By look I mean a portrait, description. The Irish Examiner details the erotica writing lives of two women co-writers and an African-American talks about her entree into the world of erotica.
Excerpts: ”We’d try and out-naughty each other,” says Caroline. “Eileen would write something. I’ll read it and go, ‘Oh my God. How can I better that? I have to get in touch with the naughty in myself’.”
Eileen writes when the children are at school, and tops up by writing in cafés.
“When I write the raunchiest sex scenes, I might have a glass of wine to push my inhibitions a little bit. I’ll read Caroline’s scene and think ‘wow’. Then try hard and top it. I tell myself I can be as filthy as I like, because nobody will read it but me. Then, when I’ve tidied it up, I send it straight to Caroline.”
Caroline fits her writing in after a long working day. She writes for two hours, or more, every evening, and also on Saturday mornings.
Doesn’t her husband mind? She laughs.
“I’m the ideal wife. He can watch rugby for hours and hours and I’ll never complain. He laughs at me a bit, but he’s the one bringing me coffee and my laptop on Saturday mornings, to make sure I get to write,” she says.
But what does he think of the sex scenes?
“He wasn’t interested in the milder romance books. But he got hold of my Kindle recently, and he read our book. I think he was a bit shocked. He wondered how I knew all that stuff. It certainly put a glint in his eye,” she says.
The entire article: http://www.irishexaminer.com/lifestyle/a-passion-for-sexy-writing-197874.html
Excerpts from, “The Good Parts,” published in the Baltimore City Paper.
I read everything I could get my hands on, no matter how I got my hands on it. I sneaked peeks at my mom’s Judith Krantz novels and consumed Judy Blume books–my copy of Forever still opens to the good parts. As I got older I read Story of O, Fanny Hill, The Happy Hooker, and the like.
But erotica wasn’t something I was supposed to get from African-American writers. This was especially true of the women authors. They often wrote about high-spirited women whose sense of self was crushed by mean-spirited people, society in general, cruelty, loss, and tragedy. The result? Sometimes betrayal and confusion, like the titular character sleeping with her best friend’s husband in Toni Morrison’s Sula; other times poignant sadness, like in Maya Angelou’s first consensual sexual experience, as described in her autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which she orchestrated so she could prove to herself that, in her words, “nothing was wrong with her.”
Those books were profoundly moving to me, but I loved to read about the joy of sensuality between black people, too. I loved reading about Celie revealing herself to Shug Avery for the first time in The Color Purple, and about Mattie Michael and Butch Fuller in the sugarcane field in The Women of Brewster Place. But enjoying the erotic elements of these works bothered me. It felt wrong–this wasn’t Tropic of Cancer or Tropic of Capricorn, these were the great works of my African-American literary role models. These books were supposed to stimulate my mind–and nothing else. The fact that the sex resonated with me as it did meant I was just getting off on the good parts, and these books were more than that, were better than that. I clearly was a sick puppy.
In spite of my sickness, I excelled academically and graduated high school with honors, ready to do my part as one of the talented 10th. I continued my education, and when I started writing as an adult, I tried to be important, and meaningful. I wanted to be the next great African-American literary voice. I did my verbal best to be a revolutionary, blazing a trail for my people with my pen. I ended up writing about sex.
Entire Article: http://www2.citypaper.com/news/story.asp?id=12703
