1) Why have you chosen Erotica as your genre of choice?
Because erotica is wonderful! Or, at least, it can be. There is a lot of badly written stuff out there, but overall erotica is an under-appreciated genre. Sex is one of the most powerful experiences that a human being is capable of, especially when love is involved, but for some reason writers don't get a lot of respect unless they're write about some kind of great suffering instead.
Because erotica is wonderful! Or, at least, it can be. There is a lot of badly written stuff out there, but overall erotica is an under-appreciated genre. Sex is one of the most powerful experiences that a human being is capable of, especially when love is involved, but for some reason writers don't get a lot of respect unless they're write about some kind of great suffering instead.
Write about people dying in WWII, you get an award. Write about the cruelty of racism, you get an award. Write about somebody starving to death, you get an award.
Write about something wonderful happening between two (or more) people...?
You can get sales. You can have a best-seller. But you'll be mocked and have your work derided, as if pleasure was somehow less noble than pain. Personally, I'd rather create works that give the readers orgasms than works that give them tears. (Although there's nothing to say that you can't do a bit of both, when it fits the story.)
Write about something wonderful happening between two (or more) people...?
You can get sales. You can have a best-seller. But you'll be mocked and have your work derided, as if pleasure was somehow less noble than pain. Personally, I'd rather create works that give the readers orgasms than works that give them tears. (Although there's nothing to say that you can't do a bit of both, when it fits the story.)
2) How did you become involved with your new book "Letting Go"?
Through Twitter, actually. I started my twitter account because I learned that award-winning journalist Doug Saunders had mentioned one of my titles in passing, in a tweet. I decided that Twitter might be a good way to publicize my works, and I was half right.
It turns out that Twitter isn't so great for getting a lot of sales, but it IS pretty good for networking. You can meet people via Twitter that you'd never encounter in your daily life. Somebody on Twitter mentioned to me that Kelli Roberts and Audrey Hollander had written some erotica, and that aroused my curiosity, so to speak.
I read their work, tweeted Kelli about it, and we sort of struck up a friendship. She ended up reading my short story "Cornholed," on Literotica (retitled "Corn Hold" for the kindle), and she was impressed by my ability to write such an absurd premise--sex with a magic scarecrow--so well.
She was already working on "Letting Go," and decided that I could bring a lot to the table if we partnered up on the project. I had been wanting to write a novel, and getting the chance to work with an AVN-nominated Adult Film producer was something that I couldn't pass up.
3) How would you describe your book?
It's romantic BDSM erotica. Not to be confused with a BDSM erotica romance. While there is romance involved in the plot, it's primarily about two people discovering secrets about each other, and about themselves, although there is certainly romance involved.
Stasia, the protagonist, has had a growing attraction to Jaxon, but the fact that they're co-workers has kept them apart, as well as the fact that Stasia considers herself to be a rather vanilla kind of girl, and she's heard some unsettling rumors about Jaxon's sex life.
She can't help trying to find out more about him, though, and she starts stumbling onto some secrets, then ends up getting in over her head.
Through Twitter, actually. I started my twitter account because I learned that award-winning journalist Doug Saunders had mentioned one of my titles in passing, in a tweet. I decided that Twitter might be a good way to publicize my works, and I was half right.
It turns out that Twitter isn't so great for getting a lot of sales, but it IS pretty good for networking. You can meet people via Twitter that you'd never encounter in your daily life. Somebody on Twitter mentioned to me that Kelli Roberts and Audrey Hollander had written some erotica, and that aroused my curiosity, so to speak.
I read their work, tweeted Kelli about it, and we sort of struck up a friendship. She ended up reading my short story "Cornholed," on Literotica (retitled "Corn Hold" for the kindle), and she was impressed by my ability to write such an absurd premise--sex with a magic scarecrow--so well.
She was already working on "Letting Go," and decided that I could bring a lot to the table if we partnered up on the project. I had been wanting to write a novel, and getting the chance to work with an AVN-nominated Adult Film producer was something that I couldn't pass up.
3) How would you describe your book?
It's romantic BDSM erotica. Not to be confused with a BDSM erotica romance. While there is romance involved in the plot, it's primarily about two people discovering secrets about each other, and about themselves, although there is certainly romance involved.
