I just put the finishing touches to a story.  Then I attached it to a query letter and kissed it goodbye.  Wishing it good luck as it wended its way through cyberspace.  I hope that it doesn’t suffer too much at the other end under the harsh sting of the editor’s red pen.   

Now I need a new project to pour my creative juices into.  I present below the starting paragraphs of two different stories.  I would welcome comments on which, if either, is worth pursuing to its climax.

1 – Mistress

One Mississippi.  Two Mississippi.  Three Mississippi.

The World Record for holding your breath is somewhere up around 20 minutes. 

Twelve Mississippi.  Thirteen Mississippi. 

That guy is a freak though, both mentally and physically.

Twenty One Mississippi.  Twenty Two Mississippi. 

When I was at nursing school, we were taught the rule of threes.  The average person is in serious trouble if they are deprived of food for three months, water for three days or air for three minutes.

Thirty Eight Mississippi.  Thirty Nine Mississippi.

For the man in the street, two minutes starts to be dangerous.  Even one minute feels pretty darn stressful. 

Forty Six Mississippi.  Forty Seven Mississippi.

Just give it a go now.  Hold your breath and count seconds.  How long until it starts to get uncomfortable?  How long until you lungs are burning and your face feels like it is turning purple?  How long until you think your eyes might pop out of your head?

Fifty Mississippi.  Fifty One Mississippi

Now imagine that someone else is holding your breath for you; exerting power over your very existence.  Imagine that you have no idea when, or even if, they are going to let you inhale again. 

Fifty Seven Mississippi.

Wouldn’t that be a mind fuck!

Fifty Nine Mississippi.

On ‘Sixty Mississippi’, I ease the long, pliable strap-on out of the bound man’s throat.   He gasps and coughs then sucks in great gulps of air.  I give him 6 good, big, deep breaths and then force the plastic dick back past his tonsils once more.   One Mississippi. It’s a hard job but somebody has to do it. 

2 – Hunting Moby Dick

Call me Lucy.  Not ‘Loo Seat’ like my big brother still does on occasion or ‘Loose-y’ like some of the girls at Uni used to; although they did have a bit of a point there to be honest with you.  In a way, yes, I am hunting for my very own Moby Dick.  I don’t mean a real dick, they aren’t that difficult to come by, even big white ones.  My Moby Dick is a giant elusive orgasm.  It’s not that I’ve never had one, I’ve had thousands, but, to extend the metaphor, they were all ordinary workaday climaxes, your Humpbacks and your Southern Rights.  Just occasionally though, I have caught sight of something much bigger.  In the oceans of my sexual pleasure I have glimpsed, from time to time, a fleeting fluke or flipper, a dark shadow in the distance that hints at a real whopper if I could just chase it down.

I remember when my quest began, several years ago now, with the first time I hunted and harpooned a big O.  I came to fuzzy consciousness one morning, a half forgotten dream of naked flesh in my mind, a butterfly feeling in my stomach and a wet line in my knickers.  I was pretty sure that I had just cum in my sleep.  I thought it was only boys who did that, but apparently they don’t have a monopoly on the wet dream.  So I determined that if it should happen again I would wake myself up and experience it fully.  It is for this reason that I remember, so very well, the dream that I had the following night.

I was a cheerleader for my school’s rugby team.  I knew straight away that this was a dream because; a) my school didn’t have cheerleaders and b) if they did then I am pretty sure that I wouldn’t have been on the squad.  My team had lost and honour dictated that the cheerleaders from the losing school had to sexually satisfy the winning team.  There were five of us on the squad and we entered the victorious team’s changing rooms with a mixture of fear, excitement and determination.  Inside, twenty or so semi-naked men waited.  Of course they included all my favourite crushes of the day.  They were sweaty, well-muscled and riding the testosterone high of the victorious gladiator.  The five of us did a quick choreographed cheer.  ‘You beat our side with daring toil.  To the victors go the spoils’.  (Like I said, if we had had cheerleaders, I wouldn’t have made the squad).  The words were accompanied by shaking pom-poms, cancan kicks that flashed naked pussies and ended with us bending over and flipping up our short, little skirts to reveal pert, bare asses.  After that it was on.

