Free Newsletter!

Back Issues
*
New! Writers' Resources
*
Order Page
*
Articles

--- Writing Porn For Fun and Profit! ---
The Bi-Weekly E-Letter
Volume II, Issue 16
May 6, 2002

=========================================
This issue may be distributed to friends, discussion lists and writing groups as long as the entire issue is included.
=========================================
To Subscribe - Send any email to
KatyTerrega-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
To Unsubscribe - Send any email to
KatyTerrega-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
=========================================

************************************
Visit The Writer's Site At
http://www.KatyTerrega.com/writers.html
************************************
Check Out The New Resources Page At
http://www.KatyTerrega.com/resources.html
************************************

==========================================
In This Issue:
==========================================

From the Editor
Article: Your Literary Neighborhood and Toxic Golf
            by Bruce Holland Rogers
Even Newer! Address For Editor Diana Sheridan
Market Listings
Answers For A U.K. Reader
Goings On
Q & A
Looking for Writers

=========================================
From The Editor
Katy Terrega
=========================================

Y'know, I love computers. And I know that without them many things wouldn't be possible, including this newsletter. But - arrgghhh! - what a pain!

Actually this last little glitch wasn't too bad, my computer friend/god/guru just re-installed Windows XP (as well as puttered about my house for the last two or three days eating my leftovers and candy, insulting my housekeeping, checking out my porn and working his usual magic on my computer - we all should have such friends) but the switch sure wreaked havoc on my email. And since email is critical to the procuction of this newsletter, well, it's been a rough couple of days. Add to that the fact that the site's been up and down and appears to have lost a bunch of email as well.

Suffice it to say, if you've emailed me in the last few weeks, whether with a Goings On or listing info, I probably didn't get it. And if I did, I lost it and don't remember it. Feel free to try again!

We've got some good stuff in this issue, a good book excerpt by Bruce Holland Rogers, lots of market listings and some good Goings On. Oh, and we've got Diana Sheridan's correct email address this time.

As usual, enjoy the newsletter and please keep in touch!

Katy

===========================================
--- Your Literary Neighborhood and Toxic Golf ---
--- by Bruce Holland Rogers ---
===========================================
Excerpted From Word Work: Surviving and Thriving as a Writer
(Invisible Cities Press).

According to one romantic vision, writers are among the last truly independent operators. Each one of us labors in isolation to bring forth the fruits of his or her unique genius. We are lone wolves.

There are some truths that match this vision. Like any freelancers, writers enjoy a great deal of liberty; the marketplace or tastes may influence our work, but we choose what to work on and how. Thinking for ourselves is part of our business; if we didn’t stand out from the crowd, why would anyone care to read us? We tend to be such individualists, tend to be so unlikely to run with the pack, that “writers’ organization” is practically an oxymoron. And we labor in solitude; when I go to get a drink or water, there are no co-workers at the water cooler.

Also, when I make a sale, I like to stand on the edge of a moonlit precipice, put my ears back, and howl. Aroooooooooooo!

The lone-wolf vision, however, leaves out something important in the life of most writers. It leaves out a community of people who share our commitments, a community that most writers seek out as a necessary antidote against environmental toxins.

By toxins I don't mean such pollutants as PCBs, lead, and arsenic. The poisons I have in mind are far more pervasive than any of those. With untreated exposure, they build up in our psyches and result in a debilitating cluster of symptoms. These symptoms vary greatly from writer to writer but may include loss of enthusiasm, depletion of energy, crankiness, depression, periods of little or no writing, or even the end of all literary aspirations. Like any serious disorder, this build up of toxicity has a name, and its name is taken from one particular patient's case history. I call it Toxic Golf Syndrome.

A Case History of Toxic Golf
Greg wasn’t a writer. He was a counseling psychologist at a little liberal arts college. The job paid modestly, but Greg was managing to raise a family on his income, and he found the work rewarding. On some weekends, he golfed on a public course. His life was going pretty much as he wanted it to go.

