I Love Rock 'n' Roll #authorlife #amwritingromance #amwritinggayromance

By Morticia Knight

Last month the topic at Oh Get a Grip revolved around using real life circumstances and events in our writing. I shared from my novel Rocked Hard because so much of myself is in that story. Aubrey is an alternative rock singer and songwriter from Los Angeles and the necessity of music in his life is as intense as mine. To add to how personal that story is to me, I used my own song lyrics for Aubrey’s band, Falling in Stereo. Which brings me to this month’s topic: Facing the Music.

That can be taken several ways. The most obvious would be actual music, but that expression can also pertain to dealing with a truth we don’t want to face. For me, both of those interpretations work. I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was twelve. And I don’t mean in a vague sort of way. I pursued this dream with a fervor that perplexed both my parents and friends. Neither could understand why it was so important that I have a subscription to Writer’s Digest or write in my spiral notebook every. Single. Day. I went as far as submitting a manuscript to Little, Brown & Company (now under Hachette Publishing), which I somehow decided was a good idea based on the research I’d done with my doorstop-sized tome, The Writer’s Market.

By the time I’d submitted my book, that was vaguely reminiscent of Harriet the Spy (neatly typed with the proper margins and correct weight/type of paper, of course), I was the ripe old age of fourteen. Then, once I’d received the inevitable rejection letter, my head had already been turned by Led Zeppelin, Fleetwood Mac and Heart. Even though the letter contained a nice postscript encouraging me to keep writing, my fourteen-year-old heart wasn’t listening. One of the New York publishing heavyweights didn’t want to publish me, so it was time to move on!

The next couple of decades were devoted to writing of a different kind. Instead of stories, it was song lyrics. Oh, I still had plenty of ideas tumbling through my mind, and I’d write them down—even getting up to twenty or thirty pages before giving up. I thought everything I wrote was horrible and besides, I’d gotten so entrenched with writing words to a rhythm and to rhyme, I almost couldn’t stop myself!

At the MIDEM Music Festival in Cannes, France. I'm the one in red.

While I did play in bands for quite a while, put out a record, made a small living at it some years—that elusive dream of being a big enough musician in the industry that I could make a solid, steady income never materialized. At a certain point, it became more of a hassle than I had been willing to admit for quite a while. I had to literally face the music. While I loved writing the songs, rehearsing them and being in the studio—live performing was too stressful. The pressure to have everything just so, maintaining a certain ‘look’, all the schmoozing; that aspect of being a performer wasn't something I’d ever cared for.  Once I reached my mid-thirties, I cared even less.

That was when writing called to me again. My first love. The dream that never should have been abandoned, as I’d come to believe. Jumping back in was a gradual process. I wrote bios and press releases for—you guessed it—musicians, did some reviews and articles, then got two gigs co-writing memoirs with the guitar player of a famous eighties ‘hair band’ and a rock journalist who had interviewed everyone from Chuck Berry to Michael Jackson. I even wrote articles on local history for two different newspapers. But more importantly, I was putting those long dormant writing muscles to work again.

At a certain point though, it wasn’t enough. I still had stories to tell. At first, I only submitted short stories to literary magazines (after, once again, doing meticulous research), but none of my story ideas truly fit. I kept veering toward romance, and it became an exercise in frustration to force the muse to bow to my literary will. At the beginning of 2011, I went all in and became an author of erotic romance. Less than ten months later, I’d signed my first contract and, in 2015, went fulltime.

I don’t regret my years as a musician and I still love music—it’s a necessity when I write. But the dream I’m living now is my true dream. I’m grateful for every single day I can still say this is my job.

Coming Out as a Writer of Smut

When I first started erotic writing years ago, I kept everything on the down-low.

I did tell my mom that I was embarking on some erotic romance writing and that I wouldn’t divulge my pen name or any details. The only person who knew anything more than that was my husband (then-boyfriend), as we do nearly everything as a team. It didn’t take long before I divulged this to our writing group, but for years, word of what I wrote didn’t spread beyond that select group of people.

