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erotica

Eyes on the Prize

by | November 26, 2013 | | 7 Comments

by Jean Roberta

When I was in my last year of high school, I won a major award in a national contest for student writers, and then lost my boyfriend. This was not a coincidence. He accused me of being on the “bad trip” of focusing too much on my writing and not enough on Life, then he promptly found a new girlfriend. (Boyfriend had taken a few “bad trips” that were more chemically-induced.)

He and I had met in a special two-year Fine Arts program, and he had told me that he planned to launch a writing career after graduation. During our two-year relationship, I revised and typed his essays for our English classes; I hoped that he would love me better if I helped him get better grades. (His grammar was shaky, and he implied that this was because he was all about big ideas rather than trivial details).

Soon after our English teacher announced the contest, Boyfriend and I both mailed in our short stories. This time, he didn’t ask for my editorial help, and I didn’t offer it. Weeks later, I won $500 (worth approximately a year of university tuition) and a three-day trip to Toronto, headquarters of the financial company that had sponsored the contest. Boyfriend got nothing. He complained bitterly that the judging had been unfairly biased, and he expected me to agree with him. Even before I learned that he had replaced me, I knew our romance was over.

Why am I recounting this historical episode? Because the race is on. Several major writing contests are still open for a short time, and award-winners will be announced at annual conferences in the spring and summer of 2014. The results remain to be seen.

Let’s start with (arguably) the biggest awards for writers of romance fiction (including erotic romance): the Ritas, sponsored by Romance Writers of America and named after its first president, Rita Clay Estrada. There is an entry fee for members of the organization, and a higher fee for non-members, but the prizes are substantial, not to mention the fame involved. The categories have been controversial, especially when “romance” was defined as a genre that excluded same-gender relationships. That restriction has been lifted, but “romance” as a genre definition is still sufficiently arbitrary to trigger debate. For more contest details, go here: www.rwa.org/p/cm/ld/fid=528 before the deadline: January 2, 2014.

The annual writing awards that especially interest me are the “Lammies,” given by the Lambda Literary Foundation for the best works of the year (fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama) featuring lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender content. The deadline for nominations is December 1, 2013, so if you are interested, you have a week to decide. Find “awards” here: http://www.lambdaliterary.org

The categories for the “Lammies” are debatable and overlapping, and I am always somewhat surprised to find work I consider erotic entered as “fiction” or “romance.” Of course, the fewer entries in a given category, the more likely it is that a particular title will win.

Then there are the “Eppies” and the “Arianas” (given by EPIC, the organization for e-published writers, for e-books and e-book covers). These annual awards have a summer deadline.

I looked in vain for information about the Rauxa Prize for erotic fiction and poetry, awarded by a Rauxa Foundation (apparently based in Englewood, Colorado) up to 2007. This prize seems to be a thing of the past.

Penthouse magazine used to give annual awards for the kind of sexually-explicit fiction published in its pages. The name of the award, the “Baudelaire,” was hotly debated in the Writers list of ERWA (possibly also in Parlor) on grounds that Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), an innovative French poet, would be appalled to have his name associated with the formulaic stories for which Penthouse was known. Even still, any writing contest which provides cash prizes for writers seems better than nothing to me.

If I have neglected to mention a currently-open contest that will accept sexually-explicit writing, I hope someone will fill in the gap.

Why do writers enter contests? The shocking, immediate side-effect of winning is that other writers (especially contestants who didn’t win) are likely to sneer. (If my ex-boyfriend is still alive and if he ever mentions my name, he probably remembers our art-student romance as one of the disillusioning experiences of his youth.) Before contest results are even announced, the guidelines, the restrictions and the judges can all be accused of bias. The problem here is that literature (published writing) must be subjectively judged, based on criteria which are specific to a certain value system. I can’t imagine how writing contests could be run otherwise.

Do writing awards result in increased sales? I don’t know of any wide-ranging surveys which show a correlation (or not). Common sense tells me that an award is likely to raise interest in a particular title–and to a lesser extent, in everything else the author has written. Experience tells me that winning a writing contest is literally its own reward, since nothing further can be expected. (The award that lost me a boyfriend did not gain me a single publication.)

It has been argued that because the judging of writing contests, like the evaluation of story submissions, is necessarily subjective, winning or acceptance doesn’t prove the merits of the chosen work. We’ve all heard this.

Yet winning, like acceptance for publication (or both combined) feels downright orgasmic. It shows that at least one person (outside the writer’s circle of intimates) read, understood and chose to honour the work. May everyone here whose work is nominated for an award be prepared for the outcome, whatever it is—and may hope and determination never fade.

——————

Theme: The Good, The Bad and The Preachy

by | November 14, 2013 | | 9 Comments

I seldom walk out of movies. When I find myself in a movie that doesn’t particularly draw me in, I tend resort to viewing it critically: identifying the story arc, the character arcs, the nuts and bolts of the construction of the story. 

