Loose Lips

by Amy Stephenson, Casey A. Childers

Genres: Humor & Satire

Synopsis

You've probably heard rumors about regions of the internet dedicated to fanfiction-vast, unmapped territories for fans so taken with their favorite books and movies (not to mention video games and cartoon cereal mascots) that they write their own continuing adventures. You've probably also heard the stories get real dirty and weird. Everything you've heard is true. In 2013, humanitarians Amy Stephenson and Casey A. Childers took fanfiction from the internet to the stage with Shipwreck, a monthly erotic fanfiction competition. Shipwreck is simple: Invite (bestselling, Hugo, Nebula, and Rita award-winning) writers to rework literature into low humor, erotic pastiche, and, like, LOTS ofdick euphemisms Perform said rewrites for a well-lubricated crowd Repeat Here, in book form, you'll find the most outrageous wrecks in Shipwreck's three-year history, drawn kicking and moaning from twenty-three of history's most cherished books and illustrated for your pleasure. Loose Lips will destroy your favorites, shock everyone in your book club, broaden your perspective, and (hopefully) make you laugh until you pee a little.

Release date: September 27, 2016

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 224

Sample

Hello. My name is Seanan McGuire. I am an award-winning New York Times best-selling author. I have more than twenty traditionally published books available all over the world. I am so prolific that I had to create a semi-secret second identity, the mysterious Mira Grant, in order to keep up with myself.

And I love fanfic.

I love the predictability of it, the author who you know writes only to make sure that Harry Potter and Hermione Granger will get the happy ending they feel J. K. Rowling denied them, telling the same story over and over again, each time in slightly different clothes (or without them).

I love the elegant, incredible ingenuity of it, the authors who unpack text and subtext and take stories off in directions the original creators would never have dreamed of and might never have been allowed to go. Modern storytelling is studded with “roommates” and “gal pals” who were never allowed—due to morality clauses or corporate demands—to be the romantic leads that they were destined to be. But in the hands of the fanfic author, Kitty Pryde and Illyana Rasputin can finally live happily ever after; Angel and Spike can finally talk about their pre-Buffy relationship without veiling it in subtext. The game changes.

I love the raw possibility of it all, the self-inserts and the original characters and the visions and revisions and the chaos and the beauty. Fanfic is a community effort, the people who love a thing seizing it and saying, “I love this so much that I want to rip it apart and see how it works from the inside out.” It’s the biology class of literature, and we are all kids with scalpels, and we are all frogs, and it is all glorious.

Like all good communities, fanfic has its own lingo, which is constantly evolving in both frequency and usage, so I think we need to define a few things. After that, we’ll talk vocabulary. And after that?

We’ll get to the smut.

Question #1: What is fanfic?

At its absolute simplest, fanfic is fiction about characters you do not own and did not create. I am aware that by this definition, most of the Disney canon is fanfic. So is most of Shakespeare, The Iliad, big chunks of Arthurian mythology, and pretty much any comic being written by someone other than the original creator. Some people are comfortable with this definition. Others feel that it’s too broad and want some legal framework.

Their definition is generally “fanfic is fiction about characters you do not have official permission from the intellectual property holder to use.” So the new X-Men comic from Marvel is not fanfic, because the IP holder (Marvel Comics) has licensed their characters to both writer and artist. Meanwhile, Wicked is not fanfic because The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is in the public domain, meaning no one owns those characters, meaning no one can have a license, meaning anything you write can be published.

Confused yet? Yeah, so are most of us.

Question #2: So, like, how is this legal?

Parody and fair use and no one really knows, so we all spend a lot of time shrugging and looking faintly baffled before moving on to the never-ending porn buffet.

Question #3: Why waste your time playing with someone else’s characters?

If you’re someone who wants to be a professional writer one day, fanfic is a great way to learn a lot about the craft of writing. I learned so much from my time as a fanfic writer. I learned about writing dialogue, writing description, and, yes, world building, because while the first stage of fanfic may be like “in My Little Pony she’s a girl like Megan, only it was Wind Whistler, not Firefly, who flew over the rainbow to bring her back to Ponyland, and she has adventures just like the ones they have on the show,” the second stage of fanfic is “what if Veronica Mars and Lilly Kane were huge fans of Josie and the Pussycats?”

