NaNoWriMo 2015 Winner! by Regina Kammer

Once again I am a NaNoWriMo Winner!

This was my 10th year participating in National Novel Writing Month. I wrote the foundations of The Viscount and the Veteran: An American Federalist Tale, the follow-up novel to The General’s Wife: An American Revolutionary Tale.

If you can't wait until The Viscount and the Veteran is completed, edited, submitted, and published and need your bisexual male/male romance fix now, I've got you covered with "Winter Interlude: An American Revolutionary Novelette" my story in The Naughty Literati's Naughty Chances: Take A Chance On Romance. "Winter Interlude" is a companion piece to The General’s Wife: An American Revolutionary Tale, delving into the relationship between Captain Samuel Taylor and Lieutenant Patrick Hamilton.

So what did I learn this year during NaNoWriMo 2015?

- It’s always best to end a day’s writing session with notes about what comes next.
Corollary comment: It is so great when the writing flows and a scene comes together, characters are changed, plot moved forward. But the previous night’s victory is dampened by the looming realization the next morning that, OMG, you have no idea what happens next.

- I really, really, really need to tamp down the inner editor. I try to by putting stuff I need to research or edit in [square brackets] and forgetting about it. It doesn’t always work.

- I am a combination of plotter and pantser: perhaps the word is “plotser” or “pantster”. But I do need that next-morning crutch of what comes next. So the pantser needs a plot plan, even if that plot plan is formulated a minute after the pantsing has finished.

- 50,000 words is basically a really detailed outline.

- I learn the same lessons year after year. I really need to pay attention to my inner writer!

If you want to see how my November progressed on Twitter, I've captured the tweets on my blog.

I encourage everyone who has ever wanted to write a novel to take the National Novel Writing Month challenge. If you can't wait until November 2016, the same organization runs Camp NaNoWriMo in April and July. Your voice needs to be heard and your characters need to come to life!

About the Author

Regina Kammer is a librarian, an art historian, and an award-nominated, best-selling, multi-published writer of erotica and historical erotic romance. Her short stories and novels make history sexier, whether the era is Roman, Byzantine, Viking, American Revolution, or Victorian. She’s even sexed up contemporary settings, Steampunk, and Greco-Roman mythology. She has been published by Cleis Press, Go Deeper Press, Ellora’s Cave, House of Erotica, Story Ink, The Naughty Literati, and her own imprint, Viridium Press. She began writing historical fiction with romantic elements during National Novel Writing Month 2006, switching to erotica when all her characters suddenly demanded to have sex.

Keep up with Regina on her website

Follow her on Twitter @Kammerotica

Or Google+

Like her on Facebook

Connect with her on Goodreads

See what’s new on her Amazon Author Page

Writing Sticky & Sweet

This story ended up being quite hard for me to write even though I’d seen the small kernel for the idea in my mind from the very beginning. Turns out, it’s actually pretty hard to write about spring/summer activities when you’re dealing with wintertime cold weather, illnesses, and on top of all that, depression.

A family member I help take care of became very sick in December, about two weeks before Christmas. We were going along okay, trying different things to help him get well, but nothing was working. Then, when the doctors gave him something different, a bit stronger, it looked like that was going to work.

And it did.

For a day.

He fell ill again. And again.

At some point, something inside me just…broke. Has that ever happened to you? I don’t know that that same broken feeling would’ve happened had I been able to go outside where it was warm, or gotten him outside where it was warm. We had an unusually cold winter for our area for the second year in a row and it added to the helpless feeling I had.

So a combination of less light, colder than usual weather, and dealing with an illness I could do nothing to make better all added up to leave me feeling helpless and broken. Depression set in and I needed to write a story that was fun, lighthearted, and about spring and summer love.

The first time I wrote the story, that’s not what I wrote. Luckily, I found that out, but that meant I had to rewrite it. But I still didn’t have the story right. So I had to rewrite it again. And the deadline came and went, and I was rewriting it a third time.

Luckily, the Naughty Literati editors are a group of amazing women. During edits, I rewrote portions again, but I didn’t have to rewrite the whole entire thing. And as more sunshine appeared, the weather began finally warming up, and surgery on my loved one began allowing him to finally heal, I was in a much better place mentally.

