Image: “We have it rich.” Washing and panning gold, Rockerville, Dak., John C. H. Grabill [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Is anything ever truly original? Have we already explored every unique avenue, theme and possibility when it comes to creative content? In art? In writing?

I believe that someone who is inherently creative will always manage to show us something new. Will demand that we look at things in a different way or engage us in a manner we never expected. Which is why I think the self-publishing movement is so important: not only does it give writers permission to take risks – those that a traditional publishing house would deem unacceptable – it also allows them to explore themes that may not be in vogue or are ‘off brand’.

Self-publishing gives writers who would otherwise have been marginalised the opportunity to be noticed. To have a voice. To be heard. Often, it is those on the fringes who have the most important and interesting things to tell us.

However, all that said, I am beginning to notice a somewhat frustrating and interesting irony: the very vehicle responsible for giving us exciting and innovative reading material is also responsible for giving us a load of same old, same old. A plethora of stories that stay well within the tracks of those that have gone before them, break no new ground whatsoever, and look like they’ve been edited in crayon by my eight-year-old. For the purposes of this post, I’m going to call this phenomenon ‘theme flood’. (Aquatic references ahoy-hoy!)

So what do I mean by this, exactly?

Well, basically that there’s an increasing deluge of stories in the erotic romance genre based around the same themes, the same types of characters, the same plot structures. To the point that I’m finding it increasingly difficult to identify books that I want to write reviews for. Why would I want to push you all towards a story you’ve already read, albeit in a slightly different guise, a billion times before? One that’s poorly written and edited at that?

I read constantly, although I’d estimate that about five percent of the books I actually consume make it onto Chintz. Quite simply, I don’t tend to write reviews for novels I don’t like. At least, not unless they really (really) tick me off in some way and I can’t contain my angst. But even that five percent has been squeezed over the past year as I struggle to find variety and diversity. One of the negatives of self-publishing, I am discovering, is its ability to push onto the market a veritable tsunami of books that regurgitate, again and again, a raft of flavour-of-the-month themes. Something starts to sell well, garners a few five-star reviews and everyone’s on the proverbial bandwagon. I get that writing is a job just like any other and that people are publishing to make money. And that self-publishing means that anyone – anyone – can get their book out there. I do. But I really, really wish there was some way of better filtering content so that the gold can be extracted from the dross.

Am I being whiny? Yeah. But at the time of writing there seems to be absolutely no escaping erotic romance books that revolve around the following themes and it’s driving me nucking futts:

• Bikers (everyone wants a bit literary Jax Teller);
• Tattooists (buttoned-up businessmen, ala Christian Grey, are out; inked-up boys with street cred are in)
• Mixed martial arts (MMA) fighters (can’t decide whether Warrior or Fighting is to blame)
• College girls going on holiday and getting kidnapped by a human trafficking ring (stories attempting – and badly – to emulate dark erotica fare such as Comfort Food and Captive in the Dark)
• Rock stars (especially those behaving like Guns ‘n’ Roses did back in the 90s)
• Angsty male leads who’re mindlessly screwing everything on two legs (of the female variety at least), have anger management problems, and are coping with some sort of personal tragedy. Enter saving grace female lead. (This theme pretty much accounts for everything in the load of bollocks ‘New Adult’ category that seems to be creepily infecting online bookstore after online bookstore. It’s the literary equivalent of a bloody chlamydia epidemic).

Whereas twelve months ago I would have taken a punt on a book based on its blurb and reviews, the ‘download sample’ and ‘excerpt’ functions have now become indispensible in relation to my eBook purchases. That one chapter – thank God – has been instrumental in preventing me from spending my cash on literary mediocrity. If you’re not using these features – and, thankfully, a number of eTailers offer them – you should be.

Romance novels and erotic stories are often described as formulaic by those who turn their noses up at such ‘low brow fare’: a love story is just a love story and sex is just sex; no real meat – boy meets girl, Part A slots into Part B, right? Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Authors writing in these categories break new ground and push boundaries in exactly the same way that writers in other genres do. And it is my sincere hope that as the self-publishing market matures, we’re better able to identify the writers and the stories that are doing so.

If you’re a writer reading this? I implore you: go where no man hath gone before. I – and a lot of other readers out there – will love you for it. (Just make sure you use a copy editor.)

The post Gold and Dross, A.K.A. more and more (and more) of the same appeared first on Behind the Chintz Curtain.

