(as part of my new gig writing for the ERWA’s blog here’s one of my classic Confessions columns. Enjoy!)

This month’s Streetwalker comes from a suggestion by the wonderful Adrienne here at ERA. When I asked her for some possible topics to cover she gave me: “How about plot ideas, how to keep works fresh and unique and advice on where to look for plot/character inspiration?” If anyone else has any ideas for columns, by the way, please feel free to zap them to me and I’ll consider them.

Now I’ve sort of touched on keeping an eye out for story ideas before, but it bears exploring a bit more. Keeping your work fresh is more than a little important for any writer, especially for smut authors.

For me, stories are everywhere – and to be honest I don’t think I’m special. It’s all a matter of keeping your eyes open, but most importantly PLAYING with the world around you.

It should be obvious that in order to write about the world you need to know something about it, but what a lot of people don’t seem to realize is that sitting in a coffee shop, scribbling away in a notebook while you ponder the imponderables of human nature isn’t likely to yield anything usable. Getting your hands dirty, though, will.

By that I mean really exploring yourself as well as other people. Look at who you are, why you do what you do – both emotionally as well as sexually. The same goes for the people around you. Spend some time really thinking about them, their motivations, their pleasures, or what experiences they may have had.

Dig deep — ponder their reactions as well as your own. Sharpen your perceptions. Why do they say what they say? What do people admire? Why? What do they despise? Why? That last question should almost always be in your mind – directed outward as well as inward: why? This depth of understanding, or just powerful examination, is a great tool for developing both stories as well as characters.

Along with studying the world, pay attention to good work no matter where you find it. A lot of writing teachers tell students to get intimate with the classics – which I agree with, but also think it’s equally important to recognize great writing even when it’s on the back of a cereal box. Read a lot, see a lot of movies, watch a lot of TV – and pay attention when something good, or great, comes along. Don’t dismiss anything until you’ve tried it, at least for a little while. Examples? Romance novels, comic books, documentaries, sitcoms, cartoon shows, old radio shows, pulps, westerns, and so forth. There’s gold all around you, if you dig around enough

Not for the fun – playing. Look at that guy sitting over there, the one by the window: Heavy, messy hair, chewing with his mouth open – easy to peg him as lonely, creepy, or even seriously perverse. Easy is a shortcut, easy is dull, easy is lazy. Instead try seeing him as something completely different than your initial assessment. Maybe his mind is lovely and musical. Perhaps his touch is gentle and loving. Who knows, maybe he’s a sex magnet – with more boyfriends/girlfriends than he knows what to do with.

Say you’ve stumbled on a particularly good book, show, series, or whatever. Great, bravo, applause – now write something like it. Who cares that the show will never, ever look at your story, or that the medium is long dead (like radio drama). Do it anyway. Have fun – PLAY! Get into the habit of automatically either writing your own version or fixing what you see as a flaw in the original. If you’re reading a book, stop halfway through and finish it in your mind – and then when you do finally turn that last page was your version better? If not then what did the author do that you didn’t?

I love coming attractions, the trailers for movies. Watching them, I always make up my own movie based on what I’ve seen. Sometimes it’s better – at least I think so – sometimes not, then I look at what the director did better than I did when the flick finally comes out.

Playing and watching, studying, that’s the ticket. If you keep your mind sharp, notice details, and examine yourself and the world around you as well as challenging and playing with story ideas, then writing a story for a very specific Call for Submission or for some other strange project will be easy and your story will be original and fresh.

(as part of my new gig writing for the ERWA’s blog here’s one of my classic Confessions columns. Enjoy!)

Of all the things to write, I feel one of the all-time toughest has got to be fetish erotica. Gay or lesbian – or straight if you’re gay or lesbian or bisexual – is a piece of cake. I mean take a quick look at it: the elements of arousal are obvious, just insert body part of preference and go with it. For gay erotica it’s male body, for lesbians it’s female. For straight it’s the opposite. You don’t have to create the ideal man or woman, in fact it’s better to describe someone (the lust object) who is a bit more … real. Perfection is dull, and can be bad story telling, but a body with its share of wrinkles, blemishes, or sags can ad dimension and depth.

Same with the motivation, the inner world of your character. I’ve said it before but it bears repeating: the trick to writing beyond your own gender or orientation is in projecting your own mental landscape into the mind of your character. You may not know how gay sex, lesbian sex, or straight sex feels (pick the opposite of your own gender) but you do know what love, affection, hope, disappointment, or even just human skin feels like. Remember that, bring it to you character and your story, and you’ll be able to draw a reader in.

But fetishes … fetishes are tougher. Just to be momentarily pedantic, Webster’s says that fetishes are: “an object or body part whose real or fantasied presence is psychologically necessary for sexual gratification.” That’s pretty accurate – or good enough for us here – but the bottom line is that fetishes are a sexual obsession that may or may not directly relate to sex. Some pretty common ones are certain hair colors, body types, smells, tastes, clothing, and so forth.

We all have them to some degree. Just to open the field to discussion, I like breasts. But even knowing I have them doesn’t mean I can’t really explain why I like big ones. It’s really weird. I mean, I can write about all kinds of things but when I try and figure out what exactly the allure of large hooters is for me I draw a blank. The same and even more so used to happen when I tried and write about other people’s fetishes.

