The Truth about True Stories (#Lesbian Sex Stories #Lambda Awards #Calls for Submission # Best Lesbian Erotica)

Sacchi Green

Very soon I’ll be sending around a new call for submissions, but much to my relief, it won’t be like the one I wrote in 2012 for Wild Girls, Wild Nights: True Lesbian Sex Stories. After several years of resistance, I’d finally given in to my publishers’ plea to do an anthology of true stories. The first time they’d ever contacted me for editing, that’s what they’d wanted, but they’d put up with my reluctance through five other books, and this time, I knew, it was true stories or nothing. One of my anthos had tanked, saleswise, and I think they only kept putting up with me because that one hadn’t actually been my idea. I’d done it, with reluctance, as a favor when the boss’s wife had said a lesbian cops theme would be great (and the boss sent me a photo of the them doing a cops scene for Halloween.) It did, in fact, turn out to be a great book, and was even a finalist for a Lambda award, but apparently most folks who wanted to read lesbian cop stories didn’t want to pay for books, and I doubt that they wanted the kind of complex, well-written, non-cartoonish stories my writers provided. (Annabeth’s was truly outstanding.)

But back to Wild Girls, Wild Nights (a title I’d proposed for an adventure-themed book that was turned down) and the true stories. Yes, I keep almost saying “true” stories, but I was determined to do all I could to make the “true” part true, at least for some values of the truth. Here’s how I began my guidelines for ubmissions:

You put something of yourself into everything you write. You know you do. Now it’s time to take a deep breath, go that extra step, and write an erotic story firmly grounded in truth. Real encounters, real emotions, real sensations, real people, drawn from memory and transformed by your art into real stories as gripping as any fiction. 

Some degree of poetic license—or erotic license—is all right. Memories are inevitably filtered through time and experience, and telling a story can sometimes reveal the inner truth of feelings and actions better without a precise list of actions or a verbatim account of conversations. In the heat of the moment—and I do want the very hottest moments—certain parts stand out so vividly in your mind that everything before and after blurs and must be imagined. Combining events into a shorter time span can make the overall effect more intense.  Pseudonyms are fine, and even if you use your own name, you must use fictional names for any other characters in order to maintain some degree of privacy.  

Then I went on to list the kinds of stories I want for any of my anthologies.

The response was wonderful, but the responsibility weighed on me. How could I claim that everything I chose was truly true? Several of the writers were familiar enough to me that I knew something about their lives and backgrounds, enough to know that their stories were, at least, plausible, and a few I knew well and was sure they were telling the truth, or close enough. Some others told me details that were convincing; one writer from Germany wrote two stories, set in different periods of her life, and told me she’d been wanting to share them for a long time but hadn’t felt she could trust anyone before me to do them justice. Okay, I’m a sucker for that sort of flattery. In any case, I was reasonably sure that each story was “grounded in real life.” There was another writer, too, with more than one story worth telling—Giselle might know something about that. In both cases they used pseudonyms for at least one of their pieces;

I was even more sure after the book came out and I organized a “blog tour” for each writer to discuss her story. In fact I was amazed at what came to light. There was a lovely story about a bittersweet romance between a mid-30s-ish woman going back to college to earn a degree in education, and a very young student who pursued her. The author revealed in her blog that she herself had been the younger girl, long ago, and she’d reversed their roles to tell the story from the viewpoint of the older woman, the age she herself is now. True enough for me. And there was the young writer who had trespassed into her older partner’s computer, misunderstood a search item she’d found, and ended up being firmly spanked—and enjoyed it so much that as soon as she could she went online to tell her close friends about it. I believed her. There were other writers who made me realize that their stories were even more true than I had thought they were, and several who had been wanting a way to tell their stories (under pseudonyms,) including one who didn’t want her grown kids to know she’d written it.

