Constance Daley's Blog - Posts Tagged "erotica"

I have been wanting to start a blog for awhile now, but have been a loss when it comes to where to start. Luckily for me, Mr. Ken Levine decided to help me along by posting a series of questions for erotica writers on his blog. http://kenlevine.blogspot.com/2012/09.... Here are the questions along with my answers. Unfortunately, I may not be the best to answer these questions. I'm still a newbie.

How do you avoid cliches? I honestly don't give a thought to cliches one way or the other. If the cliche fits the scene I wouldn't hesitate to use it, but I don't compile a list of the things and try to incorporate them. I believe that cliches can have a certain degree of usefulness, mostly in the fact that they are familiar to people, and some level of familiarity can help a particularly extreme sex scene be a little more relatable. I do always ask myself, is this a cliche because it happens to so many people that it's an accepted aspect of our lives, or is it a cliche because of its inherent ridiculousness. The first have their uses, and honestly so do the second in the right circumstances.

Is it possible to write a sexy novel without using the word throbbing at least once? Though I'm yet to write a sexy novel, I've written enough short stories to add up to the length of a novel, and I've written more sex scenes than any novel is likely to include. Strangely, throbbing isn't one of my go to words. I'm mostly indifferent too it. I also don't really like to use the word member. Really, my go to word for the male sex organ is cock. Dick is okay (as a word, as a thing it's pretty fantastic), but cock is just so much more masculine. I like cunt better than pussy, but I think pussy fits most sentence constructions better (and pussy lips sounds so much better than cunt lips). My go to word is spasming, even though the program I use for my writing refuses to accept spasming is a word. I like my sex a little more wild. Throbbing to me is like a heartbeat. It's too even in its beating for my taste. I prefer the wildly irregular feel of spasms. So if you read a bunch of my stories, you might get awfully tired of reading about spasming cocks and spasming cunts. I'm an erotica writer though. I think throbbing is more a romance writer thing.

Comedy writers rarely laugh at what they've written. Do romance writers get turned on by their work? This is a tough question, because it has a two-fold answer. While writing certain scenes I definitely get turned on. I think that's one of the ways you know the sex is working. If you're not at least a little turned on, why would your readers be? On the other hand, writing is a craft, and you don't want to get so wrapped up in your own arousal that you neglect properly describing what is going on. During the editing and post-editing process it's a different matter entirely. Sometimes when I'm editing my stuff, I'll realize that I need to go back over the scene because I got so caught up in reading it that I probably breezed right past grammatical errors and typos. I find post-coital editing to be perfectly effective. You're still aroused enough to really feel the scenes, but you have the patience to give the editorial side its due diligence. To me I know a story really worked after I've finished reading it if I think about it later when I'm horny.

Do editors give you a lot of notes? I don't get the types of notes Mr. Levine describes, such as substituting one object for another (could she use a butterfly vibrator instead of the wand?) or even substituting one orifice for another (I really think it should go in her ass now instead of her mouth), but the small editorial crew that helps me out doesn't hesitate to recommend wholesale story revisions if the mood just doesn't seem right or if the character just doesn't fit the sex. Some stories have had to be rewritten from the ground up after a nice long discussion with my editor. Also, more than a few stories have been scrapped altogether after my editors have discovered some intrinsic flaw that I somehow missed. Sometimes a fantasy, though wonderfully delicious in my head, doesn't have the backbone to be a story.

Do you need to get in the mood? I tend to have a lot of projects going at once, which is easy to do with the length I work with (no double entendre intended there). This allows me the luxury of only writing sex when I feel like writing sex. If I'm writing a story and get to the good part, but discover I'm just not really in the mood to write it, I move on to something else. Some days I'm in the mood all the time, and I can write multiple sex scenes in one sessions. Some days I enjoy the task oriented process of plotting. I know it may not seem like there's a lot of plotting involved in erotic shorts, but I promise you that setup and payoff still matter a great deal.

At what point do you realize that imagery is not your friend? Honestly, when it comes time to write about fucking, I'm ready to write about fucking. I can get very wrapped up in whose doing what to who and forget about anything but the play-by-play, but then I remember that I'm writing erotica and not porn. It's very important to know the ins and outs of what's happening, but description matters too. To me, describing what the character is feeling is what matters, much more than what the images of what they are seeing. In most my stories it is up to the reader what the characters look like because I want to put them in a sexy situation and let them dictate the cast.

