When I sold my first novel, the contract specified a two-book deal. I was excited to find out what the other book was about. Turned out that was up to me, and in the contract for the third book, the content was also my call. Since my first book was an erotic romance, the easiest path for books two and three seemed to be a sequel and, finally, the completion of a trilogy. All of the sudden there was a need for erotic material.
I’m a married mother of four—I have kids in college, high school, middle school and elementary school. They’re in lots of activities. I don’t have an excess of erotic romance in daily life. I’m more likely to be chaperoning a Girl Scout field trip than participating in some light BDSM fetish fantasy play. I don’t imagine romance readers would be interested in three books’ worth of straight, vanilla married sex. So, to fill in the gaps, I had to enter the often-icky, at-times terrifying world of pornography.
I’m as much a fan as the next woman of some erotic writing. Literotica.com and other sites are places where you can read steamy stories, and there are countless e-books with bad covers if I wanted to be inspired. I’d estimate one out of every 100 of those stories is well-written. I did enjoy Erica Jong’s edited Sugar in My Bowl: Real Women Write About Real Sex, which isn’t necessarily porn, but is hot, and the essays are good. And sites like Sshh.com are good for erotica for women.
But reading about sex, while inspirational, isn’t helpful in writing a scene that, let’s just say, may not be something I’ve ever experienced in real life. The new novel, for example, prominently features a dominatrix. I don’t happen to be a dominatrix, so I perused journals and blogs of dominatrices but ultimately the time came where I was going to have to see one in action. Oh geez. Spam filters, here we come. Luckily I have a MacBook Pro and not a PC, which surely would have died a thousand deaths, and I wouldn’t want my mom to see a list of my Google searches over the last six months. Even the Mac was throwing warning pop-ups like Bitch, are you crazy looking at this kinky shit?
So the main challenge was finding porn that didn’t bring a bunch of suspicious spam warnings that were going to jeopardize my computer. So I Googled “find me some damn porn that doesn’t have malware on it” and learned that there’s an entire search engine called Boodigo.com (Say it out loud: Booty. Go.) where you can search for smut, and it’s all been run through filters or something so that none of the results will lead you to anything hard-drive-erasing. That doesn’t mean the results won’t lead you to a bunch of cheaply-produced, terribly-written porn from the 1980s that would make you rather clean the kitchen floor than have sex.
Finding classy porn that's sexy enough to watch for more than five seconds, and be inspired to write a slutty scene in romance novel? Proved to be a random, much more difficult task. I could definitely tell within the first moments—even by the still shot, really, if it was going to be watchable. 1970s pornstaches or early-90s Jazzercise hairstyles are an immediate turnoff. Next.
What’s in the background of the scene? Is this in someone’s house? I don’t want to see plants and couches and bedspreads. Well-produced, light BDSM threesome porn (which happened to be the scene I was working on) should be in a professionally-produced filming studio with people who appear to be actors or at least are halfway decent porn actors.
They shouldn’t talk much either, because chances are they’re not really good actors, so just do what we all came here to see, don’t try to pretend there’s a complicated storyline here. And for the sake of all that’s remotely sexually arousing, please, no music in the background.
—Mary McCarthy’s third novel The Scarlet Letter Storm releases May 10, 2016.
