What Fresh Hell is This?

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

Okay, so I’ve rolled my eyes at the ever increasing amount of erotica in my non-erotica reading.  This isn’t a simple matter of “you got chocolate in my peanut butter, yum!”  When you get erotica in my romance, it might be sort of kind of excusable, at least when the erotica is relevant to the plot — it rarely is — well written — it VERY rarely is — and interesting — it never is, not in romances — but when you get erotica in my mystery, I start to go all frowny face.

Look, bub, unless she’s hiding a blade in her vagina and is going to slice the detective’s throat any minute now, I don’t want to hear, see, or be told about what went into her vagina and how many times.  No, Mr. Bond, I don’t want to know what you did with Gold Finger.  Or … never mind.

And when it comes to getting erotica into my historical non-fiction… Well!  Yeah, some people really were history’s greatest sluts, but when you go out of your way to mention that the common people were doing it on the streets, and then to introduce the chapter with a hot-and-heavy blow by blow (sorry, it had to be said) of people doing it on the streets — and the heartrug, and in the garden, and behind the carriage! — I get truly upset.  I read these things for research.  Research, dang it, and unless you are disclosing some new anatomical arrangement or some novel position that existed only in this time and place, I don’t want to hear it.  (“Do the Robespierre.  It will make you lose your head!”)

I’ve classified this as a disease of traditional publishing.  In a panic, unable to realize that it’s political correctness that has killed reading-for-fun, they stampede ahead towards more political correctness, more by-the-numbers inclusiveness (Now  more inclusive!), see the numbers fall, can’t figure out why (people with excellent liberal arts education aren’t made of stupid, but they’ve been trained to appear to be) and then discover that — wow — sex sells.  Even vapid, improbable implied sex with sparkly vampires or explicit even more improbable S & M with cardboard cutouts.

And then they scream like cartoon characters (people with excellent liberal arts educations aren’t cartoon characters, but they often act like them) “More.  More Twilight.  More fifty shades.”  All without realizing that when it comes to badly written romance or erotica a little constitutes a surfeit and like the jokes in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress that are “funny only once” these are “salable only once” or a very few times.

Instead, they take from this that “Sex sells” and then I get erotica in my peanut butt–  wait, no.  In my mystery and while mystery in my erotica (what is this?  A Hemipene?) might be acceptable, the opposite is not.  Or not in massive doses.  (“No, Mrs. Higgins, your removal of your clothes doesn’t distract me from my acquiring of clues to…. Oooh.  Is that a grappling hook?  What an unusual location for it!”)

But this at least is traditional publishing doing what traditional publishing does.  “More, more sparkling vampires.  Bring out the glitter!”

However, this weekend I found a new one and it’s indie.

No, seriously kids.  SERIOUSLY.  These are at most 5k words, are selling for 2.99 — okay, so I sell my shorts for 2.99.  Uh, my short STORIES.  But they’re not improbable copulation with the ancestors of birds!

What’s more interesting these women are MAKING A LIVING from this.

I take back everything I said about traditional publishing.  Perhaps their problem is that they haven’t gone far enough.  Perhaps…

Well, no, let’s recap.  What you can take from this is that NO, that story you have in the drawer is not too stupid to live.  Yeah, I mean that one where the knight gets it on with the ostrich.  Bring it out.  Put it up on Amazon.  Okay, your mom might die of shame, but hey, you’ll be able to pay for a real snazzy funeral.

Am I raging against this?  Well, no.  Seriously, I don’t often get surprised these days, but the fact these area selling just about made my jaw drop on the floor.  On the other hand, it is proof of my belief that no matter how strange your fixation, if you write it and publish it, and keep trying, eventually you’ll connect with people just as crazy as interested in it as you are.

All that agonizing you do over “is this the right thing to write?”  “Will anyone buy it?”  That’s old thinking.  Put it out.  Put it all out.

Why not?  T-Rex does!

169 thoughts on “What Fresh Hell is This?”