Stasia, the protagonist, has had a growing attraction to Jaxon, but the fact that they're co-workers has kept them apart, as well as the fact that Stasia considers herself to be a rather vanilla kind of girl, and she's heard some unsettling rumors about Jaxon's sex life.
She can't help trying to find out more about him, though, and she starts stumbling onto some secrets, then ends up getting in over her head.
Most of the novel takes place over a single weekend, and (like most of my writing to date) there is a LOT of very descriptive sex involved. We tried to avoid doing the kind of "then they did this position, then they did that position" kind of writing where only the physical acts were concentrated, and made sure that every sex scene helped develop the characters, and/or advance the plot.
Stasia ends up going through a number of things that she has never experienced before, and part of the appeal to me with that kind of story is all of the internal thoughts and reactions that new experiences bring.
Also, many of our readers will find things in the novel that they have never personally tried before, and when we wrote the scenes, we strove to write them in such a way that readers would have some idea of what the experience is actually like: what the appeal is to being spanked, paddled, chained, and such.
4) How was writing the novel different from your other writing experiences?
It was my first novel, for one thing. I've been a bit intimidated about writing novels, simply because I can be so extraordinarily verbose in my writing. My first erotic story was "An Innocent Haircut," and my intention was to just dash out a very quick sex scene between a young man and the woman who cuts his hair. I figured that a simple, one-scene story would be fast and easy.
I wrote it out fast enough, and the story ended up being over nine-thousand words long, most of those words describing the sex.
That tends to be my writing style, so I really wasn't sure of how a novel would go for me. If I aim for a quick, 4-6k story, I tend to end up with something in the 9-14k range. I was afraid that if I aimed for something in the 50-100k range, that it would never end!
That's one place where having a partner came in handy, which is the other new experience for me with this project. I'd never worked with a partner before. Kelli and I came up with a story arc that let us accomplish all that we wanted to do, while still keeping us under 65k words. We were able to both push each other to meet goals and to do our best, as well as to reign each other in a bit when needed. Overall, it worked out very well. We seem to have had the right blend of flexibility and firmness in our working together.
5) Where will your writing take you next?
Someplace interesting, I expect!
I always have a number of projects in the works, and even more in my intentions. I've been compiling my various short stories--including two not-yet-published stories--into an anthology that I hope I'll be able to release soon.
I've been working on a short piece of vampire erotica. Even though I've said in the past that I'd probably never dip into the vampire genre, sometimes stories just kind of happen to you, and you need to write them.
I'd like to write a sequel to "Letting Go" at some point. There's still so much more that can be done with those characters, and the world that was created in that book. That'll depend on sales, though, as well as the good people at Wastelands.com, because they're the ones ultimately behind the project.
The future is open, and I'm optimistic.
6) Do you have any messages for readers or those interested in the bdsm lifestyle?
I’d like people to keep two things in mind when reading the novel.
First, experiences vary, so one person's reaction to certain stimuli is going to vary from another person's. It's all so very personal, depending heavily on how the people in question are wired both physically and mentally, as well as on their past experiences. One of the things that I've discovered with BDSM is that it is such a wonderfully wide and eclectic mix of people and passions, that there's no way to encompass everything in one novel, or even in a dozen novels.
So when you read the book, and one of the characters within that book enjoys a certain thing, that doesn't mean that you the reader would enjoy it. Likewise, the reverse is true: just because you the reader might not enjoy an act depicted in the book, or you might not react the same way, doesn't mean that nobody else out there would react the way the character does. That's one of the nice things about erotica- no matter what you write, somebody out there is likely to find that it reflects their desires.
Second, the work IS fiction. There may have been some places where we had to compromise realism in favor of storytelling. While we endeavored to write a novel that would help educate newcomers about various BDSM experiences, this is not a "How-To" book, nor a description of the BDSM community, nor any kind of guarantee that everybody who enjoys reading about the acts depicted in the book would actually enjoy those acts in real life. It's simply a fantasy, not any kind of commentary on the concepts, communities, or people involved in real-world BDSM.
That being said, if anybody wishes to compare their own experiences to scenes in the book, or if anybody wishes to discuss anything within the book that they feel was inaccurate or incorrect, feel free to contact me via any of the means below:
Twitter: @RichardBacula
E-Mail: RichardBacula@gmail.com or RichardBacula@aim.com
Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7514047.Richard_Bacula
And please, if you read “Letting Go” (or any of my work), I’d love it if you could leave a review for me on Amazon!
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