Definitions: What is Erotica?

[UPDATE: Please also see my reprise blog post “Definitions: Erotica, Erotic Romance, Steamy Romance”]

People frequently make broad assumptions about what it is I write. Friends, family, and acquaintances snicker about my “porn”. Romance writer colleagues imbued with the cadence of traditional romance often bandy about the term “erotica” as if to signal the ugly otherness of erotic romance.

So I will attempt to answer the provocative question What is erotica? and by doing so answer corollary questions about misunderstood erotic-like literary variations: Erotic romance, steamy romance, smut, porn, and Romantica®. Continue reading

Steampunk Inspiration (Part 1): A Naughty Device

Steampunk? A historian writing Steampunk?

I’m used to writing about characters and situations and places that actually existed or could have possibly existed (I mean, c’mon, it is fiction). I’m definitely not used to writing stories that take place in some futuristic pseudo-past where women wear corsets — leather corsets! — on top of their clothes. Besides I know absolutely nothing about science or mechanics (except when I was young and owned a VW Bug).

What’s the old adage? “Write what you know”? When you get right down to it, what on Earth does a librarian-art historian really know about erotica, much less Steampunk erotica? Continue reading

Seven Lines from Book Three

I was tagged in a Twitter-based writers’ exercise called Lucky Seven (or, rather, because it’s Twitter, #luckyseven): Continue reading