Art and Play -- #inspiration #amwriting #creativity

 Image by kissu from Pixabay

I discovered buried treasure today.

There's a box in our storage closet labeled “L's Writing”. I hadn't examined it in quite a while. I knew it held my old journals, my poetry notebooks, various term papers, theses and other academic artifacts. I couldn't recall, though, how much I'd kept of my very early schoolwork and writing. After all, my life journey has taken me through five decades and halfway around the world since I was in junior high school. Maybe I'd jettisoned some of my childish output – or maybe it had disintegrated, the paper drying out and crumbling away after half a century.

In particular, I was looking for a set of science reports I remembered from eighth grade. Each week the teacher would perform a demonstration and ask us a set of questions. In our reports, we were supposed to diagram of the experiment, then answer the questions and draw conclusions. I liked to draw and I liked my teacher. So instead of simple scientific figures, I created a series of cartoons, some of them harboring private jokes. I had great fun concocting those reports. I'm sure it took me far longer than if I'd merely followed the instructions, but I didn't care. I was happy putting in the effort, expressing myself. It was homework but it was also a kind of play.

Imagine my delight when I found a tattered manila envelope crammed with documents going back to elementary school – some as fragile as I'd feared, but many in decent condition. My book reports and my compositions from French class . My high school honors thesis about the Great Chain of Being in Tolkein's Middle Earth. My plays about the Beatles, about the jealous gods of Olympus, about the 1964 presidential election. My ghost and science fiction stories. And, just as I'd hoped, the full set (as far as I can tell) of said science reports.

You might ask what all this has to do with writing erotica.

I've been pondering the way we present our writing process as work. We discuss conflict and pacing, the theory of the short story, the exterior and interior elements of character, techniques for evoking sensory experience in our scenes, strategies for self-editing. We wrestle with revisions. We “kill our darlings”. We train ourselves to view everything we write with a critical eye.

I don't mean to minimize the importance of self-analysis or craft. However, I sometimes worry that we're too analytical, too focused, too left-brained, about our writing. Or maybe I should say “I” as opposed to “we”. I'm so concerned with markets and word count, sentence structure and word repetition, that I forget why I started doing this in the first place. I've lost my sense of play.

Nobody taught me how to write creatively. I've been doing for as long as I remember, and from the very first, I did it for fun. I played with words, and back when I was a kid, I played with images too, as can be seen from my eighth grade efforts. (I was always a better wordsmith than visual artist, though.) I was, in psychological jargon, intrinsically motivated, writing, drawing, painting and rhyming simply because I enjoyed the process.

And that's what's often missing now. The product is what counts, from the perspective of readers and publishers. They're waiting for my next book. I try to ignore the pressure, but I'm never entirely successful. The limited time I have available for writing adds to the sense of stress. I only have this day, these few hours – what if I can't get the words out?

Art cannot be compelled. You have to simply open yourself and let it flow. I know there's a theory that all great artists must suffer. I don't know if I buy that, but in any case, I'm not aspiring to greatness. No, I just want to enjoy my writing the way I did when I was younger. I want to play.

I managed this, to some extent, with my portmanteau novel Rajasthani Moon. I undertook this project solely for my own amusement, as a challenge to myself: how many sub-genres could I combine in a single book? In a sense, I was thumbing my nose at the erotic romance establishment, which so loves to slice and dice, categorize and label, every story. So I let my imagination run free, and I didn't censor myself to please my publisher. I even included some F/F interaction, generally considered to be the marketing kiss-of-death in traditional erotic romance. If it turned me on, I put it in and damn the markets.

When the book was done, I knew it was no work of enduring literary significance – but it's lively, entertaining, and pretty hot. Most important, I had a fabulous time writing it.

I want to do that again.

I'm willing to put in the effort it takes to write well – but not without the payoff of having fun. Not anymore.

What Comes Next? #Suspense #AuthorCraft #AmWriting

 

We all love stories. It's in our genes. Humans have been spinning tales for thousands of years. From the sagas our ancestors told as they huddled around their campfires to the ebooks flying off today's virtual shelves, stories satisfy some deep psychological need.

