New Year's Revolutions: personal and political

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.

Perverse Parent Of The Year

OK, I know it was Erotic World Book Day yesterday as well as regular WBD (and do click that link and buy that book...) but some people seem to have got a little bit confused between the two.

Yup, a mother actually sent her 11-year-old to school dressed as Christian Grey, carrying a blindfold and a handful of cable ties. The school, predictably, threw a collective fit, and the mother has been having fun pointing out various logic fails in their attitude
.

(pic from the Daily Mirror article)

And she does have a point: it's not like Christian Grey is the only abusive fictitious ringpiece around. Kids are allowed to go as James Bond (who kills people) and Dr Who (who has committed genocide more than once) and Bellatrix Lestrange (who kills and tortures people)... Christian Grey 'only' stalks and perves over dimwitted young women.

Also, it is quite a funny idea and quite a clever, satirical one as well - it certainly points up the fact that most people still don't read many books (and don't get me started on how many kids' costumes on sale for WBD are for film/TV characters rather than those who have ever come to life between pages). I sort of wish I had thought of it (and it would have been even funnier to do it with a toddler who would have had NO IDEA what was going on). But the truth is, I wouldn't have actually done it to my own child, or any child under the age of about 14. It's not that kids aren't vaguely aware of the character, given the apocalyptic hype over the film - my own offspring has seen the (very tame) TV ad for it, and the posters on the buses, and asked me about it. What I find a bit uncomfortable is that the parent is driving this and basically making a kid the butt of a joke he is too young to fully understand. When he's older: old enough to date or want to date, these pics might come back to bother him in a more complicated way than the standard Embarrassing Fancy Dress Photo that most of us store up against the time our little darlings bring home their first dates. Hopefully this story will be a short-lived sensation, so Mini-Christian doesn't later on have to go through the whole messy, unnerving, exciting, complex business of working out his own sexual identity with an extra layer of pressure from stupid people's expectations that he will be kinky/abusive/irresistible. Or his adolescent rejection of parental values might mean he turns into John Stoltenberg by the time he's 21, though for his and everyone else's sake I do hope not.

But does anyone else wonder what this story would have looked like if some parents had decided to dress their child up as Anastasia Steele instead?

Feeling lucky? FREE SHORT STORY!

Things I don't usually do part 156...
Anyway, given that it's such an entirely suitable day and date to do so, I've uploaded one of my short stories to the blog. If you read and enjoyed Black Heart you will recognise the characters - and I will helpfully point out that the events in this story are supposed to have happened before the beginning of Black Heart.

And no, there's no 50 Shades of ANYTHING going on here.

If you like this one and have a particular fondness for gender blending and/or cross-dressing, grab a copy of the anthology it was published in.

Sunday Snog: Black Heart

I'm normally far too lazy, disorganized or otherwise engaged to join in the Sunday Snog but this weekend I just happen to be at home, awake, and reluctant to go anywhere, so I thought all those of you in the same boat might enjoy this little extract from Black Heart - two snogs for the price of one.

Feet padded along the hallway and Gary came back into the room; at a murmured command from Rosa he knelt beside Daniel. There was another prolonged moment of silence, and then she said, ‘Look at me.’

She stood before them, smiling, at her ease, holding a multi-tailed flogger in one hand, dangling it lazy by its little looped handle. Her leather trousers fitted her perfectly, caressing her long legs; her black shirt was unbuttoned low enough to reveal a black lacy bra and the upper curves of her breasts. Daniel had never wanted a woman so much in his life.

‘So much potential,’ she said, in the same soft, dreamy voice. ‘Pleasure and pain, and both together. Stand up, both of you.’ The last sentence was rapped out sharply, and they both scrambled to obey her. When they were both on their feet, she moved up close to them, close enough to touch, and Daniel struggled not to reach out for her, though he longed to do so. But it was Gary she went to first, lifting his chin with one finger and kissing him, lightly at first, then with greater intensity. Daniel was standing close enough to feel the tremor that ran through the drummer’s body, and he clenched his fists. Waiting his turn was exquisite torture: would she kiss him, too, or would she decide it was more fun not to? He thought of the night he’d seen her beating another man, how his blazing jealousy had mixed with a strange, compelling enjoyment of his own suffering.

Then she was in front of him, twining her fingers in his hair, holding him still, and her mouth was on his. The kiss was hard, demanding, sending tiny explosions of ecstasy throughout his whole body, and it was only with a great deal of effort that he managed not to wrap his arms round her and prolong it when she finally pulled away.

