Web Woes & Thoughts on *Fiction*

So for about three to four hours this morning my site was down due to a Word Press Plugin php error. It took me this long to actually get ahold of my hosting company to get access to upload the corrected php file. Believe it or not – it was an if () statement (someone forgot the 1) that screwed it up! Good Gods! Amazing how the omission of a single number can take down an entire website. Crazy stuff.

Now onto some other stuff.

My sister and I were having a conversation this morning at which time critics came up. We began discussing how in erotica, there are some readers out there who want definitive realism in their stories. They don’t want fantasy and they don’t want fiction. There’s only one problem with that from my perspective as a writer. I’m one of those writers who writes fiction that always contains fantastical elements. Heck – look at my novels in other-than-erotica genres and you’ll see a great deal of fantasy. I tend to take liberties. I know a lot of writers who do the same thing. Some readers really don’t like this. I have had a reader or two tell me,  “Real BDSM relationships aren’t like XYZ.”

I don’t know – I disagree. What is real? I know – it’s a metaphysical response. But really – what’s real and “right” with regard to something as personal as a relationship is often based on our own limited POV based on our personal experiences and the subjective reality those experiences create. I, for example, would never date a guy who didn’t have a playful side or a good sense of humor. Hence you’ll see those traits in most of my male protagonists. I also don’t write helpless, hopeless protagonist women. Each writer often draws from his/her own experience.

The other laughable thing I have heard people say about erotica, “These sex scenes are contrived!”  Umm, yeah – they were because the author made them up. Of course they were contrived. All fiction is contrived. Now if by contrived you mean forced, admittedly every author has a first. There is a learning curve and I don’t think any author should apologize for it. I admit fully that I was uncomfortable writing sex scenes once-upon-a-time. I imagine there are other writers who had to work into it, too.  All I can do is try to make future books better than their predecessors.  That’s all any author can do, really.  I imagine a lot of erotica authors started out with a clunky sex scene or two. Something “contrived”.

I guess my point is that if a reader wants reality – they should read non-fiction. If they want fiction – they should read fiction. It’s called fiction for a reason.  🙂

Oh – and the defintion of fiction, just in case no one believes me, is : something feigned, invented, or imagined; a made-up story or the class of literature comprising works of imaginative narration, especially in prose form. (from dictionary.com)