Please don’t hate me, Grammarly, but I really don’t give a f***

By

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March 15, 2021

pencil-1758276_640 — Image by AxxLC from Pixabay

I just hit a “Centenary Superhero” milestone with Grammarly (don’t worry, I didn’t know what it was either). In using the basic grammar program, which I do indeed recommend, I get reports on my writing from the company all the time. In addition to this new milestone, I am presently 82% more productive, 29% more accurate, and use 93% more unique words than the rest of Grammarly’s users.

Well, whoopie for me, huh?

Actually, between you and I, I don’t rightly give a rat’s dingus. If I could stop Grammarly’s insidious checking in and reporting on me, I would. I don’t need their tickling of my taint. I don’t rightly care how I measure up against others. I don’t even want to keep score on what I’ve managed to do.

This writing thing, penning naughty words, and mainstream stuff, is my livelihood. I am not in a competition or along for the ride of social media approbation. Sure, I want an audience. Sure, I love it when people connect with a story or come back to me and tell me how something they read of mine gave them a nice warm feeling (just as long as I don’t have to help them wipe up). And I especially like when I give forth on a class of would-be writers, as my buddy and fellow writer M. Christian and I have done on a few occasions at the kink conventions we have presented at… and hopefully will present at again with all this COVID b.s. is over. But I don’t care a whit about the opinion of some algorithm.

This Grammarly update speaks to a more significant dilemma of our modern world, and one I shan’t really dive into here. But generally, because of social media infecting our lives as it has (or more precisely how we have infected ourselves with it), people find it very hard to do anything without a response. People sign-up for exercise programs and eat well campaigns, enjoy Zoom instructions, pretty much get together across digital platforms consistently.

Sure, I’ll give you the pandemic. I know that has pushed us into isolation more than anything we have ever experienced on the planet. But why do we need confirmation so bad, the return tweet, and the ‘like,’ the fellow dieters? And why would Grammarly think I’d give a… well… a rat’s dingus, that I surpassed one of their milestones?

I’m too busy writing, which you should be too!

Write What You Know? Creating Erotic Fantasies

By

Ralph Greco

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March 4, 2021

Ok, confession time. Not everything I write falls into that ‘Write What You Know” category. Especially in erotica writing, I’d either have to be very lucky and, by extension, exceedingly exhausted, to do all of what I write. My most favorite writer, Ray Bradbury, certainly someone who had never been to the planet Mars, still so elegantly wrote about the place in his seminal The Martian Chronicles (if you have never read them I urge you to, right now, go ahead, I’ll wait) said of his imaginative traveling: “I came on the old and best ways of writing through ignorance and experiment and was startled when truths leaped out of brushes like quail before gunshot.”

He merely worked hard to dream where he wanted to go and then went there.

As any adult with a few relationships under their belt can relate, it’s sometimes best to keep a fantasy strictly fantasy. The third person in your mane trios might turn out to be a lot more clingy than you, and your regular partner wants them to be; that ping-pong paddle might sting a lot more than you ever imagined when you bend over to get spanked by it; chocolate sauce really does get very sticky when…well, you get the idea. Things birthed with our fevered imaginings don’t always the best reality make, but they sometimes do provide the goods for good stories. In fact, a case could be made that those things you do not make real indeed make for the best fictions as they pretty much have always been fiction to you anyway as you come to ‘work out’ what it is you desire through writing it.

Admittedly, it’s best to go forth with at least a modicum of facts about the action at hand, even if it is something you have never tried (this is one of the main reasons that ‘write what you know axiom’ is so often offered as advice). One of the criticisms I repeatedly heard about E.L. James’ Fifty Shades of Gray fantasies, came from kinksters, who said the primary power-play relationship portrayed in the books felt false. This is undoubtedly a subjective assessment of the trilogy. Still, authenticity is essential when writing about trussing your lover to an overhead beam as much as figuring out the propulsion used for a rocket ship.

Conversely, getting mired in the details doesn’t always make for a spectacular read…especially with erotica. I recall trying to slog through the one thousand pages Anne Rice set herself midway of her otherwise engaging The Witching Hour relating the history of her “Talamasca” sect. Rich in detail, florid in background, still the book ground to a halt for me when Rice opened things up into this history. Who am to criticize Anne Rice, the lady is a smashingly fantastic fantast and a very sweet person (I met her at a book signing once, and she couldn’t have been nicer). But have you a penchant for giving forth on what every whip crack feels like as it bounces off a sub’s skin or what the air on a particular planet smells like, remember details are useful for however long you can maintain their effectiveness.

