Constance Daley's Blog - Posts Tagged "writing"

Men love lesbians. All women know this. Society has taught us that lesbianism is hot. To a certain extent society is right, but it is never as simple as society makes it. What makes lesbianism hot isn't that there are two women involved (yes, I know men will disagree with that sentence), but the idea that it is different. Different is sexy.

When setting out to write a lesbian story, I considered the idea of writing about a married lesbian couple. That seemed so forward-thinking and in keeping with our times. But the more I thought about it, the more I realize that it didn't work. It's hard to write erotica about long time married couples having normal sex on a Thursday night, and the same applies to lesbians. To make it work, at least for me, I needed it to be forbidden fruit. So I scrapped the idea of a married couple and went back to the most tried and true lesbian cliche of all. I went for experimentation.

As I started to write the story, I realized that experimentation was more important than I realized. Erotica is about discovery; if the story involves a character doing only things she has done before, it's not very exciting. The character needs to learn about themselves, needs to try things for the first time, for it to be interesting. There's a lot of erotica out there about firsts. First time anal. First time lesbian. First time cuckold. The reason for this is simple. The first time is where we learn about ourselves, where we challenge ourselves. Who wants to read a story called "Her Twelfth Anal," or "Sleeping With My Husband's Brother for the Fifth Consecutive Sunday."

There's another reason novelty matters for the character. Unless you're just starting reading these stories, it's hard for even the most lascivious imagination to conjure new scenarios and sex acts for every story. After all, there are only so many things you can stick in so many places, and only so many people/supernatural beings/furries you can have do it. Because of this, very little is still novel for the reader. Experiencing the newness from the character's point of view allows the reader to share in that feeling, and it's a great feeling. There's nothing like that new car smell or that feeling of being fucked hard for the first time.

So I knew I wanted to do a lesbian story, and I knew it had to be a first time lesbian story. The question was, what was the justification. In my stories I want the characters to behave at least somewhat believably, which means that our heroine has to have a good reason for what she does. The last few years it seems like all my longtime friends are getting divorces, and almost always for the same reason. Their sex life is stale, or it wasn't very good to begin with and they thought they could live with that but discovered they really can't. So that was in the mix, and then I imagined a woman who still loves her husband, but whose marriage is flat. How could she rekindle that? Of course I could have just had her bring a friend home, but the character I had in my head wasn't ready to go that far, at least not yet. I had to have her undergo a progression, and that progression couldn't involve the husband being there.

Luckily we live in a day and age where someone can be there without being there, and I knew the perfect way for her to titillate her husband without setting out to step outside her own comfort zone. Once I knew that she was going to use pictures, the old song Pictures of Lily popped into my head, and a slight change to the name of the song gave me a title and a character name. The rest was simple.

I know I've talked about it before, but I'm fascinated by the performance of Pictures of Lillian on my sales charts, so I'm going to talk about it again. The thing is, Pictures of Lillian is not only NOT my bestselling story, it's pretty much the worst. Since my descriptions are intentionally vague so as not to spoil whatever plot twist the story might contain, the reader can only get a basic idea of what the story will be about. Pictures of Lillian is my only story with a lesbian bent, my only story that a reader has tagged with the word lesbian on Amazon.

The question is, why isn't it selling? The answer is, I have no idea. I understand that the market for lesbian erotica might be limited to begin with, that there are probably a great many women who have no interest in reading it. But that just begs the question as to why so few women seem to be interested in the genre? When every possible fetish imaginable has a sizable reading demographic, why does something as relatively prosaic as lesbianism have such limited appeal.

I wonder sometimes if the problem is that it is too accessible. For the most part I deal with situations and types of sex that most women can't really have, whether because the actual experience would be too much for them or because even arranging such a scenario is difficult. After all, we can all read about our husbands watching us have sex with another man, but actually making it happen could lead to a trip to a divorce lawyer. Lesbianism doesn't have this issue. First, it was readily available for most of our lives. There was nothing stopping us from making out with a girl. Second, even if you're married chances are bringing up making out with another girl to your husband isn't going to send him running for a lawyer. It'll probably send him running for the video camera.

