Interview with Kella Z. Driel

 

I met Kella on twitter. It’s always great to meet another futa author who writes crazy stories. So buckle up and let’s get to know the awesomeness that is Kella Z. Driel!

You are stranded on a desert island, what three books do you have with you?

The Necronomicon by Abd-al-Hazred and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy—the real one referred to by Douglas Adams in his book of the same name, with its store of Galactic wisdom. The third would be the Transnomicon, which I invented for my silly stories. It has a lot of genderswap spells but there’s other magic in there, too.

The secret to getting off your evil desert island trap must lie within one of those books!

Clowns, do you like them or find them the most terrifying thing ever imagined?

Coulrophobia is no laughing matter! Doctors estimate up to one in fifty Americans suffer a deep, abiding fear of clowns. If you’re one of these victims, suffer no more! Driel Pharmaceuticals introduces KlownAway™ a powerful new psychoactive medicine with absolutely no deleterious side-effects and erections that do not last forty-eight hours. Start living a clown-free lifestyle today!

If you could have a dinner with any literary character, who would that be and why?

Gennifer the Gender-Swap Genie from my story Gender Genie! She can turn me into a Gender-Swap Genie, too, and then we could live in her castle in Cloud Cuckoo-Land, smoking weed and playing videogames in-between filthy sex. Then we will create a magical spaceship that looks like a muscle car and we’ll explore the universe together, forever, like in that South Park tribute to Heavy Metal the movie.

She owes me, after all I created her!

Favorite Disney animated movie?

Not sure, but I know my favorite song from one. In Anastasia, the villain Rasputin launches into this crazy musical number called, “In the Dark of the Night.” It’s the best bad guy song ever, extolling the joys of evil while providing backstory and explaining his evil plans. All the while, he’s dancing around amid a chorus of bug-demons. When it reaches the crescendo, he howls:

“Come my minions, rise for your master! Let your evil shine!”

That’s the greatest thing a villain ever said, so it’s always in my playlist, somewhere between Morning Musume’s Go Girl Koi No Victory and Slayer.

What word do you hate reading in a sex scene?

Love banana. Honey basket. Baby bakery.

Unless it’s a comedy, non-standard words for sex parts take me right out of the scene and put me into creative writing critique group mode. It’s fine to use non-standard terms in dialogue for something like characterization, especially outside of a sex scene. Otherwise they just grate, like authors who use “yelped happily” and “spewed hungrily” and “chortled wholesomely” instead of just “said.”

For example, in My Lesbian Girlfriend is a Futa Now, I had this short exchange:

“Jezzie!” I said. “The first rule of Lesbian Club is that we don’t want cocks.”

“You don’t understand,” she said, her voice taking on a grand, sweeping, theatrical tone, like a vampire prancing across the stage. “I don’t want some guy’s dick. I want a cock of my own. A penis. A Johnson, if you will.”

Re-reading that, I realize Jezebel is channeling her Inner Maude Lebowski. But I would never use ‘johnson’ or ‘joystick’ in the actual sex scenes or anything but cock or dick and maybe rod or shaft if I needed a few other variants. But no love bananas or muffin clams.

Writing questions:

What was the first erotica you ever read?

The Story of O; it’s well-known but for those who don’t, it’s about dubious things that happen to a submissive Frenchwoman. Amusing, because every Frenchwoman I’ve met is strong-willed and independent. Anyway, it anticipates Fifty Shades of Gray because it’s the same setup: submissive female-point of view BDSM. And holy hell, that’s where the money is in Amazon erotica and here I am writing futa genie nonsense!

Why did you start writing erotica?

When I first started writing, I wrote terrible Tolkien-D&D fantasy pastiche but some scenes turned erotic and derailed the plot and I was like, fuck, now what? The solution: write straight-up erotica when that mood took over, leaving me a bunch of poorly-written, unsexy rough drafts. The other stories weren’t good either. But you have to go through that process of trying and failing before you can succeed. Like a guitarist banging away for hours, writing takes practice.

Last year, I published 500,000 words of erotica. Wrote it, edited it, copy-edited, marketed it, blurbed it, made my own covers. That’s worth more than a Master’s in Creative Writing if you ask me and I got paid for it instead of paying for it. You learn something every time.

What is your favorite erotic kink to write and why?

