On Writing Erotica.

The ultimate selfie.

Constance 'Dusty' Miller

Writing erotica has its dangers.

People can take offense, and some of them aren’t shy about expressing that.

Our stories push some kind of buttons within ourselves. There is a sense of taking some kind of risks with a story.

It’s not quite the same as literary fiction, where making a cup of coffee and stirring in a couple of spoons of sugar can take on some kind of cosmic significance.

Some sort of deep metaphor, an allegory of life, and the absurdity and meaninglessness of existence…erotica and romance is about people finding each other, and perhaps finding themselves as well. It's not that deep, after all is said and done.

It’s just another theme, from the technical aspect of this art we call writing…

At some point, people always ask what you write, and yeah, we probably get this funny look on our faces when we consider how best to answer this question.

We don’t always want to tell them, either.

Telling a certain type of person we posed for our own book cover is strictly a no-no.

The computer had a glitch the other day and we had to take it to the technical people.

There’s nothing really bad in there, nothing actionable, anyways. Yet my grandmother might not have approved of some of the stories and some of the book cover images on the hard drive.

We had to let poor old Bert in on our dirty little secret.

The first thing Bert saw when he got it open was Germans In Bondage on the desktop.

Anyways, we got her fixed and it didn’t cost too much.

Erotica sells, at least to some degree. It doesn’t sell particularly well for us, obviously we’re not putting a lot of money into covers and reviews and cover-endorsements by famous authors.

We’re not going to make the bestseller lists with short stories and novellas anytime soon.

One of the big challenges with erotica, and romance especially, is that maybe we’re not going quite far enough.

There are a few things we’re not too comfortable with writing, and so we’re just not going to do it.

What feels a bit scary to us may be entirely ho-hum to the reader, in a world flooded with cheap ebooks and millions of good writers.

What’s really weird is that our sex lives seem to improve when reading, or even writing erotica. Hell, even our love lives improve, because we're at least thinking about it.

(It’s still sex, even when you’re alone. – ed.)

...what about love, – ed?

(How the hell would I know? – ed.)

It is difficult to say what would make such a book or story stand out from any other.

That would be the big challenge.

END

Constance ‘Dusty’ Miller always has something up for free. Check her out on Smashwords.