In the winter when he couldn’t golf himself, Greg watched pro golfers on television. He enjoyed watching the experts play, but he noticed that after he had watched a few hours of golf he would feel gloomy. The bad feelings often lingered into his work week. These blue moods didn’t seem to have anything to do with whether or not his favorite players won. He didn’t really have favorite players. So why was golf on television so depressing?

Greg began to watch golf more critically, and he finally figured out that it wasn’t the golf that depressed him. It was the ads. Golf players, and thus golf viewers, were assumed to be an affluent crowd. Advertising works by creating dissatisfaction, and golf ads were aimed at making the viewers who were already doing pretty well financially feel that they hadn’t quite arrived yet, that they needed a more luxurious car, that others would look up to them only if they had a more stylish wristwatch. The message that Greg got was that with his compact car and his Timex, he wasn’t even on the radar of Respectable People.

Although he knew that on his own terms he already had the good things in life, Greg couldn’t escape the powerful images of this advertising. The ads were undermining his values so effectively that his self-defined success seemed empty. If he stayed at the college and kept doing the work that he loved, he would never be a member of the country club or drive a Lexus.

It was scary, he thought, that ads could have such a profound effect. But he understood why they would do so, even when he consciously resisted. Humans are social animals. We need each other to survive, so we are easily influenced by appeals to fit it with those around us, to value what they value.

In his own living room, Greg was spending hours with the wrong crowd, a crowd that dismissed the importance of things that mattered to him. Running with that crowd was making Greg miserable. He stopped watching golf.

Good Neighborhoods and Bad
Your literary neighborhood can nurture and support you, or it can be like toxic golf, contradicting your own values. Our broader cultural neighborhood is a least partly hostile to our writing ambitions. To non-writers, we’re pretty weird. We spend hours in the company of imaginary people. We’re fussy about aspects of craft that most readers won’t even notice. Each of us makes less money than we would if we’d brought the same passion to, say, real estate. How we feel about a day’s work may have nothing to do with whether it’s any good or not, so we can’t even say with confidence whether we’ve had a good day.

All around us is a culture that sends messages about the incorrectness of our choices. “Don’t you think you should have something to fall back on?” “You’re a writer? You mean, unemployed?” “Since you’re home anyway, I didn’t think you’d mind watching my kids for a couple hours.” Or else people who have known us before we were writers resist the new identity we’re announcing for ourselves. When Australian writer Pearl McNeal told people around her that she was a writer, one of them was likely to say, “No you’re not. I know you. You’re Pearlie McNeal.” So she changed neighborhoods. She left the continent, in fact.

Of course, even if we emigrate, even if we go to a place where the natives believe that we are indeed writers, they still aren’t going to understand and support our values. There’s not much we can do about the influence of this broader neighborhood, unless it’s to do without neighbors altogether. There are hermits who write. They don’t need the support of literary neighbors because they don’t feel social pressure that needs a counter force. However, for those of us who aren’t cut out for extreme solitude, it helps to move into a literary subdivision where the gal next door never asks us if we wouldn’t be happier with a real job. This means finding others with whom we can celebrate our successes, trade advice, and exchange inspiration. It means finding people we can lament with who understand both our discouragement over the hundredth rejection and our commitment to keep sending the work out anyway.

Note, however, that it’s not just any gathering of writers that makes for a good community. Some literary neighborhoods are bad ones. I’ve seen an online group, one hosted by a successful novelist, begin and uninvited discussion of why their host’s just-published novel was an artistic failure. I have heard rumors of another online group whose accomplished host regularly sorts participants into the “real” writers and the pretenders. The marketplace is already obsessed with picking winners and losers. This is not how good neighbors foster a sense of community and work for the common good.

