Category: Writing

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Writing Wednesday – PerNoFiMo wrap up

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Thank god it’s over. I finished work on PerNoFiMo – Personal Novel Finishing Month – on Sunday night. By that point, I had hit just over 40K words, doubling the amount I had written in that particular writing project to date. The work-in-progress, Whip It!, is still nowhere near done. I estimate the final story will be around 120K. But for now, I’m letting the story sit while I focus on other projects.

So, what did I learn from PerNoFiMo? Well, let’s see…

  • I can actually turn out 40K words in under 30 days.
  • About half of those words, if not more, are going to be pretty crappy.
  • But crappy writing can be edited, while no writing is still no writing.
  • Evenings after the kids have gone to bed make excellent time for writing. I loved curling up with the laptop in bed every night and just banging out words for two or more hours straight. This is one habit I hope to keep up.
  • I cannot write and handle e-mail in the same time period. I can either write, or check e-mail, but doing one negates the possibility of doing the other. I lost an entire evening of writing to tackling a response to just one e-mail. Yeah, three hours on one message. I was not happy about that.
  • Speaking of e-mail, I get too much of the damn stuff. It’s currently eating up at least 2 hours of my work day, and I still can’t keep up with the shit. Which probably means…
  • I need to cut back on a few things, to cut down on the amount of e-mail, or else free up time to handle it more. Or possibly both.
  • Final lesson – I cannot write a mystery without an outline. I must have the story blocked out first; not so much that I’ll lose all interest in the actual writing of the story, but enough to know what clues need to be set up and how to get from the crime to the solution without wanting to shoot myself along the way.

So, there ya go. PerNoFiMo – 40K words in 30 days, story still unfinished and half of what I wrote is complete donkey dung, but it’s progress none-the-less.

Where to go from here? Like I mentioned above, I intend to let Whip It! sit for a bit, possibly 2-3 months, before I return to it. On my to-do list, I have three stories for three different anthologies to write, and I need to get these done. That means I will once again be curling up in the evenings with the laptop to write for two hours before going to bed. Unlike PerNoFiMo, however, I intend to work at a more comfortable pace. I ended up writing just about every night for 2-3 hours, including weekends, and I started to burn out before the last week. Honestly, I like taking weekends off, and so I plan to not write on Friday and Saturday evenings just so I can curl up with the Hubster instead of the laptop and maybe watch some crappy TV. Or hey, even go out to a movie, or dinner, or have sex! Wouldn’t that be novel (as opposed to being a novel, in progress, every night of the week).

I took Monday and Tuesday nights off, so I plan to sit down again tonight and pull out that first story I need to write. Actually, it’s already written, but I really want to take another whack at it and make sure it’s good. Then I’ll get my other two stories written and go back to Whip It! I promise, I will get this story done.

Next week, I’ll try to post a snippet of what I wrote for PerNoFiMo, but for right now, I’ve got all that damned e-mail waiting for me to take care of it. Ciao, babies!

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Nerdvana is Out!

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I don’t have the official press release yet, but the m/m erotica anthology Nerdvana is out and available on Amazon.com!  Yours truly has a short story in it entitled, “Bully on the Playground.”  This is one of my more hardcore stories (and it’s never been published anywhere else!), so if that’s what you’re looking for, go get it!


And yes, I do think the guy on the cover looks like a naughty cross between Draco Malfoy and Harry Potter };D

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Welcome to Mundania is available now at ARe!

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My short story collection, Welcome To Mundania, is available for purchase at All Romance e-Books.  You can buy the collection of  all four stories here for just $4.99, or get the individual stories for $1.99 each at the following links.

A Man In A Kilt – When Jimmy, a strong-willed Scott, meets a dominatrix named Nan, he’s in for the sexual experience of his life. But what will he do when Nan insists on meeting his family? And how will they decide who wears the kilt and who wears the pants in their relationship?

Rapacious Mrs. Horner – Diane Horner is divorced, outraged, and addicted to gay porn.  She wants what she shouldn’t want.  When her son’s best friend confesses his attraction to her, she knows she should walk away.  But how do you walk away from what’s right there in your own bedroom?

