A Note of Acknowledgment

Discover what Alexis Hall was thinking while writing For Real.

1.Epigraph

Alexis:The thing I love most about Donne as a poet was that he wrote mostly about sex and then found faith. And still wrote mostly about sex. Just, like, about God?

But, seriously, I go weak at the knees for the words and forms of secular passion used in a divine context. Or do I mean the other way round?

Or both. I probably mean both. I usually mean both.

Chapter One

1.Paragraph begins with: I turned to make my escape…

Alexis:Honestly, what makes a "realistic" portrayal of a kink club is a pretty vexed question, given (depending on where you are in the world and who you know) they run the gamut of club night to sex party. I think the fancy dress/cabaret night with some alcohol and some play represents a very specific end of the London kink/alternative scene that existed when I was writing this book. (God knows what anything looks like post-pandemic.)

I do know, however, that I wanted to steer away from what strike me as heavily fictionalised portrayals of BDSM clubs. Don't get me wrong, all fiction is fictionalised and I don't believe it's the point (or the job) of fiction solely to represent reality as accurately as possible.

But secret kink clubs run by gorgeous twenty-eight-year-old billionaires feel like they're pretty thin on the ground outside the realms of romance and erotica.

2.Paragraph begins with: It had been the best part of a year…

Alexis:Gosh this feels a bit of a wild reference even for me. But I do actually find Powell a fascinatingly human and surprisingly accessible writer, despite his very long sentences and very many books.

The context of the quote is the narrator thinking about Poussin's A Dance to the Music of Time (after which Powell's very long book sequence is named). Being an upper-middle-class white man who grew up between the wars, and bore witness to all the changes that were wrought across the twentieth century as a whole, he's obviously thinking about the figures from his past who have woven like dancers in and out of his life as Time controls the movements of all.

But honestly? It's also very what belonging to a relatively insular subculture can feel like.

3.Paragraph begins with: I was also supposed to have brought a shtick of some kind…

Alexis:Hell yes. Fuck nice.

4. Paragraph begins with: I scanned the gathered revellers.

Alexis:This image is another nod to Donne (one of his secular poems this time, ‘A Valediction Forbidding Mourning'):

If they be two, they are two so

As stiff twin compasses are two;

Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show

To move, but doth, if the other do.

This image of the twin compasses, moving eternally together, has stayed with me all my life as an image of love (secular or divine, depending on your Donne Context).

5.Paragraph begins with: Sam blinked. "Wow, man, that's a seriously dated reference."

Alexis:And now even more dated. *weeps in old*

6.Paragraph begins with: "Kink crowds are the same the world over."

Alexis:This is, of course, Laurie being cynical. But also I secretly think he's got a point.

7.Paragraph begins with: "But we could get him a little kennel."

Alexis:Oh no, even the non self-consciously dated reference, that Laurie is too old to get, is now dated.

8.Paragraph begins with: "A popular beat combo," explained Sam, smirking.

Alexis:I sometimes wonder if this is one of those British cultural references that does not translate for U.S. readers.

There's no confirmed attribution but the urban legend goes that "a popular beat combo, m'lud" was the answer offered by a barrister to a judge when the latter asked him who The Beatles were.

It's usually used as a semi-ironic shorthand for "you are not down enough with the kids to get this."

9.Paragraph begins with: He wasn't particularly attractive.

Alexis:Ah yes. Romance heroes with traces of acne. Why don't we see more of these?

10.Paragraph begins with: I gazed down at him, into his oddly dark blue eyes…

Alexis:Apparently I have a weakness for eyes like this. Although, to be fair, in Boyfriend Material, Luc's eyes are blue-green. Whereas Toby's are, um, blue blue? Yes. Definitely distinct. Uh huh. Moving on.

11.Paragraph begins with: His hair had flopped again…

Alexis:I am secretly fond of this detail, even all these years later. That Toby would passionately press his hand to his heart, except in the wrong place, and Laurie would notice he had.

12.Paragraph begins with: Because I knew what he meant.

Alexis:I think kink as part of identity is complicated, especially as it intersects with marginalised identities like queerness. On top of which, there's always this worry that you're accidentally doing capital-R representation—or you'll be perceived as doing that—when you're just trying to depict a certain POV that some people hold, but that is absolutely not the only possibly POV to have. In any case, this feels right for how both Laurie and Toby think about themselves.

13. Paragraph begins with: "It's like," he went on tormentedly…

Alexis:Bluntly, this is kind of the whole heart of the book for me. Why I wrote it. Obviously I am not dissing the dom/me fantasy Toby articulates here, but our ideas about sexual power are entwined so deeply with our ideas about social power—perhaps more deeply than they should be—that I wanted to tease those things apart and see what we got. And what we got was Toby Finch.

14.Paragraph begins with: "Anything. Any of it."

Alexis:This also speaks to complex ideas about attractiveness and power. I mean, don't get me wrong, I think it's just as enthralling for someone in the submissive role to possess none of these traits (other than the wanting to do it, of course). But even writing these annotations in the 2020s, years after I wrote this book, there's still a degree to which we view power as masculine and, therefore, the surrender of power as anti-masculine. And so I guess I wanted to explore that as well. Push back against it a little maybe.

15.Paragraph begins with: I didn't know why I did it.

Alexis:This is the kind of bullshit I only get away with in Spires. That ambiguous hanging "it" of whatever Laurie does. The fact he refuses to (or can't?) tell us what the "it" actually is for several paragraphs to follow.

Although I feel that the narrative evasiveness speaks to where Laurie is right now, as regards both his emotions and his capacity for submission. It takes him a while to work up to submitting in text as well as in person.

16. Paragraph begins with: There was a stillness in the room.

Alexis: For some reason, this line from Laurie makes me even more excited to get to write Dom the Dom's book. I think I'm just kind of obsessed with writing complicated subs. Especially since being complicated often feels like it's the prerogative of the dom.

17.Paragraph begins with: But he only grinned…

Alexis:I tried to walk this line with Toby as regards his confidence. I didn't want to make him invincibly assured or have him just instantly become what we'd recognise as "a dom" as if by magic. But I did want to give him first rate instincts. Especially for Laurie. And especially for Laurie's bullshit.

18. Paragraph begins with: Oh God. I was so hard for him. For this.

Alexis:Normally my anally retentive attention to detail (or mental unwellness) would not allow me to end two sentences so close together with "for this" and "from this" since it can create a sort of visual/aural clashing. Like the wrong kind of echo.

However, in this specific case, it is the right kind of echo. Given how far Laurie and Toby are apart emotionally, I gave them a lot of linguistic mirroring during their sexual encounters to keep reinforcing the idea that these two are, in fact, in sync. If they can let themselves be.