Tag: writing

Dissecting the Popularity of 50 Shades of Bad Grammar

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Back in 2014, I was at a writer’s conference and was waiting in line for a seat in the hotel restaurant while chatting with a woman I had just met in the lobby.

I didn’t know who she was at the time. Just a really fun and interesting person who had crossed paths with me on that day.

We chatted about a lot of things and the topic turned to romance and erotica writing. I had just published a book under a pen name in that genre.

She had been asked to contribute to an article entitled, 50 Writers On 50 Shades. A look into why a book with so many obvious grammatical errors and ridiculous plot lines had rocketed to the top of the best seller list.

Sidenote: published in the summer of 2011, this book had sold more than 150,000,000 copies just one year later.

So as my new pal, Katharine told me about the article she had been a part of and the fact that the book’s popularity had left the public and the publishing world shaking their heads as to why it was so damn popular, I said, “I can tell you why.”

She tilted her head and said, “ OK. Tell me.”

When I finished my explanation, she gaped at me and said that was the first time she had heard that theory and she wished I had been a contributor to the article too.

Two things

1-I found out later that Katharine was a literary agent. (!!) In New York. With a very successful firm. Yikes. I’m over there shooting my mouth off about my thoughts on women’s romance writing and she’s just laughing and chatting away. I would guess our visit was a nice change from people hitting her up for book pitches and publishing favors.

2- About an hour ago, and years after that chat that had people listening in and chuckling, I found myself on a FB Group message thread where the members were still discussing this baffling phenomena of poor writing generating a best seller and a bazillion dollars. People are still talking about this! Reading through the responses, one thing was clear; no one was addressing the core issue that draws women to read hot, erotic, material.

I couldn’t resist throwing my 50 Shades theory into the fray. The same one I gave Katharine in our not-at-all private setting with a bunch of conference attendees pretending not to listen in. Granted, it’s more than a decade later so not verbatim. And it’s updated, but it’s damn close to the first word barf. And it still feels accurate to me at least. So here it is.

Why was 50 Shades of Grey so freaking popular?

I’ll tell you why.
13 years ago, when the 50 Shades book released, women everywhere, were just realizing something. We were tired of being in charge of our own orgasms.

Directing men in bed with body movements, some words or drawing a map on us to say, “This spot! Right here! The same place that you’ve missed a thousand times!”, gets pretty freaking frustrating.

And given that all they have to do is insert in a hole and repeat to reach their happy ending, women have been living with a lot of mediocre sex. Yes. Some fantastic too, but when you canvas women for factual data, those experiences are as frequent as Halley’s Comet.

So, horrible grammar aside, that guy in that book took 100% charge of the delivery and quality of that girl’s orgasms and, because he enjoyed doing so as much as he did, he even showed her more ways to reach those “little deaths” to more spectacular conclusions. Without a road map! Or running dialog with specific instructions! Unlike the reality of most sexual encounters with non-fictional males who roll over and snore 2 minutes after making a deposit.

Yes, even just 13 years ago, most women were just starting to be more open about seeking satisfying erotic reading, more so with the privacy of a Kindle or e-reader that would allow them to read anywhere, anytime, anything they wanted.

The explosion of horribly written erotica for women after that grammatical dumpster fire was published, was unprecedented. And it also gave an opportunity for the really great writers to rise and shine.

So, thank you E.L. James for that contemporary trailblazing into women’s “romance” writing and she, in turn, can thank Anais Nin for lighting the way.

Women were so hungry for reading about (fictional) lovers who not only can deliver, but REALLY enjoy delivering the goods, that they devoured that spectacularly mediocre writing in 2011. Like picking through the inedible chicken bones to find the juicy meat clinging to the book carcass. And given the fact that Romance Fiction is now a $1.44 Billion dollar genre, I’d say we’re still a little peckish.

And that is why E.L.James is currently lounging on her pool deck in the South of France and we are all in line at Taco Bell waiting for our black bean grilled cheese burritos.

Writing…

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Shhhhhhh!

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Falling into Wonder

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Great blog posts are a little like the holes covered in smooth water on forest pathways where your foot sinks in deep and you’re falling and twisting; adjusting to the shift in equilibrium. Recovering your balance, you might find that you’re facing a different attitude direction now, and the path of your day has changed, ever so slightly.

That makes me think about trajectory. Turning your foot a few degrees in a new direction will not change your world overmuch if you aren’t planning on going very far. But making a tiny adjustment to how you walk through your life can, over the long haul, bring you to a very, very different destination from the one you thought you were heading towards.

Starting out a day with a steaming bowl of Crap Soup with a side order of Unfortunate Circumstances will always set your internal GPS on an expressway to Meltdown City. Reading something that changes your mind, just a little, is a reset move that lets you input a new route for your wreck-of-a-day, putting you on course for a much better destination.

As I wander the Internet, especially on my own Crap Soup days, I love to find myself stuck, neck deep in someone’s clever pile of wonder. Their carefully chosen words and images encircle me like tendrils and hold fast. I can go no further until I’ve drank my fill of what they are offering and when I am released, I am just a little bit different. I have new words now. I have something in my head that wasn’t there this morning and I’m on a new quest to find a little altar in my mind or in my living space where I can put it on display.