Ultimately there's no way to know why some things sell and some things don't. I still plan to write another lesbian story at some point, just in case the real problem with Pictures of Lillian is something else entirely. Maybe people think the scenario is lame. Maybe people never noticed it. But I always enjoy a little speculating, so I thought I'd share my thoughts on the matter.

Just a forewarning, I will probably be using the term "butt sex" a lot in this blog post, mostly because I think it's awesome but unfortunately has no place in erotica. After all, it's a lot hotter for a man to say, "I'm going to fuck your ass," than "I'm going to have butt sex with you now," or even "I'm going to sex your butt." So this is one of the few times I get a chance to refer to the action as butt sex, and I'm not going to let that opportunity pass.

Butt sex has a weird place in our culture, in that it is one of the last taboos. Sixty years ago something like a blowjob was likely to be a man's primary fantasy, but now that those are commonplace it seems that anal is final frontier. Because of that, it seems to feature very heavily in a lot of erotica, and I'm still not exactly sure where to incorporate it and where not to.

For the most part, you can squeeze butt sex into pretty much any story with just a few minor tweaks (though there are exceptions). The question is whether you should, and I have to admit that I don't know the answer to that. You have two potential audiences to worry about, those who are instantly turned off by any backdoor action, and those who require it in their erotica. You don't want to alienate either audience, but ultimately you're going to have to. The question is, which one should I cater to?

So far, judging by my sales, anything that can be tagged on Amazon with "backdoor sex" seems to do pretty well, though not as well as "spanking," and nowhere near as well as "reluctant." This leads me to believe that as a writer, you're probably better off catering to the butt sex crowd than not. But being the type of writer I am (as explained in an earlier blog post), I'm not really catering to anyone yet.

I'll check back in on this subject a few months down the line, once I have more sales data to parse and maybe more stories featuring anal exploration to give myself a better idea of what people like. Readers, if you have a particular preference for more or less anal in your erotica, please let me know in the comments.

For the most part, my characters don't have much to say while they're having sex. There are multiple reasons for this, and I'd like to share a few of them today.

To a certain extent, there are two major types of talk possible during sex. One is emotional talk, exploring your feelings with your partner. The other is dirty talk, and I think we all have a pretty good idea of what that is. The thing is, neither one of these really fits the type of stories I want to tell. I write mostly short erotica, and my characters are usually not seeking some type of spiritual connection when they fuck, so emotional talk is basically out the window. And I've always felt that dirty talk, unless done well and in the proper context, comes across as sounding like the "dialogue" in porn. Sure, there are characters who speak like that and I won't shy away from it in those situations, but I'm not going to include it just for the sake of including it.

I have always believed that words have power. I have believed that since long before I became a writer, and I believe it even more now. What I've discovered reading a lot of books over the years, particularly in regards to romance novels, is that dialogue is expected, but usually works against the writer. In short, most dialogue in books sucks (except for you, Nora Roberts, you write great dialogue). But since writers are expected to include it, they do, and their characters usually sound like idiots.

If you're a writer like me, and you struggle to write good dialogue, all I can say is don't push it too much. Sure, characters need to talk to advance the plot, and sometimes a little banter is good for the story (like in Put It In, Coach!, which is almost certainly my most dialogue heavy story, or No-Telling where Garrett's dialogue is key to setting up the twist). But for the most part, I'm okay with my characters talking very little. They aren't in the story to orate, they're in the story to fuck, and I hope that is what they are good at.

I like vampires. I find vampires inherently sexy. But when it came time to write a vampire story, I was stumped. In fact, I struggled with it for days before I finally figured out what I wanted to do, mostly because I went about it the wrong way.

When I decided I wanted to write some erotic stories for Halloween (which is my favorite holiday, by the way), I knew that I had to include at least one vampire story and one werewolf story. There were two reasons for that. One, I think that it's hard to do Halloween without those things. Two, I'm hoping that those two archetypes sell. A girl has to be at least a little pragmatic. I sat down to write the vampire story first, even going so far as to open a file in Microsoft Word called Vampire. I then proceeded to stare at the blank screen and write nothing.