Diablo -Randall is rich and spoiled and used to getting what he wants.  He has his eye on Ty, the hired hand at Polk’s Stables, but Ty only cares for Diablo, Randall’s horse.  Can Randall win over the object of his desire with kindness and friendship, or will he resort to more sinister methods to get what he wants?

A Room With A View -Darcy Daniels is out of work, out of her apartment and out of luck entirely.  When the economy tanks, she’s forced to move back in with her parents and take a lousy job at a burger joint to make ends meet.  Things are looking pretty glum until the day she meets Bobby Kritken, the boy next door.  He’s strictly off-limits due to a feud between his father and hers, but then Darcy discovers she can see Bobby’s room from her bedroom window, and suddenly she has a whole new outlook on life!

You can get these stories and more at All Romance eBooks.  And remember, e-books make lovely Christmas presents, and the price won’t break the bank!

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Writing Wednesday – The home stretch for PerNoFiMo

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Only six days left in November and I’m still working hard on PerNoFiMo – Personal Novel Finishing Month. At this point, I’ve written over 31000 words for my work in progress, tentatively titled “Whip It!” That’s well past the minimum goal of 20K words, and nearing the ultimate goal of 40K for the month. I’m doing good, right?

Eh, not so much. I’ve hit a snag at this point, you see. I started writing “Whip It!” almost three years ago. Back then, it was fresh in my mind and I had lots of ideas. Fortunately, I did put many of those ideas down in various documents. Unfortunately, I jumped right into PerNoFiMo without really digging through those notes first. That wasn’t a problem for the first two weeks, but for the last few days, I’ve been struggling to get through the story because I don’t know where to go with it. I’m the kind of person who prefers to have a story roughly mapped out before I begin to write. I don’t have to have every detail firmly in place, but I do need to know a general direction, and I mean I really need to know it. I need to have a good solid feel for a story, and quite frankly, I don’t have that with “Whip It!” right now.

Nor do I have the research I really need to make this work. The main character in “Whip It!” is a chef trying to start her own catering business. I know jack about catering. I spent a good part of last night searching the web for info on health regulations and food service permits and other such stuff. There are things I’m not sure my characters can do. For example, can you have a naked man in a kitchen during a health inspection? And how does one get a permit to run a catering business? Since much of the plot revolves around the heroine proving to her jerk ex-boyfriend that she can indeed stand on her own two feet and start up her own business, I actually need to show her standing on her own feet and starting up her own business. So I’ve got a lot of research I need to do before I can write certain parts of the story.

In fact, I’ve got so much research and outlining I need to do at this point that actual writing has ground to a halt. I just can’t keep plowing through the story until I take care of these matters. So what to do? Is there anyway I can hit my goal of 40K words?

I’m going to say “Yes!” Let’s face it, PerNoFiMo is my game so I get to set the rules. And the rules say that if I can’t write actual novel-type writing with plot, character, dialog, etc., then I can and should go ahead and play the game of “What happens next?” “What happens next?” is the question I always end up asking myself when the story grinds to a halt, like it has now with “Whip It.” For instance…

Lucy Cheeks, chef and would-be caterer, is in the middle of a health inspection which she must pass prior to getting the go-ahead to run her catering business. However, her assistant chef, Eduardo Suave – a deeply spiritual but very odd man who looks like the love child of Antonia Banderas and Freddie Mercury – was in the yard behind her kitchen doing nude yoga and he comes back inside, still naked, much to the surprise of the health inspector. What happens next?

I don’t have to write the story to answer it. I can just write notes to myself to keep the ideas flowing. So my answer might go something like this.