The best story-about-the-story, though, concerns a submission that I didn’t accept at first because I really couldn’t believe it. There was a humorous orgy party involved, and animal-ear hats, and it took place in the San Francisco area. I had to drop one story I’d accepted (co-written by a couple who’d met recently, and broke up soon afterward) so the publisher asked if I had something else to fill in with. I explained my doubts about the orgy story, sent it in—and discovered that several of the young staff members in the publisher’s office (in Berkeley) had actually heard about that party, and it was, in fact, pretty much true. How could I have doubted it?

So that’s my true story about wrangling true stories for an anthology (which, in fact, won that year’s Lambda Award for lesbian erotica.) I don’t plan on doing that kind of thing ever again, but one never knows. Meanwhile, I do have a new anthology in the works—Best Lesbian Erotica of the Year Volume 2 (actually BLE 2017, but they’ve tweaked the title) with my call for submissions coming up soon, but unless I get some submissions within the next two weeks, I don’t think I can work that into the upcoming What Are You Reading topic. Sad.

 

The Reluctant Hustler

Sacchi Green


“Hustler” generally has a pejorative connotation, with the sense of swindling someone, or at least tricking them for profit. A pool hustler may or may not be cheating—is it even possible to cheat at pool? (Obviously I’ve never played it.) In any case he’s likely to conceal just how expert he is until his “mark” has agreed to big stakes. But the hustler has to work for his money, and the most positive definition of the term is something like “an enterprising person determined to succeed; go-getter.” This would apply as readily to a pool player as to a business executive or politician clawing his way to the top, and we may even have a spark of admiration for those who make it.

Then there are those who try, but don’t make it. And those who pretend to try.  That last is my category.  As with all writers, our “hustle” isn’t an attempt to swindle anybody, but just to get them to for god’s sake buy our freaking books! We, of course, think our books are supremely worth reading, and even paying for, so we’re not trying to deceive anyone, or not exactly. We’re just trying to convince them. Or at least get them to notice the existence of our books!

The rise of “social media” has held out hope for ways to do this, which of course leads to publishers urging authors to get out there and hustle, to have web sites, write blogs, get reviews, make “book trailer” videos, flog the titles and covers of their books on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Goodreads, etc., etc. If you’re not doing those things, you’re not doing your part to sell your books, and if your books don’t sell, you don’t continue to get published. It’s not personal, it’s business, and, in fact, I understand, and don’t hold it against them. But I also understand, at this point, that the best I can do is make the motions of hustling.

I’m on Facebook, and enjoy it, but well over half of my “friends” are other writers rather than book-purchasing readers. I have a blog, and when I began it I posted essays about writing and various other themes that I found interesting, besides news about my books. I never figured out how to attract readers to it, or even tried much to figure that out, but I’d get comments from time to time, especially when I posted free stories. Eventually comments became rare, even when my stats indicated a modest number of readers, and I fell into mostly just posting about my new books coming out, with occasionally a review or reference to someone else’s book. At this point I get more “hits” than I used to, sometimes inexplicably, as when, fairly often, my stats cite a one-day flood of hits from Russia, but there’s no indication that many people are actually reading my posts (although the free stories do pretty well.) The most hits for specific pages are for my Calls for Submission for new anthologies, and I’m still getting an amazing number looking for my CFS for Best Lesbian Erotica 16—renamed, this year, Best Lesbian Erotica 20th Anniversary Edition—routed through my publisher’s web site. The deadline for submissions is long, long past, of course—in fact I just got my box of the new books from the publisher, and the official release date is February 9th—so I guess the folks come to my blog to see if I’m taking submissions for the next one. I have no idea whether I’ll be editing the next one, and I expect the publisher (new to me because the business was sold last year) won’t decide on that until they see how this one sells.

The new publisher, or rather the new owner of the old publisher, has its own new publicity people, with their not exactly new ideas, so I make an attempt to cooperate. I’m already out ahead of them in some areas, like doing readings; I’ve done those for years because I enjoy them, and so do my writers, but I only do them in places I can get to fairly easily, and where at least three or four of my writers are close enough to join me.  Fortunately those places include New York and New England; unfortunately they don’t include the west coast. I’m already in the habit of doing book give-aways on Goodreads and on a site or two where potential readers gather, although it’s getting harder and harder to get any takers when I offer free books on Facebook for potential reviews. I did a blog tour for my last book, with my writers participating, and I’m organizing one for this new book, too, more to give the writers some attention than to promote sales. Do any of these activities actually sell books? Probably not, with the possible exception of readings in New York, and even then I think the people who buy them would have bought them anyway. But at least I can tell the eager staff at my publisher that I’m doing things.