Two nights ago, I walked out of Ender’s Game.  I’ve never read the book. Although I am a massive sci-fi fan, there are certain areas of the genre that don’t turn my crank.  Robert Heinlein and Orson Scott Card just never did anything for me.  Nonetheless, big budget, hyped marketing campaign… I bought my ticket, sat in my seat, and stuffed my face with popcorn.

At some point – about an hour into the film – I caved to the overwhelming urge to be out of the cinema. Later, when I tried to analyze why I couldn’t bring myself to sit through it, I realized that it was the way the theme of the story was being presented that I found almost suffocating.

Without a strong theme, stories are soulless. They feel fluttery, airy and insignificant.  But when the theme of a story is so obvious and so constant that it eclipses the story, the characters and the plot, it becomes like treacle. It gums up everything.  Theme can, if you let it, suffocate every other aspect of your story.

Recent cultural and literary theorists have had a very low opinion of theme.  Post-modernism rejected the idea that stories have any responsibility at all, to anyone. Being a staunch modernist myself, I’m rather glad to see this era of the glorification of the totally meaningless pass.  But when I sat in that theatre and choked hard on the dominant theme in Ender’s Game, I could see why they wanted to kill the beast dead.

I teach writing at college level, and theme is one of the hardest things to teach.  It is easier to say what theme isn’t than to say what it is. And, of course, there are stories with more than one theme.  Time and culture can deeply influence the themes that come to the fore of a story and how they are perceived.

No matter what the story structure, the theme should be what the reader takes from the story as its overall message. In archaic structures, such as fables, the theme is the moral of the story. In parables, the theme is the ‘wisdom’ it imparts at the end.  Old story structures demanded that the theme was an answer to a universal question.  In more modern, adult story forms, the theme shouldn’t offer answers, but encourage the reader to a deeper consideration of some serious and universal question.

Because of its broadness of scope, erotic fiction has the capacity to offer a valuable exploration of many aspects of the human condition in depth and at a very personal, concrete level.  So often, themes in erotic fiction deal with issues of ethics and morality, of embodiment, of identity, of loneliness, of abjection, of mutuality. Deep, deep stuff.

Erotic writing represents an entirely culturally constructed part of humanity (our sex drive is animal and focused on reproduction but, as cultures we have abstracted and reinterpreted that drive to the point where the things that trigger our arousal are entirely constructed.  Horniness may be biological, but eroticism is the meaning we’ve layered on top of that biological imperative).  So it would seem that erotic fiction is a great place to explore theme. We bind our sense of the erotic to so many elements that don’t have a biological foundation.  Here, in the rarified air of lateral and obtuse relations between intellect, the emotions and groin, theme can run riot. That’s a wonderful garden to explore.

Choosing a theme can help you make decisions as to how to carve a peace between your characters and your plot.  It can guide you to where a story needs to go. And yet, if you let your theme dominate your story, it will leach all the colour, all the texture, all immersive ‘hereness’ from your story. Themes are abstractions. They should sit at the foundation of the story, but never on the surface.

Let me give you a very simple, obvious example: I want to write a story with trust as a dominant theme.  BDSM seems like a perfect fit. My characters are going to learn that the only way they can explore the outer reaches of their erotic imaginations is to trust each other.

However, if I keep bringing up ‘trust’ in the story. If I keep placing the words into the mouths of my characters, into their brains, if I keep bringing something as abstract as ‘trust’ to the fore of the story, it will lose every ounce of heat it might have had. You may end up with readers nodding their heads in agreement, but you’re preaching to the choir. You’ve just produced a piece of rhetorical propaganda, not a story. 

Of course, the issue of trust needs to be there. But it needs to operate below the surface, like a current in the river, driving the story along invisibly.  You can show your reader the ultimate results of a lack of trust. You can show your reader what its presence can enable. But if you bring it directly into the text of the story, you treat your reader like a child. You don’t allow them to discover the theme and its implications on their own. You need to let your theme inform your story, but not dominate it.

If you do, your reader will come away from your story not only having had a good, immersive erotic experience, but also with a head full of ideas and questions.  For me, this is the ultimate goal of writing anything.

When you start thinking about a new story, do you consider its theme? How do you weave it in?

Things that Go Bump in the Night (Why Paranormal is Sexy)

by | October 30, 2013 | | 4 Comments

By K D Grace

Once, in a blog interview about my paranormal Lakeland Heatwave
trilogy, I was asked if I believed that sex magic is real. My answer was
something along the lines that I believe sex is the only kind of magic, and certainly the only kind of magic we all
have access to. But the question itself got me thinking about why the
paranormal and the erotic work so well together.