Eduardo and the health inspector, Imelda Blanc, have some history between them that Lucy doesn’t know about. In fact, what Lucy doesn’t know is that Imelda was one time Eduardo’s lover and dominatrix. She knows all about his nude yoga habit, and is not surprised to seem him roaming around nude in the kitchen. However, Eduardo is a very hairy man, and as a health inspector, she is concerned that some of his body hair might fall into any food they make. For this reason, she insists that Eduardo cannot be naked in the kitchen. He protests, and Lucy fears she’s going to lose her permit over this when her great aunt Bernice speaks up and says…

So that’s how “What happens next?” works. I just keep plugging away at the ideas, throwing writerly style to the wind. Basically, I’m outlining right there in the body of the story. In fact, once I hit my final word count, I’ll probably lift the entire “What happens next?” stuff out of the story document and save it as it’s own file, then continue to work on it and get all my plot points settled and all my research handled before I go back to the actual writing.

See? Word count keeps growing and those pesky outline and research problems eventually get solved.

One more week left in PerNoFiMo. To everyone out there plugging away at NaNoWriMo, I wish you all the best during these final days!

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Writing Wednesday – Should erotica writers hide?

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Meant to post this earlier today, but it’s been one of those days, by which I mean crazy busy. In any event, a quick PerNoFiMo update. Last night I passed the 20K word mark on Whip It, which means at just a little over halfway through the month, I’ve already met my minimum goal. Now to see how much more I can write before November is out. If I can turn out 1500 words a night, every night, until the end of the month, I could hit 40K words. But I’d have to write at least 1500 words every night, and there in lies the challenge.

We’ll see what happens. For now, I’m 20K words farther into this novel than I was two weeks ago, and that’s an accomplishment as far as I’m concerned.

Now onto today’s discussion topic. While reading through the Erotica Readers & Writers Association blog, I came across this post by M. Christian. The article is about the hazards of being an erotica writer and the need to protect oneself from the slings and arrows of the righteous, the intolerant, the uptight and the inhibited. Among other things, M. Christian urges the need for erotica writers to hide what they do. I can understand why he offers this advice. For erotica writers, the threats of being fired, stalked, harassed, arrested, of losing one’s home or even one’s children are all very real.

But…

Here’s my problem with this. You can’t ever hide completely, not if you want to write. You can’t hide and get your stories published. You can’t hide and promote your work online. You can’t hide and go to signings or conventions. You can’t hide and write. Because once you write those words, those awful filthy words about the most forbidden subject of sex, you’ve already revealed who and what you are. You have made your mark in the erotica genre. You have left evidence for others to see. Short of deleting the file and wiping the hard drive (or for you low-tech writers, burning the notebook and throwing away the pen), you can’t get rid of that evidence. You did the deed. You dared to write the porn, the erotica, the smut, the whatever-the-hell-you-want-to-call-this-genre. You wrote it, and it’s yours. Oh, you can use a pen name, you can promote only online, and you can demur when people ask what you write about, but still. If you write sexually explicit material, then you have already put yourself at risk for being fired, harassed, stalked, etc. Computers can be searched. Pen names can be revealed. You yourself might trip up and let slip some detail that would allow people to connect your story with your name. Even if you just write one erotica story, one steamy sexy scene, and hide it away in a dresser drawer, it’s still there for someone to find and you’re still going to be at risk. It’s like trying to take a dip in the pool without getting wet. Even if all you do is just put your little toe in the water, you can’t not get wet.

For my part, I have never hidden what it is I do. I have never used a pen name. And somehow I have never suffered any of these horror stories that I’ve heard about from other writers. Maybe it’s because I’m not in as vulnerable a position as others are. I’m a stay-at-home mom; I can’t get fired from that job! And I’m in a good, stable marriage. My husband knew from the start what I was writing. So did my parents. To this day, my mother introduces me as ‘her daughter who writes porn.’ My husband’s family all know what I write. My friends know. Heck, even our pediatrician and my daughters’ teachers know. I have never made a secret of this. And yet somehow, I’m doing okay. Maybe I’ve just been lucky. Maybe my own personal horror story of stalkings and obscenity charges and court cases are just around the corner waiting to happen. Who knows?

What I do know is that anyone who tells me to hide the fact that I am an erotica writer might as well just tell me to never write erotica in the first place. The consequences are dire, so don’t even dare it. But telling me to not write erotica would be like telling the late Charlton Heston to not let anybody know he liked guns. To paraphrase the man himself, I will only stop writing porn when you can pry my keyboard from my cold, dead hands. Until then, risks be damned. I’m writing.