  1. I’ve seen those books mentioned on other blogs as well, which leads me to the theory that they’re selling because of the “So Bad It’s Good” effect: people want to see just how much of a trainwreck these stories are.

    (I’ll have to check the Amazon reviews; if they’re all joking ones along the lines of the “Three Wolf Moon” T-shirt reviews, that would be a major plus in favor of this theory.)

    Yes, sometimes reality can be stranger than fiction. But in this case, I’m pretty sure people aren’t buying these to get turned on by dinosaur porn, they’re buying these to laugh at them.

    1. To me it’s like Sharknado or Pride & Prejudice & Zombies: the joke’s been made in the title, and there’s no way to write the story worth of the title—so they don’t bother. People are going to buy and read these books anyway, because dinosaur pr0n, or zombies, or whatever. ⍨

    2. She wrote them because the idea made her laugh so pretty much the whole thing is a joke. Which is all to the good, really, because if you’re writing erotica, you have to have a sense of humor

      1. It’s okay to laugh during sex, as long as you don’t point.

        But by Ugol’s law, there will be people into it seriously.

        (Ugol’s law. Any question about sex that begins “Am I the only one who is into…” will invariably be answered “No.”)

          1. Your hip started clicking and you started singing “Tico Tico no Fuba” by Carmen Miranda in time to noise? That’s why we started laughing.

        2. Mauser | October 7, 2013 at 4:54 pm
          > (Ugol’s law. Any question about sex that begins “Am I the only one who is into…” will invariably be answered “No.”)

          Or, these days: “Does the phrase ‘Rule 34’ ring any bells?”

          1. Up in there is the theory that if you try to make up some sort of non-existent porn that nobody’s heard before by sticking words together, it will suddenly spring into being, and within a day there will be a website for it.

            1. I vaguely remember a Dave Barry column some twenty years ago in which he talked about the Internet. The line I best remember was when he said that the Internet was full of sites devoted to oddities, like People Who Like To Have Sex With Goats That Are On Fire. My thought at the time was, “I don’t know if such a site existed before he wrote that column… but I’ll bet it does now!” (I hadn’t heard of Rule 34 yet, but I clearly understood the concept.) BTW, I’ve never Googled that phrase, because I truly don’t want to know.

              1. Good thing you didn’t. The second link that comes up is from TVTropes.

                But it turns out that the quote is this:

                The Web brings people together because no matter what kind of a twisted sexual mutant you happen to be, you’ve got millions of pals out there. Type in ‘Find people that have sex with goats that are on fire’ and the computer will say, ‘Specify type of goat.’
                — Rich Jeni

                1. Good thing you didn’t. The second link that comes up is from TVTropes.

                  I caught full-blown TVTropian syndrome in my college years — days at a time on the site, weeks of lost productivity, the whole nine yards — but it has left me with an immunity. I can now visit that site, read the page I was interested in, and leave without clicking on any links. Yes, I know it sounds impossible, but it’s true.

                2. “Field of Dreams”… but as C.S. Lewis pointed out with the Dark Island in Dawn Treader, nobody said the dreams would be good dreams.

  2. > people with excellent liberal arts education aren’t made of stupid, but they’ve been trained to appear to be

    Zing!

    Very well said.

  3. They could sell it to Furry Fandom if they got rid of the icky human woman….

    No, seriously. The furries will pay $10 for a short if it pushes their fetishes. And they’ll price it there because they don’t read the TOS and realize that they’re screwing themselves out of royalties by not dropping that penny off.

    1. Oh, does Amazon pay royalties on a different scale for prices up to $9.99 vs. prices of $10 or more? Not having anything to sell (yet), I haven’t been paying attention to their pricing structure.

      1. Yes, they do Robin. $2.99-$9.99 doubles your royalty percentage.

        Also I HATE the evil, quirky trick of math manipulation that $2.99 is going to sell much better than $3.00 because the search engine encourages you to search for items under $3.00, but not $3.00 and under. It was bad enough in gas stations, and auto sales. Part of the war on math. At least the evil genius who invented craps relied on a trick in the human brain that inhibits proper assessment of probability without specific training.