Title:

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I used to work in the videogame industry. I won’t go into detail, but suffice to say, when At Any Price (Gaming the System) came to my attention earlier in the week via a link in this post by Skye Warren, I was immediately intrigued. My mind began to whir. Was the heroine going to get ‘serviced’ next to the servers? Would the hero decide to ‘review her build’ during the daily Scrum meeting? In my experience, game dev. is a whole load of (stressful) fun, but calling it sexy would be … a stretch, to say the least. Unless you count listening to hundreds of emote .wav files to make sure they don’t sound unintentionally orgasmic, getting shot (repeatedly) with Nerf guns when you tell the dev. team they need to fix a bug the night before manufacturer submission, asking the rigger to make a character’s boobs smaller, and informing the lead artist that the creature he’s spent the last few days concepting needs to look ‘less penis-like’.

However, it turns out that the videogame backdrop for At Any Price (the first in a series of three books by author Brenna Aubrey) is more peripheral than integral, despite the references to patches, servers and avatars. It’s true that Adam, the hero, can code like a god (apparently, he’s the Zeus of C++) but it’s his addiction to his mobile and laptop, rather than his association with MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing) game development, that ultimately define him in Ms Aubrey’s story.

It all starts with an online auction. Gamer girl and blogger, Mia Strong, from whose point-of-view At Any Price is told, is strapped for cash; her mother is recovering from cancer and, thanks to a bunch of medical bills, about to lose her house. Mia herself is struggling to foot her college tuition. What’s a girl to do? Well, if you’re her, you decide, in a rather Catarina Migliorini-meets-Belle de Jour move, to wave your middle finger at the social stigmas surrounding prostitution and sell your virginity online.

 I’ve decided to decry the crimes and impositions put upon my sisters since the beginning of time until now. And I offer, therefore, a new paradigm. One where a woman can sell her purity and enjoy the fruits thereof.

I’m not spoiling the story by revealing that Adam Drake, CEO of Draco Multimedia Entertainment, is the guy who wins the right to deflower Mia. But despite a raft of contractual clauses pertaining to said deflowering, things go a bit … awry.

Hands up, I was more than a little worried that our leading man might turn out to be yet another carbon copy of the dreadful Christian Grey (beware the millionaire with the contract), but, thankfully, he managed to dodge the Fifty Shades of Gaming bullet. So how best to describe Mr Drake, then? What sort of man pays three-quarters-of-a-million for some skin and blood? At the risk of revealing myself as a complete geek, one who is Alpha in both the traditional (me Tarzan, you Jane) and gaming (fully functional but his assets need work) senses of the word.

Mia? She, too, is very much a work in progress – not without her bugs and, like Adam, in possession of an emotional and social codebase that needs a whole lot of finishing.

At Any Price raises some interesting and difficult questions. If you sell yourself for money, just the once, are you a prostitute? Will society continue, as it has done for hundreds of years, to see prostitution in the negative and malign those who engage in it? Independent Institute research fellow, Wendy McElroy’s words seem particularly appropriate in this instance:

“Prostitution is not merely an exchange of sexual favors; it is a financial exchange. At this point, individualist feminists rise to defend the free market as well as a woman’s self-ownership. This is expressed by the question: ‘Prostitution is a combination of sex and the free market. Which one are you against?’”

Of course, I couldn’t help but jokingly accuse a bunch of ex-colleagues of writing At Any Price under a pen name, which lead to some hilarious back-and-forth about whether the hero performed at ‘a consistent 60fps per second’, if he ‘qualified as a Class A’ (for the non-nerds amongst you, that’s the worst type of bug you can get during development and, generally means that no one is getting any sleep for the foreseeable future) and this extremely witty parody from a good friend of mine who is married to an Executive Producer:

“As his fingers pumped the buttons of the controller her thoughts turned to what else those dexterous digits could do… the washing up, putting that picture on the wall that’s been lying around for 6 months, clearing out the garage. #reallifeofagamerswife”

Sexually speaking, At Any Price is relatively tame. But the story is more than interesting enough to carry things along. Some readers may find the coitus interruptus aspect a bit frustrating, but the good news is that although this book is the first of three about Mia and Adam, there’s no make-you-want-to-tear-your-hair-out cliff-hanger.

Tickle your fancy? Click on the following links to purchase a copy.

