So where are we heading in 2016? Yeah, I know I sort-of mothballed this blog a few months back but what the hell, it's too cold to go anywhere this afternoon and any and all methods of housework-avoidance are valid...
In the wider world. it's not looking that great - austerity biting ever harder, for one thing - but there are still flashes of joy and hope and above all humour. Whether your portion of the Interweb is an echochamber for your own view of the world or whether you regularly scan around and check out a diversity of opinions, there's enough stuff around which shows human beings sharing their common humanity to offset some of the worst of the rest of it.
In my small corner and chosen hangout of erotica writers/bloggers/kinky people, there's also a mix of good and bad to contemplate. Amazon still seems to be fucking about with erotica writers in particular: both by their randomly-implemented rules on 'unsuitable' content and the latest trick of deleting reviews because a reviewer allegedly 'knows' the author - given the high level of peer support and friendliness within the erotica world, this is hitting our genre disproportionately hard. The 50 Shades 'effect' is still not, actually, doing the majority of writers any good: if anything, the glut of cookie-cutter billionaire/bimbo erotic romance is making things worse. Again, though, there are flashes of joy and hope. There are interesting books coming out all the time, and an increasingly visible community of writers: events such as Eroticon and the Smut days are thriving and my own DSW slams are starting to build a following.
I wish you a good New Year, and will leave you with this thought: erotic writing as a genre may not be a powerful political force for good, but what we authors can do is make someone think, or at least make someone's day a little more enjoyable, and that's something to believe in and take forward, at any rate.