You also don’t want to come across as the smartest kid in the class. Sure, this is your journey we are on, but what you don’t want to come across as a know-it-all. In a lot of the fetish writing I read, I find authors get too mired in the minutia, as if they are trying to impress upon me all the wild sex they have engaged in while letting me know that they are indeed writing what they know. Yeah, yeah, I get it, you are super peachy-cool wild in bed. But is the tale you are relaying interesting? Does it move me emotionally? In the end, this is all I really want from you, Potsie.

This writing thing is a balance beam of imparting what you have experienced, what you dream about, and your skills at embellishing, infusing your fiction with “truths leaping(sic) out of brushes like quail before gunshot.” Write what you know, what you imagine, what you wish, but mostly, what you want to read.

To journal or not to journal? What’s Your Preference?

By

Ralph Greco

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March 3, 2021

pexels-pixabay-414551 — pexels by pixabay

Here we fall onto another one of those areas I can’t rightly advise you on from any true personal experience. I don’t journal. I don’t on a plane. In the rain. In a house with a mouse. I just don’t.

Do you? Have you never but have been thinking of starting? Have you heard your fellow writers espouse its virtues, friends prompting you, teachers assigning you to get to it for this semester? Maybe, you want to dip your toe into writing for the first time and feel this is a good way to begin?

Sure, get to it, I say.

Why don’t I Journal?

First of all, despite some high-school, and college creative writing teachers indeed assigning journaling to me, non-writers assuming I do it all the time, and plenty of well-intentioned folks giving me journals as gifts (and I’ve received some very nice ones, over the years) I’ve always felt that the writing I do pretty much during most of my day, is all the writing I want to do. I’m not talking about keeping a pad and pen handy at my bedside table, or in the car; I am constantly scribbling down ideas, turns of phrases, snippets of conversations I know might lead me into interesting territories for stories, etc. (and this practice of having pen and paper handy is one I can and do advise).

But the self-reflective ruminations that journals are supposed to pull from you (don’t get on my ass here, I know one can write anything they like into a diary, and I talking about diary-like scribbling here), I feel I’m already slipping that into my fiction, blogs, poems, plays and songs, especially my songs). I’ve always worried that, for me, journaling would lessen the vitality of my ideas or see me puking forth so often in a diary that I’d be too exhausted to write any of these thoughts in my ‘real’ writing.

Pretty much what I have against blogging for oneself or tweeting all day long.

Yes, I know the argument could be made that prompting a steady flow of stream-of-conscience writing keeps one better in touch with one’s emotions. That all writing keeps one’s writing muscles in shape. I can’t argue either point, but none of this is true for me, or more precisely, I am not going to start journaling now when I have never done it, and certainly have enough writing to keep me busy during the hours of the day when I am trying to earn my bread-and-butter money.

For some people, the only writing they ever get to, is what they manage when they journal. And being an old curmudgeon eschewing technology as often as I do, I certainly like the idea of putting pen to paper for whatever reason (I love how it so often shocks people to see me sitting in a Starbucks or some other over-priced too-cool-for-school coffee spot, working furiously on the papers of a manuscript, or actually reading an honest-to-goodness book!)

Really, it’s not for me to tell you to journal or not; if you have read any of this column before, you know by now I would never demand that a writer has to do this or that. Whatever gets you there, short of smoking crack or going out chopping up city sanitary workers, burying them in your basement and then writing what you feel is authentic serial killer short stories, is fine by me. (Actually, if you are smoking crack, that’s fine by me, but leave those city workers alone ok?)

To journal or not to journal, that’s up to you.

Naughty Memoirs; Erring On The Side Of Discretion

By

Ralph Greco

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February 15, 2021

pexels-ekaterina-belinskaya-4674372 — Photo by Ekaterina Belinskaya from Pexels

The subject I am tackling in this installment can add up to quite the sticky wicket when it comes to erotic writing (and God knows, not everybody likes their wicket all that sticky). In one’s naughty scribbling, especially in the adult fiction one creates, one (be one lucky enough to have had some fun or have shelled out an inordinate amount of cash over the years) often plucks ideas from that which they have experienced as much as from what one fantasizes about.