What do you think of FIFTY SHADES OF GREY? Is this a trick question? Honestly, I thought it was a pretty fun read, though it trended a little too much to the romance and away from the sex for my tastes. Also, and this is probably just a personal issue, I thought the transition from virgin was too fast. But my biggest problem was the alpha not being alpha enough. When it gets to the point where Christian tells her he's going to fuck her mouth, I was screaming with excitement. But then she takes control and gives him a good old-fashioned blowjob with no mouth-fucking at all. There's nothing wrong with a blowjob, but if I'm reading about a man who takes what he wants, but then every sex scene seems to be more a negotiation than anything, I'm a little disappointed.

I know what some of you are thinking. Why would a lowly newbie erotica writer bother writing a defense of the best-selling book on the planet? The reason is simple. I don't much care for the treatment the book is getting from the erotica literati.

To be up front, I'm not a huge fan of Fifty Shades of Grey. To see why you can check my previous blog post. I think most of the criticisms of the book are at least somewhat fair. I don't think it's particularly well-written or well-plotted, nor do I think the sex scenes are particularly hot or that it is a good representation of the BDSM community. By now some of you are wondering how this is a defense of the book when I don't have much positive to say about it. The answer is simple: it gets women thinking about sex, and about different types of sex.

Much is often made of how prudish American society is, and there is validity to this criticism. So when a book comes along and has everyday women even giving a second thought to things like dominance and submission, I think it's a great thing. I think one of the best things 50 Shades has going for it is that it isn't an accurate representation of BDSM. I think an accurate depiction would scare off most women by page fifty. For all intents and purposes, 50 Shades is a romance novel with slightly kinkier sex. And that's an okay thing to be.

The worst thing that might happen to an erotica writer because of 50 Shades is someone new might buy their book. And you know what, if all the naysayers are the amazing writers they seem to think themselves, then that person who bought one of their books is likely to buy all of them. And if one of those books includes a truer representation of the BDSM community then great, 50 Shades led them there anyway.

We live in a world where many women have never used a vibrator, where many women never masturbate, where many women never orgasm during sex, and we're worried about whether or not a book that might help a few women do some of those things is a work of literary genius. It's time for everyone to get off their high horses and recognize that the whole point of what we do, at least to my mind, is to help people come. If 50 Shades is doing that, then it's the best book of the last fifty years.

Consider this an open letter to the erotica writing community. If I read your book and am impressed by your vivid images and rhapsodic prose, then congratulations. But if I'm still not turned on, then you've failed. My whole goal in reading a story of that type is to get wet, to get horny, and eventually to get off, either with my husband or one of my trusty toys. Because even the best books I've ever read, and I've read a lot of great books, are not as good as the best orgasms I've ever had.

I know what some of you are thinking. Aren't you the same Constance Daley whose website bears a declaration that we all need to stop reading poorly written smut? Of course I am. Can't a girl have it both ways? Seriously, the poorly written smut I am referring to is a great deal different than 50 Shades. There seem to be a lot of ebook authors who dump trash on the market, books with basically no editing where it is difficult to follow the action because of grammatical errors. I have no use for these books because their authors obviously have no use for them other than trying to steal the reader's money. And they give other ebook authors such as myself a bad name. I encourage all readers to use the Look Inside feature on Amazon before buying to make sure that the author at least bothered to do a little proofreading.

I'm a little different than most people when it comes to sex. I guess that should be expected or I wouldn't be writing the types of stories I do. But what makes me really different is I don't have a kneejerk reaction to things. I believe in giving everything a try. I don't mean physically, just mentally. And I don't mean everything. I'm not talking about things like pedophilia. But anything that you could do with another consenting adult should be on the fantasy table.

It is easy for us to be dismissive of the fetishes of others. I used to be that way too. But at some point I realized that we all have fetishes, and there isn't much that separates the ones we like from the ones we don't. So now I do my best to at least try to imagine something before I dismiss it. Sometimes that goes poorly (I just can't get past the smell factor for certain fetishes) and sometimes it goes well (maybe the idea of pegging is a little hot).

The key is recognizing that your fantasy limits can be way different than your real limits. There are things that are incredibly sexy to read about that you would never go near in real life. For some couples, any type of adultery fits that bill. There is nothing wrong with fantasizing about men other than your husband. There is nothing wrong with reading stories about sleeping with the hot personal trainer at your gym. But when you can no longer separate fantasy from reality, you have problems. In a healthy relationship you should be able to share your fantasies with your partner because that's all they are, fantasies.