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Writing Wednesday – E-mail is EVIL!

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We’re now halfway through the second week of PerNoFiMo (Personal Novel Finishing Month), or as it’s better known to other writers, NaNoWriMo.  So far, I’ve written around 11K words, more than halfway to my minimum goal of 20K, so I’m very pleased. I’ve discovered that I can churn out between 1200 and 1800 words without much problem, so long as I follow a few rules.

First, just write, don’t re-write and don’t edit as you go. Remember, neither PerNoFiMo nor NaNoWriMo are about a perfect first draft. Their goal is a first draft in any crappy shape you can manage to turn out.

Second, don’t go back and re-read your previous day’s work. A friend of mine, Scarlett Greyson, mentioned that she made the mistake of doing this and she wished she hadn’t. She wanted to rewrite everything!  Again, this is not the point of PerNoFiMo or NaNoWriMo. Don’t rewrite! Just get it down the first time. The next month, and the month after that and the month after that, you can rewrite to your heart’s content.

Finally, whatever you do, don’t open your frikkin’ e-mail before you sit down to write! I made this mistake last week. I just wanted to check something, but then discovered a super very important life or death e-mail that I had to answer right that second! I spent the next two hours writing one stupid e-mail, and there went all my time for writing that evening. I had to make it up the next day, and damn near killed myself trying to write 3K words as opposed to the usual 1500 or so.

Anyway, that’s what I’ve learned from PerNoFiMo/NaNoWriMo so far. What about you folks? Figure out anything interesting from all this writing?

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PerNoFiMo update

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I mentioned a couple of weeks ago in a Writing Wednesday post that instead of doing NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), I wanted to do PerNoFiMo (Personal Novel Finishing Month). I’ve got three unfinished projects on my computer that I really need to get done, one of which was as far along at 40,000 words.  That’s a lot of novel to have written and then left unfinished.

So on Monday, I pulled out that 40,000 words and started adding to it.  It was a little rough at first.  I had wanted to get started on Sunday by re-reading what I had written so far, but Princess came down with the flu and I wasn’t feeling so hot myself, so nothing got done that day.  I plowed into it on Monday instead, adding about 1500 words, and then spent Tuesday and Wednesday reacquainting myself with my notes and rough outline.  I’ve got a ton of notes still left to sort through, but I got myself far enough along to know the general direction I need to head in, and on Wednesday night I started writing again.

Last night, Thursday, I made the mistake of checking e-mail before doing any writing, and spent an entire 2 hours responding to a very important e-mail, thus failing to get more than another 10 words written in the novel.  So I cleared everything off my plate today and sat down at noon to start writing again.  I got through another 3000 words, bringing me to a total of 6000 so far for the week. I’m hoping I can squeeze in another 2000 before I go to bed on Sunday night.  We’ll see.

Some interesting things I’ve discovered so far this week.  I had planned to work on this novel during the day, but I’ve had to spend so much time dealing with the usual e-mail and day-to-day promo and supporting work I do as a writer that I can never manage to do any actual writing.  So, I decided I would have to stay up a little later and write after the girls go to bed.  It’s actually kind of nice. I climb into bed with my laptop, and just type.  It’s very cozy and I can actually get 1000 words done pretty easily this way.

The other thing I’ve discovered, or rather knew but am now actually experiencing first hand,  is that I don’t need write perfectly to get this done.  If I try to write the perfect story, I will fuck myself over completely and not get anything down on the page.  Instead, I just need to type anything, and I do mean anything, that comes to mind.  I’ve said this before, the point of NaNoWriMo, and now PerNoFiMo, is to get as many words down on the page as possible.  Not the best words, not the exact perfect words, just as many as you can in order to rip through the first draft of the novel.  I’ve had to constantly remind myself of this every time I hesitate and think, “Eh, did I really mean to type that?  It doesn’t sound exactly right.”  It doesn’t matter if what I typed is exactly right.  What matters is I typed it and now I need to move on and type other things.

