A few weeks ago I ran into a very dear old friend of mine at a party. It was good to catch up, but it was
great to learn that she'd just published a pseudonymous erotic novel! I devoured
The Heartwood Box: A Fairy Tale
a day later; it's a great read, highly immersive and extremely well-written. "Lilia Ford" was kind enough to answer some interview questions....
JMD: When I wrote The Explosionist, it was
partly because I’d read Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy and Garth
Nix’s Abhorsen books; I found myself haunting the Bank Street Bookstore and
looking in vain for more books exactly like those, and when I realized there
weren’t any I thought I had better write one myself. What were your
models, in that sense, for The Heartwood Box?
LF: I wrote
the book I wanted to read but couldn’t find.
When you talk about erotica, it’s probably most helpful to distinguish
between brows—high, low, middle. We’ll
forget high-brow—no one is going to read my book and think “it’s just like Anaïs
Nin!” Low-brow is porn or so
incompetently edited that I feel like I’m grading an expos paper when I read
it.
That
leaves the middle, where I’d place my own book.
Critics keep bashing Fifty Shades
of Grey, but E. L. James might as well be the Henry James of this genre. The number one book on the Kindle erotica list
as I write this is Training
Tessa: Hot Texas Bosses BDSM Erotica, about two brothers who try to one up each other spanking and
humiliating their secretary—I highly recommend checking out the cover. The brothers are billionaires, and Tessa
desperately needs money to keep her mother in a special-care facility. Over the course of the story, she starts to
have feelings for one of the brothers, who also falls in love with her. I read it in less than an hour and for the
genre it’s not terrible—the author has a sense of humor, it’s properly edited,
it only costs $.99.
Romance
is different: I think in some ways we’re going through the golden age of the
romance and paranormal romance genres, with some very talented people working
in it. But those writers (or their
publishers) adhere to some pretty hard limits on what they’ll depict. They’ll dip a toe in the BDSM waters—it’s
next to impossible to find a hero who is not
portrayed as an “Alpha”—but it’s no more than a toe. I’m interested in how differences in actual
power, whether social, physical, financial, magical, play out in a relationship. I think those conflicts are very erotically
charged, and that’s what I want to read about (as opposed to things like nipple
clamps). But I also want characters who
are not completely clichéd, a plot largely free of inane rom-com contrivances, clever
dialogue, and a strong sense of the connection between the lovers—why they
truly belong together, why their lives would be empty apart. That’s the book I tried to write.
JMD: The Heartwood Box
is such a striking and appealing title. Did you have the title and/or the
concept early, or did it come late in the game?
LF: They were
both part of the original idea. Every
piece of fiction I’ve written has started the same way: I have a sudden idea
which starts playing out in my head almost like a movie. Either I type as fast as I can or I sketch it
out as an outline, but either way, I have about fifteen pages of material that
forms the core of the story. The seed of
Heartwood was the idea of a young
woman who has desires that she is unaware of and wouldn’t accept if she were;
then the idea of a magical box which could somehow sense and then expose those
desires; and most disturbingly, a male who was very happy to take
advantage.
JMD: You’ve published this book under a
pseudonym. I like the novel very much and wonder how you can resist the
temptation to get more glory from and for it! I know it’s erotica, but do
you see yourself in future integrating your private persona and the Lilia Ford author-persona,
or do you guess you will prefer to keep them separate?
LF: I have two parts to this answer, which I’ll call before and after
Christian Grey.
There is
nothing simple, mentally speaking, about writing under a pseudonym, and I have
no doubt this issue alone will end up making my psychiatrist a lot of money
over the next few years. I initially
chose to use a pseudonym because I have a YA novel that I spent years writing
and I have been trying to get published. I’d just had a set back, so I threw myself
into Heartwood as a kind of
escape. Next thing I knew, I had an
almost finished novel that I could publish myself, in a genre where that is not
a disadvantage. It just made sense to
publish it.
