On this newly organized website, I’m sharing posts about where my writing is published. These posts often include excerpts from the book or story in question. Some of these excerpts might seem to have … gaps.
That’s because they do.
One reason is because I trim lines for better flow in an excerpt context – tightening the pace and skipping slightly ahead to a phrase that creates the mood I want to draw you into. But the other reason is less fun: we’re in a censorship-happy cultural cycle and authors of erotic content (not to mention authors of queer content, regardless of eroticism) have to err on the side of caution.
So I’ve edited some excerpts to be more sensual or safe for work – not that I’d recommend reading them aloud in your workplace, but you get what I mean. Or, say, “R” or even “PG-13” rather than “NC-17” (I’m swallowing a digression about the MPAA ratings as a tool of censorship and sex negativity and even rape culture…)
Hopefully this keeps me within WordPress’s preferred terms, including any more restrictive future version of those terms. (I’m swallowing a digression about Gumroad’s betrayal…)
So where you see a “…” that doesn’t quite flow, you can assume it covers a reference to genitals or something similarly white-hot.
I’m not in love with that choice because I like to let readers know what they’re in for. At the same time, I don’t expect anyone will accidentally buy a book marketed as erotica expecting fade to black or “””clean””” romance (swallowing a third digression on sex-negative terminology and hoping my copious scare quotes get the idea across…)
I do write some romantic stories with less sexual content (and sex that happens after a nice long slow burn). I write the occasional literary piece that is about sex but through a screen of semi-metaphor. I write poems that are about desire and longing, including their physical dimensions, but not in full-frontal erotic terms. I’ve got a story in the works about an entire utopian celibate culture and how they navigate intimacy, another story that’s entirely dialogue (some of it steamy, granted), a number of stories that are deliberately nonspecific about characters’ genitals, and stories where the charge is as much or more from kink – power dynamics, bondage, impact play – as from genital interaction. As you can see, I’m very capable of using unerotic language like “genitals” to refer to erotic things. And I write asexual characters and characters with boundaries that mean their sex lives don’t always fit inside conventional definitions of what “counts” as “sex” (imagine a few dozen scare quotes and my related digression…).
I love writing all of this stuff. But I want to write it because I choose to, not because I’m not allowed to write anything else.
You could say I want to consent to my creative and erotic expression. And you get it: you want to be able to choose your own reading – to pick up what you want, when you want, and stop reading when you want, and think what you like about it – not to have it chosen for you. We need to be able to say both ‘yes’ and ‘no’ for either to have any meaning.
I could get into a days-long digression here. For instance, I could talk about how the New Smut Project’s anthology Between the Shores got particular scrutiny on itch.io because it explicitly talks about consent (including acknowledging consent is sometimes violated) and now that entire topic’s a third rail. This thanks to pressure from a group that pretends to care about violence against women (just women, I guess – I mean, as a woman, I’d say I appreciate the consideration but I…really don’t). This isn’t a movement that wants to make people safer, it just wants us all to shut up. We can fight back – one way is being very loud at payment processors who are also driving these restrictions.
Anyway, the key takeaway here is: My excerpts are getting less explicit, and I will post fewer words specifically about genitals on this website. But I will still write those words (and words on adjacent body parts and topics) and get them out for you to read in any way I can. If you see a puzzling use of ellipses, you can trust it’s covering something wonderfully hot that is uncovered in the full story.
If you want to read more of my digressions, encourage me and I might unleash one in a separate blog post. If you want to go yell at a payment processor, please do (don’t yell directly at the customer service reps, but take up as much of their time as you can and express your displeasure. Or, for those of us who aren’t great with phones, let’s write and mail some angry letters.)