The problem was that I was trying to think of any interesting new twist on vampires, and I was failing miserably. Every time I came up with something, I'd remember another movie or book that already did it. Vampires are so common in literature and film that it seems almost every permutation on them has already been explored, and that left me in a bind. I try to write my stories around a hook, around a scenario that is interesting to the reader. But I couldn't find my hook.

The key was when I talked the issue over with my spouse, who was kind enough to ask me what was hot about vampires in the first place. What was it about them that makes a girl wet? Suddenly the whole story came to me, mostly because it wasn't really a story. It was a vampire distilled down to what has always drawn me to them, breaking them down to the very essence of their erotic pull. I didn't need a story, I didn't need a hook. All I needed was my own fantasy of vampire sex, and that is what I shared with the world as Rhythm of the Night - A Tale of Vampire Seduction.

The funny thing is, now that I'm past the sex scene, I'm starting to get an idea for a story that fits those two characters. I'm just not sure if it's something I want to write or not. There's something perfect about leaving them as they are, in their one perfect moment. But sometimes a writer can't control herself, and has to move the characters on.Rhythm of the Night - A Tale Of Vampire Seduction

I've had a number of female friends over the years who, while discussing a particular sexual act, will say something along the lines of "I would never let my boyfriend/husband do that, it's so humiliating." I'm always left wondering why they don't take the next step and really evaluate the act in question. There doesn't have to be anything wrong with humiliation, just like there doesn't have to be anything wrong with submission, just like there doesn't have to be anything wrong with pretty much anything in the realm of your sex life. It's about how you feel about each of these things that matters.

Take me for example. I'd make a terrible submissive, but that doesn't meant there's anything wrong with the concept. It just doesn't work for me. I'm not a big fan of being humiliated either (though reading about it really works for me, so who knows), but that doesn't mean that it doesn't work for some women. I've known women who get off on the idea of being humiliated, who enjoy the feeling of shame, and I think that's great. If shame works for you, I'm okay with that. If it doesn't work for you, but you're letting your lover shame you anyway, then that can be a problem.

This whole issue can get really interesting dependent upon the situation. Most women seem to agree that certain things are beneath them, and would never do them. For example, porn stars do ass to mouth, but that's something that most women probably wouldn't do (or at least wouldn't admit to). It's disgusting, they would say, and they may be right. But I had a friend who wouldn't give her boyfriend a blowjob because the thought of that was disgusting. Is she wrong? Nope, not necessarily. Like I said before, your sexuality is your own, and thus it is rarely wrong. The exception to that is if you have an aversion to something because someone else has taught you to and you blindly accepted it.

All I ask my readers is that they do their best to be honest with themselves. If they find themselves dismissing something with a simple word like "humiliating" or "disgusting," then evaluate how those words make them feel. You might be surprised to find that there's a little eroticism of the forbidden awaiting you behind such simple declarations.

I'm here to tell you something a little strange and perhaps unpopular with some people, but sexual inhibition is actually a good thing. Granted, as an erotica writer, it's doubly good for me, but I believe that it is good for all people. Here's why.

To a large extent, each person's sexual journey is learning to work through their inhibitions, to explore their sexuality, and I'm hugely in favor of that. This blog post is not supposed to encourage people to remain overly inhibited. What I want people to recognize is that inhibition fulfills a very valuable role in our sex lives, and moving to a completely uninhibited society would have unforeseen consequences.

In my opinion, without inhibitions, we wouldn't have fantasies, or at least we'd have a lot fewer of them. I'm willing to guess that most people, men and women, don't fantasize about good old vanilla sex, the type most of them are having. Fantasy is our safe zone, our place to explore aspects of our sexuality that we aren't yet comfortable with, or that we might never be comfortable with. That's a good thing. Human beings need taboos, need lines they cannot cross so that they can imagine crossing them. If we lost all of our current inhibitions, we would need to create new ones to transgress. Eventually we would be left with nothing but blatantly illegal and unethical acts to fantasize about.