‘Face one another,’ she said. ‘Hands on each other’s shoulders, lean into one another, and stay still.’

Still dirty after all these years

Another year older and, yes, still in debt, but remaining optimistic. I do feel the need to mention that this year ended with a Significant Birthday, because such birthdays do make you stop and reconsider. I'm not living the life I thought I would be ten or twenty years ago, but in some ways it's better than anticipated. Though I'd prefer it to be like this with more money, of course.

As far as writing goes, it's been a nice, interesting year. Eroticon and Smut Manchester were both great fun, and I also got going on my own Dirty Sexy Words slam nights, which will be getting bigger and better in 2015.

My alter ego published a novella and a couple of short stories this year and I managed to get two short stories out into the world and begin on a hugely complicated new novel. Once again I am awed by the productivity of various pals who manage two novels, three novellas and fifteen shorts per annum. I should spend less time on Facebook and more time in front of Vintage TV with the little laptop, I really should.

And the wider world? Continues to be a fucking tricky place for everyone: austerity and inequality here and the most psychotically misogynistic terrorist group in the universe rampaging around elsewhere. Yet there are still daily acts of kindness, big and small. I wish you all luck in 2015 and hope for the best.

Flashbacks and book sightings: La Boudoir

Having been tipped off by the lovely Cara Sutra that the launch of the Boiler Room at La Boudoir Boutique was happening, I took myself off to the East Kent coast. Having been a student at the University of Kent I have all sorts of depraved memories attached to Herne Bay, Whitstable and Canterbury. I was therefore wildly overexcited on the bus from Herne Bay to Birchington and full of vivid flashbacks of motorbikes, men in leather, giggly post-party/post-coital stumbles homeward and all the rest of it.

La Boudoir is lovely, too: a series of beautifully decorated rooms (including the aforementioned Boiler Room which combines steampunk and dungeon aesthetics with some really good furniture and a tempting range of toys); friendly staff and a welcoming atmosphere. I was also happy to record a sighting of Books In The Wild.

It's always nice to see books on shelves and do a quick namecheck/headcount to see who and what is represented - I spotted Aishling Morgan and Kay Jaybee among others.

more than one bookshelf, as well...

A thoroughly good way to spend a damp Saturday afternoon - check them out if you're in the area.

Porn for men, erotica for women?

It’s one of the most persistent tropes there is: men like (disgusting, crude, blatant) porn while women like (softer, classier, more intelligent) erotica. Like most tropes, it’s mainly adhered to by people who don’t know an awful lot about either. It also props up another basic and unhelpful myth – that women want love and men want sex. While there are people more interested in one than the other – and a percentage of people with little or no interest in either – women can be driven by lust, keen to experiment with multiple partners, toys, roleplay and fetishwear and men can be romantic purists, interested only in the naked body of the beloved.

Sometimes, the boundaries get properly blurred, at least for a while – in the early 90s there was a small explosion in the provision of porn aimed at women. First came the magazines: Ludus, For Women, Women Only, Women On Top, Bite! And, running along in a panic and a little bit late to the parade, a UK relaunch of Playgirl, then the launch of Black Lace in 1993: a fiction imprint loudly and proudly touted as By Women For Women. Around the same time other publishers were busy launching or expanding erotica imprints that were not just female-friendly ‘Mills & Bonk’ as they were sometimes called – X Libris, Chimera and Nexus all provided homes for the work of a wide range of authors.

At present, even though it seems like the mighty wave of Mary-Sue-ish ‘virgin and billionaire’ cut-and-paste Erotic Romance is peaking and about to drown the whole genre, there is still interesting stuff going on if you know where to look for it, and it doesn’t divide strictly along gender lines. Authors like Peter Birch, Slave Nano and Charlie J Forrest produce interestingly filthy, but also well-written and empathetic works of fiction, and there is also a growing movement of  feminist porn, and female porn producers exemplified by the likes of Pandora Blake.

As with everything else, it doesn’t have to be Different For Girls.

Screwdriver!

**** EDITED**** Link to the rest of the party now works!

Fancy a drink? Those of you who read this blog for the feminist rantings might want to run off elsewhere for the day – or not. You might want to sit down, grab a stiff one and join the fun.

Today I’m piling on on the Kinky Cocktail Party which has been organised by Kristina Lloyd to launch the blog tour for her new novel, Undone, which centres on a cocktail bar. Checking out both the book and the rest of the antics going on all over the Web on the theme today is strongly recommended.