  4. I basically agree about erotica in my historical fiction, thank you very much. However, I think it’s a theoretical possibility that someone could do a masterful fictional treatment of some historical episode which turned in part on events between the sheets — perhaps the English breakaway from the Catholic church, or the rise of the Duke or Marlborough — in which what we’d expect would be Too Much Erotic Information would actually work.

    It’s a pretty safe bet that any given attempt to do so will turn out to be terrible instead, but hey, I thought it was a pretty safe bet that Terminator II would be a terrible movie, and instead it turned out OK, and I thought it was a pretty safe bet that the 1970s spooks had messed up the Data Encryption Standard with their mysterious s-box changes and it turned out that they were optimized against what would decades later be rediscovered as “differential cryptanalysis,” so lightning could strike a third time…

    1. What Sarah was talking about, though, was erotica in her historical NON-fiction! and I had to laugh because I knew exactly what she was talking about! It has become far too prevalent – and that’s sad, because history told right is plenty sexy enough by itself without the blow by blow.

  6. I think that as far as historical non-fiction erotica is concerned, Irving and Amy Wallace’s Book of Lists: Sex Lives of Famous People has pretty much (un)covered it, and no more need ever be written on the topic (unless new information is discovered, of course).

    As for the maiden/dinosaur erotica discussed by our hostess, “fresh hell” about covers it. I am as fond of erotica as the next man, and probably more than most, but prehistoric bestiality? Pass.

  7. A step toward the mainstreaming of bestiality. Next: a bold but sensitive bestseller that shatters taboos and challenges preconceptions. Movie to follow.

    I’m old enough to remember that a number of publishers rejected Silence of the Lambs on the grounds that that kind of stuff did not belong in the mainstream.

    1. No surprise, everything else (incest, polyamory, pedophilia [or at least hebephilia]) is getting mainstreamed. Or at least I’m seeing articles that are putting forth arguments that “it’s not really that bad”, or “hey, consenting adults!”.

      1. People are that jaded, I guess. The breakdown of families is symptomatic of a deeper problem – a chasm between men and women that makes them hold back, not entrusting all of themselves to one another. So instead of “cleaving to” one’s spouse, marriage becomes two individuals who happen to be going the same way for a while.

        This sort of “relationship” is empty, leads to feeling bored and jaded. Sex, at least, is some sort of feeling, and people are encouraged to explore it to its most insane extremes (“everything is okay between two consenting adults”). What surprise, then, that such extreme pornographies are created to fill that nagging void so many people feel and don’t understand? They are safe, they don’t require opening yourself to another person, they allow escape.

        When the culture is so accepting of sexual extremes of the mind, how big a step is it to accepting them in real life?

        1. The problem is that in many respects, it’s like attending rock concerts that damage your hearing. Just because everything grows gray and silent and you realize it, doesn’t mean you can go back.

          1. You’re stealing bees from my bonnet!
            We got this oxytocin gadget, see, evidently has some kind of survival value in the wild. When it’s jaded, you’re jaded. One way trip.

  8. I remember older gentlemen asking for ‘real’ Westerns, the ones without all the sex in them when I worked at the library. Now, I am one.

    1. Sex in Westerns? I think that the closest I ever found in a Louis L’Amour book was when the wife pushed the sleeping pallets together so they’d be that way when her husband got back to camp. Absolutely nothing else was said about it.

      1. Don’t go looking at “adult westerns” as they used to be called. As a kid I stumbled onto a couple that could have been how-to manuals for coitus. By then I’d already found a relative’s medical textbooks, so the discovery was less exciting than it might have been. I went back to digging for Azimov books.

      1. We get the culture the “gatekeepers” try shoving down our throats. Since much of the shoving is done to impressionable young people in college, it “takes”, at least for awhile. The smart ones realize it’s crap. The dumb ones perpetuate it. Kind of like some government legislation.