But what happens when one takes their pen or flying fingers to an erotic memoir? How discreet should you be in making your real past into a story?

If you cover your shapely, possibly blushed posterior enough by changing names, places, and even tweaking action here and there, you can pretty much get away with masking real stories/memoirs. I’d recommend this, at least a little. Your exes usually don’t want to be outed, would probably rather there wasn’t a hint of them in your reiteration; discretion really is the better part of valor here.

But lots of writers want to stay as true to their experiences as they can, and charge full speed ahead by writing real names, specific places, and step-by-step saucy action into their memoirs.

I’m talking less compromise here and more maturity.

Have you a care for an ex sex partner, a smidgen of good taste, and seeing as we are presently in the throes of rabid connections through social media, you might want to err on the side of not telling tales out of school even when you are telling ‘those’ kinds of tales.

I have been working on a memoir for a while now, a full account of some of my wild and woolly years of singledom, specifically as this time in my life relates to the kinks I have enjoyed with some wonderful ladies. But I’ve changed names, places, and shifted times, as well as also writing this book under a pseudonym. I don’t feel I’m compromising myself in any way and truly feel in my heart that the only way I can get this story told (and I do want to tell it) is to do all I can to hide identities.

As I always say here, you do you.

Proceed as you feel best. In fiction, you’ll certainly have more opportunities to distract your reader off the scent of a real person, place, or time. And while you can do the same in a memoir, I feel the trick when spinning as true an account as you want to (or dare) is to try and stay as close to the truth as you can while still maintaining discretion.

Remember, there are lots of naughty stories to read, write, tell, and Jill and Jack-off to in this great big world of ours. If you are contributing in any way to the erotica of the world, no matter what it is you are writing, please consider discretion.

The ass you keep from getting kicked could be your own.

How Do You Create Naughty Characters?

By

Ralph Greco

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January 31, 2021

pexels-vickie-intili-5983152 — Photo by Vickie Intili from Pexels

My answer to the question I asked in the title here is simple: damned if I know! The people who come to populate my fiction, plays, poems and lyrics, be they naughty men, women, robots or alien lifeforms (or not) are as much amalgamations of the wide range of folks near and dear to me as they create themselves whole cloth. Where they come from, if they have been hiding out in my brain for some time, or if the action of my story births them, I have no idea. But without my characters, I know there wouldn’t be much reason to read my work.

Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple, among other wonderful works, claims that her characters come to her, reveal themselves as she writes. The equally wonderful writer Ursula K. Le Guin pretty much said the same about her fictional people; they came and told her their story, she simply reported it. Notice neither lady says to just wait around for inspiration to strike; their characters came and told them who they were and what they were about as Walker and Le Guin set about writing, a crucial point, I feel. These fantastic writers (and they are both fantastic) saw their characters, with their story, settings, and themes come flowing out of their brains as they did their work.

As I have been saying all along: to write, you have to, well, um…get to writing!

I have an inkling that erotica might just be slightly different than other forms of writing when it comes to character creation (actually, in my opinion, erotica is different in very many ways from other forms of writing). Sometimes we naughty scribblers create folks we really wish we could meet or rabidly fantasize about. Sometimes they are created to invest other (naughtier) qualities into the folks we might be fucking in real life.

Given the nature of what it is, the more extremes of particular human qualities sometimes play across erotica characters, and not everybody we know has these extremes. Then again, some of the very best erotica I have ever read, even written, has featured characters who display their motivations and emotions in very subtle ways. I’d venture to say that a story where characters move through space and time in a socially acceptable down-to-earth manner can be just as steamy as those where we get characters revealing their highly kinky needs in a pornographic-like interplay.

From fantasizing, mix-and-matching real character studies or Willy Wonka’s favorite, ‘pure imagination’, the creating of the folks who populate our worlds can be as magical as Walker and LeGuin allude to (while doing the work!) You might find somebody forming across your page or screen via dialogue and action that you’ve never considered before. (And to alert you to some great work on this score, have a peek at Roger Zelazny’s Amber Chronicles for the very best example I have ever read of an author fleshing out characters via dialogue… fuck it, read Zelazny anyway, he is a GOD!). The people of your fictions, plays, narrator’s of your lyrics, wise old sages of your prose poems come upon you when you least expect them, and it’s your job as a writer to make them count.