But
erotica is a tricky genre. I read a lot
of it, so the sex in my book doesn’t seem particularly extreme to me, but it
shocked the first people I gave it to who never read that genre. I’m proud of the book: I wrote the best book
I could, but it’s still about a woman with three partners, with spanking and
bondage and a lot of power play that does not necessarily reach a politically
correct settlement. As I got closer to
publishing, I talked to my husband and teenaged son about it. My whole family has been extremely supportive
of my writing, and I felt like I owed it to them to take their views into
account. We all agreed about the benefits
of publishing under a pseudonym.
And all
of this was before Fifty Shades of Grey.
The bottom line is that nothing will
ever be the same with the genre. I’m
still glad I went with the pseudonym, but I quickly became much more lax about
it.
JMD: It’s inevitable, I fear, and probably a question
you will grow very tired of: but what do you think of the Fifty Shades of
Grey books? Many of the usual literary pundits have read very
little erotica and don’t have much context for the whole phenomenon. Do
you have any insights or observations on the basis of having read pretty widely
in the field of contemporary American erotic fiction?
I have no
problem at all talking about Fifty Shades
of Grey—I only wish that someone close to me had read the damn book. I find the punditry a lot more painful and
stupefying than the book itself. From
what I can tell, it is impossible for a critic for The New York Times to write about a book like this without the most
insufferable condescension to the book and the people who liked it. You don’t have to admire or enjoy Fifty Shades of Grey, but talking down
to people who do, privately or openly pitying their lack of taste or education,
bemoaning whatever you think this says about American culture—all of that to me
feels like a failure of imagination on the part of the critic. It would be the same if I tried to write
about NASCAR: I don’t get it, so I probably shouldn’t write about it.
You work
on the 18th century novel, so you are very aware that there is a
long history of cultural leaders attempting to police popular writing through
ideas of taste or morality—and excoriating the (usually female) readers who
consume it. I don’t want to make some
kind of fancy academic point here—or even argue that I think the novel is
“good.” But when 20 million people love a
book, I think critics need to stretch themselves to understand why.
In purely
selfish terms, I think the book is the best thing that could have happened to
writers in this genre. It’s more than
just the attempts to coattail on its success.
The closet door on this kind of reading hasn’t just cracked opened—it’s
been ripped off altogether. E. L. James
finished the job the Kindle started. Arguments that the novel is politically
regressive are beside the point: this is fantasy. People should be able to indulge without
feeling like they’re guilty of unmaking civilization.
JMD: What advice do you have for novelists considering
digital self-publishing? Is there a site or two that you’ve found
especially useful?
I’ll
probably be better able to answer that question when I figure out if I can make
this work: self-publish a novel that finds its readers—those who like this
genre. There is no question the publishing landscape is changing at a dizzying
speed. I wouldn’t put any weight on my
own predictions of where it will be in ten years, except to say that those
people who wax nostalgic about paper books sound a little like my husband when
he talks about his vinyl collection. I’ll
throw out three things that I think are key.
1. Understand the genre you want to publish in. Read a lot in it, buy a lot of books in it,
read the reader reviews, have a sense of the upper and lower ranges of both
success and quality (which in erotica are not necessarily the same). Pay attention to how you make your buying
decisions, why you think a book succeeds or fails, and what the general expectations
of the readers are.
2. The single most important thing will always be
the quality of the book you write. The
great thing about digital self-publishing is that time is not the same issue
that it was. Your book will stay
available—you’re not dependent on Barnes and Noble giving you some of their
precious shelf space. You will have the
chance to find and grow your audience if that audience is out there. But that will only work if you have a good
book to begin with.
3. For God’s sake edit it properly and hire a
proofreader—please.
As far as resources go, I’ll single out Lindsay
Buroker’s blog. She self-published a fantasy series called
the Emperor’s Edge and blogs with remarkable
candor about her experiences: advertizing, sales numbers, proofreading, kindle,
Goodreads—you name it. She’s extremely
generous with her hard-won knowledge, and we can profit from it—and she wrote a
great series also, which gives her opinions a lot more weight for me.
