Two writers start a great new erotic novel. Not a stroke story or wank material.
-
This is why few sex stories have everything you want and there are only a handful of great collaborations.
-
My laptop made a ‘ding’ as I received a message from ‘Authorwench’. She was my favorite writer, other than myself. “Hi again, Limnophile. I enjoyed your latest story quite a bit. We should collaborate. I think we could do something truly great together!”
I smiled and excitedly replied, “I’d love to write something with you! What kind of story should it be?”
I got up to get a snack and returned to see, “Mind control, incest, and BDSM are very popular these days; and many readers have other fetishes. There are a lot of LGBTQ+ people too. I think we should include everything we can, so lots of readers will enjoy it.”
I responded, “That makes sense. To include most of the common fetishes we’ll need at least 18 or 20 characters. What format and point of view do you think we should we use?”
“Multiple POV is getting more popular these days. I think we should tell at least five chapters from each character’s viewpoint. A lot of readers complain if chapters are short, too. I think we should do at least 20 pages per chapter.”
“Hmmm… if we do a hundred chapters with twenty pages each, that’s two thousand pages. With my family and job, I only have time to write or edit two or three pages a day. If you include editing time, that will take us over five years. Do you want to publish chapters once we finish them, or write three or five chapters in advance so we have time to catch continuity errors and plot holes?”
Authorwench answered, “It’s better to be safe than sorry. How about we publish once the whole story is complete and we’ve gone over it several times to make sure there are no mistakes?”
I sighed and replied, “That makes sense, but I must admit I’m a bit of a ‘score whore’. I like getting feedback on my writing. Waiting five years for a ‘good story’ or ‘more please’ would be difficult for me. Another concern is having a backstory and family for each character. Assuming an average family size of five people, we’ll need to create about a hundred characters instead of just the 20 or so main ones.”
“Well, there are other problems with including families too. All the characters need to be plausible with some depth, not one-dimensional. We should write at least five pages about each of them. I know you really enjoy whips and spanking in your stories, but I’m not into that. I hope you don’t mind if I include some pee and scat scenes?”
I shrugged and wrote, “You like potty play a lot, but it kind of grosses me out. How about we avoid bathroom play and pain scenes, so we’ll both enjoy writing it?”
“I guess. There’s also the big worry about law enforcement and website editors. They’re very alert and suspicious if there’s even a tiny chance something might be underage content. We better be very careful about ages. I don’t want to risk including any characters under 21.”
I typed back, “Absolutely! I had a story rejected for ‘underage content’ just because a character mentioned playing football a decade earlier when he was in high school! Another one was kicked back because a female character saw a size 12 dress! They’re ridiculously touchy these days, so we need to be very careful.”
“You’re right about that! I liked some stuff written by a guy Frankie, but he got five years in prison just for stories he dreamed up and typed! There was no video, no pictures, and nobody under thirty was involved in writing it!”
“I want to be sure our story will be published, and without us getting in trouble. The problem is, if the youngest offspring are 21 the main character parents need to be at least 43, since we can’t imply they had sex before they were 21 either. I don’t know how we’re going to write exciting scenes if everyone involved is mid-forties and older.”
“There’s also the issue with fetish-shaming and some readers being overly ‘squicky’. Some homophobic men leave nasty comments if they see a bisexual male or gay scene. Many others quit reading if there’s toilet play, incest, smoking, pain, drugs, bondage, or anything non-consensual. Half of them don’t look at the story tags and get upset when they’re surprised by something they don’t like. Some don’t read cautions at the beginning of stories, even if you type them in ALL CAPS!”
I let out a big sigh and responded, “So we need to figure out how to include as many fetishes as possible without offending anybody; keep track of about a hundred characters; write an extra thousand pages to make them believable; make the story hot and exciting with 'average people' characters in their forties and fifties; and nobody will read it and thank us for over five years?" I thought a long moment before I hit 'Send', and added, "I don’t know if I want to do all that.”
Her reply surprised me a little. “You’re right. That’s way too much trouble if we’re not getting paid for it. I guess I’ll just have a glass of wine and watch some porn before bed.”
“Excellent plan, I think I’ll do the same. Good night.”
LimnophileReport