The non-perils of sex writing

A few days ago, a friend sent me a link to an interview in the Paris Review: Nicholson Baker, The Art of Fiction No. 212.   Though I'd been intrigued over the years with various titles of his, I'd not read any of his books yet. When House of Holes came out last year, I put it on my mental "to read" list, but of course our library doesn't have it (or any of his sexually-themed books). I've since checked out The Mezzanine (his first novel) from the library and started it last night. I think I've found another writer whose strange work I love.

The interview is long, and I had to read it in chunks because I was otherwise occupied. But it is well worth the time. What I most loved about the interview was Mr. Baker's answer to the question "Can we talk a little about the perils of sex writing?" Mr. Baker answered "Yes. There aren't any."!!! :-)

I would love to know if the interviewer was as flummoxed as it seemed. A little further on, Mr. Baker is asked "Is writing about sex arousing for you as you’re writing it?" and part of his answer is the whole reason for this post. "There’s no point in doing it if it isn’t arousing to some degree. Erotic-romance novelists talk about, after certain chapters, taking a “fun break.” You’re imagining all these wild, explicit things. I think it would be really perverse to sit there completely unmoved."

But we, as in those of us who write erotica/smut/porn/whatever already know that. ;-)

Something about reading this review made me very happy. Nicholson Baker had much more to say about "sex writing," so go read the interview. It's great!

Sexy Mama blogging at Good Vibrations blog

In a fit of confidence and bravery, I answered a call from Charlie Glickman, that I saw on Facebook, for bloggers (especially for their Sexy Mama series) for The Buzz/Good Vibrations Online Magazine. And got the job!

I'd heard Charlie speak at Momentum, and have been reading his stuff for awhile. I sent some writing samples (from here and other places), and it meant a lot to have him say that he likes my writing style.

I'll be blogging mainly about sex and parenting, though I gather whatever tickles my fancy is fine. I'm thrilled to get a chance to pursue some subjects in a way that didn't feel quite right for this or other venues. I opted to write as Erobintica, for a bunch of reasons. I'll write about those another time, but for now...

Here's my first post: Hard To Teach If You Didn't Learn

Accepted into Best Erotic Romance 2!!!

Sorry this is a bit late being posted, but Kristina Wright, accepted my story "Another Chance" for inclusion in Best Erotic Romance 2013 (or BER 2)!!!!

It's an honor to be sharing the pages with these folks. And I'd find links to folks's sites, but my laptop is being real slow. Maybe I'll add them another time. Yeah, am thrilled!!!!!

BEST EROTIC ROMANCE 2013

Table of Contents




Foreword                                                            Saskia Walker

Introduction: Can’t Get Enough

Kiss and Make Up                                                Heidi Champa

Waiting for Ilya                                                Teresa Noelle Roberts

Three Nights Before the Wedding                        Catherine Paulssen

Flowering                                                            Donna George Storey                       

Teach Me                                                            Jeanette Grey

Last Hundred Days                                                Geneva King

The Price of Love                                                Kate Pearce

Another Chance                                                Erobintica

Cutting Out Hearts                                                Kristina Lloyd

Chocolate Cake and You                                    Victoria Blisse

Adagio                                                            Torrance Sené

Nothing Important Happened Today                     A.M. Hartnett

Renovate                                                            Nina Reyes

Trouble in Paradise                                                Crystal Jordan

Kiss of Peace                                                Dominic Santi                       

Grounded                                                            Nikki Magennis

Sweet Memories                                                Kristina Wright

On getting a very nice review

Yesterday, thanks to Emerald, I got to read this really nice review (of Suite Encounters: Hotel Sex Stories) at Erotica Revealed. She (Em) wanted me to see this because the reviewer, Nathan Burgoine, said some especially nice words about my story, "Return to the Nonchalant Inn."

On a completely different note, “Return to the Nonchalant Inn” by Erobintica was a lovely piece with a man and a woman reminiscing on the erotic adventures of their youth – but from a vantage point of an older, wiser – and still sexually heated – perspective. I think the inclusion of this story, with a woman confident and content in her mature body, was an absolute win for the collection – and a very strong reminder that eroticism doesn’t die with the passing of years.