I write transgender though I do some pseudo-lesbian books and I wrote one femdom book called UFO SEX: My Galactic Mistress that had a dominant blonde alien chick putting this guy through the wringer, even dangling him out of her UFO on a bungee cord. But I’m not known for femdom works, so it went over as well as a concrete balloon.

Within transgender, I’ve bounced around different sub-genres: sissies, futanari, genderswap, and more. I prefer the futa stories because, frankly, it captures the essence of one particular erotic fantasy without bogging down the plot the way a sissy story must. In a sissy story, there is first the desire to dress like a woman and get dominated, then start acting out on these desires, then getting transformed, etc. It dictates the plot. Many people don’t “get” the sissy niche, but to me it’s straightforward: it’s crossdressing combined with submission, a trans-specific flavor of BDSM.

In contrast, futa women are naturally born women who acquire their cocks through weird science or cool magic and then you move on to the sex and the rest of the story. There’s more flexibility for fun plots and genre crossover: spies, swords & sorcery, science fiction. But in a sissy story, it’s all about that journey and so realism is crucial. If the sissy suddenly woke up in a fantasy world, captured by futanari elves, it would just be weird. It’s still doable, as a story, but it would be weird and not written to market.

Every niche within transgender has certain expectations and you need to research and find out about them and then deliver them. This is also true of romance and other genres. The customer’s always right. Entertainment is a service industry.

How much of your real life experience is found in your books?

Little. Kinky Neo-Tokyo cyberpunk game shows, barbarians running around with futa elves and well-hung amazon warrior women, post-apocalyptic wastelands … sadly, this is not my actual life.

It’s what Moctezuma Johnson calls ‘smutpunk’ and he asked me to write something for an upcoming anthology of that kinda stuff. The story I wrote is called ‘Futanari Roommate Situation’ and is about this diffident English bloke who takes a semester abroad in Neo-Tokyo and is assigned a futanari roommate who teases and teases and teases him until his lust overcomes his shyness.

Even my college stories aren’t that realistic, unless there exists a university somewhere where actual orgies break out on beaches and half the student population are futas, sissies, and gender genies. I haven’t experienced anything like that in real life—yet!

What influences affect you most as an erotica author?

I read a lot of erotica in my niche to keep up with the market but I wouldn’t say it influences me much. There are authors I respect and admire for various facets of their craft: for example, I envy your consistent branding, your dedication to a schedule, and a Stephen King-esque level of output. Few are so endowed with such endurance.

Still, for influences I tend I go outside the erotica genre and it depends on the sub-category. Japanese hentai and ecchi manga is full of imaginative ideas but one must be careful, some of it’s extreme

There’s a maxim ‘write what you know’ and since I played a fuck-ton of Fallout 4 last year and have read and watched plenty of other post-apocalypse stuff, I did the ‘Bunker 69’ series as a fun sci-fi futa story. It’s about an astronaut named Jilly who got sent on a mission to Proxima Centauri and then returns centuries later thanks to Einsteinian relativity affects, only to find her world destroyed by atomic war. So her backstory is a nod to The Planet of the Apes. It’s set in and around the Pacific Northwest where I live, so she ends up in Portland’s ‘Hot Zone’ near Bunker 69, where the radiation is giving women strange … mutations. You can imagine where it goes from there.

I’m actually working on the third story in that series this week. It’s got zombies and strippers but not, thank God, zombie strippers because that’s gross and not-to-market.

What is the naughtiest thing you’ve ever written?

Did you know Amazon will slap the adult filter on you if you have watersports in the title? Yet what could be more natural or more beautiful then a pseudo-lesbian swim team enjoying a golden shower? It’s even more natural if they share this dirty secret out in public, in a group setting. In fact, it should be part of the initiation into the Lesbian Watersports swim team. So yeah, My ‘Hot Water: Lesbian Gold’ series must be the naughtiest since it gets the adult filter.

A lot of my other stories get wild, too. I have one scene in Kor the Savage where this barbarian guy, Kor, is running across the steppe, getting chased by futa amazons on horseback. One of them whips a rope around him, pulling him to the turf. She jumps him and they roll around and rut in the mud like beasts. Later, they haul back to her camp for an orgiastic feast.

