Everything You Wrote Before Now Was Boring As Fuck

by Giselle Renarde

When I started writing erotica in 2006, one of the most popular blog topics was something like: Erotica versus Smut. What's the Difference?

I remember lots of authors elevating their work--you know, saying their erotica wasn't smut, wasn't porn. Their work was superior because... I don't know... reasons. You think I can remember random blogs I read 9 years ago? I can barely remember what I did this morning.

What I do remember is writing these defiant posts (maybe in my head, maybe on the internet) about how I had NO trouble calling my work smut. I embraced the term. It's sex writing. It's fucking on paper. It's smut!

Man, was I talking out of my ass. I had no idea what smut was, back then. No clue. Yeah, I'd written stuff for Hustler Fantasies, but my pieces were tame. I know that now, because I've turned a corner.

Early in my career, I primarily wrote short stories for inclusion in erotic anthologies. Literary erotica. Brainy erotica. Boring erotica.

Whoa, whoa, whoa! Hold up, there, Giselle. Did you just call literary erotica BORING?

Yeah. Or no. I called MY literary erotica boring, but I say that contextually, and I'm going to explain.

There's a certain kind of piece you write when you're submitting your work to a collection of literary erotica. The latitude you can take is enormous. What qualifies as erotic is really up to you--and your editor, of course. You can write diverse fiction. Sex can be anything.  Except porny. Because we're better than that.

How could that much room to move possibly be boring?

Well, it really depends what your readership is after. Why are they reading this story you wrote?

If they paid $15.95 for an erotic anthology, yeah, they're probably looking for literary erotica. They know what to expect. They want you to tickle their brains.

But if they paid $2.99 (or $0.99 or got it free on Amazon) for your weird-ass boring piece of shit short story, trust me, you're going to hear about it.

I speak from experience.

When the calls for submissions dried up in the land of literary erotica, I learned pretty fast that the story you write for an anthology isn't the story you publish as a standalone piece of smut.

The reader is buying your $2.99 or $0.99 or FREE ebooks to get off. Not to tickle their grey matter. Not for their horizons to be expanded. Not for their perspectives to shift so they can look at life in a different way. They're buying this piece of smut to get turned on. That's it.

I didn't learn the true meaning of smut until Lexi Wood came into being. I remember being scandalized when "Daddy" erotica was popular. (It still is popular, but you can't call it that anymore or your book will be banned.)  Suddenly Lexi comes into my life, and she's writing about stepdaddies fucking their barely-legal stepdaughters, and I find out that's where the money is.  The money's in your stepdaughter's tight virgin hole.

She drags me into her world of pure smut and I realize why so many readers have called my work boring. I wasn't giving them what they were looking for. Now that Lexi's led me to water, I'm drinking in everything sweet, tangy and taboo.

...and, GOD, do I love it...

Case in point.

Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Smashwords

Lilith

By Lisabet Sarai

He’s searching for God. She’s just looking for a fuck. But that’s not quite right. She knows, somehow, that you don’t have to seek God. God’s already there, inside. You just need to figure out how to open yourself and let divinity out.

For her, sex is the way, the consummate opening. When she’s writhing in a lover’s arms, the barriers crumble. For a few glorious moments, she can experience first hand the communion she normally has to take on faith. The bliss and the certainty are as brief and fragile as they are transcendent, She’s left with mere memories that fade the more she tries to clutch at them—scraps of joy, glimmers of magic. She’s learned over the years to let them go, the same way she releases her lovers when it’s time for them to move on. There are always new bodies, new hearts—new truths.

He doesn’t understand, thinks she’s been put there to tempt him him from his path of purity and righteousness. He’s not pure, though. He knows very well he’s not. If he were, he wouldn’t want her so badly.

She loves his youth, his shyness, his awkward innocence, his cleverness with words and with his hands. His intuition astounds her; the depth of his feelings humble her. When they meet for coffee and intricate conversations, she aches to touch him, but he’s armored in self-denial. The most casual brush of her hand makes him flinch away.

A veteran of many couplings, she can read his desire like the books he cherishes. It’s in his darting eyes, his flushed cheeks, the sweat she can smell, even across the cafe table. It’s more than lust. It’s like a prayer.

He stares into his coffee cup to escape her bold stare, even as he speaks of Japanese folk tales or dissects King Lear. In the fragrant and bitter dregs he reads his fate—an instant of forbidden indulgence then a long, hard fall. He vows to be strong, but her magnetism draws his traitor body. His stubborn cock is a pillar of iron between his tensed thighs.

Iron, and salt, the destiny of sinners.

Every Monday they come together to pace out the same steps in this dance of frustration. What can she do? Perfume and decolletage don’t dent his desperate resolve. If only she dared make a first move—but she knows terror and need will send him skittering away. She cares too much to cause him that distress.

She dreams of him, imagines the magic they’d create in connecting. He might be the one to finally set her free. No virgin, still she succumbs to the seductive promise of a soul mate. And if that promise fails, the mystery of opening remains, illusion vanishing like fog in the white-hot flare of pleasure, incandescent truth shining forth for a few seconds before the curtain falls. That’s what he craves, too, or so she believes.

But how to reach him? She ponders the conundrum as she twists and tosses on ocean-scented sheets, her fingers an unsatisfactory substitute for his maleness. His aspirations to holiness make her feel like a whore, but that doesn’t matter. Nothing matters except her need to wrap her legs around his waist and pull him inside her.

Finally, she writes him a story.