So I picked Screwdriver as a cocktail, even though I’m more of a pint-of-cider type, because I fancied talking about science, research and technology in erotic fiction.

I am an absolute bollock when it comes to mechanical, practical stuff. I had trouble changing lightbulbs until I started living alone in my late 20s and got deservedly mocked for trying to make visitors do it for me. However, this didn’t stop me having various goes at writing sci fi stories in my teens, and even having one published in the late, lamented Erotic Stories some time in the 90s. You don’t have to understand the precise working procedures of the internal combustion engine to have your heroine jump into a car and drive over to the house of the person she fancies fucking the arse off tonight. You do, maybe, need to know the order in which one switches off the handbrake, looks in the mirror, tunes the radio and puts the car into fifth gear, or whatever if you are going to mention these details because getting them wrong will make you look a bit of a dipstick. But given that the majority of readers not only know how to drive cars but do the basic list of actions involved in starting a car and driving it away so frequently that they hardly think about them, it’s actually a bit strange to itemise every stage of the process when writing a story that’s predominantly about sex and other human interactions.

With sci fi, or steampunk, or fantasy, you’re making it all up anyway, but it helps to think it through and make your making-up comply with your story’s internal logic. A story-universe full of horny goblins and Merrie England naughty peasants is not going to have its conflict resolved convincingly by someone Googling the problem. If there’s a bit of your hard science and hardcore BDSM tale of interplanetary buggery where someone needs to fix the landing pods, you might need to involve some sort of Alien Beans instead of Magic Woo Beans for this to work.

Either way, you can’t get by without a little research. Be aware of the classic tropes (and the relevant laws of time, motion, gravity, energy etc) whether your subject matter is spooks or spaceships. Writing about vampires, for example, means deciding in advance whether or not they have an issue with garlic and religious iconography and, quite probably, acknowledging the choice you made somewhere within the story given that, like driving a car, most of your readers will have some sort of idea of how to get rid of all those pesky biters.

I’m currently working on a steampunk story which features an orgasm-powered train. I did my research, or some of it anyway, at a steam museum. No, I didn’t offer to demonstrate my theory.

The Glory That Was Geekfest

Having gone along to the first Nine Worlds Geekfest last year to sell stuff, along with Miss Deadly Glamour, and had a completely wonderful time, I was even more thrilled to be attending this year as an actual speaker/performer/workshopper.

I am a thoroughly subcultural, non-mainstream old bird and always have been - give me pagans, perverts and morris dancers over z-list slebs and hipster hangouts any day - and one of the reasons I love these types of event is that you meet nicer people. Nine Worlds deserves particular praise in this area for managing to host an event that is hugely inclusive and accessible without the organisers ever getting tiresomely officious about it. It's just a done deal - all kinds of people are attending: everyone's got the right to be there and enjoy him/herself without being pestered or mocked or patronized or chivvied about.

To my great regret, I was only able to be there on the Friday, but I made the most of my time. Cosplay is something I admire but am generally crap at, being lazy, skint and not much cop at handicrafts. However, I did happen to have a nice gold frock in the wardrobe and, after some consideration, decided that it would form the basis of a Muse costume (given that my official reason for being there was to help Kristina Lloyd run a workshop on erotic writing along with a Smut Slam).

(gold frock, Cthulhu necklace and laurel wreath - job done!)

Admittedly it might have been smarter to wait till after I had done my bit before diving into the messy injuries make-up workshop and putting on a zombie face. But no one seemed to mind my sunken eyes and smears of fake blood.

Despite a couple of technical hitches at the beginning, our workshop went off well, and people seemed to enjoy being given a selection of short passages to transform from one genre to another (steampunk to BDSM, lesbian spanking to paranormal het romance, etc) and the standard of work read out at the later Smut Slam was pretty damn good as well. Kristina and I agreed that, in the spirit of inclusiveness and good sportingness and stuff, we would not give the prize to any of our mates even though several were in the room having been pestered by us to enter the contest in case no one else did, but luckily all the writers who were new to us were brilliant too, and it was actually a difficult decision to make.

And I have lost the bit of paper on which I wrote down the winners' names, which is extremely crap of me. But you were wonderful and I hope you enjoy your books.

Next year, I am definitely going to go for the entire weekend. Even if it means repeated 4-hour night bus journeys while dressed as some kind of alien.

