Episode 112: Writing Erotica for the Oldies

Suzanne Noble: I'm very excited to welcome our new sponsor, Higher Nature, who have created Rekindle, which I'm currently trying out and is working a treat. A 100% natural libido-enhancing supplement for women, which contains clinically backed ingredients to give your sex life a boost. And who doesn't want that? Hi, I'm Suzanne Noble, and you're listening to Sex Advice for Seniors. And this week I thought we'd deviate a bit from talking to the sexperts and the sexologists and the tantra practitioners and the urologists and other doctors and everybody that we've spoken to over the past 109 episodes or whatever. Like a lot of episodes, and actually talked to somebody. Actually, we did actually talk. I'm lying. At the very, very beginning of Sex Advice for Seniors, we had a chat with Rachel Kramer Bussell, who, who, who does a lot of anthologies, erotic writing anthologies, primarily. But, but today, but, but Rachel is quite a bit younger than than our target audience. But, and our current guest is hot, so that's nice that we're, we're on the same page here. And I'm talking to Stella Fossey, and the reason why we're, we're, we're gonna have this chat is because, um, because I came across Stella, I think it might have been through Advantages of Age actually, maybe, um, talking about erotic writing, romance writing, and talking about being an older woman writing this material for an older audience, which I think makes you very, very unique. Because most of the time, in romance writing especially, and even in erotic writing, I think, the characters tend to be young, quite young. And, and, and that imbues it with a different kind of energy, I suspect, than when you're writing older characters, older life experiences, stuff like that. So, welcome, Stella. I'm so curious to know, How did you get into this stuff?

Ah, so this, this connects directly with what you were just saying about the younger characters being so prevalent in erotic writing and in romance writing. Part of that has to do with the publishing industry and the bias against older characters. When I was about to retire, I had been in biotechnology and done technical writing for a long time. I was thinking that I would retire and write whatever the heck I felt like. And then I read this article that was in the New York Times Book Review section. It was by a woman romance author in her 50s, and she was advising her sister writers of a similar age that if they wanted to get published, they needed to write characters in their 20s. Oh, interesting. And I thought, the heck with that. I am not doing that. I am not closeting myself. I mean, it was, you know, shades of the Brontë sisters who originally published with male pen names so that they could get published. Was I really going to write young characters? No. So around that time, my friend Lynx Cannon contacted me. She had started a reading series at a bookstore in Oakland, and the reading series was called Dirty Old Women, and it was for women writers of a certain age. And she, she was looking for authors over 50 who were writing erotic stories to come and read before a live audience. And I thought, okay, am I going to put my money where my mouth is? Am I going to really do this? So I did. And it was really scary and it was really fun. And so I started writing erotic stories. This is even before I retired and getting up and reading them before a really mixed age audience. And one of the interesting things that came out of that was we had women in their 30s in the audience who would come up to us at the end of the reading and say, thank you for doing this, because the message we get from the culture is that women's erotic lives end at 40. Yeah. So it turns out that this is not only fun to write and fun to share with age peers, it's also— I think of it as sort of a fun revolution where we're letting women of all ages know that erotica, romance, all that stuff keeps going. It's not age-limited.

Yeah, and, and funnily enough, I met Rachel originally in New York when I did some reading of some erotica at a series she used to run in New York called In the Flesh. And there used to be loads of us that used to get up and read, and it— and in fact, I, I read it, and I was going to start a similar book, uh, thing here with Rose. That's And I mean, this is all serendipity because when Rose and I first met from Advantages of Age, it was through a woman called Lynn Franks. And in the course of just having a chat, we both discovered a passion for writing and erotica and stuff. And we said, why don't we start something in the UK, in London, around doing erotic readings? I love the idea of an erotic reading series called Dirty Old Women. I think that'd be awesome.

Oh, you can steal that.

Suzanne Noble: You've inspired me to think about that. I mean, I don't know about you, but as somebody who loves writing erotica from time to time myself, I do find that it can be a real turn-on, you know.