Part of it was due to embarrassment of writing erotic fiction and part of it was due to not wanting to be out as gay to everyone. (Oh, I should mention, it’s gay erotic romance and erotica I write.)

For example, at the time my day job was accounts payable and receivable at a battery warehouse. The boss was rather forward thinking, I think, but my co-workers and the delivery drivers were all very, hmm, redneck. I didn’t want any of them know I like dick, so that meant never telling them about what I write (not that I had anything close to a conversation with 95% of them).

When I moved onto my next job, a desk job at an office, I soon went on a trip to a writing convention in Calgary (just a few hours’ flight from here) where I had agreed to do a few author-type things, like a public reading of a smut scene. I told my boss what I was up to — my workplace is very gay, so liking dick is normal — but asked him to keep it secret.

In Calgary, I did that public reading of a smut scene. I was more comfortable there than I was back in my home city because I knew almost no one there. It was also a genre-focussed convention, so smut was fairly common there. I read the opening scene of Autumn Fire to a room full of middle-age and senior women. The opening scene is an anonymous bathroom blowjob. I was so uncomfortable. Afterward, a kindly older woman came up to me and gave me suggestions on how to make the scene even sexier, to really root the reader in the blowjob.

I managed to put aside the awkwardness for the rest of the weekend. I made some conference friends there — you know, the kind you hang out with for the weekend and never see again after that. A couple of them read my book over the weekend and told me they loved it.

Also at the conference was a female friend and her ex-boyfriend, and the ex fell in love with my bathroom blowjob scene and literally followed me around for the whole weekend. It was during that weekend that my friend found out her ex was bi and had kissed guys before. He was cute.

I was starting to get used to the idea that the world wasn’t going to end if people knew I wrote sexy fiction.

Still, though, I was happy to leave it all in Calgary.

However, when I returned to work the following Monday, a co-worker came up to me and asked me how my weekend in Calgary was. He wasn’t discreet. From his body language, I could tell he was trying to draw a secret out of me — a secret he already knew.

On the one day of work that I was absent — the Friday — apparently the whole staff had found out what I write. While some co-workers had that awkward “I’m uncomfortable that you write about sex” attitude that can be expected, the rest of my co-workers were surprisingly cool with it, to the point that they seemed almost proud of me.

Over the years since then, it’s been an interesting journey. Some folks are still of the “I’m uncomfortable that you write about sex” category and they try to cover it up by making jokes about sex writing that don’t really hide their discomfort. The rest, though, continue to think it’s very cool, especially the business aspect as I start up and grow a publisher, expand into podcasts, and somehow continue to write.

Since then, I’ve been slowly coming out to friends and family about what I do. A handful of those friends have gone on to read some of my books — which is a whole new level of awkwardness for me as a writer — and loved them.

Recently, I think I passed the final level of smut-writing awkwardness and exposing my smutty self. I published my latest novel, New York Heat, through my publishing company and needed it proofread. I had recently taken on a couple family members as proofreaders at the publisher to help us get through a glut of work and there was only one proofreader available and able to read my mammoth smut book (186K words, with 27 filthy gay sex scenes)… my mom.

She took it on with little hesitation, powered through it, and told me she loved it. She’s not eager to read another smut book by me right away — but she’s up for reading more if they appear in the production queue.

It’s kind of odd.

Six and a half years ago, I ventured into smut writing as a mental break from the crushing workload of my masters degree and the epic sci-fi trilogy I was trying to perfect. I landed a publisher for the first smut book and a year later that book was out, along with my first self-published short story.

I entered into a world of secrecy, not unlike a steamy and dimly-lit bathhouse. Little encounters happen here and there, names are not exchanged, and secrets are kept.

And over the five and a half years since that first publication, my confidence in who I am and what I do has grown. Shame and stigma have been cast aside. As I let people in on my secrets — sometimes not of my own choosing — I found that I didn’t face the rejection or ridicule that I had expected.