Sex and secret identities

I was reading a series of posts by Charlie J Forrest earlier this evening while pondering some identity issues of my own. My concerns are to do with the fact that I have just landed a bit of a part time Proper Job which will demand respectability and grown-upness of me, and my most overwhelming thought is: thank FUCK my blog, Other Me's blog, both Twitter accounts and my main Facebook account are under a name which is not actually my real, legal, taxpaying-and-voting name, so no little beancounter in an office miles away is going to make the connection and fire me for the modern equivalent of moral turpitude before I've even picked up my first paycheck.

Nearly all erotica writers use pseudonyms. I can only think of a handful who write under the name that is genuinely the one on their passports and birth certificates (and no, I'm not going to say who. It's their business). In the 90s, writers tended to pick elaborate, glamorous names for themselves, simply because they could - and the recieved wisdom at the time was that while readers accepted that these names were aliases, they preferred to read the writings of Rock Steele or Violetta Harlequin-Hampstead to those of Ethel Figgins or Timmy Thompson. The other generally accepted view was, of course, that the male writer of sexy stories was better off selling them under a female identity and the majority of male writers published by Nexus etc in those days did put their work out with a woman's name attached. So my initial reaction to Charlie's concerns was a little bit more 'Calm down love, you'll hurt yourself' than 'How dare you tell such lies to your readers?'

But things have changed in the last 20 years, as I am constantly having to remind myself. Back then, the erotic writer just wrote her or his stories, the publisher published them, they got reviewed in mags like Forum, Desire, Fetish Times or Penthouse, and on the whole the readers just read them. Some readers might speculate about the actual private life of the author, and some authors might have any amount of fun dreaming up biographies for their pseudonymous selves, but no one really cared. These days, though, everyone, even the shyest of scribblers, has to have a social media presence, preferably with a picture or two, and engage in online conversation with readers and potential readers and other writers and anyone at all. And while a pseudonym is still acceptable, a pseudo-personality is not.

I'm not entirely happy about the demand to bare your whole self to the public if you want them to buy your work. I appreciate that people have been angry about a few bloggers and memoirists who invented entire alternative lives for themselves, changing age, sex, race and ethnicity, because these authors were claiming - or at least allowing others to claim - that they were telling an important truth. A fiction writer, though, is telling a story that s/he has made up. So it seems entirely reasonable to use a pseudonym if you are so inclined. Your work isn't about truth or about the unvarnished version of yourself. It;s a story. It doesn't matter who wrote it as long as it's good.

Goodbye 2013 and all that.

You might well call it an interesting year, in a lot of ways. The  zombie apocalypse didn't happen, at least (sorry, have just got around to reading World War Z and am therefore quite glad) though we do seem to have more than our fair share of soulless, brainless, shambling undead in positions of power, which is not so good.

(that's me in zombie drag by the way)

In personal terms, well, I think I'll skip any boring on about repeated tedious (but not, ultimately, dangerous) health scares or the usual freelancer's struggle to get paid on time, or at all, in some cases. It's worth pausing for a moment to raise the Parting Glass to the unhappily high amount of friends who went back into the great atomic stream of the universe this year: Hazel, Velda, Nick, Bill, Clare, none forgotten.

Professionally, it's been what you might call a reawakening. After two or three years of really not writing very much and leaving fiction almost entirely alone I, like a few other people, got swept into the post-50-Shades excitement, and produced one novel, one novella and eight short stories. (Skim through previous posts for details of what and where and how to acquire your own copy). Yes, it looks a bit lame compared to the output of some of my new pals, but it's a start.

Ah, new pals. At the end of May I was invited along to the relaunch of In The Flesh, an evening of erotic readings in a Soho bar. Though that's seemingly in suspended animation at the moment, reading my work there led to invites to participate in readings at Sh!  and later to join the BritBabes and the Smutters and a whole gang of fellow erotic writers at Erotica. There is a bit of a belief among the general public that authors are twitchy, paranoid, competitive and obnoxious, and though I'd be inclined to believe that when it comes to the white, male, 'literary' types there's a bit of willywaving and snipey exchanges via the broadsheet newspapers, writers of erotica tend to be lovely, friendly, mutually supportive and forever ready to put their heads together and dream up new ways of introducing more readers to the masses of good stuff that's out there.

It does perhaps have to be mentioned, though, that this may be partly down to a shared need for support and encouragement given that not all the publishers in the field seem to be pulling their weight. Whether it's the shoulder-shrugging expectation that authors can bloody well do their own promo and, well, if it works that's nice but if it doesn't, whatever... - or the hassle it can be to get paid even when you're selling, it's unsurprising that there's a bit of a drift towards self-publishing. And perhaps even more unsurprising that self-publishing of erotica has been getting a bit of a kicking off the big boys and girls in the name of 'taste and decency'.

