About Kat M
I’ve been a reader of adult stuff since I was 9, and my friend and I discovered a book of “true confessions” type stories on her mother’s bookshelf. It was funny and embarrassing to two 5th grade girls, but it lit up something in my mind. That book made me realize very early how everyone had sexuality and sexual imaginations… even parents… even teachers!
After that, I couldn’t read a book without looking for the characters’ unique sexualities. If it wasn’t acknowledged, the character seemed incomplete. While I did not want to have sex when I was a child, I still realized that it was a part of everyone, and wanted to see that understanding reflected in entertainment.
I came to realize that, even in entertainment for mature audiences, something either “had sex in it,” or not. Either a lot of emphasis was put on the sex, or that aspect was completely ignored.
This seemed stupid. It led to a few common outcomes, none of which was satisfying to me:
- the sex was boiler-plate and not tied to the characters at all (cut and paste romantic love scenes, basically)
- it was all sex and no story; the characters were stereotypes and generic
- it was awkward since the writer tried to throw in sex without thinking about the characters
- the stories were unnaturally sterile and didn’t even acknowledge sexuality, even though it should have been there
What I wanted was for character sexuality to be integrated into the story, and come from actual characterization, not just because they were highly desirable physical specimens (alpha mates.) I wanted to see the part of sexuality that wasn’t directly rooted in the characters’ identities as A Man or A Woman, but what made them uniquely themselves. Since I was reading as a unique being, I wanted to read about other unique beings, not general classes of people represented in a single character. While there were a few exceptions, the majority of characters in romance, erotica, and pulp was too type-based to bond with.
Then, I became a critique partner. I started studying all kinds of entertainment theory, and I realized that I wasn’t looking for anything strange — I was simply demanding excellence and attention to detail in genres where you don’t usually find them. (Not that the writers of these genres are bad — they aren’t — they have just been conditioned to pulling their punches by genre incest, society, and the market.)
I started AJ for my offline and online critique partners, gathering the best of the hive-mind discussions at the cafe and typing them up into meeting notes. The response was so good, the site grew from there.
I don’t expect your automatic agreement when you read my articles, blog posts, and tutorials. They are designed to draw your attention to certain areas of writing that might go underrepresented, and to help you think and make up your own mind about your story design.
I’m very excited to help people write the kind of fiction that I want to read. Selfish, yes, but true — anyway, I think the kind of stuff I want to read is also what a lot of people want to write.
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