Yes, absolutely. You know, for women who feel like trying writing erotica, you can just do it for yourself, even if you don't have folks to share it with. Of course, sharing it makes it even more fun. But yes, it's definitely— I mean, there's that whole, you know, we have all this libidinal energy, you know, it's, it's part of us, it's innate to us, it doesn't go away because we get older. And, and to write, to create, is to engage with all that. So yeah, it's, it's a fabulous thing to do for yourself as well as, you know, if you do end up sharing it, it does of course push back on all kinds of ageist stereotypes.

Yeah, and you know what? I mean, the thing is, although a lot of the characters might be younger, I do know and have met a lot of erotic writers in their 50s and 60s and older. I mean, it's— yes, we may be pigeonholed into being asked for commercial reasons to write younger characters, but as you said, if you just say, "Fuck you, I'm just gonna do what I want," there's no reason why we can't write the characters that we want, inhabit the world that we know now, and, and, and, you know, share that joy of being an older woman, you know, in a sexual way with our readers.

Mm-hmm, absolutely. And, you know, one of the interesting things that's happening in this sort of dynamic world we're in with publishing and the development of self-publishing is that there are so many more avenues that, that whole situation where publishers were the gatekeepers and controlling what kinds of characters were presented and controlling what kind of voices were heard. That's all breaking down. And so even the publishers, the traditional publishers, are publishing what they call seasoned romance or late-in-life romance. And for writers who are not able to access traditional publishing, there are all kinds of other options. There are hybrid publishers, There is indie publishing. There are many ways to skin this cat. Yeah, for sure.

I know you're on Substack. I'm on Substack. I've been, I've been dallying with the idea of should I put some of my dirty stuff behind a paywall to see if I can get, I can get more people to pay me, frankly, than do currently. But yeah, I think the world of publishing is blown wide apart now through the opportunities that exist on the internet and elsewhere of, of just doing what you want. You know, the— look, the bottom line is, as you know, with all of this stuff, it's about finding your audience. Absolutely. You know, yes, you can sit in your bedroom and you can write stuff for yourself and you can get off on it. You can share it with your lover or your partner or whoever you're intimate with or not in your life. You could just share it with yourself. But ultimately, if you want to be if you want to make some money out of it, then you have to find your audience. And, you know, for me, that's where things like Substack potentially could, can deliver an audience, whereby, whereas before it was pretty, it was hard, I think, to find, to find an audience if you didn't have the traditional publishing route.

Mm-hmm. That's true. We have, that's something that I've, I've written about in my new book. We have so many opportunities to build a social media platform, to blog and build a mailing list, to go out on things like Substack, as you're mentioning. And there are many, many ways to find an audience now that didn't exist when we were in our 20s, 30s, even 40s. None of this was out there. Self-publishing wasn't out there either. And So the whole situation has changed, and it's really, you know, now to be an author is also to be an entrepreneur in a way that wasn't true in the past. So there's, there's a lot to think about, a lot to learn, but also a lot of opportunity.

Yeah, I mean, one of the things that I suspect a lot of people don't know is that Erotica and romance, they're very different beasts, and they have very different ways of— the story has to be told in very, very different ways. It's true, you know, erotic writing is really just focused on sex mainly, and, and getting to the point where people are having sex.

Right.

I know that when I've written more long-form stuff, it was very clear to me, like, keep all the boring shit to a minimum and get to, you know, we, we have to have 4 threesomes, and we have to have, you know, some other stuff going on, and then it's got to do this, and it's got to do that. And so it still has a format, but the format is very much around the number of times you, you mentioned people having sex and how, how you describe that. Whereas romance, of course, I know nothing about romance, really. So what, how does romance compare?