So I'm heading into 2014 with a degree of optimism. Censorship attempts from both the government and the big online booksellers have not, actually, gone down very well with the ebook-loving public, while live reading events have been attracting enthusiastic punters all over the place. And I have this massively good idea for a new book, as well...

Sh! Oh and no shit Sherlock.

After another excellent evening at the Sh! Xmas Reading Slam I was feeling once again quite benign towards the world and proud to be part of the goodhearted, entertaining and multi-talented gang that is the British-based erotic writing community.

It's possible (or shall we say inevitable) that one of the reasons erotic writers tend to look out for one another, support each other and offer help unaided is that we know we're still a bit of a marginalized bunch, either ridiculed for our supposedly poor writing skills (yes, we know, because 50 Shades, but the existence of a lot of piss-awful crime novels doesn't stop the likes of Ian Rankin or Mo Hayder being good writers) or condemned as sickos who are a menace to society..
So the kerfuffel that's come up this weekend around Caitlin Moran and her oh-so-clever pisstake of fanfic writers was a bit interesting. The contrast between the generally dignified behaviour of the fanfic writer whose work Moran used without permission to take the general piss out of fanfic, and Moran's own behaviour in thinking it was a good idea in the first place is startling and infuriating. Quite a lot of 'successful' journalists are very quick to dismiss and belittle the work of independents, or amateurs, or people whose interests are not particularly mainstream. In some cases this is about reinforcing the well-paid writer and his/her readers' sense of their own normality. A big deal is made about 'objectivity' in journalism (which is, if you look at it closely, almost always a matter of writing from the viewpoint of a heterosexual white man with a reasonably good education, or as near as possible to those parameters). But sometimes it's a matter of reinforcing a hierarchy - the desirable are inside the gates, the 'outsiders' merit only derision, because otherwise they might start getting ideas above their station.
Still, the fact that Moran is getting her arse kicked round all four corners of the Internet might just teach her that holding someone up to ridicule and contempt just because you can is not great journalism or even crouw-pleasing entertainment, it's just playground spite.

Doesn't matter what you wear, just as long as you are there: the LFF.

There's quite a busy buzz going round about this Sunday's London Fetish Fair, which is of course an excellent thing. It's moved to a new venue, which sounds terrific: the last one was very nice but simply too small for the event. As I rummaged around for the various components of the stock bags (everything having been vigorously redistributed round the office to get ready for Erotica the other week) I started reminiscing about the years I've spent standing behind a table piled with books and bits and pieces. A whole sixteen of them. Way back at the beginning, I was writing the Clubs column for Forum magazine, amongst other things, and used to sell, with the agreement of the then-publisher, copies of the current issue and any stray back issues we had around the office. Over the years, the stall which had generally been known as 'Zak's stall' or 'The Forum stall' turned into the Guild of Erotic Writers Stall selling Guild membership and copies of our anthologies along with printed slave contracts (a line of stock that always generated about ten times more press coverage than sales)  whatever I could liberate from the review cupboard into the early stages of Decadent Media, and now that's what it is today: a mix of books acquired from various sources, badges, stickers, fridge magnets and assorted bright ideas.

I've been with the LFF in a variety of locations: some nice and others less so. Moving around is no bad thing and sometimes necessary. Venues change hands and new owners either shriek with horror at the mere mention of sex and refuse to host, or operate a policy of not-so-benign neglect such as allowing the bar to run out of not just beer but any alcohol at all. Even when things went a bit wonky, as they occasionally did over the years, it's always been fun, it's always been interesting, and it's never been quite the same twice. And most of the time it's been marvellous. For at least the first four or five years of its existence, I used to recommend it both to new friends and in print as the best place to go if you were new to the whole fetish scene - you don't have to dress up, you are not going to be turned upside down and fucked up the bum the minute you step through the door (you'd have to wait till the afterparty and even then it would only get anywhere near happening if you asked very nicely) and the place is always full of friendly, cheerful and often very knowledgable people. I still would recommend it for the exact same reasons, but people these days are more able to look it up online for themselves.

So if you're new to the scene, or a full on fetish veteran, a player or a watcher, or just someone who fancies picking up something that will really blow heads off at the office party, stroll on down this Sunday.

I'll be the one behind the table of books and badges and stuff, and mine's a pint.

Books and bums and badges and beer - Erotica revisited.

