Today marks the first day of my blogging career. I’ve tried to blog before. I’ve been around just long enough that it's hard to remember a world without internet. Yet, I still haven’t mastered the art of maintaining a blog. Life is just too demanding, too full of things worth doing, too much undone living. The last blog I had, shriveled up and died on the vine, as have the two or three before that--the most I've a hand in...well...in my entire life.
What makes me think that this blog will work?
If you’re not familiar with nanowrimo, it stands for National Novel Writing Month, a program run by the non-profit ‘The Office of Letters and Light’. A fluffly kind of chaos, their sole purpose is to get people writing. They challenge you, the would be writer, to write 50,000 words in one month. You don’t have to have ever written anything in your life, or you could be a prolific writer looking for a challenge. It doesn’t matter. Their one task is to spur you to write and not look back.
I myself did not officially participate in Nanowrimo. Instead, I watched two of my friends burn the sweat from their brow, typing dizzily away to meet this word goal. Somewhere watching this race, I got sucked into it. Surely, I thought, I could write 1,667 words a day. That doesn’t seem too much. And if I can’t, most certainly I can write 500. My precise friend, whom we shall call Capricorn, and might be a tad anal, created a color coded excel worksheet to track her writing and spur her on, despite a tracker available online from the Office of Letters and Light. She shared it among the three of us. Capricorn struggled tremendously to get the words to flow. I learned from watching her how precious well written words were, and the cost of the struggle of many an author to get their ideas on paper. My creative friend, I dub her Aquarius, rolled her eyes, started typing, and only stopped when finished her story, sadly 3000 words shy of the NaNoWriMo goal. The story flowed out of her like astrology from a hippy, and she struggled the most trying to figure out how to add 3,000 words to her story to reach the 50,000 goal, that actually mattered in terms of the story.
I was a curious mix. Writing didn’t flow out of me, but I didn't struggle like a tortured mad woman. Unlike both of them, I didn’t meet the 50,000 word goal, but did meet the 500 a day goal. I got a story out and felt basically satisfied. It wasn’t the gut wrenching bloody birth that Capricorn experienced, leaving her weak and exhausted, but triumphantly holding her living baby, nor was is the Nirvana filled river of flowing peace pouring out of me, as it did Aquarius, leaving her with the satisfied glow of a rescuer listening to the suckling of baby pandas she is hand-feeding.
Instead I felt like that pedestrian birth where I struggled for twelve-hours, only to realize I wasn’t pregnant, just constipated, and with a little ex-lax everything came out just fine. (Birth, adoption, and defecation metaphors aside, and totally unrelated, each of us adored Scrivener as a writing tool, and all of us complain voraciously about the terrible thesaurus inside of it.)
What I realized was, once I understood that I didn’t love what I was writing, it became easier and nearly painless to push it out, but I wasn’t left with a darling I wanted to nurture to maturity, nor did I feel triumphant. Instead, the gift I was left with was feeling capable that I could endure, and do the real thing, if only I were working on something I loved, not just something for the sake of doing it.
That's when I realized that I wanted to write erotica. I go to sleep every night crafting erotic dreams to lull me. If I had chosen to write those dreams, perhaps I would have had an experience closer to the process of Aquarius, and the product of Capricorn.
That is where this blog comes in. One of the most helpful things about NaNoWriMo for all of us was progress reporting, venting, talking about challenges, creating accountability to a world that is only semi-invested (they weren’t going to be checking our manuscripts, but they did care to some level, even if it was only for the camaraderie and support reflected back to them.)
I can’t NaNoWriMo every month, but I can blog.
Here is where the blog is critical.
I don’t know anything about writing erotica. I feel it in my body, my n*****s, my c**t. I’ve never written it, but I believe it can flow like the wet juices I’m experiencing right now. This is most certainly going to be a journey, and I feel that journey is best served by blogging—-a sort of self created NaNoWriMo cheering process.
At this writing of this blog, I haven’t actually found a blog platform where I’m sure I can blog on erotica (including the words I censored above), but as soon as I do, I’ll publish these journal entries, and keep on working on my journey.
I’m Alaska Daneel and I will be your host in this journey on how to learn to write erotica.
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