Meet Author and Publisher Cecilia Tan

My first for-pay story was back in 1995 and the woman who bought my story was named Cecilia Tan. Over the years I've gotten to know her better, even shared a hotel room with her at a convention, and we've continued the relationship of publisher and writer. She, herself, is an accomplished author, one of my favorites. Today I want to introduce you all to her.

Welcome to the Butt-Kicking Women Write About it, Cecilia. Thank you for agreeing to talk with me so I can let the world know more about you.

Cecilia, you've been in publishing and in writing for quite some time now. How did you get into this career?

I always knew I was going to be a writer from a very young age. I was four when I taught myself to write using the alphabet because I wanted to write by own books, not just have my mother read me the ones I already had. I could literally write before I could read. I got a job in book publishing right out of college, thinking that would be the best day job for a writer to have, and voila, here we are more than 20 years later. 

I met you in the 1990s as the publisher of Circlet Press. While I don't want to spend a lot of time on that part of your life, would you share something about Circlet so our readers could check it out?

Sure! I had been working at a regular book publisher for a couple of years when I started writing erotic science fiction. When I realized there was no one out there publishing erotic science fiction I thought, well, I know how publishing works...I'll start a house to do it. So I founded the company and published "Telepaths Don't Need Safewords" in 1992. Since then Circlet has published well over a hundred books, most of them erotic science fiction and fantasy of some stripe. We do anywhere from ten to twenty-five books a year now. 

Do you think there will come a time when you give up the role of publisher to just focus on your own books?

I almost did that in 2007, after 7 years in a row of the company losing money. Then the Kindle store suddenly appeared and I thought, well, I'll teach myself to convert our old books to Kindle format and see what happens. Suddenly, wham, Circlet was busy and making money again. Nowadays I have a staff of a dozen editors and two freelance publicity people so I think Circlet will continue for a while yet. The good thing about having other people working on the company is that I can spend more time on my own writing and I don't have to shut down the company to do it. If someone offered me enough money to sell the company, I probably would, but right now I'm content to have both my writing career and keep the company going. 

Let's focus on your own books. Of all of your books, which one has has the greatest success, however you wish to define that?

The book that has made the biggest splash by far is SLOW SURRENDER. Not only was this the book that had the biggest mainstream commercial reach (it was sold in Target as well as regular bookstores), it also won a couple of the major awards in romance (RT Reviewers Choice, Magnolia Award), got good reviews, and has overall been my best-selling book to date. It was published in the wake of Fifty Shades of Grey when fans were both clamoring for more BDSM romance while on the other hand those critical of Fifty Shades were clamoring for something more representative of consensual kink. SLOW SURRENDER managed to satisfy both. 

Have you heard of this new Syfy series called The Magicians? When I first heard about it and saw promos it made me think of your series Magic University. Do you think your series could make a good TV series?

Magic University would make a great TV series except they would never get away with showing all the sex necessary to the plot. When your main character has to masturbate to do his homework assignments and has to have ritual sex to pass his classes and move the plot forward, I just don't see how they could do that on television. 

I think it might work on some cable channels but let's all keep our fingers crossed for that.

Cecilia, you've had success with an online serialized work called Daron's Guitar Chronicles that have turned into books but also continues online as a web series. How did you get the idea to do this particular series?

Daron walked into my head fully formed as a character when I was a teenager. I was about sixteen, I think. He came to me as an adult character in his forties, actually, with a long backstory that I started delving into right away by writing stories about him from the points of view of other characters. Then in my MFA program in 1992 I started writing the current Daron's Guitar Chronicles. When I hit 300,000 words I forced myself to stop, and my agent tried to sell that version (four times the size of a regular novel...) but got no takers other than a few literary houses that would have paid $2,000 if I could cut it down to 80,000 words. 

I tried but could not realistically condense it down that much. I gave up and stuck it in a drawer until 2009, when I realized, hey, I could just publish this as if it were this character's blog. DGC really is a serial, not a novel, where the chapters are very short and not a lot happens in any given one: it's all about the gradual buildup over time of experience and maturity that allows our character to overcome his internalized homophobia, childhood trauma, and become a fully functioning human being. It's still going, two new chapters a week, six years later. 

