Hello, all! While writing my newest piece, I was entangled again in yet another one of those juicy mini-scandals that happen on sexstories.com (although thankfully I wasn’t at the center of it this time) and kind of snapped. Not like in an ‘I’m going to yell at someone’ way, but in a ‘something needs to be done to address this’ way. And if you want something done right, you do it yourself.

So over the course of a few days, I planned out and wrote my latest and possibly last essay, at least for a while, ‘The Online Erotica Writer’s Guide to Etiquette.’ As I’ve endlessly preached, community involvement is important when you want to become an erotica writer. God knows with my past I’m a good source of what not to do in order to be taken seriously, but I’m happy to have grown from my mistakes and have the opportunity to share the experience with others so they don’t make the same mistakes.

I think etiquette and politeness are often overlooked when it comes to having an online presence anywhere, much less the erotica world. I’ve met writers that were the most polite people I’ve ever met, and I’ve met writers that were kind of stuck-up and rude. Three guesses whose stories I enjoyed more after meeting the writer. I also want to point out, for the record, that on a whole, writers that were less rude usually wrote better stories.

This is not a coincidence. I have this theory that those that understand the perspectives of others well enough to write better characters also understand the perspectives of others well enough to accept that other opinions exist without getting angry at them. Outliers aside, I have yet to see a single instance where getting upset at a critic works out better for a writer than calmly responding with any semblance of grace.

To some, this is obvious and need not be said. I wish that were the case for all, but it isn’t.  I never wish to be some kind of authority when it comes to these essays, but rather to share the knowledge to newcomers and the like to make sure we’re on as equal a playing field as possible.

For that reason, this will be the last essay I do for a while. Five essays could be argued as excessive as it is, and I want to make sure we all keep writing as opposed to making sure they write to ‘my standards’ or whatever. People can absolutely reject what they’re reading in my essays – the most important thing about these essays is that it makes people think about what’s important, whether it be in erotic writing itself or how we present it. If I wrote more essays than I have, I’d have less validity to my claim that I’m just trying to start a conversation as opposed to have it with myself and pretend others are having an equal say. I can’t be greedy with my philosophy, and presume it’s the sole philosophy on sexstories.com.

Plus, hey, if I’m not writing essays that means I’ll be writing more stories, so yay. School is unfortunately still as busy as I’d feared, hence this update being on the next Monday of all things, but I’m still working as hard as I can on new material, only time will tell as to when it will be done. I’ll talk to you all next week.