  10. Dang, I need to write me some erotica. They might have the dinosaurs sewed up, but I figure if I write about BDSM bestiality with early mammals like the woolly mammoth and saber-toothed tiger; I can just kick back and wait for the money to roll in. 😉

    2. The advantage of tapping the “early mammals” market is that it allows your male characters to get in on the action — Yo! Check out the boobs on that sloth!!

      I admit to a certain puzzlement over the lizardotica (saurusmut? dinoporn? a genre name is needed), if only in the phrasings employed “He was hung like a T-Rex: teeny and useless.”

          1. I dunno – you talking ’bout the powdered tobacco people shove up their noses or are you going for the kind folks rub on their gums and tuck into the cheek? I can sorta see stories about people sneezing but don’t know if the Skoal demographic reads.

  11. There’s a sub-group of porn that goes for “shock appeal” and that’s what IMO this dino-porn is about. Of course, what happens if nothing is shocking? [Sad Smile]

  12. Now Sarah, I seriously doubt that you have a peanut butt, do check with Dan to confirm if you must.

    1. Hmmm, as “peanut” is often used as a term of endearment for somebody small, wouldn’t a “peanut butt” convey one that is small, attractively curved, hard with a delicious interior?

      Sigh – now I must quash the “Mr. Peanut, Amateur Cracksman” series that is shaping up in my head. “When he saw what she was offering he dropped his monocle. Then he dropped his walking stick and took off his top hat. Slowly undoing his cummerbund he murmured, “So, you ever do it with a legume before?”

  13. So that’s where Lackey gets her constant refrain of “everybody is rutting like dogs.”

    FWIW, I put it in the same category of wish fulfillment as those “there are only two kinds of 16 year olds– those who say they’re having sex, and those who are lying.”

    2. They know, in their heart of hearts, that they should be rational beings, governed by their reason and not their crotch. They console themselves with the delusion that everyone else is, so it’s really just too hard.

      Hence fanfic insisting that every character ruts like a beast in heat.

    1. Seriously predates xkcd. I was in the room when the alt.sex hierarchy was conceptualized. In those days there were gryphons.

    2. Yah, we invented Rule 34 back when the “internet” was a bunch of DEC VAX computers exchanging encoded porn files by modem overnight….

      1. Please excuse the poor phrasing on my part – I didn’t mean he invented it, rather that his depiction and description of it is so perfect that it’s become canonical. (spoken as someone who met his wife on usenet).

          1. As I progress in years (unlike undead Gaius Iulius), I find it more and more useful in my dealings with the younger generations that Saint Clint has definitively established the M1 Garand as a lawn care implement.

                1. In Larry Correia’s Grimnoir series (Hard Magic, Spell Bound and Warbound) JM Browning is a major character.
                  Warbound came out last month from our favorite publisher–Baen! Interestingly Larry manages the difficult feat of writing about a modern world that has both magic and technology. His world is a compelling AU of ours in the 1920’s and 30’s.
                  It is highly recommended, It is written in a noir style.

    3. For those who know Mad Mike personally, when_he_ declares people to be “WEIRD,” you know they are. Ask him about his one, and I think only, trip to MediaWest(?). The only one he would talk about w as “Starsky and Hutch _slasher_ fanfic.I don’t even want to think about what he was unwilling to talk about. =8-0

  15. Oh my … I looked … the reviews are clearly satirical, referring to the “accuracy” of the literature in question. Also note there is no preview enabled, not that I would have looked even if I could, I’m sure. The author’s self-description is also a hoot — “… my inner thoughts are filled with lusty thoughts of big, strong, powerful monsters …” She’s versatile, too — dinos, weres, dragons, orcs, gryphons, oh my! And who are those models for the covers — do they have stock photos for p*rn?

    Sarah, how do you know this “Sims” person makes a living at this? Is there a way for an ordinary person to see sales or something? Just curious …

    I guess those tangential references I heard about the Roman Empire were not imaginary after all …

      1. Actually, SPQR, my first thought when I saw the covers, after “Oh for the love of Bog,” was to imagine a German and a Roman auxiliary talking in a tavern, or at a market along the Limes, and the barbarian is shaking his head in disbelief as the auxiliary tells him the latest rumors he’s heard about Rome. Then thinking of a different auxiliary up on Hadrian’s Wall thinking, “They’ve gone mad back in Rome.”

