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This is number twenty-two in the blog series, “My Life In Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community so I can afford to keep writing.
I’M TRAVELING THIS WEEK and confess this post was not finished in time to be reviewed by my fine editor. If he reads it now and changes something, I’ll update the post. In the meantime, I’ll just hack away at my own thoughts without benefit of review.
My major distributor of erotic books is Bookapy. According to it, I have forty-four titles published. I know there are six others that I’ve overlooked releasing on that platform. Of the forty-four, I’ve classified thirty as ‘coming of age’ stories. The six I will eventually release could also fall under that classification.
But I’ve more recently discovered another term that applies to many of the stories and a second term that might overlap it and be applied to other stories. Oddly enough, the literary terms for these genres are all German words of thirteen characters (and other terms that are even longer).
Many of my works fall under the classification of Bildungsroman. I first used the term to refer to my Nathan Everett novel, A Place at the Table.
Courtney McColl, a former AP Lit/Language teacher blogged her definition on SmartBlogger just a couple of months ago. I’ve found other compatible definitions, but this one is easy to follow.
In its simplest form, a Bildungsroman novel is a coming-of-age story. And it’s fiction rather than a biographical or autobiographical narrative. The writer covers the formative years of the protagonist’s life. Our main character experiences loss, struggles, acceptance, and growth (phew!).
Right. I already said it was a coming of age story, but McColl goes on to describe other requirements.
And it can’t be just a series of childhood adventure tales told by an adult for kicks and giggles. The child must evolve and grow with evidence of reflection and maturation. Society must also be present as an obstacle and/or catalyst for our young character’s growth.
In essence, the literary genre focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from childhood to adulthood in which character change is important. In writing erotica, it is easy to focus on the ‘event’ of becoming a man or a woman. In other words, sex. But just having sex—even repeatedly—doesn’t explore the protagonist’s psychological or moral growth. It’s actually a physical thing, like having a birthday or growing from five feet to six feet in height. The event does not imply the kind of growth that the Bildungsroman requires.
I’m capitalizing and italicizing the word because it’s German and they capitalize nouns. The meaning is literally ‘an education or forming novel.’ This is very much like what I described a few weeks ago in the post “Character Arc,” in which I discussed the Hero’s Journey.
Imagine my surprise in finding that some of my most popular books belonged to a kind of sub-category of the Bildungsroman. I sort of fell into it with my first story on SOL. People liked my stories about artists! In fact, it was listed as one of the features that people liked most in the survey I took some time ago.
Enter the term Künstlerroman. It means ‘artist’s novel’ in English. Like the Bildungsroman, it is a narrative about the artist’s growth to maturity. It differs, though, not only in the profession of the protagonist, but in that the protagonist in a Bildungsroman typically settles for being an ordinary citizen once he or she has come to grips with the society in which they live. The hero of a Künstlerroman typically rejects the everyday life society demands and continues to run counter to the mainstream.
I think of my ‘Strange Art’ series, starting with Art Something, where Art is definitely on the autistic spectrum and sees the world differently than other people. This emerges in his art, in his multiple polyamorous relationships, and in his relationship with his sister.
In the ‘Model Student’ series, Tony continues to battle with depression and anxiety, all the way through The Prodigal, letting it influence his artwork in ways that he can’t let others see, even while he enjoys a family with four ‘wives’ and children. And we are seeing the same thing appear in the ‘Photo Finish’ series, currently running with book four, F/Stop, as protagonist Nate Hart finds and nearly loses his photographic art as he attempts to conform to a system he does not completely believe in.
According to Oxford Reference, the difference may lie in a longer view across the Künstlerroman hero’s whole life, not just their childhood years. Though it takes six books to get there in the ‘Photo Finish’ series, the story extends years beyond Nate’s college years.
We could continue to classify kinds of novels according to the German literary terms, commonly used in literary criticism.
The picaresque novel (Schelmenroman) follows the life of a rogue or picaro, a clever and amusing adventurer of low social status.
The Abenteuerroman or adventure novel recounts the adventures of the hero in an entertaining and humorous way, but often incorporates a serious aspect. An example from my works would be Bob’s Memoir: 4,000 Years as a Free Demon.
A French term, roman à clef (Schlüsselroman), or novel with a key, has the extraliterary interest of portraying well-known real people more or less thinly disguised as fictional characters. See my blog post of two weeks ago on “Naming Names.”
In the educational novel (Erziehungsroman), the emphasis is on the description of the pedagogical influences and effects on the person described.