Sometimes we want a familiar story, even though we've heard it a million times before. We anticipate and then enjoy the expected conclusion, which reassures us that all is right in the world. Often, though, we follow a story because we want to know what comes next. Suspense and uncertainty produce a particular kind of excitement., a tension that is pleasurably released when the uncertainty is resolved. Suspense is what keeps readers turning pages long after their normal bedtimes. They don't want to stop reading until they see how it all turns out.

In genre fiction such as romance or mystery, readers know the final shape the story will assume. The lovers will overcome the obstacles that confront them in order to be together. The guilty parties will be identified, the mechanisms of the crime will be explained and usually the perpetrators will be brought to justice. Part of the reason readers enjoy these genres is that they provide the same satisfying reassurance as a well-known fairy tale or myth. A book that labels itself as romance or mystery then fails to provide the expected pattern of resolution will likely arouse readers' ire.

This does not mean that stories in these genres should be predictable. As the story progresses, a skillful writer will make the reader question how the expected ending could possibly come about. You'll lose your reader's attention if he or she stops wondering what happens next.

Unfortunately, I find that a significant percentage of the romance I read is far too predictable, at least for my tastes. By the time I've finished the first chapter or two, I know the general path the story will take. I can't presume to speak for other readers, but this definitely diminishes my own enjoyment.

As an author of erotic romance, I struggle to add suspense to my own stories. It's not always a conscious process, but when I sat down to write this post, I tried to analyze the strategies that I use, or have seen others use, to avoid predictability. I identified four techniques that can be helpful in this regard.

1. Withhold critical facts

Even if you're a pantster rather than a plotter, you'll generally know more about your characters and their background than you tell your readers. Often there are things in a character's history that are critical to the plot. By holding back and not disclosing these facts right away, you can heighten the level of uncertainty and make the final resolution more surprising.

I found an example in my ménage story Wild About That Thing. Ruby Jones, the heroine, owns a struggling blues club that represents her life's dream. As the story opens, she has received a letter from the lawyers for the new owner of her rented building, indicating that her lease will not be renewed and that she must vacate the premises. Her anxiety over her impending eviction colors her reactions to the two men who become her lovers.

Quite late in the tale, I reveal the fact that one of her lovers, Remy, is in fact the building owner. This serves two purposes in the narrative, emotional and practical. First, it adds a sudden obstacle to the relationship (since Ruby is rightfully upset that he had not told her sooner) and also allows the second man in the triangle, Zeke, to come to Remy's defense. Second, it provides a plausible solution to the problem of Ruby's eviction.

Keeping important details secret from your readers can be an effective way to add unpredictability, but it does carry the risk of appearing contrived. The new information, when it is finally exposed, must be believable. It must not seem to "come from left field". If you can, you should drop hints earlier in the story. When the revelation finally occurs, you want your readers to nod their heads, saying "Yes, of course, I should have known!"

2. Keep alternatives alive

Fiction, especially romantic fiction, frequently revolves around a character's choices. Your heroine may be choosing between two potential relationships, or between a relationship and a life path that will make that relationship impossible. To avoid predictability, you need to paint the competing alternatives as equally attractive and plausible. You should also maintain the ambiguity concerning the character's ultimate decision for as long as possible.

To implement this strategy, you can use trade-offs. No one choice is perfect. Each has advantages and disadvantages. Highlight those contrasts for your reader. Meanwhile, watch out for stereotypes. The handsome, arrogant, wealthy playboy; the smoldering, tortured bad boy biker; the sensitive, nurturing guy next door... You know what I mean. Stereotypes are a sure way to kill suspense - unless you set them up and then turn them on their heads. This is actually another technique for avoiding predictability. If, for example, the playboy is later revealed to be a submissive who wants to serve as the heroine's 24/7 slave, you'll definitely surprise (and possibly delight) your readers.

This strategy can apply to alternative explanations or scenarios, as well as decision alternatives. In my erotic suspense novel Exposure, Stella realizes that any of several people might be responsible for the mayor's murder and the threats she receives: the mayor's widow; his opponent in the upcoming election; the sinister mob boss; even the cop who's Stella's high school friend and current lover. I try to provide evidence supporting each of these hypotheses. I want to keep the reader guessing.