But I have managed to learn a couple of tricks about it, in the course of my writing as well as boobie dwelling (hey, there are worse ways to spend an afternoon). I’ve come up with two ways of approaching a fetish, at least from a literary standpoint. The first to remember that fetishes are like sex under a microscope, that part of their power is in focusing on one particular behavior or body part. Let’s use legs as an example. For the die-hard leg fetishist their sexuality (all or just a small part) is wrapped around the perfect set of limbs. For a leg man, or woman, the appeal is in that slow, careful depiction of those legs. The sex that happens after that introduction may be hot, but you can’t get away with just saying he or she had “a great set of gams.” Details! There has to be details – but not just any mind you. For people into a certain body type or style the words themselves are important. I remember writing a leg fetish story and having it come back from the editor with a list of keywords to insert into the story, the terms his readers would respond to, demanded in their stories. Here’s where research comes in: a long, slow description is one thing but to make your fetish story work you have to get your own list of button-pushing terminology.

The second approach is to understand that very often fetishes are removed from the normal sexual response cycle. For many people, the prep for a fetish is as important, if not as important, as the act itself. For latex fans – just to use an extreme example – the talcum powder and shaving before even crawling into their rubber can be just as exciting as the black stretchy stuff itself. For a fetish story, leaping into the sex isn’t as important as the prep to get to it – even if you do. Another example that springs to mind is a friend of mine who was an infantilist – and before you leap to your own Webster’s that means someone who likes to dress up as someone much younger. For him, the enjoyment was only partially in the costume and roll-playing. A larger part of his dress-up and tea parties was in masturbating afterward: in other words the fetish act wasn’t sex, it was building a more realistic fetish fantasy for self-pleasure afterwards. Not that all of your literary experiments need to be that elaborate but it does show that for a serious fetishist the span what could be considered ‘sex’ can be pretty wide.

The why to try your hand at fetish erotica I leave to you – except to say what I’ve said before: that writing only what you know can lead to boredom for you and your readers. Try new things, experiment, take risks. In the case of fetishes, it can only add to your own sensitivity and imagination – both in terms of writing and story-telling but maybe even in the bedroom.

And who could argue with that?

(as part of my new gig writing for the ERWA’s blog here’s one of my classic Confessions columns. Enjoy!)
A friend of mine recently called me ‘ambitious.’ I’m still not sure what he meant by that — compliment or criticism? Put-down or praise? It’s made me think, though, and that’s always a good thing. I’d normally describe ambition as a drive to succeed, a persistence to rise in status, income, reputation, so forth. But what does that mean to a writer? It could be money, but when is money the answer to anything? It could be ‘reputation,’ but then a lot of bad writers are well though-of, even famous (are you listening Tom Clancy?). Ambition can also mean a cold-heartedness, a reckless disregard towards anything and anyone that’s not directly related to a goal. God, I hope I’m not that. I do know that writing is important to me, probably the most important thing in my life. Because of that, I look for opportunities to do it, to get it seen. I rarely let opportunities pass me by: markets, genres, experiments, anything to get the spark going, juice up my creativity, to get my work published. Erotica was one of those things, an opportunity that crossed my path, and that has been very good to me. I didn’t think I could edit a book, but then I had a chance to do that as well, and now have done 18 (or so) of the suckers. The fact is, opportunities never find you, you have to find them. The fantasy of some agent, or publisher, or agent, who picks up a phone and just calls you out of the blue is just that or so rare it might as well be just a fantasy: certainly not dependable as a way of getting published. Writing is something that thrives on challenge, growth, change: some of that can certainly come from within, but sometimes it takes something from the outside: some push to do better and better, or just different work. Sending work out, proposing projects, working at maintaining good relationships with editors, publishers and other writers is a way of being involved, in getting potential work to at least come within earshot. It takes time, it certainly takes energy, but it’s worth it. The work will always be the bottom line, but sometimes it needs help to develop, get out, and be seen.
Remember, though: “Ambition can also mean a cold-heartedness, a reckless disregard towards anything and anyone that’s not directly related to a goal.” Drive is one thing, but when it becomes an obsession with nothing but the ‘politics’ of writing and not the work itself, it takes away rather than adds. Being on both sides of the fence (as an editor as well as a writer) I’ve know how being determined, ambitious, can help as well as hinder in getting the work out. Being invisible, hoping opportunity will find out, won’t get you anything but ignominy, but being pushy, arrogant, caring only for what someone can do for you and not that you’re dealing with a person who has their own lives and issues, can close doors rather than open them. I like working with people who know about ‘Chris’ and not just the person who can publish their work, just as I like writing for publications that are run by kind, supportive, just-plain-nice folks. Rejections always hurt, but when that person is someone I genuinely like or respect then I’ll always do something better next time. As I’ve said before, writing can be a very tough life: having friends or connections that can help, both professionally as well as psychologically can mean a world of difference. Determination to be published, to make pro connections at the cost of potentials comrades is not a good trade-off. I’d much rather have writing friends than sales, because in the long-run having good relationships is much more advantageous than just the credit. Books, magazines, websites, come and go, but people are here for a very long time. I also think that sacrificing the love of writing, the struggle to create good work, is more important than anything else. Someone who has all the friends in the world, a black book full of agents and publishers, but who is lazy or more concerned with getting published than doing as good a work as possible is doing those friends and markets (as well as themselves) a serious disservice. Getting out there is important, and determination can help that, but if what gets out there is not worthy of you … then why get out there in the first place? It might take some time, might take some work, but good work will usually find a home, a place to be seen, but bad work forced or just dumped out there is no good for anyone, especially the writer. The bottom line, I guess, is that I really do believe in ambition, both for work and to find places to get exposed, but more importantly I believe in remembering the bottom line: the writing: that the drive to be a better and better writer is the best kind of ambition of all.