Gender Swapping

My tea fairy, Treena, recently sent me an anguished email featuring the link to an online article about the latest blight on the literary scene. The queen of vampire schmaltz has struck again, and with a new twist on the same blunt instrument. I thought we’d dodged a silver bullet when a draft manuscript of Twilight told from Edward’s POV was leaked and Stephenie Meyer sacked the idea of releasing it, but she has since re-written her horrifying-for-all-the-wrong-reasons series, this time with the protagonists swapping genders. Yup, mortal Bella is now Beau, vampire Edward is now Edyth, and werewolf Jacob is now Julie. 

It’s a new way of wringing a few more drachmas from the golden udder for sure—E.L. James has done precisely the same thing by rewriting her candy-coated S&M trilogy from the sadist’s point of view.

As my dear friend Nicole would say, BLERG.

Maybe it’s not new to take a familiar story and change the hero to a heroine or vice versa. I admit, the idea is intriguing. I’ve even spent an idle moment or two toying mentally with my own work and wondering how a female Julian or a male Cassandra might alter the plot of their respective stories. On a less daunting scale, I considered a revamp (no pun intended) of Between the Storms, but then I thought, wait a minute. I don’t have to regurgitate what I’ve already done. I can write new stuff!

Snide asides notwithstanding, change the sex of a character and you must change the story. I only got so far when contemplating the switch for my tale of a hit man on hiatus who discovers a girl washed up on the beach outside his house. Sure, female assassins exist, and the man washing up on her beach might be on the run from a control freak, but the rest of it would require more than a global replacement of character names. The villain, for one thing, would have to become female, and a man who runs from a domineering woman will be regarded with more ridicule than sympathy, possibly even by the heroine who saves his life. So the whole back end of the piece, including the resolution, would have to be redone, and if I’m going to write a story, I’d rather do it with all new characters and a new beginning.

On the other hand, I have considered taking a really badly written story and rewriting it to standard—but that would mean reading Fifty Shades of Grey first, and I just can’t bring myself to do it.