  17. All sorts of things went through my mind when I learned of the existence of dino porn. Ruminations on the moral and spiritual implications. But my main question was: would you actually survive the experience?

          4. I’ve run across at least a couple nifty shorts based on that idea .. All were fairly ancient, so all clothing remained firmly in place.

            Mew

  19. Dino porn? Really? I guess it is true that one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the american public.

  20. Wow, I am now required to gouge out both of my eyes, and rinse them in lysol before re-inserting.

    Oh Jeeez. I didn’t need those images, nor the ones that those covers then proceeded to create inside my head. Anyone have a case of Brain-o handy? Where’s the damned delete button on this thing?

  21. Saw these things on Vox a bit ago. End of the world man. END. OF. THE. WORLD.

    Perfect example of Rule #1, that is, People Are Stupid.
    Everyone, you, me, everyone. The only thing that makes me different is I admit I have a problem. Got a sponsor, go to the meetings, the whole 9 yards.

    But seriously, this is proof that democracy, at least as we practice it, doesn’t work. A short while back I came to the conclusion that the vote needs to be restricted somehow. Honorable discharge from the military, a min. IQ score, something, … anything. All I know is that I don’t want the people who buy this dreck to have a say in how the nation, and thus the world, is run.

    1. Frankly, I don’t think that odd fetish porn really marks the end of the world by itself.

      I’m just disappointed that it escapes quarantine in Japan where it belongs.

      1. We should have known that letting anime onto the Saturday morning cartoon lineup was just the opening salvo. Next it will be full length CG films derived from manga and . . . too late.

          1. Don’t forget Star Blazers! (We’re ooooofff, to outer space! We’re leaving Mother Earth! To save the human race. Our Star Blazers! Searching for a distant star, heading off to Iskandar, leaving all we love behind! Who knows what dangers we’ll find!)

        2. Is this where we go off on an extended digression over the real meanings in the unbowdlerized for American consumption Sailor Moon?

          Complete with careful analysis of the (barely) hidden symbology of the series and the obvious metaphor of attraction between Sailor Moon and Tuxedo Mask?

          1. You do realize that this is going to become some young college kid’s PhD thesis in Comparative Sociology now, right?

      2. THIS.

        It’s not that the stuff exists, it’s that it’s somehow escaped the land of the salarymen.

        I’m sure there’s cthulu- and other tentacle- related stories out there as well, and that’s probably the TAME stuff.

      1. I’ve been thinking that for twenty years or so.

        Afaic there are inalienable human rights, and there are civil rights that a society awards its members. If I ask my fellow citizens to support me, it is not necessarily illegitimate for them to withdraw some of my civil rights in exchange for the bailout. The details are a matter for ethical discussion and and political negotiation.

        P.S. Congrats on the gardening prizes.

    4. I favor having to prove having filed a 1040 as a sort of “minimum bar” to clear for voters. Don’t file? Don’t get a vote (hah!) on how the taxes are spent.

      Mew

        2. Only posted the summary, Bob.

          The longer form is for the IRS to check SSNs for validity – they’d know, right? – and send “tickets” (by mail, so tampering is a crime) that the recipient must present to gain access to their polling place… and, since it can also be determined, that’s their polling place *of record*, based on where they pay their taxes.

          No 1040, no valid SSN, no ticket, no access to the polling place, no vote. College student on mommy and daddy’s 1040 or filing from “home”? Guess where you get to vote…

          Mew

          2. With what we’ve seen of this IRS????????? They would make the military voting system look a very marvel of competency and efficiency.

              1. A) You think the IRS will change? There may be some new window treatments but the fundamentals will go on as they ever have. See: FDR/JFK/LBJ uses of IRS to punish enemies (see also: Nixon’s attempts to similarly use the IRS, notable for being unsuccessful.)