The third stage is “what if the crew of Serenity were high school students putting on a production of Oklahoma?” We get a little weird from there. And all these things, every one of them, will teach you how to write.

If you’re not someone who wants to be a professional writer one day, fanfic is a way to write and share your stories and be part of a community and remember that literature is for everybody. Stories are for everybody. If you want to do nothing more than share your vision of Emma Swan and Captain Hook’s great romance with people outside your head, you can do that.

Fanfic is magic.

Now let’s talk about that lingo I mentioned before.

When you’re writing new stories about familiar characters, you sometimes need new ways to describe what’s going to happen. For example, the infamous slash. Originally devised by fans of Captain James T. Kirk getting it on with Mr. Spock, slash stands for a romantic pairing between same-sex characters. (Usually. Some people use slash to stand for any romantic pairing, because we’re rebels in the fanfic world, and no one actually gets to police how words are used.) Femslash is a slash pairing with women. Most romantic or smutty fanfic will have their pairings listed at the front, like “Hamilton/Laurens” or “Veronica/Lilly.”

OTP means “one true pairing,” or the pair of characters the author believes are truly meant to be together. It’s possible to have multiple OTPs, one in each fandom the author works in. OT3 means “one true three,” or the threesome the author believes is truly meant to be together.

Fluff means nothing really terrible will happen; angst or darkfic means the opposite. Ratings—PG, R, NC-17, NSFW—mean just what they would mean for any other piece of media.

Confused yet? Well, there won’t be a test after this book, but if you come away burning to dive deeper into the wonderful world of fanfic, you’ll encounter all these terms and so many more during your journey through our archives. It’s a great big fannish world out there, and you’re more than welcome to join us. We have booze. We have cookies.

We have a remarkable number of ways to say penis.

Excuse me, I am a fainting flower and don’t like that kind of language.

If this is the case, you have picked up the wrong book, and I strongly recommend putting it down and walking away. (Author’s note: I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to tell people to read something else in the introduction to a fancy new book of fanfic and porn, but one of the best things about fanfic is that we do not believe in vague disclaimers. We like to put it all out there, so that you can tailor your reading experience to your own deepest, weirdest, most non-canonical desires. That leads to a better fanfic community for everyone. You enjoy what you read more and writers get more positive reviews, which encourages them to keep writing—everybody wins!)

Porn has a long and storied history in fanfic, going back to the night so many centuries ago when an older sibling, tired of listening to the same fairy tales over and over again, decided to make up their own fairy tale, one where it was a glass butt plug instead of a glass slipper, or where Rapunzel really enjoyed using her hair for bondage. The beat went on. The beat always, always goes on.

If you can name two characters, the odds are good that porn has been written about them. Fanfic is like a bespoke bakery of porn. You want your jelly roll with chocolate cake, buttercream icing, and a raspberry drizzle? We can do that. You want your threesome with light bondage, fisting, and a few literary allusions? We can do that too. We are porn connoisseurs living in a golden age of access and easy sharing, and we’re going to do it. We’re going to write about the butts.

What you are now holding in your hands is the equivalent of a Chopped cookbook, only with a lot more dicks. So many dicks. A heaping smorgasbord of dicks. Also butts, vaginas, boobs, scrotums, fingers, tongues, and basically any other tool you could want to use in our porn kitchen. And that metaphor got away from me somewhere in the middle of that sentence, but that, too, is the nature of fanfic: because we’re doing whatever the fuck we want, sometimes things can get a little wild.

(See? I said fuck. Now that’s the sort of literary freedom that you can’t get in every introduction.)

When Amy contacted me, a known fanfic enthusiast, to participate in the first Shipwreck, I admit, I was a little hesitant. A lot of people don’t “get” fanfic. They either think it’s silly and frivolous—which it can be—or that fanfic authors aren’t real writers—which is bullshit—or that it’s all nerds giggling and blushing while writing “he had a penis it was amazing he let his best friend touch it OMG.”

