Patrick Doolittle
My name is Patrick Doolittle. I write bad erotica.
Yes, Doolittle is my real last name, No, I don’t publish my books under that name. I publish them under the name Sandra Wolf. People (I say people, I really mean women, which my publisher says makes up 90% of my audience) are apparently much less willing to buy bad erotica if it has a man’s name on the cover.
Bad erotica.
I know it’s bad. It’s intentionally bad. I used to write good erotica, but well-written sex doesn’t sell for shit. Well, I used to write legitimate literature; you know, the kind that’s about racism and poor people and all the other things university types like to pretend to care about, complete with all the non-existent layers of “deep meaning,” but that sells even worse than good erotica.
My agent – Michelle Field, a hell of a woman – made a great point after my first few manuscript attempts. Women want erotica. All women. It’s their porn. She called it “word porn.” When I hear “word porn,” I think of James Joyce. If you were actually going to jerk off to words, you would jerk off to Ulysses. The book sucks, but the words are positively orgasmic.
Anyway…
Michelle made the (very valid) point that if you want to sell a lot of books (and of course I did - as she put it, “if you really cared about artistry, you’d still be trying to play cuckold to John Steinbeck and teaching at the community college.”) you have to cast a wide net.
What that really means, in business terms, is that you have to write things that many people are interested in and capable of reading. In practical terms this means that most people are barely literate trash and you have to convince them that your book is more fun than a dime bag of shitty weed. In literary terms, this means that I have make creative use of a limited vocabulary comprised primarily of vulgar verbs and the pejorative words for penis and vagina.
I’ll give you an example:
Clarice felt her pulse quicken, blood rushing to her breasts and neck, precipitating into a field of tingles in her flesh, like many needles poking her. She sighed as Bartholomew ran his roughened hands over her shoulders and down her chest, intensifying the heat she felt both inside and out. His fingers lingered on her nipples, and a pinch of dull pain became an explosion of undulating pleasure.
Her desire, so long held at arms within her heart, was becoming manifested in the physical world, but not in the way she had imagined. When she looked at the man who strained her heart on previous days, she saw the life she wanted: comfortable; fulfilling. Now all that her mind could entertain was a visceral, carnal, coveting of his body.
See? I think that’s pretty good. In fact, reading it makes me a bit hard, which is weird. However, if Michelle were to see this (actually, she probably will if I ever publish this thing), she would point out the following flaws:
1) Too fucking long. People can’t read that fast when masturbating.
2) Metaphor. Lots of people would be confused and pause at the comparison to needles, ruining the scene.
3) Vocabulary. Most people can’t read words like “undulating,” “precipitating,” “visceral,” and “intensifying.”
4) Names. Who the fuck knows anyone named Bartholomew? It doesn’t matter that the story takes place in 19th century New York, pick a better name.
Here’s something that would sell:
Claire felt hot as Brice grabbed her tits forcefully and pinched her hard nipples. She moaned in pleasure. All she could think of was how much she wanted his hot, sweaty cock inside her.
There you go. You can have that one for free.