An epistolary novel (Briefroman) is a novel written as a series of letters between the fictional characters of a narrative. I’ve often seen this done by two authors, each taking one of the roles.
And, of course, we have the good old romance novel (Liebesroman), which places its primary focus on the relationship and romantic love between two people, and usually has an “emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending.” In fact, my first foray into the world of erotica, The Art and Science of Love, emerged from a deep need to write a romance with a happy ending.
To wrap up this rambling thought piece on literary genres, any of these can be erotica. Mine certainly are and I’ve identified several of my stories in different categories. But if it is good erotica, it involves not only the titillating sexual aspects, but it also develops as a good story—something that shows growth of the character.
I’m going to depart from the literary posts next week and write a little bit about “Fitting into the Industry.” Of course, I’m referring to the sex industry. It’s been an interesting ride. So to speak.
This is number twenty-one in the blog series, “My Life In Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community so I can afford to keep writing.
Sometimes I try to understand what I’m writing. Believe it or not. And words come into play that surprise me because they describe something I didn’t know there was a word for. Like “acyrologia,” which means an incorrect use of words, particularly replacing one word with another that sounds similar. Next week, I’ll take a look at “Bildungsroman vs. Künstlerroman.”
Enjoy!
This is number twenty in the blog series, “My Life In Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community so I can afford to keep writing.
I should have learned my lesson long ago. But even back then, we weren’t so “rights” crazy that I really needed to worry about it. At least I didn’t think so.
I wrote a long serial, way back when (Living Next Door to Heaven). It was very nostalgic. The story took place right where I grew up and I named characters after kids I knew, even describing their appearance, though the characters were not at all like the kids I knew. After the series was nearly finished, I decided to publish it as eBooks. Too long for just one eBook.
And that was when I realized that a reader could do a search on Amazon and recognize herself in my writing!
Oh no!
I went through the entire series and changed the names of people and places that might be recognizable. That caused such an upset on SOL, that I changed all the names back on that platform only. It still causes confusion because two years later, I wrote a tenth eBook in the series, What Were They Thinking?, and used only the new names. To this day, I have people contacting me about which character equates to whom.
I thought everything was taken care of, but when I published book seven (of ten), Hearthstone Entertainment , on Amazon, they blocked it. They would not be specific about why they blocked it and threatened to review all the books I’d published to be sure they met community standards and would cancel my account if they didn’t, if I pursued the matter.
Their only statement, when I pushed a little, was that they didn’t like the cover and some internal content. The cover was by the same artist as all the other nine covers in the series and showed nothing more than any of them did! The internal content? No comment.
Let me just say that the Jolly Green Rainforest fancies itself as a publisher. NO. They are not a publisher of most of their content. They are a damned bookstore. That’s all! End of rant.
After nearly a year of examination of the content and Amazon’s vague “community standards,” I concluded that what offended their delicate sensibilities was having used the name of a popular late-night talk show and its long-dead host. I rewrote the content using a fictional name and published the book on Barnes and Noble and on Bookapy. Not on Amazon. That ISBN was blocked permanently. So, I give that volume away free in the series. Guess I showed them! Um…
Regardless, nearly all the distribution platforms now ask the publisher or author if they own the rights to all the content and swear that no names or images of actual people or products have been used without their explicit permission.
So much for historical fiction.
That brought me to a dilemma when I started writing the Photo Finish series with Full Frame, Shutter Speed, Exposure, F/Stop, Over Exposure, and Follow Focus. I was writing a historical fiction. According to MasterClass, a streaming service with online lessons in many fields, including writing:
Historical fiction transports readers to another time and place, either real or imagined. Writing historical fiction requires a balance of research and creativity, and while it often includes real people and events, the genre offers a fiction writer many opportunities to tell a wholly unique story.
“…includes real people and events…”
The setting for the Photo Finish series is the decade from 1966-1976. It is a fairly well-known period in American history. It includes racial tensions, the Vietnam War, the draft, free love, drugs, rock and roll, riots, and protests. It includes The Beatles, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, Gerald Ford, Robert McNamara, 2001: A Space Odysey, Alice’s Restaurant, and M.A.S.H.
At one time or another, I mention all of these. What am I supposed to say when asked if my work contains the names of real people, products, etc. without their permission?
Note: This is a work of historical fiction. As such, names of historical characters, places, products, events, movies, and music have been used to set the context and reality of the time. But the story and characters are fiction. While much of the action is based on actual events or experiences, ultimately, it is still all fiction. Perhaps it will entertain. Perhaps it will take you to a similar time in your own life. Perhaps in rare instances, it will enlighten.
