More, more, more

Erotica thrives because we enjoy imagining more and better sex than anyone gets in real life. In the series I'm working on now, the heroine is stinging from being dumped by the man she loves. She sees an opportunity to live out her deepest fantasies, and goes for it. Her anger at the faithless lover spurs her on. What moves the story into the realm of erotica is her extreme willingness to fuck, her ability to handle all kinds of penetrations and positions, and the wildness her living fantasy stirs in her mind and body. She's limber, luscious, wet, and ready, and the next day she's hungry for more.

One problem with this story is that the sex is so frequent and detailed that I'm having trouble squeezing in a plot. I've left the first 20,000 word story in first draft stage.  I plan to push on through the first draft of the second story, then rewrite them in sequence. I'm hoping I'll invent a few more angles that I can go back and add to the first story.  I'm not too worried about this. As long as the sex stays hot, the series will get where in needs to go. In erotica, the sex and the plot should be nearly the same thing.

Sneak peek revisited

A second pass through the scene I posted yesterday prompted quite a few changes. Now it feels like a good enough first draft to go on with. Here's a part of the revision:

We dress—if you can call it that—and follow the guy through a maze of hallways and down a flight of stairs. No brass and glass spiral this time, only a dim unpainted service staircase.  I'm wearing the shortest possible short shorts, purple with yellow trim, a matching cap with a yellow W on the front, my black feather choker, and my face paint. Nothing else.

          Holly and Skyla are better than me at managing the steps in super-high heels. I hold the handrail to keep from teetering. Though I try to hurry, I can't keep up.

          When I finish struggling down the stairs, I'm in front of open double doors. The guy who escorted us here serves me a grimace of impatience. I sashay past him with my nose high, hoping my body language puts him is his dickwad place.

          A pinch on the seat of my shorts makes me flinch, which is all it takes too lose my balance. I stumble into a tall bar chair. The back of the chair falls against the shoulder of a man at the next table. He's too busy running his hands all over Skyla to give me more than any annoyed glance.

          Mr. Dickwad gives me a wink as he walks away to tend bar. I regain my balance and look around. Old rock music and sports announcer nonsense blare out of huge speakers. In the light cast by a room full of giant screens, naked women come on heavily to men who seem nearly as interested in the televised football game. Beer bottles are everywhere. So is sex. Evidently there aren't any private rooms connected to the sports bar. Fondling, kissing, sucking, and fucking are happening at the bar, around and on top of the tall tables, in the booths, and on the couches.  

 

Sneak peek

Here's a clip from what I wrote this morning:

We dress—if you can call it that—and follow the guy through a maze of hallways and down a flight of stairs. I hold the handrail to steady the wobbling of my ankles in my six-inch heels. I'm wearing the shortest of short shorts, purple with yellow trim, a matching baseball cap with a yellow W on the front, my black feather choker, and my face paint.

            I'm the last in the line again. A door opens. Old rock music and sports announcer nonsense blare out. I watch Holly and Skyla stride into the light cast by a room full of giant screens.

            At the threshold of the piano bar I was intimidated. This place is lower rent. I tell myself I'm not scared. I pull my shoulders back, thrust my hips out, and try to imitate Skyla's entrance.

            I can't tell her and Skyla from the other naked women curled in the laps of the men on the couches. Hands wander over skin, but the eyes of the men are on the screens. Something happens in the game they're watching. The room fills with cheers. Beer bottles sway in the air.

            The screens cut to commercials. The men play with the women.  Tits go into mouths. Fingers find cunts. Heads dip to crotches.

            No one is grabbing me. How did Holly and Skyla get themselves taken so fast?

 

Putting out

Possibly the best-known quote about the art of writing is:

The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair. –

                                                                                                                 Mary Heaton Vorse.

 With that in mind, I'm signing off this post and spending the next hour firmly affixed to the seat of the chair while I plow ahead on my new story.