The second reason inhibitions are good for us is that actions have consequences where fantasies don't. There is nothing wrong with me fantasizing about pretty much anything, but making some of those fantasies real could be disastrous to myself and to my relationships. Let's take an imaginary woman in an imaginary happy marriage. She fantasizes about having sex with other men. No one is hurt by that fantasy. Were she completely uninhibited, she would just do it. I don't honestly see any way she could do that without affecting her happy marriage. Perhaps for these imaginary people it would work out just fine, but in the real world there are always repercussions to things like this. Real people have real emotions, and they will have real responses to such activity.

And of course, the reason inhibitions are good for me as an erotica writer is that they give me something to write about and you, the reader, something to read about. Simply put, many of us enjoy reading and writing about things that could never happen or things we would never do. It's why BDSM stories don't need to be written by or for people actually living that lifestyle. If you're living it, you don't need to read about it. As a writer, I am free to take the parts I like and leave the parts I don't, and as a reader you are free to do the same.

Ready for some mental experimentation now? Ever wanted to cheat on your husband while he watched? Try out one of my stories like Sliding Doors and enjoy the freedom inherent in your imagination. Sliding Doors

I have a male friend, and I won't name him here because I don't want women breaking down his door to hang him, who believes very strongly in his theory of needing new cow. How it works is like this: he believes that no matter what, sex with any one partner grows old and boring, and at that point you have to move on to someone new. Being an unrepentant male chauvinist pig, he refers to the woman he moves onto as new cow. He compares it to eating at the same fast food joint daily for the rest of your life.

As obviously wrong as his theory is, there is tiniest kernel of truth at its center. Over time, sex with any one partner can tend towards growing old and boring. That is why I'm a strong believer in spicing it up, but maintaining the sweet vanilla center. I think most couples (if not all couples) would benefit from trying new things in the bedroom, and incorporating some of those things into their normal sex life. But I also think that it's important to not always incorporate those things. So, for example, sometimes it's great to use a vibrator while having sex, but I don't think you want to use it every time. That's just as stifling as having basic vanilla sex every time, and it is just as likely to get old and overly familiar. Change things up. There is no magic panacea to sex, it takes time, energy, and imagination to do it right. Don't neglect any of those things.

This is also why I encourage patience when it comes to your sex life. When things are going great, when things are really hot and heavy, it's easy to blow through scenarios and fetishes on a nightly basis. There's nothing particularly wrong with that, but remember that once you've tried something the first time, you can never try it for the first time again. Be just a little frugal with first times, spread them out and allow yourself to enjoy them. And don't mix and match them too much. If you're trying out being tied up for the first time, I would recommend avoiding piling on trying nipple clamps, or flogging, or anything else at the same time. The friend I mentioned earlier always races through each relationship the same way, treating it as a conquest instead of an exploration, and then finds that once he has conquered he's not satisfied.

Take your time, and you may find that you enjoy "same cow."

Some of you might have noticed that, at long last, my publisher has started unveiling other authors. As much as I enjoyed my time in the spotlight, I don't mind sharing, and since I have a neat little blog here I volunteered to introduce them. I'm going to start today with my friend Eva, because she's my friend, and because after reading her stories I realized that she gives me an opportunity to discuss two of my favorite things: climaxes and completions.

Everybody likes a good climax; our bodies and minds automatically relish a nice slow build to a stimulating peak. It is how we view what comes after that is so different from person to person. I'm a happily ever after person. No matter how dark a place my stories might venture into, I always want them to end up in the light. Even if my main character is subjected to humiliation and degradation, I want her to learn something about herself and come out a better person, a person more able and willing to enjoy their lives. I take this ideology for granted. It's in most of the fiction our society produces and consumes. We like happy endings, even when dealing with stories of dubious consent (which is my favorite Amazon product tag by the way).

When reading Eva, I somehow expected those same types of endings. But after finishing Mean Spirited I just sat and stared at the last sentence. The ending was so bleak that I didn't know what to make of it. That night, laying in bed, I thought about how it made me feel. At first, I couldn't get past the idea that the character didn't deserve what happened to her. But after I got over that initial reaction, I realized that there was something pleasingly erotic about the ending. Sure, it wasn't the happily ever after I'm used to, but really sitting down and thinking about it, there's something extremely sexy about the ending.