 

Well, the new venue's an improvement on Olympia in many ways. Tobacco Dock is a lovely steampunky setting full of corridors and little rooms, so the vibe was rather more of an upmarket shopping centre than a lairy great aircraft hanger. And the endless subdivisions of the showspace did make it a bit easier to stay unaffected by the sound from the live shows. In former years, the stage noise was the thing that the traders tended to hate the most: not just the volume but the repetition, as there were something like six shows a day for three days, and every show the same. I still can't hear the opening riff to You Can Leave Your Hat On without swearing to myself.

 

The stand, organised by the wonderful Smutters queens Lucy Felthouse and Victoria Blisse was a couple of tables in a corridor, but this actually worked to our collective advantage, especially on Saturday when we were mob-handed and we had an amp and a microphone. We got a lot of through traffic, even if a percentage of it only wanted to ask for diretions to the loo... I've said it before but it's worth saying again: erotic writers seem to be such a lovely bunch of people. There's a lot of mutual support and enthusiasm and friendliness - perhaps because we're still seen, to an extent, as a rather strange minority so it's extra-delightful just to hang out with our peers and not have to go through the usual 'No, I haven't really done everything I write about. No, actually, I don't want to do any hands-on research with you, mate.'

 

The visiting public were enthusiastic and friendly as well, with books shifting rapidly to the extent that Victoria and Lucy were probably going home with empty suitcases. As I don't currently have much that's in print form, I took a scaled-down version of the Decadent Media badge tray with me, and that seemed to appeal to punters as well. I've certainly come back from my two days in Tobacco Dock feeling revitalised and inspired and ready to write a lot more stuff, which makes a change from past events when I often came home knackered, hungover and with a head that just spun with the line 'better luck next year.'

Writers' gigs, my new favourite thing

Erotica writers are really lovely people. Not just 'normal' people, as the slightly condescending Women Behind Erotic Fiction project insists - Ooo, look! They're not all actually running around with their fannies out and doing strange things with the contents of the bathroom cabinet! - but friendly, witty, kind and thoroughly supportive of one another. I've only met two absolute whangers over the couple of decades since I started getting involved in the erotic fiction business, and one was a walking advert for why Twelve Step programmes are useless, the other a self-aggrandizing silly moo who has long since disappeared.

But over the past few months, as I've been exploring the world of erotic fiction reading events, I've found nothing but fabulous new friends, and I'm remembering and rediscovering all sorts of things I had totally forgotten about.

(pic from the SH! website)

Last night I went along to the Sh! Erotic Poetry and Reading Slam in Hoxton Square, and had a most excellent time, as I had sort of expected. OK, anything involving free drinks and cakes and smut is going to appeal to me, but there was something else going on as well and when I got home I was full of ecstatic tipsy jabbering and sat up till about 4pm telling my long-suffering co-parent about All This Stuff Is So Exciting. Because it is. Way way back - in 1995 as it happens, I was involved in setting up the Guild of Erotic Writers. This was pretty much pre-Internet (yes, I know that there were dial-up bulletin boards and the Net existed, but it was still mainly used by geeks and freaks - I actually devoted about three pages of a book I wrote in '96 to describing the arcane and complex process of going to a Special Internet Café and Sending Someone An Email), and one of the reasons the Guild was begun was in recognition that erotic writers were a slightly lonely lot, and would jump at the chance to meet others of their kind. We held conferences, with panel discussions on a set theme, and there would always be drinks and a buffet afterwards (the fact that these often ended up with me shagging a publisher is quite another matter). The mid-90s was a reasonably good era for erotica, particularly stuff aimed at a female audience: it seemed as though a new imprint was being launched practically every month.

Over the years, though, the whole thing seemed to fizzle out: Headline Liasons, Idol, Sapphire, Nexus all bit the dust, and the Guild had faded away around the turn of the century for various reasons. But now there seems to be a whole lot of new life in the erotica genre, and it's not just down to EL James; the momentum's been gathering for a while. And these days, there's so much more opportunity for people to get their fantasies and feelings and filth out there to a wider audience.

I'm looking forward to whatever's going to happen next.

Bunch of arse - or not?

Yes, I changed the profile picture. Yes, it used to be a picture of my arse, and I decided to remove it.

Oh please, put your tissues down. It was just an arse, and a clothed arse at that. And a very old pic, taken as a favour one night in the old studio around the inception of the very wonderful SharkInfestedWaters website, though I have a feeling the particular image was destined for use on a flyer for a club I was then running. The picture later got re-used as a book cover.