I'll grant that I'm not perfect, and that I need a little realism thrown into stories when I read them. Anytime a man just rams it in a woman's ass with no lube, I cringe. I just don't see why the writer can't take a few seconds to acknowledge biological reality on that one. The anus isn't self-lubricating, and the lubing process can be pretty sexy in and of itself. Some people might think that in a story where a man is just taking what he wants then that's a little different, but then I just wonder if it would actually be any good for the man either. I'm as guilty of overthinking as the rest of the world, even when I try not to be.

So I'm encouraging all my readers to not be so dismissive of another persons' fantasy. Try it on for yourself, spin around in front of a mirror a few times, and see if it fits you better than you thought. Expanding your fantasy universe is a good thing.

I studied the Classics at university. I share that in my biography on my webpage and author page on Amazon because I think it's important to know about me. I understand that many people consider the Classics a dull course of study, but they couldn't be more wrong. Sex is everywhere in the Classics. Sex is everywhere in human culture throughout all of history.

I have read of many erotica writers coming to the field from reading the Marquis de Sade, or Pauline Reage, or even Anne Rice. It seems that most smut writers come to the field through other smut writers, through writers of fiction. This was not the case for me. And I didn't come to it through the Classics either. Well, not exactly at least.

My favorite writer, and my personal hero, is Camille Paglia. I admire her for a number of reasons, foremost amongst them that she is not an ideologue. She does not allow politics or culture to force beliefs on her. She evaluates everything in the context of her own belief system and proceeds from there. Reading her books is a fascinating process of discovery because you can never anticipate her opinion on any given subject, but you know it will be intellectually and personally honest.

But the main thing I love about Paglia, the thing that endears her to me so much, is that she has always believed that there is nothing inherently wrong with being sexualized. I don't mean being sexy, I mean being sexualized. She has traced the history of the sexualization of females throughout history and reached the conclusion that there is no inherent disgrace in it.

Growing up, I always wanted to be sexy, even if it was only my own concept of sexy. But the media has waged a war against being sexy. We are taught that fashion magazines are destroying young women by giving them a false image of beauty, that a proper goal for a woman is have a career. We are taught by society that a woman baring her midriff at the mall looks like a slut, and that there is such a thing as a skirt being too short. There isn't. Some women look perfectly fine in the shortest skirt you can imagine, and some do not. Instead of worrying about what others are wearing, we should be worrying about ourselves.

Reading Camille Paglia taught me that nothing a woman wears changes who she is, that clothes can be an expressive commodity. Despite all protestations to the contrary, women in this day and age dress to impress other women, not men. They do this because other women will think badly of them if they don't. Women are oppressing women.

If you go to my website, you will find pictures of me that are probably best described as cheesecake. Some women, upon seeing them, might think badly of me. They might not like me parading my body around. I don't care what these women think. I like my body. I like my looks. I have no problem sharing them with the world. For some reason there are likely those who think it is appropriate for a woman to share her deepest fantasies with the world through writing, but not okay to show a little cleavage. I find that ridiculous. I embrace the idea of sexual personae as Paglia wrote of it, and I like being able to be all of those personae in one. I can be a tramp. I can be a mother. I can be anything and everything.

That is an incredibly valuable lesson to learn.

Men love lesbians. All women know this. Society has taught us that lesbianism is hot. To a certain extent society is right, but it is never as simple as society makes it. What makes lesbianism hot isn't that there are two women involved (yes, I know men will disagree with that sentence), but the idea that it is different. Different is sexy.

When setting out to write a lesbian story, I considered the idea of writing about a married lesbian couple. That seemed so forward-thinking and in keeping with our times. But the more I thought about it, the more I realize that it didn't work. It's hard to write erotica about long time married couples having normal sex on a Thursday night, and the same applies to lesbians. To make it work, at least for me, I needed it to be forbidden fruit. So I scrapped the idea of a married couple and went back to the most tried and true lesbian cliche of all. I went for experimentation.

As I started to write the story, I realized that experimentation was more important than I realized. Erotica is about discovery; if the story involves a character doing only things she has done before, it's not very exciting. The character needs to learn about themselves, needs to try things for the first time, for it to be interesting. There's a lot of erotica out there about firsts. First time anal. First time lesbian. First time cuckold. The reason for this is simple. The first time is where we learn about ourselves, where we challenge ourselves. Who wants to read a story called "Her Twelfth Anal," or "Sleeping With My Husband's Brother for the Fifth Consecutive Sunday."

There's another reason novelty matters for the character. Unless you're just starting reading these stories, it's hard for even the most lascivious imagination to conjure new scenarios and sex acts for every story. After all, there are only so many things you can stick in so many places, and only so many people/supernatural beings/furries you can have do it. Because of this, very little is still novel for the reader. Experiencing the newness from the character's point of view allows the reader to share in that feeling, and it's a great feeling. There's nothing like that new car smell or that feeling of being fucked hard for the first time.

