Thoughts on the Bristol Erotic Meet

This post originally on the fabulous Erotic Meet website.



So it turns out that local legend has it that there is real human skin on the door of The Hatchet. Many thanks to Lucy Felthouse for pointing out that slightly grim bit of history.

Annie has already done a fabulous job of summarising what went on at the recent Bristol Erotic Meet, so I shall point you at her rather than rehash what she's said. I’m just adding a few points about what I got out of the meet.

It was really great spending the evening with Annie, Erotic Moonbeam and Smut Muppet as we're all coming at erotica from different angles. I spend a lot of time thinking about writer craft and publishing these days and it was really good to discuss those themes. I imagine I shall ask the same questions at the London meet as I don't tire of talking about these subjects! We talked about other stuff too (such as website coding and honesty when reviewing work by other people) but these are the things that stood out to be as particularly interesting:

Fiction vs Real Life: A reader doesn't know whether what you're writing did or didn't happen. Which is quite freeing, as it means you can write whatever is in your head, real or otherwise.

Professionalism vs Enthusiasm
Lots of people write erotica simply because they want to, and other people write it because they want to make money out of it. There is nothing wrong with either camp, but the attitude that goes behind each camp is different. What bothers me is there is generally no way of telling between one and the other when you're buying fiction until you start reading.

I left feeling rather patted on the back in many ways. It's nice to bounce ideas off other people and find that you've been going in the right direction all along. Especially when the company is so attractive. ;)

It was really good of Annie to come all the way over for the meet and there had been a lot of interest so the number of people that turned up was a little disappointing. I guess it's still early days for the Bristol meet and I hope we'll have lots more fabulous people at the next one.

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Lessons in "Oh." (A Review)

I bought “Lessons in 'O' : Deep Throating /Oral Sex / Three Some/ Lesbian” by Gemma Parkes from the Amazon.co.uk Kindle store because Parkes tweeted that it is number 17 in Best Female Erotica 2011 list and I presumed this was based on sales. I realise now it was just a list by someone on Amazon. A lesson for me in more careful purchasing. There aren't any reviews for this particular piece but there are reviews of other works by same author and they're generally quite good so I presumed this would be alright.

I bought it, despite the fact that the tag words are in the title, and “threesome” is left as two words rather than combined into one. I bought it despite there being no front cover, so to speak, just a slightly odd CGI image of a pair of lips which looks like it wasn't actually rendered, it was lifted straight from a work in progress on a 3D modelling package.

My second impression was about as great as my first. The formatting was annoying – I had to turn the font size down because it was enormous. There are no proper line breaks or tabs for new paragraphs. There's a serious lack of punctuation right from the off. I was at this point feeling distinctly disappointed. I make no secret that I've not read a lot of erotica lately that I've enjoyed, but I still wilt a little when I try someone new that doesn't raise my expectations. Looking over the comments I've written already I'm wondering why I still went ahead and I bought it. I didn't want (perhaps unwisely) to judge the book by it's cover.

The premise is... bizarre (slightly creepy, I thought), but gets points for being original. Ellie's guy would like her to read his ex-girlfriend's book about oral sex in order to become better at it. Being a good girlfriend, Ellie does try it – and then invites the author/ex-girlfriend over, and lesbian antics ensue.

There's a lot of quite well written sex and it's quite light hearted, but that was about it, really. The dialogue is very clunky and made me cringe more often than relate to the characters. The ex-girlfriend is painted as intensely irritating (and a bit mentally imbalanced, if I'm honest) and I found myself wondering what Ellie was doing with her. There was no “Three Some”. Overall I felt it was confused, with the issues overshadowing the occasional glimpses of potential brilliance. Nothing that a few solid edits couldn't fix, perhaps, but not ready to be in the Kindle store yet, even at £0.86.

Conclusion: Not without merit, but not worth paying for. 2 out of 5 stars.

In the interest of constructive criticism, here are some (hopefully) helpful comments:

• First impressions are incredibly important. It's unfortunate that many readers will judge your book by it's cover but it's the truth. Make sure that your work looks professional from the outside.
• Please, please, PLEASE get someone with a decent grasp of grammar to check over your work before you publish it.
  
• Check that your work is properly formatted for the medium you're selling it for. If you don't have a Kindle, find someone who does. Your reader will thank you.
  
• I don't like to judge an author based on one piece of work, but many readers will do just that. You could be selling hundreds of other stories but work like this may well be putting off many more “come back” readers that you would otherwise be attracting. It pays to get it right all the time. This leads me to....
  
• ...if you go back to a story like this and realise that it is letting your other work down, take it out of circulation and fix it. Don't just leave it there like a bad smell.

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Nosce te ipsum

If I ever get a tattoo, I think it might be this one.

“Know your enemy and know yourself and you can fight a hundred battles without disaster.” ~ Sun Tzu

This past week I've written thousands and thousands of words. None of them have been fiction. Not all of them have been on my own page either – they have been through twitter, in comments on blogs, via MSN and text messages. I've spoken to a lot of people and written about that too.

There have been many, many words about editing (and lack thereof) and if and how that affects quality of content. I have considered where inspiration comes from – how do you write realistic erotica straight from fantasy? How do you inject fantasy into real events to make them fiction? How do you write a first draft without getting stuck? How do you do anything without getting writers block somewhere?

