that I had a fairly pressing reason to embark on a full novel. Like I said, at that stage I was not much of a reader of erotica. But I now had the makings of a decent setting, a couple of intriguing characters, and I had the bit between my teeth. Things, as they say, had just gotten serious.

  As I got more serious about the project, I also began to read erotica. As I did so, I started to think about my own responses to the genre. Well, just to get things clear in my mind, I worked up a list of my own preferences in the realm of erotica. They are the following:

  1. I enjoy graphic depictions of sex, with scenes described in quite a bit of detail.

  2. I like either male-female or female-female. Either partner can dominate.

  3. I really don’t like über-alpha-male characters.

  3. In the case of male-female scenes, I like the woman to be in control to some extent.

  4. I am not turned on by anything ‘kinky’, especially bondage or any sort of sado-masochism.

  5. Narratives told from the point of view of the woman in the action feel most natural to me.

  So, you see, pretty much vanilla with sprinkles! If you have read the present book, Carol, you will notice that there are no sex toys and no particularly unusual sexual practices; just human bodies and minds living in the sexual moment. In other words, I mainly like scenes involving the simple intimacy of two people enjoying each other’s bodies in a natural way. These preferences might change radically tomorrow. I have a fairly open mind.

  On a more general level, what I found when I started getting into the erotica genre was that there was just an enormous range of stuff out there. Much more, I think, than in the case of crime mysteries, where if you go for a new writer, odds-on it’s a renegade cop with a failed marriage and a bad habit of some sort... I exaggerate! Yet even if it’s not exactly like a typical crime mystery, for a book to be considered a crime mystery, it’s likely to be fairly close to established parameters of that genre.

  Erotica embraces a more varied repertoire of scenarios, styles, atmospheres, characterization and plots. And I think it does this for one very clear reason: whereas thriller readers will expect a steady diet of action, and mystery readers will enjoy the details of the case as they are carried along by it, readers of erotica essentially want to read about people having sex with each other, which is, by definition, the most universal trope of them all, both in fiction and in life.

  The plot which carries you from one sex scene to the next in an erotic novel can be almost anything, because the template for this genre is not in fact to do with pillars of the narrative structure or plot point
s; it is simply that there will be quite a lot of sex. With an erotic novel, then, the plot might be absolutely essential, and very prominent in the narrative, but it is not in and of itself part of the genre. Indeed, there is no standard template for the broader plot structure of erotic fiction. It’s a blank page. With someone having sex on it.

  For this reason, erotica can more easily crossover into other genres. I’m thinking, for example, that subsequent Carol Schmidt might well involve more espionage; perhaps one day Carol will become a spy, or will add to her repertoire of skills in some other way (cowgirl? sex-ninja?). As long as she still provides the fireworks, I don’t see that it would stop it being erotica.

  I think this essay, so far, has in fact been one very long-winded way of saying that erotic fiction opens up new frontiers for the writer. It gives the writer an amazing buzz, and part of the reason for this is that it offers boundless scope, an infinity of avenues to explore and probe. Erotica is a ‘genre’, but not as we know it. Erotica is something different, kind of narrative free-reign, a new territory, somewhere fantastical yet very much a reflection of human desires and needs.

  There is one final, and slightly less glorious, aspect of my journey as an erotic novelist that I would like to discuss. It is the question of author anonymity.

  As you will know if you have read my bio, Lori Cook is not my real name. My true identity is hidden, and I do not intend to make it public any time soon. Why? I adopted this pseudonym for reasons which are both regrettable and practical. I really enjoy writing and reading erotic fiction, but I do not want this to become a problem for me in my everyday life.

  Let’s start by saying that everyone is allowed to hold true to their own values. You might love depictions of erotic acts, or you might hate the very thought of them. You might believe that an open attitude to sex is evidence of social progress, or a symptom of society’s decay. These are simply a matter of one’s own beliefs. Even those opposed on principle to the idea of erotic fiction would, I think, accept that given appropriate warnings and age-restrictions the things that one person reads and writes should be a matter for her own personal choice.