3. Allow your characters to change

A story is a journey taken by your characters. Events occur and the characters change in response. You can use these changes to make your story less predictable. As the tale unfolds and your characters develop, they will behave and react in ways your reader may not expect. In fact, their surprising behavior will reveal the nature of their inner changes.

The movie "Long Kiss Goodnight" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116908/) provides a great example. Geena Davis stars as a suburban wife and mother who gradually recovers from amnesia to realize that she's a former spy. Over the course of the film, polite, conventional, squeaky-clean Samantha morphs into wise-ass, slutty, violent Charly, the top secret agent now running for her life. The shift is gradual. Since you never know (until you see it) how far Charly has reverted to her old self, you never know exactly what she's likely to do.

Most romance character shifts are less extreme. Just remember that static characters are easy to predict. Also, some change trajectories have become clichés. The uptight, authoritarian female executive who gradually realizes that she craves submission; the woman wounded by past relationships who must learn to trust a new love; the emancipated, free-wheeling chick looking for no-strings sex who discovers instead a deep need for commitment; these patterns have been been employed so often that they'll kill any suspense - unless of course, you use misdirection, shattering the cliché to send the character off on a new and surprising path of development

4. Take advantage of strong emotion

Characters don't just change over the course of the story, but moment to moment as well. Even the most stable individuals are not 100% consistent in how they behave, especially under the influence of strong emotion. Anger, grief, guilt, terror and shame can all induce people to behave in atypical ways that would be hard to predict based on their normal personalities. Since such emotions often occur at critical points in your plot, you can use them to introduce the unexpected into your tales.

For example, Kate O'Neil, the heroine of my novel Raw Silk, is a self-confident, independent professional woman. Her first full-blown experience as a submissive stuns and scares her. She actually skips out of work, jumps on a plane, and escapes to the safest place she can think of (in this case, Singapore). This is highly unusual for someone as responsible and career-oriented Kate. Even I was surprised when she did it! The episode contributes to the plot by providing her with an opportunity to reflect on her reactions - as well as a chance for readers to catch their breath.

I’ve been using erotic romance for my examples so far, but non-romantic erotica also has its predictable patterns. Ultimately, readers expect the characters to have some sort of sexual interaction—and more likely sooner rather than later! Readers are in it for the climax, sure, but the experience will be more pleasurable if there are some twists and turns along the way. That’s why I personally find a lot of “stroke fiction” uninteresting and unsatisfying. If there’s no suspense at all, just fucking, the story falls flat. (Your mileage may vary, of course.)

Authors of genre fiction walk a tightrope. On the one hand, we must give our readers the pattern of resolution they expect - a happy ending, in the case of romance, an orgasm (or more than one!) in erotica. On the other, we want to keep our readers turning the pages, wondering what is going to happen next. We must be faithful to the conventions of our genre while still ringing enough changes to be fresh and exciting. It's a tall order. I hope that the suggestions I've made in this post get you thinking about how you can maintain this balance in your own work.

My First Love (#poetry #sonnet #erotica)

Long before I started writing erotica, I was a poet.

Well, at least I was writing poetry. Love poetry, mostly, or maybe lust poetry. When you’re a teenager, it’s hard to tell.

Nobody taught me to write verse, though my parents did read poems to my brother and me from a very early age. Finding rhymes, feeling the rhythm of the words, seemed to come naturally.

Poems were how I expressed my emotions. They were private, personal, efforts to capture a moment. Little conscious art, and certainly very little deliberate craft.

Then in the late nineties, I started writing and publishing prose. Somehow, the well of poetry dried up. I think this was partly because I’d gotten over a good deal of the angst from my teens and twenties.

In the past decade, encouraged by my friend and colleague Ashley Lister, I’ve starting writing some verse again. The experience is very different, though. Ash is an expert on different poetic forms. Many of my recent poems were experiments using forms he proposed in his monthly exercises at the Erotica Readers and Writers Associationblog. The emotion is still there, but I’m much more conscious of the process, and the result.

I still seem to have a sense for the way words chime and combine, though.