Finding Neighbors
I’m a lucky man. Good fortune picked me up from my exile in the midwest and dropped me in Eugene, Oregon. Eugene has not just a thriving community of writers, but thriving communities of them. I have participated in the weekly Wordos workshop, a monthly workshop with Kate Wilhelm and Damon Knight, monthly meetings of something called Bovine Smoke West. I have lunch every Friday with four or five writers. I play golf with another writer. (I’m careful not to watch it on TV, though.) Everywhere I turn, I meet another novelist in Eugene who moves in a circle of writers that may hardly overlap with my own. Not every writer belongs to any sort of writing group, but most are eager to talk about craft or business over lunch.

So if you’re looking to land in a supportive literary community, you could come to Eugene. Writers have moved here for that very reason, science fiction writers in particular. We’ll be glad to have you.

If you can’t come to Eugene...well, I pity you. But all is not quite lost. You can join or build a writing community wherever you live.

Here are some of the things that I’ve done to expand my literary neighborhood:

Classes. Teach a class or take a class. I’m still in touch with Illinois writers who I met by running newspaper ads and putting notices in Laundromats for a workshop that I taught in my living room. I’ve met other long-time writing friends in classes that we took together.

Form a creative group. Here in Eugene, one of the most dynamic groups I belong to is Bovine Smoke West, a group that meets in the home of artist and writer Alan M. Clark. We aren’t a critique group. We’re a performance and collaboration group. When we meet, we share our recent work with one another. Some of what we share is finished, and some of it is in progress. Instead of criticism, we offer one another an instant audience and opportunities for collaboration. We’re also a support group. The professional frustrations of a fine-arts painter have much in common with the frustrations of a mystery writer.

Read the contributors notes in magazines. When you discover a good story by a writer who is local to you, look her up in the phone book or ask the magazine to forward a letter for you. I met Allison Clement, a writer who lives 40 miles from me, after reading a wonderful story she had published in The Sun.

Join a writers’ organization. Most come with a directory, and you can search that for other members who live near you.

Attend nearby writers’ conferences or genre conventions. Hang out. Ask the writers that you meet where they are from. Except for the very largest events, most of the attendees will be local. Trade business cards not just with editors and agents, but with your fellow writers.

(If there isn’t a conference in your area, perhaps you can create one, even without the usual facilities. Celeste Mergens lives on Whidbey Island in Washington. The island has no conference-sized hotels, and the only auditorium space is at the public high school. Friday sessions of the Whidbey Island Writers’ Conference are held in the private homes of islanders—non-writers, most of them. Saturday and Sunday sessions are at the high school. Speakers and attendees stay in small hotels and B&Bs all over the island, shuttled efficiently by volunteers who get some extra face time with professionals. Now Celeste’s writing community of top agent, editors and writers comes to her once a year.)

As a last resort, you can surf the net. I consider this a last resort because for me, anyway, face-to-face relationships are the most nourishing. I see the internet chiefly as a way to maintain a long-distance community rather than to start one. The social support of someone whose face you know is somehow more edifying than even the most inspired words from someone you know only on the screen. Still, an all-text community is better than no literary neighborhood at all. I like what I’ve seen of Holly Lisle’s Forward Motion site, and of course there is the Rumor Mill site at Speculations.com.

Our work as writers is done alone, but at the end of the day, most of us crave companionship. We aren’t lone wolves, and it’s just as well. In nature, a lone wolf isn’t such a romantic figure after all. Wolves, like people, are social. The lone wolf joins a pack, or he starves.

The fate of the lone writer is worse. If he doesn’t find a pack of his own kind, he ends up watching golf on TV, stops writing, and eventually buys a Lexus.

I get a cold chill just thinking about it.

Arooooooo!

---

Stories by Bruce Holland Rogers have been translated into eight languages and have won two Nebula Awards, a Bram Stoker Award, a Pushcart Prize and a nomination for the Edgar Allan Poe Award in mystery. You can sample his short-short stories at www.shortshortshort.com or read more about Word Work at www.panisphere.com/word/

Oops, there was a mistake made concerning editor Diana Sheridan's new email address last issue. The correct address is Dianaedt@bellsouth.net.

