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Publishing Erotica Part 5 – Writing Erotica

Publishing Erotica Part 5 – Writing Erotica

Click here for Publishing Erotica Part 4 – Pen Name

So now you have your pen name, your software, you understand what you can and cannot write and still publish on the major vendors, it’s time to get to the nitty gritty and start writing your kinky, nasty, filthy erotica. Let’s stat out small with short form erotica. So that’s a story between four thousand (4k) and seven thousand (7k) words. You can go over, of course, but don’t go under. 4k is enough to get a basic story and a hot sex scene in place. I shoot for between 6k to 7k with my futa stories, and 7k to 8k on my serials, but those are story driven.

First, you’ll need inspiration. Luckily, there are a lot of ways to get it. Watch porn, ready other dirty stories, and close your eyes and imagine. Find out what other people like and enjoy. Go on Pornhub and see what’s popular in the searches, or check out free erotic story sites like Literotica and see what other people write. You can get a Kindle Unlimited account and read erotica off Amazon for $9.99 a month to check out the competition. Understand the kinks you want to write and what makes them sexy.

Then add your twist to them.

Don’t be afraid of getting turned on by your ideas. That’s a good thing. If your fantasy doesn’t excite you, how can you excite someone else. Brainstorming breaks are very important. And by brainstorming, I mean masturbation.

Author, you need to love yourself. Let all those dark, dirty fantasies boil to the surface. Explore them, follow where they go for inspiration to your story. Capture the feelings bursting inside of you as you plot your erotica.

Then get ready to write it down.

Now before you start, you need to do a little prep work. Notes. You’re going to have only a few characters in an erotica. Generally, in short form, you write from a single person’s POV, usually the woman, but don’t feel you have to. The man’s POV can be just as hot and if you’re writing in bisexual or gay, well, you’re writing as the man anyways. So determine first who the story is about. Who is the person experience and being acted on? Whose fantasy is being played out? That should be the person you write about.

So create notes. Jot down your characters names, their physical characteristics, any personality traits or background info that will be necessary. You don’t need a lot, just enough to make them feel like a real person. Then you should outline your story. You should know how your characters are going to get into the sexy times. What are the circumstances leading up to it. How are you going to build to the climax (which will be literally in the case of erotica).

Write a short outline. I recommend this at first. You may find you don’t need an outline. I don’t to write most short-form erotica. I’ve written enough to have a feel for when I need to move the story to the various stages and bringing it in at my word goal. But starting out, you might not. Plus, it will help you to have direction and make sure your story is going somewhere. Have an idea for the kinks you want the characters to experience and the various sexual positions they will employ. Will there be foreplay (always a good idea) and how should it go. Should you have toys or props. Should there be a change in the power dynamic between the couple (or the threesome) and when should that happen.

Knowing this ahead of time will help smooth the acutely writing and, hopefully, make it go a lot faster so you can get your work written, edited, uploaded, and making you money.

Now here is the next important thing—you should set aside at least an hour everyday to write. I know this can be a challenging proposition. I found it very hard when I decided to write seriously. You have a life, a job, probably a significant other, and maybe you have kids or pets. All these put demands on your time. Adding another hour seems impossible.

If you want to be a writer, you have to find the time to write. This goes for whatever genre you’re writing in. If you want to be successful, writing has to be a priority for you. So carve out the time. Force yourself to write. It’s a discipline that can take you a while to develop.

Another problem you might face is lack of motivation. Sometimes you don’t feel like writing. You have the time set aside and you know you should be writing, but you’re feeling lazy. Or maybe you’re not sure what to write. You might tell yourself, I’ll just take a break today. And then tomorrow comes and maybe you take another break. That is a mistake. If you want to be successful, writing must be a job. And you know what, how many times have you felt zero motivation to go to work.

A lot.

It will happen with writing. That doesn’t matter. You need to sit down in front of your keyboard or with your notepad and force those words to flow. If you’re stuck, go take a quick walk around the block. Think about what you want to write. Ideas often come when you do activities like walking, bike riding, showering, gardening, or driving. If you don’t like the project you’re working on, take a break by writing something else.

Just. Write. Something.

Keep it up. Don’t let yourself stop. Don’t let yourself make excuses. You don’t have a boss breathing down your neck to keep you doing your job. You are your own boss. So you need to be a hardass and keep yourself in line if you want to be successful.

Writing is not the easiest job in the world. Writers do not lounge around all morning sipping cocktails on the beach then popping into their office to spend a few moments writing down a few chapters of their book. The reality is so far from that. It is hard work.