It was hard writing Sticky & Sweet, but not once did I ever consider throwing in the towel. My readers are too important to me to just give up. Y’all are the ones who kept me going, who kept me wanting to make the story better, even if my mind struggled to do so. Readers are very powerful motivators for writers and I thank you all so much for your support of what we write.

I write, not only for my own enjoyment, but for y’all’s entertainment as well. When you read Sticky & Sweet, you’ll have to let me know if it makes you want ice cream as much as it made the members of my writing group want ice cream. They sent me ice cream emojis every time they read another version of the story. Yum!!

Writing Inspiration: Delia's Heartthrob by Regina Kammer

Hi Everyone! This is Regina, once again sharing a post from my own blog. In "Delia's Heartthrob," my story in Naughty Hearts, there's a festival celebrating the coming of Spring. Spring is definitely in the air where I live, and it's giving me inspiration for new stories. Read further to see what inspired my Steampunk series!

In Steampunk Inspiration (Part 1), I discussed my family ties to a unique object of inspiration for my very first Steampunk story. I also hinted at the source of inspiration for my second Steampunk story.

For “Delia’s Heartthrob”, my entry in Naughty Hearts the Valentine’s Day release from the Naughty Literati, there was a specific source of inspiration. But before I get into that there’s a bit of very personal backstory.

While I was writing “One Cheek or Two?” I had a traumatic experience in my real life. I won’t discuss it except to say that at the time it was very difficult to write creatively. I’m a writer, it’s my job, so I had to force myself. The ideas were there, but I found it quite crushing to get them down on paper (or in the computer, rather). I wasn’t experiencing writer’s block; it was post-traumatic stress disorder.

Yet something very odd was going on in my freaked-out brain: my characters were waiting for me. Specifically the characters from “One Cheek or Two?”—Delia, Edward, and Sebastian—were waiting for me to write their stories. It was as if they were hanging out in the Green Room of my mind, smoking cigarettes (Sebastian) and drinking tea, conversing amongst themselves at a level of volume I couldn’t hear, lounging about, completely out of character like off-stage actors.

It was comforting knowing they were there, waiting patiently.

And then when I was ready, their stories started pouring out of me, a deluge of ideas, scenarios, characterizations. A whole series developed, actually. It was quite bizarre.

I knew I had to continue writing stories from the Ockham Steam-Works Laboratory, and began contemplating how exactly to do this—Search for anthology calls? Self-publish? Post as an extra feature on my website?

The Naughty Literati Valentine’s Day anthology, Naughty Hearts, was the perfect opportunity to continue the story of Delia, Edward, and Sebastian. But, hmm, Valentine’s Day…how could I make that unique?

Festivals As Inspiration: Burning Man

In August 2014, I went to Burning Man for the fifth time. The arts festival has a reputation for being a week-long, drug-fueled party for naked people. I suppose some people experience the event in that way. But for me, the main attractions are the artworks, the performance art, and seeing friends.

As an erotica writer I constantly get people saying to me “Oh, you go to Burning Man! You must get so much inspiration from being there”—implying, most likely, that somehow the candid nudity and sensuality inspire the erotic aspects of my writing. Actually, Burning Man has never inspired me in that way. However, it has inspired elements of plot and setting. The first such inspiration found its way into Hadrian and Sabina in the form of the festival of Osiris:

The colorful banners and costumes during the day and the flaming, noisy spectacles as night fell…

The theme for Burning Man 2014 was Caravansary and the Man was positioned in the middle of a souk, or bazaar, made up of tents. There were some excellent artworks spread across the Playa and Black Rock City. A few made lasting impressions upon me, and a couple of those gave me ideas for some sexy Steampunk machines in my latest Ockham Steam-Works Laboratory story.

Pulse and Bloom and Skull of Actaeon were interactive art installations that utilized electronic sensors to synch LED lights to a participant’s pulse, thereby visualizing human heartbeats. It was pretty amazing. Pulse and Bloom had the added component of mingling the heartbeats of two people at the same time for a syncopated effect.

Embrace was a large-scale wooden sculpture of two figures embracing (spectacularly set on fire one morning). Inside each of the figures was a glowing red heart hanging like a chandelier.