So, so whereas erotica is, as you're saying, really focused on sexuality, and to the extent that there's character development, it's often the development of the main character through learning about themselves through their sexuality. Romance is a really different beast. So in romance, You have usually two main characters. There can be three, but typically it's two main characters who start off with a central conflict. Um, a classic one would be, let's say, somebody's an environmentalist and the other one's a real estate developer. I mean, it could be anything. Yeah, yeah, just for an example. So they start off with a conflict. They start off also with inner conflicts, with with reasons why they don't want to be in an intimate relationship. And of course, for older characters, you could have reasons like they've internalized body shame, or their kids are worried about what would happen if they got into it. It could be all kinds of things. But so they start off with inner and outer conflicts, and then the whole romance novel is an extended seduction. So, it starts off, it could start off with, you know, gazing at each other and progresses to hand-holding. And, you know, meanwhile, there are conflicts that set the relationship back. The plot is driven by the progress of this relationship. There may be external stuff going on, you know, but the main plot driver is the relationship. And it always ends with a happily ever after, or at least a happy-for-now ending. Maybe they don't, you know, have a big wedding at the end like the, the old-fashioned romances did, but at the end they're happy together and they are engaged sexually, and there is a love scene. It, depending on the level of what's called heat in romance writing, it could be that the whole, you know, the, the reader stops at the bedroom door if it's, you know, sort of light romance, or it could be very, very physical and a big description of physicality and sexuality. So, so there are variables, there are lots of variables to play with, but it does have a structure. And I don't want to say a formula because people talk about romance being formulaic. Well, you know, so is a sonnet, right? But nobody says a sonnet is formulaic. Yeah, I suspect that the fact that most romance novels are written by women and so many reviewers are male may have some impact on the literary perception of the romance novel. Just saying.

And I think also the thing about the romance novel, going back to like the different ways that we can publish now, is that if you go to Mills Boon, for instance, or some of the traditional publishers, they will expect more of a formula, and they will be looking for that formula within the within the narrative, they will, they will have those expectations. Whereas if you're doing it without the constraints of those big publishers, I suspect you can be more, you know, you can be more playful with that formula and you can potentially stretch the formula or the, or the way that it's delivered a bit. So it doesn't have to be so constrained by the, the beats that you're that you're being expected to hit at different points in the book. And I know that some people love having that, having the way that the narrative is being told in quite a strict format because it actually imposes on you that discipline to be like, I have to get to that point by this point. Look, I mean, romance novels are not the only art form where these kind of beats or constraints are placed upon it. We see the same thing in most feature films. And there's, you know, there's books that tell you, like, at 10 minutes in, there has to be a source of conflict that makes the reader go, you know, the viewer go off or think, what decision are they gonna make at this point? And that's gonna drive the remaining part of most of the film, at which point they're gonna hit an arc and la-la-la-la-la. You know, all these sorts of things. So, I don't think that we should say that, you know, personally, I don't think that having a structure, a specific type of structure, means that it's any less an art form than any of the other creative endeavors that people do. I mean, I think it's, I think it is undervalued in terms of how people see it. And I think also disrupting the traditional way that it's told by By bringing in older characters, older life experiences, and telling the story from an older perspective is in itself really a fresh way of going at a, you know, at a genre that's been going forever, right?

Yeah, yeah, I think you're right. And in the United States, there's been huge controversy. There's an organization, Romance Writers of America, that has run into significant challenges because the organization, not just the publishers, but the organization, uh, did not embrace diversity in terms of, um, race in particular. And, you know, we, you know, we, we see, we see even within, uh, groups of romance authors that there can be some pushback on the kinds of diversity that we'd like to see. And, you know, there, there, there have been challenges for folks who write romance, gay romance. There's really, frankly, very few romance novels with characters with disabilities. There are lots of ways that the genre is starting to grow, but there definitely are growing pains. And certainly, to your point, the presence of older characters as main characters, not sidekicks, not, you know, "Grandma gave me some advice," but the, you know, the main romantic characters, that's been slow going to come to that place, which is interesting because most readers of romance are over 45. So, you know, what's that about? Do we really want to be reading about characters the age of our children, our grandchildren? Or how about if we can read about characters our own age?

Yeah, and look, we— let's face it, we don't, as older adults, have many role models when it comes to looking at older people as still being romantic and sexual. You know, I can't really— I'm always using Helen Mirren as our, as our poster child, right? Because she's pretty much one of the few women of a certain age that we can look to and say, still attractive, still sexy, still putting it out there, you know, ballsy, all of that kind of thing. So where do we go to find those role models? And it seems to me that one of the things that your books are doing is providing older adults with some role models and some aspirational characters that they think, ah, this is, you know, this could be exciting. This opening myself up to the possibility of romance at this stage of my life could actually be fun and exciting. Even if these are fictional characters, there's still that possibility of, you know, there's still, there's still life in me yet. And I think that's That's also really important. And also going back to your point about the lack of diversity, interestingly enough, I think there's been a, you know, there's, there's a lot of material when it comes to gay male erotica. Like there's a long history of that. There's quite a few imprints that have been around for a significant period of time dealing with gay male erotica. I don't know about women. I haven't seen any too much in that space. As you say, there's a lack of representation in writing about people with disabilities. But there are sort of these little pockets of diversity. It's just that they've sort of just gone, we're just going to chug along here on our own. We're not going to— we don't— we're not going to stir things up too much because we're doing okay here with our, you know, just with writing about gay male experiences, you know. So I think it is interesting how these things have developed in some ways and not developed at all in other areas. So how— I know that you've just published this book about writing romance. How are and who is publishing your, your work?