Hopefully, I’ll do another update on PerNoFiMo next Wednesday as part of Writing Wednesday.  My goal is to get at least another 20,000 words added to this story by the end of the month, though I would prefer to write as much as 40,000 and maybe get this story done.  But any progress at this point is good progress, and right now I’m already 6000 words ahead of the game.

Write on, dudes!

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Writing Wednesday – NaNoWriMo?

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November is coming up fast, and with it, National Novel Writing Month, or as it’s better known, NaNoWriMo. This is the first year since I’ve been writing seriously that both kids have been in school most of the week, and I always thought that when I reached this point, I’d finally commit and do NaNoWriMo.

For those of you who aren’t familiar, the goal of NaNoWriMo is to write a 50,000 novel during the month of November. That’s 50K words in 30 days, which works out to about 1700 words a day. It can be a bit of a challenge, unless you embrace the idea behind NaNoWriMo, which is not to write well, but just to write period. In other words, if you slave over every paragraph, every sentence, every word, there’s no way in hell you’re going to write 1700 words a day for 30 days straight. But if you just throw your perfectionism to the winds and churn out the words, then hell yeah, you can get a novel written. And then, once you’ve finished that lousy first draft, you can go back and polish it into a better second, third, fourth or however many drafts it takes to reach the perfect finished state. But you can only get to that point if you write the lousy first draft first.

So anyway, NaNoWriMo is coming, the kids are both in school most of the week, and I’m confronted with the possibility that this is the year I could finally participate in NaNoWriMo. This is the year I could knock out the first draft of a novel in a month, get the second draft done the month after that, and maybe have a finished novel ready to send out by the time Valentine’s Day rolls around, or even sooner, depending on how long the rewrite/polishing process takes. And it would be great, really great, for me to do this, except I can’t stop asking myself…

“Could I? Should I?”

I’ve been working since September to clean up my computers and get a new website designed and so far I’ve managed only to clean up the computers (though not redo the laptop from scratch, which was the ultimate goal)  and get the new blog up and running (that’s a far cry from having a complete website done, I tell ya). I’ve still got a few days left in October to finish up that website , and then NaNoWriMo would start. But I’m not sure I want to jump into NaNoWriMo completely cold. I would prefer to have an outline worked out, a little research done… you know, I want the writing pump primed, so I’m ready to bolt once the starting gun goes off.

Then there’s the matter of the three unfinished writing projects still sitting on my computer’s hard drive. One of them is up to 43K long. That’s a lot of words to just leave sitting there unfinished. I know NaNoWriMo is all about starting and finishing a first draft, but I don’t want to start a new project when I’ve got 3 others unfinished and one that far along.

So here’s what I’m thinking of doing – finish up the website by the end of the week. Then the first of November, open up that really long, sadly unfinished project and start reading and getting myself back into the feel of it. By the end of the first week, begin writing again. I think I could do 1000 words a day if I pushed myself. I won’t be writing on weekends, because I just can’t right now. The podcast gets recorded and produced on weekends and that’s about as much as I can do and still have a family and a life of sorts. I reaize this won’t fulfill that 1700 words a day I’d need to do NaNoWriMo, but then I’m not actually doing NaNoWriMo. This is more like PerNoFiMo – Personal Novel Finishing Month.

So that’s the goal. I could get 20K words written this way, and that would bring me closer to finishing the first draft of this novel. Then maybe I can do another 20K in December and actually finish it. Can’t say for certain that 40K total will finish this particular novel, but if not, I’ll do another 20K in January and maybe then we’ll see.

If you’re doing NaNoWriMo, or some variation of it, let me know. I’d be interested in hearing who’s doing it and what they hope to accomplish in the upcoming month!

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Wired Hard 4 is out!

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Wired Hard 4: Erotica for a Gay Universe is out from Circlet Press!  My short story, When the Angels Fall, is in this one.  If you’re looking for really good sci-fi m/m erotica, then pick this book up now!  You can get it just about every e-book format, from just about every e-book outlet available, with the Kindle version from Amazon.com coming soon.   Get more details here: Wired Hard 4 at Circlet.com.