It requires toil and sweat, dedication and determination, motivation and perseverance. Those that find success do so because they treated their writing as a job. They kept their focus. They kept working. They kept producing more and more words. When they get writers block, they keep on writing anyways. They put something down on the page. It might be terrible. That’s fine. Rewrites and editing are for polishing your manuscript.

Right now, you just need a manuscript to polish. So get it written. Churn out your first short. Then write the next one and so on.

Next time, we’ll talk about rewrites and editing.

Click here for Publishing Erotica Part 6!

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On Writing: Words and Characterization

On Writing: Words and Characterization

by Reed James

 

It should come as no surprise that words are very important to a writer. English is a rich language, and that gives writers a lot of tools when it comes to their writings. Often we have two, three, or even more words that can convey almost the same meaning, with only minor differences in the shades of their meeting. Since words are our tools, we should get to know them well, keeping them sharp and choosing the right word for the write task.

Take ‘yell’, ‘shout’, and ‘cry’. They all pretty much mean the same thing: to exclaim. But yell has connotations of anger and rebuke, shout gives the feeling that the character is trying to be heard over another noise or over distance, and cry adds a feeling of pain or sadness or even passion to what the character exclaims.

7585568394_486de2d363_oThis is very important when it comes to characterization. Depending on your writing style, you could be employing first person or third person limited POVs, where the narrator either is your character or the narrator lives in the mind of the character. This is less important in normal third person narrative, where the narrator is omniscient and can flit in and out of character’s minds for brief moments. Different characters will think with different words, and when you’re writing their POV you need to demonstrate that. An uneducated person isn’t going to use large, scientific, or obscure words and is more likely to use slang and simple words. A prudish person isn’t like to use harsh swear words like ‘fuck’ or ‘shit’, and may use euphemisms like ‘fudge’ or ‘shoot’. A religious person may not use the Lord’s name in vain. Regional dialect will crop up, changing the patterns of speech. Even with an omniscient narrator your characters will still speak, and their speech should reflect who they are. Maybe its punctuated with obscenities, maybe their given over to verbose speech in an effort to prove how intelligent they are, maybe they use a lot of technical jargon.

The protagonist of my upcoming erotica ‘My Test Drive Lover’ is a lesbian. She’s working at a dealership selling Ferraris. My own inclination is to use the word ‘salesmen’ to describe her job. I’m a man and often don’t think about such gender issues (I know, a failing on my part), but Aurora is not a man, and she certainly wouldn’t be one to use a gender specific title when the gender neutral ‘salesperson’ is available. That’s an important thing as a writer; you have to be prepared to step out of your own experiences and into someone else’s. You have to try and imagine not just how they would act, but how they would speak and think, changing your own language to match theirs like a chameleon changing his skin to blend into the background. And you do that by mastering your words.

And mastering your words takes practice. I’m not perfect. I make grammar mistakes all the time. I bet there’s going to be one or two in this article that I’ll completely miss when I edited this. That’s life; you’re only human. But you have to strive and practice. If you don’t care enough to understand your tools—your words—then your audience will pick up on that. So read up on grammar. When you have a question, look it up on the internet or ask someone’s opinion. Writing is a craft and, like all crafts, it takes practice to hone and maintain. Your writing will only benefit from this.

Here’s a couple of sites I use when I have questions:
Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary: The go to dictionary for American English. They have a free site, but their unabridged dictionary costs about $30 dollars a year, and they add new words to it all the time.
Grammar Monster: Short and quick rules.
Your Dictionary: A nice, ordered site for looking up rules.
Grammar Girl: She has a great article on what to look for while editing.

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My Experience Self-Publishing!

First time Self-Publishing

Hey everyone, I thought I’d share my thoughts on self-publishing.

After putting a lot of hard work into writing my first short story, Roleplay Gone Wrong, part of the Naughty Wives Series I plan on writing, I had the daunting task of self-publishing. I knew I would have to make a cover, and I had know idea how to do that and not to have it look like complete garbage. So I turned to Google.

I found a post: Create Your Own Ebook Covers, Step by Step, With Pictures by William King. From him I learned of image libraries. Websites with thousands and thousands of photos that you can buy the license for commercial use for relatively cheap. If you’re poor like me, it’s a great solution. My cover art for Roleplay Gone Wrong cost me about $14 from Dreamstime. Another image library I found is iStock.