Just for fun today, I’m sharing a couple of poems. The first is more than twenty years old. It’s not in any particular form. The second I wrote in 2015, and is the form of a Petrarchian Sonnet.

To be honest, I like them both. But in a very real sense they were written by different people.

Meditations on a Crescent Moon

(To GCS)

a bright thorn lodged in my flesh,

scarlet petals crushed on my breasts;

silver hook reeling me in;

scimitar pricking my skin.

clipping of a fingernail,

charm to bind; scorpion's tail,

sweetest poison in the sting,

fever dreams; broken ring

of the ancient myth,

how I shall know

my other half.

silken curl

from some platinum plait;

comma—a pause,

saying hush, wait.

light leaking beneath the door,

beneath the blindfold—

nothing more,

in the darkened room

but a lingering kiss

and the rough caress

of the bonds

on my wrists.

Burlesque - Petrarchian Sonnet

Black satin glove discarded on the floor;

a smooth descent of zipper down your spine

disclosing inch by inch, by clear design,

a glimpse of pearly flesh. You promise more

than you deliver. Desperate, we implore,

we beg you, Take it off. You pout, recline,

expose a shapely leg where slits align,

content for us to hunger and adore.

A sultry soundtrack drives you to reveal

in increments the charms your clothes conceal.

In thong and tassels finally you pose;

a teasing smile, a shimmy, then you steal

away to leave me with a racing heart

and wonder: is this Lust or is it Art?

The Much Maligned Adverb (#amwriting #craft #StephenKing)

“The adverb is not your friend.”

This pronouncement, by Stephen King in his influential little volume On Writing, has inspired floods of red ink. Adverbs—especially those ending in -ly—arouse the irrational ire of critics and editors. “Weak!” they exclaim. “Verbose!” “Unnecessary!” “Outdated!” Some of the more poorly educated even claim that adverbs violate the rules of grammar.

Nonsense.

I’m a writer. That means words are my tools. All words. I’m not about to countenance some pundit (or even a best-selling, highly skilled author) telling me I should jettison an entire class of words just because they’ve become unfashionable.

I understand the logic behind King’s critique. Novice authors frequently overuse this part of speech, describing the manner in which a generic action is performed rather than search for a stronger or more specific verb. Excessive use of adverbs can be a sign of laziness. Certainly, they’re not the best tool for every occasion. A rich repertoire of evocative verbs can be far more effective than a bustling stable of adverbs.

That’s no argument for banning them outright.

Editors argue that adverbs slow prose down, making it less potent and direct. That’s probably true. However, sometimes I want to slow the pace of a paragraph. My personal style differs from the spare, unadorned prose King creates. I learned to write in a less hurried era, when an author could afford to explore her scenes and her characters in a more leisurely manner.

I had the notion that I’d post a few paragraphs from my current work in progress, then strip out the adverbs to show the effects of this edit. What I discovered is that my most recent stories use far fewer adverbs than I expected. I guess the unfashionable status of this part of speech has in fact influenced my writing as well. I also realized that these days I tend to use adverbs to modify adjectives or participles rather than verbs—to qualify or limit descriptions.

In any case, I think removing these adverbs would make the prose less effective. In some cases, it would even change the meaning. Here’s a snippet to illustrate what I mean.

“Would you like to see my drawing, Dr. Gardner?” Alisha offers me a sheet of paper, presumably the picture that so thoroughly captured her attention yesterday. Color explodes off the page, garnet red, cerulean blue, shockingly bright purple. In contrast with its violent hues, the lines of the drawing are delicate and precise. Meticulously rendered gardens and palaces fill the every inch of the paper—arched gates curtained with ivy, marble fountains spilling silvery cascades over velvet green lawns, onion-domed towers soaring toward feathery clouds. I'm reminded of the jewel-toned miniatures painted by the eighteenth century Ottoman masters, until I look more closely. Then it is Hieronymous Bosch that comes to mind. For in the shadowy corners formed by vine-draped walls, and on the lushly carpeted floors of the pavilions, I see tiny beings—not people, no, not with those swollen heads, sharp-taloned limbs and tooth-lined maws— engaged in the most perverse couplings imaginable. Here an enormous penis splits a dripping orifice. There, a long, tri-forked tongue penetrates multiple bodies simultaneously. A fat-assed creature squats and strains above a gaping mouth. A head literally disappears between splayed female thighs while smaller beings perch on the woman's abdomen to gnaw on her pendulous breasts.