Festivals As Inspiration: Imbolc

But how to integrate all of this into a story? How could I bring Burning Man to an imagined Steampunk Newcastle? Elisabeth Waters my colleague at the San Francisco Area chapter of Romance Writers of America gave me an idea. At one of our meetings she told me about the Celtic festivals celebrating the seasons: Imbolc, Beltane, Lughnasadh, and Samhain. Imbolc is the festival marking the beginning of spring and occurs about halfway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox.

That is, in February, kind of near Valentine’s Day.

And, thus, the setting and plot elements of "Delia’s Heartthrob" were born.

Naughty Hearts is now available, but if you want to get an introduction to the characters in "Delia’s Heartthrob", their first story is “One Cheek or Two?” in the anthology Valves & Vixens: Steampunk Erotica. The two stories can be read as standalones, although I’d really like it if readers discovered the whole world of the Ockham Steam-Works Laboratory.

And I think Edward, Delia, and Sebastian would like it if you read about their lives outside the Green Room of my mind.

Writing Inspiration: On the Eighteenth of January… by Regina Kammer

Hi everyone! This is Regina sharing a post from my own blog. It's still winter-cold where I live, so a post about a story set in winter seems appropriate! Enjoy!

Recently, I’ve been writing blog posts on what has inspired me to write what I write, you know, those little things that spark ideas that turn into stories. Today is January 18th, and I’ve actually written a story called “On the Eighteenth of January, ’78; or, A Night at Valley Forge”, published in Naughty List, the winter anthology from the Naughty Literati. So, what inspired a story that takes place on such a specific date?

Well, I had just finished and released the new edition of The General’s Wife and was starting to think about a sequel involving the secondary hero First Lieutenant Patrick Hamilton. But before the sequel would be released (it’s not even written yet!) I thought I should release a short story to set the scene. An interlude at Fort Revolution featuring Captain Samuel Taylor and Patrick during the winter of 1778 which happens off-page in The General’s Wife (there’s a story break between November 1777 and May 1778). It sets up an emotional backstory to the (outlined) sequel.

Then I saw a call for submissions for an American Revolution erotica anthology. Who better than I could write such a thing? The General’s Wife is an awesome book! And I had just done all that research… So I decided to write a story. Actually, my friend and colleague, Amber Belldene and I egged each other on to write American Revolution erotica shorts.

And that’s when everything goes blank.

I do not know for the life of me where the story I eventually wrote came from! It just happened. I think it was one of the most creative writing moments in my life. Amber and I exchanged stories and beta read each other’s efforts. Hers was sweet and romantic and gay. Mine was, according to her email, “Super kinky and bizarre and queer.” I think I squealed in delight at that response! When I try to describe it to people I’m sort of at a loss. The best I can do is to say it’s a male/male George Washington cross-dressing role play historical short.

Indeed.

The story was never published in the anthology I wrote it for (I turned down the contract). I’ve always intended for it to be published alongside the above-mentioned Pat and Sam short since the stories take place during the same intense winter of 1777-1778, albeit in different locations. But it’s a damn good story and I kept searching for a place for it. When the Naughty Literati formed, I found its home. You can read an excerpt on the Naughty Literati blog.

Now about the title. It comes from a line in the poem “Paul Revere’s Ride” (also known as "The Landlord's Tale") by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882):

“Listen, my children, and you shall hear Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere, On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-Five; Hardly a man is now alive Who remembers that famous day and year.”

I think hardly an American is now alive who remembers this poem! I remember it from my childhood. I’m sure it’s just an inside joke to me, but that’s why I titled my short story “On the Eighteenth of January, ’78; or, A Night at Valley Forge”.

Naughty List has been out since December 1st, and we’ve made some bestseller lists and gotten some good reviews. I hope that means there are readers out there who’ve enjoyed my story. It’s Misterotica’s favorite of my stories, and might just be my favorite as well.

Regina Kammer is an award-nominated, Amazon best-selling, multi-published writer of erotica and historical erotic romance. Her short stories and novels have been published by Cleis Press, Go Deeper Press, Ellora’s Cave, House of Erotica, with the Naughty Literati, and her own imprint, Viridium Press. She began writing historical fiction with romantic elements during National Novel Writing Month 2006, switching to erotica when all her characters suddenly demanded to have sex.

Keep up with Regina on her website http://kammerotica.com/
Follow her on Twitter @Kammerotica
Or Google+
Like her on Facebook
Connect with her on Goodreads
See what’s new on her Amazon Author Page