Writing Process | More About Me
Eleven Personal Writing Habits of a Flowery Fantasy-Erotica Writer
From Emily Dickinson to Care-Bear Stares…
Content warning: This article is absolutely safe for work, but since my Medium specialty is literary erotica, sometimes with a rather dark theme, the stories that are linked might not be for everyone. Regardless, thank you for reading!
Last week Marie A. Rebelle graciously tagged me in a deep-dive article about her writing habits that was inspired by Subhi Najar’s questions about the writing process. Her article’s here, and you can find the original questions in Subhi’s article here if you’d like to give them a try. If you do, please tag me as well — I’d love to give all your answers a read!
So, as for the questions…
When did you start writing? Is there a specific story?
As far as writing itself goes, I can hardly remember anymore. I used to write stories about fantasy adventures starring my friends and classmates that I’d read for the class. What little I can even remember of them is embarrassingly bad — like, we went to Care-a-Lot and met the Care Bears levels of bad — but they were heartfelt, appreciated by my friends, at least, and marked my first venture into crafting imaginary worlds.
The first literary ventures were open-mic poetry readings, late in high school and throughout college. Stage, barstool, smoky wood-finished interior with lots of photos on the wall, and me in a black beret carrying on about class warfare and one-night stands. It was a hipster cliché through and through, but it also made for some wonderful memories.
If we’re going by erotica writing — and not counting, ahem, teenage Buffy fanfiction that may or may not have revolved around Spike — that would be “Season of Owls.” It’s a kinky everything-and-the-kitchen-sink Halloween horror romp that thankfully holds up quite well and introduces a character who goes on to become a ferocious heroine in her own right.
Do you have rituals in writing? If yes, then please share them with us.
Coffee, headphones, music. The link between being in writing mode and having a cup of coffee by the keyboard is so ingrained that, even if I’m not drinking it, I still need to see it there. Music varies quite a bit depending on the writing: brainstorming means creating a playlist that reflects the mood, while the nitty-gritty of narrative is either lofi (hip-hop beats to study-slash-relax to, it’s a requirement now that we say the whole thing) or, if it’s an especially intense moment (an emotional confrontation, a fight scene, or, you know, other reasons…), just noise-cancelled silence.
The ugliest monster that writers are afraid of is writer’s block. If you have a recipe to deal with it, kindly share it with us.
I wish I did, and it’s sort of something I’m struggling with at the moment after finishing a few projects over the early spring (that, and just being so busy with lots of life-maintenance work that leaves little time for writing). For me, it isn’t so much “writer’s block” in the sense of being unable to come up with a story; I do have elaborate story ideas and can daydream up plenty more on demand. The issue is believing that anyone else wants to read them, and when I don’t believe that, or I’m afraid of disappointing anyone who’s looking forward to them, the stories end up just becoming detailed daydreams with a “to-do” note. Having ideas is never the problem: it’s the often-grueling process of turning them into a well-written story for other people to enjoy that separates dreamers and writers.
So how did I get through it last time? Well, the secret was to stop thinking about how to do it and just do it. It’s like exercising or dieting, or quitting a bad habit like smoking: the process of figuring out exactly how to do it can become its own stalling tactic. The way to do it is to stop procrastinating and actually do it. It’s that simple — which isn’t to say that it’s easy.
Describe the process of finding ideas for your stories. Please elaborate.
Since my Medium writing focus is on literary erotica, that’s also what I’ll focus on for this answer. They come from a variety of places, some much more adventurous than others, and, well… let’s just talk about a few stories for examples. That’ll be much more interesting to read than watching me flounder and say “I dunno, different places” for three paragraphs!
“Elevator Pitch” began with the general anxiousness of being alone in an enclosed space with someone, and the sense of childish wonder I still get from riding glass elevators, and from one particular instance of sharing an elevator with just one guy and being overcome with quiet panic, an odd mixture of attraction (he was hot!) and a chest-clenching awareness of being vulnerable, that I was trapped with this stranger in an otherwise deserted building. Nothing happened, and I have no reason to think he wasn’t just a perfectly nice and normal person, but confronting that stifled panic in a sensual way became the starting point for this story.