Yes, it was about the only useful and appropriate picture I had handy. And, for a book about shagging, well, it's a picture of an arse, in PVC. And, for a while, for a blog which is, if not about shagging then about sexual behaviour and erotic fiction (when not ranting about general politics, feminism, atheism and market trading) that was also a useful and appropriate picture. 

Only I've gone off the idea of waving my arse at people in a general sort of way. For one thing, I don't want to perpetuate the idea that every woman into kink really really wants to bend over and wave her arse at Her Master. I'm a top, end of. So until I can manage to coordinate a photoshoot of me doing something fiendish to some fit bloke's arse, profile pics will consist of items from the stock cupboard.

And speaking of which, if you fancy buying the book depicted above, please do! It's not a bad little effort even though it's over 10 years old and Of Its Time ie issues that could have been solved by Googling have to be solved by other measures and all that.

Authenticity and the Wank Break

I spend a certain amount of my time pointing out to people that sex is just another recreational activity, and that it's stupid to insist that everything to do with sex has to remain in the ghetto called SEX and be treated as  different, special, dangerous, etc. While it's not at all unreasonable for people to get outraged about the exploitation and shitty working conditions some sex workers experience, it's stupid to insist that the sex industry should be totally banned on the grounds that people within it are mistreated while ignoring the abuse and suffering that goes on in the catering and clothing industries. And no, I'm not whining about being forced to work late and poop-scoop for the creative director's chihuahua if you're a junior fashion PR, I do mean the child labourers locked in their factories sewing pictures of cartoon characters onto jackets for pennies a day, and the cockle pickers who drowned at Morecambe. We should all try to make sure that our pleasures come from a reasonably ethical source, at least as much as we can afford.

When it comes to fiction-writing, though, there's one bit of received wisdom that does seem to make sex a bit of a special category, and that's the wank break. I doubt I invented the concept, but I have certainly peddled it a fair bit over the years. It's this: if you are writing erotic fiction, and you finish a piece of erotic fiction without having stopped for a wank or at least really, really wanted to do so, then what you have written probably isn't very good.

(pic nicked at random off the interweb)

I still think it's true, of course: if you've written an entire erotic story and not had the faintest urge to put your hand in your pants or go and grab a nearby playmate then your story is not likely to be all that erotic. Erotic fiction is still the baby of fiction genres, which means that every unpublishable cash-hungry buckethead thinks that/s/he could 'churn some out' to make some money, and they are all completely wrong. Writing good erotic fiction is like writing good fiction of any kind: you have to care about it and enjoy it or it's going to be unreadable crap. It might, of course, be unreadable crap even if you care a lot, but it won't be as unpleasantly unreadable as the stuff produced by people who really don't care about a word they have written.

Fiction should engage you, make you think, make you care, make you want to do... something. And it's only right that good erotic fiction should make you want an orgasm - but it probably isn't the case that good crime fiction should make you want to go and kill somebody. I used to make faces at the people who asked me if I'd personally done all the sex acts I wrote about, and ask them how many people they thought Agatha Christie or Ruth Rendell or Sara Paretsky had killed while they were writing their (good, honest, satisfying) books. That's probably the only argument in favour of treating erotic entertainment as a special category that I haven't yet found a counter to.

Minor Erotic Writer Fail

Back in the days of the Guild, when erotic writing was on all of our minds a lot, we used to discuss the way in which almost every experience could be turned into some form of erotic story. I have, admittedly, long maintained that there is nothing in this world that someone, somewhere, wouldn't want to have a wank over, and I say this as a former reader of erotic fiction submissions who is still haunted by the Bloke With A Thing About Teatowels. Whose manuscript was illustrated with little drawings of... oh go on, work it out.

(image 'borrowed' from seller of fabric items)

And I did also have a bit of a chat with the Countess at the weekend over where and how Stuff turns into Stories, and it's not just a matter of 'Oh, I'll put you and your entourage of naughty boys into a book, because there's all  these filtration processes and clever stuff wot I does and all that...' It is, in fact, quite entertaining to look back at a piece of work and pick out the odds and ends that almost unconsciously made their way in there.  But I'm going to have a job putting this week's experiences into a horny one-handed read, I think.

Basically I have been, very briefly, in hospital, and I am now utterly baffled by medical fetishists. I couldn't find anything arousing at all in the blue pyjamas and nylon hats most of the staff were attired in. And, as a top in BDSM terms, I'm not wild about being chopped into and given pain, even if the drugs were pretty damn good. I suppose if I ever decide to have another go at horror fiction I might utilise the Walk of Doom, where you follow a medical professional down endless corridors, in your barearse nightie and your own slippers, to the place where you will be laid on a bed and operated on, but it's probably been done already. 