That is the official disclaimer I put at the beginning of each of my stories in this cycle. All the characters in the action are made up. They may have some similarities to people who lived through that time, but so does my Aunt Cora. People mistake her for someone all the time. The location is based on a real town but I gave it a fake name. The names of the people, the businesses and everything else about the town are fiction.
In other words, it’s historical FICTION!
I will say that I visited the town on which this was based and the librarians were both excited and pleased to help me research the community and get the atmosphere right. They went so far as to call in a fellow who lived in the town during that period so I could interview him! Even when I told them the story was erotica, they were so pleased that I was setting it in their little town! That was the inspiration for later setting a movie in the town of Tenbrook, and the town’s enthusiastic response to having a murder mystery set in their community!
I still have to be careful, though. I can’t quote a conversation with a historical character if it contradicts what is known historically. I could still write a conversation that could have happened, but that starts treading on shaky ground. I can’t send a character to the embassy in Nassau six months before The Bahamas became independent and were recognized as a nation. I can’t do anything that contradicts what is known. I can’t, for example, declare that Tricky Dick admitted to me that he engineered the entire Watergate break-in and cover-up. I didn’t talk to him and Dick is known to have never really confessed, even though he resigned and was given amnesty so the action couldn’t be investigated. Similar to other illegal actions that will be forgiven as soon as someone is in power who will do so.
Within those boundaries, I can be as free and crazy as I want to be. And hopefully, my generalization of a character living through that era will enlighten others regarding this small subset of people who lived in that era.
If you decide to write historical fiction, you need to determine what the boundaries are for your work. If the time was more than fifty years ago, you might be able to simply write a story about a dead historical figure. If you declare your work an “alternate timeline” then you can pick up anything you want and change all the details you want, because it isn’t what really happened. All you are using is a set of characteristics of the era to set the stage.
Regardless, Amazon, the great self-declared literary police force, might refuse to “publish” your work. Believe me, they won’t tell you why.
I drafted this post during a week when I was at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon. Great experience. But recent events have me wondering about the temporal nature of our words. Or as Hamlet said, “Words. Words. Words. Words.” Next week.
This is number nineteen in the blog series, “My Life In Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community so I can afford to keep writing.
In 1971, a British farce premiered in London’s West End titled No Sex Please, We’re British. In 2014, the play was named the longest-running comedy in British stage history. It was not so well received in America and lasted only 16 performances. The movie version in 1973 also received a lukewarm welcome and is rated 5.3 stars out of 10 on IMDB. While there are many double and triple entendre, and a couple of call girls running around in their underwear, there’s no sex in the show.
The reception, though, shows a vast difference in audience appeal, and there is just as vast a difference in the appeal of sex—even in erotica.
If you are familiar with my erotic works, you know that I tend to like a slow burn in my writing. It’s often two thirds of the way through the first book in a series—or even later—that there is actual intercourse. I think building the tension and expectation is especially savory.
Not all readers feel the same. I’ve had several readers in the past respond with comments like:
“This would be a lot better if there was some sex in the story.”
“Twenty chapters and no real sex!”
“This kid needs to get laid sometime soon.”
Of course, I receive just as many emails and comments that say:
“This would be a great story without the sex.”
“I just skim over the sex scenes. You don’t need so many.”
“I know this is a sex story site, but do we have to have so much?”
What’s an author to do?
In my currently running “Photo Finish” series, it wasn’t until chapter 29 of 36 in Full Frame that the principal character had intercourse. But every step of the way had a new experience: first girlfriend, first kiss, first touch of a breast, first bare skin fondling. There are so many firsts to be enjoyed along the way, and I took my time describing and enjoying each one. To hear some readers talk, the pressure, so to speak, was building intolerably.
But there is a cycle in fictional sexual relations, just as there is in real life. It may be better described as a bell curve. It starts out slow and gradually builds. When you reach the tipping point, the curve accelerates and it seems like there is always a drive toward more sex. Then life starts to interfere with the sex. There are no longer as many partners to be had. There is a job to go to every day and get home feeling too tired to do more than mow the grass that seems to be growing at the rate sex did at first. There are kids. There’s travel. There are disagreements. You suddenly find that you’ve been on the downslope of the curve and didn’t even realize when it had changed.