My stomach turns. My cunt melts. Both reactions are completely inappropriate in a therapist. I swallow the disgust rising in my throat, ignore the desire smoldering in my sex, and hand the sheet back to Alisha.

~ From “Countertransference” by Lisabet Sarai, unpublished work

Let’s strip out the adverbs:

“Would you like to see my drawing, Dr. Gardner?” Alisha offers me a sheet of paper, presumably the picture that captured her attention yesterday. Color explodes off the page, garnet red, cerulean blue, bright purple. In contrast with its violent hues, the lines of the drawing are delicate and precise. Rendered gardens and palaces fill the every inch of the paper—arched gates curtained with ivy, marble fountains spilling silvery cascades over velvet green lawns, onion-domed towers soaring toward feathery clouds. I'm reminded of the jewel-toned miniatures painted by the eighteenth century Ottoman masters, until I look more. Then it is Hieronymous Bosch that comes to mind. For in the shadowy corners formed by vine-draped walls, and on the carpeted floors of the pavilions, I see tiny beings—not people, no, not with those swollen heads, sharp-taloned limbs and tooth-lined maws— engaged in the most perverse couplings imaginable. Here an enormous penis splits a dripping orifice. There, a long, tri-forked tongue penetrates multiple bodies. A fat-assed creature squats and strains above a gaping mouth. A head disappears between splayed female thighs while smaller beings perch on the woman's abdomen to gnaw on her pendulous breasts.

My stomach turns. My cunt melts. Both reactions are inappropriate in a therapist. I swallow the disgust rising in my throat, ignore the desire smoldering in my sex, and hand the sheet back to Alisha.

In my opinion, this snippet is less dynamic than the original. It feels flat. I use adverbs for emphasis here, and to convey nuances of excess. I also intend to convey the fact that the narrator (who is a highly educated psychiatrist) is a highly verbal person who uses words both to comprehend the world and to distance herself from her own feelings.

Your mileage may vary, of course. Each of us uses our tools in different ways. You may strive for the lean, muscular prose of Stephen King and Elmore Leonard and personally eschew adverbs as unnecessary ornamentation.

Do not presume, however, to banish them outright. I want them in my tool box, along with all the other delightful and varied structures in the English language.

And don’t get me started about the universally condemned passive voice!

Someone Else's Skin (#characters #research #empathy)

Kate O'Neill, the heroine of my first novel, had quite a lot in common with her creator. Like me, she was petite and curvy, loved to dance, and was sufficiently adventurous to go live in Thailand. She had graduate degrees and worked as a software engineer, just as I did. True, she had flaming red hair – I've always wanted coppery curls instead of my mousy brown – and she was quite a bit younger than I was when I dreamed her up, but I think it's fair to say that many of her emotions, reactions and fantasies mirrored my own. Most importantly, the journey of sexual self-discovery that she undertook in Raw Silk paralleled my personal sexual quest, in spirit though not in detail.

Writing Raw Silk was surprisingly easy. All I had to do was look inside my own heart.

I shared a lot with Miranda Cahill, the protagonist of Incognito, too. Not physically – Miranda was a tall, slim brunette. However, otherwise, she was much like me in during my (many) years in college and graduate school: shy, hard-working, so serious that she doesn't always understand other people's jokes, but seething with desire and sexual curiosity underneath her prim, good-girl exterior.

By the time I got to Ruby Maxwell Chen, in Nasty Business, I was beginning to create characters whose emotions and history weren't copies of my own. For one thing, Ruby was bossy, bitchy and competitive – nothing at all like me...! Ruby was also far richer than I could ever dream of being, and part Chinese. I tried to make her cultural heritage an integral aspect of her personality. With Exposure's Stella Xanathakeos, I moved even further from my roots and comfort zone. Stella is working class and not particularly well-educated. She's streetwise in a way that I, a product of the suburbs and the American middle class, will never be.