Did your work on Daron's Guitar Chronicles lead you to your Rock Star series?

Partly? The hero in Slow Surrender is a rock star, too. Having worked in rock radio and the music industry during high school and college, I have a lot of background in the music business. After Slow Surrender was so popular, my editor at Hachette said she wanted more rock stars, but this time wanted a series with a new hero in each book. I told her, "I can write rock stars all day long." And she said, "Bring it." So I did. 

Your latest book, Taking the Lead, is part of a the Rock Star series, the first book in the series. Would you tell us a bit about this book?

This book kicks off a new series that will have a couple of common threads. One of them is that the heroes are all members of the same rock band, The Rough. Taking the Lead's hero is the lead singer, Axel, while Wild Licks (August 2016) will star Mal, the guitarist, and Hard Rhythm (January 2017) will star the drummer, Chino. 

Are Ricki Hamilton (Taking the Lead) and Gwen Hamilton (Wild Licks) related to each other? Is this series the stories of a family?

They are sisters, and the heiresses to a Hollywood mogul's fortune. One of the other threads in the rock star series is that a provision of the will is that they have to keep the secret BDSM club that their grandfather started in the 1950s going. There's a dungeon in their mansion and they each have differing feelings about the family's secret kinky legacy. 

You have two more books coming out in the Rock Stars series. What are your writing plans after that?

I've already turned in the first book of The Vanished Chronicles, a new erotic urban fantasy/paranormal series from Tor Books that I'll have coming out in 2017. It's a bit like your classic "there's an underground world of vampires who walk among us" story, except there are no vampires. Instead there are practitioners of an ancient ritual magic that modern BDSM and blood play can trigger. And with any luck, who knows, maybe both the rock star series and this series might carry beyond three books!

I'll cross my fingers for both series to become more than trilogies. Thank you, Cecilia, for talking with me today.

Interview with a "Pervy Fetish Writer"

In a world of self-publishing and decreasing quality of fiction, erotica or erotic romance can be difficult to navigate. I've written about my love of Laura Antoniou's Marketplace series but today I want to introduce you to another published author I've grown to love: Elizabeth A. Schechter.

Thank you, Elizabeth, for agreeing to answer my questions.

Your website, "Memoirs of an Imp of the Perverse," has quite a Bibliography but let's go back to the start. Where you always a writer and a storyteller?

Pretty much always, yes. I wrote terrible fanfiction in grade school, slightly better fanfiction and some really derivative original stuff in high school. I stopped writing for a while because everyone told me
that I'd never make it as a writer, then picked it up again years later with a play-by-email role playing game based on the Jacqueline Carey Kushiel books. I relearned how much I enjoyed writing, and I finally got brave enough to try and sell something. That first sale was a short story, to Circlet Press. Then they bought my second story. And my third.

I just recently had the chance to tell Jacqueline that it's all her
fault. And I still write fanfiction.

When my first book came out, my mother said "That's okay because you're married"... How has your family reacted to your short stories, novellas, and novels?

My sisters both had the same reaction: "I'm shocked! Shocked, I tell you! Where's my copy?"

Very few authors can make a good living with only their income from their books. Very few authors can simply write all of the day, day after day. What else is going on in your life that either challenges your ability to write or offers you balance?

I'm a stay-at-home mom, and we homeschool. My son is twice exceptional
-- he's gifted and he is ADHD, and he has a vision defect that effects (sic)
his motor skills. He'd be in fourth grade this year, but he's reading
on a seventh grade level, doing fifth grade math and writing his own
computer code. He also started out the year with the handwriting of a
first grader, and his executive skills are not there, so organizing
his thoughts and keeping on task are harder for him. This means that
one-size-fits-all public school doesn't work for him at all. We made
the decision to pull him and homeschool, which I think was the best
decision we have ever made.  I get a lot of writing done during
various therapy sessions and in the evenings.

I learn a lot along with him, now. We're raising monarch butterflies
right now, for a 4H project. I had no idea how big the caterpillars
get! We had a lot of jokes about kaiju and Mothra. And the chrysalises
are so pretty! They're pearly green, with metallic gold flecks, and
you can see the markings of the wings as they form.

