I’m back… kind of

So, you might be wondering, what happened to Kendel?

Well, the morning after my last post on this blog I went to the park, slipped on some trash and my kneecap and the tendon that holds it in place decided to separate.  I had to have surgery to reattach them and was immobilized for almost two months on some very effective painkillers that worked for the leg but messed up my mind when it came to writing.

Also, it’s true that anesthesia does mess with your short-term memory in a major way.

I’m on the mend now, trying to write as much as possible but what I did mostly in my time away is do a great deal of reading.  I didn’t know it at the time but I was wood shedding my writing by filling my mind with as much literature that I could get my hands on.

Of course most of it was erotica or books on writing erotica as well as a lot of Mark Twain (I needed to laugh a lot to stop from crying) and the one thing that a diet of fiber and vicodin did for me during this time is allow myself to not judge what I’m reading as much as I was looking at how the writer attempted to get their ideas across.

Oh, and I read a great deal of short stories that if I wasn’t on pain killers I would’ve need them by the time I ended them if I wasn’t on hydrocodone.  However, what I did learn by having to read lines several times for clarity because my mind would wander when a sharp pain would shoot through my knee is that it was easy to tell which writers were writing erotica because they love it and the ones who were writing because they read some blog that said writing erotica is “in” so to speak.

Rather than get into the ins and outs of who, what, when where and why, the important thing I started to do is take a hard look as what I’ve published so far and see how close it comes to who I really am.

I love writing first and foremost and the main reason I got into writing erotica is because I had a huge slate of erotic stories that I had written for myself over the past decade that I felt I could share with the world.  I didn’t have an agenda.  There wasn’t a target audience I was writing for.  What I was doing was searching my mind to find meaning in the darker sexual recesses of my mind.  Personally, I had gone through some crazy relationship issues and rather finding somebody else to try fuck away my problems with, I chose to write them out and read between the lines to see if I could find a solution to my own problems.  It was raw, unfocused, sporadic and very self-indulgent.  Very much the same as I was back then and even though, when I look through those stories and get past all the technical flaws, I see a guy who only wanted to express himself to himself to try and figure out who he really is and you know what?  I kind of miss that guy.

I don’t miss his lack of concern for the rules of grammar or his need to over write and then for good measure repeat what he just wrote in a different way just to make clear the he knows what he’s saying.  What I really miss is that raw emotional intent that he had.

What I was trying to do back then was recall in great detail my most gratifying, scary, and unfulfilled sexual experiences and tried to figure out how I got into these situations.  My soul ached to re-live what the different women I had been with felt like.  The similarities, the differences, what I did to get into their beds and what I did to get kicked out of them.  It was just my mind in its purest form uncensored and unrefined.  It wasn’t until I started trying to present this work to an audience of more than one that I started to judge not just how I was writing but what I was writing.

It’s never a bad thing to write for a specific but if you don’t know what your audience is then shoot for the moon and let the chips fall where they may.

Rules are made to be broken.  Well, only if breaking those rules works for you, but deep down it’s all about giving someone an experience.  I’m talking about having your words take strangers on an orgasmic journey by just using your words and hoping they understand and feel the ride you’re taking them on.

The first time that happens, it removes the fear of going further and eventually you might find that place where those raw sexual emotions flow from your mind to the paper and people will want to constantly buy your work.  The audience you write for is YOU because you can never try and predict where the market might take you and your writing.

All this is to say that during the healing from my knee injury I almost completely forgot that I celebrated my first anniversary of being an erotic writer this month.  It was slightly over a year ago that my short story Umoja Mean Unity appeared as part of the Naughty Nights Press Doing the Naughty List Twice Anthology.

And you know what?  I wasn’t writing for an audience with that story, I was writing for me.  I allowed myself to write that story from an emotionally raw place and whenever I’m that connected to what I’m writing, I never seem to fail.

So, that’s what I’m trying to get back to now.  To write from that raw emotional place that alluded me somewhat until I injured my knee and forced me to look at what I’m doing and why I want to keep on doing it.

And why is that?  It’s simple.  Because I love it.

If you haven’t done so yet, check out Doing The Naughty List Twice.  Filled with stories to keep you warm this holiday season.