Second and Final Day at #EAACON

The second day of EAACON (The Erotica Authors’ Association conference) began with the Editors’ Panel.

Not a lot of new stuff at this for anyone who has been submitting to anthologies for a while.  Basically, writers who don’t follow formatting requests when they submit tend to turn editors off.

For anyone reading who has just started but is gaining enough confidence in their writing to submit stories to anthology calls, please let me be a lot more brutal and forthright than any of the very polite panel members:

READ THE SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

FORMAT YOUR STORY IN EXACTLY THE WAY THEY HAVE SPECIFIED.

If the formatting specifications confuse you, or you aren’t sure how to go about meeting their guidelines, you have a number of options.

• a) email the editor who put out the call and ask for an explanation.
• b) join one of the good online writer’s groups like ERWA or EAA and ask for guidance.
• c) make friends with more published writers who have made successful submissions and ask.

When you submit stories that don’t follow the content, word-count or formatting guidelines, an editor will interpret your failure to do so in any or all of the following ways, depending on their personality, their state of mind on the day, and whether they’re suffering from a hangover:

1. If this writer doesn’t have the discipline to follow my guidelines, he or she probably isn’t sufficiently disciplined to hone his or her craft enough to be published.
2. This writer hasn’t even got enough respect for me to deliver the story the way I’ve asked for it to be submitted. Fuck’em.
3. I have 300 submissions, I can’t read them all. I’m going to sort through them and just toss out all the ones that are formatted badly. Great! Now I only have to read 150!

The bottom line is YOU ARE NOT SPECIAL OR AN EXCEPTION. Follow the rules like everyone else. If you have problems with authority, think kinky and consider the exercise a literary ‘submission’.  The only beneficial way to stick out amongst the other submissions is to submit a good story that fits the call. All the other ways you can stick out are negative.

I don’t often submit stories, but in eight years I have only ever received 3 rejections. I’d like to think this was because my stories are fucking brilliant, but actually, I’m quite certain that it’s more often because they were adequate, somewhat related to the topic and I was scrupulous about their guidelines. These people aren’t usually just editors. They are often fellow authors. Adhering to their specifications is my way of saying: I respect your work, I want to be in your book and I’m going to make it as easy as possible for you to accept my story.

Never explain your story, make excuses for it or talk it up in the enclosing email. Let it speak for itself. If you really don’t think it can, then you shouldn’t submit it.

Always be absolutely honest about where the story may have appeared in the past. Some editors are specifically looking for stories that have been ‘published’ before and some don’t want to see a story even if it has only appeared on your site. Others want stories that have never appeared anywhere, including your blog.

If you are not sure what level of prior exposure they are willing to tolerate – and I often have a hard time interpreting this particular guideline myself –  send the story and explain where it has appeared in the enclosing email. I can’t be entirely certain of this, but my gut says as long as it’s a great story, you own the rights to it, and it hasn’t been in another print anthology or a paying site, most editors are flexible on this issue when they can be.

An eye opener at the Editors’ Panel was Hazel Cushion‘s statement that if she doesn’t see some sort of sexual stuff on page one then she won’t accept the story.  My first reaction was disgust. Not because of the swiftness of getting to the sex, but because I truly believe that stories have their own ways of telling themselves and you just have to let them do it. But, after having some time to think about it (I’m so glad I waited a couple of days to write this) I got a little clarity. Hazel knows what her product is and who Xcite readers are.  And the mistake I have made is thinking that what I write is in anyway related.  It’s just not. Period. I doubt I will ever submit anything to Excite and that is probably a good thing for both of us.

For me, the idea of strategically putting sex on the first page, just to conform to the marketplace is absurd. It’s not that I haven’t written things with sex on the first page – I have.  But it doesn’t matter, because what I write on the second page is not going to make her readers happy anyway.

My mistake is in assuming that I am somehow allied to another author or a publisher just because our material all contains explicit sex.  It’s a telling statement on how writing things that society finds problematic somehow ghettoizes us into the same small space.  But the truth is we have entirely different goals. And that’s where the focus should be. She’s a lovely woman. I respect her. She’s done a lot to make a lot of women happy.

Fast forward about an hour.

I sat in on a couple of readings and I promise I will get you that list if I can. Damn but I love hearing erotica read aloud. It never struck me how rare it is to hear those words, all that desire, all that lust and decadence and perversion ring out in a room.  Personally, I don’t write to be read aloud, and anyone who has listened to my podcasts knows how difficult and unsuitable most of my work is to read aloud. I’ve got the worlds least poetic sentence structures.  Plus, I’m just fucking chicken. So it was thoroughly delightful to hear braver souls than I do it and do it so well.

In the early afternoon, I had the privilege of sharing a panel on Taboo in Erotic Writing, chaired by author Kate Dominic, with Blake C. Aarens, Cecilia Tan and Andrea Dale.  At first I thought we were going to get stuck on simply naming all the ways you could offend your readers, but I’m glad to say we quickly progressed into a discussion on why offending your readers might be a good thing and what purpose challenging those boundaries and comfort limits serves.

I was expecting some argument from the audience.  Perhaps it was that the voices in support of writing freedom were so damn loud that those who disagreed felt unable to say so, but there was literally no dissent.  And that, to me, in that room full of writers, was a truly wonderful thing. We all agreed there were legal issues and we had to be reasonable in our publication expectations, but damn… yes. It was good.

Later I attended Graydancer‘s  hands-on-kink session. It was mostly his hands on the very lovely and spankable Sharazade (who has a truly magnificent ass) and being the voyeur I am, that was delicious. I’m pretty familiar with kink  at this level, so there was only one light bulb moment. However, it was a spectacular one.

Gray asked the audience what they thought needle play was about. There were a lot of good answers but as the only male in the room and the only one in attendance likely to stick a needle in anyone who isn’t a diabetic, he said ‘needle play is about penetration’.

Yes, seems obvious, doesn’t it. And I feel like an imbecile for not having seen it. It does tell you a great deal about how being a receiver can severely limit your perspective. Of course, it’s not the only right answer. Needle play is many things to many people, but I loved his answer. Now I have to crank up my writing brain and do something about it.

The closing party was loud, lewd and included rope bondage.  I have to admit to not staying long. I don’t do well in crowds of people. I keep wanting to initiate deep and important conversations with people who fascinate me, which is entirely inappropriate. Well, I’m entirely inappropriate. I just don’t know how to be social in those kinds of environments.

I can only hope and pray that this conference was financially successful enough to consider a second annual EAACON.  I met great people, and listened to a lot of good ideas and good erotica.

But more than anything else, it’s a lonely thing we do – not just the solitariness of writing, but the isolating aspect of what we write. It was wonderful to feel part – really part of a community.

I want to formally thank D.L. King, Kathleen Bradean and Nan Andrews for their superb organizational skills and their vision.  I want to thank them personally for inviting me to participate and getting me out of my closet here in the wilds of Southeast Asia to do it.

Somehow, through all this experience, I have been fundamentally changed as a writer. This conference came at a time when I was having severe doubts about who I was and if I had a voice worth writing.

I am Remittance Girl and I’m a writer.