I'm having a regular conversation with a man who doesn't know me very well. The fact that he's talking to me illustrates this point perfectly, I'm completely anti-social and he'll be barking up the wrong tree, as it were. He asks me what I do and I tell him I'm an author. All seems fine. I might even get a few compliments and words of praise--that does happen as people imagine the life of an author to be a glamorous one...aw...bless--then the conversation shifts when it's revealed that my novels contain...smut.
Gasp. Shock horror. No, that was just from my sister, (ha ha sorry, love you xx).
What normally happens then, is that a once fairly civilised conversation instantly plummets to the gutter and I'm treated to a wealth of filthy comments and suggestions. It doesn't seem to matter that my brand of smut is Yaoi--or men getting it on with each other, to the uninitiated.
Yes! Suddenly it's okay to hit on me and drop all pretence of respect for me being a woman--and a mother, I might add. Okay, granted, being a woman or a mother doesn't automatically give you respect but there you go. My experience as a female author of smut is that I'm treated as somehow less deserving of normal courtesy by some, when it’s discovered what I do.
Why is that, I wonder? I also write a web novel about a serial killer. No one inches away from me when they find out that wee gem. Neither is it assumed that I'll want to know, in gory detail, methods I may not yet have considered in which to bump someone off.
When I sat down to write my first sex scene I barely knew where to begin. I'm going to blame my partner in crime, Yuramei, for the fact that there was a sex scene to be written at all. She suggested we make the book a Yaoi. I'd seen the tame sort of Yaoi and really couldn't work that with the kind of characters I write and so we agreed, explicit Yaoi it had to be.
I didn't read or watch a lot of gay porn to prepare myself for the task ahead. I did what most writers do. I invited the characters from the scene into my head, gave them a rough idea of their motivation and left them to it. I simply took notes, like a furtive voyeur who couldn't afford, or had neglected to bring, a decent camera. I wrote it all down and was actually pretty pleased with the result. Sadly, when that scene was later published, it was pointed out by the very first reviewer that the main character had used both Vaseline and a condom. Gah! Big mistake. But as the main character is Judas MacGregor, I forgave myself the lapse. He's not exactly mastermind and hadn't expected to use the Vaseline in the first place, having made his first attempt at penetration, “with spit alone”. He just went a bit overboard after his sexual partner complained about his technique--the cheek of him.
The scene still reads the same now and I'm not ashamed of it, despite Judas's sexual faux pas and the completely graphic content. Art imitates life. In life, occasionally, or so I'm led to believe, people have sex. They also eat, sleep and go to the toilet. I'd be lying if I said that there were highly detailed flushing scenes in my books but there are a lot of toilets mentioned. Judas is an incorrigible cottager.
I refuse to hang my head in shame for writing what some would describe as gay porn. The sex is not the focus of the story but the genre requires that sex is included in the content.
So some men talk dirty to me when they find out what I do. Hilariously, people often ask me, but how can you know what it's like?
My answer to that is usually, did George Lucas ever fly an intergalactic spacecraft?
That's flippant, I know. But the reality is that both male and female authors of heterosexual sex are always writing half the scene from a male point of view and half from a female. (And authors/ editors, you know what I mean. Don't get me started on POV glitches here.)
To sum all of this up, I am Katsura and I write smut. If you read it, just enjoy it. Like real sex, it's messy, funny and may contain nuts...as well as the odd mistake.
Katsura and Yuramei's work can be seen here: www.bigdealcomic.com
Their first novel, Big Deal: vol 1: Lust for Vengeance, can be purchased here:
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