Write What You Know: Paranormal Edition by Regina Kammer

Beginning writers are often advised to “write what you know,” that way words and stories and emotions will resound authentically. The general public has glommed on to this aphorism and often conflates “write what you know” with “write your actual lived experience”. Erotica and erotic romance writers especially fall victim to this definition. We get a lot of “heh, heh” “snicker, snicker” at parties and such, because of course we’ve all done every blessed thing our characters have done.

Sigh.

The weird thing is that no one asks murder mystery writers if they’ve ever killed a person, or pseudo-medieval fantasy authors if they’ve quashed enemies to garner a throne, or vampire epic authors if they enjoy the taste of blood. Nope. It’s just the sex writers who get asked all the crazy questions.

Someday I’m just going to say, yes, if you’ve read it, I’ve done it, so why don’t you just go out and buy all my books, please, and then we’ll talk about time traveling back to 1777 New York and getting gang-banged by Hessians and a British general.

The truth behind writing fiction is far more interesting and fun. I’ve written about the weird experience of characters who refused to do what I wanted them to do, of characters who utterly drove a sex scene (and again), and having history spark my imagination.

As I delve more fully into unknown frontiers of writing, though, “write what you know” takes on a whole new meaning. I wanted to write Steampunk, but I know nothing about machines. Yet, I do know enough about the Victorian era to tweak it a bit. I wanted to write about Vikings, but my academic background is in the Late Roman-Early Byzantine period. Ah-ha! The Vikings paid a visit to Byzantine Constantinople. I thought about writing paranormal, and...

I got nothing.

I seriously do not understand things like shape-shifters and vampires, and it takes a really good writer to make those things sexy to me. I swore I would never write paranormal for these reasons.

I was taking a writing class a couple of years ago, and we had to post a link to an excerpt. I had only one polished excerpt to share at the time, from Hadrian and Sabina: A Love Story, an epic historical erotic romance, with four intertwining love stories. Upon re-reading the excerpt I suddenly realized: oh my god this is paranormal.

So I had already written paranormal, just not the kind of paranormal (e.g., vampires, shape-shifters) that’s really popular. It was a kind of paranormal I knew, with Greco-Roman gods and goddesses and a dream-like setting. I went back and re-read Hadrian and, lo and behold, there were other light paranormal elements, including a great four-way sex scene.

When the Naughty Literati were planning our anthology Naughty Flings with a springtime theme, I asked myself “what do I know about spring?” (because, um, you know, the whole write what you know thing). Hmmm...the end of winter’s frost brings a rejuvenation of the earth...agriculture...Demeter, the goddess of agriculture...who brings winter to the earth when her daughter Persephone is abducted by Hades...and spring arrives when Persephone is released. I’d written about all of that before, in Hadrian and Sabina. In that book I offered an alternate interpretation of the Persephone myth. And in "Hot as Hades" I offer yet another interpretation.

I had a lot of fun writing the story -- the paranormal story. I hope you enjoy reading it.

About the Author
Regina Kammer is a librarian, an art historian, and 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, 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/
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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.