The Facts About Me (#amwriting #erotica #author)

by Cameron D. James

I find the reality of being an erotica writer very different from people's expectations.

I've made no secret of the fact that I write under a variety of pen names, ranging from more vanilla than this one to ultra-kinky. When I present as those other pen names on Twitter, I attract a lot of attention -- particularly on the kinkier end of the spectrum. And it leaves me in an awkward spot.

I have a female pen name. My presence on Twitter for that name is largely automated promotional tweets. It is very rare that I go on and pretend to be this person. I also don't have a profile picture that pretends to be an image of this author -- it's a generic stock photo that I used for one of my covers.

Yet, this pen name gets hit on through private messages on Twitter quite regularly. Particularly by Nigerian soldiers. I don't know what draws people to that Twitter account and makes them think they should hit on me when they have no idea what I look like. (When I explained this to a friend of mine, she said, "Welcome to being a woman on the internet!")

For my ultra-kinky name (which is a male BDSM dom persona), I do sometimes tweet as if I'm that person. It's my biggest selling pen name so I want to put some effort into it. I get frequent private messages from men wanting me to be their dom. Like with my female pen name, I've never shared a photo that I pretend to be a real photo -- I use a stock photo there too. When people ask me if it's a photo of me, I'm up front and say it's not and that I don't share photos. For most people, this doesn't really matter and they still ask me to be their master. I have received a lot of dick pics to this account.

With both of those names, the assumption is the same. I'm a writer of erotica so I must be absolutely sex-crazed, promiscuous, and insanely nuts about dick.

I mean, I like dick. A lot. But that doesn't make me sex-crazed or promiscuous.

People who know me as an erotica writer first (particularly from those names), are shocked to find how boring and plain I really am. I have a little cozy house with my husband and our two cats. I assume I have sex as much as most average people do.

The flip-side is interesting. I generally don't talk about my writing to my friends unless someone spills the beans. So there are friends of mine who have no idea that I'm building a writing career and have nearly 100 publications. Even if they did, they'd never guess that I write about people fucking.

Like I said, I'm boring and plain. Really. And I'm very polite and friendly and innocent (or at least I appear to be). So when people find out what I write (and I don't even tell them about the filthy end of the spectrum), it takes them time to process that information. This then inevitably leads them to thinking that I have a secret sex life that is as wild as the stories I write. It's a running joke at my day job that I'm sex-obsessed and probably have frequent extra-marital hookups.

Sigh.

I let them believe it. I smile my little smile that makes them think I have a secret -- and I don't say a word.

Those who have seen the work side of being a writer -- like my writers group and my mom -- know that this is all work and it's really no different than a day job. (I'm a manager in my day job, but that doesn't mean my private life is full of promiscuous managering. I don't hire and fire friends.)

For the rest of the world, they have a belief of what it means to be an erotic writer. There's a fictional story of what it takes to create these stories.

While I don't really care for the unsolicited dick pics and I generally don't respond to people looking to woo my female pen name, I have come to accept it is part of the job. Really, that fiction helps sell books. Who are people going to buy filthy erotica from? The innocent-looking dork or the BDSM master?



Cameron D. James is a writer of gay smut. His most recent publication is New York Heat.

Closing the Door on The Superfluous Man: Eugene Onegin, a post by @GiselleRenarde.

I’m proofreading and I’m obsessed. Obsessed with turning this book I wrote into the best piece of writing it can possibly be. Because, you see, this book of mine has been years in the making.

It’s a contemporary adaptation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, a tale I’ve been into since I was a teenager. That’s when I first heard Tchaikovsky’s operatic version on the radio. Instantly, it became my favourite opera. And it still is. The Canadian Opera Company is mounting a production this fall—a Met production I’ve seen twice on TV and once live… with obstructed view, granted—and I’m going to have to scrounge up a ticket somehow. Just one. I WILL go to the opera alone. I’ve done it before.

Tchaikovsky didn’t even refer to this opera as an opera. I think he called it “lyrical scenes” or something. Which is just as well, considering the work it was based on was a verse novel rather than prose. The whole thing rhymes.

I’ll admit something shameful, here: it’s been 20 years since I read the original Pushkin (in English, not in Russian—I’m not that impressive). When I wrote my adaptation, I shaped it by basically laying my words over the structure of the opera. I had the libretto open beside my computer and I even went line by line, at times, creating this new version. Mine does diverge from the original in many ways, but not in form. When it comes to structure, I need all the help I can get. It’s always been my weak point, so I’m not afraid to steal from opera.

