A year of stories

I'm coming up to a year of committed writing effort. At times I've taken on too much and had half a dozen or more deadlines looming for calls for short story submissions. And I still haven't got very far on writing a longer work. But I've learnt a few things along the way. Bear with me while I give you the stats.

Since last spring, I have written 32 stories. I've just gone through and totted up the word counts: 111,300.

The shortest is a 500-word piece, Vermilion Number Six, published by the For the Girls website. The longest is a 13,500-word story that I sent in for a submissions call at Storm Moon Press in February. Fingers crossed. 

I have five stories out in multi-author anthologies and a collection of three of my own in Miranda's Tempest. I have eight stories round and about on the web.

I have six stories out for submission that I'm waiting to hear about and five in the hinterland between an anthology editor's acceptance and the final say-so from the publisher.

I'm currently writing one short story and have another couple of antho calls I'd like to go for. 

I have started three novellas, which are in a state ranging from a first chapter done to 15,000 words that need completely rehashing.

I've had three stories rejected, two of which were repurposed in some way for another anthology. I sent one submission email that never arrived and one publisher suddenly cancelled their short story calls.

What have I learnt?

• When you submit one story, you get on with the next. Waiting for acceptance or rejection will do your head in.
• If you don't get an acknowledgement of your submission, check it got there.
• If you're going to be a writer, it's going to take over your life at times.
• Having stories accepted is a wonderful thing. Seeing the resulting book is even better.
• Having stories rejected is not the end of the world. You can often use the ideas again and all writing is good practice.
• The more you write, the better you get. And the faster.
• Short stories are great fun, a great place to try things out, practise your craft and get quick gratification. But I could have written four or five novellas or one long novel in the time it's taken me to write 32 short stories.
• It's good to try new things. I've discovered I love writing m/m stories and I can write stories that are quite sweet and contain no rope. Who'd have thought it?
• I have no willpower to overcome internet distraction and I would dearly love a nicer shed than the worm-eaten one at my allotment where I could write without wi-fi and preferably with a little woodburner crackling away.

So what are you pissing about here for when you should be writing?

Smut by the Sea: Inspiration

Inspiration’s a funny thing. Stop by on Friday May 3^rd and you can read master storyteller Kay Jaybee’s thoughts on the matter. I’ve been thinking of the roundabout ways in which I pieced together my story, Stuck on the Edge, for Smut by the Sea Vol 2.

The story is set on Bardsey Island, where a happily married couple escape for their first holiday alone without the kids for several years. They have one last paddle in the bay near their little stone cottage before they’re due to get the boat back to the mainland and drive home. But it turns into a little more than a paddle – and then they discover that their journey home isn’t going to go quite so smoothly after all.

You’ll often hear the writing advice to ‘write what you know’. When it comes to erotica, I don’t believe that this means you have to be particularly promiscuous or have done every sexual act you write about. Horror writers don’t go around chopping people up with chainsaws, after all. If you had to write only what you’d personally experienced there would no fiction, only autobiography. This isn’t an excuse for not doing some research and getting your facts right – because you can bet some of your readers will have done the things you write about (unless we’re talking tentacles, which I gather is a big thing in fantasy land) – but the point of being a writer is that your imagination can extrapolate a lot of story from a little information.

I think writing what you know is more in the little details that bring the story alive. So what do I know about my story? Well, I almost went to Bardsey Island once. Yes, almost. It was as a reporter to write a travel feature. But the weather was too bad over several days for us to actually get there because although the island is not far from the end of the Llyn peninsula in North Wales, the waters are pretty treacherous. So I’d done some research and had an idea of what the island was like although I’ve had to use my imagination and stretch the truth a little in places. And I knew it was possible to get stranded there for longer than you might have planned.

What else? Well, I’ve swum in the Irish Sea and I’ve paddled in mountain lakes and when I describe the ‘bone-crushing chill in your ankles that makes you wince’, I bloody well know what I’m talking about. And I have a fondness for rustic pottery, which the couple’s cottage is full of. So when my female character whispers her reply to a milk jug, I’m picturing a jug I have that’s in shades of brown and cream with a vaguely Celtic kind of swirl scraped into the glaze.