So I knew I wanted to do a lesbian story, and I knew it had to be a first time lesbian story. The question was, what was the justification. In my stories I want the characters to behave at least somewhat believably, which means that our heroine has to have a good reason for what she does. The last few years it seems like all my longtime friends are getting divorces, and almost always for the same reason. Their sex life is stale, or it wasn't very good to begin with and they thought they could live with that but discovered they really can't. So that was in the mix, and then I imagined a woman who still loves her husband, but whose marriage is flat. How could she rekindle that? Of course I could have just had her bring a friend home, but the character I had in my head wasn't ready to go that far, at least not yet. I had to have her undergo a progression, and that progression couldn't involve the husband being there.

Luckily we live in a day and age where someone can be there without being there, and I knew the perfect way for her to titillate her husband without setting out to step outside her own comfort zone. Once I knew that she was going to use pictures, the old song Pictures of Lily popped into my head, and a slight change to the name of the song gave me a title and a character name. The rest was simple.

Of all my stories currently available on Amazon, No-Telling is probably the most objectionable to the largest number of people. There are a lot of reasons for this, but I'm not going to discount the fact that the level of coercion is very high in this story. I'm also not going to lie, I find coercion sexy, but only when the coercion leads to pleasure.

In a society where many women still have their sexuality stifled, they can allow themselves to be talked into something they want to do anyway. By offering lip service to denial, they don't gain the negative reputation from their actions because they had to be talked into it. I find the fact that society functions in this way distressing, but I also write for women as we are, not as we should be. Which brings me back to coercion in my stories.

For the women who need some type of permission to explore their fantasies, having the character be coerced allows them to inhabit the character more fully. Freeing the character from culpability allows the writer to push boundaries that could not be explored otherwise. Most women would not be comfortable with the character in No-Telling if she initiated the actions, but because she is just as forced as her lover, there is no blame. So it's okay when she gets turned on by things that are beyond the pale of normal society.

Human sexuality is a tangled knot, and the knot unravels in different ways for each of us. To a certain extent, once we reach a certain age it is monumentally difficult to change the way we view sex. For some women, brought up in certain ways, it will never be okay in their own minds for them to be turned on by certain things. This actually applies to many women to at least a certain extent (myself included, there are still things in the bedroom that are much more erotic if I'm playing the submissive, allowing it to be done to me instead of asking for it to be done). There are no easy answers or solutions to any of this.

I know I've talked about it before, but I'm fascinated by the performance of Pictures of Lillian on my sales charts, so I'm going to talk about it again. The thing is, Pictures of Lillian is not only NOT my bestselling story, it's pretty much the worst. Since my descriptions are intentionally vague so as not to spoil whatever plot twist the story might contain, the reader can only get a basic idea of what the story will be about. Pictures of Lillian is my only story with a lesbian bent, my only story that a reader has tagged with the word lesbian on Amazon.

The question is, why isn't it selling? The answer is, I have no idea. I understand that the market for lesbian erotica might be limited to begin with, that there are probably a great many women who have no interest in reading it. But that just begs the question as to why so few women seem to be interested in the genre? When every possible fetish imaginable has a sizable reading demographic, why does something as relatively prosaic as lesbianism have such limited appeal.

I wonder sometimes if the problem is that it is too accessible. For the most part I deal with situations and types of sex that most women can't really have, whether because the actual experience would be too much for them or because even arranging such a scenario is difficult. After all, we can all read about our husbands watching us have sex with another man, but actually making it happen could lead to a trip to a divorce lawyer. Lesbianism doesn't have this issue. First, it was readily available for most of our lives. There was nothing stopping us from making out with a girl. Second, even if you're married chances are bringing up making out with another girl to your husband isn't going to send him running for a lawyer. It'll probably send him running for the video camera.

Ultimately there's no way to know why some things sell and some things don't. I still plan to write another lesbian story at some point, just in case the real problem with Pictures of Lillian is something else entirely. Maybe people think the scenario is lame. Maybe people never noticed it. But I always enjoy a little speculating, so I thought I'd share my thoughts on the matter.

Just a forewarning, I will probably be using the term "butt sex" a lot in this blog post, mostly because I think it's awesome but unfortunately has no place in erotica. After all, it's a lot hotter for a man to say, "I'm going to fuck your ass," than "I'm going to have butt sex with you now," or even "I'm going to sex your butt." So this is one of the few times I get a chance to refer to the action as butt sex, and I'm not going to let that opportunity pass.

