Erotica Month

Pic courtesy Nagarjun, Flickr. Erotica at Khajuraho temples, India.

Dirty stories are not for everyone. They might not be for you. They probably won't be for your mum. You might not advise your boss checks out a short fiction piece about someone losing their virginity, or poem about a shy but eloquent driving instructor being coerced into his / her first threesome. Sex is still taboo, particularly here in the UK. In a lot of places, writing about it is still frowned upon.

This could be because a lot of what people perceive “erotica” to be- the likes of EL James, or worse, the articles in Fiesta- is actually garbage. Erotica- good erotica- is free of the clichéd scenarios, flowery metaphors, vulgar descriptions and general bad writing that surfaces in popular smut. This is another reason why sex writing is looked down upon- a good portion of it is horseshit, and its critics have never been exposed to- or have never sought out- anything better.

But fuck it, I've written about sex before and I'm going to do it again, and hopefully the right way too. In fact, I have some smut/ erotica/ dirty stories- whatever you want to call it- stored on my computer and it hasn't been polished off yet.

Okay, bad choice of words. I haven't finished it and fired it out yet. Wait. No. I- well, you get what I mean. Sex is everywhere, so there's no reason not to write about it. It's not a big deal. Something that is too big a deal for me, though, is the thought of reading out drafts of these stories at Writers Connect at the local Wetherspoons. That WOULD be awkward. So instead, I figured I'd use Scribophile, a creative writing feedback site, to gain advice on these pieces and knock them into shape.

Once the poems and stories are ready, I'll be using a few free online databases to search out markets for the work. I've found a few sites that look really helpful. Stay tuned for site reviews.

I've only written a small amount of erotica so far, but a good amount of what I've written has ended up in magazines. So let's see if I can build on that success over the next month.