The first "BDSM stories" I read were in kink magazines that I found in my house. I was old enough to know what "bondage" was at that point, and I knew that I loved it from the "tie-up games" I liked to play, but the stories didn't really do much for me because they were heavy on S&M (which I hadn't tried and wasn't into at the time) and they had a lot of non-consensual sex. When I got online, though, I found stories more to my liking on USENET at alt.sex.bondage, as well as erotic forums on places like America Online and CompuServe. (Wow, typing that makes me feel old.) I've kept reading kinky stories over the years, but there was something about those first stories I found online that stuck with me through the years, more than any others I've read since then.
As I was getting ready to write California Bondage Sorority Book One, I revisited those old stories -- saved first to 3.5" floppy, then Zip Disk, then CD-ROM, and now my iCloud -- and tried to figure out just what it was about those stories that I liked so much. Part of it was definitely nostalgia -- even if I'd read those stories from BDSM magazines, the ones I found online were the first ones that I actually liked -- but a lot of what I liked had to do with the level of detail that the writers put into describing the feeling of being bound and gagged and played with. That created a kind of verisimilitude that let me enjoy the stories more than other kinds of kink erotica that I've read, especially since the writers came up with some very creative situations that I enjoyed for their sheer brilliance. I definitely tried to emulate those stories in my own writing, both the emphasis on the actual kink going on and the creativity of all the different situations that the characters got into.
In these first couple of months of having California Bondage Sorority Book One up for sale, though, I've run into a problem of reader expectation. For better or worse, the category of erotica, at least as far as literature goes, is almost always lumped under the category of romance. Although California Bondage Sorority Book One has some elements of romance, they're definitely not as present as they are in other "kinky novels" I've read; I'll definitely be incorporating more romance in later books, but I've always wanted the California Bondage Sorority books to be not just erotic texts, but also novels that can be appreciated as literary fiction, suspense, and much more. I'm not comfortable classifying California Bondage Sorority Book One under a genre other than erotica, though, since bondage and other forms of kink play such a huge part in the story.
If erotica continues to fall under the broader category of romance, then it's only natural that readers are going to expect not just romance in erotic novels, but many of the other conventions of romance novels as well. Maybe California Bondage Sorority Book One, and those stories I first read online over twenty years ago, belong to a different classification of story, one that borrows heavily from kink-themed erotica but should be considered its own genre. I don't know what that genre would be called, or how to set it up so readers have appropriate expectations coming into a story, but part of the reason I'm writing the California Bondage Sorority books is to encourage more writers to write stories and books like what I've written, so maybe I should work on defining and promoting that new classification.
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