“Own it when you bone it.” – Me, I don’t know what I’m ever talking about.
Let me back the truck up, beep beep, from my title and say that this cute listicle is not really about sex acts I don’t like to see in erotica. If the writing is strong enough, you should be able to get off to all sorts of horrific stuff. This is more or less a list of complaints I have with the quality of writing. Self-publishing is hard, proofreading your own work is hard, I know. Sometimes I buy myself like five whiskeys, simultaneously, when I think about having to edit my own work.
Make it easier for yourself: don’t do the following four things.
#1 The Hair/Eye Color Trap
I go downright nuts and break every stick of furniture in my house when authors only give us the hair and eye color of their main characters, and then just expect is to call that characterization. “She had ice blue eyes and chestnut hair” is just not enough to create an image in my mind. Is she a mannequin head? Does she have a Pinocchio nose that sticks out ten feet past her face? I want to know other things, like about her favorite genre of movie, the food she loves best… pretty much anything that makes her a person, and not a combination of two colors that says nothing about who she is.
#2 Exclamation Mark Overdose
Unless the character says something which requires an emphasis, there is no damn reason to use exclamation marks in your erotica like a 7-year-old describing their dog Sparky. “Gee wiz! Sparky loves to eat!” It just makes the writing seem deranged, somehow. And I cough up a hairball every time I see it.
#3 Cheesy Set Up
The beautiful thing about erotica is that you are creating a porn with no budget, just your fingers. You can have your characters say or do anything, and it won’t come across as “bad acting” in the mind of your readers. So why does everyone revert to the bad acting, bad lighting, uninspired set up of porn? A pizza man with a delivery, a repairman with a bunch of muscles, etc. The world is your oyster! Get weird! Porn doesn’t have the budget that you do to create a lavish fictional set up.
#4 Crap Dialogue
I’ve seen it all. The grunts. The promises to cum. The oohs and aahs. Here is the nice thing about erotica that doesn’t happen in porn or real life: no one is embarrassed to say filthy stuff unless you write it that way. So get creative! They don’t have to sound like the porn star you heard last week whose only catch phrase is “yah baby yah.”
“If you do any of these four things…will you get into heaven?” –Me
That’s all for now, my dears. I am about to go get myself a nice stiff drink and think a little more about how much I hate exclamation marks.
Mintie Price 