Embracing Our Erotic Pleasures

Last week, Foreplay and Fangs hosted romance author Kirsten Blacketer, who shared with us her 10 Things Never to Say to A Romance Author. Among these, Kirsten discussed the oft-repeated opinion that “Romance is just porn for women”.
 

This is not an uncommon opinion, but the more important question—brought up to me by a couple of colleagues on Twitter—really should be, “so what if it is?”

Talking Shop: Poetry as a Tool for Better Writing

In college I took a couple of creative writing classes geared specifically towards poetry and poetic analysis. I generally find the subject of poetry is not well-appreciated outside of certain demographics within the writing community, and often early writers of literary fiction and prose may not appreciate how much poetry, as a written art form, can benefit them.

Talking Shop: Discovering Myself through Erotica

There are a lot of reasons I enjoy writing romance and erotica, not the least of which is sheer enjoyment. I recently realized these genres are the only ones where I find myself capable of writing something actually literary, something more than simple fiction. That’s not to say fiction and genre storytelling aren’t wonderful ways to express one’s writing passions; I prefer a good escapist fantasy over heavy literary tome any day. But I find it fascinating how deeply erotica can reflect subtle truths about the human condition and the people we truly are.

 

One thing erotica has allowed me to do is to fully realize my own sexuality. As a child I understood the hetero-normative view of the world. When I wanted to kiss my female best friends, I knew full well I’d be going against the status quo. I knew never to tell a female friend I loved her without qualifying it as platonic. I understood that I was STRAIGHT, 100%, because I had a boyfriend.

 

Talking Shop: Writing Erotic Content

Erotic content must be exactly that: erotic. But good erotica is more than just a graphic sex scene; oh, my, it is so much more.

 

Where do you feel erotica?

Take a moment to consider the way your body feels in different states of arousal. Imagine the sensations going through your physical form. Everywhere in your physical form. For me, I can feel arousal in the back of my neck and shoulders, welling up in my chest, and shooting down my legs. It isn't just about your sex organs. Keep this in mind, because it's going to be important later.

Talking Shop: The Importance of Queer Stories in Paranormal Romance

As of this writing, a quick perusal of Amazon categories shows us this: the Romance category in Books contains a total of 604,105 titles. Of those, 7% make up the Paranormal Romance category. 39% of Romance books are Erotica, and of those, only 2% are Paranormal.

 In order to find out roughly how many LGBTQ Romance and Erotica books feature paranormal plots and characters, we have to piece together numbers from a special filter labeled "Erotic Characters". If you add up all the titles featuring angels, demons and devils, ghosts, shapeshifters, vampires and werewolves, you come up with less than .7% of titles in LGBTQ Romance and Erotica that are paranormal.

Just for comparison, "Billionaire" erotica makes up 1.4%.

Talking Shop: The Power of Subtlety

In the past we’ve talked about Showing versus Telling, and Overdoing Your Characters. Today we’ll put together some of the points discussed on these subjects, and work on developing our powers of subtlety.

Talking Shop: You're Always Showing, Revisited

If you're a writer, it's a fair bet you've heard this one:

"Show, don't tell."

 

 For many writers, this can be a challenging lesson. For others, it comes fairly naturally. What many don't realize, however, is that whether or not you realize it, you are always showing something.

Talking Shop: The State of Virginity in Erotic Romance

While it’s not a hard and fast rule with me, I don’t usually write stories with virgin leads.

There are a couple of reasons for this. First off, I tend to train my writer’s ear on who my character tells me they are, and I don’t have a lot of characters reveal themselves as virgins to me. Every now and then I have a character whose background makes it sensible—a member of a religious order, for example—and sometimes I have a character who, for whatever reasons, simply hasn’t engaged in sexual relations prior to the story I’m writing. As I work on Rhiannon’s third Blood and Fire title, it took me some time to determine the sexual background of Sascha, the Russian sorceress/thief, and it finally seemed to me that, for her own reasons, Sascha hasn’t had any relationships in her past.

Talking Shop: Writing the Lady Casanova

If there’s one consistent criticism I get for my fae romance, Goblin Fires, it’s that the main character Reagan “sleeps around”.

Many reviewers feel Reagan’s lusty pursuits (she has three carnal encounters which do not involve her leading lady) undermine her likability as a character, and her devotion to Ceridwen, the woman she loves from afar.

Talking Shop: The Responsibilities of Editors

I’ve heard it said here and there that, “The best thing about self-publishing is that anyone can do it. And the worst thing about self-publishing is that anyone can do it.”

There’s a lot of criticism out there for self-published and Indie authors, based on the opinion that a good deal of self-published and indie material is simply not good. Poorly written, poorly researched, poorly edited...there are dozens of different components that go into publishing a good book worth paying money for, and with the freedom afforded by all the new self-pub services we have to choose from, the quality control of all these components can get by as largely unchecked.

