100,000 words

I have a new idea for a story. More importantly, I have an idea for the character at the heart of that story and can already feel her like a real person in my mind. Stories - especially erotic ones - usually need good characters in them to come alive, and I'm already sparking lots of ideas from this one.

Which is leading me to take the plunge and try something new in 2013. A friend of mine has told me of a challenge for writers based on doing 100,000 words in 100 days. As I mentioed before, I've done NaNoWriMo in previous years - with non-erotic stories - and this is a variant on the same idea, requiring less average daily output, but over a longer period. I've done 1000 words a day for long periods before, so I'm hoping that this, and the new idea, will get me back into gear and writing properly again.

Wish me luck!

Writer's block

There was a time earlier this year when stories and associated creativity were pouring out of me. Everywhere I looked seemed to be giving me ideas for new stories, and I was jotting them down and getting all the pieces of them together in my head.

That's part of the way I write. The kernel of a story comes along, and slowly lots of other parts then agglomerate around it. I can hear the characters talking, see little flashes of their world and how it all fits together, work out the direction of the story, even the ending. It's what Stephen King called 'the hole in the page' in Misery - that glimpse through into another world that you've created and brought to life.

But for some reason, during this year that's stopped happening as much as it did. Characters I thought I knew well are just falling flat on the page, and their worlds just aren't taking shape the way they used to. That's why there haven't been many entries here and my Twitter feed's just been full of plugs for stuff I've already written - there's nothing new appearing right now.

I've been trying to write, but nothing's coming. I've done NaNoWriMo several times and completed it every time until this year, when my inspiration just deserted me and a story that I thought was going to fly merely sputtered and refused to take off. Characters that had been living and thriving in my head not long before turned to ciphers on the page, stuck in a torpor and letting plot happen to them, not doing anything for themselves.

The ideas are still there, and the characters still floating around so hopefully I'll get out of this hole sometime soon and get creating again. I just need to keep writing through this, and at some point, I'll be struggling away and everything will click again, all will spark into life and the hole in the page (or the screen) will open up.

Until then, I hope you're free of blocks and your characters come alive - and the block I've got now doesn't affect the things I've written before!

Almost Chance now available on Amazon Prime

Yes, I've taken the plunge and made Almost Chance available to Amazon Prime subscribers, so you can read it for free! You can buy it from the links on the right, and if you do read it, please leave a review.

A new free story: Emma's Favourite Place

Just to let you know I've got a new short story up at Literotica, called Emma's Favourite Place. Hope you like it, and if you do please give it some comments and good votes. You can see all my Literotica submissions here if you're looking.

It was just a quikc piece and a chance to try out an idea I had, so it's not a straightforward 'X meets Y and they have sex' story, but it's always good to do things differently, just to see the reaction it gets.

A new story for free

I've been a bad blogger, haven't I? Nothing here for so long, but to make up for it, I now have a new story that you can read for free. It's called 'When There's An R In The Month' and you can read it on Literotica or at the Nifty Archive.

I hope you enjoy it, and I'd love to hear your comments. It's a simple tale of an encounter between two women - Rose and Shauna - and is just vanilla sex, no kink or anything else involved. I wrote it for the Smut By The Sea anthology, but it wasn't accepted, so thought I should set it free into the world for you all to see, rather than letting it skulk unread on the hard drive.

Another story completed

I've just sent in my submission for the Smut By The Sea compilation which has been a fun little story to write. It's quite a simple story, but those can be the hardest to write as it's about trying to find a balance between the utter minimalism of 'X met Y, and then they had sex' and something that gets so obsessed with detail that you can't see the sex for the body parts. I think I've struck the balance, and managed to give the characters in it some depth and some reasons for their getting together, but we'll have to wait and see what the editors think.

And as I came to the end of that one, I had another idea for another compilation that's coming up soon. It'll be interesting to write, as it feels like it should be in first person, and the lead character's got a very distinctive voice, but if I get it right, that's what'll make the story go well.

Almost Chance: Reviews

Some comments from reviews of Almost Chance at Literotica:

You have truly captivated the submissive soul in this piece. So revealing, even in the unstated. Very well done.

This is the most beautiful and extremely erotic story I have ever read and I just wanted to say thank you for sharing it!

BDSM scares me. So why was I so highly turned on by this? 5 stars for the whole series.

This story was perfect. my Mistress suggested it to me and i am so glad that She did. i read it from beginning to end in two hours. From the very first sentence to the last word, i felt like i was Jen. i experienced everything right along with her. Her journey into submission actually *felt* real. Thank you for writing this story...and thank you even more for sharing it.

 You can find it there and read more or buy a copy at Amazon US, Amazon UK or Smashwords.

Interested in reviewing?

Would you be interested in reviewing Almost Chance? If you've got a blog, website or something else with readers who might be interested in a piece of lesbian erotica, then get in touch and I can send you a copy for you to review. I got quite a few good reviews for it when it was published on the web, but it would be nice to get some for the work as whole.

I'm happy to return the favour and review other people's work, though I will always strive to be honest and won't promise a good review if I don't like something.

Writing Almost Chance

I've been reading erotica online for years, and often with an undercurrent of 'I could do a lot better than that.' I found that the pieces I enjoyed the most were the ones that took some time to establish who the characters were, in order to give some meaning to what happened between them.

Sure, sometimes you just want a literary quickie and don't want pages of pages of character beforehand, but the stories that lingered with me were the ones that created memorable characters. I'd actually begun work on a much longer novel with several characters, with their lives all happily intersecting with a big plot bubbling in the background, but then one day the opening scene of Almost Chance came into my head.

It started with a simple question - what would it be like to be on a train and meet someone who you felt an incredible sexual draw towards? How far would you go to explore that?

(I was travelling to and from work on trains at the time, so that may have had something to do with it coming up)

What I found was that when I stopped and thought about that situation, I saw the whole story and how it played out. Not down to the level of knowing the exact scenes, but I could see who Jen and Mistress were, why Jen would take such a risk and follow her, how their relationship would develop in the time they had together and just what had brought them together.

Because of that, it was a pleasure to write. When I had the time, I just had to drop myself back into their world, and there they were, waiting for me to reveal what happened next. There were some surprises for me on the way - I found myself writing about Mistress's tattoo without understanding why, but then realised it was all part of another story - but once I'd gone into their world, it felt real and solid.

I originally posted it in parts to a few of the websites I used to get my erotic story fix from, and was very gladdened by the response I received. After I'd finished it, I left it for what was meant to be a while, but then life got in the way and limited the amount of time I had for writing, even though the stories would still float around in my head, waiting for a chance to be released.

Now I have some time to write again, and decided to relaunch myself onto the world by converting Almost Chance into an ebook - and correcting some of the errors in it that time had revealed - and put some more of my imagination into reality.

What will those stories be? That's a tale for another post...

Hello and welcome

Having decided it was time to get pro-active about promoting my writing, a blog was an inevitable step. Please bear with me while I think of content to put here, but there are many inklings running through my head at the moment, some of which will hopefully develop into proper thoughts.

In the meantime, some gratuitous plugging for my work. Almost Chance, my novella of lesbian bondage, submission and love is available as an ebook from several locations, including:
Amazon US
Amazon UK
Smashwords

And that gives me an idea - for my next post, I'll talk some more about the book, where it came from and how it was to write.