From a Hannibal Lecter to a Huck Finn to Little Women’s Jo March, characters drive story because of how close, or sometimes how far away, from the reader and writer they happen to be. And while I can’t rightly tell you how to create yours (other than to sit down and start writing), I can say you really can’t have worthwhile readable stuff, dirty stuff or clean, without good characters.

+++

Check Our Ralph Greco’s new book:

No Whip, No Problem

Ralph Greco, Jr.Jan 2021

Pink Flamingo Media

A rousing spanking sets things straight between this couple in, After, the Coffee, then in John’s Very Last Hurdle he’s already had his cock-caged for who weeks, now she wants him to what? Suck another man’s cock! In Packing, a group of 30-something ladies out for the night sport secret strap-ons under their clothes looking for willing male recipients to take it in the ass. And What Cindy Might See turns into a whole new sexual world for her, while watching the writhing Bruce being dominated by his playful girlfriend. It’s good clean consensual fun when a woman takes charge and plays the Dominant to men willing to submit to their naughty sex games. The woman in question doesn’t even need to wield a whip to make her intention plain.

What Did You Say?-Making Money Via Audio Books

By

Ralph Greco

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January 19, 2021

pexels-yuri-manei-2766408 — Photo by YURI MANEI from Pexels

Just as eBook came to print, audio comes to eBook (and yes, print) as both another way to enjoy a story or 300-page tome and as a separate revenue stream for a writer. And the beauty of audiobooks, at least so far in my experience (albeit I’m not the kind of a writer where a publisher is signing me exclusively or wants to gobble up all my output), is that in many cases, the writer can set a separate deal for an audio version of his or her book that doesn’t impinge on the deal he or she has on the print or eBook version.

Yes, many a publishing house does it all, but there are plenty that only publish eBooks (especially in the erotica field) as there are lots now that are trying to carve out a niche only in audiobooks. As I have said time and again, if you can manage to grab a publisher interested in your naughty little tales and they only will publish you in eBook and print-on-demand (which is mainly how my deals are set up with the publishers I have books with) but give you free reign to scout out and scare up an audiobook publisher for the same book, I say take those freaking reins and go get another deal for the same book!

The publishers I work with see no harm in ‘spreading the wealth’ this way, as I have mentioned in previous columns. The overall thought here (and one I agree with) is that the more of my titles that are out there, in any way that they are out there, the better my chances are that one person will stumble across an erotic audiobook version of one of my books, enjoy it, and not only go a’searching for more audiobooks from yours truly, but might stumble across other titles of mine, from other publishers, and even if not audiobooks, might give one or two of my written or eBooks a try. Or somebody comes to one of my audiobooks from the reverse kind of searching, having read me in print or eBook first.

Especially with erotica, many people find a whole new way to enjoy what I have scribbled when it is read by some professional who can breathe life into my words and scenarios, providing a thrill in a manner just reading the written word can’t. So, yes, audiobooks indeed work for me.

One of the people I work with in the audiobook world (although they publish print-on-demand and eBook) is WORDWOOZE (here is their submissions page). I was just alerted, via their CEO, to a podcast they have been running, having recorded 172 episodes this year alone. You can find them here: Audiobook Test Drive • A podcast on Anchor. I’m letting you in on this podcast, less to sell my wares as to conclude this column assuring you that audiobooks are out there, a viable way to get your stuff published (and heard), and could provide another way for you to sell your book even if you have that book already published in eBook or print form.

So, go out and get your stuff heard!

I Hate My Shameless Self-Promotion

By

Ralph Greco

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December 17, 2020

I have mentioned this before, in this column, to friends, in erotica writing classes I come to teach, commiserating with my bestie, fellow fantastic naughty scribe, M. Christian (who also happens to be my co-host on the podcast Licking Non-Vanilla); I am very uncomfortable with self-promotion. Yes, I just ‘dropped’ the name of the podcast, but you have no idea how it pained me to do so and how I’ve come to regard lots of my writing across the web, even that which I am paid to do, as falling a little too close to shameless attention-getting.

Still, we all do it, don’t we? Or we should. Right?