                B) Simplest is best, and the system being proposed is to subject to abuse and exclusion of, for example, retired military veterans living on pensions.

                C) The proposal has been thoroughly explored here in the none too distant past and I’ve no interest in re-litigating it.

                  1. Is a better idea prerequisite to rejecting a terrible one?

                    Simple, readily implemented ideas such as Voter ID and stricter voter roll hygiene are a first step. History strongly suggests that all efforts to “manage” the polity tend to go badly awry.

                    You are treating symptoms without addressing the problem.

                    1. Readily implemented? You call voter ID “readily implemented”?

                      You further ignore that faking a State ID is easy enough that two-digit percentages of the high schoolers in the country do it?

                      As for voter roll hygiene, *how* long has Florida been in court over this, and is there an end in sight prior to 2016?

                      I find your dismissal of one idea with problems in favor of another idea with problems to be .. silly.

                      Mew

                    2. “Readily implemented” in comparison to the suggestion put forth that we can radically alter the culture of the IRS, entrust them with a voting critical new software implementation (how’s that Obamacare implementation working out for you?) and casually disenfranchise a significant portion of eligible voters (including active-duty military & veterans as well as retirees on Social Security) without resistance from entrenched interests comprising one house of Congress and the Executive branch (not to disregard their propaganda arm, aka the MSM.)

                      Voter ID is supported by >80% of the public and is only being blocked by the … D.O.J. (geeze, wonder how they’d react to your scheme to strip the vote from almost 50% of the populace, including a disproportionately high % of “minorities”?) Voter roll hygiene is a similarly low-hanging fruit and yet, as you notice, the fight against its implementation is fierce.

                      Your inability to differentiate between the scale of problems posed by the two small steps I suggest and the radical leap you advocate brings to mind adages about motes in your neighbor’s eye and largely defines silliness. Thanks for the amusing demonstration how to of strain at a gnat and swallow a camel.

                    3. Cleaning the voter registries can also be done on a local basis, taking falsely purple areas back without the chance for PR attacks.

                    4. N.B., you did not request a perfect solution, merely a better one. You failed to demonstrate the proposals offered weren’t better. Playing “shift the goalposts” is extremely silly.

                    5. I agree, and yet I see yours moving as well – you have also failed to demonstrate that your proposal is better, for the simple reason that the one who counts the votes and appoints the election judges can still royally eff things up.

                      As you are clearly not interested in conversation, preferring condescension and false accusations, I will simply wish a good day to you.

                      Mew

                    6. Good grief — returning twelve days after a comment to call the kettle black and say you have no interest in further conversation? Wouldn’t it have been easier to simply let it drop and avoid appearing the obsessed compulsive, desperate for the last word?

                      Pathetic.

                      My proposals, being implementable without wholesale restructuring of a massive arrogant government bureaucracy (redundant, I acknowledge) and denial of the franchise to people on, for example, military retirement, are not perfect? We’re dealing with human beings here, perfect ain’t on the menu, minimizing negative consequences is the best we can hope for.

    5. Chad Lynch | October 7, 2013 at 1:09 pm
      > A short while back I came to the conclusion that the vote needs to be restricted somehow. Honorable discharge from the military, a min. IQ score, something, … anything. All I know is that I don’t want the people who buy this dreck to have a say in how the nation, and thus the world, is run.

      It took you *this* long to figure that out? I gave up on Democracy and Representative Government in junior-high — the first time I sat in on a student council meeting, I realized “if this is what ‘popular voting’ results in….”

  23. This is just sheer insanity. Who buys this stuff? Now if there was a pterodactyl involved, I could understand…

      1. Indeed there is. One. Only one. It is a true literary masterpiece. The plight of the voluptuous Dianne being ravaged by an extinct flying reptile is surely applicable to our lives, and cuts to the heart of the human condition.