I have thought about the background of various prolific authors and the demographic to which they appeal. I have wondered why these authors are doing so well when I don't think their content is particularly good and I haven't enjoyed it much. By extension I have considered which demographic I am a part of, since it isn't theirs. I have begun to think about how to differentiate between “erotica” and “vapid romances with explicit sex”. I've pondered how one would set up a classification system for different themes in erotica in order to find the stuff that I'm going to enjoy, as my pot luck approach is not serving me well.

I've discussed erotica as a genre and its place in the wider world of fiction. I've thought about how it is presented to outsiders and considered that in order to be taken seriously, something has to give. I have wondered how to give erotica as a genre the stamp of professionalism which will make it comparable to other genres of writing, but which many erotica publishers don't appear to consider important.

Moving that discussion along, I've looked at self-publishing. If you can't trust a publishing house, how and why do you publish yourself? I have worried about how I am going to make a name for myself as writer when there is so much shit out there putting people off trying indie authors. Should I be concerned about them? Is there something that I can do to change the status quo?

There are so, so many opinions and suggestions about all these subjects. I have considered how to express my own opinion without burning bridges with the writers that I should be impressing in order to market my own work. Can you be really, truly honest without pissing people off? What if you're scaring off people that would read your published work if you weren't criticising other authors they really enjoyed? I have been advised to be completely honest rather than dumbing down my opinion. I have been thanked for my honesty but then removed a tweet in which I criticised somebody's work because I was concerned I'd upset the author. I've stopped myself saying a whole number of things that I feel very strongly about but which I feel aren't beneficial to express.

To return to the quote at the beginning of this post, I realise that writing is not really an enemy. I do, however think that in order to succeed at anything, it is vital to know what you are up against. I'm sorry if I haven't come across coherently as I would like. I've tried to condense a whole lot of thoughts into a much shorter space. I have barely scratched the surface of this art but I already feel I've learned a lot. I'm beginning to understand myself not only as a writer but also as a reader. (Don't ignore readers – without readers there would be no writers.) Most importantly though, I think I'm beginning to understand my place in this industry of writing. I have a plan, of sorts.

I also have a whole lot of thoughts and opinions, and you can bet your ass I'm going to share them with you. And I'd really love you to share your thoughts and opinions with me. We are, after all, all in this together, are we not?

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On Editing (Or Not)

As a disclaimer: I don't really want to offend or upset anyone with this blog, but given the perhaps sensitive nature of the content, I guess it might be taken as a personal dig at various people. It's really not. Also, I appreciate I’m setting myself up to be a hypocrite. I’m not perfect and neither is anyone else and that's not the end of the world. I’m mainly asking for a bit more vigilance on this matter.

I’ve just sat down to write a review of Alice by Selena Kitt, and you know what? I can only think about one thing. A characters name is misspelled twice on page one. This was at first confusing, and then so annoying I nearly stopped reading the story there and then. How could someone have published something with such an obvious mistake so early on? I had however paid for it, and it seemed a waste of my money to stop reading it, so I persevered. My expectations of the rest of the story has bottomed out. I thought “if she can't spend the time making sure her characters names are spelled right, why should I assume she expended any effort making sure the story is any good, or the grammar is understandable?”

See, you laughed at that, didn't you?

In fairness to Ms Kitt, Alice is an excellent story once I got beyond that, and I promise not to overdo this gripe again in my review. But the point stands that rather than going on and on about great the story is, I’m sat here ranting about the spelling. Is that really what you want your work to be remembered for?

I’ve come across a lot of poor editing in recent months, and it's really starting to get to me. Before I read erotica I think perhaps I took editing for granted. You'd come across the odd misspelled word in a book and it'd be funny. But since I began to read erotica, I routinely come across sentences that don't make sense, words spelled incorrectly, and grammar in all the wrong places.

Admittedly, most of the erotica that I read is free, and the quality varies wildly, which is what I expect of self-published fiction and is probably one of the reasons why self publishing is prone to bad press. Lately though, I’ve been buying more erotica from seemingly reputable publishing houses and I’m astounded to find that the issues persist there. It's making it very difficult to know what is and isn't worth buying. Slowly but surely, I am losing my faith in published erotica as a genre worth taking seriously. And that makes me very sad, because I like to think I’m good at what I do and I wouldn't want someone else to dismiss my work off-hand because they'd had bad experiences with other pieces of fiction.

Will somebody please think of the children?!

My most serious issue is with authors that charge for their work because they truly have no excuse. I think it's demeaning to your readers to expect them to pay for mistakes that you could easily have fixed. However, to authors that put their work out for free I say: don't do yourself down by failing to edit properly. Not charging for your work is a poor reason to put out any old rubbish. I recently read a story with a friend of mine which would have been average if it had been edited for grammar and misspellings, but which was truly dismal because the incorrect punctuation made a number of sentences almost unintelligible. Thankfully, we laughed our asses of so it wasn't a wasted time, but I feel for the author as I seriously doubt it was her intention that we mock her story rather than enjoy it. I read a free story by another author which was quite good for content but poor on grammar and I’ve been seriously put off looking at the work they have for sale because I have no reason to expect it's any different.

Perhaps this is a bee in my bonnet because I am a writer and spending my time nit picking my own grammar and spelling is what I'd ultimately like to be paid to do. If, however, this is as widespread an issue as it seems to be, then people need to be standing up and complaining about it until things begin to change. Lets not allow the poor editing of some to ruin the reputation of everyone out there that is writing genuinely fantastic erotica.

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