Erotica By Helen E. H. Madden

I'm beat. I've been up late every night this week working on a short story for ERWA's Theme Week. In case you're not familiar with this, the Erotica Readers and Writers Association has an online writing group where people can post stories for critique. Once every month, the writers group does a theme-story only week. The editors of the site choose the theme and all stories submitted that week must be related to that theme. Pretty straightforward, right? The idea is to prompt people to write to a theme because many erotica anthologies are theme-based, and if you want to succeed in the antho market, you've got to be able to write to all sorts of themes. The theme weekend is also supposed to get people to write in subgenres outside of their normal area, but there are a few folks (like me) who sometimes use theme weekend as an excuse to write something in the subgenre they love the most.

Well, this month's theme weekend was erotic speculative fiction. To qualify for submission to the writers group this weekend, the story had to answer the question "what if?" and take us to a place where reality as we know it has been altered. Although speculative fiction is frequently associated with science fiction, it goes well beyond that. Think alternative history (like Harry Turtledove), alternative societal structures (Sherri S. Tepper), and more.

For me, the erotica spec fic theme is an opportunity to play with current day issues of gender roles and sexuality. Over the last four years, I've written four different stories for the same theme. With this year's story, I asked, "What would happen if men died immediately after conceiving children during intercourse?" Odd question, maybe, but think about praying mantis' or queen bees. They mate and then kill their mates. What would happen to human society if husbands died the first time they had sex with their wives? That one odd question gave me plenty to think about and plenty to write. I didn't come up with the idea until last weekend, so I spent all this week pounding out the story as fast as I could. The current draft is really rough, but at least I managed to get it to the writers group for critique. I'll admit, there was more speculation than sex in this one, something I'll be changing in the final draft (hey, it is supposed to be erotic speculative fiction). But I think the final story worked well. I'll be posting it on the website when it's done.

Labels: Current Work

Sunday, June 10, 2007

Work, Work, Work - My Story For ERWA's Erotic Speculative Fiction Theme Week