I don't want to ruin the story for anyone who hasn't read it, but playing around with the story's fantasy, really letting myself imagine it, was surprisingly gratifying. The very statement happily ever after implies eternity, that's what ever after is. Mean Spirited was the exact mirror image of that idea; it was as ever after as things get, and though it might not be my idea of happy, everyone is different, and for some people it isn't about happiness.

The more I thought about it, the more I recognized just how much a story is slave to its ending. If I had written the same story, I would have been forced to make a dozen different choices along the way, just to setup the ending that I would prefer. The story I would tell would not necessarily be better or worse, but it would have to be different, because to tack my ending onto that story would do a disservice to both. The little beats of the story, all the little parts of the setup, are instrumental in earning the happy ending. Just as importantly, those same beats twisted slightly earn a different ending. I admire Eva for being willing to embrace the only ending the story actually earned, even if it might make some readers uncomfortable.

I don't see myself changing the way I end my stories. I like the endings, even if it sometimes takes some serious twisting of logic and circumstance to bring those endings about. But it was fun to think about different ways to come down from the climax. I'm a proponent of trying new things, and that includes trying new authors (though I guess I don't really mind if you decide to read nothing but my stories for your own happily ever after), and I think Eva is a great change of pace if you're looking for something a little different, a little less (or depending on your point of view a little more) happily ever after.Mean Spirited

When it comes to sex, some things work for me and some things don't, and I think that's true of most of the population (I'm allowing for asexual people and people who are turned on by pretty much anything). When I read erotica, I tend to have one of four reactions. It turns me off, it doesn't really work for me, it kind of works for me, and I'm pulling my husband away from whatever he's doing for a quickie.

The first of those is really rare, the second of those is fairly common, the third is fairly common, and the fourth is unfortunately not as common as my husband would like it to be. The thing about those reactions is they only have a little to do with the quality of the story I'm reading. Granted, a story being particularly well written might bump it up one notch, and a particularly poorly written story will probably fall a notch, but the subject matter is just as important as the writing.

When people think of subject matter in regards to erotica, they probably think first of the sex. I'm not going to lie, the sex matters. But people don't seem to recognize the importance of the setup. Without a good setup, even a fantastically written sex scene is only half as arousing, because we need a few moments to acclimate ourselves to the story and get an idea of what the characters should and shouldn't be willing to do (I'll cover that idea a lot more in a later blog post, because I think it's extremely important).

What does this have to do with introducing Ruby? Ruby Llewellyn is one of the new authors whose work my publisher is handling, and so they sent me a bunch of her stories to read and asked if I might mention her on this blog. Of course I was more than happy to do so. What struck me while I was reading Ruby was the power and importance of setup.

I was reading one of her stories, Sibling Rivalry, and though I enjoyed it, I realized it was only a two for me, almost a three. The problem wasn't in the sex, which I found suitably stimulating, it was in the scenario. In this day and age, where erotica is so easily accessed, people can easily find a dozen stories that fit their own predilections. For people who have even a passing interesting in sibling rivalry, this story will probably be off the charts sexy. But my sisters and I aren't very close in age, and having never competed with one of them for a boyfriend or a lover, I just couldn't really identify.

Compare this to one of her other stories, the recently released Thanksgiving Brake (available in the collection Thanks For Nuttin' with one of my own stories, if you don't mind my shameless plug). Thanksgiving Break is about a woman who, when left with no other options, had to use her body to pay for her car repair. This story really worked for me because it was so much easier to identify with. I could identify with the situation, could fetishize it. The hook was the right size and shape to catch me.

After making this realization, I went back and evaluated my own stories, trying to figure out if applying this idea helped me figure out why some of them sell better than others. I discovered that the rest of the world is probably a lot like me. Some scenarios work for us, some setups work for us, and some don't. And that's a good thing. It's good we all have different fantasies. My stories are my own way of sharing some of my own, but I'm not offended that some stories don't work for everyone. All I ask of myself is to write stories that with quality setups that work for people who share that particular fantasy.