So this post is somewhat delayed, but I just wanted to update you on the sales figures for Yes Boss in April.  This represents my first full month of sales. If you have read my previous post, you will know that March’s figures were not too stellar making me only $4 of commission.  I have adjusted my expectations accordingly.  My first goal for April, is to make more than March, My second is to total $15 because that is about £10 which means that I will actually get paid (no money is transferred until the author is owed at least that much).  My third goal is to make $1,000,000 and retire.  A girl’s gotta dream.

So

Drumroll….

Total sales for April were – £7.51.

So my commission was £3.75 or about $6.

Goal 1 achieved goal’s 2 and 3 still outstanding.

Xcite is selling Yes Boss for 65p a time so, bizarrely I sold 11.5 copies in April bringing the grand total to 18.8. I don’t think I have told that many of my friends about my extracurricular activities so it is fairly likely that someone I have never met has actually paid real money to read one of my stories.  That is pretty amazing stuff.  I just need to persuade 3,076,904.2 more people to do the same and I will be home free!

I had a disagreement with my first reader today.  She is the person I trust to read my stories before they are fully polished and ready for publication.  She tells me if they are engaging fantasy material or stinkers fit only for filing in the big circular file under my desk.  In a way it was a thumbs-up for the story.  My reader became so engaged with the narrative that, when the plot took a turn which she did not agree with, she felt ‘violated’ by it ‘and not in a good way’.  After some discussion, I agreed to a rewrite but I am interested in canvassing a few second opinions.  Here is a brief outline of the plot followed by six possible endings.  I would like to hear comments / opinions / votes from you guys as to which way you would like the story to end.

Catherine is a maiden in a far-off fantasy land.  She is picking blackberries one morning so that she can impress her fiancé, Rowan with her culinary skills.  But today is the day of the dragon dance – the dragon mating ritual.  Dragon mating takes place at midday because they are massive show-offs.  Any humans who witness the spectacle will immediately cast off their inhibitions and rut like bunnies.  Catherine comes from a strict puritanical background.  In her village they worship the Blessed Virgin who supposedly once witnessed the dragon dance but manifested a saintly level of self-control and remained chaste.  All the villagers will be safely locked in the church at midday on the day of the dragon dance.

Catherine is daydreaming about her wedding night which is only a few months away and, wouldn’t you just know it, stays out too long.  She sees a pair of dragons going at it and is overcome with lust.  Catherine runs, naked, towards her village looking for someone to bunny-rut with.  On the way, she meets her rescue party.  There are three of them, the idea being that they can chaperone each other.  The priest is picked for his piety, the blacksmith for his fortitude and her fiancé because he wouldn’t trust the job to anyone else.

So, what happens?  Here are some options to choose from.

A – They drag her bodily back to the church where they exorcise the lust-madness through prayer.

B – Catherine overcomes Rowan with her animal passion but fortunately, the priest has time to marry them in a brief open-air service before the two newly-weds go at it in a sinless union.

C – Catherine overcomes Rowan with her animal passion. He disables the blacksmith, the priest flees to preserve his piety and the two horny youngsters have hot, sinful, premarital sex.

D – Catherine overcomes Rowan and the blacksmith with her animal passion.  The priest flees to preserve his piety. Catherine satisfies both men in a surprising display of sexual athletics for a young virgin from a sheltered upbringing.

E – Catherine overcomes Rowan and the blacksmith with her animal passion.  The priest lies catatonic on the floor. During the ensuing rut-fest, she rides him as well because she just can’t get enough.

F – They drag her bodily back to the church where they try to exorcise the lust-madness through prayer. They fail and the whole church is consumed in a massive count-the-feet-and-divide-by-two orgy.

Comment / vote below for your favourite ending.

I have read up a bit on how to promote myself and my book. Maybe I will be able to bust through the £10 barrier this month. £10 is an important milestone because Xcite don’t write cheques for anything less so you have to amass ten whole pounds of royalties before you get paid anything. If it was a real cheque I would frame it so that I could sell it for a large sum when I am a household name but unfortunately, it is just a bank transfer. Top of my shopping list at the moment is chocolate.

To ensure that I reach this stretching sales target, which is equivalent to 30.8 copies or 23.5 extra on top of what I sold in March, I have developed the following action list:-

1 – Start a blog –

2 – Get some more books published.

Bullet point two has a number of sub-actions which I will probably go into in more detail in a separate post.

