Originally published at Kat M | Adele Journal. Please leave any comments there.

I have so many draft posts that are 80% finished, but aren’t ready to be released into the wild yet. Here’s something I thought of today, and would love to know if you have the same experience.

I am a dedicated amateur writer. I do it for love and fun, and mostly to amuse, embarrass, and horrify my immediate circle of friends. I have no real drive to “go pro,” mostly because I have a career I love already (entertainment marketing) — and I mean, I really really, love it.

On my birthday (Friday), I am getting two of my closest friends & clients together for drinks, and we are going to talk shop. Because that’s how much I like to do it.

But there are fundamental drawbacks to not being a pro, ones that might affect the quality of my writing. I don’t think of it as a job, because it isn’t one, for me. I do wait until I feel “inspired,” which no professional has the luxury of doing. And sometimes, I will want to write, but it feels impossible to connect emotionally with the story enough to make my writing feel true.

Today, I figured out the answer (for me): imagining my intended audience. I’m working on a private XXX-Mas story that is intended to horrify, embarrass, and amuse my friends. The first 1300 words came easily, and I cackled evilly with every paragraph. But today? I looked at the words and felt like I was writing a technical document. It’s not that the writing was bad; my heart just wasn’t in it.

But I realized my mistake: I was thinking, “Oh, I have to work on this piece.” My mindset, going into the story, was much different: “OMG, they’re not gonna believe I went there. What else can I do to make ‘em squirm?”

Once I started envisioning the end result, everything in my mind just fell into place. It was easy to pick up where I left off.

It’s stupidly obvious to me now — it’s simple goal setting. My friend, a personal trainer, could have told me this in an instant; she always advises her clients to think of the end result (being thinner, stronger, etc) — not the going-to-the-gym part.

I am an entertainer. My goal is to get a certain reaction out of my audience. Without that, my work is meaningless. I don’t enjoy the actual work of writing, but the end result.

Is it the same for you? Comment below if you have something to add. (Gotta work on my story… XXXMas is coming, and my deadline looms.)

Originally published at Kat M | Adele Journal. Please leave any comments there.

Original post is here. Read it — it’s short, and the comment thread on his site is almost always thoughtful.

Relevant exerpt:

“You wanted—and expected—them to say, “This is great! I always knew you could do this. How can I help make it better? How can we tell the world about it?”

But no, you don’t get that at all. You just get the the faint praise, the brush-off, the indifference.

Then you realize… maybe this thing just wasn’t that important to them. Or maybe you didn’t know them as well as you thought you did. How sad.”

I have a very different experience in that I never expected any of my family and close friends to get what I do.

After all, I’m an erotic writer. And not because I want to make my living from erotica/romantica/erotic romance because it’s a huge trend in publishing right now.  My impulses to do adult work have very early origins. Sexuality is part of how I understand people in their entirety. It comes out in my art, because it’s my way of expressing my human experiences and empathy for other humans.

Do I expect my conservative father to get it?  No!  He’s embarrassed at sex scenes in movies (so am I, but for different reasons.)  He was shocked when I saw The Crying Game and Basic Instinct at a slumber party.

Do I expect my close friends to get it?  No!  My close friends are not vocational.  They are good friends from childhood and college, and not part of the sex fiction world.

Achievers desperately need support, but it’s often just silly to expect it from people close to you.

You don’t get to pick your family — why should you expect them to get you?  Don’t a lot of teenage fights come from parents not understanding what really drives you?  Your parents often have different values and participate in different emotional fantasies (EFs.)  Their definition of success comes from your achieving fulfillment of their EFs and values, not your own.

They simply don’t know what yours are, and being human, they probably don’t see them as valid as their own.  For example: one my mother’s emotional fantasies (she’s an interior designer) is to have a home that truly reflects her personality, somewhere she can be comfortable in.  She works constantly to fulfill this EF for herself and other people.

I live in a co-op, have very few possessions, and sit on the floor.

My top value is freedom.  It makes me uncomfortable when my place fills up with too much stuff.  I have The Purge every season and very little attachment to objects.  She really doesn’t get it, and thinks that her EF will make my life more complete, if I’d just try it.

If your best-friend-growing-up’s ultimate EF is to have 3 daughters and coach soccer, do you think he’ll truly get why you want to write scary mime erotic horror?  Of course not.

