.


This weekend I won't be writing anything except a detailed chapter-by-chapter outline of the novel, as I'm now at the point where I'm just sort of floating along without any direction. I don't want to get halfway through the ms only to realize that I have to go back and insert some new thread or character that's integral to the main plot. Granted, that may happen anyway, but at least a proper outline should give me a better idea of what I need each chapter to do, how each chapter should push the narrative forward. So the wordcount above will be static for several days, but no biggie. I can make it up later. Better to write well, than write quickly. :)

One thing that's come out of my ms so far is rather surprising: I've written a couple of explicit erotic scenes, which I hadn't intended to do. I don't know if I'll keep them for the final draft, but if I do, then that means I can't pitch this novel as horror anymore, but as erotica. Horror readers may tolerate a fair amount of sex in their novels, but erotica is usually explicit beyond what is considered "tolerable" for literary and genre fiction. Once the first draft is finished, I'll have to decide whether the erotic scenes make the novel better as a whole, or if they should be cut. The bad part about marketing the novel as erotica is that I can think of only one agent in the business who represents erotica writers, and she's already rejected my writing (rejection by way of simply never responding to the manuscript her associate passed on to her, after said associate rejected me - it's been over a year, and she hasn't responded to my polite query, so I assume it was tossed in the trash).

It also means that in addition to being agentless, the ms will also have only a couple of legitimate print publishers that I can send it to. (No, I will never have any novel of mine e-published.) Understand, I don't have a problem with writing an erotica novel - much of my fiction has a lot of sex in it, and my erotica tends to be a bit dark and fantastical, so there's potential for reader crossover as I move from one genre to another. But it'll just make it harder for the novel to find a home. Which kind of sucks. I'm getting ahead of myself, though. I should probably stop thinking about it and just keep writing the damn thing. :/

Labels: "the ruins of love", erotica

FYI, I have an invisible site counter that logs the visits (and ISP's and locations) of everyone who clicks on these pages (I also have one embedded in my Livejournal). I've noticed a recent surge in people coming to this blog after searching on Google for explicit erotica and porn. As in, VERY explicit. Usually one of the words in the searches will link to either a past post or my novella excerpt. That doesn't bother me, and I have no intentions of taking down the excerpt or censoring discussions about my writing. However, I think you Google Erotica Seekers should know that searches for explicit sexual content on this website will yield nothing. I will never post any explicit erotica - excerpts or full stories - on this site. I suggest you visit the wonderful Fishnet if you want to read beautifully-written literary erotica. Of course, those Google searches tell me that that's probably not what most people are looking for, but that's another matter....

Labels: erotica

I think it's ok to post this, but I'm going to confine it to this largely-unread blog until I know for sure, then I'll post it to Livejournal: "The Unattainable" has sold to Cecilia Tan's anthology Cowboy Lover: Erotic Stories of the Wild West. It'll come out at the end of April from Thunders Mouth Press.

YAY!

Labels: erotica, sales

Another milestone, if a very small one: today I got the page proofs for the upcoming issue of Subterranean Magazine #6, with my story neatly inserted into it. It was sort of thrilling and nauseous all at once to see my name in the TOC. I printed out the entire ms, and flipped to my story. It's very small - I didn't realize how tiny it is compared to the ginormous stories by Elizabeth Bear and Caitlin R. Kiernan. Then again, I feel ok with having such a small story in the middle of such a huge issue. It seems right to start off with a modest size. I have plenty of time to work my way up to the big projects.

I'm going to be putting a non-explicit portion of "At the Edge of Ellensburg" onto this website, probably in the next couple of weeks. I need to have something up here that shows my writing, whether people like it or not. People like to read free fiction, and if I can at least offer a snippet of the novella, it might get them to buy the anthology. It's not just about sales, though - I need to show what kind of style I write in. It's important that people see that I write well, even if it's "not their thing" or they don't like the subject matter. At some point this year, I hope to put up a least one good story as well, just something that will show what my writing is like. I might post a trunked steampunk story - "The Girls of the World". It's one that I have no desire to resubmit to anyone, as I've already planned on rewriting the characters and setting into my novel "The Cemetery Queen". The story is good, although flawed - I think it'd be an interesting read.