============================================
--- Market Listings ---
============================================

Second Annual 50 Word Bondage Story Competition
Heather Bond, who runs the ever-popular Bondage Fiction site (http://www.bondage-fiction.com), has announced the kickoff of the second annual 50 Word Bondage Story Competition.

The rules are simple:

- Must be bondage related in subject matter
- Must be 50 words or less (and may have an additional 15 words in the title)
- Stories will be marked on story quality, eroticism and style (the more that happens, the more you are likely to score)
- You may enter as many times as you want
- The competition runs until midnight GMT 31 May 2002

Prizewinners get to choose their prizes from an extensive list of goodies, including: e-book versions of three books by Adrian Hunter (he's also one of the judges); a custom photoshoot of the winner's entry starring bondage model (and fellow judge) Amalieve; a year's subscription to Lorelei's Bedroom Bondage; a personally autographed picture from legendary bdsm model Ashlee Renee; and many, many more!

For more information, please visit http://www.bondage-fiction.com or send email to heather@bondage-fiction.com.

---

Best Lesbian Erotica:

Guidelines:

Submit short stories, novel excerpts, other prose

Poetry will be considered, but poetry submissions are not encouraged

Both unpublished & previously published material will be considered, provided it was or will be published between 9/1/01& 12/31/2002

Include a cover page with: Author's Name, Title of Submission(s), Address, Phone/Fax, and Email Address

All submissions must be typed & double-spaced; number the pages

Each submission should be a maximum of 5,000 words

You may submit a maximum of 3 different pieces of work

Submit 2 hard copies of each submission

No email submissions will be accepted, but you can email queries to tristan@puckerup.com

All submissions must include a self-addressed stamped envelope (SASE) or an email address for response. No manuscripts will be returned

Send all submissions to:

TRISTAN TAORMINO
P.O. BOX 4108
GRAND CENTRAL STATION
NEW YORK, NY
10163

DEADLINE: May 12, 2002

---

Spanking Stories - Call For Submissions

See http://www.abcdwebmasters.com/venture/faq.html

---

FANTASIES MADE FLESH

First submissions deadline: May 15, 2002
Second submissions deadline: September 15, 2002

Okay guys, what’s lurking in that filthy, homosexual mind of yours? What do you think about while jerking off? What scenarios are played out in your head when someone you’ve “just settled for” is sucking your cock? What fantasies wouldn’t you dream of sharing with your lover of twenty-five years? Indeed, what dreams? Remember the guy you saw coming out of the liquor store last week, mounting his Harley at the strip mall? My god, those cheekbones, those lips, the way his jeans fit! How about that road worker with the pumped, tattooed guns? You know, the one you drove around the block to get a second look at. Why is it that you still fantasize about feeling his insides with your hard-on, five years down the road? It’s like what your favorite porno star says to you every time he steps out of the DVD into your bedroom: “You can stop doin’ that, man; I’m here now…” And hey, why is that hunky young deacon at your church strung so uptight, I wonder? How much you wanna bet he feels guilty about shooting off while thinking about St. Sebastian, bound and writhing at the column, pierced with arrows? Seems t’me a good hot fuck would loosen his bowtie considerably; wouldn’t you agree?

I want to pick the deepest recesses of your mind-fucking brain over the course of my next two anthologies – the title, Fantasies Made Flesh (deadline, May 15th) being the first. I encourage established “masters of male erotica” and new talent alike to overstep their boundaries for once, to relax the stereotypic reigns, to write as “fantastically” as they see fit. I am interested in dream sequences, wet nightmares, black hole investigations, flashbacks, flash-forwards, stream-of-precum-consciousness, experimental/straightforward/cutting-edge composition – you name it. Setting doesn’t concern me, but never underestimate my admiration for a well-constructed and varied sentence structure, no matter how free-form your narrative. Seduce me with monologue, dialogue, asides and free association that smacks of male sexual reality. Give flesh to your fantasies on the printed page and send them in. Tease me, frustrate me, keep me guessing. Take a risk. Just bend my fucking zipper in the process.