I’m totally not offended when I get a weak response from them.  In fact, I rarely tell them what I’m doing, just that I’m doing a project that I’m excited about.  I save the details for my vocational friends, the ones who do share my EFs and values, and can immediately connect what I’m doing to fulfillment.

And, of course, appreciate the project for its own sake.  (Yes, I’m going to finish that centaur porn piece…)

Originally published at Kat M | Adele Journal. Please leave any comments there.

This is going to be a quick and unedited post, but this topic has been on my mind.  Names omitted to protect the parties involved.

Here’s the situation, and I’m sure it has happened more than once.

Someone wrote a novel-length, pretty good fanfiction story in a well-established fandom.  When my friend went to look for it, years later, it was gone.  Not unusual, right?  Fanfiction archives come and go. But she rediscovered… it as original fiction!  The author had turned her fanfiction story into an original novel and is now selling it through one of the M/M niche presses.

Is this cool?

As I have discovered from my own efforts, some fanfiction is so far off from the original story that you can’t really say it’s fanfiction!  I couldn’t claim that my own story had any place whatsoever in the fandom (such as it is), but was only “inspired by” the original.  Many of the better AUs I’ve looked at fall into this category for sure.

I’ve always thought that fanfiction is 50% original, anyway.  FF writers bring their own ideas and life experience into the existing work, creating a synergy that is half theirs.  Is this part of why fanfiction is such a gray area?

Anyway, when I heard about this, my reaction wasn’t automatically, “OMG she’s trying to make money off fanfiction, that’s so wrong!” If the writer could sell the manuscript without her characters smelling like the originals, chances are, her story had very little in common with the parent work in the first place.

“I’m never going to have an idea as good as this one.”

I used to be a mass-market product marketer.  Now, I have become an art, entertainment, and info-tainment marketer.  I work with artists, and one of the biggest obstacles I run into is their belief in good idea scarcity.

They don’t want to give away anything for free because they’re afraid they will have nothing left.  Or that their next work may not be as good.  This is usually BS, of course, but that fear creates the reality.  One of the hardest parts of my job is convincing artists to offer free samples when possible… to give more of themselves and their work than they are comfortable with.

Writers are the worst offenders, but musicians are the coolest about this.  Some writers are totally cool, too, but they are usually the experienced ones used to deadlines.  The authors with the confidence and proof that their well will never run dry, even under adverse circumstances (like writing books “by committee” under a Big Name Publisher.)

My own reaction.

I don’t think it was morally wrong to turn what must have been a serious AU into original fiction.  And yanking what used to be a freely available story, making minor alterations, and putting it behind a pay wall… well, I would never do that, but I guess it was her right?  I’m not too sure about what I think about this — hopefully comments will help me clarify my own reaction.

What I felt the most was sorry. I don’t know the reality of the situation, but it smacks of “I will never write something as good as this again.”  If she were truly confident in her ability to write more good stories, would she have done that?

Dunno.  What do you think?

Originally published at Kat M | Adele Journal. Please leave any comments there.

Lately, I’ve talked with a lot of artists, mostly writers, who have no idea how to market their book. This isn’t news, of course! Artists, in general, hate to sell their stuff — it’s one of the reason that publishers exist. (No need to go into how bad a job most publishers are doing — you can read all about that here and here, if you like.)

Most of them have said things like this:

• “I don’t know anything about SEO/Google ads/getting visitors to my blog.”
• “I tweet three times a day and update my Facebook page, but I don’t know what else I can do.”
• “I’ve spent a ton of money on publicity or book tours, and I’ve only sold a few.”
• “The publisher went all out in their efforts, but I only sold through a fraction of my copies!”
• “I have no idea how to sell, and I hate selling.”

Though these issues are all important, that’s not the most important thing to address.  The biggest deficit in marketing skill is not specific techniques or building a website, twitter, FB following, etc.  It’s not even building a list — though that skill alone is often what separates successes from failures.

The biggest problem is that writers aren’t thinking like marketers!

If you’re not thinking like a marketer, all your work may not pay off.  It’s like going to the grocery store when you have no specific meal in mind — you can spend $150, and not have a thing to make for dinner.