In recent years, I've challenged myself to write characters with whom I have very little in common. In my short story “Fire”, my nameless character is a young man from the American midwest with a fetish that compels him to arson. The story is told in the first person – there could hardly be a voice more different than mine. “Refuge”, the story I wrote for Alessia Brio's charitable anthology Coming Together: At Last, is narrated by a dark-skinned youth from the backwaters of northeast Thailand, forced to join the army and work as a guard in a refugee camp by his family's extreme poverty. My M/M paranormal romance novel NecessaryMadness features the rocky relationship between a homeless clairvoyant teenager and a bitter city cop.

As the social, psychological and experiential differences between me and my characters increase, it becomes more difficult to create characters with depth, breadth and believability. To succeed in capturing my readers, I need characters whose emotions and actions are both genuine and compelling. How can I step into someone else's skin and imagine his or her thoughts and feelings, when that person and I come from different worlds?

Part of the answer, for me, is my conviction that individuals, despite their backgrounds, histories, cultures and gender, are more similar than might be expected based on surface characteristics. Certain emotions are fundamental: fear, anger, desire, sorrow, joy. Although different people express and react to emotions differently, we all experience them. In fact, I think my job as an author is to elicit these emotions in my readers. The very act of creating characters with whom my readers can identify presupposes a level of emotional commonality.

So, when I am trying to create a character very different from me, I assume that I can still use my own emotional reactions as a starting point. This seems to work quite well for sexual desire. If my story requires a character whose sexual interests don't mirror my own, I begin by imagining a scene that does turn me on. Then I transplant my arousal to my character, focusing it on different objects or activities. In Raw Silk, my personal kinks drove the story, quite transparently. My lusts and fantasies still stoke the fire in my work, but now they're subterranean, roiling like molten rock beneath the surface of my characters' existence.

Imagination and analogy can take you a long way toward an understanding of life in someone else's skin. But this strategy will fail if not accompanied by research. Writing requires creation not only of your characters but also the world they inhabit. If you are writing a tale set in a different time period or culture (including a sub-culture), you need to have a deep sense of the world you're trying to evoke and the ways that it shapes its denizens. Assumptions, vocabulary, sexual practices and taboos will vary from one world to another. Sadly, I've read far too many historical romances in which the characters wear period costumes but think and act like representatives of modern Western culture.

So if you are writing, for instance, a homoerotic tale, you can't simply rely on your imagination to tell you how gay men interact. You need to watch and read gay porn. You need to talk to gay men and read about their experiences. In the case of M/M erotic romance, it also helps to read other authors in the genre and figure out what works and what doesn't.

This brings up the fascinating issue of realism versus expectations. I will use M/M erotic romance as an example here, but the same question arises with BDSM or interracial or lesbian or historical erotica. Readers have certain notions about what to expect from a particular genre. In the M/M romance I have read, the rough aspects of gay sex rarely appear. Furthermore, the fear of homophobic attacks, the stigma of being gay in an ostensibly straight society, the effects of HIV on the gay community, are mostly absent. I suspect that if an author tried to be realistic about the experience of being a man who desires men, a significant segment of the readership for M/M romance would be turned off, possibly even upset.

The same could be said of BDSM erotica. Most BDSM tales present an idealized dominant who magically understands the needs of the submissive. (Raw Silk is no exception.) They ignore the far more common situation of insecure, incompetent, ego-tripping or genuinely cruel doms. They usually omit the lengthy negotiation process between dom and sub, in which the pair explores the submissive's squicks and limits. It's far more exciting to imagine a master so intuitive, so attuned to his slave, that he understands what she wants and needs without any prior discussion.

Thus, research by itself is not sufficient. Once you understand how your character's world is different from your own, you still need to decide which differences to highlight and which ones to discard. Reviewing the conventions of your chosen genre can help, but this can also be a trap, producing cookie-cutter stories where the characters and situations are far too predictable to be interesting.