I’m on very good terms with my ex-wife. Love her to bits. We just couldn’t stay married. But I keep uncovering bits and pieces of our past (as does she) and we share them back and forth. Old photos, old journals, trip diaries, etc. In twenty-five years of marriage, we accumulated a lot of stuff. Last year, I came across the trip diary from a wonderful three weeks we spent taking Eurail from place to place and riding horses. I transcribed the journal, as written, and sent it to her and to our daughter.
“My God! We had a lot of sex!” Treasure said.
I didn’t remember it as being too much, but agreed it was a lot more than at any time after that trip. There were jobs and houses and a baby. Taxes to pay, meals to cook, cars to maintain. Another college degree, a new business, travel. I didn’t write any new books for nearly twenty of those twenty-five years, so sex wasn’t the only thing to decline.
When I got married the first time, I was told (warned?) that if I put a toothpick in a jar every time we made love in the first year of marriage, and took a toothpick out of the jar every time we made love thereafter, I would never run out of toothpicks!
The point is that characters (and fictional works about their lives) go through much the same kind of bell curve. We ultimately find ourselves on the long tail of the curve remembering what it was like back when.
In the “Photo Finish” series, six/sevenths of the first book is gone before intercourse. Then they make love as often as they can. And over the pages of Shutter Speed (book 2), new lovers are added and many many models come to have their inner being exposed in Nate’s photos. “Inner being” is somehow linked to their nudity and seduction. In Exposure (book 3), we find the independence of going off to college with its attendant opportunities and discovery of a new patron to drive a continuing batch of new experiences, but the increase is slowing to a peak.
In F/Stop (book 4), we find ourselves at the apex of the curve. There are still some new partners and new models, but the episodes are briefer. We’ve settled down with the family we want to stay with. Nate begins to question his lifestyle and why he would want anyone other than the women in his household. In Over Exposure (book 5), a lot of pressure builds to maintain his household, to get out of college, to deal with the draft board, and get the perfect picture. Finally, in Follow Focus (book 6), sex is almost an afterthought. It is focused on his immediate family as he has to go to work full time in a position that requires as much as 80% travel. And when another partner is introduced, it nearly tears the family apart.
There, I’ve given you spoilers for the next three books in the series as only books 1, 2, and 3 have been released so far.
Too much sex? Not enough sex? It will depend entirely on your taste and what part of the story you are in.
I believe the right amount of sex is what contributes to the storyline or the character development. I don’t—normally—write stories that are simply about the sex. I write stories in which sex is a contributing factor to the story or character.
SOL has five ratings for sex content: No sex, Little sex, Some sex, Much sex, Stroke. With any of my stories, my ex-wife would rate them “Too much sex.” That wouldn’t be equivalent to “Stroke” because it wouldn’t turn her on. I consider the stories to have “Some sex.” It’s there. You might be able to skip the sex scenes and still gather the impact from what happens after, but there is purpose to all the scenes. You can see the cycle of character development described in a previous post, “Character Arc.” By the end of the cycle, you will see what kind of man Nate has become, and what kind of family he holds together.
The Photo Finish series will continue public posting through approximately the end of April, 2024. The first three books have been released. Book 4 will release on July 27, 2023. Book 5 will release on October 15, 2023. Book 6 will release on February 22, 2024.
Mentioning the Photo Finish Series, which is still running, made me think of the whole topic of writing historical fiction. There are a lot of traps here, but I’m going to tackle “Naming Names.”
Enjoy!
This is number eighteen in the blog series, “My Life In Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community so I can afford to keep writing.
One of the things that I struggle with in creating characters is finding that character’s voice. What does he or she sound like, and how do I get that across in my writing? In reading the works of other writers of erotica, I find the problem is prevalent, even if not recognized or admitted.
My editor, Pixel the Cat, drew my attention to this when I was writing the post, ‘Talk Dirty to Me.’ He said,
"Something you kinda-sorta addressed, and I don’t know that I’ve seen it in any of these: personalizing characters’ functional vocabulary. Like Bob always describes how he feels using a certain set of words, while his GF Judy Lee has some overlap, but her own way of saying ‘good morning’ while her sister Jolene again has some overlap, but her speech is flavored by her time at college in Maine. That sort of thing. For a lot of writers, if one reads only the words they say, all dialog could be the same person."
As the popular Facebook meme says, “I’m in this picture and I don’t like it.”
I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time working on this, ever since a reader Down Under got so enthused about the Living Next Door to Heaven series that he had his sixteen-year-old daughter read The Agreement. She read it and responded, “Yeah. It’s okay but Brian talks like an old man.”
Ouch.
