Writing with My Daughter

For the first time ever, my daughter and I sat down together and wrote fiction. She's twelve, and she's 100% certain that she can't write a paragraph. That's not true, of course, but I tried to stay on topic and keep her from repeating that too many times.

I've wanted to write something other than erotica for a while, but I can't imagine anyone buying some little story I write without the added bonus of the smut. Young Adult is what I'd like to do, but young adults today like the Hunger Games, Twilight, Harry Potter. I can't even enjoy reading them, much less writing them.

I was brooding on this one morning in the shower, trying to come up with an idea that some kid would actually read. Just as I was ready to resign myself to writing smut forever, my brain switched over to a little story I wrote last summer for Literotica, The Side Effect. This is the closest to Sci-Fi I've ever stepped. In this story, the (foolish) man can't bring himself to go down on the woman he wants to marry, so his sister hooks him up with a woman with questionable ethics from a pharmaceutical lab who gives him a drug with strange side effects--senses and sense organs get mixed up.

As soon as I thought of that little tale, I had my premise. I'm not going to tell you what it is ('cause I don't want anybody stealing my story!), but within minutes of making the connection, I had my main character, her abilities, her family, her backstory. My brain was on fire!

But I was afraid to tell my kids what I was planning. All I needed was a judgmental twelve year old rolling her eyes and saying, "That's stupid, mom. Nobody would read that."

After a couple of weeks, I had to spill it, just because we really needed a good mother-daughter bonding moment. I told her what I was going to do, and braced for the smack-down. Instead, she giggled. "I would SO read that," she said.

Wait. What? It's not dumb? Am I dreaming? Did she just say she'd read that?

So I said, "Well, then you can help me write it."

Today we sat down at the table, each with our graph paper composition books and we started to brainstorm. Then we started to write. We had two good paragraphs written by the time we had to go out for the day, and the minute we got home, SHE ASKED TO WORK ON IT AGAIN.

We finished chapter one before we decided we'd done enough for one day. It needs some polishing, but we are ready to go on chapter two tomorrow.

Writing with my daughter is awesome.

Making a change

In the summer of 2011, I started writing erotica. I started with true, but grossly exaggerated, and moved on to my first piece of fiction within weeks. I wrote a few stories, thinking they were the only ones I had in me, and then my real life took over, and I set the smut aside for a year and a half.

In the summer of 2013, I returned to writing. Skater's Waltz was churning in my brain for about two years. The idea of a woman skating naked was powerful, and I thought about it from a bunch of angles.  I thought of a bachelor party, hiring figure skating strippers. I thought of a skater at an early morning practice, all alone except for the Zamboni driver. Somehow I came up with the idea of a former competitive skater working out on a private, frozen pond, stripping while listening to a Jackyl song, Screwdriver.

That was my Literotica Nude Day 2013 contest entry. I felt good about it. It didn't win, but that was okay. What was important was that I was writing again. And I haven't stopped since.

Now I see stories everywhere I look. Every song gives me an idea. I overhear a sentence, and I see a plot forming as clearly as I saw the chick in Frozen building an ice castle. There's a lot going on in my brain.

My conflict comes from the fact that I'm weaning myself away from Literotica. I've enjoyed the feedback, the discussions, the friendships I've made. But the conflict I've found there has spoiled it for me. Too much posturing, grandstanding, fighting and backstabbing.

I'm just about to publish my first stories to Amazon. If I am giving up the feedback and friendship from Literotica, I need something in its place. I'm making the leap to trying to attain some monetary success from Amazon.

My biggest struggle is that my 20k word stories will never sell on Amazon. Erotica readers like shorties. I'm trying to embrace chopping my "babies" into shorter pieces of a series, but it hurts dammit. Sigh.

I have a plan, and hubby says I have to shut down my computer. I guess that's enough to get me through tonight, huh?

It ain't easy being a smut writer.