Slipping inside someone else's skin and writing from their experience is tough. It requires considerable effort and judicious craft. Writing characters that are similar to me is far easier. Sometimes I feel like being lazy, just opening up my mind and letting my perversions flow unchecked onto the page. When I do, though, I run the risk that I'll just be writing Raw Silk, over and over again. To keep my work fresh, novel, exciting to other readers as well as to me, I need to get away from myself, to look through the eyes of characters who see the world differently.

All Over the CyberSphere (#blogging #craft #confessions)

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The Learning Curve (#pnr #series #writing @AuthorLolaWhite)

By Lola White (Guest Blogger)

Hopefully, every writer that sits down to create a story will get better with every tale told. But it can be an arduous process. There are skills that can’t be taught on blogs about writing, you can’t learn them through advice, or even by reading others’ books. These resources might be helpful as a starting point, but, eventually, you have to find your voice and you have to learn for yourself how to share it.

Writing a series turned out to be akin to jumping into the deep end for me. It also puts my learning curve front and center, on display for all to see. When I started writing the Magic Matched series the concept was completely different, but it soon settled into what became Betrothed. I thought I would write one book, but I hadn’t even gotten halfway through Betrothed when I realized I would need many, many more words to tell the story in my head and in my heart.

I didn’t want some horribly long epic adventure, yet that was what my main plot needed. So I started planning, and realized that I would need four books. However, the story is about two witches, and four books about two witches, especially an erotic romance when the two witches are forbidden from having sex, seemed a little…drawn-out. Learning, learning! I added more depth to what used to be secondary characters, and gave them each prominent roles on the main stage, then broke the whole into manageable chunks. Two romance stories in each novel…

I also learned that the first in a series is a breeze. It’s a blank canvas, you’re making up the rules as you go. The second in the series isn’t too bad, either. It’s not yet complicated enough to have you drawing graphs, and if you write the first and second back-to-back like I did, everything is fresh in your mind. It’s a fairly fluid continuation. Looking back, however, I can see how those first two books were influenced by my love of Stephanie Laurens’ romance novels. They have a prose-y-ness that most of my other books have outgrown. (Not completely because I do love a good turn of phrase, but knowing what flowery phrases to keep is also part of the learning process.)

Then came the third book, Motherhood. Just released on May 17th, I’m amazed it wasn’t delayed indefinitely. I started writing the book just after the second. I’d written most of it when my brain shut off—which usually means my subconscious thinks something is wrong with my story. I put the book aside until I could figure out what was wrong with it…and going back was torture. I despaired, for the first time in my life. I thought I’d have to scrap everything and start over, and I had no idea how to do that, where to start that wouldn’t lead me to the same mess.

That’s part of the learning process, too—not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I wrote a summary of each chapter on index cards and laid them out on my floor. I’ve never done that before, and haven’t since, but I did what was necessary to get my story in good order so I could continue.

Then I got to the emotions. I would have told you that I wrote with emotion, mine were always close to the surface, but Motherhood touches fears I’ve shoved to the very back of my mind. The next step in an author’s evolution, the next rise on the learning curve, is finally digging in to the core of who you are. 

 

Some get there faster than others. You can write with passion, you can tell an amazing, engaging, best-selling story…but eventually, all true writers break through that emotional wall, and nothing is ever the same again.

For me, it turns out that Motherhood was not only the hardest to write in the series, being a crucial turning point for my main characters, but also The Wall. I was a wreck, but now I feel like I can tap into my emotions more freely than before, and yet they are no longer so sharp as they were with Motherhood. One of my fears is what I’ll do when I lose my grandmother—we’re very close. In Motherhood, Georgeanne has to ask herself the same question, as her grandmother is very ill. Another one of my fears is fully trusting a mate…I’ll freely admit to being a commitment-phobe. It’s hard to hand yourself over to another—mind, body and soul like all epic romances should be right?—but Christiana Davenold is being asked to do just that by her husband.

And then we get into the heart of things. For me, the reason I shy away from a deep commitments is because I don’t want to be hurt, of course. That’s why we all run, and those who stay are the bravest people I know. Georgeanne and Silviu are at a point in their relationship where it’s all or nothing, but betrayal lurks and forgiveness can be difficult. How much could you forgive…because the betrayal in Motherhood is deep and decisions about the future will have to be made.