Talking Shop: Breaking the Rules of Romance

Last week we discussed Redefining the Romance Genre with Maggie’s Song, a novel featuring an African-American lead struggling with identity and self-esteem as a “plus-size” woman in the music industry. And I think it’s safe to say that, as writers and readers, we’re excited to see a story told from the point of view of a POC main character who isn’t runway-model flawless. By that token, I think Maggie’s Song deserves it's applause. It's actually not wholly alone, though...

So what is redefining the genre, really? For many of us in the genre, we struggle against more than the pre-conditions by editors and readers expecting our characters to be perfect white women with all the ideal beauty traits and a totally winning personality to boot. In fact, while those certainly are some frustrating expectations of the genre, I’d say they are less predominant in recent years, and less binding than some of the Sacred Commandments that truly limit us.

Talking Shop: Taking on National Novel Writing Month

I participated in NationalNovel Writing Month for the first time in 2006, and I really never expected to finish. At the time I was just out of college, working part-time at Starbucks, and had just discovered a love of tabletop roleplaying.

I don’t recall exactly what motivated me to finally undertake the challenge of writing 50,000 words in 30 days. I’d heard of NaNoWriMo before and even been encouraged by friends to try it out, but I’d never had the inspiration—i.e., courage—to give it a try.

Talking Shop: POV ~ Keeping it in Your Head

I recently did some beta reading for a young writer hoping to submit her first manuscript for consideration. I thought the story had some great potential, but of course as this young writer is still testing her wings, there were definitely a few things she needed to learn about the craft.

This provided an excellent opportunity for she and I to discuss elements of writing, common concepts which all writers run into at some point or another. One concept in particular, which has been my own bane and can prompt my editor to bring out the riding crop, is the infamous problem of "head-hopping".

Talking Shop: Queer Voices in Paranormal Romance

Writers, have you ever wanted to try your hand at queer romance? It's a very passionate subject to me. I feel strongly that the Romance genre as a whole, and especially it's speculative sub-genres like paranormal, fantasy and sci-fi, could do with a good deal more queer voices and stories.

But writing queer romance comes with a hefty research cost, especially if you're not queer yourself. This is not an area in which to charge blindly forward. The LGBTQ spectrum, like any medium for relationships, is a lot more nuanced than pop culture and mainstream media tends to express.

The following are some beginning points to research and writing LGBTQ romance, based on my own research and reading experience. I don't claim this post to be a "cheat sheet" so much as an introduction, for those who either haven't written queer romance before or want a little insight to different areas of it. I can't include all the details I'd like to include about each identity that makes up the queer community. I can, however, offer up what I've learned so far in writing the genre myself.

Talking Shop: Revisiting the Sexualization of Minors

I'd intended to write this week about the suspension of disbelief in erotica, however a major migraine has me down for the evening. So I'll be saving that subject for next week, but in the meantime I'm revisiting an old article I hope you will find interesting. Till next week!

Allow me to get up on a pedestal about one of my favorite books, Proven Guilty, by Jim Butcher.

 

A little Dresden fan art by yours truly

Here is a portion of a review posted by a reader about this book.

 The last few pages of this book made my skin crawl. Sexualizing an underage character and Harry blatantly lusting after her and beating himself up over it and trying to moralize it is just... awful. But like I said, this isn't Harry. This is some weird thing Jim Butcher has going on in his head. Was he substitute teaching while writing this one? I mean, he talks about her body, and piercings that you 'can't see' and I wondered which one of his friends' daughters he is lusting after in real life.

Eeee-yikes.

Talking Shop: Writing About the Pussy

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Talking Shop: Writing About Anal Sex

Let’s talk butts.

Anal sex is, let’s be honest, a subject that doesn’t allow for much sense of “romance”, when you first think of it.  It’s very much a staple of erotica more than anything, and outside of M/M romance it still has a sort of taboo to it. It shouldn’t be this way, but at the same time it’s not very hard to understand why.

Talking Shop: Writing About Blowjobs

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Talking Shop: Tips for Pacing

"Well.  That escalated quickly."

 Have you ever been reading a book or watching a movie and suddenly think the plot jumped waaaaay ahead of the timing?  Here's a common one I run into in my genre: two characters meet, discover they dislike and sometimes even hate each other, and on the next page they've never felt such incredible magnetism, never been so drawn to another. On the next page, they're inexplicably in love.

Talking Shop: Don't Overdo It

Last week Foreplay and Fangs went dark, as I dealt with some severe heat-related fatigue. We're back this week and preparing for a Lotus Petals blog tour, soon to be posted. For today's Talking Shop, let's look at character development, and the dangers of "overdoing it".

What is a caricature? The dictionary defines it as "a picture, description, etc., ludicrously exaggerating the peculiarities or defects of persons or things".  When most of us here the word "caricature", we think of something like this:

As a literary device, caricature is described as "a device used in descriptive writing and visual arts where particular aspects of a subject are exaggerated to create a silly or comic effect".

Here's a very recognizable example of caricature: in the Fox animated sitcom Family Guy, a character is introduced as a part of a domestic violence plot in Screams of Silence: The Story of Brenda Q (Season 10, Episode 3). The character—Jeff—is the loud, obnoxious, abusive boyfriend of Brenda Quagmire.