I hope that’s happening to others when they trip on a search word and fall, head first into this blog site. I hope they push themselves up and find they have a little bit of something I wrote stuck in their hair and it’s talking to them, like some enchanted leaf; turning their head just a tiny bit and sending them on a trajectory towards more and more wonder.

Even when I am too busy to post here, like I have been lately, I notice that new people are dropping by all the time. I love to get your emails and feedback! I really love that you all tend to come back again, now that you know the way here. There are footprints of nearly 1500 of you on this blog and closing in on 6,000 on the other, over at http://laughingmyrearendoffliterally.blogspot.com/

I’m imagining myself as a wood sprite, positioned in the trees above and watching as unsuspecting visitors stumble in to this joint. It delights me to know when you’ve gone back into the archives and dug out some words that you want to take home with you.

I recently had the weird experience of having someone who was conducting an expensive self awareness workshop at a university be handed a little memory card I had done with some powerful questions written on it. They had a little epiphany and asked if they could copy it and hand it out to their attendees because it was exactly what they needed to hear. Discussions of pending book projects and intellectual property were had. I decided that while I wait for the publishing world’s response to my manuscripts, I would push ahead and get the Three Questions project going. And so, I have dug a new small web hole that you’re invited to trip into. Soon, I’ll have some products (wallet size cards) for the project and you can carry them to remind you of how easy it can be to communicate clearly with others. http://crystalclearmeaning.wix.com/crystalclearmeaning

I’m doing a fair amount of wandering whenever I have free time, reading through your sites too and sharing the gems and shiny things with links back to where you dropped them. It’s always a really good day when I trip over a diamond and fall into a big pool of wonder.

New Excerpts from The Grove: Awakened ~ Book One

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Today, I’ve uploaded some new pages from my upcoming Sci-Fi Fantasy Adventure, The Grove: Awakened. Have a taste…

https://wordninjagirl.com/appetizer-menu-a-little-taste-of-the-grove/

Road Trips and Blue Pills and Music…Oh My!

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If you follow my blog, you already know I’m kind of a music freak. In some alternate universe, I’m a HUGE rock star. In this one, I’m a huge fan. There are just a few types of music that I can’t handle. They usually involve sounds that resemble metal cheese graters shredding my soul into julienne pieces and 3.2 minutes of recorded Tourette’s syndrome rants about women’s Va-jaja’s, assault weapons and counting money. Beyond that, I can pretty much, lean into any kind of music you throw my way.

Though I’ve sited mostly older music in these posts, my playlists hold primarily new and amazing bits from young artists. This is a renaissance time for music and there are hundreds of young artists out there with phenomenal work pouring out of them. I’m listening to “Satellite Heart” by Anya Marina as I write this. Great song.
This morning, I finally set up my iTunes on the new laptop and got chills of joy as the zillion files floated down from the cloud and filled my library. It was like Christmas morning and I was 6 years old. Crank the JBL’s!

For some weird reason, I have acquired a ritual of listening to a few specific songs each time I take a road trip. I load a playlist for the drive as part of my packing chores and I faithfully add The Allman Brothers, “One Way Out”. It’s the musical equivalent of a 100 mph run on a vacant stretch of Route 66. Excited to see my old pal again, I clicked play and heard the familiar opening guitar riff slithering out of the speakers. Damn it to hell! Instead of my best road song, all I could hear was the background music in that fucking Cialis commercial where the guy is on a beach and about to hit the open road, so of course, he’s thinking about his erectile dysfunction problem.

I don’t know about you, but I hit saturation point with those commercials about five years ago. I mean, come on! Enough already! We get it! It’s called…aging.

There are some completely legitimate circumstances for the use of E.D. meds. SOME. We’re not stupid though. There is no way in hell that pharmaceutical advertising departments would pour hundreds of millions of dollars into the promotion of their pills to people who do not need them, if they weren’t earning billions in return. They’re sitting, right now, around their board rooms tables high fiving and laughing their asses off because they have successfully convinced a ridiculous percentage of the male population to “ask their doctors” for a little somethin’-somethin’ to jack up their weekend. What most of those guys actually need is a personality transplant and (surprise!) their partner’s just might work their own somethin’-somethin’ to insure an outstanding performance in the boudoir.

For the miniscule fraction of the population that is under 45 years of age and suffering ED, you are a major rarity. Factoid: most of the blue pills dispensed in America are used by NON-E.D. sufferers who are rolling the dice that they do experience an erection lasting more than four hours. These are the same guys who were huffing spray paint cans in junior high, mind you. Still at it I see. Another large percentage of the little blue pills end up as hand out favors at bang parties where guys with heavy gold neck chains and crystal bowls full of blow get their jollies with the young girls who dropped out of hair & nail school and now work the morning shift at the strip club across from Walmart on I-94.

Do you think this might be nature’s way of keeping wrinkly old guys from chasing after 25 year old girls who should be waking up next to Taylor Kitsch and not Larry King?