I've been reading that over and over again. And at times it makes me choke up. I'm 54. Not getting any younger. And as I said in my last post, I was afraid "Erobintica" was fading away. Yeah, in a way I think I've been mourning some lost youth that I never really had, because back then, I was not wiser and I sure as hell wasn't confident, or even content in my younger body. But these past few years, Erobintica has been a journey for me. And I'm learning something new about myself every day. Sometimes I like what I learn, sometimes I don't.

Or more exactly, I don't like some things about me, even though they may be crucial to who I am. Who I will be happy as. When you deny parts of yourself, you shut yourself off from being "confident and content." I've always been worried about what people (those amorphous "people") would think and worried that those who mean a lot to me wouldn't like who I am (or want to become). But that kind of worrying and thinking is so fucking self-limiting, that it was almost as if a sign from Eros, that I saw this posted on Facebook the other day. I saved it on my desktop and even printed it out so I can glance at it often:

I've always admired that in other people. Maybe it's time to try it on for myself.

Just when I needed it most

We're just about ready to put the house on the market. The painting and refinishing and packingpackingpacking (and filling a 10 X 10 storage unit almost to the ceiling) and purging is almost done.

I've been neglecting my writing. Have only written one poem (and that was about packing) in the past several-or-more months. I think I did crank out a story or two. And I've hardly blogged at all. Not much to say.

And for awhile I kept worrying that my Erobintica days had seen their best and that she'd be slowly fading away. Because it felt like that to me. Inside. Where the spark for her lived. Yeah, I was thinking past-tense when it came to my erotic core. I won't enumerate the reasons for that. Because I discovered she wasn't gone, just asleep.

Several good, no, make that great! things have happened lately, to give me a bit of a boost just when I needed it most. Some I can write about, some I can't. But let's just say that I'm back and ready to gaze below the surface again. :)

A month come and gone

I haven't been here since April. Blogger has a new look since the last time I logged in and posted anything. I almost couldn't, because I had to change stuff since Google is so all-tentacled now and I've been around on Blogger since before those days. Not with this blog, but another old one. For a moment I was afraid I couldn't get into my own blog to post!

We have been very busy with getting our house ready to put on the market. We want to move to Maine once it's sold. But we've been in it for more than 18 years and it's a lot of work. We missed our aimed-for date of March. Then April went by. Then May. Now it's June and we still have work to do. I've neglected my writing as well as [obviously] my blogging. Time to remedy that. Beware, the next paragraph will have lots of links.

Yesterday I traveled into New York City to attend a reading at Bluestockings for Kristina Wright's just-released Lustfully Ever After. I met Emerald (who was reading) and Tess Danesi in Grand Central and we had a wonderful dinner together at Noodle Bar. Then we walked the couple blocks to the bookstore where we met Sacchi Green and Michelle Augello-Page (both reading) out front. Inside was Kristina, and it was wonderful to finally get to meet her in person. Then Jeremy Edwards and Helia Brookes showed up. The reading was wonderful, and afterwards we wandered around finding a place that could seat our group. We ended up at Sauce, and had some delicious food, desserts, and wine.

Riding the train home, I realized how nourishing the evening had been for my writer-self. I've been so focused on doing stuff to the house–packing, cleaning, painting, refinishing, "staging"–that I've not allowed myself to go to that writerspace and that I've missed it. Sitting at the computer typing words, or scratching in a notebook often don't seem as important as taking another load to the storage unit or painting more window trim. But I realized that one of these days, hopefully soon, this house will be sold. And that writer-self needs to still be here. I do believe that if you don't use it, you lose it, mainly because I've seen it to be true. I need to use my writer muscles more. So, I'm going to try to blog more regularly, and not think of writing as something to do when...

So thanks to those wonderful folks last night. The connections I've made–no, change that to the friends I've made–through this online world of erotica authors, mean a lot to me. And here I sit, looking at all these words I've quickly written and I'm thinking "yeah, I need to do this more."