I thought I had done such a good job of capturing the progression from little boy to teen. But both the content and the vocabulary gave me away.
In the entire series of “Erotic Paranormal Romance Western Adventures,” I struggled to make sure the accent, vocabulary, and tone were distinct between the contemporary character and his or her time-traveling self in the 1800s. I had pages filled with Victorian slang and Old West slang. I read books written in that era for language use. I itemized the differences between a character’s speech in the contemporary world and his or her speech in the 1890s or even the use of Cheyenne words by two of the characters who traveled back as members of that Nation.
And then, making sure other characters around them in either era weren’t mimicking the same speech patterns.
Finding the voice for a character is more important than having a physical description. I might have one character who is a tall strong male and another who is a short buxom female, but if they sound the same then the reader is constantly depending on ‘he said’ and ‘she said’ to follow the dialog.
So, how do you make distinctions?
Many authors choose to spell out dialects. This can work to a certain extent, but you will find readers quickly get tired of it. And when a writer uses spelled out dialect, she needs to be careful that she isn’t spelling out words with a different meaning.
I edited a book about the Pony Express for a friend who confided that there were lines that really gave him fits. At one point, a youngster stubbornly refused to accompany a parent by saying “I ain’t goin’ to come.” The author’s father had read it and wanted it put in a more dialectic language as “I ain’ta gonna cum.” The author had to explain to his father that in much of the world, that phrasing could mean something very different than refusing to accompany the adult.
I prefer to use vocabulary and sentence structure to make distinctions. For example, the kids in Blackfeather (available on Bookapy) are ranchers in the 2010s. They use a lot of slang and contractions, and a little cursing. Their counterparts in the 19th century use almost no contractions and the slang is period slang. Miranda indignantly tells Ramie, riding in her head, to “Remove your hand from my privities,” and constantly reprimands her for taking the Lord’s name in vain. It helps to paint the conflict between the two personalities inhabiting the same body.
Perhaps one of the key items to consider in creating voice is to find the difference between the male and the female. And believe me, don’t depend on porn to teach you how women talk about sex. Porn is primarily (not exclusively) written for male entertainment. The language used is language men would use. Most women don’t refer to their pussy or their tits, for example. Those are male terms.
I always think of a scene in Living Next Door to Heaven 4, Deadly Chemistry, in which Brian has been writing sexy stories for Rose. At one point she says, “Orbs? I have orbs?” In that instance it sets up a nice exchange about what she would call them. “Breasts,” is the answer
There is probably no way you can learn to talk like a person of the opposite sex better than reading the writings of a person of that sex. This is one of the reasons I recommend the website OMGYES. It’s where women talk about their own sexuality. The vocabulary is impressive.
When I was writing Nathan Everett’s Municipal Blondes, I started a blog, stating right up front that I was an older man writing a story from the perspective of a twenty-six-year-old woman named Deb Riley, and was using this blog to try to find her voice. I encouraged women of that age group to respond to me and tell me how I was doing. I got a huge following of women in that age group who corrected me, engaged with me so I would have to talk like them, and gave me feedback.
It was so intense that when I started writing the first draft and posting it daily on that blog, my readers engaged with me as if I was indeed that twenty-six-year-old woman. In December, I took a short break around the holidays because it was a very busy time. A few days into the break a follower wrote a panicked note to me. “Deb, I haven’t heard from you since you took off across Belize with that guy. Are you okay? I don’t trust him. Don’t let your guard down. And please let us know you’re okay!”
Now that’s audience engagement! She’d completely forgotten or intentionally ignored that I was a male author writing this piece and it was fiction. To her I was that young woman named Deb Riley and she was worried about me.
Be warned: It can backfire. When I wrote the short story titled “The First Clue is You Can’t Find Your Coffee Cup,” I modeled the narrator’s voice after a person I knew and had worked for. When it was first published, twenty years after it was written, the editor of Line Zero magazine said, “A new and mildly disturbing voice.” Several years later, when I published it on SOL, I got countless emails decrying the bad grammar, telling me I couldn’t write, and that I needed an editor. They were unable to accept it as the voice of the character.
I guess the sum of this message is to find your character’s voice. Make it as distinct as any person you know. In fact, make notes on how other people talk. Jot down their ‘isms.’ Then put them together in your own writing to make genuine living characters who don’t all sound like each other, or like you.
I’m having way too much fun writing this blog. Sometimes I forget that I’m supposed to be writing a story at the same time. I think I’ll have a little fun with the next post. Is there such a thing as ‘Too Much Sex?’
Enjoy!
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