It’s like emerging from that dark and claustrophobic bathhouse and walking into the middle of a pride parade. Honestly, coming out as an author of erotic fiction was as hard, if not harder, then coming out as gay.

When I figured out what was going on with me — that I was gay — it took less than a year to come out. I wasn’t ready to fully admit it to myself until that fateful day I met the man who would become my husband. After meeting him, I came out a week later.

Coming out as an erotic author? Man, that took years.

But I’m glad I did. Just like being gay, I found being a closeted erotic author to be stifling, restrictive. And to be out about it was freeing, thrilling.

My name is Cameron D. James and I write erotic fiction — and I’m proud of it.

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

Rediscovering the Joy of Writing

I write under several pen names. Some of my pen names even have pen names. (Like, for example, I write my young adult gay romances under the name “Dylan James”, which is the YA-friendly pen name for “Cameron D James”, which is in itself a pen name.)

Altogether, my bibliography, ranging from a few magazine articles, to a crap-ton of short stories, to full-length novels, comes out at 103 publications. I’ve got two more books pretty much ready-to-go and I’m in the planning stage for perhaps a dozen more projects, again ranging from short stories to full length novels.

For me, sometimes writing and publishing can be a revolving door of projects. I finish one and I quickly move on to the next. Often I hit the “publish” button with little fanfare, really doing not much more than simply sharing it in my newsletter.

I treat writing like a job — which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean that I sometimes lose the joy in all of this. I’m so focussed on getting my next project done and out so that I can move onto the project after that — and I sometimes forget to look at the milestones I’ve accomplished or to celebrate the joy of a book well-received.

(As well, it might be because of this sometimes lack of joy on my part that leads to very little fanfare on social media and very few reviews. I used to think it’s because I don’t flog my books. But now I think it’s that I don’t celebrate the joy of my books, so few people in turn celebrate that joy on my behalf.)

Last week was the publication of my first young adult romance novel, Gay Love and Other Fairy Tales. This was really a risk for me. Well, not a risk, but certainly a step outside of what I normally do.

For one, there’s no sex in a young adult novel. (Well, big publishers can sometimes get away with implied sex, but as a small press or an indie author, that’s a no-go for YA books.) It’s been years now since I’ve written something that didn’t include at least one fully explicit sex scene. It was … unusual.

It was also the book that we chose to launch my publishing company’s young adult imprint with — so it was the first book for Deep Hearts YA. If the book is a flop, then the publishing imprint gets off to a very weak start. It’s not impossible to recover from, but it can be challenging.

It’s also a brand new start for a brand new pen name — Dylan James. While it’s loosely tied to Cameron D. James, it is still separate. I had to build a platform in a matter of weeks without relying on my Cameron D. James clout — though I did try to flex that clout whenever I could.

Understandably, I was quite nervous about this book.

So it was with this book that I finally slowed down … finally re-discovered the joy of writing and publishing.

I got my first review the other day — five stars — and I’m currently on two top-100 lists on Amazon (teen LGBT romance and teen LGBT fiction). While of course reviews ride on the strength of the book, I can’t help but wonder if some of the success is due to me being joyful about the book. I talk about it on my Dylan James Twitter and I post about it on my Dylan James Instagram — I talk about it more than I usually talk about my books.

I think I need to do this more often.

I’ve also been talking a lot (especially on here) about my upcoming book New York Heat. I’m joyful about that one too. I’m excited to get it out and get people to read it. I haven’t felt this joyful about writing and publishing for a few years now. This is new. I like it.

I think I want to make this joyful attitude a regular thing. I should be excited about my writing and my books. Really, I am, but I need to show it more. If people can see I’m excited and joyful, hopefully they’ll feel the same. And that can only lead to good things.



Cameron D. James is a writer of gay smut. His upcoming publication is the (surprisingly smut-free) gay YA romance, Gay Love And Other Fairy Tales, under his YA pen name, Dylan James.