Butt sex has a weird place in our culture, in that it is one of the last taboos. Sixty years ago something like a blowjob was likely to be a man's primary fantasy, but now that those are commonplace it seems that anal is final frontier. Because of that, it seems to feature very heavily in a lot of erotica, and I'm still not exactly sure where to incorporate it and where not to.

For the most part, you can squeeze butt sex into pretty much any story with just a few minor tweaks (though there are exceptions). The question is whether you should, and I have to admit that I don't know the answer to that. You have two potential audiences to worry about, those who are instantly turned off by any backdoor action, and those who require it in their erotica. You don't want to alienate either audience, but ultimately you're going to have to. The question is, which one should I cater to?

So far, judging by my sales, anything that can be tagged on Amazon with "backdoor sex" seems to do pretty well, though not as well as "spanking," and nowhere near as well as "reluctant." This leads me to believe that as a writer, you're probably better off catering to the butt sex crowd than not. But being the type of writer I am (as explained in an earlier blog post), I'm not really catering to anyone yet.

I'll check back in on this subject a few months down the line, once I have more sales data to parse and maybe more stories featuring anal exploration to give myself a better idea of what people like. Readers, if you have a particular preference for more or less anal in your erotica, please let me know in the comments.

For the most part, my characters don't have much to say while they're having sex. There are multiple reasons for this, and I'd like to share a few of them today.

To a certain extent, there are two major types of talk possible during sex. One is emotional talk, exploring your feelings with your partner. The other is dirty talk, and I think we all have a pretty good idea of what that is. The thing is, neither one of these really fits the type of stories I want to tell. I write mostly short erotica, and my characters are usually not seeking some type of spiritual connection when they fuck, so emotional talk is basically out the window. And I've always felt that dirty talk, unless done well and in the proper context, comes across as sounding like the "dialogue" in porn. Sure, there are characters who speak like that and I won't shy away from it in those situations, but I'm not going to include it just for the sake of including it.

I have always believed that words have power. I have believed that since long before I became a writer, and I believe it even more now. What I've discovered reading a lot of books over the years, particularly in regards to romance novels, is that dialogue is expected, but usually works against the writer. In short, most dialogue in books sucks (except for you, Nora Roberts, you write great dialogue). But since writers are expected to include it, they do, and their characters usually sound like idiots.

If you're a writer like me, and you struggle to write good dialogue, all I can say is don't push it too much. Sure, characters need to talk to advance the plot, and sometimes a little banter is good for the story (like in Put It In, Coach!, which is almost certainly my most dialogue heavy story, or No-Telling where Garrett's dialogue is key to setting up the twist). But for the most part, I'm okay with my characters talking very little. They aren't in the story to orate, they're in the story to fuck, and I hope that is what they are good at.

I like vampires. I find vampires inherently sexy. But when it came time to write a vampire story, I was stumped. In fact, I struggled with it for days before I finally figured out what I wanted to do, mostly because I went about it the wrong way.

When I decided I wanted to write some erotic stories for Halloween (which is my favorite holiday, by the way), I knew that I had to include at least one vampire story and one werewolf story. There were two reasons for that. One, I think that it's hard to do Halloween without those things. Two, I'm hoping that those two archetypes sell. A girl has to be at least a little pragmatic. I sat down to write the vampire story first, even going so far as to open a file in Microsoft Word called Vampire. I then proceeded to stare at the blank screen and write nothing.

The problem was that I was trying to think of any interesting new twist on vampires, and I was failing miserably. Every time I came up with something, I'd remember another movie or book that already did it. Vampires are so common in literature and film that it seems almost every permutation on them has already been explored, and that left me in a bind. I try to write my stories around a hook, around a scenario that is interesting to the reader. But I couldn't find my hook.

The key was when I talked the issue over with my spouse, who was kind enough to ask me what was hot about vampires in the first place. What was it about them that makes a girl wet? Suddenly the whole story came to me, mostly because it wasn't really a story. It was a vampire distilled down to what has always drawn me to them, breaking them down to the very essence of their erotic pull. I didn't need a story, I didn't need a hook. All I needed was my own fantasy of vampire sex, and that is what I shared with the world as Rhythm of the Night - A Tale of Vampire Seduction.

The funny thing is, now that I'm past the sex scene, I'm starting to get an idea for a story that fits those two characters. I'm just not sure if it's something I want to write or not. There's something perfect about leaving them as they are, in their one perfect moment. But sometimes a writer can't control herself, and has to move the characters on.Rhythm of the Night - A Tale Of Vampire Seduction