And there are things that I don’t, as yet, do. I got an e-mail from an enthusiastic young intern at my publisher’s office who had the great “new” idea of short book videos, so I said I’d try, but it hasn’t worked out yet. I don’t have the tech chops, but I thought I might do a voice-over montage of all the BLE covers since the first one in 1996, so I asked her to get me good files of the covers to use—and haven’t heard back. I did check out the link she gave me to the ones already done by my fellow editors, and I’ve done it again recently. In two months Rachel Kramer Bussel’s video has had 48 viewers. In one month, Sinclair Sexsmith’s video has had 6 viewers. Somehow I don’t think the absence of one by me is a big loss to anyone, but I may still try.

So here I am, a reluctant hustler. You might say that I’m hustling my publisher by appearing to do things but not in a big enough way. I don’t know. When it comes to the positive kind of hustling, the go-getter kind, what I’m good at is getting good writers together, and sometimes helping potentially good writers be really good ones. As far as selling the books goes, all I can really do is make sure they’re worth reading. If there’s any way to hustle or swindle anyone into buying books, I don’t know what it is, which is just as well; this way I don’t have to decide whether to take the high road or the low. But if anyone does happen to know a trick that works…        

At Play in the Fields of the Past

Sacchi Green

History has always fascinated me. The past is a different enough world from the present to be as interesting as any fictional story, and sometimes even more so, because the present grows out of the past and can’t be fully understood without knowing what came before. Of course written history can’t be relied on to be factual—it depends on who wrote what from which perspective, and with what agenda, and so many other variables—but that doesn’t prevent it from making an engrossing story, especially when presented in fictional form by really good writers.

As a kid, and on into my teens, I loved to read Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn (which took some further maturity to really understand, but still grabbed my imagination,) and Little Women, and all of Jane Austen’s novels, and the Sherlock Holmes stories (as much for the sense of the period and the atmosphere as for the mystery element) and so many other books that let me feel immersed in the world of the past without having to cope with the discomforts of really living then. Those were books written more or less during the eras they depicted—Mark Twain was already looking back at a past world, but one he’d inhabited—but I also loved books by authors writing of eras long before their own, like Scott’s Ivanhoe and stories about legendary figures such as Robin Hood, and novels about more recent periods like Gone with the Wind.

Maybe my longing for other times that seemed more interesting than my own had something to do with growing up in a small town in the truly boring 50s. When I discovered Kerouac, it was in the 60s or close enough, so by then the Beat Generation was well in the past, but still an active influence on “our” generation that produced hippiedom and sit-ins and rock-and-roll and even feminism. I said in a comment to a previous post here that history is what happened before a time you can remember, but I take that back—the 60s and 70s are history now to me, and so is pretty much everything before the 21st century. History never holds still.

When it comes to my own writing, I especially love to set stories in the ready-made world of the past, and I often enjoy the research more than the writing. Almost always, in fact. Writing is the hardest part. Whenever possible I try to read contemporary accounts of the period, to get a sense of the flow of the language and the perspectives of the people, although the farther back the time period the harder that gets.

I’ve written several erotica stories set during WWII, and found invaluable first-person accounts (although often through interviews by more recent writers) of what it was like to be a woman WASP pilot ferrying warplanes or the Russian “Night Witch” women pilots and bombardiers flying hundreds of missions against invading German troops. I’ve written Vietnam-era stories, too, with memoirs by WACs and nurses serving “in country” augmenting my own memories of what it was like stateside. In those cases, of course, language was no problem. Writing a story set during WWI was more of a stretch, but not much—dozens and dozens of British mystery novels set more or less in that period had been a large part of my youthful reading, and I still love the Lord Peter Wimsey books by Dorothy L. Sayers. Not to mention Wodehouse.