Maybe I should tell you what Eugene Onegin is all about. I think of the story as being popular because I’m aware of it, but I also woke up this morning with a song in my head from a 1992 episode of Jeeves and Wooster because I’ve watched it 6 times this week. This might be niche knowledge. I just don’t know anymore.

The best summary I’ve heard of Pushkin’s story comes from the introduction to the 1979 translation by Charles Johnston and it goes like this: “Tatyana falls in love with Onegin and nothing comes of it. Then he falls in love with her and nothing comes of it. End of novel.”

Sounds like quite a romp, doesn’t it?

But it’s full of angst, and that’s probably why I loved this story as a teenager. I believe it was Turgenev who referred to the character of Eugene Onegin (and those of his ilk) as The Superfluous Man. He’s got money, but it doesn’t make him happy. Everything bores him. He seeks amusement in travel, in gambling, in women, but nothing floats his boat.

Tatyana is a much less cynical individual, but something attracts her to Onegin. She’s infatuated, pretty much in an instant.

I just realized I’m spoiler-ing this story for those of you who aren’t familiar with it. So I guess you could stop reading now, and pick up a copy of Pushkin’s novel… or, better yet, wait for my book to come out and buy that.

But I’m going to continue with my spoiler-y post, because this book was written nearly 200 years ago, so I’d say ample time has passed.

Anyway, Tatyana proclaims her love for Onegin in her famous letter scene, but he rejects her. Hard. He’s a condescending jerk about it.

Years pass. Tatyana marries a prince. When the Fates conspire to put her in the same room with Onegin once more, he decides it’s a good time to return her love. Now he’s infatuated and she’s decidedly not. Also, she’s a princess. Eugene, dude, all the ennui in the world can’t compete with that.

“Tatyana falls in love with Onegin and nothing comes of it. Then he falls in love with her and nothing comes of it. End of novel.”

So that’s that. Interest lies in these characters’ emotional experiences.

I began my adaptation of this work a couple years ago during NaNoWriMo, but I did something weird with it—something I’ve never done with any other book. I wrote my entire first draft as dialogue with the odd stage direction thrown in. I guess I did it that way because I was working from an opera, but also because the contemporary characters existed so strongly in my mind that I was just recording their conversations.

It took me years to come back to my first draft and fill in prose where it was practically non-existent. I wouldn’t recommend this process. Or would I? I’ve got to admit, the dialogue is very snappy, and I think it came out that way because I wasn’t stopping my characters’ conversations while I filled in dialogue tags and descriptions. I just let them run wild.

That said, writing the second draft was a considerable slog. I felt like I’d already written this book and why did I have to write it all over again?

As much as I enjoy this little book of mine, I’ll be glad to close the door on it, and the reason for that is a personal one. Nabokov said, of Onegin, “those most anxious to read a moral into the poem are apt to impose on it not only their own interpretation but even their own version of its events.” I’ve gone so far as to write my own version and, as I look back on the adaptation I’ve created, I can’t help thinking how strongly it reflects one aspect of my life.

I don’t need to go into detail about the man I was once in a “relationship” with. The married man who was my teacher, whose mistress I became. You’re sick of hearing about him and I’m sick of reflecting on that time in my life. I’m ready to close the door on that, too.

Well, I can’t help thinking how much I was like Tatyana, in my younger days. Wanting not only his attention and affection, but wanting more. Wanting a real life together which, thankfully, I wasn’t granted.

Ten years went by. I didn’t marry a prince, but I would make a terrible princess anyway. Plus, I’ve got my girlfriend. I’m happy with her. I don’t want my ex back. At. All.

So when he started sending me all these pleading emails recently, it grossed me out. Big time. Especially the one where he actually wrote the words “You are my bucket list.” Eww. Who wants to be called a bucket list? I shudder.

I asked my girlfriend what to do about this grossness. She agreed that responding was not the answer, since he would take any response as an open door to further communication. She said, “Why don’t you block his email address?” and I was like, “You can do that?!?!” I had no idea. That’s me and technology for you.

So I did it. Immediately. I closed the door on him. I blocked him out of my life for good, and I can’t begin to tell you how empowering that felt. I’m sure you can hear it in my voice. I was so done.

John Bayley, in his introduction to Pushkin’s work, points out that “Eugene Onegin not only tells its own story to the reader but tells a story which feeds the reader’s own particular needs.”

Onegin wants Tatyana back, but nothing’s going to come of it.

She’s closed the door on him.

