Charlie J Forrest

Just a quick note to say that if you’re in Scarborough (or, frankly, the northern half of England) on the 14th of June this year, you can come along to the “Smut by the Sea” event at the main library in Scarborough (tickets etc to be found HERE). I’ll be there and, all going well, will be offering up a reading from one of my books (two if I can squeeze them in) and signing autographs, doing press interviews and all the other glamorous stuff that Scarborough is famous for (read: sitting on a windswept bench eating fish and chips).

Scarborough… maybe.

See you all there (hopefully) 🙂

Well following on from some interesting internet discussions I’ve been lightly prodded to give my views on Twitter.

I’ll start off by saying that Twitter is, in my opinion, a massively underrated and misunderstood platform.

Part of the reason why it’s underrated and misunderstood is that there are a lot of people on there who are doing it badly. I don’t claim to be an expert, but I’m hoping to give some idea of how Twitter can work well, and ultimately how to not be terrible at it.

The Problem

There’s a pie chart of Twitter usage I saw once. It broke down into roughly three sections Self Publicists; Aggressive Self Publicists; and people who update you on every bowel movement. I can’t find the link at the moment but I’m sure it was well sourced and researched. Anyway, it’s funny because it’s basically true.

It seems that what a lot of entities, not just writers but companies big enough to have PR departments that should understand this go through this process when first encountering twitter.

1) I need to follow people, OK, I’ll follow ten people who sell the thing I sell.

2) OK, they just seem to be sending endless tweets about what they’re selling, I guess I’ll do that.

3) Why don’t I have more followers?

4) Twitter is useless.

5) optional I’ll hand over control of the Twitter account to the intern, what’s the worst that can happen? cue hilarity.

But just because there’re a lot of people out there doing it wrong doesn’t mean you have to be one of them and certainly doesn’t mean you have to clog your twitter feed by following them.

Balance

So the first rule of Twitter for marketing is the same as most other platforms. You need to hit the right balance between BUY MY STUFF and other materials. There are numerous thoughts as to how this balance should be but I’d generally say that direct marketing tweets

“Exciting news, just released, Chimney Sweep IV Burt’s a cumin’ available now HERE!!!!”

Need to be balanced with tweets that make you seem like a human being rather than a robot. This is similar to blogging in that you want the ideal impression of the reader to be

“Oh there’s that Girl who makes some interesting points about gender politics and the S&M community, oh and I think she writes some stories too, maybe I’ll check them out”

rather than

“Oh God! It’s that account that constantly cycles through adverts for it’s 12/50/100 different titles full of exclamation marks and hashtags. #KMN!”

Eros Blog has written countless posts about the careful balance of marketing and other content and has, over the years, provided a lot of quite insightful thoughts on the whole sex-positive blogging sphere. As a general rule of thumb though, your direct marketing posts shouldn’t be more than half of your output.

One important aspect in which Twitter differs from conventional blogs is that it doesn’t matter if you don’t tweet much. Unlike a blog where there’s likely to be wasted effort in checking for updates, Twitter loads automatically. If you’re not tweeting, nobody’s annoyed by this (though if you never tweet they may make occasional purges of their ‘following’ list). So you don’t need to worry about necessarily tweeting all the time. Most people tend to tweet in little flurries of five minutes or so. If you manage that every other day, great, if you manage that once a day, even better. If you do it every hour you should probably be getting some work done; that rooftop gangbang scene with the nanny isn’t going to write itself!

What to Tweet

There’s a long and a short answer to this question. The short answer is I don’t know. The longer answer is it very much depends on you. Whatever you tweet, just make it something that indicates you’re a human being. Tell us something interesting about that research you’ve been doing on novel uses for worm screws or how well your oboe practice is going. Even mundane tweets about daily life do the job of making you human and relatable.

Here’s an example. I was writing the other day and had got properly, elbows deep into a pretty filthy scene, I was in the smut zone so to speak, when the phone rang. It was my mother. Instantly I had to close that window, and a few more, go and look out into the garden and have a grown up conversation about my little sisters. After I hung up I posted This.

