Day 10. Wow. ‘Herding cats’ is nothing on keeping track of a bunch of writers. But we’ve made it this far.
Today, Kimber Vale hosts author Ravon Silvius here. Check out their interview for another in-depth look at creativity, storytelling, M/M steampunk mysteries, and great giveaways from both authors.
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As a side note, I’m not alone among my fellow erotic romance writers, in hoping our readers ‘Come for the sex, but stay for the story’, as Kimber says. The sex is all well and good, whether it’s M/M, M/F, or whatever combo rocks our world that day. You won’t find a one of us who is particularly shy about that! But the stuff we like to write isn’t just skimpy text frameworks linking smut scenes.
Story is sexy. Story is foreplay. Story makes the sex scenes hotter.
I say this because there’s a vocal contingent of erotica authors on Amazon and other online vendors who are all about writing fiction that just helps readers get off, to be blunt. Fast stories with little characterization, setting, or background, just accessories to a moment of pleasure. That’s okay. I’m grateful that I live in a time and place where such things are allowed, rather than criminalized or hidden in the dark margins of society.
But for the AW blog hop authors, we tend to like things a little more complicated, a little richer, with higher stakes. That just makes the inevitable smut all the more fun, we’ve found.
So our readerships might not overlap that much with those for the quick-n-dirty erotica shorts on Amazon. The disconnect can result in Did-Not-Finish when one of their readers stumbles into a book that requires too much set-up for the payoff. Or angry reviews of low quality and derivative story, when one of our readers picks up a smutty wankfest collection that offers little else.
It’s apples and oranges. Both approaches are valid. I just wish that both readerships could accept that, when they launch into reviews. A drive-by one-star review does no one any good, author or prospective reader. Tell us what worked and what didn’t, in your honest opinion. (I’ve had one-star reviews that I cherish, for both good and bad reasons, because they either reconfirmed my opinion of my craft, or they taught me to be a better writer.)
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Speaking of sex scenes, I’ve just received word that I’m in an even more massive online extravaganza in late July: the 2014 Sex Scene Championship, sponsored by Scorching Book Reviews. Choices, choices, choices: I have to pick a published sex scene from one of my stories, between 500 and 750 words, and aim it against a few dozen of the best erotica and erotic romance authors in the business.
Eeep. I have several hot scenes from Moro’s Price, and one from ‘Saints and Heroes’ in the Cleis anthology.
I’ll be taking suggestions of scenes from my readers, from now until July 7. Bonus: if you enter a suggestion by then, you’ll be entered into my necklace giveaway.
I’ve been thinking hard for the last four days: which hot scene in ‘Moro’s Price’ would I recommend? And I keep coming back to the same one – in Chapter 2, where Moro is taken in the arena by the slavemaster Michol Kott. On one level, I’m horrified at myself for thinking so – it’s so brutal. But there’s so much to be won or lost in this scene, and there’s obviously something BIG going on that we don’t know about yet, nor do we quite know who’s on what side … and all this is played out against the engineered brutality of the arena system, and feeding the reader information about how this works as a business and as a socio-cultural phenomenon. (‘Socio-cultural phenomenon’? Lorna, are you kidding? Sorry – I’ve just lifted my head out of writing an academic paper.) So: that’s my choice. Seeing this snapshot of what Moro’s life has been like for nearly ten years, with the crowd going wild as he’s raped in the arena. It’s not pretty, but it *is* hot.
Anthropologists and sociologists talk about sex all the time, Lorna. They just use more complicated terms.
Ah, the infamous chapter 2. The one that started this novel in early March 2011, with the very first line ‘Throw the fight…’
A year later, that chapter got the query bounced with extreme prejudice from several major houses and one minor erotic romance publisher. Because there’s a safe little rule in many e-rom houses: no rape for titillation, ever, under any situation. It protects them from critics across many political and social backgrounds. But it’s disingenuous, from the sheer number of dub-con and non-con scenes that still get into erotic romance books, and from the fact that other genre publishers have ignored the rule all along.
I’m not a rape apologist. It’s a terrible crime and it ruins lives in so many ways. There are e-rom houses I will never submit work to, because of their track record in publishing stuff I consider too rough for even my taste. There are stories from the old days on Nifty.org that I really wish I could un-read and forget. And I’ll probably have a blog post about the double standards, soon.
Chapter 2 edges right to the dark side. For a big plot reason. Moro is the way he is, and it’s not from Kott or Lyton or even his Aksenna Sonta genetics. They’ve all just taken advantage of it. That’s why I turned down publishing offers based on changing or cutting that chapter, because it’s too central to Moro’s story. As it was, I actually softened it just a bit for Loose Id, because they came up with a way to do it that didn’t destroy the plot.
I can’t use part of Chapter 2 in the championship – I know that. But I am leaning strongly toward using Val’s later counterpart scene in Lyton’s cell, because it goes full circle back to the arena.