In my budding career as an erotic author, I have been lucky enough to hit the ball on pretty much my first swing (check out Yes Boss on Xcite), whether it is a home run or just trickles to a halt a couple of yards from my feet, remains to be seen. Here is a diary of how it happened.

Mid Jan – It has been in the back of my mind to take the stories that I have already written and make some money out of them somehow. A girlfriend of mine tells me that she is enjoying one of the Cocktales books.

http://www.xcitebooks.com/Book/1207/6111/All-Night-Long.html

I go online to find out who the publisher is. This turns out to be a little outfit called Xcite books. After reading and rereading their Write for Xcite page, I think that I might have some material that they can use, I also note that they pay 50% of their ebook royalties directly to the author.  I can practically hear the sound of rustling bank notes.

26th Jan – I sign up for, download and read all the free content that I can from Xcite plus a few other similar outfits to get a feel for the standard of writing and the type of subject matter that they want. I am not too intimidated. In fact, in my own humble opinion, my stories are at least that good if not better. I do have a few problems though.

Most of my stories are really just scenes rather than stories in that they cover a single sexual encounter. This means that they are too short for submission to Xcite. Also, according to the Xcite guidelines, I need to put in more plot and motivation for my characters. Mostly, my characters enjoy the sex so much that it is its own motivation!  Xcite would like a bit more depth to their thinking. The story of mine that seems closest to their requirements is about a naughty secretary and her after-hours encounter with one of the suits. Its biggest problem is that it is written from the man’s point of view and Xcite prefers a woman’s perspective. I decide to rewrite it from the woman’s POV. This will give me the opportunity to put in a bit more thinking, no offense to any men reading this .

Over the course of two long evenings, I take my 4,300 Male POV story and re-jig it to nearly 6,000 words of female POV story. Then I cut it back to 5,000 to be within the Xcite short story guidelines of 3,500 to 5,000.

29th Jan –I send off my manuscripts. Manuscripts plural as I decide to send both the Male and Female POV. I am hedging my bets but I also think that the contrast is interesting.

The title, rather pretentiously, is ‘Misuse of Company Resources’. I have edited it until I am bored. I have reformatted it with the appropriate font and line spacing. I have included all the relevant info in an email and written a short promotional blurb. I cross my fingers and hit the ‘Send’ button.

Then 5 minutes later I do it again but this time with the actual documents attached.

30th Jan – Begin waiting.

31st Jan – Bored of waiting. Begin researching how much money I am going to make.

1st Feb – Rather disheartened to discover that my chances of getting published are rather less than 1% and even if that happens then my chances of getting rich are still pretty minimal. I stop writing the resignation letter that I have been working on.

14th Feb – I get an email back from an Editor at Xcite. Just seeing it in my inbox gives me a completely out of proportion chill of excitement. It is very prompt on her part, but 2 weeks has been long enough to dampen my original high hopes somewhat. I am expecting a standard rejection letter such as the one’s Stephen King used to keep on a spike by his desk before he got his first break.

I scan her email so fast that the words are a blur. Fortunately, she is clear and direct in her writing and I spot the important bit straight away. There it is, on the third line, we would like to buy it. My heart leaps into my throat. I read the email again at something slightly less than superhuman speed, and then again at nearly normal speed. It’s true, I have sold a story. I am actually giddy.

I want to run up and down the cubicle farm corridors high fiving and cart wheeling. I just about manage to restrain myself and finish the day without whooping out loud but I do get the resignation letter back out and redraft it a few times whilst daydreaming about selling the film rights.

16th Feb – I get another email from my editor. My editor, I love saying that. I was so excited yesterday that I sent her a long gushing mail answering her questions and asking many of my own. I wanted to know how she liked the male POV and the contrast between the two voices.  What it was that made her say yes. What I should write next and many more. When it turns out that she didn’t even read the male POV all the way through I am somewhat deflated.

Once I think about it though, I understand a bit more about how this works.  She probably has a stack of 100 submitted stories on her desk. She reads my first one and it is good enough. Tick. She starts in on the second one, once she realises that it has the same plot as the first, she knows that she isn’t going to buy them both. Xcite caters mostly to women so the female POV is the winner. Decision made, no more effort required, stop reading. Then she is on to the next story in a stack that is now only 98 high. Except 3 more submissions just came in so there are actually 101 in the pile and she needs to get a wiggle on.