Though the main gripe I really had about the whole business was the lack of anything good to read once my own choice of literature (a fairly lame bit of vampire romance, since you ask) had been locked away. Four month old Mail on Sunday supplements, leaflets on incontinence or planning your funeral, or the final horror: Hello magazine. I think perhaps I should gather together some of my stock of out-of-print erotica by other people and donate it to the local day unit. Or, if I have to go back in there again, maybe I should try to think of this poor chap.

(image found somewhere on the web and used by someone else taking the piss out of it)

My little big thrill

OK, so it was another of those irrationally quiet and customer-free days on the market. I say irrational because I simply don't understand why people weren't out and about on what was apparently the Last Lovely Day of the year, but they weren't. So I might have come home dispirited. But I didn't. Not in the least. Because the Good Thing happened.

I expect you've all got your own particular Good Things that happen to you very rarely, but when they do, they're unmistakeable, unfakeable and it's probably a bit of a mercy that your brain lets you forget about them when you haven't had one for a while. One of mine, just by way of digression, is seeing or hearing a band that I had previously known nothing about, and them being utterly fabulous to the point of instantly becoming my new favourite band ever. A couple of years ago, for instance, I saw this lot... 

That's The Men That Will Not Be Blamed For Nothing, in case you didn't know, check them out, they are like nothing else on earth and completely brilliant.

The other Good Thing is book-related. To be specific, it's the moment when I have the right idea for a book, the idea that makes the whole thing fall into place, and it always seems to come, not quite out of nowhere, but somewhere unexpected. About 20 years ago, I was sort-of-commissioned to write a novel, or at least be one of the people writing a novel for a new-ish publishing venture, and I had some vague ideas but nothing that was exactly crystallizing. And then I got given one or two useful pointers by a colleague and I thought I knew what kind of story I wanted to write, and I went home for a bit, and I went to the pub for a bit, and scribbled frantically on the backs of envelopes, and then went home again and played the last song on a review tape that I hadn't finished listening to. And the lightning struck.

The song, if you're interested, was this and I'm still massively fond of it. Every time I hear it I remember spending a fortnight in the Scottish Highlands with my notebooks and a load of red wine, after my holiday companions had gone to bed for the night, endlessly playing that tape on my headphones and scribbling like mad.

The book in question ended up being this one.

I have no idea how many copies are left in existence, but that's mine and you can't have it.
But yesterday, sitting beside the river with a can or two and no customers, doodling vague sort of outlines for the vague sort of commission and knowing I had a set up but no plot, out of nowhere for no particular reason (the radio was being broadcast over the sight and it was actually playing Amy Winehouse doing Valerie at the specific moment, so not directly influential)... the Great Idea occurred.

If you want to know what it was, though, you'll have to wait till next year, when the book's done and in the bookshops. But so far it's made me happy.

Here we go then.

Oh... hello. Anyone out there? That's all right then. If I were to say this is less of a blog and more of a flog, would you all get the wrong idea? Maybe I ought to change the profile pic, even though these days my arse is probably more appealing than my face (as long as I stay off the Ikea Meatballs; oh boy do those things make you fart!). Anyway, until I get another pic, that one will have to do, but don't be fooled into thinking I'm a sub and this is a thinly-disguised appeal for some berk who's read the hype about 50 Shades of Shit to send me a photo of his willy and a command to rock up to his Red Shed Bungalow Bedsit of Pain Ann Summers sale goods for a spot of anal fisting.

Basically I am too idle and incompetent to build a proper website, so I've decided to set this up instead as a way of letting you know what stuff I've got for sale, where I'm selling it, and anything else interesting that comes to mind. I've been running Decadent Media since about the turn of the century, mostly at the London Fetish Fair.  I've always sold books, right from the beginning; and over the years I've added (and subtracted, and sub-contracted) T-shirts, photographs, badges, keyrings, stickers and other odds and ends.

Currently, like quite a lot of people in the adult industry, I've been capitalizing on the hype around That (piss-awful) Book and hope to carry on doing so. 

The Guild Anthology has been doing quite nicely and I've been having a little success with The Master's Voice as well. 

But I haven't achieved the height of audacious cool demonstrated by this British hotelier. There are few things I love better than watching someone pull the public's tails and get themselves masses of free advertising by exercising a bit of wit.