On the face of it it’s a simple “mothers eh?” tweet. But it says several things at once, I have a mother, like everyone’s she calls at inappropriate moments, and like so many people out there I have to balance a normal everyday life with writing smut. Me, made human in one tweet.

Follows, following back, PMs, etc

I generally try not to fret over how many followers I have. If you have a number of followers that’s a reasonable fraction of the number you follow then that’s fine (I’m currently at about 1:3 on my writer account). If that number is higher you’re doing pretty well, if you’ve followed 2,000 people and have three followers you’re almost certainly a spam bot!

Now, you will get alerts telling you

“The unclean chimney (@SweepMeNow) is now following you…”

That’s a good thing, it shows someone is interested in what you have to say. now, whether to return the compliment by following them is up to you.

A lot of people have told me that following back is just good Twitter etiquette, but I’m not convinced. Firstly it leads to weird self-delusional bubble where everyone’s following everyone and nobody’s reading anything anyone tweets. Second, this tactic is often used by people to try and scrape up followers (if you don’t immediately follow back they’ll unfollow you… because apparently this is a point scoring game to them) and thirdly, because once you’re both following each other, then you can send private messages. I’ve never fallen foul of anyone being unpleasant on the internet, but it happens and private messages are an easy way to be a dick to people. That said I tend to ‘follow back’ more on my writer account than my other accounts, not least because a lot of the people following me are worth taking a look at.

What Who to Tweet

One of the big benefits of Twitter is that it makes it incredibly easy to connect with people. Any tweet you send you can add someone’s Twitter handle (the thing beginning with an @ (e.g. @BigBallBurt) and it will pop up as one of their “interactions”. It’s not the same as a private message because it’s there for the entire world to read, but it’s a way of addressing someone, even someone you don’t know.

Now, of course, if I try to send a tweet to Stephen Fry then the odds are it will be lost in the noise and I’ll never hear anything more. But if someone tweets to a small time writer like me to say they liked that last story but they wish I’d put a bit more soot into it well, gosh and jolly, I might just reply and let them know that the next instalment will be sootier than Harry Corbett and thank you so much for reading.

But also don’t be afraid to join in conversations. If you see an interesting comment on your feed, don’t be afraid of hitting ‘reply’. Before you know it you’ll be in an in-depth conversation with a new friend about the best way of hardening a sweep’s boy’s knees.

Hi folks,

Well “Cuckquean in Chastity” is now available to buy HERE.

In other news I’m having a bit of a special giveaway for Valentines day. That’s right, this weekend only there will be TWO of my books available for FREE!

Bound in Plain Sight Will be available HERE for FREE on Saturday 15th of February (I tried to do it for the 14th but Amazon didn’t like it).

PLUS

Letters from my Kinky Lover will be available HERE for FREE, not just for Valentines day, but all weekend (14th to the 16th).

Well it’s that time if year again, the nominations have been announced for the annual literary “Bad Sex Awards”. Joy to lazy journalism and literary snobs alike.

I struggle for words to describe not only how infuriating the very existence of this award is, but also at the fact it’s clearly organised by a bunch of castrated lemurs.

There’s a book by the late great Iain Banks called the steep approach to Garbadale. One of the key plot threads is a relationship between two cousins over the span of a number of years. Unsurprisingly there’s a fair amount of sex in it. What’s more surprising is how good it is. Banks’ prose is simple, grounded, intimate without ever crossing the line into crude. It was masterly. To this day it’s my recommendation for any writer wondering how to do a sex scene to read Banks, and this book in particular.

The steep approach to Garbadale was nominated for the bad sex awards.

F F S!

In all honesty, Banks’ only error was probably in writing a sex scene in a reasonably well read book.

Which leads me onto the wider point. An award for bad writing is pointless, intimidating, and unjust. How are we meant to encourage young writers to go “over the top” and charge into the sexy battle, heaving breasts and clunky similies in their hands if all that awaits is a hail of self-righteous snorts?