        However, the other books suffer terribly from the lack of pteranodontidae, azhdarchidae, and even the smaller pterodactylus (most painfully felt in Taken by the T-Rex, which you would expect would reference Taken by the Pterodactyl from its very name). No, I fear without the grounding provided by these living fossilized embodiments of the human spirit, the other “stories,” if they may so be called, come off as disgusting smut. With, of course, the exception of The Orc Chief’s Virgin Tribute, which implies the presence of a pterodactyl in the tribal art of the chief’s tattooing.

  24. While I can commiserate on the historical non-fiction (and the mystery, when people ask ‘where’s the mystery?’ in their sex lives…that’s not what they mean) I can only laugh at the saurusmut.* That’s what we get when we open the market up. With 7 billion people knocking around it’s a given that somebody somewhere has an odd notion. And somebody else, somewhere else agrees with ’em. I don’t worry much about the declining culture as reflected in (pick your medium).

    Rule 34 is simply an acknowledgment that a relatively open information system (particularly coupled with anonymity) will let the ‘wild ones’ out to play. I usually take it as an opportunity to marvel at the variability of the human animal.

    *credit RES, this wins my vote for genre title.

  26. Seems like a natural result of indie .. the “overhead” is smaller, so the “wins” to support the overhead can also shrink .. and let’s face it, some people can and will read anything.

    Mew

  27. I just have to know – did you find those because of seeing one of my comments to a friend on FB, or did you find those from some other source? Because having two people share them within a couple days of one another would be just too crazy (even though that’s what happened to her).

      1. Then they must be going around everywhere (like sluts – who’d’a thunk it?), because, like I said, one of my other friends had TWO of her friends send them to her. Maybe we’re part of the reason they are selling…

    2. I was linked to the article a few days ago. (They were joking that I should write it.) I haven’t read it yet, but it reassured me that however strange some of the ideas I think are hilarious enough to write are, there will probably be a market for them. I’ll use a pen name, just to quarantine them from the others, though.

  28. Lizardotica, saurusmut, dinoporn, hebephilia,, hemipene? Yikes, I’m learning a whole new vocabulary today! I’m not a fan of censorship, but I do wish that people wouldn’t be called censors for exercising judgement and good taste. Only rude children think everyone should speak their mind at all times. Holding one’s tongue (or pen) is a lost art these days.

    Re-watched Dracula 2000 last night as part of our Halloween movie binge (highly recommended). As Dracula is walking down the streets of New Orleans during Mardis Gras, he comments on all the high tech new ways of pushing sex, “Ingenious.”

  30. I have been seeing those everywhere. Based on how many books they have out, I’m not surprised they’re making a living at it. I’m really just surprised that it hadn’t been done earlier.

  31. I wonder how long this will last. The authors of the above “dinosaur porn” have put up over 100 short stories in any number of porn variants (dinosaurs, werewolves, were tigers, wargs, centaurs, orcs, etc), all apparently in the last month or so. If it’s all really that new, their high income is likely to last a few months and then the fad will pass. I also see a few of other authors jumping on the bandwagon, with the story descriptions all looking quite similar.

    If the Kindle sales start flagging the authors could come out with the “dinosaur porn swimsuit” calendar using the book covers — from my perspective I’ll stick to looking at the scantily clad females rather than reading the blow by blow of the story.

  32. “then I get erotica in my peanut butt…”

    You know, I’ve got a story along these lines, but I’m almost certain you don’t want to read it.

    1. Oh, I should add that by “story” I don’t mean fiction or written down.

  33. Sarah: when you say “Do the Robespierre. It will make you lose your head!” — are you also implying a “Murat to be done in the tub?

  34. Oh, I needed a laugh today and those T-Rex things….

    And it only get’s the “traditional” treatment after the brilliant author makes a million bucks and all the acquiring editors are demanding something similar for their publishing houses.

  36. By the way, if you haven’t clicked on the link Sarah provided in the post …

    Don’t. And by that I really mean …

    Don’t. Just don’t. I wish I could unlearn what I learned.

  37. “This isn’t a simple matter of ‘you got chocolate in my peanut butter, yum!’”

    Just don’t ask about what’s in the “jelly” doughnuts….