I've, I've been through a couple different iterations on that. My My first book, Aphrodite's Pen: The Power of Writing Erotica After Midlife, which was an outgrowth of the Dirty Old Women writing group, was published by North Atlantic Books in Berkeley, California. And my partner and I went to the meetings with that publisher, and they were great to work with. And my partner, as it happens, is a retired VP from an IT company. And he went to those marketing meetings with me and he said, you know, if we did this ourselves, we could keep 85% of the revenues instead of 15% royalties. So ever since then, so we started an imprint, we started our own imprint, Baobo Books, named after a very sexy character, older woman character in Greek mythology. And so my other books, both of my novels, my story collection, and my latest book, which is another, you know, book on writing, those have all come out through Baobo Books, which has been a real adventure. I've learned so much about the nuts and bolts of publishing, which has been really fun.

So are you— yeah, because I've, I just had a I tested the waters, not with anything to do with erotica, but I just published a few little ebooks using Kindle Publishing, just to understand how it works and how easy it is to upload your books and format them and all that kind of stuff. I have to say, it was actually— Kindle self-publishing was actually super easy, and I went on an app and uploaded my file, and it just made everything look beautiful. And, you know, it, it was— I thought it was quite incredible. But of course, that that I didn't— after that, I sort of wasn't enthusiastic enough to then go out and do all the promotion. So I realized that actually nowadays, the— if you, you know, you could proofread it yourself, you could get a proofreader, you could edit it yourself, you could get an editor. Like, you can employ all these people yourself now through all sorts of different gig marketplace channels. I mean, there's so many of these people out there doing it, plus there's AI and all that nonsense that can support you with that. But I think the challenge is, as we said before, is that then you got to develop your audience, then you got to let people know about it. So are you doing book tours? Are you, are you doing some of the sort of what I would classify as the more traditional marketing route in terms of, you know, just trying to get it into the bookstores and doing the book tours and doing the blogging sites and, you know, the way that I've experienced some of that.

So, so that's a really great question. So, so marketing— first of all, let's talk for just a second about publishing. You were mentioning about, about going direct through Kindle. You can also publish across multiple sites. You can, you can publish, can you can publish Amazon and Barnes Noble and Kobo and and Apple Books and on and on and on. And so that's a whole skill set.

Wow. Okay. I didn't even know that. But you can do—

you can— yeah. So you can publish wide is what they call that.

Yeah.

Publishing and marketing. If you're going this route, if you're primarily selling online, it's a really different animal to market that than it is if you're marketing through a traditional publisher.

Yeah.

So in my new book, Write and Sell a Well-Seasoned Romance, I talk about how to build your marketing plan and execute it. Um, and it really depends a lot on your publishing route. Those two things are co-joined. So if you are publishing online, as opposed— doing indie publishing online, as opposed to going through a traditional publisher, which actually makes a lot of sense because something like 80% of— at least in the United States, at least 80% of books that are sold now are sold through Amazon.

Yeah, yeah.

So you can, you can really do this indie thing yourself, and then your marketing plan is going to be influenced by that. For example, most bookstores are not that interested in indie-published books. Yeah, most bookstores are really looking for the books that are going to be coming out through big traditional publishers and heavily promoted by those publishers. Yeah, that's what they want to put in their stores because that's what they think will move in, in a bookstore. They also have really good working relationships with the reps coming out from, from those traditional publishers. So what, what I've found works for me is to have a really strong online marketing effort that pairs with the online sales. So I'm on, um, as we talked about, I'm on Substack, I'm on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, um, basically every online platform. I'm on there every day and I am putting up a lot of things that have nothing to do with selling my books but that will attract the audience that I'm looking for.