Erotica writer and critic Sylvia Storm in her blog said:

This story is written in that savage, rough and bloody style of ‘conqueror’ books, with a barbarian hero and a well-endowed in more-than-one-way sidekick Amazon, and the two wrestle, fight, banter, and make love as savagely as the world is deadly and I devoured this one like a leg of lamb pulled from a spit and offered to me in a tribal gathering.

There’s another scene in another story, Futa Elf Wedding, where two futa elf princesses get married and the priestess ties their futa cocks together with a ribbon. Cute!

What characterizes your style of erotica?

I try and offer my readers creativity, solid writing, stories longer than average, and a back-catalog full of fun. I do all right. I landed a story in a Vampire Erotica anthology called Blood in the Rain 2 and they put my story first, meaning it was what you see in the preview, what they hoped would sell the book. There’s almost no market for erotica outside self-publishing, so that’s some validation.

I don’t believe in flouting genre conventions but transcending them. If I’m going to write a futa story in a fantasy world, that world’s going to be plausible, realistic, true to the fantasy genre, yet also natural in its accommodation of futa. And those futa are going to be fun and sexy and full of life and all over the place, doing the dirty things futa do. I never want worldbuilding or backstory getting in the way of sexy fun times. That’s the kiss of death in erotica.

Sally Bend, arguably the leading critic of transgender erotica, characterized my work like this in one of her reviews for Transformation magazine:

Whether your tastes in erotic fiction run more to submissive sissies, elegant transwomen, or fetishistic futas, Kella Z. Driel has a flair for capturing the essence of each fantasy. Her stories are just that – stories – complete with well-developed characters, complete plot arcs, and (of course) erotic moments. There is a certain narrative style that connects them all, but each is shaped around a main character, whose feminine personality drives the telling …

What defines all these stories, and what makes them so memorable, is the very essence of femininity in each. Driel does a wonderful job of capturing the innocence and freedom of blossoming girlishness, complete with the mannerisms, language, and behavior.

Gosh! (*^_^*)

What was the greatest hurdle you found in writing?

I’m creative and decent at craft but my own greatest enemy is myself: a lack of discipline. There are days I can write ten thousand words then stretches where I struggle to get out of bed. Consistency is my goal, sloth is my opponent.

What words of advice would you give any aspiring writer?

Write. Try every market. Self-promote.

You’d be amazed at how many people I meet who want to be writers yet turn up their noses at erotica, romance, and self-publishing. They will only be satisfied if their first story appears in the New Yorker which somehow leads magically to a book deal and a glowing review in the New York Times and a Hollywood film and a million dollars. These are what super-agent Donald Maas calls ‘status-seeking’ writers. They might as well play the lottery; it will be a more efficient way to waste money than getting advanced degrees.

Some of them have only managed three unpublished short stories and an unfinished novel that peters out on page 50 because they never read a single book about plotting. But they have thousands of comments on various writing forums talking about their writer’s block and how devastated they are about whatever is trending on Twitter that day.

As the great Pulp Fiction reminds us:

Marsellus: The night of the fight, you may feel a slight sting. That’s pride fucking with you. Fuck pride. Pride only hurts, it never helps.

Let’s not end on such a grim note. The secret to writing is…

Write!

Writing erotica’s uplifting because unless you’re doing it wrong, there’s always a happy ending.

Wow, that was great, Kella. Thanks for stopping by. And check otu her new book:

My Lesbian Girlfriend is a Futa Now: And that’s okay with me!

Alice is a college freshman, majoring in Erotica. But when her girlfriend decides to become a futa, Alice isn’t sure that’s a good idea!

The two embark on a throbbing journey of mutual pleasure, full of hard passion, naughty witchcraft, dirty discoveries, and lots and lots of stained lingerie!

My Lesbian Girlfriend is a Futa Now is a 6,500-word, light-hearted, erotic romp, featuring futa-on-female, oral, threesomes, menage, group fun and more!

Another sexy tale set at Jeff Pac University, the kinkiest campus on Earth!

Kella Z. Driel is an award-winning author of transgender, lesbian and other spicy erotica. Her stories range from contemporary college campuses to the mythological past and a thundering, awestruck future. Her tagline is “transgressive erotica for a kinky world” and it shows in each new release.

Blog: https://kellazdriel.wordpress.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/kellazdriel
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Kella-Z.-Driel/e/B01CKQY00W/

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