I really underestimated this aspect until I started interviewing writers in person.  The techniques themselves that I use are incredibly simple, like saying, “Hey, buy this,” in a banner ad.  Anyone can do this… if they’re thinking like a marketer.

So, how do you think like a marketer, then??

Three words: know your audience.  Know exactly what they want, why they want it, and how to sell it to them.  Start with asking, “Who, exactly, are my readers?  What do they like?  How many children do they have?  What authors similar do they like?  What magazines do they subscribe to?”  It’s like knowing your character — marketers go through the same process to “profile” their audience.  Assumptions can be very expensive.

Here’s an example from this morning.  Let’s say I have a client who writes m/m romances, and I’m trying to find her a new audience outside the realm of existing m/m readers.  Basically, I’m looking to expand the market, and test potential audiences that might like m/m, even if they haven’t read it before.

This morning, I open a copy of House Beautiful — one of the most popular mass-market magazines for a mature female, affluent (or wannabe affluent) audience!  They aren’t modern like Dwell, but more traditional… perfect for testing a romance novel offer.

What do I see?

An ad for Olay Regenerist, no shock there, right?  But also…

An ad for some home furnishing company featuring:

• A hot shirtless guy
• Books in the foreground clearly displaying “Tom Ford” and Michaelangelo

‘Kay.  This could mean that they’re catering to a gay audience — and HB has one.  But it could also mean that the magazine has a good percentage of older women who love gay men, and might be interested in reading traditional romances featuring two men.  I dunno, it could mean nothing.  It could be that the women subscribers wouldn’t be interested in m/m at all.  But it was a clue, and nothing happens by accident when you’re paying $10,000 per page.

Naturally, I wouldn’t suggest taking out a full page ad in House Beautiful to start — that would be expensive and foolish.  I’d have a lot more investigation to do before I decided to invest in a market test, such as finding out if they watch Queer As Folk.  My point is, the better you know your audience, the more opportunities you have to reach them.  Most writers wouldn’t even think of advertising in House Beautiful for their books, but these more indirect connections are sometimes where all the profit is!

This work must be done before you take out any ads. Before you do any work at all communicating with your audience, whether it’s on your website, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Originally published at Kat M | Adele Journal. Please leave any comments there.

Friends,

I’d like to introduce you to my Adult Storytelling Manifesto.  It’s been a while in coming, and it’s basically all my most important thoughts on the state of adult fiction and storytelling, put into a video presentation.

AJ Manifesto – Intro, 1st Draft from Katherine M. on Vimeo.

In a series of 4-7 minute presentations, I describe what I think people need to do differently to write incomparable adult fiction.  Not just good, or good enough to be published, but really and truly awesome stuff that stands out.  As far as I know, no one addresses the idea of excellence in the adult genres… but why can’t it be excellent?

Romance, erotica, and pulp with graphic content can be just as lasting, just as enduring and ‘artistic’ as anything else. The trouble is, most of us have been conditioned to think that it can’t be, just because it contains explicit sex or violence.  It doesn’t help that many of the standard books on writing subtly denounce anything sexual as mere titillation, and dismiss anything extremely violent as shock value scenes that carry no weight in the story.

But you know that’s bogus, right?  I know it’s bogus, and so, I’ve made this Manifesto.  I can’t change the prejudice against adult-oriented genres, but I can help deprogram us all from the belief that romance and erotica stories can’t reach the heights that other works do.

The embedded video should be showing up above, but here is where you can find the intro video in HD:

http://vimeo.com/13686937

I need your help!

It’s just the intro, and I wasn’t going to release it until I made the first real installment.  I’m putting it up now because I really need critiques!  I’m so new to this video stuff, I feel like I’m doing the equivalent of fingerpainting.  I have no idea what I’m doing.

Unless there are major problems with this (like everyone hates the black screens), I’m going to take what you say and apply it to the next one.  So please, please tell me what you think.  It’s only 4 1/2 minutes long. Leave your comments on this blog or my Vimeo page, either one is fine.

Join the update list to get notified when the next one’s up.
I’m now at work on the next presentation. Knowing me, it’ll be at least another week or two before it’s ready for release, but if you want to know when it comes out, just join the updates list here:

Originally published at Kat M | Adele Journal. Please leave any comments there.