Writing always exposes us, though that exposure is
sometimes more obvious than others. As I thought about the question, I realized
that the choices I’d made when I wrote the Lakeland trilogy were very much my psyche’s
way of doing the full Monte. I’ve written lots of blog posts about the magic of
sex, about what happens when we cross that final barrier and get inside the
skin of another person, about what happens when we make ourselves vulnerable.
Though it certainly wasn’t a conscious part of my decision, choosing to make
the witches of the Elemental Coven practitioners of sex magic speaks very
powerfully of my writing credo and of my own psyche and what I believe is
important.

    

I started writing erotica mostly to see
if I could, and because I had always enjoyed writing sex scenes. But it was the
magic of sex that kept me writing. It was what the act of sex revealed about my
characters and how it exposed them, all of them, in one way or another to the
magic of sex that kept me writing. Somehow sex brought them closer to their
humanity while at the same time increasing the chance they would experience
their own divinity, and that of their beloved. And, with any luck, my readers
would experience the same, vicariously. There’s something exciting in knowing
that the very act of sex between two people can completely change the course of
a novel. All of these elements of sex kept me writing erotica. And all of these
elements are the reason I believe sex is magic.

There are few
parts of our human nature we struggle more fiercely to control than sexuality.
How miserably we fail in that struggle is a testament to the biological drive
and even more importantly the archetypal power of sex. And that’s a whole other
area, the place within the sex act that borders on the mystical, the magical.
That’s why paranormal tales partner so beautifully with the erotic. Once that
boundary between the magical and the sexual is breached anything can happen.

Ultimately, sex
makes people uncomfortable, and anything that makes people uncomfortable is a
fabulous tool for fiction. On some level sex is all about biological urges,
experiences of a much more visceral nature than the sanitized, well defined,
well ordered way we like our world to be. But the power of sex reaches way
beyond the procreative. I know of no other act that can connect us to our
animal nature while at the same time lifting us outside ourselves to the realm
of the gods. I also know of no other act in which we become physically one with
another human being, in which we literally get inside the skin of another human
being, in which there is the possibility of literally creating new life. The
human sex act is about as close to magic as we can get, and we’re not all that
comfortable with anything we can’t explain away and dress up for polite
company.

Sex is that one
little sliver of our life in which real magic happens. It’s the place where our
boundaries are most permeable. So it’s not surprising that we like to team up
the erotic with things that go bump in the night, things we can safely
experience on the written page, where those things are free to scare us and
titillate us and take away our human control thus allowing demons and vampires,
ghosts and witches, werewolves and succubae to dance the tango with our libidos
while we all perform our own personal versions of sex magic.

Whether you
celebrate Halloween, Samhain, Day of the Dead, All Saints, or whether you just
like to enjoy the season, I wish you much sexy magic! 

That Elusive Thrill

by | October 26, 2013 | | 12 Comments

by Jean Roberta

Synchronicity (defined as “the coincidence of events that seem related, but are not obviously caused one by the other”) usually seems to be at work in my life. Lately, I’ve noticed that several bloggers have written about the factors that change writing (especially sex-writing) from a thrill into a chore or a duty.

Once a writer has managed to fight off the inner censor for long enough to write a few sexually-explicit stories or even a novel, this work is usually posted in a public place where readers can comment on it. When the writing goes public, the writer is advised to promote herself/himself as well as the work, to write something new, to follow current trends in order to find and expand an audience. The advice (or the pressure) never ends. If zombie romances are currently fashionable, why doesn’t the writer pose in full zombie drag, including fake oozing wounds, and post their portrait on Youtube, with links on Twitter and Facebook? Why doesn’t the writer write a series of zombie romances? Doesn’t s/he want to be successful?

As a reviewer as well as a writer, I can see a difference between erotica which seems commercial (written for a specific market) and erotica which seems like amateur work in the original sense: written for the love of it. Some commercial stuff is written with great skill, and so is some amateur work. The difference in tone doesn’t necessarily have to do with sloppy grammar or unbelievable sexual gymnastics.

To give an example of commercial erotica, I have reviewed several anthologies from Cleis Press and have been proud to see my own stories in several others. There is nothing wrong with Cleis productions; au contraire. The paperbacks always have slick covers with eye-catching, tasteful photographs on them. The stories inside all seem carefully copy-edited. By now, there are dozens of these books, usually on specific themes. As a reviewer, I know I will always enjoy most of the stories in a Cleis antho, especially if they are written by contributors I recognize. These writers are professionals. When I see the name of Erotic Writer X in the umpteenth Cleis anthology in the past five years, I hope that s/he is not approaching burnout.

Some of the novels and anthologies I have reviewed have been put together by on-line groups that first gathered as amateurs, lovers of the genre and the craft. After much on-line discussion and mutual critiquing, the group decided to produce a book for the wider world to read. Sapphic Planet, an anthology of lesbian stories self-published in 2012 by a writers’ group of the same name, is a case in point. As a contributor, I couldn’t review this book myself, but I loved several of the stories by my fellow-contributors when I first saw them. Several of these writers are fairly prolific; they could be defined as both amateur and professional in different contexts.