Guidelines:
Submit only double-spaced hard copies on white 8.5 x 11 paper at this time; you will be advised to provide electronic formatting upon acceptance. Include a cover letter with a short bio, your name, mailing address and e-mail address. Indicate whether or not your submission has been previously published, and if so, where and when. You need not synopsize your submission in the letter; your work will speak for itself. Please be advised: submissions that do not include a SASE with the correct return postage will not be considered. I am much less concerned about length (so to speak) than content. If your 7,000-word submission intrigues me from beginning to end, more power to you!

All accepted submissions will be subject to editing. Contributors will be paid upon publication and receive one contributor’s copy.

Send submissions to:

Fantasies Made Flesh c/o Michael Huxley/Editor STARbooks Press P.O. Box 2737 Sarasota, FL 34230-2737

Or email stories as an .rtf or .doc file ONLY to michaelhuxley@starbookspress.com

**************************************************
Has this newsletter helped you get your work published or
motivated you to finally put pen to paper?

If so, please consider making a
voluntary subscription payment of $5 per year
to help defray the many costs inherent in running a webzine, such as
advertising, payments to contributors and prizes for the contests.

Order your voluntary subscription Here
And thanks for your support! ***************************************************

==========================================
--- Answers For An Overseas Reader ---
=========================================

Well, this section of the issue was going to be devoted to answers about last issues' questions concerning overseas writers. But I keep all my "to-do" newsletter info in my inbox and a recent operating system change made short work of them. The gist of what you readers offered - thanks! - was that Social Security numbers are not needed for overseas writers but that payment can sometimes be a bit of a pain. If you need any other info, let me know, I can probably reconstruct some of the answers if necessary.

==========================================
--- Goings On ---
=========================================

"Eden Lenz's short story "Envy" has been accepted for Best Women's Erotica 2002. The piece was originally published at Mind Caviar. Her story "Master Zayd" has been sold to Abby's Realm and she was Amoret's Author of the Month for April. Her erotica webpage is http://eden.piggyhawk.com/ceilidh"

---

Kelly Steed published a blurb about her novel Stasis, co-authored by Colleen Elliott, on the Writer's Digest (April 2002) Brag Board. She was also the Featured Author for April at Anthologies Online http://www.anthologiesonline.com and will be the Artist of the Month (Poet) on Jassmine.com http://www.gotojassminesitenow.com for May 2002.

---

Congrats! If you sent me your Goings On but don't see it here, just let me know and I'll get it out.

---

Tell me what's going on! Have you made a sale? Do you have a piece being published? Let me know and I'll print it here for all to see! (It helps if you write it in the format above; makes it easier for me to just cut and paste.)

---

Check out my column at http://www.absolutewrite.com/ on - what else?! - writing porn. This week I tackled "Dealing With Distractions," mostly of the internet variety...Check it out here -
http://www.absolutewrite.com/specialty_writing/porn_101.htm

===========================================
--- Q & A ---
=============================================

Send me your questions! I'll answer the most common ones here, and if I don't know the answer, I'll do my best to find a pro who does. (Of course, failing that, I'll ask y'all for help...)

===========================================
--- Looking For Writers ---
===========================================

Send Me Your Stories And Ideas!

I'm looking for essays/articles that will inspire and/or instruct other porn writers. Success stories, how to break into certain markets, unique views on the genre, etc. Around 800 words is good, although I'm flexible.

I'd love articles on specific markets. There are so many sub-genres of porn and it's hard to know the subtleties of each. If you've got a specialty, from BDSM to Watersports to Leg Sex to Amputeeism, feel free to share your knowledge.

You can either suggest a topic (query) or send something whole. I'll get back to you within a week as to whether or not I'll be able to use it.

Payment varies; From $0-$10 per article (depending on site income for the month) OR a copy of one of the books on the Order Form. I'll also include a lengthy bio and url if you'd like.