Diiiiirty...

It was really interesting reading Giselle’s post yesterday. Her experiences seem to be very much in sync with my own.

I, too, started publishing in 2006, though to look at my back catalog you wouldn’t know it. I also wrestled with the idea of going smutty and had a voice of protest in the back of my head insisting I could keep it literary, and hot, AND have the readers coming in droves. I’ve moved in circles with many of the folks who started smutty and then expanded to the more romantic genres. Plenty of them are really kicking arse, these days. Others have been only moderately successful, though in comparison to my own performance, still pretty durn amazing.

I missed the gravy train, for whatever that might be worth. And I tend to kick myself quite often, simply because I have tons of smutty ideas I never wrote. Smart-arse titles that straddle the line between porn and erotica, and which would at least raise a smile, if not a cock. As authors we often complain that readers can’t separate the writer from the story. Clearly I was struggling with that same beastie.

Though I only have three solo titles out at the moment, I’ve published many more. I just have an annoying habit of un-publishing them with a view to re-working, and then getting snowed under with more ideas.

And the more ideas I get, the smuttier they become. To me, this is a good thing.

Despite how visually permissive our world has become, there’s still an element of taboo and naughtiness in the writing of dirty stories. And let’s not make any bones (heh) about it, what we’re writing is dirty, even if it’s a sweet erotic romance.

Still, though, I wrestle with how smutty to make them, and I’m certain that comes from having grown up in a society which was still determined to paint women as either princesses or whores, and never the twain shall meet. I’m certain that when I try to make my work dirty, or even seditious, I end up holding back because I grew up still being told that women “don’t like it”. Not so much by my family, which was neither actively open nor closed about sexual matters, just ambivalent. It was more from school, and extended family, and probably just my own young brain’s interpretation of “the rules”.

Of course, I’ve since learned that many women like it dirty. And I mean really dirty. The kind of fiction I don’t know if I could even read, let alone write. Again, because of those same values which were instilled, or which I inferred.

Having said all that, my next works will actually be a sweet and daffy series of shifter stories. A three-parter, more romantic comedy than smut, but just keeping the bedroom door wide open.

I have plenty of darkness in my head and in my life to draw on. One day, perhaps. For now, I’m keeping it light.

But still dirty, of course.