Hello, there. A long silence from me. Briefly put, I spent October and November of last year volunteering 20 hours a week in an effort to prevent a lot of things that have since happened. I answered phones for it! (And got to hang up on at least one memorable misogynist crank caller.)
This was on top of the volunteer commitments I already have, my day job editing, keeping my home more or less occupyable, and spending way too much time following news and commentary on the news.
I knew I was digging myself into a hole and figured it was worth it. I’d rather…much rather…have tried and succeeded, though.
Anyway, I’ve been crawling out of that hole over the past nine months or so. I’ve kept writing, and I’ve especially kept working on what I’ve affectionately dubbed “the WIP,” a duology of polyamorous hurt/comfort following a bisexual knight who’s been ransomed out of (metaphorical) hell and has to put himself back together, with the help of the commoner friend he’s falling in love with and the wife who has hesitated to consummate their arranged marriage for reasons of her own. There’s plenty of angst and plenty of sweetness to go around (and a fair bit of creative sex in the second book, once the slow burn of the first has ignited). It’s set in the fictional kingdoms neighboring Hartlorn, the setting of my Lady Elise Crayl series — and yes, Elise and Adam have roles as side characters. It’s been incredibly absorbing, but in the way of writing and self-editing, also pretty isolated.
My goal for the next few months is to have a more active writer’s presence out in the world, including this online portion of it.
-Longtime followers will notice I’ve revamped the color scheme of this blog; the lighter background feels more modern and easier to read text against.
-That’s a first step to the larger change of updating my WordPress theme. I have a few options for what I want to change to, keeping features like this blog and a portfolio option for sharing links to my books and stories.
-I’m going to increase the number of tags I use and make them more systematic to help readers find the subgenres they’re most interested in. For everyone’s convenience, I’ll also lean more on universal book links via Books2read.
-I’m also changing to a new newsletter provider, because I’ve found MailChimp increasingly unwieldy–especially the design features. This probably won’t change much for newsletter recipients, except you might hear from me more frequently if the process of writing an email doesn’t send me into overstimulated fight-or-flight.
-I worked with an editor to proofread the text of Teleny, the gay Victorian erotica that might or might not have been written by Oscar Wilde (and many others, in a round-robin approach). Soon I’ll have a cleaner version up — I mean clean in the formatting sense, obviously. The sex is still in there and as Victorian as ever.
-I’m going to put together a short ebook as a gift for newsletter subscribers.
-As I make backup copies of this website’s content in preparation for the theme change, I’ve found a number of stories have gone out of print. Online erotic fiction seems to be a shrinking field, sadly, although there are still some sites keeping it going. In addition to continuing to write and publish new fiction, there are some old pieces I’ll be looking to re-release.
-I’ve also been writing poetry, and getting increasingly serious about it. By which I mean, paradoxically, I’m having so much fun with it that I want to keep doing it in better ways, more often, and sometimes share what I write with other people. Some of the poems are romantic or erotic, some aren’t. I plan to keep publishing under this penname, not least for the freedom it gives to cover all kinds of topics. This week I signed up for an in-person workshop in my hometown where I can hopefully show some poems and ask “Does this make any sense at all?”
-I’m significantly expanding older fantasy story and plan to release it as a dark romance novella. Like the hurt/comfort WIP, there’s some excellent angst in this one (I affectionately call the two stories together my “boys in dungeons” pieces), although not so much sweetness. More desperation, enemies-to-lovers, a game of wits, suspicions of sorcery, two men trying to break each other’s wills, things of that nature. I wouldn’t say it’s entirely without tenderness, though. And I hope it’s as cathartic to read as it is to write.
-Then, yes, down the line there’ll be the novel-length releases (probably two of them)! Now that I know I can write long stories – the secret, it turns out, is to keep writing one chapter after another – there are some former NaNo projects I’d like to return to. But I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself.
-I also don’t want to get too far ahead of myself on the New Smut Project either, especially since I had to cancel the last go at Erato II thanks to schedule overwhelm (not helped by a bout of COVID, but not solely caused by that). Still, I have some thoughts on doing future anthologies in a way I hope will be short, simple, and sustainable for all involved. This definitely doesn’t feel like the right time to step back from publishing excellent literary erotica that challenges sex-negative narratives. And, as I think I said a few years back, I’d like to publish an erotic poetry collection… Oh, and I might need to move NSP’s newsletter from MailChimp to a platform I don’t find physically painful to use, too. Let’s see what happens.
-Lastly, I’m in edits for two short stories that’ll be released by a powerhouse of an online erotica site; excited to say more about that down the line!
