Here’s an author interview with Roxy Katt. Take it away, Roxy…
- How did you start writing erotica?
Sheer sexual arousal, I guess. A long time ago I started drawing erotic pictures and cartoons, but I can’t really draw. Eventually, I found it fun to write erotic stories instead. My first publication was “A Suction Story” in the first issue of Heavy Rubber Magazine, 1997, illustrated by Tom Porta. Even then I was into the comical humiliation end of things, as the story involves a clumsy vacuum cleaner salesman and a woman in a rubber catsuit. Well, you can guess what might happen there. In the middle or late 2000s I started getting into hardcopy anthologies such as the Mammoth books and books by Cleis Press, for example.
- What’s your favorite published work of yours and why?
That’s a tough one. Probably a toss up between “The City Pony” in Cleis Press’s Where the Girls Are (but I sell it now as a single at Amazon and Smashwords) and Rubber Space Academy, a novella in Roxy Katt’s Naughty Tales of Leather and Latex published by Wordwooze. It’s fun writing stuff like that. With “The City Pony” I had these two characters slowly start to know each other as they met on occasion by accident, and somehow these comical conversations just kept pouring out of their mouths without me having to think about it. In Rubber Space Academy I faced what is for me a common technical problem: how to more or less “believably” have my protagonist (in this case, one Pamela Blamm) have one sexual encounter after another with various characters while pursuing an over-riding non-sexual objective. Well, somehow it worked out. And really well. Each escapade transitions to the next in slapstick fashion.
- Where do you draw your inspiration from?
Well, women in leather or latex, or simply attractive women in general. Also, any tale of erotic/comical humiliation. Some of my own sexual icons are Batgirl and Catwoman, also Emma Peel.
- Where’s your favorite place to write?
In a coffee shop. I just like to get out of the house and go to the coffee shop and write. I suppose it would save time to stay home, but there is something about going out and parking your ass at a little table and writing. You’re alone, but you’re not alone, you know? I like that.
- What was your ideal career when you were a child?
Scuba diver. I was probably influenced by Lloyd Bridges’ Seahunt TV show from the 60s. As a child I don’t think I realized the erotic connection. Eventually, I lost any real desire to be a scuba diver, but the erotics of rubber suits and such are still with me of course.
- What’s the best writing tip you’ve ever been given?
Somewhere on the net I read (I don’t know if this is true and I haven’t looked it up again. It doesn’t really matter) that Margaret Atwood decided at an early age that she was a writer: not that she was going to be a writer, but that she already was one, even though she hadn’t written anything yet. I think this is a good attitude if you really want to be a writer. Don’t wait for the nod or divine election from some “authoritative” source to tell you you qualify as a writer. Decide you are one and write.
- If you get writer’s block when you’re writing, how do you get around it?
I get writer’s block writing non-erotic literary fiction, but not when writing erotica. More often, when writing erotica, I get the opposite: writer’s diarrhea—if I may be so vulgar. I keep coming up with different versions of how the story should go. What happens first? What are the characters wearing? How do they end up having sex? What kinds of things do they do? Writing a porn story is like chasing a fantasy in your head and trying to nail it down into a final form. This can be the hard part.
- What’s your favorite genre within erotica and why?
Comical humiliation. I’m not sure this is even recognized as a genre yet, but it’s the overarching theme of my work. Of course, there is leather, latex, and bondage fetishism and related stuff, but I guess I would say the overall framework for me is comical humiliation. Especially getting stuck. The cool part about all this is that while there may not actually be a lot of people into the comedy humiliation per se (especially not the getting stuck stuff) my work overlaps with a lot of other fetishes enough that it’s not caught in some tiny fetish ghetto. Nonetheless, there are marketing difficulties involved. There could be all kinds of people out there looking for work like mine and not knowing how, exactly, to find it. I keep thinking there are a lot of comedy humiliation fetishists out there who have not discovered my work, and, when they do, they will say “alas! A pervert after my own heart!” and so on.
- What are you working on at the moment?
Last Fall I got inspired by jodhpurs and got into two short stories and a novella about haughty phallogynes (women with dicks. I don’t like the term “futa”) being humbled. Then with the demands of other things in my life I got too busy and had to leave all that off. I haven’t done much erotica writing since (though I would like to get back to those stories. One of them was tantalizingly close to being done.)
- What’s the biggest writing challenge you’ve ever taken on? Did you succeed?
I think the biggest challenge is not so much the writing at all as getting time to do it, and dealing with the bureaucracy. Promoting your work and maintaining a website, and formatting work for various e-publishers, for example, can be very daunting. I have trouble with artwork. I have done some of my own covers and am pleased with some of those, but others I made are dreadful. Good cover artists can be expensive.
But the biggest writing challenge per se was probably Rubber Space Academy and Rubber Cat Burglar (the latter being a phallogyne novella). These are my longest works to date.
- What’s your biggest writing achievement? Why?
Maybe it’s just hanging on and having faith in my work. I’ve been at this (though not constantly or full time by a long shot) for over 18 years. I know porn is generally seen as pretty ephemeral, but I aspire to stuff that will last. But if you are asking in more specific terms, well, “Fancy Pants” was in Cleis Press’s Lesbian Cowboys, which won the Lammy Award for lesbian erotica in 2010, which was pretty cool.