Why We Write What We Write and Why PayPal Should Butt Out #censorship #erotica
Please hop on over to the very lovely Eden Connor‘s blog and read her series of interviews with banned authors. I am honoured to be the very first of them. Dirty Mind vs. The Debit Card. What I’d like you to do, if you are an author of a banned book, is consider writing about […]
Erotica Writers: Be Passionate but Be Careful with your Facts #paypal #censorship #erotica
I am overwhelmed and delighted to see the gloriously spirited and passionate response to the PayPal censorship issue. It’s good to see so many writers of all stripes blogging so eloquently about this issue. However, there is something that is disturbing me. I’m seeing a lot of understandable but er… careless wording. This is not […]
Pragmatic Compromises & The Moral Hazard of Expediency
As you can see, my last post generated a huge number of comments from both readers and writers. I gave Mark Coker a very rough ride and, to his credit, he responded eloquently and in a very gentlemanly fashion. I want to reiterate that I think Smashwords is a vital, valuable and outstanding site for […]
Two Legs Bad: An Open Letter to Mark Coker #smashwords #censorship #erotica
This post is a public response to an email sent by Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords, asking all erotic writers to take down any books that contravene their Terms of Service Dear Mark, I thank you for taking the time to write all published erotica writers offering their work for sale on Smashwords. I thank […]
Doing Good while Being Bad: Coming Together’s Share the Love – #comingtogether
All this month, Lisabet Sarai is hosting a series of posts by writers who have participated in and contributed to the ‘Coming Together‘ Project. Coming Together is the brain child of Alessia Brio who, six years ago, came up with the idea of publishing excellent erotic writing for charity. If you’d like to read more […]
Accidentally Kinky
Michel Perkins introduced his unique survey of modern erotic literature with George Bataille’s incisive quote: “Man goes contantly in fear of himself. His erotic urges terrify him.”(Perkins 1992). What serious novelist would deny themselves such a challenge as a topic? Yet most contemporary literary writers do, either by refusing to write about the sexual lives […]
On Pornography: Towards a revised definition
I’ve complained a great deal about the way in which all sexually explicit material of any sort is called ‘pornography’. And I’ve often insisted that what I write is not pornography. Because of this, I often worry that I leave my readers with the impression that I am anti-porn. I want to stress, categorically, that […]
My First (and perhaps last) ERWA Blog post
So, today was the first of my monthy ERWA Blog posts. It may very well be my last when my co-bloggers are confronted with 2000 words of density. We’ll see. Anyway, I’ve been blogging a lot lately about the lack of well-written or arousing sex scenes in literary fiction, and musing over the possible reasons […]
Show Me, Don’t Tell Me – Unless it’s Sex.
There were some really great comments on my last post about the literary world and its aversion to including erotic sex scenes in literary fiction or eliciting arousal in readers. Laughingly, and perhaps a little brutally, I said that it might have something to do with individual authors and their own feelings of sexual inadequacy. […]
Why Good Writers Write Bad Sex: An Exploration of Literary Prudery
Last year, Arifa Akbar wrote an interesting article in The Independent: Bad sex please, we’re British: Can fictive sex ever have artistic merit? I’ll be honest, I’ve been ruminating over this piece for about a year. First, let me give you some quotes from prize-winning writers and critics as to why they purposefully write unarousing […]