When I ventured into the Elizabethan period, Shakespeare was my obvious source, both of language and plot. What could inspire a transgender story better than a theatrical tradition of boys playing girls (and sometimes playing girls disguised as boys?) The language had to tread a line between the modern and the Elizabethan, of course, leaning much more toward the modern, and I don’t know how successful I was, but it was a lot of fun. So much so that I’ll indulge myself in an excerpt:
__________

A Dance of Queens

Midsummer’s Night, the play safely done, dusk sweet as a languorous touch on yearning flesh...and still I could not take my love into the greenwood and lay her on my cloak and be consumed in her fire.

I cursed my own impatience. We should have pressed on without pause, but Quenta had tormented me so, slipping a hand beneath my shirt and then down into my breeches until I could scarce walk, and must stop for a taste of the feast to come.

So the Queen’s messenger had caught us. And truly, by the shimmer in the air at the instant she appeared, I knew there had never been hope of escape. In the Welsh hills and valleys we have tales, more than tales, of such creatures, though I had thought the filth and disbelief of London must repel them. At another time I would have been glad that the green countryside along the Thames still held such folk. Glad or no, we had no choice now but to let the greenwood’s promise fade into shadow.

Frustration pounded in my veins. I jerked away from Quenta’s touch, the mere brush of her hand making me forget that I must not even think of “him” as “her” until we could be blessedly alone.

I focused on the wide skirt sailing just ahead. Though the farthingale was not devised with a lady dwarf in mind, its absurdity was more than countered by the messenger’s bearing and the Queen’s crest broidered on her sleeve. It scarcely needed Quenta’s nudge to put me on guard against those keen, merry eyes, though they looked up at me from about the level of my belt.

Such danger should have chilled my ardor. But surely the Queen would waste little time on us, might have forgotten already her whim. At most there could be a gracious word or two, perhaps a small purse. Why, then, command that we bring our play-garb? A jest among her ladies?

But in the great bedchamber we found Her Majesty alone, a slim, pale figure whose aura crackled through the paneled room like heat-lightning.

Our diminutive guide swept a curtsy. “The player boys, Madam. Quentin O’Connor and Kit Rhys.”

Bright tired eyes assessed us. “Well enough, Gwen. Now keep us private for a bit.” The attendant gave me a wicked sidelong glance as she went to sit between the great oak door and the carven screen before it.

Quenta elbowed me sharply. I joined her in an elegant stage bow, feeling the royal glance caress our snug-hosed calves. Her Majesty was said to have ever an eye for a well-turned leg; if it went farther than a look, or a leg... But I had never heard so much as rumor that it did.

Her voice was cool enough. “So, Titania and Hippolyta. You played the queen’s part well, each in your own way.”

“Never so well as you, Your Highness.” Quenta’s green eyes gleamed wickedly, and I suppressed a groan. This was no time for her sly wit!
__________

What follows is something of an erotic comedy of genders, with twists and turns, a snippet of history, and a bit of magic.


I’ve wanted for a long time to get a chance to edit an anthology of historical stories. I did, in fact, do an alternate history book a few years ago, Time Well Bent, under my alternate name, Connie Wilkins, for Lethe Press. It wasn’t erotica, per se, although some of the pieces were definitely erotic, including Lisabet’s rif on Gilbert (of Gilbert and Sullivan) being seduced by a handsome young understudy, which I believe she mentioned in her post last week. Excellent stuff. But a gig editing an historical erotica book has eluded me until right now, when I have an actual Call for Submissions out for Thunder of War, Lightning of Desire: Lesbian Historical Literary Erotica, to be published by Lethe Press. The deadline is near, but extensions are possible. And I have another CFS for an historical lesbian romance anthology, Through the Hourglass, with The Liz McMullen Show as publisher. For these guidelines, you can check out my blog, http://sacchi-green.blogspot.com (just scroll down a few posts past my other current CFS, for Best Lesbian Erotica 2016.)

Such good timing! An historical theme for OGG right now, just when I actually have something to say on the subject!