Your asking for donations for a porn novel? Are you kidding?

A commenter on Facebook asked this the other day, replying to a post about the crowdfunder I’m doing for my erotic novel, Coming. Here’s my reply:

Yes, I am.

If you don’t want to read this novel and don’t want to support the crowdfunder for it, don’t. Not everyone is interested in everything, and that’s fine: I’m probably not going to support a crowdfunder for a book about golf. But if you hold sex writing in contempt and think the very idea of asking for support for it is ridiculous, I’m going to ask you to either reconsider that opinion or leave my page.

And for those who do enjoy and respect my writing about sex, and want to support it and read more of it: Here’s the link to the crowdfunder! A little more about the novel: Tentatively titled Coming, it tells the story of one woman’s sex life, starting in 1970 when she’s 18, and ending in roughly the present day. Each chapter describes a different sexual encounter, at a different point in her life: essentially, the book is a series of intense sex scenes, with several years between them. I’m looking at this woman’s life — her name is Sheila — through the lens of sex. I’m exploring Sheila’s sex life, the rest of her life, and how they intertwine. In particular, I’m looking at how she makes choices about sex: Sheila is often adventurous, even reckless, and she makes decisions impulsively, but she’s also cautious, a careful planner, and likes to be in control. I’m interested in how being both impulsive and a control freak plays out out in her sex life.

Yes, I’m writing the novel with lots of fun, hot, sexy sex. Women with women, women with men, probably some men with men, probably some gender fluidity, some of it kinky and SM-y, some of it not. It is an erotic novel, and I’m making it erotic. It’s also a novel — a story about people’s lives. As you know if you’ve read my erotic fiction, I hate erotica that’s, “plot, sex scene, plot, sex scene.” I don’t see these as separate. Erotica is much hotter when you feel what the sex feels like — not just what’s happening physically, but the emotions, the sensations, how this sex is going to change the characters’ lives.

If this makes you want to read the novel — please kick into the crowdfunder if you can! I’m offering a number of perks for donators, including signed copies of the book, regular updates about the book’s progress, invitations to a private book launch party, one-on-one Skype conversations about the book, and thank yous, of course. (A complete list of perks is on the Indiegogo page.) If you don’t want to read the novel, that’s totally fine; whether it’s because you don’t like erotic fiction or aren’t interested in this particular book. But if you’re going to express dismissive contempt for the very idea of erotic fiction as something of value, you picked the wrong writer to tangle with.