A Proud Author: Beach Bod Authors Notes · 1:47am Jun 30th, 2022
Hello again my loyal readers! It has been too long since I last wrote for you, I know. I have been most busy as of late, working on an internship that should bring my work to get a master’s degree in public history to an end. But that’s a story for another day. Instead enjoy a tedious essay on sex, gender, and writing! Or just skip over it and get straight to the author notes on Beach Bod.
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So, I wrote a little something for Pride Month! I’ve frequently considered having stories with themes that fit their release dates, but I’m usually so bad with schedules that I wind up only thinking about it and never following through. Well, not this year! I was determined that I’d get something out the door by the end of the month.
Those who have followed me for a while might know that it’s been only recently that I’ve started writing lesbian ship fiction… though really I have been doing so for some time, just unconsciously. I don’t exactly know why it took me so long to admit to myself that is what I was doing. I’m not sure why, but writing female characters has always come more easily to me. I think it’s partly because I fear male characters just turning into bad versions of myself. Having the distance of a different gender is just enough to make my characters have too much of myself in them, I feel. Also, unfortunately, because society discourages men from embracing their more sensitive sides and emotions, I think it’s hard for me to write a really romantic guy. Equally I feel that it’s difficult for me to write romantic attraction from a male pov in a way that doesn’t seem creepy, thanks largely to the misbehavior of my fellow men.
I’ve been an ally for years now. Ultimately though I’m afraid outside of some passive support my ally ship hasn’t meant much. In my defense, I’m a straight cis man, so outside of “not being shitty” I’m not sure how much I can do. It’s not my intention to insert myself into spaces that aren’t for me.
I understand there is a… less than good… history of men writing lesbian stories, but I hope that I can manage to be one of the better ones. I particularly admire Frank Baum, writer of the OZ books: he was writing a sapphic relationship between Dorthy and Ozma (the princess of OZ and also a trans girl) at a time when women were still gaining the right to vote! He was related to some of the women who were at Seneca Falls, and he wrote a lot of books for girls under pseudonyms. He also wrote one of the first books about a female pilot, and in so doing coined the term “aviatrix”. His works are still well regarded and also a major part of queer culture… in spite of the fact he played fast and loose with his own continuity and in the middle books of the OZ stories was clearly phoning it in because he wanted them to end so he could write something else!
With my writing talent, I hope I can bring some happiness to my readers and finally give something back worthy of being called “allyship”. I know that things lately have been grim, so I hope that I can offer some light in the darkness.
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Okay that was all a bit heavy, wasn’t it? Let’s talk about something lighter now: all the goofiness in Beach Bod!
A lot of the inspiration for this story, in terms of setting, goes back to the Beach Party movie series of the 1960s. They featured teens, beaches, and light romantic drama. So they are a trope maker for much of our popular ideas about Beach culture. I decided that Shy’s dad in EQG, was a surfer dude back in the day, who met Shy’s hippie chick mom at the beach. In other words they met via the plot of one of those old movies. This gave me a perfect excuse to give Fluttershy a cool car, her dad’s woody, to pick up Dash with. Also, it was an excuse to lampoon mid-century American automotive engineering in all its ponderous, unsophisticated glory, to humorously undercut some of the cool factor of vintage cars with the day to day reality of what they are like to drive.
The phrase “fast and bulbous” is stolen from a Captain Beefheart song, the couplet concluding with “the mascara snake”. It seemed an apt description of an early 1950s car.
“Ugh, why’d they have put the shore so far from the beach?” is another reference, to the line “Why’d they put the sea so near the shore.” from the classic nonsense song “Peeping Though the Knothole in Grandpa’s Wooden Leg”, made famous by Bugs Bunny, and is an old vaudeville bit.
The scene of Flutterdash walking down the dunes to the beach is taken from my Michigan vacation experiences. I’m sure the Michiganders in the crowd will recognize the setting of Wilderness State Park, and the many other beaches like it along the lake.
The “Like Wearing Nothing At All” gag is of course an extended Simpsons reference, and basically my reaction to Fluttershy in a wetsuit. Dash and I are on the same page about that: sometimes more is less!
Writing the pulpy Daring Do section was a lot of fun for me. Sometimes it’s nice to be able to be as over the top as you can be.
Fluttershy emerging from the water is of course directly stolen from the iconic scene in Dr No, where pearl diver Honey returns from diving illegally on Dr No’s island, and Bond is secretly watching from the mangroves. In fact I watched the scene far too many times in order to make every movement match.
The ending of the story was difficult for me to write, so much so that I actually scrapped the original ending and wrote a completely different one because I was unsatisfied with the first draft ending’s tone.
In the first draft, some rando was going to mug Dash when she went to order at the ice cream stand. There would be an struggle, and Fluttershy would go full yandere and put the knife to the guys throat.
Yeah, it was not good. On a plausibility scale, I think it failed because even I could not justify not having the authorities get involved and Shy not getting arrested. The whole situation also relied too much on random, undeveloped characters that were merely plot devices. Fatally, it clashed too much with the tone of the rest of the story. I salvaged a few good turns of phrase, and scrapped it.
So in the rewrite I made sure to tone down the violence and up the interpersonal conflict. I really dislike Zephyr Breeze as a character, being as he is a lazy collage of bad stereotypes about millennials and also a dudebro. With his clearly unwanted advances towards Dash, relationship with Shy, surfer dude persona, and previous appearance in a beach episode of EQG he seemed the perfect villain for the piece.
My EQG Shy is out to her family, who with the exception of her brother have always been loving and supportive. I imagine a similar situation to “Fludder Brudder”, only with his jealousy of the new relationship between Dash and Shy being the inciting incident, arose and finally got Zephyr disowned by his parents (and rightly so!). The “recently removed” remark alludes to this and to the old “twice removed” remarks in family genealogies.
I thought that having Dash and Shy getting treated poorly for having a public relationship would be, sadly, relatable for some of my readers and a much better fit with the Pride themes. I hope Zephyrs comments manage to be inappropriate but yet
mild enough to not be too triggering. Fortunately Zephyr is equal parts coward and bigot, and gets his comeuppance!
The whole Yandere act Fluttershy pulls here of course derives from years of fandom memery, but it also comes from an in joke of mine. I find doing the Dirty Harry “Do you feel lucky Punk?!” Monologue in Fluttershys voice hilarious as do some of my friends and a few years ago I actually used one of those voice AIs to make a OK sounding approximation. Ultimately I decided to not steer too far into the Yandere interpretation of Shy as I think that ruins the relationship dynamic so I had it be a “mask” she wears as a defense mechanism much like Dash’s Macho persona.
“A Whiter Shade of Pale” is of course stolen from the song of the same name from Procol Harom, though I know it from David Mitchell’s singing it to the theme of the Muppets, which I actually think fit the words better than the original version. The hectic up tempo Muppet’s theme just seems more appropriate to “dancing the light fandango” than the dull, dirge like Procol Harom music.
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That’s my story and I’m sticking to it! I hope all of my loyal readers, new and old, enjoy my little Pride month contribution. If you are new to my stories, don't forget to check out my other works, especially Wondercolt Weekends, which is an anthology containing the prequel to Beach Bod, Just Us Girls Night.
Special Pride shout outs go to IceStar who helped edit that prequel, and all my other readers who are LGTBQIA+ !
It was an interesting read.
I’m so glad you enjoyed it! It was a blast to write, even if I had to push myself to get it out. And now I know I can do that.
Which part did you enjoy the most?
And thanks for the blog post, and the extra information therein. :)