13 thoughts on “Writing Sex For Money”

  1. Furthermore, as everyone knows, when you’re not in the mood for it, porn is gross. After the first few hours, it was also unendurably boring. Nonetheless it made me horny, in a downtrodden, creepy way. I was disgusted and horny and disgusted by my horniness. I was hornily falling asleep in my chair. I was hornily staring out the window and hornily wondering how I got to this point.

    This sounds suspiciously like she edged her way through the project. If that worked, she should have said so, great tip!

  2. Dirty little secret: Writing is not difficult, if you have any aptitude for it at all. Even at the pace descibed (a 100K novel a month) that only comes to about 13 pages a day, which is less than 2 pages an hour. That requires a blistering typing speed of about four words a minute!

    During the height of my career, I managed to output about 600 pages of sexy SF pay copy a year (less than two pages a day), but I did hold down a full-time job, along with family stuff.

    You know what’s hard? Writing a thousand 15-page user’s manuals user’s manuals every year! Also part of my sordid literary past…

      1. I prefer to write in the morning when I can. When I was working full time, that was 45 minutes between getting up and shower/depart. Nowadays, it’s usually a couple of hours mid-morning when something else hasn’t come up.

  3. Florence King’s novel ‘When Sisterhood Was in Flower’ has a protagonist who ekes out a living writing porn. There is a classic passage wherein the woman writes a description of eating a boiled egg, written in the style of pornography.

    1. I remember that. She used the term [F-word]y Fudging the describe how she could stretch out the word count. I’m of the Hemingway school of thought. I write everything I can think of, then strike out anything that seems like it won’t be missed. I once edited a 100,000 word novel manuscript down to a 15,000 word novelette, because I couldn’t sell the novel, but wanted to be paid for something. It was humbling to realize even I didn’t miss the 85,000 deleted words.

  4. The easiest way to write is to copy someone else’s ideas. When I found out that Robert Lynn Asprin had writer’s block, I thought “how hard could it be?” and started writing a story using his characters and style.

    I wrote fifty thousand words in one day.

    I really should have sent it to him. But it worked out ok, he got over the block and gave me more Myth adventures.

      1. It just poured out almost as fast as I could type, but I’m only about 70 wpm. I spent about 16 hours in front of my computer that day.

        1. The thing about writing is, if you just do it, it gets done. I limp along at 25wpm, writing no more than an hour a day (if I’m lucky!), and yet the books got done somehow. I had a hilarious on-line set-to several years ago about writing productivity vs. typing speed. People were claiming they could type faster than what’s in Guiness (despite never having written a publishable novel), and a number of folk stopped speaking to me forever because I laughed at their claims of type 250wpm. I was a difficult child.

  5. I used to write a lot of porn about Hillary Clinton, Janet Reno, and Helen Thomas. The military used it at Gitmo.

  6. Here’s what I think about writer’s block: You notice nobody ever talks about programmer’s block? Programmer is a job. (And I’ve been both, of course, so I have a clue.)

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