Nobody is going to champion your work like you, no matter the work you do. If that work is contingent upon your customer’s taste (as opposed to someone buying insurance, which they usually need and pick a carrier or agent who can offer them the best price), then the maker of the product (in my case, the product is words on a page) is at the mercy of the consumer/client/audience liking (or not) that product from a subjective assessment. Yes, we are told repeatedly that criticism/rejection is just personal opinion, take of it as we may anyone’s particular like or dislike, still losing a reader or even a writing job can rankle one deeply.

And one needs to build a thick skin for the game.

In building this thick skin, one is also advised by writers/PR people/and just plain folks smarter than me to self-promote any chance you can. And therein, as we know from Hamlet, “lies the rub.”

In my case, I think my aversion to self-promotion comes from the fact that for many years of my life, mainly my brash and wild 20’s, I was a performer. I fronted a five-piece band that performed music I wrote and did my best to present a ‘show’ replete with costume changes, ribald and sardonic patter, and not a fair amount of big hair waving (yes, my neck was killing me 24/7). I was loud, ‘out there,’ pushing the band’s brand way back before the Interweb was a place one could get seen and heard on (it didn’t even exist way back then), self-promoting wherever I could lay my stank and ever-expanding ego. It was fine for a guy in his mid-20’s, ‘young, dumb and full of come.’

These days, all the yawping I see across the web, Instagram posts, tweeting and twatting infinitum, shameless self-promotion at every quarter makes me run screaming from the din. Certainly too long in the tooth now, all but completely jaded and seeing less and less of a reason for any of this as I am, I am caught between having to push my ‘stuff’ and damn well finding it seemly to do so. Sure, I love me a good prostitute, and I’ll entertain anybody asking me a question pretty much about anything. But I’m just not so comfortable talking about myself or my writing.

But again, I know I must if I want to get some traction, gain/keep an audience/make a living.

Chris and I say this all the time (yes, on our podcast Licking Non-Vanilla, which you can hear @ Licking Non-Vanilla), one must choose the platforms (or not) that work best for them. I can’t tell you that you must make a website landing page and pepper it with links to your work (I do not have a website for my work, had one for my music, which I have since taken down and even now am struggling if I want one for my writing) or get yourself up on Twitter. I don’t know what will work for you, what you will be able to stomach, and even if anything, at all, in modern self-promotion, even works these days.

All I can advise is, think hard and long about what you might be able to stomach and move forward slowly, always knowing that at any moment you might come to hate yourself for all the ego you are displaying or come to love yourself even more.

Writers Chill! A Lesson in Humility: Don’t Take Yourself Too Seriously

By

Ralph Greco

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November 15, 2020

pexels-andrea-piacquadio-3907440 — Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels

Here’s a joke from Steven King that I’m slightly paraphrasing:

A priest, a nun, and a rabbit walk into a bar. The rabbit looks around and says, “I think I’m a typo.”

That’s writer’s humor for ya.

Thank God somebody in this godforsaken shutdown anything-but-normal ‘new’ normal world is trying to make a funny! From all I read daily across blogs, see on the news, hear people twatting and posting about, very few of us seem to take our sense of humor out for a walk these days. Everybody is poised for a protest, looking to show off their offense, wanting to cancel somebody for saying something. Is it Covid’s influence or, could it be that because of social media infestation, we feel our every utterance is worth uttering, and we can rail when we want at everything we want?

Can’t we all just chill out? Take it down a notch?

I feel if anybody should lead the charge of amping down one’s ego, letting go of the supposed righteous indignation, ‘taking a chill pill,’ it should be us, erotica writers, actually, all creative types. Let’s face it; we are some of the worst culprits of taking ourselves too seriously.

Yes, what we do is important… to us, but I hate to burst your bubble; your scribblings, songs, sculptures, or flower pot set-ups are never going to be as important to somebody else as they are to you. As firmly as you may hold them, your opinions are just as valid as anybody else’s… but not more so. You might get paid for your naughty stories, or singing (wonderful, I say!), and the very nature of doing well in your profession might allow you a little more spotlight than the best janitor in the local high school, but what we create, true to our lives and center to our existence.

I know you are trying to sell yourself at the same time, protect your reputation, and self-worth against constant rejection. But nobody really wants to hear anybody going off these days, when all anybody seems to be doing is going off about some new injustice or railing on Twitter about a post.