Next best thing to being in 5 places at once: The Momentum Conference e-book.

A few weeks ago, I went to the 2nd Annual Momentum Conference outside Washington, D.C. Subtitled "Making Waves in Sexuality, Feminism, and Relationships," I found the conference to be even better than the first one in 2011.

One drawback to successful conferences like this one is the inability to be in multiple places at once. Considering all the sessions I attended were great, I knew I was also missing wonderful stuff in the other sessions. Unfortunately, one must make choices.

But this year, Tess Danesi, Dee Dennis, and Inara de Luna have edited an e-book of "Selected Essays by 2012 Speakers Advocating Change in Current Sexual Dialogues," which allowed me to not only sit in–well, in a manner of speaking–on sessions that I'd had to pass up, but also gave me really good notes for the ones I did go to. As soon as I got home from the conference I bought it (though it has to be on my husband's PC Kindle since I have a "vintage" mac that doesn't support hardly anything anymore).  When I saw Tess asking if folks wanted to write about it on their blogs, I jumped at the chance.

But this e-book isn't just for folks that went to the conference, or even for those that missed it even though they wanted to go. From the foreword by Dr. Joycelyn Elders to the lovely closing poem, "Easy Does It" by Leela Sinha, this book is filled with fascinating essays. There are a few weird blips (blank spaces in lines, what might have been a few missing words), but nothing horrendous. I do wish I had an e-reader for this though.

I know I'll go back and read the essays by the folks I heard in the various sessions and the opening and closing plenaries: Dr. Elders, Esther Perel, Rebecca Chalker and Lara Riscol, Allison Moon, Charlie Glickman, Audacia Ray, and Joan Price among others. What I was interested in was what the folks I didn't get to hear were writing about.

I jumped around a bit. I loved Ned Mayhem's "Sexual Science, Academia, and the PSIgasm Project" and it's 4 1/2 pages of notes at the end. He brings up the good point that if legislation and medicine are based on sexual science, then we better be sure it's good science.

Stef Woods' piece, "Sexuality and Social Media" resulted in my first jotted down quote: "The movement from cave paintings to provocative Calvin Klein billboards to a blog about sexual expression is merely an evolution of delivery, not concept."  Yes!  And she talked about a "Sexual Genogram" that I'm going to have to go back to, because I was very interested, but lacked time to think about it when I read it.

Then I had a "wow" moment while reading "Self-Expression & the Contemporary Media: A Call to Action" by polyamory advocates Lisa Speer, Brian Ballard, and Jasmine Goldman. I hope they don't mind me quoting this - but it meant enough to me that I wrote it all down longhand in a journal. I intend to pondering why it got to me so in a future blog post. And if you've read my blog for any amount of time, you know why this hit home for me.

"We'd posit that a large portion of shame stems from not owning who you are and your choices. This type of self-censorship afford and individual some comforts: not feeling odd or standing out poorly amongst peers, not facing a barrage of scrutiny and doubt concerning your personal choices in life. The cost of these comforts, however, are staggering. The perpetuate behaviors such as hiding, being purposefully unclear or only revealing half-truths, and most alarmingly, living in a constant state of fear of discovery and anxiety... all frames of mind that chip away at one's joy and self-expression [emphasis mine]."

I also enjoyed Avory Faucette's "An Exercise in Sexual Orientation" with its discussion of sexual scripts,  why gender?, and designing your sexual orientation. "Some of the things I like have a relationship to gender, and some of them don't."

Even though I'm only familiar with Fetlife through hearing about it from other folks, I thoroughly enjoyed Cunning Minx's very practical guide to "How Not to Be a Douche on Fetlife."

The last piece I got to read (in other words, yes, I haven't read the whole book, which I like, there's more to look forward to!) was Maggie Mayhem's "How Your Sex Community Can Combat Sexual Assault (Without Forming a Lynch Mob). All I can say is I love her wisdom.

If you're wanting a great summary of all the essays, go here to check out what Rebecca Chalker had to say, since I've yet to finish the book. Oh, and rather than infest this post with a bajillion links, go here to read about the presenters and find links to their own sites.