Gareth stood behind me and put his fingers to the flimsy bit of fabric at my hips. He drew my knickers slowly down. I lifted my legs in a detached sort of way as I gazed at the view, as if I was barely aware of what he was doing. Although when he reached a hand under my ass to push his fingers up the slit of my pussy, I may have moved my legs further apart. Ever so slightly. I was wet already, and not with seawater any more. With his words and his tongue and my imagination. He found my clit and rubbed it gently, making me stick my ass up higher and whimper. A whimper that said “harder”, but which he ignored whether he understood or not. The clouds were racing across the sky and I saw a cormorant fighting into the wind.

“I’d better check the water,” he said. “Don’t go anywhere.”

“Okay,” I whispered to the milk jug.

You can get your hands on Smut by the Sea Vol 2 at All Romance, Amazon UK and Amazon.com. And if you're free on June 22nd, why not come to the seaside in Scarborough for the Smut by the Sea launch. Entry for readings and talks during the day is free, and you can grab a ticket for the evening's entertainment along with all the info at the website.

Out now: Smut by the Sea vol 2

Ooh, I've got a new story out, Stuck on the Edge in Smut by the Sea volume 2.

Here's the blurb for the book:

Light-hearted, sexy fun by the sea is the theme of this erotic anthology, edited by Victoria Blisse and Lucy Felthouse.

From the sun-soaked beaches of Brazil to the altogether cooler coastal towns of England, Smut by the Sea Volume 2 has it all. Whatever your interpretation of naughty seaside fun, there’s something nestling between the covers for you. Amusement arcades, beach houses, mermaids, honeymooners, shipwrecks, sex toys and more abound in this exciting collection of stories from erotica’s finest authors.

My story is set on Bardsey Island off North-West Wales and includes some pretty chilly shenanigans in the Irish Sea. I'll tell you more soon. 

You can buy Smut by the Sea at All Romance, Amazon UK or Amazon.com.

Lust in Time reviewed

There's a fab five-star review of Lust in Time, edited by Rob Rosen, over at Hearts on Fire Reviews.

Reviewer Aggie says there's "a little bit of something for anyone who enjoys historical gay fiction". 

She picks out the stories she believes were the "standouts of the anthology and are what makes Lust In Time highly recommended and extremely enjoyable". And this is what she says about 27 AD, by yours truly:

I loved this because it was kinky, borderline non-consensual, and very erotic! Lucius, a Roman soldier, is basically f**ked  when he is captured by Finian, the barbarian enemy. And oh, what is poor Lucius going to do? The dude has a submissive streak in him a mile wide. He gives himself over to his captor with almost extreme glee and anticipation, and I loved it! Nothing like hearing a guy say that he “moaned like a wanton whore” as he is being ”pillaged” and “plundered” by his enemy. 

Gosh, did I write that story? Sounds pretty hot. Lucius falls head over heels for his captor and they get it on in sweet romantic style, which in Tilly World involves ropes and swords and mud and a strong, fighting man who loves being brought to his knees. 

I recently received my author copy of the book (thanks Rob!) and had to take a moment to rub its glossy cover against my cheek (no, not that cheek). I'm a convert to ebooks but a real, live book is still a little piece of magic.

Get your hands on Lust in Time at MLR Press, Amazon.com or Amazon UK.

A writing experiment

Just after publishing my last post, about writing discreetly in a notebook, preferably whilst hiding in a cabin in the woods, I read a snippet in the arts section of my union mag The Journalist about the book Dragon Lords by Silvia Hartmann and her project The Naked Writer. 

Hartmann went in completely the opposite direction and wrote her novel live online using Google Drive so people could see her writing and editing in real time. As she was writing, people were commenting in a separate panel at one side of her screen. Hartmann says on her own website: "I could feel the story reacting to their presence and shifting in response. Very strange and extremely exhausting."

She describes a story-writing process in which you do not plot and plan beforehand, you simply sit down at your keyboard and let the story unfold: "If you so much as think in the direction of the story when you're not in front of a keyboard, it will run and you will have lost the opportunity to document it fresh, and in real time. Then you're writing from memory and it's never the same."

The Journalist reports that between September and November, she wrote 76,000 words at a rate of 16 words per minute and had more than 13,000 readers take part. 

The genre is a bit off topic here - apparently the readers called for more sex but it didn't work for the characters - but I think the process is fascinating. And frightening. 

Hartmann's description of the process goes into much more detail and includes her own take on creativity and the subconscious, which she calls the "energy mind". Read more here.

Ironically, she also describes the day she woke up to a power cut and had to write by hand in a notebook. 