(And if you wrote that line in your first ever fanfic, more power to you. It took me years to admit that the people whose sex lives I wrote about were probably having sex with actual body parts and not with psychic powers. Except when I was writing about telepaths and didn’t have to worry about all that messy biology. We all start somewhere.)

So, yeah, I was worried.

I didn’t need to be.

Shipwreck is a celebration of story. It’s an acknowledgment of the fact that, yes, we are all grown-ups with dirty, dirty minds, and sometimes we like to hear stories about the characters we already know doing filthy, filthy things with each other. It’s a party that happens over and over again, and I dare anyone who isn’t sure about fanfic to remain unsure after they spend an evening in a room full of consenting adults howling with delight over the many, many euphemisms for masturbation that Shipwreck’s many devious minds can come up with.

Like any good fanfic adventure, Shipwreck wears its disclaimers—or “tags,” in the fanfic parlance—on its sleeve. No non-con, or non-consensual sexual activities; no underage characters (which led to a frantic e-mail during the second round of Pride and Prejudice, where I asked Amy, “Wait, Lydia was underage in the novel. Do I have to avoid Wickham fucking her?”); no intentionally harmful humor. All pieces are read and reviewed for content before the event. When you come to Shipwreck, you are entering a profane, foul-mouthed, absolutely safe space. You can relax into the pornography.

And oh, the pornography! The book you hold in your hands right now is full—absolutely full—of beloved characters doing terrible things to one another. Some of them (most of them) are funny. Some of them are poignant and sweet. Absolutely all of them are filthy as hell, because this is an erotic fanfic competition, thank you very much, and what’s the point of being told that you can be as dirty as you want to be if you’re going to keep things clean?

Beyond this point are words that can never be unread, images that can never be unseen, and stories that have never really gone untold, even though it often seemed like they did. We’ve always been here, telling them to ourselves, over and over again, while people tried to pretend that fanfic was just a phase.

Now we’re ready to tell our stories to you.

Strap in. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.

*Closes book*

Why, hello. Welcome to our library. We were just admiring our vast collection of leather-bound books. Leafing through them. Sharing our thoughts.

*Sees you eyeing the door*

But I’ve forgotten my manners. I’m Amy. Make yourself at home in the Georgian wing chair there while Casey tends the fire.

*Motions to Casey, who’s struggling with the old-timey chimney flue*

But now, as to the reason you’ve joined us this evening, let me set the stage. The year was 2013. Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” was topping the charts, and San Francisco was falling in love with erotic literary fanfiction thanks to me and Casey. Our little show called Shipwreck washed up on the first Thursday of every month at an independent bookstore, the Booksmith, in the Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco (there goes the neighborhood).

Fanfiction… is complicated. Some authors love it; some hate it. We, and this might be obvious, love it. Fanfiction is when fans of a work—in this case, a book—write their own stories based on the characters or the world they love. It’s the cat’s meow of the Information Superhighway, and like so many huge phenomena on that crazy web, it’s also widely ridiculed. But it seems safe to say we’ve all at least thought about writing fanfic when the story ends before the characters you were super into got to bone. If you were REALLY upset that they didn’t bone, you might write a story that takes place six months after the story ends or ten years before it starts. Or maybe you hated the love story, so you picked up the main character and dropped her into another universe entirely to have new adventures without the jerk she wound up with in the real story.

Or maybe you read The Maltese Falcon and you couldn’t stop picturing Effie Perine quitting her thankless job and starting up her own detective agency with Lisa Simpson and Hermione Granger and calling it Girl Friday Private Eye. If you wrote that story, it would be fanfiction, and we would love to read it (please write that story and send it to us).

You get the point.

So why the name Shipwreck? The first half, the Ship part, is from shipping culture. Ship is short for “relationships” in the fanfic community (e.g., “I ship Dagny Taggart with an aging Holden Caulfield”). The wreck half is giving you fair warning that you’re in for the literary equivalent of a complete trainwreck. A friend suggested the name—a friend who’s got a story in this collection. It felt perfect. It stuck.

*Pours a finger of single malt scotch and raises a toast*

Anonymous friend, whomever you may be, we are forever in your debt.