Going all the way

The new spin I thought up for my story is working better than the one I had to replace. (See yesterday's post, if you're curious.) Now the thing to do is push on through to the end of the story. A wonderful writing teacher taught me to avoid too much rewriting until a first draft is finished. Then you know the story. After that, you can rearrange, add and subtract, and work on the language. If you try to rewrite every chapter until it's perfect, you tend to never get finished. The most important thing about a story is--duh--the story. Many readers will put up with bad writing to read a good story. (Think, John Grisham.) Relatively few readers will put up with a bad story to read good writing. (Think, Raymond Carver.)

Writing all the way to the end before extensively rewriting also seems to help keep the tempo of the story upbeat. You end up with fewer paragraphs of ambling description, and more paragraphs of movement, action, and in erotic fiction, fucking.

If you read my last post, you've probably noticed how deeply I'm contradicting myself. Yesterday I wrote about going back to the start of a half-finished story to add a spin. Today I'm talking about the importance of pushing straight through the story to the end before rewriting. So you were expecting me to be logical? Stories are driven by emotion, not logic. The same should be true for writing. 

 

The spin

A story works better if it has a spin—some element, large or small, that throws the whole narrative beyond the edge of normality. This is my opinion. Others disagree. You see a lot of stories about characters who are (a) living in a realistic world, (b) not very good at it, and (c) extremely sad. Sometimes I find stories like this interesting. But not usually.

You don't need to have the spin defined when you start writing the story. In fact, you don't need to have much at all defined. A general idea of the type of story you hope to write is enough. Then dig in. Describe. Explore. Invent. The spin might grow naturally out of this process, or you might have to backtrack and add it more purposefully.

In an erotic story, the spin needs to be erotic. For my novel Mandi, it was the sex pills, first the Fire Genie and then the Master Genie. I wasn't planning on these when I started. Mandi was having a fine time and lots of sex right from the first line. But when I dreamed up the sex pills, the story spun off in whole new directions

In my novella Clytie, the spin was the title character. The point of view character, Paris, had enough going on to fill up a long story, but his life got far more intense when Clytie came on stage. I invented her on the fly. Paris was looking at the backs of three novice bull leapers who were about to be tested by their first live jump. It occurred to me that one of them could be a female. From that point on, Clytie stole the show to the extent that she forced me to use her name for the title.

In my Fair Warrior Chronicles series, the idea of a cave on Crete where six friends would be ravished by a paranormal presence was not at all in my mind when I started the first story. All I had for the opening was the idea of writing about a minor character in Clytie, a guy who goes around in a bull mask and causes riots at orgies.

Now I'm working on the first story in a new series for eXtasy Books, and the spin hasn't emerged. I decided to go back to the beginning and dream one up. Icame up with a pretty good thing about the point of view character being driven to sexual heights by dreams of mating with a huge bird. (Think, Leda and the Swan.) But then I remembered the eXtasy Books policy against bestiality. For some reason, I have a hard time with that limitation. They made me take out a great scene in Clytie simply because it had a scene with a woman fucking a bull.

So I'm back to the drawing board on the spin for my current story.

Writing wild

One way to get a good result out of writing a scene, especially in an erotic story, is to describe a place that's full of possibilities, and then let your imagination loose inside it. Say for example a high-priced bordello, seen through the eyes of a woman on her first night of work there.  I've just finished the first draft of a scene in that setting.  Here's an excerpt:

The room has a long black bar built in an S curve and backed by a glowing wall of red glass. The light makes silhouettes of the liquor bottles on the glass shelves and of the bodies of the topless women tending the bar. They wear black masks across the upper halves of their faces, derby hats, and white collars. Their red lips are pretty, their bodies are slim, and their tits are small. I wonder if the bartendresses are for sale.

          Men standing at the bar watch me descend the stairs. Their eyes follow me without any pretense of politeness. Some wear the business casual uniform of khaki slacks and polo shirts, but most are in good suits and some have on tuxedos.

          The women walk straight to the men at the bar and at tall round tables under red spotlights. Shapely bare arms reach out. Bodies sway under the touches of strangers. I stand with one foot on the last step and wonder where in this wildness to go.