I'm also in the process of setting up a new Livejournal where I'll eventually post what I'm calling "Antediluvian Juvenilia" - a selection of poetry from my college years, and a series of very weird dark fantasy stories/prose poems from 1995, only two years after I'd moved to New York City. The poetry is good, but not spectacular - but the stories and "ephemera" from 1995 have held up considerably well. I'm also going to serialize my erotic novellas there, as I have no desire to e-publish them, but can't find a traditional print publisher who'll touch them. Unfortunately, I'm going to have to keep the livejournal "friends-only", partially to keep underage kids from reading the erotica (as well as people from my workplace), and partially to keep some semblance of copyright. Also, while posting something on the internet does NOT constitute publication, there's still so much confusion over this that I think it's better to simply keep the fiction private, just in case I someday have the opportunity to legitimately print-publish any of the works in question. At any rate, I'll link to the journal when it's ready to go live - that should be sometime in February.

That's it for now. Back to reading about filthy 19th century Tacomans and writing lurid college sex scenes. Mine is the glamorous life, for sure.

Labels: erotica, free fiction

The story is now 8800 words - I swear, I'll spend the next seven days agonizing over what words to cut. It's not about "killing my darlings". With me, it's about repetition. I tend to say something, then repeat it in a smarty-pants "poetic" image. It's quite annoying, to say the least. However, my erotica tends to be more lush in general than my regular genre fiction, so I usually go for the poetry, even if it's a bit over-the-top. Erotica is the one genre where I feel justified in indulging my love of purple prose. I do try to keep it at a minimum, but I can't help myself. When you're writing about sex and all its attendant emotions, sometimes a little excess is the way to go.

Below is a small snippet from "The Unattainable" - this is a paragraph that I think I'll end up cutting. I'm on the fence. At any rate, it's completely work-safe. I'm posting here, because this has become, once again, The Blog That Nobody Reads (my popularity lasted only a day, lol). If I post it on Livejournal, I'll get tons of critiques and quibbling about how crappy it is. Really, I don't need or want that. Ok, yes, it's overblown and poetic. It's the end of a sex scene in an erotic story. Just enjoy the language for what it is, and nevermind that it's not Hemmingway. ;D

***
He wraps himself around me, sinks into me again, and I'm the one who drowns. Liquid-limbed, I sink into delicious half-sleep, floating through half-formed dreams. The land lies all around me, with me, and I am the Cascades, ice-capped peaks covered by his star-shot skies. And somewhere in between, three words thread their way through the night, a radio whisper of the heart drifting from one slumbering body to the other. Let me submit. I reach the black lands of sleep, a frisson of fear pushing its way in with me, as I realize I don't know where the words came from--from me or him, from the mountains or the sky.

Labels: erotica, revising

I finished the new version of my "brokeback erotica" story. It clocks in at a little over 10,000 words. Whoops. I can whittle it down to the 8,000 word limit, but I'm pretty certain that the length has done me in. There's less than two weeks before the deadline, which means that most of the space in the anthology has probably already been filled. Even if there's 10,000 words left to be filled, it's more likely that the editor's looking for two or three normal-length stories to fill that space, not one big-ass novelette.

So.... What to do with it? Well, I'll polish it up and send it out anyway. At this point, I consider it an "introduction" (which I always sort of did to begin with) - a way of letting the editor know that I'm appreciative of her inviting me, that I can write well (it is well-written, if nothing else), that I don't crap out on deadlines, and that I'd like to be considered for invites on future anthologies.

And then, after it's sent back to me, I'll send it out to a few other markets. If no one bites, I'll expand it to novella length (as a companion piece for "At the Edge of Ellensburg") and put it away as inventory. Maybe someday I'll have enough cowboy/Ellensburg erotic novellas written that I can slap together some kind of collection. I know, I know: no one gives a shit about collections written by authors that no one's heard of. Then again, maybe it'll become a must-have book for the good student body of Central Washington University, and I'll gain a notoriety of sorts - as the Cormac McCarthy of erotica. lol. You never know.

EDIT: I've retitled the story. It's now called: "The Unattainable"

Labels: erotica

I've been struggling with my annual ear and throat infection, the one I always get in that mysterious interim between summer and fall, when no one knows what to wear or if they should cover up or not. I've always called it "the fifth season", because it's not quite summer and not quite fall, yet this "non-season" seems to have a mind and purpose of its own. Ok, well, there's another story idea right there... At any rate, I'm heavily medicated and quite mellow, thank you very much. I'll get better in a couple of days.