The concept of Shipwreck is simple. We pick a book from our splendid library for each show and invite six writers we love to help us completely wreck it with erotic pastiche (and, like, plumb the depths of their imagination for dick euphemisms—as in Appendicks). Each writer is assigned a character and given time to write ahead of the show. Then comes the big night. The stories are read aloud by our thespian-in-residence to preserve author anonymity and to foster grandeur—always grandeur. The audience votes for their top three favorites. The winning writer comes back the following month to defend their title.

*Crash offscreen as Casey wrestles with a television cart*

AMY: We had a video prepared.

CASEY: The VCR ate it, I think.

*Casey pulls an arm’s length of ribbon from a videocassette as evidence*

AMY: Awww. Don’t worry, champ. We can use words.

Our Thespian-in-Residence is Baruch Porras-Hernandez. He always starts the show by taking the mic and asking a simple question in his booming, seductive baritone: “Is everybody ready for some PORN?”

The answer—always—is a screaming, deliriously ebullient, YES. He sips his whiskey while the screaming subsides and then settles into an oversized armchair to deliver dubious erotica for about an hour.

Think Masterpiece Theatre, with glitter canon orgasms.

*Casey interrupts*

Oh, hello. I was just lighting the fire in our resplendent library. Here, have a pull on this fine Turkish shag in my pipe while I transport you to the heady year of 2013. Lorde’s “Royals” was choking the airwaves and—

AMY: What are you doing?

CASEY: Setting the stage for—

AMY: I already did that.

CASEY: Oh… How far did you—

Shipwreck began as a three-event series to round out the sleepy summer months when nobody is on book tour and Booksmith’s events programming lags. The first show had fifty people. The second had more. The third: even more. We kept it going. Within six months we had to start moving every shelf out of the back of the bookstore to accommodate all the regulars and the first dates and the would-be contributors and the stunned tourists who wandered in and stayed with their hands over their kids’ ears. Shows started to sell out weeks early. People on social media started saying things like, “This is the most despicable literary event possible (@nathanielwagg),” and “It used to be we had to sit in dark, sticky booths to get these kinds of sleazy thrills (@courteousflush).”

Local rags started writing think pieces about us. One (and this is true) was titled “Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Erotic Literature Contest at Booksmith.” We’d announce a book for an upcoming show and the store would immediately sell all their copies. We took the show on the road—all the way to New York City! Our faces were even on MTV.com, which, if you were a ’90s kid, is a big fucking massive mind-blowing deal.

To quote the profile about the show on KALW and sum up the evening’s ambiance quite succinctly: “this is the largest group of people I’ve ever seen in a bookstore, enjoying themselves raucously.”

*Produces book of clippings to ease your skepticism*

And it is raucous. People cosplay, they bring props, they make signs. During Little Women, someone brought a bag of limes and quietly rolled one up the aisle every time a lime was mentioned. People wore shark costumes to Jaws. A writer brought two Dorothy costumes during The Wizard of Oz and changed midshow. Another writer brought about eighty succulents to Great Expectations to give it an authentic Miss Havisham vibe. We even embraced our inner neighborhood haunted house with strategically placed dry ice for Frankenstein. We went from a literary event at a prestigious bookstore that looked completely dignified to an outsider to what was essentially a mini-con: it’s fanfiction come to life.

That’s Who, What, and How. What remains is Why? Our favorite part. The Why is that fanfic creates a back door into a one-sided conversation through which anyone can enter. It takes the vast collection of leather-bound volumes down off the shelf and reveals it for what it is: books of words, written by people, that make us feel a lot of things but also leave a lot of people behind or out completely. We fanfic because it’s fun to join the conversation about books we genuinely love. We erotica because it’s essential that we take neither ourselves nor the canon too seriously to appreciate what lies beneath—the lovely and often problematic personalities, times, and observations of the Great Books by which we measure our world. Shipwreck lives in that space in between the sharp intake of breath at the beauty of the thing and a sarcastic exhale, a pfft, at its presumptions.

We talk back, basically. Something fans have been doing long before we got here (long before the internet, even) but seldom so—

CASEY: Out loud in a room full of embarrassed spectators?