End of novel.

UPDATE: My Onegin adaptation is now available and it's called TRAGIC COOLNESS. Buy it now! Or ask your local library to acquire a copy. Read it now!
TRAGIC COOLNESS is available from Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/901726?ref=GiselleRenardeErotica
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07JHW2Q2V?tag=dondes-20
Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=NNpyDwAAQBAJ
BN: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/tragic-coolness-giselle-renarde/1129759465
Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/ca/en/ebook/tragic-coolness
iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/id1439408697

Time Management and Choosing My Battles

Time management is my biggest battle.

Between having a full-time day job, writing/publishing as Cameron D. James, occasionally writing/publishing under my other pen names, managing Deep Desires Press (which involves a lot of editing and publishing), editing for private clients, and hosting/co-hosting multiple podcasts, I’m a little pressed for time.

And then, no matter how carefully I plan something, it can all get thrown out the window when I obsess over a new project. I’ve mentioned my current New York Heat / New York Ice two-book series. I started mid-December and now, a month later, I have about 80,000 words. But to get to those 80,000 words, I ended up sacrificing a few important tasks… tasks that I had to do anyway, so I just got way behind on everything.

My to-do list is miles long. I don’t know if I’ll ever finish it. But there’s a constant juggling of priorities – and that shift in priorities can changes weekly or even daily. I have a website I’ve been neglecting to update and I’m fine with those updates being put on hold – but I have a feeling that one day very soon I’m going to decide that those updates take top priority and everything else will be on hold until it’s done. (And it’s pretty big update project.)

What I’ve learned as the key for me being able to accomplish all of this is to carefully divide my time. Before heading to my day job, I have some time to take care of small tasks. At work, if it’s quiet, I can work on some editing. At lunch, I do social media or tasks that can’t wait. In the evening and on the weekend, I do the longer things – writing, publishing, and paperwork.

Amazingly, I still have a social life. My husband makes sure that I have one.

Thankfully, my husband is a writer/editor too and co-manages Deep Desires Press with me, so he’s completely sympathetic and supportive of the insane number of projects that I take on. I wouldn’t be able to manage this if I had a different partner (or if I had kids).

But for all the careful work I put into time management and balancing my projects so that there’s forward momentum on everything, I still (frustratingly) can be reactive and impulsive. Just before writing this blog post, I stumbled across a call for submissions for a publisher and within ten minutes I had a plot worked out in my head. I’m itching to write this. But to do so would likely mean a new pen name (as it’s sweet MF romance and wouldn’t fit with any of my current names) and taking time away from all of the other important projects I’ve got going on. I'm battling in my head, going between my desire to take on the challenge of this project and the reality of the fact that I simply don't have time.

Sigh… I’ll work it in somehow, I guess.

Maybe I can give up sleeping.

Cameron D. James is a writer of gay erotica and M/M erotic romance; his latest release is Schoolboy Secrets. He is publisher at and co-founder of Deep Desires Press and a member of the Indie Erotica Collective. He lives in Canada, is always crushing on Starbucks baristas, and has two rescue cats. To learn more about Cameron, visit http://www.camerondjames.com.

Writing is Madness

I think it takes a certain madness to actually want to be a writer.

I spend hours and hours and hours and hours just sitting with my laptop or iPad, typing away. I have whole worlds, characters, plots, romances, and more (including big dicks) floating around in my head and I obsess over them until I finally get them out and onto the page.

And while I make some money on this, it’s certainly not enough to quit my day job.

And, yet, I prioritize this … this madness over important things.

Earlier this year, I got a job offer that was a huge jump in pay over what I get at my present day job. And I turned it down. Why? Because the commute would be four times as long and I like to write in the mornings before I go to work. I would have less time to write.

(With hindsight being 20/20, it’s good I didn’t take the job. I know the person that got it and so I know the inside scoop. It’s a terrible job. Horrible.)

Still, I turned it down because I wouldn’t be able to write as much.

Then there’s this past weekend.

I’ve been obsessed with this huge story idea for weeks now. It’s been slowly percolating in the back of my mind for a couple years — it’s a sequel to two different series that I wrote way back when. This sequel would combine the two “worlds” into something new and carry it forward as something better and stronger (and sexier and with lots of big dicks). In the last few weeks, all the puzzle pieces came together and all I can do when I’m not writing is think about how much I want to write this book.

So I finally started writing this past weekend. The words flowed so naturally and beautifully. I wrote 10K over the weekend with almost no effort. I sit down and I type and I love what I’m putting together.