An example of amateur work which I could and did review is the anthology Literotica (2002), a gathering of stories from the website of the same name. Both the group and the anthology have been dismissed as rank amateurs, but IMO, this is exactly why some of the stories in this book are unusual, intense, quirky and brilliant. I was taken aback by a few of the pen names in this volume and the 2009 sequel, Literotica 2 (“Dirty Old Man” “Whiff,” “KillerMuffin,” “jfinn”) and I can only hope these writers went on to write under more professional names, for lack of a clearer term.

Here in the Erotic Readers and Writers Association, probably the best-known amateur member (in the best sense) is Remittance Girl, who has openly stated that her goal is not to make a profit from her writing. Her invulnerability to market forces is exactly what gives her work a certain integrity which seems rare in any genre.

And of course, ERWA itself gave rise to an anthology, Cream, edited by Lisabet Sarai and published by Running Press in 2006.

Here are some questions I have been chewing on for some time: how is it possible for a writer to keep the enthusiasm and the recklessness of an amateur even after crossing over into the ranks of professionals? And where is the boundary between amateurs and professionals? (For instance, I have at least 100 stories in anthologies, not including two out-of-print single-author collections and one that just came out on September 1. However, my writing time still has to be stolen from the time I spend on my teaching job in a university as well as the “free time” I have to spend with family and friends. Does this mean I am a writer who teaches on the side or a teacher with a writing hobby?)

Judging from current laments, becoming a published writer often begins a long slide into conformity, numbness, distraction, and eventual writing burnout. I really don’t want to get there, and I am alarmed when fellow-writers I admire send distress signals from a place further down that road. Writing about sex, in particular, seems to require a certain continuing amateurism to retain its authenticity.

My own way of trying to recover the thrill of the sport is to withdraw temporarily from the world of published work, including the latest on-line piracy and the latest decision by a major book distributor to “disappear” any title that might be defined as “obscene” according to deliberately-vague legal standards. For a limited time, I don’t care about any of that.

For a few precious minutes in “the zone,” I care only about the characters who show up in my mind when I clear some space for them and ask them what they want. Inevitably, they want pleasure in some form. In most cases, their feelings about each other are complex and ambivalent. Their feelings are a catalyst that suggests the beginning of a plot. Will the characters (at least the one who speaks to me the loudest) get what they want? I need to find out.

The rest of the world can wait.

I Think I May Be Crazy…

by | October 23, 2013 | | 2 Comments

By Lucy Felthouse

Eek, I’ve only gone and signed up for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month)! I had no intention of doing it, until I saw someone post about it. Then curiosity led me to their website, and before I knew it, I’d signed up. And now I’ve signed up, of course, I’ve got to give it my best shot.

50,000 words in a month is probably not a lot for some people, and probably tons for others, but I’m somewhere in the middle. I don’t write full-time, but I do run my own business working from home, so I can juggle my schedule around writing when necessary. And I think in November, it’s definitely going to be necessary. I don’t work weekends, so my 50k will have to be done on weekdays. It’s still doable at 2.5k a day. In fact, on really good days I’ve written well in excess of that. But to do it every weekday for a whole month… well, let’s just see how I get on, shall I?

I’m currently in the process of finishing up other projects and also planning for the novel I’m going to write for NaNo. I’ve been researching it for the past couple of months, so I figure NaNo will give me the push I need to get a good chunk of it written while the research is still fresh in my mind. And who knows, by the end of December, perhaps I’ll have something ready to send to a publisher. Watch this space.

And, in the meantime, if anyone needs me, I’ll be the one hiding in the corner, panicking.

Are you NaNo-ing, too? Here’s my profile – come friend me: http://nanowrimo.org/participants/creativewriter1985

*****

Lucy Felthouse is a very busy woman! She writes erotica and
erotic romance in a variety of subgenres and pairings, and has over eighty
publications to her name, with many more in the pipeline. These include Best
Bondage Erotica 2012, 2013 and 2014 and Best Women’s Erotica 2013. Another
string to her bow is editing, and she has edited and co-edited a number of
anthologies. She owns Erotica For All,
and is book editor for Cliterati. Find
out more at http://www.lucyfelthouse.co.uk.
Join her on Facebook
and Twitter, and subscribe to her
newsletter at: http://eepurl.com/gMQb9

Dead but Not Forgotten

by | September 26, 2013 | | 3 Comments

by Jean Roberta

Let us pause for a moment in our busy lives to remember all the quirky magazines, websites, and small presses that have vanished forever during the upheavals of the publishing business. And while we’re doing that, let’s remember a few people who have either left this world or have gone on to do other things and take on other identities.

During the summer of 2013, I had to move all my books and papers from one university office to another, which meant that I had to sort through approximately twenty years’ worth of material: the useless, the outdated and the valuable (“So that’s where I put it!”). In sorting out and reclassifying, I realized that I needed a shelf dedicated to Dead Publishers, where I keep a few choice pieces of correspondence, old contracts, eye-catching letterhead and other ephemera from publishing venues that went bust from the late 1990s (when I joined the Erotic Readers Association) to the current year.