Amazon.co.uk

• At Any Price (Gaming the System) – Kindle
• At Any Price (Gaming the System) – Paperback

Amazon.com

• At Any Price (Gaming the System) – Kindle
• At Any Price (Gaming the System) – Paperback

*Apologies for the lack of stick figures in this one, troops. My black ink pen has run dry and I’ve yet to buy a new one!

The post At Any Price (Gaming the System) – Brenna Aubrey appeared first on Behind the Chintz Curtain.

Like Lazarus rising from the dead (although granted, in this case, the resurrection has taken a lot longer than four days), I’m finally (finally!) back on the laptop and twitching the florals. Woot! It’s been pretty damn frustrating not being able to blog and ramble as normal but I suspect it’s been far more so for those of you who’ve continued to visit Chintz over the past two-and-a-half months in the hope of finding a new post. So inappropriate hugs and kisses to everyone who’s stuck with me and offered their support as I’ve moved from one side of the world to the other; it’s been a long slog but at long last I have a reliable Internet connection and an actual house to live in. Largess.

I’ve decided to kick off my new (albeit slightly delayed) blogging year with an Alert Me. Given that I’ve been offline so much recently, it feels like there are about a billion news stories and articles that have passed me by, so in a lot of ways this round-up is as much for me as it is for you. Enjoy.

In Which I Explain Why I Turned Down a Three-book New York Print Deal to Self-publish
Source: Brenna Aubrey (via One Handed Writers)

This piece by Brenna Aubrey makes for fascinating reading. If you’re a self-published or aspiring author, then I strongly encourage you to swing by her Website and cast a beady eye over it. Not least because it gives an excellent breakdown of some key contractual clauses that writers will come across when presented with book deals drawn up by traditional publishers. Pay careful attention, people, to the Non Compete clause. This is a bloody important bit of legal jargon. And can I add that any new author who has the guts and strength of character to turn down a six-figure deal in order to stay true to her own personal writing goals and aspirations has my undying admiration. On the strength of this post of Brenna’s, I’ve now downloaded the book in question, At Any Price (Gaming The System). I’ll let you know how I get on with it; stick figures may be on the horizon.

SexBytes
Source: SexBytes

If you’ve not yet subscribed to SexBytes, you really do need to sign yourself up. Attached to e[Lust], this handy little site pulls together all sorts of sex-related posts and articles and files them in once place so that they’re easy for you to find and peruse. These past few weeks, there have been some truly excellent entries, including Skye Warren’s article, Why Can’t an Author Make a Living Wage?, Why I Post Nude Photos (and Why I Blog About Sex) (an exceptionally thoughtful and eloquent piece on sex blogging, by Penny’s Dirty Thoughts), and Ready, Normal People? (an on-the-money article examining the U.K.’s current Internet censorship crisis courtesy of Sephy Hallow).

‘Normal Sex’ Is Becoming More Popular Among Women: Fifty Shades Of Regular?
Source: Medical Daily 

I’ve included this article because it ruffled my feathers to such an extent that small tendrils of steam came out of my ears. I was willing to forgive the use of the term ‘normal sex’ in the title (what the hell is ‘normal sex’, anyway?) because it was enclosed in quotation marks and thus had some self-awareness. But then I came upon this delightful paragraph:

‘Two summers ago, women were glued to Fifty Shades of Grey, and the novel had women asking their partners to explore unchartered sexual fantasies. Many claimed that the racy BDSM novels helped them to explore their sexuality and be more open with what they desired from their partners. Others just called it “mommy porn.” There was also a speculation that the racy novels would cause a baby boom, according to Digital Spy. However, according to a recent survey, many women are more inclined to revert back to “vanilla sex,” or, in other words, they are ready to hang up their whips and put away their handcuffs; women are craving intimacy.’

It’s that last phrase that really bothered (and continues to bother) me. What, there’s no intimacy in BDSM? Let me tell you, when you truly submit to someone, when the very core of you is laid out and vulnerable, when you’ve had all your secrets, wants, needs and desires pulled out of your head and held in the palm of someone else’s hand, there’s a level of closeness that I cannot begin to articulate. I am not for one minute saying that there is anything wrong with ‘vanilla’ sex – or that it is less intimate than BDSM sex (albeit in a very different way) but I am saying that words like ‘normal’, ‘intimacy’, ‘security’ and ‘love’ are as applicable to those who engage in ‘kinky’ sex as those who don’t.

Happy belated New Year, everyone.

The post Alert Me: Back from the dead, turning down publisher deals, and tasty little SexByte morsels appeared first on Behind the Chintz Curtain.