To be serious for a moment, 1 in 4 women, across the globe, will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime. I really don’t think a product that makes guys hornier is what the world needs right now. Especially not when I have to sit through fifteen E.D. medication commercials during a three hour block of prime time TV and then I have to watch aging male senators casting a vote on the hill that takes away my right as a woman to govern my own body. If I made the rules there would be no blue pills at all as long as there was no right to choose. At the very least, the pharmaceutical companies could add a birth control element to the Viagra/Cialis/Crushed and powdered panda testicle potion or whatever the hell else men use to continue getting laid after their bodies have put on the breaks.

So, yeah. My Allman Brothers song is tainted…forever, with the acrid stink of corporate greed. I need a new song. You know how you can adore a particular fragrance and every time you smell it, your mood is elevated to a happy place? Well, some skeezy individual has bathed in my fragrance and now, I can’t smell it without the new visual accompaniment of the skeezer. “One Way Out” has been skeezed. I have to find a skeeze free song, quickly, because it’s summer and the road is out there waiting and I want to hear something that won’t plant the vision of Larry King with a boner when I crank up the volume and put the top down.

Suggestions? Send me yours.

Now, if I can just get the image out of my head of the antique bathtubs with the two naked people bathing side by side on a cliff overlooking the 6th hole on Pebble Beach…

Wild Hope

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I’m nearing the final pages of my manuscript and there’s a small war going on inside me. Where is this one going to land and what happens if it ends up some place that wasn’t my first choice? Pouring my morning coffee into what I affectionately call “the bucket”, an oversize mug I made for my son that he left here “to use when he’s home”, I was running through scenarios of editors with machetes. That, naturally, made me envision scathing reviews on Amazon balanced precariously with a reader base that comes to your aide with pens flaming and me standing, like a mother, pleading with both sides to just get along.

Before I needed a case of Tums to face my laptop, I stopped and did what my friend, Nancy, tells us all to do when we forget that stress is a choice; just breathe. Books, like the children we bear and raise, reach a point when they naturally move out into the wide world and cut their own path, whatever that might look like. Stories, books, music, poetry, art; anything we give creative birth to is going to come out of us kicking and screaming and when it hits the air outside of us, it then belongs to the world. It will be treasured or abused. It will be scrutinized or ignored all together. It will touch some people deeply and it will bore others who were looking for something bloodier, sexier, harder, softer, shorter or longer or slightly more beige.

While we are pushing our creations out of the tiny orifice that only artists can locate, we can hold onto the wild hope that it emerges with all fingers and toes. We can hope that it becomes the fully formed, three dimensional, memorable, moving vision that was planted in our mind by a passing horny muse that put its mouth to our ear and in a deep voice, whispered it to us one night as we were falling asleep.

Wild Hope. The phrase reminded me of the album that former pop princess, Mandy Moore, birthed into the world back in 2007. Prior to that, I only knew of her from the snips of music I caught on car radios or from an adolescent’s playlists pre-9/11. One day though, I heard a piece of her music that made me follow it to its source and bring it home with me so I could hear it again. The words were luscious, the orchestration and production nearly flawless. Her voice on that independent album embodied that moment, somewhere in your late 20’s, when shit gets real. The curtain falls down exposing the powerless little wizard you assumed had control over your emotional life and you found out it was just you, making some stupid choices and some surprisingly good ones as well. Beauty.

The title song is perfect and there were many other gems on the collection. I found a YouTube video an hour ago; Mandy Moore-Wild Hope-In The Studio; a diary of the making of the album. At the 5:20 mark, she says, “There is nothing like the freedom of having the absolute control to make the record that I want to make.” She had won a hard fight to break free from her recording contract that was forcing her to barf up mainstream elevator music and this would be her solo flight.

Inspired to hear it start to finish, I went searching my CD stacks. No luck. Someone “borrowed it” (read: stole it and it’s never coming back). Fine, this is the age of instant gratification. I’ve got Spotify. I’ve got iTunes. I’ve got those other weird programs on my Windows laptop that I’ve never used before. I’ll find it, download it and be listening before my bucket of coffee gets cold. Guess what? It’s not on any of those sites. In fact, I had to order a new copy of the CD, from the U.S. outlets though, because the European version is usd$51.oo. Seriously.

Well, that sent me into panic number two this morning and I still haven’t opened my manuscript file to begin my climb to the last pages of the book. Why have they taken the downloadable files away from us? Has someone kidnapped Mandy and the ransom is forcing her to return to a candy filled Willy Wonka factory to turn out teeth and ear rotting junk food music? Is there a telethon for this where I can send a donation? Am I avoiding ending my book by obsessing over the missing Mandy Moore Music? Hell, yes.

Fine. My coffee is cold anyway. My book will go out and some people will love it and some will use it to line their guinea pig cage; though if you’re going to trash it, I would prefer it be kindling for a beach bonfire. So much more romantic, you know?

So, here’s the song. At least you can hear this one. I’ll just have to wait for delivery of the CD that I found online at a record place in Chicago. I’ll get back to writing and while I wrap this manuscript up, I’ll hold onto my own Wild Hope that everything will be all right.