I realise that editors are very busy people who don’t have time to mentor, spoon-feed or coddle their neurotic authors. The corollary to this is that we authors have to be self-sufficient or at least find support personnel who will work for free.

17th Feb – To be fair, my editor does point me at a few things that I need to polish up like the blurb which I completely rewrite although I think I still need some practice on that front. She also helps me with the title which goes from the pretentious Misuse of Company Resources to the much punchier Yes Boss. I also get an e-contract from Accent Press which I e-sign and return.

It all feels very official now.

20th Feb – I get the edited and typeset copy of Yes Boss from my editor. Gee, she works fast.

It looks very different from my original. There are a lot of formatting and punctuation changes, some to correct my mistakes but mostly to conform to house style. It is all very professional. But then, very soon I will get a royalty cheque (I’ll buy a copy myself if I have to) and I too will be a paid professional author. Is it bad that Word had to autocorrect me when I misspelt professional just then?

21st Feb – I send back my final changes to the manuscript, which are minimal, and that is it. It is finished and ready to go. It is too late to make it better. That night I dream about ways to improve my clunky writing; a better adjective here, a judicious cut there. Was I too repetitive with my verbs or did I stretch my readers ability to suspend disbelief with too much referring to my Thesaurus. Did I explain everything and get all my ideas across or did I overburden it with too much description?

Note to budding authors; make sure it is perfect before sending it out there because there is no getting it back.

27th Feb – My editor sends me my author’s copy. There is a hot young, dishevelled blond on the cover. I always pictured Debs as a brunette as well as a bit older and more buxom. But I reckon this young ingénue may sell a few copies so that is OK. Seeing my little tale presented as a proper book for the first time is an unexpectedly large thrill. I am a bona fide author.

I start making a shopping list of things to spend my first royalty cheque on.

8th Mar – Go live date. The book is now available on Xcite for the bargain price of 65 new British pence. Of this, I will receive half, or 32.5p. I want to email my whole contacts list and make them all buy one but I restrict myself to a trusted few, the ones I don’t mind telling that I am a pornographer.

This list does not include my Mum.

7th Apr – My good friend Nicky tells me that she has seen Yes Boss on the Barnes and Noble site! Wow I have hit the big time. I Google myself and discover that I am available on:

• FeedBooks
• Borders
• BookStrand
• BarnesAndNoble
• Diesel-ebooks
• KoboBooks
• BookDepository
• AngusRobertson
• And of course Xcite.

I am going to be rich. Rich, rich, rich!

30th Apr – My first royalty statement arrives. My sales for March are.

Drum roll please.

£4.75.

So my half is £2.37.

That is about $4. Or €3 Euros.

I may have to rethink my shopping list.

Interestingly, at 65p per copy that means that I have sold 7.3 copies. I wonder who bought the 0.3.

That leaves only 3076915.7 copies to sell before I am a millionaire. Maybe April’s numbers will be better.

Don’t you just hate it when you see those warnings on TV that say ‘This show may contain sex scenes.’

May, that’s no good to me, I want to know for sure, will it or won’t it contain sex scenes, and exactly how explicit will those scenes be.

If you have read my first blog entry, About Me, then you will know that this is a blog about erotic fiction. If not, be warned, there will be sex scenes. Plus bad words, naughty images, adult themes, inappropriate ideas and generally grown up stuff. It will all be very tastefully done though, of course.

Hi, my name is Samantha. I work in a standard office job, albeit at a reasonably ‘executive’ level.  I don’t exactly live for the 9 to 5 though. I would love to be able to make a living doing something more fun. So I recently hit upon the idea of writing erotic stories. In fact I had already written a few erotic stories, the idea that I truly hit upon was to try and make the odd dollar by selling them.

This was a few months ago, before I had even heard of ‘50 Shades of Grey’ but now that old E.L. has beaten me to the punch I figure that I should try to ride her petticoat tails as much as possible. Consequently, I am intending to put some serious hours into writing, editing, crafting and peddling my smut over the next few months. This blog will offer insights into that process.  Plus the odd free thrill.

To be honestly dishonest, Samantha is, in fact, an alias (No you don’t say!). I use it to protect my job which is in a fairly high profile firm. I am sure that the suits at the top of the building would frown on my burgeoning career as a verbal pornographer although that would be hypocritical of the damn lot of them. Its only sex for smut’s sake.