An inexperienced college junior has been writing bad erotic fiction about his straight roommate. The roommate finds it and makes our guy edit his writing, line by line. The most fun part has been writing bad erotica as a jumping off point for the two characters.

With you, man. On the one hand, authors whose primary income is writing erotica will tell you it doesn't matter that much. On the other hand, it's really boring to rewrite the same sex scene time and again. I've been trying to read more, both the good stuff and the garbage to get a handle on how other writers describe sex and sensuality, and have attempted to incorporate some of the elements I like into my own writing. Aside from that, I'm switching up the reasons why my characters are out here fuckin', so that I enjoy the buildup to the actual scene.

Buy. The ethics of a reverse Pinocchio terrify me.

Pistachio or almond?

Never catch a disease. Does it work for allergies as well?

Flirt in the comments or slide into their DMs?

Does it count if it was right after my last day on the job?

On

A Google Doc with limited permissions is much easier to line edit, FYI. DM me.

My smile.

No, but someday I'll get behind the wheel of a tuk tuk.

HYE hooked up with someone delivering to your door?

Donald Duck. Both the character and how I wear clothes around the house.

Soft cheese or hard cheese?

Quote by CharlotteRusse1
I like well written erotica but found I had to read a lot of dross to find good content.

This is exactly why I wrote my first story—if I was going to complain so much, I might as well do something about it. Though I've been writing my smutty little stories for years, I took a long hiatus during which I had not a single idea for a new plot. I revived this pen name in hopes that I could free up all the space in my brain dedicated to the dozen or so unfinished stories. Now, oops oops oops I'm migrating some of those stories here while I throw new stuff up on a subscription account. Fully back in the game, baby. Having spent such a long time writing in isolation, it's been good for me to connect with other erotica authors as well as get in the practice of replying to feedback.

Spring. You go from soup weather to shorts weather, which is my preferred direction.

Full beard or clean shave?

Sausage, but only if it's links and not patties. A blueberry pancake with maple syrup and a little bit of that sausage link is a superior bite.

Summer Olympics or Winter Olympics?

Bold and direct. Is that teasing, though?

Surf or turf?

A guy I see at conferences a couple times a year. I wouldn't want to take him from his wife, because she's lovely, but if I could duplicate him…

Charlie Christian

Leather, because it eventually remembers your shape.

Big wet snowflakes or fine powder? (I'm watching a blizzard out of my window)

Do I keep building on what I started? Or do I take what I’ve written, change the names, and turn them into stand-alone stories? I keep going back and forth.

When you create characters that you really like, and you keep their stories going, how much of that is for you vs. for potential readers?

If you're writing for pure pleasure, you get to do whatever you want. If you get bored, you don't owe people shit—not an alt ending, not a bonus chapter, not a HEA. You're the boss of you, baby. If you're writing for profit, however, you do have to keep your readers' investment in your characters in front of mind.

(Caveat: I often base characters on the most annoying people I've met in my life. I enjoy putting a real dumb dumb into a situation where they make sexy decisions that their real-life counterparts would never choose. It helps me be a little less precious with the fictional people I'm manipulating.)

If you want to keep characters going, it's worth figuring out why your audience likes them…or if they're more interested in the scenario you've built. And why not do both? A series that follows your favorite characters through various horny adventures, and a series in which various characters encounter the same horny situation but react differently?

Joey Purp is out here making rump shakers, and I am into it.

One thing on my mind is how MM fiction is having such a cultural moment and (largely female) audience

No lie, I started writing because so many of the top MM stories on another erotica platform (we're talking 2006) were written by women, and I'd read them and think, "I don't talk like that. That's not how men describe each other. That's not how we think," etc. My first story was a test to see if I could beat them in the ratings with characters that behaved in a more familiar manner to me. I…am…[sigh] still trying.

I'm trying to decide which story gets put in Lush moderator purgatory next. Club bathroom quickie? The guy who gets turned on by thunderstorms? The straight bro who tries to fight his fiancée's male best friend and loses the fight and his anal virginity? Everything needs a good edit, and I made shitty covers for all of them (it makes me laugh, leave me alone), but the agony of the wait makes me want to upload one that I don't care about.

It took over a week to go from submission to publication, but my silly little story about a man discovering he's not as straight as he thought is finally up.

https://www.lushstories.com/stories/gay-male/sandalwood

You know those people who claim they're only a little gay when they're drunk? Straight

=sober, but tequila=make out with the closest person regardless of gender. (Maybe that was specific to my college, but most of those people came out later) This was my version of those people, dialed up to 11.

To add to all the great suggestions above, one of my favorite things to do when distinguishing character voice is to figure out who in the story curses more. A buttoned-up nerd or bookish church mouse might not curse at all, finding dorky or antiquated replacement words. "Oh, fiddlesticks!" So it becomes a moment of character development when they utter their first real "fuck" on the page.

A brash person with little regard for their surroundings will curse even when it's unnecessary or inappropriate, and might have a smaller vocabulary than their peers because their favorite words all have four letters.

"Fucking gimme the thing."

"The what?"

"That little fucking thing. The buzzing thing. The shit you're holding right fucking now."

"Did you just forget the word 'vibrator?'"

"Fuck off."

Within a sex scene, one partner might say "yes please" while the other says "fuck yes" while the third is more "hell yeah" kind of dirty talker.

How someone curses, in the U.S. at least, can signify ethnicity or background without falling into racist caricatures. "Holy shit, you look awesome!" gives a different impression than "God damn you're looking good!" Or having a frustrated character say, "These fucking idiots are driving me batshit," feels different from, "These motherfuckers are about to drive me out of my god damn mind."