The publishing biz in our time, or the apparent general shift from paper publications to e-books and resources in cyberspace, is not the only villain that has killed off too many publishing venues. Before I wrote erotica, I was in a collective that ran a local alternative bookstore, and I tried to keep track of feminist publishing in the 1980s, when many a grassroots, kitchen-table women’s press produced a few books and then crashed. In some cases, enthusiasm and idealism helped a small press get off the ground, but a lack of business experience and a political discomfort with the process of selling anything for a high-enough price to pay the bills (not to mention conflict within the press collective) killed the thing off.

Despite many closures and upheavals, niche publishing in general seems to keep expanding. Just as feminist publishing (books by women, for women, produced and circulated by women) amazed and delighted me in the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s, erotic publishing has amazed and delighted me in the 2000s. Sexually-defined communities that didn’t visibly exist in the social mainstream in the recent past now have a presence in the world because they have presence in cyberspace as well as in journals, e-zines, fiction and how-to manuals. Every small press, website and journal has its own flavour, and words on a page (or even on a screen) have the potential to last forever.

Here are two relatively big, successful presses whose deaths surprised me. I keep souvenirs from them on my Dead Publishers shelf.

– Naiad Press. For many years, this was the only lesbian-centred press I knew of, founded by the late Barbara Grier, who had written anonymously in The Ladder, newsletter of the Daughters of Bilitis, a fairly closeted lesbian organization of the 1950s and ‘60s. Naiad produced numerous lesbian romances, in which the sex generally appears in soft-focus. Bella Books has been referred to as a successor to Naiad, and it produces explicit erotica.

– The Haworth Press, including its Harrington Park imprint. This was the only scholarly producer of fiction and non-fiction on gay/lesbian/bi/trans subjects until its fiction and non-fiction operations were sold off separately, in approximately 2007. Several Haworth anthologies in the pipeline were simply cancelled. Luckily for those of us with stories in Haworth books, several of them were picked up and reprinted by other publishers.

Here are some smaller publishers of erotic and/or LGBT material that I still mourn:

– Masquerade Books of New York. This press seemed very ambitious to me in the 1990s. It had imprints for (among other things) BDSM, gay-male and lesbian material. It also put out a very attractive newsletter illustrated with vintage erotic art. This was the first publisher I ever heard of that focused exclusively on sexually-explicit work. As far as I know, however, Masquerade died before 2000.

– Amatory Ink. This was an e-press run in England by Roy Larkin, who also wrote BDSM fiction as “Laurie Mann.” This press closed shop in 2006 after producing an interesting variety of novels and anthologies. The owner complained after the closure that it was hard to find good literary erotica in the slush pile.

– Black Books, run in San Francisco by Bill Brent, a gay man who also produced a magazine, Black Sheets, and community fundraising events such as the reading series Perverts Put Out (which has continued). I was privileged to take part in one of these soirees in 2001. (There was nothing like this in Saskatchewan, where I live.) The crash of Black Books in the early 2000s seemed directly related to economic factors in the publishing biz. Unfortunately, Bill Brent ended his own life in 2012, but his influence is still felt.

– Suspect Thoughts, run by two San Francisco men with an experimental approach to literature. They favoured the offbeat and the postmodern. They produced a large, meaty newsletter and a literary website that had theme issues. I suspect that economic issues also forced them to close.

– Love You Divine/Alterotica of Ohio. The closing of this press in 2013 has affected me directly, since I had a collection of erotic stories, Each Has a Point, in their catalogue. The larger-than-life owner, Claudia Regenos (who also writes as “Lady Midnight”), finally had to close shop when her serious health problems threatened to destroy her mobility. The LYD group on Yahoo has enabled Claudia to keep in touch with her authors, and apparently her recent surgery has helped immensely, but running a press is not on the agenda – at least, not now.

Here are some dead websites that I miss:

– Ruthie’s Club, run by Desmona Dodds of Ohio. This was an attractive, entertaining subscription site for erotic stories, each illustrated by an artist who worked with the author. Each story appeared for only one week, after which all rights reverted to the authors, who were paid well. (Payment depended on length. A story of 4K + was worth $45 U.S.) All stories were carefully edited, but editors were open to negotiating with authors about revisions. I can only assume that the generosity and professionalism of the owner and editors cut into the profit to be made from paid subscriptions. Alas.

– The Dominant’s View, run by Kayla Kuffs, an ERWA member from the west coast of Canada. As far as I knew, this was the only BDSM site focused on self-defined Dominants as complex human beings rather than deliciously-scary, unknowable characters in erotic fantasies. I was honoured to write reviews for this site, and Kayla provided me with an endless stream of books for review. (Review material did not have to feature a Dominant’s viewpoint.) As far as I know, Kayla could not continue running the site by herself.

