Erotica By Helen E. H. Madden

Here's an unusual scenario. Right now, it's Saturday evening. I am at my laptop with a bowl of ice cream and a glass of wine. My youngest child is sound asleep. My oldest just left a little while ago with her father for an evening pool party and won't be back for two hours. The house is quiet. I am alone.

Oh my god, what am I going to do with myself?!

I am so fried and tired from the past two months. Since May, I've picked up a couple of paying graphics jobs, I've set up this blog and redesigned my entire erotica website around it, I've written a new short story, submitted two stories and three flash fiction pieces for publication, and outlined a new book on my digital voice recorder. On the personal side, I've been playing nursemaid to a very sick cat (who keeps crapping on my carpet, eats six times a day and has to be medicated at every meal so now he's in the garage to keep the other cats from eating his food), I've celebrated my youngest child's first birthday and my neighbor's wedding, and I've had to watch my husband's birthday, Father's Day, my wedding anniversary, and my sister's birthday sort of slip past as I gamely struggle to keep up.

Man, I am exhausted just from writing that last paragraph. Damn.

I have been enjoying myself with some of this stuff (not the cat crapping on the carpet though, that's been really icky to say the least). One of my graphics projects is a website I'm designing for a fellow writer. Some of the artwork I've done for that is so nice that I want to steal it for myself. And the other paying gigs are for one of my all time favorite clients, Logical Lust. They're always fun to work with.

But having said all that, I'm just beat right now, and it's killing me because being this tired has led to a horrendous case of writer's block.

Now, I know I have one book that I have already outlined, and I pretty much know what I'm doing with that one, so that's not the problem. No, the problem is I'm trying to come up with ideas for this website or maybe for an erotica podcast I'd like to do. What I want is to have some original content, i.e. FICTION, that's never been previously published. In other words, it's just for this site. I'm thinking a serial fiction piece that I can write in small episodes that appeals to my favorite sub-genres of erotica - m/m, fem dom, BDSM, sci-fi, fantasy, horror, and spec fic. And I've had ideas, some of which I've been really excited about, but when I start to do some serious thinking about them, I can only get through maybe a few scenes before the story peters out and falls flat.

What's the problem here? Why can't I jump start myself and write?

I've had this happen a lot lately. I blame it on being stuck in "Mommy" mode. I can go on and on about taking care of the kids and cleaning the house to the point where I sort of forget what it’s like to write erotica. Or maybe I should say I get a little scared of writing erotica. You know how I mentioned I had an inner prude? Well, when I'm in "Mommy" mode, the inner prude takes over and squashes my inner porn queen. Now I have nothing against my inner prude. When you're a mom, you have to have one in order to sort through what's okay and what's not for your kids. But man, can that bitch kill my ability to write.

I had this problem back in the fall when I struggled with an m/m story for an animal-themed anthology by Torquere Press. I wanted to do something upbeat, a sweet little m/m piece involving two guys who loved horses but kept locking horns over how to break a particular stallion. It had all the right elements - hot young guys who hate each other yet find each other strangely attractive; a stable for wrestling and later frolicking in; bridles, saddles, riding crops, and all sorts of other naughty props. I wrote about 20 pages of that story. And then I got stuck. So I rewrote it. And rewrote it... And rewrote it...

It took me ten weeks to figure out what the problem was. I wanted a light, fluffy story with a happy ending, while at the same time I wanted a hot story with horses, and a forbidden passion for said horses, in it. Really forbidden stories rarely ever end happily. To keep my happy ending, I kept taking out the things that would make the story really hot. But I was so damned determined to have a happy ending, to not get near that forbidden line of "bestiality," that I kept neutering my story. Thus I could never get anywhere past the twentieth page.

When I finally figured out what I was doing, I sat down and banged out a searing hot story in two weeks. It has no happy ending. It does veer toward that forbidden zone of bestiality (but does not cross into it - that's a big no-no). And it included elements of bullying, questionable consent, and violence. But I swear I get wet every time I sit down and read this story.

That story never made it into the Torquere Press antho. Nor did it make it into the next market I sent it out to. Both rejection letters stated that the story was very good, but not the right fit for the market. A silver lining, but one I appreciate, because getting feedback on any story is always a blessing, and in the instance of the Torquere antho, I got detailed feedback and suggestions as to where I could send the story next. Can't beat that with a stick.

So after killing myself over that story, I sat down to write something entirely different - an older woman seduces a much younger man. I was ready for to write. I knew what I wanted to do. No writer's block this time.

Except that it happened again. I got about twenty pages in and whammo! I was stuck.
This time, I was at least able to recognize I had a problem, and that the problem was probably something similar to my previous episode of writer's block. I was trying too hard to write a nice, upbeat piece of fluff. I needed to write something else entirely, I needed to write something forbidden. So I wrote about a divorced housewife addicted to gay porn who seduces her son's best friend. And then I had a story that curled my toes and set my laptop on fire.

Again, this story did not get into the anthology it was written for, although once again I did get nice comments back from the editor. I sent it out again last night and am now in the holding pattern, waiting to see if someone else likes it and this time wants to publish it. It would be nice...

So after all that, you'd think I'd be an expert at dealing with writer's block. No way in hell. I'm stuck neck-deep in it again. I've had no less than three great ideas for a serial story/podcast, and in each case, I've not been able to get anywhere past that twenty-page point. I think it's the same problem again. I'm afraid to head out into forbidden territory. Given what I've written in the past, you'd think forbidden territory would be like a second home to me. It's not. Every time it's new and scary. Every time I sit down to write, my inner prude jumps up and screams, "Oh my god, you can't write that! You're a mother of two! What will people think?!"

But you know, if I want to be an erotica writer, that's exactly the sort stuff I need to write. And it's exactly the sort of story I want to write. And I know I've got those kinds of stories in me somewhere. Stories about two beautiful young men hopelessly attracted to each other, who find themselves alone in some secluded place, who can't help but undress each other, stroke each other's cocks then suck on each other until one of them finally ends up on his hands and knees, biting his lower lip as his lover...

Ah, I just need to sit down and day dream a bit, maybe have a little more wine. I'm sure with a little bit of coaxing, my inner porn queen will soon come back out to play.

Labels: My Inner Porn Queen, My Inner Prude, Write-At-Home Mom, Writer's Block

Saturday, June 30, 2007

Where Oh Where Is My Inner Porn Queen?