So, I lived in a place where the houses were basically made out of ticky-tacky.  And yes, many of them did all look the same, as the “city” really only got popular from the 60′s on.  My sister even wondered if it was the city that inspired the song.

The apartment I lived in technically wasn’t connected to the neighbor’s, but the walls were so thin — the outer walls — that I could easily hear his music, a blend of show tunes and sad folk songs, which he sometimes sang to in a blustery quaver.  There’s a lot I could say about my complex, haunted neighbor, but tonight, I remembered one thing: what he sounded like when he came!

He was old enough not to care about people seeing or hearing him having sex, and he had some regular casual hookup nights.  I think there was a group he went to on Thursdays, because he always came back with someone to have sex with.  Usually, we were too busy making techno to hear anything, but one Thursday night, I was lying in bed with gut-burning nausea.

It was, of course, made worse by the fact that it was about 90 degrees — the usual temperature for about half the year — with no air conditioning unit, since we’d probably fry the whole block’s circuits if we put one in.  I got the dubious honor of hearing my neighbor’s orgasm.

I tended to think of my neighbor as a hot guy who had long ago run to seed, and the sound he made wasn’t remotely sexy.  It was the exact sound that a guy makes when he discovers that his pet had done something bad on the rug, or when his friend tries to shock him with a disgusting — and probably false — story.  In fact, when I heard it, I thought he was on the phone.  It took me a few moments to catch up.

“Ugh!”  What is that smell?

“Ugh!”  I stepped in something squishy.

“Ugh!”  Please, spare me the details of your bodily processes.

“Ugh! Ugh!”  Oh God, it’s leaking all over the floor!

I had to bury my face in the pillow to muffle my laughter.  Even if he had heard, though, I don’t think he would have minded.  We both had an over-developed sense of the absurd.

Originally published at Kat M | Adele Journal. Please leave any comments there.

Most of my ideas come from dreams — at least, the seed of my stories.  Last night, I had another unusual sex dream which might show up in a story.

Being a dream, it makes very little sense in reality, but the setup was this:  I was in a conference center, and there was some kind of sexuality conference going on.  One of the “panels” was… interaction with sex workers, sex included.  Of all kinds.  There were two cozy, dim, low-ceilinged rooms with a collection of student lounge type velour-covered armchairs and loveseats, and about 15 attendees milled around in them, waiting for the sex workers to show.  I was an attendee, but I was also a reporter, maybe a blogger.  All I remember is that I was there in some kind of official capacity and carried a small camera.

The sex workers entered, and to my shock, there was quite a variety — almost like circus folk.  Men, women, but also a midget and two young teens (!), a boy and a girl who were maybe around 14.  I was quite disturbed when one of them came on to me.  Still recovering, I incoherently refused any hands-on demonstration, and didn’t know what to think when he got offended.  I think he actually said, “I’m not man enough for you?”

Waving him off, I drifted through the rooms, looking for someone to talk to.  I almost tripped over two white pod-like sleeping bags, from which emerged two flushed women who had obviously been masturbating together.

All of a sudden, I wanted to have sex with a sex worker, too.  A built black tattooed man caught my eye, but I was specifically looking for a woman.  Then, I woke up, thinking “wtf?”

Originally published at Kat M | Adele Journal. Please leave any comments there.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conversation

Holy shit.  I just happened to watch “The Conversation” last night (1974).  I hardly ever watch broadcast TV, but it was on in the common room, and I caught the opening scene.  Instantly hooked, I watched one of the best movies I’ve ever seen.

These days, a “conspiracy thriller” would consist of:

1. Hunky or beautiful lead who is clearly on the side of “good,” or thinks he/she is.  Either a weathered, fresh-faced, or beaten-down male, or an impossibly beautiful, strong, and (of course) tough-as-nails female.
2. Constant jeopardy, such as people breaking through high-rise windows with grenades, snipers with laser targeting, etc.
3. Clues would have to be pieced together as the lead is constantly on the run, stopping only for Hollywood Sex.

I’m not saying that stuff isn’t entertaining.  I’ve gone to my fair share of American action movies — and to be fair, the “conspiracy thriller” tends to be a lot more story-driven than normal action movies.  But clearly, there’s a formula that works, and people largely go with it.  Even if a movie is adapted from a book, you can tell it’s usually been Hollywoodized (you know it when you see it.)