There is other cherished material on my Dead Publishers shelf, with a label in gothic font. However, if you’re still reading this post, I don’t want to wear out your interest. I could continue on this topic next month.

I can’t help thinking there should be an actual or virtual museum for erotic publishing venues, much like the sex museums of Amsterdam, where archaic sex toys and erotic art are on display. I hate removing the names of defunct publishers from my own list of publications.

As various cultural pioneers have pointed out, if we don’t remember our history, we are doomed to reinvent the wheel – or our favourite devices.
——————-

Are You a Plotter or a Pantser?

by | September 23, 2013 | | 2 Comments

By Lucy Felthouse

Are you a plotter or a pantser? First, I’d better explain what that means for people that may not know. Basically, it’s whether you plot something when you’re writing, or just fly by the seat of your pants/make it up as you go along. I’m interested in the answers various writers have to give on this topic, which is why I thought I’d write about it.

So, personally, I’m both. I used to be a total and utter pantser, but the longer I’ve been writing, and the longer works I’ve been writing, the more I’ve plotted. I plotted my first novella, then made my second one up as I went along. I plotted my first novel, then the one I co-authored with Lily Harlem we made up as we went along. For the most part, it depends on the project. I plotted my first novella and novel because it was a big jump for me to go from short stories to longer stuff, so I needed to make sure I had enough material for the length of the story, and I also wanted to ensure things didn’t get boring in the middle, and that the thing had a beginning, a middle and an end. Now I just use a mixture of both, depending on what feels right.

And here’s what some other writers had to say…

K D Grace

I’m a plotanster. I never start a novel without a working blurb and a chapter by chapter synopsis. It usually takes me several days to come up with a blurb and chapter by chapter that I feel I can work from. That few days usually involve a lot of walking in the countryside and talking out loud to myself and alarmed glances from the people I meet en route. The blurb is only a short paragraph and the chapter by chapter is only a few sentences for each chapter. I’ve worked out roughly how many chapters, averaging 2500 words, I need for an 80K or a 100K novel and write the synopsis accordingly. It’s very loosely planned and very much subject to change.

That’s the plotter bit of my process. Once the actual writing begins, I’m happy to take detours and side trips all over the place, and I often end up on a very scenic route to the end of the novel. I leave lots of room for the muse to kick me in the arse and point me in a different direction. I think the blurb and the synopsis serve as a writer’s security blanket for me. Once I have those two things in hand, no matter how far I stray from the original plan, I KNOW there’s a novel in process, and I KNOW I’ll get to the end of it, even if the route’s not the one I started off on.

Kay Jaybee

I must hold my hands up to being a pantser.

I try to be a planner- I really do- I even go as far as to make nice neat chapter plans for all my novels each time I start one. Then, inevitably, the plot slowly begins to go out of the window as my characters take on lives of their own. I swear they look me square in the face and say, “Come off it Kay, we’d never do that. Let’s do this, it’s much more fun!” And off they go, dictating their own literary destiny, and recklessly flying by the seat of my pants!

I’d get cross with my imaginary protagonists, but so far this ‘not quite managing to hold onto the plot’ policy seems to be working for me.

So, what about you, folks? What works best for you?

*****

Lucy Felthouse is a very busy woman! She writes erotica and
erotic romance in a variety of subgenres and pairings, and has over seventy
publications to her name, with many more in the pipeline. These include Best
Bondage Erotica 2012, 2013 and 2014 and Best Women’s Erotica 2013. Another
string to her bow is editing, and she has edited and co-edited a number of
anthologies. She owns Erotica For All,
and is book editor for Cliterati. Find
out more at http://www.lucyfelthouse.co.uk.
Join her on Facebook
and Twitter, and subscribe to her
newsletter at: http://eepurl.com/gMQb9

Series Writing

by | July 23, 2013 | | 8 Comments

By Lucy Felthouse

Writing a series is something I put off for a while, because the idea scared me. I’ve been known to lose consistency in a short story, never mind a series of stories! But I knew I couldn’t put it off forever, and now I’m writing two!

My first dabble at series writing started with my series of short stories based around two young men on their gap year before starting University. They were going to have lots of adventures and tumble into bed (or wherever!) with various different women. So I had a challenge on my hands, remember their likes and dislikes, personality quirks, as well as what they did with who and where. And so began my insane list. It’s full of the above, and there’s a list for each of my characters and the names of what women they slept with and where. It sounds pretty clinical, and I suppose it is, but it was the only way I could be sure that Ryan, the main character, didn’t end up having sex with four Janes, two Emilys, three Roses, and so on. I’ve just finished the third book in the series and it’s working for me so far, so fingers crossed it will continue to do so!