Take it down a notch, people, please!

Let me leave you with this example from my writing life that reiterated the need for humbleness, for taking one’s head out of one’s ass, for chilling…

The Roar of the Greasepaint – The Smell of the Crowd

I have made some (a very little some) professional headway in the playwriting field. I haven’t much gone beyond community theater. Still, I have been lucky enough to have had many of my one-acts produced and have had my words acted/spoken by some wonderful people under the direction of other wonderful people in equally wonderful theaters across the US. I have been humbled at each turn, truly; I love “The Roar of the Greasepaint-The Smell of the Crowd” (look that quote up, it’ll be worth what you find). But only once have I been asked to sit in on a rehearsal of one of my plays. I never thought to get in their anyway, figuring the rehearsal was the domain of actors, director, lighting, and sound crew. But I was asked this one time and gladly, humbly, accepted.

I loved it. In fact, the process was an eyeopener as I was able to cut some words, whole passages in fact, after I saw the actors deliver my meaning with a look or the director through some subtle blocking with better intent than my lines could.

But I had been told time and again that writers are especially forbidden in rehearsals because most can’t take a word being changed or a few lines cut, where I welcomed the revisions (and if you aren’t revising, as I have cautioned in another column, you aren’t doing the writing right).

Indeed, ‘putting up’ a play is a unique process for a writer of that play since you are collaborating. Each person’s contribution is equally important (yeah yeah, without my words, there would be no play to perform, I get that, but how would it be performed without actors, directors, crew, and audience?).

My point here, as it relates to the title of this piece and the theme this time out… we all could do well with taking ourselves out of the center of the drama of life, realize we are but one small voice in the great din. Stay true to your opinion, even share it if you like (although I do believe there is too much of this happening these days to serve anybody, really) but remember, even if somebody says something that really gets your goat, rubs you the wrong way way (because everybody wants is to be rubbed the right way right?) realize, please, that it’s just an opinion.

Keep your head down, get to work, take it down a notch.

Go Out And Get That Writing Job, Bucko!

By

Ralph Greco

-

November 4, 2020

pexels-andrea-piacquadio-3813006 — Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels

I am the last guy to toot my own horn or even go so far as to let anyone know I exist. This is why I get such a kick out of playwrighting (this theatre in NJ being my favorite spot where my plays have been produced). I can watch other people say my words, saunter around the stage in a world of my creating and sit back (usually in the booth with the sound and light crew) enjoying from afar. Unless there is an author Q&A, all anybody knows about me is the very brief bio blurb I allow in the theater’s nightly program.

I just ‘do the words’, which is perfectly fine by me.

In my other life, I am a recording and occasional performing musician. Also, as you know, M. Christian and I teach at kink conventions now and again. So, I have no problem, and in fact, enjoy getting up in front of folks to occasionally making an ass of myself if this situation or work warrants it.

It’s just that I’m not so good at self-promotion or even pursuing work… although, as a freelancer I know I damn well should be.

Years ago, for the website, www.shortandsweet.com, I interviewed the fantastic actor, Frankie Faison, a nicer guy you’d never meet. He was promoting a movie at the time, and I was allowed about fifteen minutes with the guy. Besides playing “Barney” in various Silence of The Lambs, movies, he was also in one of my favorite all-time flicks, the Keith Gordon directed film version of dearly-departed Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night. In talking with Mr. Faison, he told me that although he was a working actor with a good amount of work to his credit and more coming, he was always looking for more.

Let that be a lesson to you and me.

I think I’m getting better at pushing myself, though. I don’t rightly know why or even when a sudden burst of hutzpah will take me, and I wish it took me more often, but I do know I am getting better at putting myself out there.

Just recently, I landed a client in Ukraine, far from my wild NJ suburban environs, by cold calling (cold emailing actually). I have never actually done this before, but desperate times and all that… although, again, as a freelancer, all times are desperate. In this case, I reached out because I happen to receive a weekly newsletter email from this adult toy company and figured, how could it hurt to just say hello and introduce myself, see if, indeed, they might be looking for copywriters.