So now I had the image and William King recommended a 3×4 aspect ration for the image size such as 600×800 pixels. I opened up gimp a free, and fairly robust, graphic editor. A poor man’s Photoshop. I shrank my picture down to 600×800, banged my head against gimps text editor, then I accidentally lost all my work just when I had it all finished. Sigh. Finally, an hour and a half later, I had the best cover I could produce with my limited gimp knowledge.

naughtywife1cover

I had my cover, I had my text. I had to combined them into an ebook somehow. Google was my friend again and I learned all about calibre. Another free software that could edit an ebook. It’s a clunky, poorly laid out piece of free software that took me a few minutes just to figure out how to do anything, like adding the document I planed to turn into an ebook.

My first attempt to turn my open office (poor man’s Microsoft Word) file into an ebook was a disaster. The formatting of the text was all screwed up, there were no paragraphs, just huge chunks of text. I tried to edit it. Ebooks apparently run a modified html code that I could make absolutely zero sense of.

Back to Google, and the discovery of style sheets. I had always ignored the formatting selection on Open Office, opting to manually do it and, worse, use tab for indents. Turns out to get paragraphs in an ebook you need automatic indents from a style sheet (Styles and Formatting or F11 in Open Office). Chapter titles need the heading format so the ebook creator will recognize them as the start of chapters. My next attempt was far better. It looked like an ebook. Elated, I felt like I was ready to upload to Amazon and Smashwords.

Amazon was definitely the easier of the two. The only hitch: I made my cover 600 x 800 pixels and Amazon required at least 1000 pixels tall cover. So I scaled my cover up and was relieved to see it still looked crisp. I uploaded it and passed their text scan. If you want to post erotica on Amazon, be prepared to never mention a characters family (other than a spouse, and that means no mother-in-laws or sister-in-laws or any other -in-laws) or use the words boy or girl to often (even in sorotity girl or frat boy). No jobs traditionally held by high school students (no cheerleaders or babysitters even if they’re over eighteen), no living animals (extinct animals are okay), and no nuns (don’t ask, I couldn’t tell you why).

Smashwords was next, and the headache began in earnest.

The cover was again a problem. Smashwords requires the width (not the length, but the shorter, top side) to be at least 1400 pixels. Again I stretched my cover, hoping it would still look crisp and sharp. Relief swept through me—it did. I was afraid that I would have had to recreate my cover from the original image.

It was time for me to face the Smashwords ebook creator—the meat grinder. I used Open Office, so I had to first convert my file into a .doc (the only format they accept). Then I submitted it. The meat grinder did not approve. I had tab errors, copyright page errors, and paragraph indent errors. Because I had foolishly used tabs to indent as I wrote (they didn’t teach style sheets when I learned typing), I had to go through and take them all out. Then I had to modify my copyright page to something Smashwords approved. I read through their Style Guide, and I set up style sheets with the recommended .3” first line indent.

Resubmitted. Paragraph error. Improper indents.

Resubmitted after making sure all the indents were in fact .3”. Paragraph error. Improper indents.

Took out the indents. Accepted. But it looked terrible. Block paragraphs with only a tiny separation between them. Unacceptable to me.

Now I was thinking I had to shell out a hundred dollars to get Microsoft Office, money I didn’t really have. I dug deeper, reading through the Style Guide Faq, and I realized what was wrong. The Autovetter message used this phrase: “If you want to use first line paragraph indents, then remove the “before/after” space you have coded into your paragraph style.” I didn’t understand what that meant. Luckily their FAQ explained things in simple terms that my pounding head could understand. My style sheet put an extra space .1” between the paragraphs when I saved it as a .doc file, and that had caused all the issues. Smashwords will let you indent paragraphs or have spaces between paragraphs, but not both. I removed the space and suddenly…

I was approved!

I shot my fist up into the air, as triumphant as a Greek hero completing some seemingly impossible task. I slew the Hydra, skinned the Nemean lion, navigated Scylla and Charybdis, and used far too much hyperbole in describing my elation just now! I survived the meat grinder, and its strange messages that made little sense.

I few days later, I passed their manual inspection. I was on the premium content list!

So for those out there looking to self-publish, remember these lessons. Make your cover width at least 1400 pixels if you want to post on Smashwords or 1000 pixels tall if you want to post on Amazon. Before you start writing, read Smashwords Style Guide and set your formatting up ahead of time. It will help to make any ebook, not just one for posting on Smashwords, and save you hours of formatting headaches.

Check out Roleplay Gone Wrong available on Smashwords and Amazon for the low price of $0.99. It’s a hot read about a married couple who get more than they bargained for with some roleplay when a Black cop catches them at their fun. Cheating, Cuckold, Wife Watching, Spanking, and Bondage. See how Frank and Evie’s relationship changes forever!

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