I'd love to start a conversation group among other QT'ers who write adult material for adult audiences.
Let me start with some home-grown definitions:
- Pornography is intended to facilitate masturbation. It is essentially the plumbing diagrams of human relations. Think Penthouse Forum.
- Erotica uses descriptions of sexual activity to portray some powerful personal growth or struggle. Think The Story of O, or Little Birds.
- Erotic Romance uses descriptions of sexual activity to further the protagonist's desire for a committed relationship. Think anything by Sylvia Day or Tara Sue Me or tons of others. The former Ellora's Cave publishing house copyrighted the term "Romantica" to describe this.
Any of these are worthy of writing, but the naming may help us get our categories and intentions together. It's not about the words we use, it's about why we're including sexual scenes in the first place.
When I write adult material, I write erotic romance, in which there's a man and a woman who are thrown together by some circumstance, have some extra-relational problem to solve as well, and have to figure out how to support one another and fall in love while doing it. I also write erotica, in which some man uses sexual exploration to address and overcome some other issues of his life (and ultimately falls in love anyway, but that's not why he starts his sexual adventures.) I also write a lot of fiction that isn't sexual at all. As Whitman said, we contain multitudes.
I'd love to see a group come together to discuss common writing problems and query tactics, and to share favorites. I'll start with the favorites question: a very quiet little book by the poet Jennifer Tseng called
Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness, which has very little explicit sex (but explicit indeed when it's there). It's a story about an early-40s librarian and her affair with a 17-year-old boy, a brilliant story of desire and confusion and loss. It falls within my grouping of erotica: it's about Mayumi's search for something greater than she currently knows. She understands that the boy will soon enough go off to college, and to college girls. She doesn't want to have a permanent relationship with him. But she does love him, and she loves who she is when she's with him.
So welcome aboard, and let's see what we can create.