And in my madness, this story turned into an epic, and then an epic times two. What was supposed to be a fun book that combines two worlds (sort of like writing fanfic of my own stuff) quickly turned into a two book series that will be huge, like possibly 200K words each. By far the longest thing I’ve ever written. It’s a massive undertaking. I’m almost a little scared.

But I’m also excited.

I can’t stop thinking about it. I dream about how to make the ending absolutely perfect (even though there’s about 400,000 words between where I am now and where that ending will be). When I’m at my day job, I think about scene I’m going to write on my lunch break and I plan it all out in my head. I know exactly what I want to do for the book trailers for each of these books (and I’ve never made a book trailer before and don’t believe they’re effective, yet I desperately want to create one for each of these books). I daydream about my characters and how to make them more real to my readers — because they’re so very real to me.

It’s a madness.

I’m infected. I’m afflicted. I’m incurable. I’m hopeless.

And I love it.



Cameron D. James is a writer of gay erotica and M/M erotic romance; his latest release is Schoolboy Secrets. He is publisher at and co-founder of Deep Desires Press and a member of the Indie Erotica Collective. He lives in Canada, is always crushing on Starbucks baristas, and has two rescue cats. To learn more about Cameron, visit http://www.camerondjames.com.

A Look Back At My Dirty Books (#gayerotica #amwriting #amediting)

My first publication was an MM erotic romance novel, Autumn Fire. I had read a handful of MM erotic romances before trying my hand at it. I threw together 50,000 words and submitted it to both an agent and a publisher. The agent turned me down, but she liked me, so she explained some of the difficulties with my writing. The publisher took me on, so I applied the agent’s advice when doing edits for the publisher. (The advice was pretty much just red flags about my writing style and how to make it more professional. And that agent’s advice was simply the best writing advice I had ever received. It’s completely changed the course of my writing career.)

I got decent reviews for Autumn Fire and decent sales too. However, despite the high hopes my publisher had for that book and for my followup with them, Silent Hearts, I never latched onto the sales market that other MM erotic romance authors do.

It wasn’t until years later that I finally understood that I was doing MM erotic romance wrong. While I was doing hot sex and a steamy romance, my protagonists tended to sleep around a fair bit, which is a no-no for romance. In erotic romance, we want hot sex, but only between the two male leads. And, typically, it starts off tamer and grows in intensity — like it’s a handjob first, then a blowjob, then anal. In my books, people pretty much jump right to anal.

What I had essentially done was take a fairly light gay erotica novel and framed it in the context of MM erotic romance. It was too seedy to classify as romance and too tame to classify as erotica. There were some people that loved it, though.

I began to brand my books (at least in my head) as “erotica with a touch of romance”. The stories are filthy and sex-filled, but more often than not, there’s a sweet romance that develops between two of these promiscuous men.

I’ve toyed on and off with erotic romance. My Forbidden Desires series of novellas each explore a taboo MM relationship, but in a way that better aligns with the conventions of romance. (The only people having sex are the male leads.) However, the first Forbidden Desires, Seduced By My Best Friend’s Dad, was the most favourably-received, but with reviewers calling it erotica. So… I guess I officially don’t write romance?

I’ve decided that if that’s how I’m coming across — that I write only erotica — then that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to stop worrying about how I’m perceived and I’m going to stop being overly concerned with genre conventions, and I’m just going to write the stories I want to tell. Readers can usually tell when an author is “into” a book or not — and if I write the stories I want to tell, then that drive is going to come across on the pages and the readers will appreciate it.

Do I regret my tamer stories? Not at all. It was all a vital learning experience and there are people who loved those books. I’ve recently had the rights returned to me for Autumn Fire and Silent Hearts. I’m rewriting them and will release them through my publishing company, but the rewrites are really just to bring the writing up to my present-day standards. (There’s sooooo much passive voice.) I’m leaving the sex and the romance as-is. It was the story I wanted to tell when I wrote it, so I’m not going to change it.

So, what’s a story that could have been dirtier? Pretty much everything where I was trying to be something I’m not. However, I still made it as dirty as I could. Other than the re-releases I’ve got planned for the coming months, my next several books will be filthy.



Cameron D. James is a writer of gay erotica and M/M erotic romance; his latest release is The President And The Rentboy. He is publisher at and co-founder of Deep Desires Press and a member of the Indie Erotica Collective. He lives in Canada, is always crushing on Starbucks baristas, and has two rescue cats. To learn more about Cameron, visit http://www.camerondjames.com.