Yeah, yeah.

So I'm sharing articles that might be of interest to other older women that might have to do with finance and retirement, or romance directly, or healthcare. Because what I'm trying to do is build connections with people who will also be interested in my books. And then about every fifth day, I put up something about one of my books. I might put up a snippet from a positive review, for example, or put up just information about my book. So it's a different kind of marketing plan than you would see if you were being published by a major New York publisher.

And do you think— I mean, what I'm hearing is that, and I'm, I'm quite similar in the way I use social media, It's not really— there's not really a focus all the time on selling. It's more about building your credibility and trust and getting people to go, I like what she's writing, let's check out what she's doing. And then go, oh, you know, a certain proportion of those people are going to go, oh, that looks really interesting. I'm going to, I'm going to download that. I'm going to buy that. I also know that online, just generally getting reviews and getting people to write reviews, especially on Amazon, is another way of building credibility. So just having a lot of good reviews where people say this book was terrific, I loved it. Have you ever used any of the, of the little Amazon hacks, like for instance, making the book free to start with and getting everybody, all your friends to download a copy of it in the same 3 minutes when it's when it's released, because I know people that have done that to chart their books.

And I have not done that. It sounds really fun though. It sounds like—

Yeah, yeah. I know someone years ago and that was his tactic. He used to, he used to have his book. He used to email everybody and say, set your timer. Here's the link. It's going to be free at this particular time. Everybody download the book. Of course, then Amazon sees a massive spike. When the book goes live, everybody, you know, and they then, and then they then push it up the charts. And then gradually he would incrementally adjust the pricing so that it went from 0 to then 10p, 20p, 50, whatever, until eventually it would get up to a normal amount of money. That person eventually got a 3-book deal with a massive publisher. So that, and after writing a series of fictional kind of more like rom-com kind of books, like, you know, a chicklet, chicklet, right? And so clearly that worked then. Maybe they've cottoned on to that one and they don't, it doesn't work anymore. But I know, I know a couple of people who did that and it seemed to work. So that's a little, that's a little book hack there. Yeah.

It really does sound like a fun thing to try.

Well, it's fun to try, right? But I think, I think really it's all about, as you said, being consistent on social media, which is something I tell people all the time. Being not selling all the time, but, you know, being clear that there's every 5 days you're gonna have some sort of a sales message so that it's, there is, you are driving people to some kind of objective or goal. But, and then, yeah, and then just knowing, like we've said before, knowing who your audience is, which are, you know, sexy, fun, older people who wanna read sexy, fun books.

Exactly.

And all the boring older people can just, you know, go read whatever, something else.

Something else. And you get— there are other fun things to try, like, uh, like book trailers, for example, are fun to do. And also, I, I do a lot of— I do a lot with Canva, um, a site where you can, you can build graphics. Yeah, you advertise a book and there you can just— there's a lot to choose from even at the free level of Canva. Yeah. So, you know, there's a lot of creativity and that's one of the things that's been a pleasant surprise. I used to think that marketing sounded like, you know, basically torture. In my book, I say, you know, a lot of us who are writers think that writing is like you know, being in an ivory tower and trying to sell your book is like coming down from your ivory tower and selling used cars, you know. But actually, if you're at all inclined to do things like create graphics or create, you know, reels or book trailers, there's a lot of fun things that you can do as part of your marketing plan.

Yeah, look, I think with all of this sort of stuff, like writing, like anything else, it's just practice. And it's just the more you practice at it, the quicker it becomes, the less you fear it. And initially it's scary. You think, oh, I'm making myself vulnerable. I'm putting myself out there. I don't know if I really want to do this. But after a while, it just becomes second nature. And I suspect there's a lot of people who probably have some sort of a book in them who are listening right now and thinking, you know, I give it a try. I always say to people as well that for me, I really, I love— well, firstly, I, you know, I write, I write erotica because I want to remember the good times.

Yes, exactly.

I want to, I want to remember when I've had some real fun scene with somebody, and it's really like turned me on in multiple ways, and I want to get it all down before I forget it because my memory is bad.

The details do not stick with you in the long term. So yes.