In praise of the notebook

Virtually every advice guide for the novice writer will tell you to keep a notebook with you at all times for that moment when you have a brilliant idea and if you don’t write it down straight away you’ll lose it for ever. Sound enough advice but pretty obvious. I find a notebook useful for far more than that.

I’m the sort of person who fantasises about running off to a little cabin in the woods and living off the land, a la Henry David Thoreau in Walden. I have, in fact, just started to write the story of a couple who build their own eco home – with the design including plenty of kink opportunities, of course. One of the things this means is that I like to know, for psychological reasons rather than out of necessity, that I can work without an electricity supply. So scribbling in a notebook goes beyond practicalities and into my personal idyll of self-sufficiency and isolation. Don’t ask me where the Biros are coming from in this fantasy world; I’m not that authentic.

I use a notebook for everything from those first tentative ideas and notes – a plot fragment, a description of something I’ve seen or heard, a spider diagram leading off a submissions theme – to actually writing the stories out in full. I don’t do that all the time, by any means, but sometimes it feels right. It means you can be discreetly productive anywhere – in an idle moment at work with your notebook propped on your knee under the desk, in the car if you arrive somewhere early, in the middle of a walk when you take a break to sit on a rock and admire a view, in the corner of a pub or cafe, at the bus stop, in a tent. It also gives you a break from staring at a screen all the time, which can be an issue if you have a day job at a desk as well as your writing time. And if you go beyond the notes and planning stage and actually write your stories out by hand, when you come to type them up you find yourself automatically doing the first stage of editing and tightening up the prose.

Although we’re all high-tech these days and you will certainly have to type the stories up at some point, I think there’s something about writing by hand that taps into the psyche in a different way than writing at a keyboard. Your handwriting itself is uniquely yours rather than being a neat, uniform image on a computer screen. If you scribble fast for a while, your hand aches in a different way from the RSI-inducing movement of fingers over a keyboard. I’m sure you can still get RSI from handwriting, but as long as you don’t overdo it the feeling is more like the satisfying ache from digging a vegetable patch compared with the pain of a plastic bag full of potatoes from the supermarket cutting into your palm. And if you do it enough, it will leave a physical mark of your craft; I still have the slight callus on my right middle finger from my pre-laptop student days.

Writing by hand can be more flexible in some ways. You can jump around the page, flick back, scribble notes to yourself in the margin, make spider diagrams of ideas, try things out without them feeling as permanent as if you’ve saved them to a computer file. You can pick up your notebook and be scribbling straight away instead of waiting for your computer to get going, then finding the right file. The biggest drawback for me is having to make sure you can actually read your own scrawl, something that can prove challenging!

If you like to ogle wooden cabins - and who doesn't - then check out these photo blogs: cabinporn.com and tinyhouseblog.com. This image is of a hikers' hut in Kungsleden, Sweden, from cabinporn.com.

Review: Vanilla with Extra Nuts by Victoria Blisse

What’s better than having one hot man attentive to your, ahem, needs? Having two, of course. That’s the upshot of this fun and fabulous story of one woman, her fella and her fella’s fella. The title itself had me hooked for its jokiness, which is perfect for the feelgood tone of the book. 

Although Megan and Adam have their problems – namely the fact that she didn’t realise he was bi, let alone in a casual relationship with another guy – there is little serious angst going on. The characters are wonderfully lacking in melodrama; they’re decent people and you want them to work things out. And while they are doing just that, they act like reasonable, mature people willing to listen and try to understand each other.

But that’s not to say that they’re not overtaken by their libidos. In fact, it seems to be the damn hot sex that makes their minds up that they can work things out between the three of them. As Adam says when they have a choice between talking and shagging: “Actions speak louder than words.” It’s the sort of sex that makes the heroine feel amazing about herself, which I guess is one measure of a good lay. When man No 2, Simon, joins in, Blisse makes the most of being able to describe the different approaches of the two men and all the possibilities for Megan of feeling two tongues on her body, four hands, two... you get the idea. The descriptions somehow seem dirty and sweet all at the same time; they’re incredibly evocative and, well, pretty spicy for vanilla!

It’s a light-hearted book full of lines like this: “It’s not something you can just throw into general chit chat. ‘Oh, by the way, I have a gay lover who thinks your breasts are magnificent, fancy a threesome?’” But at the same time, you find yourself caring about the characters, sharing their emotions

and wanting everything to work out well for them.

I bought Vanilla with Extra Nuts from Amazon. For other options, check out Victoria's blog post here.