Those characters grew on me (the lead couple did, at least — that sexy villain in the elevator hasn’t been heard from since) and they starred in two more stories. The third one, “Behind the Blindfold,” is much more literally autobiographical in some ways that I won’t get into as much here because, well, it’s very personal, rather steamy, and there’s an article that talks about the inspiration behind it already, and there’s the story itself.
But I also wanted to write about the role BDSM can play in a healthy and realistic relationship. A lot of romance and erotic fiction has characters who are locked into their dom/sub roles all the time, who never interact on an emotionally equal level, who hardly even seem human. One’s always on the throne and the other is always on their knees. That’s never been my experience with it (which isn’t to say it can’t ever be true), and so the story is about a relationship that includes bondage, submission, and safewords, but with a couple who can also be themselves with each other.
As for the supernatural stuff, it’s usually either a ghost story or fairy tale with a carnal subtext, or some kinky horror premise that’s marred by a tradition of misogyny and sex-negativity, and could stand to be dusted off and turned into something else entirely. The throughline for those stories, especially the later ones that I prefer, is “why is it always the villains who win at sex? Why shouldn’t Mina turn the tables on Dracula?”
As humans, we suffer without knowing it by choosing not to move outside our comfort zone. Do you have a “comfort zone” in writing ( i.e. a topic that you always like to write about)? Have you tried to step outside your comfort zone and write something drastically different?
Well, there is an answer and we’ll come to that, but I’m not entirely sure I agree with the sentiment. It’s a very, very common one, and I think it’s born out of post-industrial social Darwinism and American capitalism, this idea that we have to keep pushing ourselves to survive, that life is sink or swim. That hasn’t been true for most of our history, and I believe such a fear of becoming obsolete is what makes 21st-century life so stressful.
But there’s a recent literary foray that went well beyond my comfort zone, The Fallen Sky. My preference is modern-day supernatural settings, so it’s set in a post-apocalyptic fantasy world. I like to write about magic, and it relies a great deal on science. Many of these stories are about forceful, bodice-ripper erotic fantasies, while every love scene in it is consensual. It’s my first effort at romance with paranormal beings, the first (though no longer the only) story to pair a human male character and a supernatural female character, and it’s my first novel-length storyline.
You know, I feel better about having not written as much last month when we put it that way! Still, more stories are hopefully coming soon…
Besides Medium, do you use other writing platforms? Please share our experiences.
Smashwords and Kindle, and Smashwords was, until recently, the better experience between the two. Its team was more communicative, its sales data more transparent, and we have full control over our sales prices, promotions, and coupons. Amazon hides most of those features behind Kindle Unlimited, which prevents a book from being sold anywhere else. Those advantages have dropped a bit, though, since Smashwords merged with Draft2Digital, especially lately. Service time is longer and less helpful, the new interface is a mess, and the sales data is more opaque.
Right now, they’re about the same experience: Amazon has better epub formatting and a nifty page-design feature for promoting other books while Smashwords is still more accepting of erotica and casts a wider net across the online publishing landscape. But, knowing what I know now, I would have started with Medium, which has a much livelier and more engaging community than there is to be found through eBooks alone.
Have you published a book? If yes, how and where…etc. Plz, feel free to share your links with us.
Oh, yes, on Smashwords and Amazon (and Google Books)! You can read most of my stories here on Medium with a subscription, but The Fallen Sky is still just by purchase, and I’m very grateful for any support!
(Google Books is a bit more obscure, but one reader found that she could only purchase them from there in her country, so, even if it doesn’t create a nice-looking banner like the other two, it’s still worth a link.)
You write because writing provides you with something special. Could you share your experience?
Here’s a dirty secret of writing, at least for me — and, I suspect, for more writers than are willing to admit it. I don’t “like” writing. I like dreaming up new stories, bringing them to life in my mind, and fleshing out every detail within my imagination. But writing it down? It’s tedious. Taking all the liquid possibilities of that idea and freezing them into a narrative on paper can feel stifling; trying to capture the enormity of what I’ve imagined can feel overwhelming. And going over each and every word, every metaphor, every sentence and paragraph construction, the chapter breaks and chapter titles, and so on, is like declaring an all-you-can-eat buffet for every obsessive-compulsive tendency in my brain. It is not fun.