We need a good sex award, and we need it now!

After all, what’s the alternative?

Well to quote Mr Banks again: “You could always not write about sex; but then, sex is quite an important part of life.”

I’ve had an interesting week.

No, not in the sense of domestic melodrama or family catastrophe, but in terms of my writing. You see, I was working on the closing chapter of “Through the Eyepiece” and, not to give too much plot away, someone’s trousers came down that hadn’t come down before. Normally this would lead to a quiet “Hooray” followed by a lengthy description of what they then do sans pantaloons.

However, this time I hesitated. Or rather, the part of me that normally does the plotting and writing hesitated. My fingers carried on and pulled the characters trousers down to reveal, not some skimpy underwear but a bulky and intimidating looking chastity belt.

Where the hell did that come from?

I skipped back over the previous chapters and, to my astonishment, realised that it made perfect sense. Yes there’s the simply continuity of this being the first time she’d taken her trousers down, but there was something else. It made perfect sense of the character. Her back story, her personality, her expressive outwardly focussed sexuality all made perfect sense when looked through the perspective of someone who’s most intimate places are locked out of sight.

Somehow, completely without me knowing, my subconscious had written this whole B-plot into the story. I should have been ecstatic, I’d somehow bypassed the normal writing process and done something through intuition, brilliant yes? Not really.

I was spitting feathers, why? Because this completely threw off the pacing of the resolution of the story. It just opened up too many new avenues to explore when I was building up to a climax. Not only that but, whilst I had a passing knowledge of this, I didn’t feel comfortable going into much more detail until I’d done some more research.

My writing schedule was in tatters.

In the end, and I hated myself for doing this as there are few things more annoying than a tease in a piece of erotica, I realised I just couldn’t fully realise it there. I mean I left it there, the chastity belt is definitely canon, but I tried not to talk too much about it until I have the chance to fully explore the idea in a story of its own.

Which is, incidentally, what I’m beavering away on this week. Let’s just say I had a very fun weekend researching a fascinating new topic. So I suppose I should be happy, my subconscious rewarded me with an interesting B-plot, material for a new story, and a fun weekend of learning about new experiences… I just wish the fucker would let me in on this sort of thing before hand.

OK, Here’s the deal. I’m relatively new to this game and, being a newbie, it’s gonna be a while before I’m a best-selling celebrity erotica writer (Hello Ms Collins). With that in mind I’ve set myself a bit of a goal. You see that little logo to the right of this post (the one that’s not my archive list) you know, the one that looks like this:

Well it’s for this really cool thing that’s happening in March in a really cool town (that I have experience of in a different life… long story but let’s just say one evening ended with someone borrowing my boots). It’s shaping up to be a really interesting gathering of readers, writers, editors etc who are into erotica and, well, it just sounds like it’s gong to be amazingly useful, really good fun and generally brilliant.

However, being a humble little upstart I can’t just decide to go and spend a weekend away from home. So I’ve set myself this little goal, if I can make enough money from sales to fund the trip, in time for the trip, I’ll book my ticket and go. It’s actually a pretty steep goal, but, well, fingers crossed…

Cristina’s back!

After a little delay book two of Cristina’s Crises is now available here.

Here’s a sneak peek at the cover art:

It’s here, it’s here, it’s, well not actually here, it’s over there, but you get my meaning.

Update: To celebrate my debut I’ve had a word with Amazon and Bound in Plain Sight will be FREE this weekend (17th to 20th January 2014). Share, enjoy and remember, the best thankyou is a review 🙂

Well there is light at the end of the tunnel. All things going well my first book will be available to download on Amazon early next week (I’m not quite feeling confident enough to say Monday but… fingers crossed).

It’s called “Bound in Plain Sight” and follows the adventures of Cristina one night in mid-winter. She’s supposed to just be getting a lift from her colleague Gavin but he has other plans.

I’ll be posting a link, photo, and excerpt when it’s ready to be read.