What is your favourite word for orgasm?
The word I use most often is “come” (and in my books I do change “cum” to “come” for grammatical reasons) but I like le petite mort. Like so many French sayings, it sounds sexier to me than so many of our words (“jizz,” “pop,” etc.). That being said, I don’t think I’ve ever used le petite mort in my writing, but perhaps that’s a new challenge/prompt for me to work with!
Which type of story do you enjoy more: characters personally achieving orgasm or characters helping their sex partners achieve orgasm?
A helping hand (or other body part) or sex toy or other form of assistance can certainly be good for the drama that is necessary to create an erotic story, but in The Big Book of Orgasms I was lucky to get to do something I rarely do, which is include a few masturbation and self-stimulation stories. Masturbation is just as much a part of the erotic experience as partnered sex, but it can be challenging to build up enough drama to work in short story form, so the micro fiction format worked well, for example, in “Steamy” by Tess Danesi, which goes from Kegels in spin class to a different kind of solo workout in the steam room. There’s a lot of room for playing up the tension of two characters interacting over orgasm, whether the type in Jade Melisande’s “Coming Together: The Elusive Simultaneous Orgasm” or “Forced Orgasms” by Shoshanna Evers. There are so many ways to orgasm physically and so many motivations mentally, and then when you add to that the layers of interaction between one or more partners, there are an infinite number of possibilities, so there’s probably more variety in the latter, but I’m open to all literary orgasms.
Which type of orgasm works best, in a literary sense: the moaner, the screamer, the talker, or the silent gasp?
It truly depends on the story. I think it can be hard to articulate the noises a person might make during an orgasm in words without sounding comical, but it can be done. Sometimes silence truly is golden, but then again, maybe they’re silent because something else is happening that is so overwhelming they can’t make noise.
Do you think a collection of stories that feature a distinct absence of orgasm would interest readers—or do we need that “money shot?”
I don’t think readers want a forced orgasm in the literary sense (as opposed to the kinky sense, such as in the story “Forced Orgasms” by Shoshanna Evers), so I don’t think it’s necessary to tell a good erotic story—one of my earliest stories “Lap Dance Lust” doesn’t have anything approaching an orgasm. But I probably wouldn’t publish a whole book of erotica without orgasms because I think readers would feel something essential was missing. I wouldn’t want to read about gratuitous orgasms though where they were there just as a checklist item; they need to be an essential part of the story. If they’re not, then maybe it’s better off without that kind of climax.
Were you expecting to publish as many kinky stories as you did?
I wasn’t sure what to expect but I’m glad the final book has a mix of vanilla and kinky stories. I think kink works well as both a means of achieving orgasm and a motivation for it in some cases, and I hope that in this format even readers who don’t normally read BDSM material will appreciate, for example, a story like “Hard Knocks” by Malin James, which looks at whether it’s possible for the main character to come from being spanked. For a lot of authors kink seems to be what they gravitate to, so it makes sense that that’s what they submitted. I wanted to make sure that with 69 stories they were as varied as possible and didn’t repeat themes, though I didn’t realize until after there are two movie theater stories, which I think is okay.
Will the follow up be called “The Second Coming?”
Ha! I’m focused right now on getting the word out about The Big Book of Orgasms and hoping that readers new to my work and possibly the erotica genre take a chance and pick it up. I’d be thrilled if it warrants a second coming, as it were, and would love to see a whole new round of 69 bouts of super short sexiness.