It took months though to get an interview/consideration/manage a Skype call with the woman who I was emailing back and forth with, and the CEO of the company. As it probably happened for a lot of us, and might still be happening for a lot of us, the pandemic shut these good folks down for a bit, or at least for considering any new employees. Since I had inserted myself unsolicited into their world, and there had been a slow courtship of ‘Do we need this guy?’ ‘Maybe we do indeed need this guy?’ ‘How do we facilitate even considering this guy?’ I waited patiently over the two-months it took to manage that Skype call. Sure, I checked in via email, and I readied further links had they wanted them, but it really came down to the proverbial ‘Don’t call us, we’ll call you.’

The lessons I learned?

1.) Do indeed reach out, even if there is no actual job posting. You might just hit someone at the very moment they are looking for what you do, without maybe, even them truly considering needing someone to do what you do.

And 2.) Stay persistent but do not cross over into annoying. Admittedly, this is not always a balance you can manage or even determine the parameters of. Still, these days with email, Skype, and digital carrier pigeon, you can maintain a respectful ‘just-checking-in’ distance.

The application of these lessons worked for me in this one instance, and I think they might work again.

I’ll add to this advice for those jobs you already have or those people you do occasional work for… keep on them as well. I am lucky to have seen a few articles published here, at Hot Movies. I hope to keep writing for them for a long time to come, and as long as I do, I will keep in touch with my contact there, as much for the work as to… well… keep in touch.

Sure, it makes it easier when your contact person, employer, editor, etc. happens to be a very nice person (as my contact at Hot Movies is,) but it’s good business to touch base every so often, stay on your contact’s radar, to say ‘hi, how you doin?’ in these times when it so easy to keep in touch.

There’s a line from the movie Glengarry Glen Ross I have morphed to fit my philosophy when it comes now to looking/pursuing work. In the film, Alex Baldwin’s character berates the insurance salesman with “Always be closing,” I feel, for us freelance writers, we should “Always be looking.”

I just have to learn to do this more. Maybe you should too?

Erotica Writers, Spread ‘Um: Finding Places to Publish

By

Ralph Greco

-

August 30, 2020

As an erotica writer, you might know a thing about ‘spreading;’ legs, libido, desires, play with various partners. For this column, though, I am suggesting spreading your scribbling as far and wide as possible.

First of all, you should be spreading your net wide when exploring possible places to submit to. Market places like the EWR will lead you to erotic publication guidelines as well as upcoming anthology needs. But with the net as your guide, you can research lots of other places for up-to-the-minute changes to guidelines and instantaneous postings. I’d say check your favorite spots often and do some deep diving as much as you can.

Secondly, even if you write only within a specific genre, you might want to search outside of the usual publishers you know who support that genre. Sure, the more niche your writing is, the harder it might be to place it far and wide. Still, you’d be surprised at the places (publishing houses, online portals, small press anthologies) that consider those pieces that might fall a little farther afield than the usual fare they take, but somehow still fits their needs. You’ll need to do a little research, but I have found quite lusty naughty tales in sci-fi books because the sex happens a few years into the future or kink passages in places I’d never expect them.

It’s also a good idea to spread your titles around…if you can. Sure, the prevailing wisdom is for building a relationship with a publisher by getting a healthy listing of books with them, so they start to consider you a worthwhile commodity. But there is also something to be said for placing a bunch of titles across the field of a bunch of publishers. Admittedly, this isn’t so easy to do with a niche like erotica, where the pickings of potential publishers are few. But a long time ago, the wonderful and wise Jean Marie Stine of Renaissance E Books, Inc., the first house to publish my erotica and someplace I go back to time and again, told me that it was a good idea to have a bunch of books published by a bunch of different houses. She never saw this as competition as much as free advertising, in that if someone found and enjoyed a book of mine published by one house, they might go looking for more titles by me. That search might very well bring them to my books published by Jean Marie…or anybody else.

Makes sense, right?

Also, even if you stick with one genre (which I don’t), you might find one erotica publisher is open to naughty stories of a certain type while another is into something else. Or houses fill-up sometimes on one kind of thing and you might find another house open to what you have. This has happened often with me, and the only way I got ahead of the game was to spread myself around, do a little digging, see who might want at the time of my submitting, and keep open (ok spread) enough to take advantage of some options.

Lay down, spread-um, and take note. It will do you and your writing a world of good.

Photo by Leo Burca