But The Conversation is different.

Harry Caul, the main character, isn’t hunky or beautiful, but a neurotic and unfashionable middle-aged professional wiretapper.  He’s not threatened by “bad guys;” his problems are all caused by his own character flaws, and there are many.  The director (Coppola) didn’t rely on the easy trick of hiring a good-looking actor to create sympathy for Harry.

Instead, he worked hard at real character design.  And Coppola went all the way with it.  Harry’s character is carried out all the way through to the extreme, even when it makes him unlikeable and unattractive.  For example:

• Harry is a professional snooper.  The logical extension of this is his constant fear of being bugged, himself, and his inability to trust anyone.  It follows that he is a socially-awkward loner who has trouble with friendships or intimacy.  Here’s the extreme: he wears a plastic raincoat everywhere, even when it’s not raining.
• His professional code is to not get personally or morally involved, but one of his past assignments led to innocent people being killed; naturally, he can’t help but feel guilty, but it doesn’t stop there.  He is a devout Catholic — extreme guilt!  If I were constructing this character, I would shy away from making him Catholic.  It would just seem like “too much.”  But it’s one of the points that makes this character strong — despite his professional code, I find it perfectly believable that Catholic guilt trumps it.
• “Another trait of Harry’s that is brilliantly and economically portrayed through sound is his musicianship. At several points in the movie, Harry puts on a jazz record and plays saxophone accompaniment to it. This is a perfect symbol for his willingness to belong to society and inability to commit to it, fearing that his identity will be compromised if it is revealed. Harry is not strictly composing, he is jamming in the jazz tradition–letting the works of others define himself within a group, and not on his own terms. And yet, he isn’t able to jam with other musicians. The closest he wishes to come to humanity is a recording of it.” (from Walter on Everything2.)

What I learned as an adult fiction writer from The Conversation.

If I’d been constructing this character on paper, I would be tempted to scrap it!  The “character rules” would be much too clear and obvious, not realistic enough.  I’d find myself thinking, “a real person would never do that… it’s not believable… it’s too extreme.”  But of course Harry Caul is not realistic — he’s a character, and characters are tidier and more extreme than real people.  Their motivations are supposed to be much clearer than real people’s motivations.

To me, it seems devicey and trite to say, “Oh, he’s haunted by the past,” but that’s because a Tragic Past usually is a transparent device meant to elicit pity for the character.  In this case, Coppola constructed a believable and traumatic event specifically for Harry — something that was convincingly meaningful for him, rather than a generic sympathy-getting dramatic device (such as a lover’s betrayal or child’s death.)  Not only did it gain the audience’s sympathy for an otherwise-repellent character, it served as a good motivating force for Harry.

Why you may not like to write extreme characters.

I know from experience, it can be disturbing to work with an extreme character.  Personality extremes often make people uncomfortable because they’re out of bounds socially: extreme jealousy, extreme passion, extreme attention to detail, etc.  It can make writers uncomfortable to mentally act out a character with extreme traits.

For adult fiction in particular, the leads are supposed to be attractive.  It may be hard to write an extreme trait because that intensity is often unattractive, at least in real life.  It can make you face hard choices, but usually, that’s what makes stories shine.

Going “all the way” might be exactly what you need to do to make your character memorable, and your story more dramatic.  While Harry Caul is an unrealistic, unlikeable character in real life, he integrated perfectly in Coppola’s story world.

But think about the characters you like and remember.  What’s extreme about them?  I have my own examples, but I’d much rather hear from you.

Originally published at Kat M | Adele Journal. Please leave any comments there.

You know that the raw material of art is life, right?  For this reason, I’ve made sure to get as much diverse life experience as possible.  In my circle of nerds, we call it gaining Life Experience Points.  So, I enrolled in contortion class.  Right, like circus contortion.

The first class was last night.  I took the train, even though I could easily have walked, not knowing how much energy I should save for class.  When I got there, 10 minutes early as is my habit, there was one other student lounging against the wall in black tights and a sparkly tank top with skulls on it.  She looked to be at least half black, with that dark blond hair that is natural, I think, to black/white hybrids.  It was done up in pigtails and left naturally curly.

