Valerie Roney

If you were wondering, I did not spontaneously combust in awkward embarrassment last night. In part because the show ran really late, and reading last, I was tired beyond even registering what I was reading. That and the fact I had edited and practiced reading so much beforehand it had all become an academic exercise and my brain barely registered it as erotica. What’s that Green Day song?… “when masturbation’s lost its thrill, you’re fucking low.” Yeah that.

Unfortunately, reading last and reading late, I never really got a chance to mingle afterwards in that room full of brilliant, bizarre, and brave people to talk about what I’ve been working on, and would like to be working on. So I’m gonna lay it out here, and get the conversation started online.

Personally, in the realm of erotica, I am no longer able to tolerate bad writing just for the sex — this may also explain some of my dating hang ups: c’mon man! your character development is shallow and this plot is going nowhere! 

Writing really good erotica requires the coming together (pun!) of a lot of different facets. Context and story help you buy in, to get excited (also pun) about what’s happening and why; some seriously sweaty hot monkey wildness is definitely necessary — I could never understand why writers think having sex with a loving partner puts the kibosh on getting your freak on; and somewhere between the clichés of honeyed mounds and the clinicality of vulvas is the language of poets: the evocative (and sometimes amusing) imagery that tells a richer story.

I know where my writing superpowers lie, and I know my kryptonite — for starters, any other erotica will be written under a pseudonym (so I can shake off that public eye in my head while I write). I’d like to take my strengths, learn from other people’s strengths, and start a project called The Erotica Files. A collaborative group, where we do more than just workshop each other’s work, but bring the best of what we have, and incorporate the best others have to offer; to insert and enfold and create something more powerful than any of us can do on our own.

In the same way cells can come together to trade the best material they’ve got in order to reproduce something more evolved than either original, I’d like to do more than the binary fission of my own mind, I’d like to bring poets, storytellers, and weavers of wild wet entanglements together to create a genre of erotica that is inspiring as well as arousing.

So, who wants to have brain sex with me?

Drop me a line and I’ll get an email conversation started on the logistics. This could be the start of something amazing, or an utter abomination. Won’t know ’til we try, right?