As I mentioned in one of my previous posts, I co-authored a novel with Lily Harlem, which was great fun. We very much just wrote and waited to see how it went. There was no planning, we literally just wrote and let the storyline and characters develop themselves. As a result, there are no notes or anything on that book. Which would have been okay… had we not decided it would be fab to write a series. We’d very much like to write about more characters from the same “world” as the first book, and so I’m currently in the process of reading through the first book and making lots of notes about the characters we’re featuring in book two. Again, this is to make sure there are no inconsistencies, and so on. Also, the starting point for book two will actually be in a scene in book one, if that makes sense. Told from the new characters’ perspectives, and so it’s vital that any happenings and dialogue are exactly the same. It’s proving fun, and I’m reacquainting myself with book one at the same time. Which is just as well, as we’re hoping to see it released by the end of summer. Watch this space.

So I kind of muddled along when it came to series writing to begin with, but now I know what works for me I can continue doing it. Lots of lists and copious notes – my characters will not change hair colour in book three, honest! ;0)

*****

Lucy Felthouse is a very busy woman! She writes erotica and
erotic romance in a variety of subgenres and pairings, and has over seventy
publications to her name, with many more in the pipeline. These include Best
Bondage Erotica 2012 and 2013, and Best Women’s Erotica 2013. Another string to
her bow is editing, and she has edited and co-edited a number of anthologies.
She owns Erotica For All, and is book
editor for Cliterati. Find out more at http://www.lucyfelthouse.co.uk. Join
her on Facebook and Twitter, and subscribe to her
newsletter at: http://eepurl.com/gMQb9

Fools in Lust

by | June 26, 2013 | | 3 Comments

by Jean Roberta

There has been much on-line discussion about the differences between literary erotica and erotic romance, whether one genre can be folded into the other, whether romance always requires a happy ending, and whether erotic writers who want to make a profit from their writing must sacrifice their integrity by writing fluff or mush.

Here are some things I have learned simply by living among other human beings: humans are social animals who need companionship as well as physical pleasure. Even in the sex trade (I’ve been there), men pay temporary companions (dancers, “models,” escorts, streetwalkers, pro Dommes, etc.) for more than the brief pleasure of skin-to-skin contact. Human beings want to feel understood, admired, and forgiven for our faults. The assumption that men with official secrets tend to whisper them to the call girls they party with is not simply a myth.

So if “romance” per se is that genre of fiction that focuses on “relationships,” broadly speaking, an erotic writer who does not want to go there must make a strenuous effort to eliminate all traces of “romance” from his or her descriptions of “sex,” whatever that means to the writer or the reader. (I’m imagining a story along the lines of The Stranger by Albert Camus, a widely-translated French novel in which the central character is almost completely emotionless.)

Even a comedy about sexual disappointment or a dark and gothic tale of sexual compulsion, sex that leaves marks, or sex that reveals the ultimate truth that each of us is alone must incorporate the other truth that each of us wants to connect with someone else, and not just physically.

Consider a case in point. I wrote a story that I considered erotic, not romantic. The occasional incompetence of Canadian mail carriers is the plot premise that results in the misdelivery of mail. The narrator, Woman A, receives letters intended for Woman B. A wonders if the same thing is happening in reverse: OMG! What am I missing? A (an “out” lesbian) knows that B receives handwritten letters from someone in New York with a masculine name. Is this B’s boyfriend? Over a period of months, A speculates about B’s life, and watches her on the sly. A doesn’t think she has the right to simply discard personal mail intended for B. So A rings B’s doorbell, a bundle of mail in her hand.

This is a variation on the theme of the wrong-number telephone call that enables two strangers to hear each other’s voices, develop a mutual curiosity and eventually meet in the real world, rip each other’s clothes off and agree that the dialling the wrong number was the best thing one of them could have done.

In my story, A is delighted to learn that B (a local artist) is also a lesbian who has learned all about A’s previous relationship via A’s misdelivered mail. B knows that during the past year, A has experienced a messy breakup. B has gone through a long dry spell of no sex. B gives A an experimental kiss, and when that bold move is accepted, B invites A into her bedroom for a good time. Neither of these women is offering each other a “relationship” at this point. It is too soon for either of them to know whether they have enough in common to share their lives. Both of them are willing to continue getting to know each other (in the Biblical sense and in other ways) to find out where this process will lead.

The climax of this story is an explicit sex scene, so I sent this story to the editor of an erotic lesbian anthology. The story was rejected. I wondered whether the editor was looking for more detailed sexual description as distinct from backstory and emotions other than lust.

This year, I sent the story to a lesbian romance anthology, and it was chosen for the shortlist. Whether or not my story finds its way into the book, the editor clearly thinks it fits into the genre. Never mind that the two characters are more-or-less strangers when they first meet in person, and they carefully avoid making any premature promises. They live in a country where two women could legally marry each other, but these characters are a long way from moving in together, let alone exchanging vows, even by the end of the story. The “happy for now” ending simply involves hope on both sides, and a certain amount of faith that their intimacy could deepen in the future. (“Faith,” in fact, is the title of the story.)

