Thinky Thoughts: How BDSM is like Frozen Yogurt
First a quick note about masks and COVID at cons: I just got back from Capricon in Chicago, and a few weeks back we had Arisia here in Boston, right in the midst of a COVID surge. Both cons required masks, and both cons have reported minimal spread afterward. Arisia only 8 cases out of 1200 attendees.
Every time I post about this, people try to send me links to studies showing that “masks don’t work.” Of course, these same people aren’t interested in seeing the studies that show masks DO work. What seems evident from the cons I’ve been to over the past two years is that if you have a science fiction convention with a mask mandate, you get low (but not always zero) spread, and if you have no mask mandate, you have dramatically more cases. If you’re a mask skeptic, I would think of it this way: Maybe that’s just because the “mask believer” behavior is less risky in all respects while the “no more masks!” crowd is more likely to carry COVID, not because of masks per se, but because of other behaviors? The cause doesn’t actually matter, only the results, and so net result: I will be preferentially attending the cons that require masks.
The other mitigation strategy I’ve been employing at cons which I’m really enjoying is this: when I want to have a “let’s catch up” meal with someone at a con, instead of going to some noisy restaurant or bar, is having them up to my room and getting either room service or ordering some form of delivery food. It’s quieter and we can actually catch up with fewer distractions! And post-COVID, my brain can’t handle distractions as well as it used to!
And with post-COVID life on my mind, I am now attempting to re-focus my career on my self-publishing efforts. There are a few reasons for this, but one is definitely a feeling that time is finite. The COVID infection I had in September probably shortened my lifespan and/or my brain’s useful working years remaining. And I have a LOT of stories I still want to tell.
Another is that it’s become clear to me that right now the big publishers are just not that into me. The “kink fad” is over for them. But in indie/self publishing, the readers are still there. If you haven’t heard me gripe about it elsewhere yet, The Vanished Chronicles is not going to come out from Tor, even though they’ve had the series under contract now since Obama was president. I got reassigned to a new editor a while back, and she’s not enthused about it. So the rights are coming back to me, and I will be putting the wheels in motion to self-publish in the future.
HOW BDSM IS LIKE FROZEN YOGURT
Do you remember back when there were exactly two places you could get frozen yogurt and they were knock-offs of each other? TCBY and ICBY: The Country’s Best Yogurt and I Can’t Believe it’s Yogurt. The main place you would find TCBY and ICBY was in airports and in mall food courts. I don’t know which one came first, but the point is that they were a staple in these big capitalist slots for decades. They were basically like soft-serve ice cream, but made with yogurt, which was nominally “health food” but whatever.
Then in the early 2000s, here in Cambridge, MA, a company started up called Berryline (their two stores were along the Red Line T, one by Harvard and one by MIT) with the concept that they wanted frozen yogurt that actually tasted like yogurt (much more sour) and not faux ice cream. They quickly had lines out the door and expanded to a third location, etc.
Capitalists took notice. This area is known for incubating successful chain concepts, and quickly a whole passel of copycat chains began proliferating across the country. Pinkberry, Red Mango, Yogurtland, 16 Handles, and more and more. The peak came around 2012… right around when the 50 Shades of Grey hype was exploding.
Kinky books had a similar trajectory. For decades there were a couple of stodgy, reliable outlets for them: Blue Moon Books and Black Lace among them, which could be very reliably found in the chain bookstores like Borders, Waldenbooks, and Barnes & Noble. They were the ICBY and TCBY of BDSM books.
But upstart publishers like Circlet Press, and romance publishers who were starting to dabble in kink, showed there was upward movement in the market, then the 50 Shades boom happened, and all of a sudden every big publisher was acquiring kinky books. When my book Slow Surrender hit the market was at the peak of this boom, which is why that book was sold in Target, alongside Christina Lauren, Sylvia Day, Tara Sue Me, et cetera.
But of the ten (TEN!) fro-yo places that tried to open in my neighborhood during the boom… ZERO of them are still in business. Even the Berryline store that had opened a few blocks from my house has closed. Does this mean people don’t like frozen yogurt anymore? Not at all. There are still a few shops doling it out to dedicated customers. But the craze for it is over.
And the craze for BDSM and kink among the big publishers is over. Does this mean readers don’t want it anymore? No. There are still thriving readerships for both queer and het BDSM, but the authors who are doling it out are back in the indie/self-publishing spaces for the most part.
So that’s where I’m redirecting my energy now. Into my own books and my own efforts. I took a workshop recently, offered by the SFWA romance writers subgroup, about writer burnout. They asked, when was the last time you really felt energized and lit up by your work? When was the last time you really felt on fire for it, like you couldn’t wait to get to the computer to write?
For me, that feeling was when I was juggling serializing The Prince’s Boy and Daron’s Guitar Chronicles simultaneously while I was writing Magic University. Far from feeling “burned out” by all that work, I was waking up every morning with writing ideas, and going to sleep every night thinking about my characters.
So. It’s time I leaned in to my queer and kinky stuff again, time to listen to my muse and not try to chase a Big 5 trend. It was nice to ride a capitalist wave for a while, because that’s what got me out of credit card debt and onto a decent financial footing really for the first time ever. And it would be great if another publisher wanted to throw a lot of dollars (or Euros) at me, but for now I should be concentrating on controlling my own creative and financial future.
CHANGES TO THIS NEWSLETTER & PATREON
What that means is I’m getting organized to start serializing some of my works in progress through my Patreon. My plan is to keep sending out this email newsletter once a month, but I’ll also crosspost it to Patreon (where there is now a free “follow” function) and to my blog(s).
I expect to begin a weekly serial on the Patreon within the next couple of months. What I haven’t figured out yet is WHICH of the back-burner projects to serialize first. One entire book of The Vanished Chronicles is finished and in the can, but I’m letting my agent solicit a few other publishers about that before I do anything with it myself (but I’m expecting it’ll come back to me). I also have a very queer cyberpunk novel that has been in the works for over 10 years. And a “trapped in a game” series that would be ideal to serialize. And so on. I will probably run a poll next month asking for which to do first!
People also keep asking me for book recommendations! I’m going to try to read more, and try to recommend at least one book per month in the newsletter.
Thanks for reading this newsletter whether you are getting it through Mailchimp or on one of my other platforms! (Please consider getting it through Patreon if you’re not as they seem to be the best at bypassing the spam filters…? They have some secret sauce!)
|