Work on the revised version of the Brokeback erotica story is coming along very well - I'm starting to fall in love with it, which is a good thing. If I don't fully love my stories, then I know I'm doing something wrong. This version is right. I'm also in the thick of research of Tacoma in the late 1800's, in anticipation of writing Tacoma Steampunk novella #1 in a couple of weeks. Every now and then I panic that I don't know enough of the history of my own hometown, and then I have to remind myself that I'm writing fiction, and science fiction at that, and steampunk science fiction with a bit of Lovecraft thrown in to boot, and therefore it's OK to not get the facts perfect. That's kind of the whole point, isn't it? Although, I still have visions of people like my mother and father - both lifelong residents of Tacoma - picking over my various historical inaccuracies with horrified disgust. To say nothing of Seattlites: because in my version of events, Seattle will become Tacoma's bitch. But I say that with looooove. Honestly. ;D

Back to bed.

Labels: erotica, tacoma steampunk

I've been having a bit of a problem with the "brokeback erotica" story. I finished it, but it sucked. I'd done all the research, I poured over the vocabulary and the rodeo sites, I read up on my history of the American West. But when I wrote the story, it was crap. I could tell when I picked it up yesterday to read - crappity crap crap, the whole damn thing. All the research is just slapped on over the story, and anyone who read it would be able to tell that the author knew nothing about cowboys. Nevermind that it's erotica, and the purpose of erotica is - well, you know. You still have to have some air of authenticity in the world and the characters, no matter how hot and heavy the sex scenes are.

So last night I decided to tear it apart and do something a bit different. First, I threw away all the research. I mean, if I were to walk into some little Western town, I'd be able to figure out who was and wasn't a cowboy without an encyclopedia, right? And if I wanted to screw a cowboy, I wouldn't need to do "research", right? (ye gods, I hope not....) So I put my character in the exact same position that I would be in, because for this story that's the only place of "authority" I can speak from - that of an outsider looking into a foreign culture. Then I changed the POV and tense to something a bit more radical: it's now present tense and second person. I did this primarily to shake myself into thinking differently about the story - I might not keep it, as I know how many readers loathe present tense and go apeshit over second person. But it's forcing me to write the story differently. I can't use the same old tricks when I'm writing in a POV that removes me a bit from the character and situation.

And then, I did something very strange: instead of rewriting the story in chronological order, I decided to chop it up and present it in a series of scenes that are in reverse chronological order. In other words, the "first" scene of the story is actually the ending, the second scene is the second-to-last moment in the "real time" life of the characters, etc. - all the way to the very last scene presented, which is the "first" scene for the protagonist. It's exactly how Harold Pinter wrote "Betrayal", if you're at all familiar with the play. There are eight scenes in the story, parallel to the eight seconds a rider must stay on the bucking horse (or bull) in order to score in rodeo competition. That I'm using this specific event time to frame the story should give you a clue as to what the story is about (I'm talking about the emotional journey of the protagonist, though - not the sex). I think the reverse chronology is a nice way of letting the reader see the events that the protagonist goes through in a different light - they'll already know the ending of her journey, so the things she says and does without the knowledge that we the readers already have of her will take on an extra dimension of meaning. Hindsight is 20/20, but it's also bittersweet.

All of this playing with style is helping me to write a better story - however, it may ultimately make it unmarketable for the anthology. That's the drawback. I don't know if my style will fit the style of the other stories, and if it doesn't, mine is out. But I think I've done the right thing with all the radical changes. My story may not make the cut for this market, but at least it won't be like anyone else's. I'm sure it'll find a place, someday.

Labels: erotica

I've finished the "Brokeback erotica" cowboy story. God knows if I've done what the editor's looking for. I'm not sending it out right away - I want to hold onto it for a while and polish. It's not due till November 15th, so there's still time to obsess over it.

Next up, through the end of the year:

* the outline for the first novel I'll be writing next year, tentatively titled "The Cemetery Queen"
* the outline for the steampunk novella trilogy, for which there is no series title yet
* novella #1 of the steampunk trilogy (20,000 words max.) - again, no title
* a very short dark fantasy story for another anthology (3,500 max.)
* a 4,000 word max. erotica story for an online market (probably fishnetmag.com)

I guarantee it will take me longer to write the short stories than the novella. But I want to keep pushing myself to write stories, at least one a month. I think it's good to keep writing in a form that I'm not entirely comfortable with, because it forces me to pay more attention to language and grammar. It's like going to the gym: I wouldn't call it fun, but it's probably good for me. :)

Labels: erotica, tacoma steampunk, upcoming