So apparently this is romance. And even if at least one central character in an erotic story is a man, the writer has to acknowledge the fact that men, too, crave love. The widespread belief that men just want to fuck, and that an artificial orifice in a plastic doll would provide the protagonist with the friction he needs is less of a myth, IMO, than a half-truth. If Captain Manpants just wants to fuck the available “girl,” he probably has more complex feelings about the wife he argued with in the morning, or he is wrestling with his secret crush on his male buddy, or he can’t forget the former classmate or coworker he left behind. In fact, he might be hoping to use the “girl” as a substitute for any of the people who have real significance in his life. Trust me. I’ve been the “girl,” and I’ve seen this process in action.

One line that sex workers hear over and over is: “If we had met some other way, we could have had a beautiful relationship.” This is when an honest sex worker gently reminds her customer of how they actually met, and for what purpose.

So do relationships, as distinct from sexual encounters, satisfy the needs of all the participants? In many cases, no. Breakups and divorce are a fact of modern life. Human beings disappoint each other over and over, but human beings reach out to each other over and over. The general advice given to the lovelorn or to those who lost everything in the interpersonal wars is that one must get up, get out, meet new people and climb back on that horse.

Even if a willingness to try once more to establish emotional intimacy with another person looks like the triumph of naïve hope over bitter experience, the only alternative looks like death in some form. So if an erotic story is to exude life, it must also include room for hope that the characters can or do connect on some level beyond the physical. I hesitate to suggest that the most hard-boiled stories about fucking must include spirituality in some form, but I’m not sure what other term would work better.

Most erotic writers of a certain age – I should probably speak for myself – can make sarcastic references to the temporary insanity that caused us to assume that our past relationships would work. Hindsight is perfect. Yet to summon up the desire and the curiosity that motivates one person to seek carnal knowledge of others is to enter a state of mind, heart and loins in which all things seem possible. Even a noir tone suggests that innocent hope and tentative trust existed before they were destroyed.

So am I advocating for romance in literary erotica? Apparently so. “Romance” is certainly not what I wanted to write when I rolled my eyes at my teenage friends’ favorite paperback novels of boy-meets-girl. Yet there it is.

So now you know: in any war between Romance and the kind of literary erotica that features epiphanies about Truth, I’m the traitor to both sides who huddles in a trench somewhere in the middle.
—————————————————–

Growing More Adventurous (In My Writing)

by | June 23, 2013 | | 2 Comments

by Lucy Felthouse

The first ever erotic story I wrote was about a young man and his teacher. But that was because I’d been dared to write an erotic story, and the “darer” gave me names and a plot. So I don’t include that one because  the plot was from my friend’s imagination, not me.

After that, though, I wrote a story fully from my own head, which was about a couple that end up getting down to it on a balcony in the pouring rain. So, pretty vanilla by some standards, but still, outdoor sex! Following that, I penned military erotica, more outdoor erotica, rubenesque, classroom sex (between consenting adults), vampire sex and first-time lesbian sex. Which, thinking about it, isn’t too bad for a beginner. Looking at my past publications, alfresco sex and military sex is a recurring theme… I can’t think why 😉

Now, though, I’ve definitely branched out. For a long time, I wouldn’t even attempt to write BDSM. There was no particular reason behind it, other than I didn’t fancy writing it. But I eventually caved in and answered a call for submissions for sex toy erotica, which also ended up including bondage and spanking. That seemed to open the floodgates. I’ve now had between ten and fifteen BDSM stories published, with lots more written, submitted, contracted and waiting for release dates. I’m not quite sure how it happened. It certainly hasn’t been a conscious decision (except when answering calls for submission, of course), but I find it much easier to write BDSM now, to the extent that I’m coming up with some seriously wild and wacky scenes (see one of my future releases!) that even make me wonder where it’s coming from as I’m writing.

I’m definitely glad I’ve branched out. My author tagline is “Erotic and Romantic Fiction… Whatever Your Fancy!” because there’s so much variety in my work. From straight, to lesbian, to gay. Vanilla to medium and hardcore kink, indoors, outdoors, military, at home, abroad, second chances, paranormal… the list goes on. I love that there are so many topics, likes, dislikes and kinks I can write about as I’ve gotten over my fear and always push myself to write something new, something that may involve lots of research, or even something I don’t agree with. There are quite a lot more things on my mental list that I want to cover, but hopefully I’ve got plenty of time yet.

*****

Lucy Felthouse is a very busy woman! She writes erotica and
erotic romance in a variety of subgenres and pairings, and has over seventy
publications to her name, with many more in the pipeline. These include Best
Bondage Erotica 2012 and 2013, and Best Women’s Erotica 2013. Another string to
her bow is editing, and she has edited and co-edited a number of anthologies.
She owns Erotica For All, and is book
editor for Cliterati. Find out more at http://www.lucyfelthouse.co.uk. Join
her on Facebook and Twitter, and subscribe to her
newsletter at: http://eepurl.com/gMQb9

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