She would have been cute if she weren’t so sullen.  It wasn’t just that she was playing on her phone the entire time and didn’t even look up in curiosity to see another person coming in — it was just the way she sat and showed no interest in the world around her.  For that reason, I judged her to be more around 20, though she was tall and thin and could have passed for more mature.

I was reminded of Commedia class, or other theater-like activities I partook in during middle school.  We’d show up, put our whiteface on, and get to work.  But even then, we interacted with each other, and as middle-schoolers attracted to the performing arts, we were naturally socially awkward and didn’t know what to say to each other.

The instructor came, a small, curvy Mongolian woman, Oyuna, whose age it was impossible to place, but my guess is around 50.  Apparently, she was a big deal contortionist in Mongolia.  “Only two student? Well, come in, maybe more later.”  I learned that the other girl’s name was Whitney, and she had taken this class before.  After she had us running laps around the springy practice floor, more people did show up.  In fact, the class had 6 people when everyone came, all winter-pale, long-limbed, silent, and dreamy.

The class itself was 90 minutes of stretching (what did I expect?)  All the other women were quite experienced, at least in dance or gymnastics or something else — in comparison, I was “made of wood,” as my teacher would say.  They could all at least come close to doing the splits, but the most stretching I’ve ever done was normal range-of-motion stuff for sports.  And, way back when, for dance — but even then, I was never that flexible. At least I knew how to do stretches.  Oyuna had to correct Whitney several times for not having her legs and arms straightened, for being lazy and unenergized.

What was really odd, though, was how nobody talked to each other.  Everyone was all in their own heads, like bodies happening to occupy the same space.  I’m used to marketers and working musicians, both really social bunches.  Not only are they naturally collaborative activities, but the fields tend to attract people who are naturally interested in other people… sometimes to the extent of being nosy (I totally own that one.)

But this dreamy non-interest was alien.  Was it insecurity?  A complete lack of interest in anyone other than themselves?  Extreme introversion?  No one seemed to know each other, or want to — I doubted that some of these people were strangers, since they all knew the routine.  They’d obviously taken the class before.

The class itself took tremendous concentration, so I wouldn’t expect any chatter during the actual instruction, but no one (besides me and the teacher) even looked at anyone else.  No one even said hello!  No one even smiled, as far as I remember, except one twiggy blond woman who did a back walkover for the first time ever during free practice.  I made eye contact with the instructor just to check if I was doing everything right, in the way that anyone who has taken private lessons with an instructor knows how to do.  I am capable of focusing my eyes and concentrating on my body at the same time, but maybe that’s just martial arts training.

Come to think of it, that may account for some of my feelings of extreme weirdness.  In MA class, we all greeted each other while warming up, unless someone was obviously meditating or sparring.  But awareness of other living bodies, of what’s going on, is essential for MA success.  Otherwise, you get clocked!

But there is more to it than that.  Hopefully, I’ll get some of these dreamy la-la girls to come out of their shells.  Enquiring minds wanna know, since I just don’t get it.  If nothing else, I will ask the teachers later.  They’ll be the most observant about their students and the culture in general.

But it was weird.  In the meantime, I have to “all time practice, ten times every day” so that I will be able to get all the way down in a backbend (assisted.)

Originally published at Kat M | Adele Journal. Please leave any comments there.

I found a picture of you, o-o-oh
Those were the happiest days of my life
Like a break in the battle was your part, o-o-oh
In the wretched life of a lonely heart
- Back on the Chain Gang (Pretenders)

My neighbor is a small, energetic and youthful 70 years old.  A super-mystical Catholic, her “hair turned completely white when A. died.”

Yeah.  That about sums it up.  A.was her younger son — brilliant, creative, eccentric, and pretty good-looking.  Inside her house, there are photos of him as a dark-eyed baby with his father (also dead), with his mom reading to him and his brother at around age 4, and as an adult near the time of his death (25, maybe?)

He killed himself.  He would have been around my age, and we have his disintegrating copy of The Very Hungry Caterpillar.  The inscription reads: “To A, on his beautiful 3rd.”

I look at my son and think, “No way is that happening to me.”  But you just never know.  My neighbor had a great relationship with him, according to her, but he was just… mentally ill.  Or was hiding something that made him loathe himself so much, he chose to die.

I didn’t ask, of course.  According to my dad, she couldn’t talk about A. for a few years after he committed suicide.  I would have liked to have known him.