Now I’m writing the last book of the Magic Matched series. (Don’t tell, I’m pretty sure it was supposed to be done already!) And I’ve learned how far I’ve come. I’ve learned how to plot a series, how to connect all the dots and tie up all the loose ends. My style has changed, though I’ve tried to maintain a similarity to the other three books, and my voice became clearer. As a woman, I am more in touch with my emotions and more willing to risk them for great reward. As a writer, I have a firmer grip on my craft.

I’ve learned a lot, but it’s an ongoing process. I hope I never complete it.

Thank you Lisabet! For any who are interested in the Magic Matched series, you can find the first two books, Betrothed and Married, for a temporarily reduced price at Totally Bound and Amazon.

Magic Matched

Only magic and politics matter…until love comes into play

Silviu and Georgeanne must learn to open their hearts to each other in order to unlock their full magical potential. But with all that stands in their way—archaic traditions, murder plots, and a betrayal that threatens all they can be—they will need the group of allies they have built to help them navigate the dangerous world of witches, and succeed against the dark magic stalking them every step of the way.

About Lola White

Delve into the emotions, dive into the erotic.

An extensive traveler who loves to incorporate various legends from around the world into her tales, Lola White likes to twist reality at its edges in her stories. She likes delving into the emotions of her characters, finding their strengths and weaknesses, and seeing (and showing) how they get themselves out of whatever trouble has found them—if they can.

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Who wants a FREE story?

In an ironic twist, I’m honoring the release of Motherhood with a celebration of fathers! In the US, Father’s day is in June, and I’ll be releasing my novella, Stolen Goods just in time to celebrate.

Comment below with a happy memory of your father, step-father, grandfather, etc. and your first name, then follow this link and let me know! I’ll send you a PDF copy of Stolen Goods.

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Oh, No ... Not a Sex Scene...

Yesterday I spent eight hours working frantically on a short story for an anthology with a deadline next week. A character driven tale about second chances, "Late Show" was moving along well. I'd been building sexual tension, as the heroine awaited the arrival of her old flame, whom she'd learned was back in town at the start of the story. Her frantic mix of fear and desire felt real and compelling, at least to me.

Then something weird happened. I got to the point where I needed to begin the main sex scene, and I simply froze.

I'd written about 2500 words at that point. Suddenly I was exhausted. I thought about putting the story aside until I felt fresher and more inspired. However, I knew I wouldn't have another chance to finish it for days, and I really wanted a chance to send it off to a beta reader or two before I submitted the darn thing.

So I sat back to analyze my problem. I'm an author of erotica. Why was I resisting plunging (no pun intended) into the carnal heart of the story? I'm not shy about sex, as anyone who has read my work will testify. I had a fairly clear idea of the choreography for the scene. My characters were raring to go. What was wrong with me?

After a while I understood. I didn't want to start the scene because it just seemed too difficult to write it well. I've penned almost innumerable sexual encounters in my fourteen years of publishing. And the longer I write erotica, the more challenging it becomes to convey the essence of sexual experience in mere words.

I want to make the sensations palpable. I want my readers to taste the sweat, to feel the heat, to writhe and groan right along with my protagonists. However, words are always inadequate to convey physical experience. One is forced to resort to metaphor, and after a while, all the usual ones feel tired and overused. How many times can I compare an orgasm to a storm, an explosion, a runaway train, a fall from a precipice? I find myself reduced to abstractions when what I really seek is the ultimate in concreteness, the telling details that make one fuck different from another.

Maybe I'm getting too old for this game. I hit menopause half a dozen years ago. My husband's more than a decade older than I am. Our formerly riotous sex life has become subdued, to say the least. It becomes more and more of a challenge to recapture the freshness and intensity of overwhelming lust.

In any case, I managed to reason my way past the block, telling myself that given my schedule, I really had no choice. I had to do the best I could manage. I turned down the volume on the inner critic and finished the story (4500 words). It's by no means the best thing I've written, but these characters have been bugging me for a long time. I had to get them out of my notebook and onto the page.

Perhaps my brother is right, though. Maybe I really should switch over to writing mysteries!