    [bunker]

    >;)

  38. Pingback: You Got Erotica in my Peanut Butter

  39. Damn kids these days and their dinosaur porn. Back when I was a horny teenager, we had to make do with tentacle porn. From Japan. And we had to swim both ways to get it!

  40. It’s really disgusting. If more and more books contain descriptions of graphic sex, then some of the porn web sites will go out of business.

  41. I have stopped reading a book because of the gratuitous sex…and violence. some authors do not understand “if it doesn’t help the story along, then you shouldn’t have the scene in the book.” rule. Which makes us appreciate authors that develop a story so much more. I made that mistake in the bookstore this very weekend. bad bad storyline that , on the surface, looked like it would be an amusing break. Thank you Sarah, for being the good kind of author!

  42. At least these books are honest in their advertising. I hate it when an author plunks graphic sex into an otherwise decent book… because it’s like I paid for pages that were just a waste of time.

    The other one that annoys me is the ‘hygienic sex that does not effect plot of character development.’ If it doesn’t advance the story, why bother?

  43. There’s an interesting (actually very interesting) interview with Justice Scalia and in the middle more or less he says soemthing similar:

    I’m rather pessimistic that my grandchildren will enjoy the great society that I’ve enjoyed in my lifetime. I really think it’s coarsened. It’s coarsened in so many ways.

    Like what?
    One of the things that upsets me about modern society is the coarseness of manners. You can’t go to a movie—or watch a television show for that matter—without hearing the constant use of the F-word—including, you know, ladies using it. People that I know don’t talk like that! But if you portray it a lot, the society’s going to become that way. It’s very sad.

    And you can’t have a movie or a television show without a nude sex scene, very often having no relation to the plot. I don’t mind it when it is essential to the plot, as it sometimes is. But, my goodness! The society that watches that becomes a coarse society.

    from http://nymag.com/news/features/antonin-scalia-2013-10/index2.html

  44. Apologies for not reading all the other comments, perhaps someone has already made this observation, but when anyone else read this column, did the cover art of the three example stories get overlaid by the Darkship Thieves cover on the web page that anyone else was reading the column on? It artistic style and theme seemed to fit in so, AHEM, nicely with the other three. Not that the writing is comparable, of course …. 😉

    1. Yes, the cover art overlies* for me, too.
      I run Firefox with noscript (and adblock+) and I’m assuming the blame lies squarely on me, as the reader, for not turning on scripts on the page. That’s my usual assumption when things look screwy in my browser.

      *Is that the correct tense? That doesn’t feel right.

  46. Pingback: Who are the real gatekeepers? | madgeniusclub

  48. Since this has almost nothing to do with today’s post: the next Cat Among Dragons book is out on Amazon, and will be $3.99 this week (Huns and Hoydens intro special).

  49. There seems to be this book by numbers that has been going on. I’m not sure if it is coming from authors, editors, or both but I’ve seen in books even from authors I would never have expected to read it from. From new authors you can almost tell what books they’ve read by what plot points they find important.

    My problem is I could do with out some and refuse to read others. I can do without the erotic scene. I mean if you want to show a loving relationship I’m quite fine with “fading to black”. I could live the rest of my life without another love triangle it will be too soon. No, really, my whole life without another on. Especially when they suddenly show up in the second book for no real reason except to have a triangle. No more team this and that.

    I don’t want to read how much “in love” the main characters “because I love you”, but to make sure it is love they are going to with everyone else in the every book but never with each other. “I know I love you because I’ve slept through 2 football teams and the last 3 years of fireman of the month calendar”. And “I know I love you because I did the cheerleaders while you were busy and every woman in North Dakota.” “Isn’t our love strong!” And I really will not read that one of the main characters(or both) got raped unless there is a really really good plot reason(which most of the time it isn’t even a little plot reason).

    I don’t even like reading romance. It has so inundated every genre you can’t tell if you going to have a book that just happens to have characters in a relationship or if you have a romance that just happens to have a little bit of Supernatural/Sci-fi in it.

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