Guest Post - Blog Eternity by Candi Delshamagus

Welcome today to the Taste Eternity Tour  - I have today a Guest post with Cani Delshamagus.. !!! 

Give it to Me Straight – An aspiring writer’s struggle with terminology

Although I’ve been writing for over twenty years, in a variety of genres, I hadn’t shared my work with the world until fairly recently. When I decided to submit an erotic short to Hot Ink Press, I nearly backed out. I’d read erotica, I’d written erotic pieces, but I really had no idea if my story fit the genre, or had swung wide of the mark.  Since research is something I love to do, though, I scoured the internet for blogs and articles on erotica writing, hoping for some direction.

Of course, researching anything on the internet is a crap-shoot, no matter how you tackle it. Writing, being an art form, is even more difficult to research, since everything aside from spelling, grammar and punctuation, is open to interpretation.

In the course of my research, I found myself dwelling on the subject of the terminology used in erotica. Medical, to Slang, to ‘Purple Prose’:  where would I find my niche? It was a much more difficult decision than I thought it would be. I really hoped for some concrete rule, but everywhere I looked, I found a variety of opinions on what each meant.

‘Purple prose’ was the most slippery slope to navigate. As students of writing, we’re taught to avoid redundancy, and encouraged to use analogy, but that doesn’t work as well in Erotica. Analogy is great in descriptions of emotion and scenery, but the moment it creeps into a description of a character in an Erotic story, during a sex scene, the author is flirting dangerously with ‘Purple prose’.

In any other genre, ‘Purple pose’ simply means language that is so flowery or pretentious that the reader is distracted from the subject at hand. In erotica, it seems to have taken on a new definition, meaning any vaguely romanticized physical descriptive. Personally, I don’t mind the odd romantic analogy. After all, sex and romance can play well together, and not every person is comfortable with common slang. Just don’t expect me to read about someone “teasing open her dewy, unfurled blossom with the apex of his sword of lust”, (No, really, I read it in a book!), without choking on my glass of ‘reading wine’ (Do you have any idea how much red wine can burn the sinuses?)

On the other end of the spectrum we have the writers who lean toward medical terminology. Again, I found  a broad spectrum of opinion on the matter. Some people feel that any adult comfortable with their sexuality should be able to use terms like vagina, penis, labia and testicles without giggling or blushing. Personally, while I neither giggle nor blush, (that I know of), while using such terms, the words themselves don’t do a lot for my imagination or sex drive.

I suppose that makes me a middle-of-the-road, kind of gal. I have certain slang that I find comfortable, and stimulating. For some it’s ‘dirty talk’ while others might find it too simple or crude. For me, it flows. I suppose, in the end, that’s all I can ask the muses for. With a  short list of favorites, it can be a struggle to keep from sounding repetitive, but I’m pleased with the balance I’ve achieved.

Now with that decision out of the way, all I had to do was figure out how to describe a foursome, without being redundant, or losing track of who was where, and doing what to whom. But that was a battle for another day.  Now that Hot Ink Press has put the story into eBook publication, I’m sure the readers will have their own opinions of the outcome.