So I just, I just want to do that. And I think, you know, with erotica, some, some people have said, oh, it's, you know, it's really difficult. And what I would always say to them is that, for me, erotica is only partly really about sex. It's mainly, and I suspect the same thing is true for romance, it's, it's about capturing the atmosphere and being and, and the nuance and the detail and the, and, and the way the room looks and the color of somebody's dress, or, you know, or, or a sound that you hear in the background or something that's, that's distracting you in some way. It's always around— for me, it's always around the periphery of, of what's actually going on, because there's only so many ways that you can say, and then he put his penis in my vagina. Right? If you're writing about heterosexual sex, right? There's, there's, there, there was one point where I was like, I don't think I can actually, I actually had to look at a thesaurus to see if I'd used every word that would, could be applied to a man's penis, right? Because there's only so many of them. And the same way you start getting a bit ridiculous after a while, you're like, you know, his appendage.

Yes. Somebody actually, there's a, I unfortunately don't remember the name offhand, but somebody has actually published a book about words to use for body parts when you're writing about sex. Oh, that's just a challenge. People, people, people want to be— make it fresh and interesting and not say the same thing over and over. And you don't want to sound clinical.

No, that's right.

You want to sound fun and interesting. So what words do you use? It's a, it's a dilemma. But I think in general that, you know, the thing about any writing is that it's play. Yeah, it's a form of play, and, and as is sex. So, you know, it's just a natural to put the two of them together. And, um, and, and I think if anybody is thinking about writing one of the things that can come up is this sort of perfectionism, you know. Oh, I'm, I'm not really a writer, or I can't do this perfectly, I can't, you know, I'll never be Shakespeare. Well, you know, none of us is Shakespeare, and a lot of us do have a grand time writing and sharing our writing and our ideas anyway. Um, and if you can sort of set aside the judgment and focus on the play and get out of your own way, it really is a— it can be a splendid— you can have a splendid time writing in either of these genres that we've been talking about.

Yeah, and, and just bringing it back to the sex advice for seniors thing, I think, you know, one of the delightful things— I, I actually started reading, I started reading Fifty Shades of Grey in the voice of, um, of the character— I can't remember her, her name, to a guy that I was with at the time, in a playful way. And it was actually, it was, even though I thought the book wasn't very good, it was, it was actually very fun to do that. And similarly, I think reading your erotica out loud with your partner or with somebody that you're intimate with can be an extremely great, good way to just draw you, draw each other closer. And, and more importantly, I think that one of the, one of the great things about writing erotica is you can as you say, about getting out of your way, you can get out of your way when it comes to what you might consider to be taboo, what you might consider to be somewhat deviant in, you know, in a way that might make you feel a bit uncomfortable but also excites you. It's a way to actually think about your fantasies without actually having to execute them if that scares the hell out of you. And also, it's a way to share your fantasies in a way that doesn't feel sometimes particularly scary because it, it's fiction. It's, it's fantasy here. So it's a way to kind of— when people, when, when couples are thinking about opening up the conversation about their intimate lives and some of the things that they might enjoy, I think sometimes writing these stories, these playful stories, is a really lovely way of exploring what you might want to do in your own relationship, or just sharing your fantasy with another person just purely for the sake of it. And, you know, I know that when I've done that, it's—

it—

people are incredibly receptive to it. And, and it can be a huge amount of fun, and, and a way to bring yourself closer to another person. So I think there's so much to recommend writing erotica, writing romance, and just basically, as you said, just being playful.

So true. You know, we, um, after— long after our Dirty Old Women writing reading series ended, um, some of us kept going. We, we founded a writing group called Elderotica, and we, we are still meeting once a month Now online because we don't all live in the same town anymore. And, and we just, we share prompts. We, so we, we have an erotic writing prompt and we all write about it and then we read to each other and it is the most fun.

Oh, that sounds brilliant. I'd love to join that every once in a while. That sounds really good because I just—

you could start one in England too.

I could do, I could do. Anyway, there's my door. That's a great indicator. It's been so lovely to speak to you. And I'll post all the links and stuff to your latest book. And good luck with all your writing.

Thank you. Thank you. And best of luck to you as well with all you're doing. And good for you for doing this work. Thank you. Okay.

All right.

Take care.