I know I look like a recalcitrant blogger but nothing could be further from the truth. I’ve got others, one of which I post to all the time, one weekly and one that got a lot of action this time last year but got put on hold as it was mostly just for me and was too much of a distraction from writing the follow up to Follow Your Fantasy.

Everything they say about second book syndrome is true. I didn’t even commit properly to keeping a diary of my struggles. And no, I haven’t quite finished the first draft. Almost though, another 5-7,000 words I estimate.

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I have been writing though. Getting a profile as a writer in general seemed like as good a way as any to do promo. And it actually pays directly sometimes. And I love it as I pretty much started out writing for a magazine. Sometimes I just did something for fun and cross my fingers it translates into promo seeing as payment was not one of the benefits.

For example, I wrote my first ever flash fiction after a workshop at my writer’s group and it got published on the aptly named (for an erotica writer) Fuck Fiction site. They don’t actually publish erotica and when the site domain name ran out because of a credit card mix up, they immediately got bought by a porn company and had to wrangle it back. My story disappeared and reappeared but here it is. The Line Up.

I got the chance, so I thought, to write for Grazia UK, but in the end they decided not to use my piece and write it themselves in their style which is less writing-like and more conversational. No problem, I simply sold the piece to xojane. Much more useful in some ways as it is an online magazine with high traffic. I got 500+ comments, such was the controversial nature of the topic. Why I’m Dating a Married Man.

Spurred on by this, I sold a follow up article to Salon, another massively read site, about lessons learned from dabbling on the fringes of open relationships. So many people refuse to believe anything positive comes out of non-traditional relationships that I wanted to tell it from the point of view of a “single non-monogamist”. 1.3k shares and prominence in the top ten most read all week. I felt like a real magazine writer!

That led directly to an interview with Newstalk Ontario 1290 CJBK. Ostensibly about the topic of the article but, as soon as, the host found out I wrote erotica, all he wanted to talk about was the book. A plug a minute – great!

Coming out as an Erotica Writer for http://www.lovehoney.co.uk was a fun piece to write. Now everyone knows. But my mum still manages not to mention it to anyone if she can avoid it.

I had a giggle writing a post about the dreaded word “moist” for my publisher, Harper Impulse’s blog. Another article that I wrote for them about the word choices an erotica writer faces, but they never got space for, found a home on the lovely Cara Sutra’s blog.

Whether any of this generated sales, only my royalties can show but it looked to me like the biggest difference might have been made by a piece I got a friend to write (a far more literary friend who could do it justice) for her Huffington Post blog. It referenced the Beauty Trilogy by Anne Rice in a discussion about erotica post 50 Shades and Anne shared it on her own Facebook page. She kind of missed the point of the article itself, but, who am I to correct such a star?

So, what has happened is that I end up thinking of blog posts but then wondering if I can home them somewhere else first. Several ideas in the pipeline…I wonder where you’ll see them!