What makes it worthwhile is the miracle that emerges from all that work. This dream that was inside my mind, and only inside my mind, is now here on paper, transformed into words, into a story that other people can read and experience too. My dream is now their dream. The characters I fell in love with are now real for those readers too, and seeing them relate to the characters in their own way leaves me giddy, like a proud mother.
I suppose that’s what it’s most like, in fact: giving birth. That moment of conception is joyous, but pregnancy itself is a hassle, and then going into labor is excruciating and seemingly endless. But when it’s over and this dream that was inside you is now alive and a part of the world, you realize every moment was worth it. That’s what writing is like for me.
Do you write a paragraph, a chapter, or a story with the end in mind or not? plz explain
The first thing I know about a story is how it begins and how it ends (and since most of them are erotica, some of the long-time fantasies to be explored along the way). Since the dialogue does the most to help me envision each character and their relationships, it’s usually written well before anything else: it’s what came to me naturally during all that preliminary daydreaming. Then it’s a matter of laying out the chapters, with each chapter containing a conversation. This chapter takes place during the day at work, that one’s at home that night, and so on.
Once the chapters are mapped out, and I know they naturally follow each other and that no plot elements are missing, it’s time to start fleshing out the narrative within each one, beginning with all those messily scribbled dialogue notes and then filling in the story around them. They’re paced so that each chapter has a structure, a beginning, middle, and end that give a sense of conclusion while leading into the next chapter.
That continues until they’re all done, though it isn’t necessarily in chronological order; it’s more about which particular chapter is grabbing my imagination right then, which one I’d do the best job writing.
All of that sounds a little dry and mechanical, and the literary side’s important too! But those less concrete elements, like foreshadowing, irony, and character development, aren’t something that I plan as consciously as the story’s structure: they emerge from the characters themselves, from my beliefs and experiences, and the kinds of stories I enjoy. That part of writing’s different for everyone, and much harder to learn.
Every writer has an idol. Who is yours? And what do you find inspiring in her/his trajectory?
Hmm, I’m not really sure! As a teen, I would’ve said Sylvia Plath, but a lot of things along the way led to my realizing that struggling with depression while idolizing someone whose life ended in self-destruction isn’t really a healthy combination. She’s still one of my favorite writers, but her story shouldn’t be an aspiration. Emily Dickinson may count: she had a very solitary life, but she kept a sense of youthful wonder and idealism towards the world despite her seclusion, and I find her to be an inspiration to social phobes everywhere (oh, oh, let me tell you how much it irks me that Apple TV reimagined her as a rebellious party girl because we introverts can’t have anyone to call our own, harrumph, I say, harrumph!).
I don’t know if she really counts as an idol — at least, not more so than Emily Dickinson — but one of the first science-fiction books I ever read was an annotated collection of short stories by Ursula K. Le Guin. Not only are her stories fantastic, but her introductions to each one, her memories of what inspired her to write them, were so funny, touching, and generally down to earth that they changed how I saw writers. Those openings are what inspired the introductions to my stories here on Medium.
Does being on a writing platform like Medium help your writing plans? Plz, elaborate.
Oh, yes! There’s a much more enthusiastic online writing community here than I’ve found elsewhere, one that’s equally accepting of genre fiction, literary fiction, and transgressive fiction, and one that doesn’t bat an eye at writers who blur the lines between them. It’s been an ideal platform for sharing my stories and discovering other writers, and it’s now where my new stories make their debut. It’s been a tremendous help.
Marie tagged many of the people I would’ve included (such as May More 💜 Tales, Posy Churchgate - Writes & Edits Fiction, JK Mill, and Jordan Riley who still get tagged for being wonderful). Oh, but this time I can properly include Bradan Writes Stories, a master at maritime horror, and Rayne Sanning, who also writes beautiful and poetic fantasy adventures, since I don’t think they’ve been tagged. And there’s Brett Jenae Tomlin, a fearlessly honest blogger who’s a personal inspiration, and whose own This or That writing challenges are very much in the spirit of this one.
And for anyone who happens to read this, if you’re inspired to share your writing process and thoughts too, just let me know with a tag!
Each week I’ll be posting a chapter from the Dreadful Desire erotica series, a collection of taboo, sometimes forceful — but never degrading — sexual fantasies. You can find links to my Medium stories in this handy compendium…
