Tuesday, January 25, 2011

When Writing about Sex Vampires is "Writing What You Know"

I had been writing plays for so long, but after having a family and moving away from NY, I lost interest in workshopping plays and spending hours working with actors and creating something for an audience.  I had written a play that might have been too big for a non musical stage and decided to turn it into a novel.  That novel turned into a life's work of trying to perfect a very complicated theme and story.

I realized that I hadn't written prose in a long time.  I had grown accustomed to writing nothing but dialogue.  In playwriting, unlike screenwriting, we are asked to use as little stage direction as possible.  I needed to hone my skills in descriptive writing.  Someone told me to write what I know.  I'm very uncomfortable writing about real life but he meant to draw things from within.  I am a fitness instructor and personal trainer so I should know a lot about the human body.  I used to be an actress so I should be able to describe a look or an emotion well.  I was also getting burned out from writing something with so much meaning and spiritual significance.  I needed a break.  I did some research and learned that most publishers do not want a ton of meaning.  They aren't looking for what impressed our English teachers.  They just want to publish something entertaining.

So I set out to write something entertaining, something descriptive, something with very little dialogue as an exercise to become a better writer.  I read a blog where a woman talked about her "button" and it started a thread on how women can multiply orgasm.  Men wrote in and confessed that their orgasms are quick and that not much happens afterward.  Intent on writing what I know, I drew on my martial arts and yoga training.  In studying Chi Kung, I learned that the practitioners believed in Chi, or energy control.  Jieng Chi was described as something you are born with.  It is also your most powerful energy.  It is your sexual energy, what came from what your parents created.  It is creation itself.  You can't get anymore powerful than that.  I decided to write a short story about a species of vampire that feed off of this powerful sexual energy.  Of course, they hardly waste their time on men because their orgasms are so short.  What could be more entertaining than lesbian sex vampires?

It is written in present tense because, for a long time, I didn't know what would happen next.  I made it up as I went along.  I discovered a lot about myself as I practiced my ability to describe the human body.  I did make the story entertaining and entertained myself with the idea of these women being controlled by creatures that had the ability to suck orgasm and orgasm out of them until all of their jieng energy had been released.  There is an awful lot of sex, gore and violence.  But on top of that, my protagonist struggles with issues such as free will, her humanity and her animal instinct.  She also struggles with her identity and her feelings towards other characters in the story.  It's a love story on top of the graphic sex.  My friends who have read the story have said it is so much more than a smut story and they were the ones who encouraged me to actually do something with it. You can be the judge.  
It's now available everywhere books are sold.  You can check it out here:





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