AMY: Right!

Along the ride, we’ve poked some gentle fun at fanfiction, but the truth is, we love fanfiction. We’ve always had it out for Holden Caulfield, not E. L. James—fanfic was just the vehicle we used to get there. We’re taking books apart by putting figgy pudding in places that figgy pudding was never supposed to go (apologies to Mrs. Cratchit).

*Crosses room to bask thoughtfully in the warm light of the hearth*

And here’s the thing we’re maybe most proud of: The show did all of this without being mean to people who didn’t deserve it. We’re not perfect, but we’ve worked our asses off at keeping this adventure safe—always consent, always inclusion, at all costs. Our tagline is “We’re not dicks; we just like dick jokes.” We do our best to stand by it.

So that’s Shipwreck.

Now here it is in book form, and we couldn’t be happier. All that remains is a simple question.

*Clears throat*

Are you ready for some PORN?

Welcome to the Classics section, in which, inevitably, The Great Gatsby comes first. When we launched Shipwreck in 2013, the Baz Luhrmann movie was making the rounds, and it only made sense to lead with that foot. A year later when we took the show to New York, we couldn’t resist taking Gatsby’s yellow car out of the garage for another spin. Why?

We learn this book as teenagers, when we’re tiny doe-eyed babes who think this is what grown-ups are like. Gatsby’s preoccupation with and unrelenting pursuit of Daisy maybe makes sense when you’re in high school. To a person with an incomplete frontal lobe, Jay Gatsby’s obsession comes off as romantic, and generally indicative of what True Love™ looks like in the sophisticated world of jazz parties and Rolls-Royces (Rollses-Royce?).

But then you read the book again as a grown-up with fresh eyes, eyes that have devoured countless think pieces and formed Serious Opinions on the white cis male hegemony we’re all trapped in, and a few things jump out at you. As a grown-up, and even more so if you’re a female grown-up, you probably want to fire Jay Gatsby out of a cannon into the sun, because oh my God, dude, seriously. Get a hobby, join a bowling league, do SOMETHING besides pine for a married woman with an alcohol problem and an extremely neglected kid.

The undeniable fact is, no matter how your life differs from the denizens of the western Long Island in the 1920s, this goddamn book resonates with people. Amy can tell you that in ten years of bookselling, she’s never gotten through a shift at the register without ringing up at least one copy of Gatsby. T-shirts, matchboxes, pencil cases—if a piece of merch bears that signature image of the sad flapper with the naked girls in her eyes, it immediately becomes a bestseller. People. Love. This. Story.

So, there’s your context. In this chapter, we learn how to care for Gatsby’s car, we hear what Myrtle Wilson’s remaining tit thought in its last moments of existence as a plot device at a gas station in Queens, and we down endless, endless champagne.

This is maybe a good time to clear up any potential confusion as to why certain authors in this book seem obsessed with ludicrous minutia and inanimate objects: We assigned them ludicrous minutia and inanimate objects. For Gatsby it was a certain billboard advertiser; for Gone with the Wind it was those fancy velvet drapes. Maybe we’re jerks for this sort of thing, but our defense is twofold. First, even the most well known of books have only a handful of memorable characters. Second, nothing highlights the sexual imagination of a great writer like being stuck with a metaphor for a dance partner.

From Gatsby we move to Great Expectations, or #DeepDickens, as we now call our December shows. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the parallels between Pip’s dogged pursuit of Estella through changing fortune bears more than a passing resemblance to Gatsby. Literature loves its creepers after all. Oh! Also, Miss Havisham makes an appearance via our first ever choose-your-own-pornventure submission (spoiler alert: All roads lead to Miss H getting her groove back).

From there, we drive our phaeton to Pride and Prejudice, with apologies to Darcy’s horse, where we live out our vicarious and all-too-modern need to see these staid Regency types muddy up their skirts and set aside decorum. Pair with pearls to maximize clutching opportunities.

Then we mount the decks of Moby Dick to call Ishmael a fuckboy to his weather-beaten face. Like the source material, these pieces ex. . .