#Eroticon2013 – Monday’s hungover recollections of Saturday’s sessions

I didn’t do my usual avalanche of tweeting during the Eroticon London 2013 conference, which goes some way to telling you just how absorbing it was. First and foremost, huge congratulations to Ruby Kiddell (@eroticnotebook) for her masterful organization of the event. It really was superbly done.  Also, a big congrats need to go to Harper Eliot (@harpereliot) who organized the associated “Aural Sex” event on Saturday evening, featuring readings from many of the conferences writers/bloggers.

The crying shame  of all conferences is that sessions run simultaneously and, inevitably, hard choices have to be made. I always end up feeling like self-cloning technology needs to get its ass in gear and offer us a way of being in three places at once. Which could also have interesting sexual possibilities. If you take a look at the schedule, it will come clear that, for the most part, I followed a writerly course through the conference. Had I attended alternate sessions, I might have had a completely different experience.

But I digress. (Like I often do)

Saturday, the opening plenary was delivered by the Brook organization. It was a mini-history of sex ed, technologies, social and cultural attitudes, and the current state of sex education and reproductive health services in the UK. Although I thought it was an excellent presentation, I think it highlighted one of the major challenges in the contemporary sexual dialectic: the practice of sex and the many and diverse topics surrounding sex issues tend to get lumped together. Being neither a teenager embarking on my sexual life, nor a policy-maker, determining focus or funding, nor a social worker dealing with the consequences of lack of education or access to services, I did find it an odd, and overly concrete way, to kick off the conference. That being said, it was well constructed and would have made a fine seminar.

One of the highlights of the conference, for me, came in the second set of sessions. Author Kristina Lloyd’s  (@kristina_lloyd)workshop was  45 minutes of the best creative writing teaching & learning I’ve ever attended. It could serve as the gold standard for creative writing pedagogy. It was engaging, funny, challenging, inspiring, fertile and tangibly productive. I walked out, having used her ‘sex machine’ with the bones of three stories simmering away in my brain. The fact that she is not heading up a Creative Writing department at a major university is a fucking sin. And far from the oft-related witticism that there are those who write and those who can’t, and therefore teach it, Miss Lloyd can write erotic fiction phenomenally. Seriously, if you are shopping for a really deeply erotic, meaty read, buy any of her novels. I swear you won’t regret it. (Well, you might, because after reading her work, you’ll read a lot of crap and feel bereft)

Cressida Downing‘s (@BookAnalyst) session on editing was not only informative, but it highlighted a thread of concern that ran through the entire conference. The fine art of good literary editing has been dying a slow death for years, meanwhile, digital publishing and the explosion in self-pubbing means that more and more works are in dire need of a good editor’s help and not getting it. A truly staggering example of this is the complete lack of competent editing in books like ‘Fifty Shades’ which was originally self-pubbed and then picked up and republished by the giant Random House, without even a modicum of editorial oversight. Good editing doesn’t just make your book better, it subtly sets a standard of expectation for readers. Random House is not the only major publisher pumping out poorly edited books by any means. Ultimately, it is the reader who suffers. They are being slowly but surely taste-trained to a vastly inferior product. Don’t believe me? This review haunts me. I cringe every time I think of it. Get your manuscript professionally edited, whether you’re pubbing yourself or going through a publisher.

The third session was my own creative writing presentation. Far more theoretical and probably not as materially useful to erotic fiction writers as Kristina’s was, but hopefully thought provoking. Attached is a PDF – it is slightly longer than the presentation I gave live, and has a writing challenge at the end. But remember, powerpoints are by nature skeletal and slightly telegraphic. Hope you can muddle your way through it.

After lunch, I attended Hazel Cushion‘s session on pitching to publishers. Hazel is the founder of Xcite Books, a UK based erotica publishing company that has grown from strength to strength under her very savvy leadership. She is a lovely lady and a very smart business woman and, after the first demise of Black Lace/Nexux, she almost singlehandedly reforged a significant place for erotica within the publishing business in the UK. Panels on pitching to publishers all suffer from the same problem. Each publisher has a very specific idea of the ‘product’ they want to sell and the relationship they want with the writer. They want writers who will accommodate them to produce that product. So, no matter how much commonality of purpose there appears to be, there is, always has been, and always should be a fundamental tension between publishers and writers. It’s an historic and healthy adversarial relationship. Writers want to write the great novel that will shake the universe, publishers want to publish what they know will sell with as little investment or hassle as possible. Between that narcissistic/altruistic creative force and the pragmatic/commercial one, the idea is that good books which are accessible to readers are made available to them, and I’ve never attended a publishers panel that ever really owned up to this reality.

With the advent of eBooks, audiobooks and the massive explosion of self-publishing, the landscape has really changed. I think Hazel offered some persuasive reasons for writers to consider publishing under an imprint like Xcite but, at the moment, I think erotica publishers have not yet taken on board the implications of some of the changes that the rise in these new technologies have meant for writers, and I believe they will need to offer significantly more in the way of support and services in order to compete with the self-pub option. Xcite has a great reputation amongst erotica writers: it treats them fairly and offers competitive royalty rates, but even with its Amazon ranking advantage, its editorial services and the advantage of having your work offered under the cover of a reliable ‘brand’, I’m not sure it is enough to make up for the stylistic and content compromises a writer may have to make, and the significant drop in royalty percentages. I was on a panel on publishing with Hazel and Maxim Jakubowski on Sunday, and I’ll write about that in another post.

I have to own to playing hookie from the last set of Saturday sessions because by that time, I was in a huddle with a whole group of fellow erotic fiction writers I admire desperately. We communed, we reinforced each other’s sense of the unacknowledged importance of our place in contemporary literature. In essence, it was a lovely, long and delicious group headfuck.