It's a juggling act, really. A friend of mine is a homeschooling mom
of three, and a full-time writer for Harlequin. She told me that in
the homeschooling house, you have a list: clean house, dinner on the
table, homeschool work done. Pick two.

Were there any authors that inspired you to try to get published?

Jacqueline Carey. It's all her fault. If it hadn't been for that role playing game, I'd never have started writing again.

How would you compare your work today to those who inspired you?

That's a loaded question, because when I compare my work to Jacqueline's or to Laura Antoniou's or to Cecelia Tan's, it's me saying "When I grow up, I want to be like HER!" In my own mind, I'm never going to be in the same league. It still tickles me when other people say I'm that good, because I keep wondering if they're really talking about me!

Your website describes you as a "pervy fetish writer." That could mean different things to different people. What do you mean by it?

Initially, it was a joke, a play on the Cassandra Clare fanfiction "The Very Secret Diaries" and her description of Aragorn as a pervy hobbit fancier. Since then, it's become a tagline, a sort of way to identify my own writing -- you can't really pin me down by genre or even sub genre. I'm not a romance writer, like Nora Roberts. I'm not an erotica writer, like Sylvia Day. So what am I? I'm a pervy fetish writer. Like Tigger, I'm the only one!

"Erotica" or "Kink" or even "Romance" seem to be more umbrella terms than genre terms. You can have a kinky historical novel, horror romance, or even an erotic Christian contemporary work. What is your opinion about genre and where your writing fits in?

My opinion on genre is that genre is an artificial construct. I'm paraphrasing Neil Gaiman there, I think -- I think it was he that said that when Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol, no one even blinked. No one gave him grief about this respected writer having written a fantasy ghost story. He had just written another novel. Genre distinctions came about with the advent of the mass-market paperback, and bookstores had to find a way to organize their stock.

Personally, most of my writing doesn't pigeonhole at all! It's all cross-genre -- science fiction erotic romance or steampunk erotic romance or historical fantasy erotic romance. About the only thing that's constant about my writing is that most of it contains the required relationship growth and happily ever after ending that define romance, and the explicit sex that defines erotica. Other than that, I write what I would want to read.

Is there a genre or setting that you haven't written in that you'd like to tackle?

I have a YA outline on my to-do list. I'll try it eventually, but I think that will be hard for me. Okay, Liz. Write this entire book and have no explicit sex!

In Erotica, Romance, and Kink literature, orientation of the characters is one main way our work gets categorized. Which orientations have you explored and why?

All of them. I've explored all the orientations. I've written straight characters, gay characters, bisexual characters, pansexual characters, and I've just written a demiromantic asexual. That last one was a surprise -- in the outline for Counsel of the Wicked, Matthias was gay. When the character revealed it (it was totally his idea!), there was a lot of stop-drop-and-research. And I had several ace
beta-readers to make sure I hadn't screwed it up!

I haven't done much with gender identity yet, because I haven't had time to do the research to do it right. I want to, though. It's on the list of projects that I'll get to eventually. I have an idea for a transgender superhero story. It's important to get it right, though. So I need to do the research.

Our work is also often categorized by the sexual activities or dynamics we cover. You have touched upon once taboo topics of rape, bisexuality, and religion just to name a few. Are there subjects that you do not see yourself tackling? Why?

I can't see myself writing incest or anything involving harm to a child.

For our final question, next week I'll be reviewing book 1 of the Rebel Mage
series from Forbidden Fiction. Where did the idea for this series begin?

It's all my sister's fault. She got the flu, badly enough to end up in the hospital. I flew up to North Carolina to help take care of my nieces. Part of this involved driving them to church. This being December, that meant three trips in one day -- once for Mass, once for rehearsals for the Christmas play for the younger niece, and once for religion classes for the older niece. So six times in one day, I drove past the ruins of the Stonewall Jackson School for Boys -- a reform
school with a very lurid history. The last trip, it was raining and there was a heavy fog, and all you could really see from the road was this two-story stone gazebo, looking very dark and Gothic and creepy. That gazebo became the Well-house and that reform school became The School.

Thank you, Elizabeth A. Schechter, for talking with me today. Next Friday I'll review book 1 of the Rebel Mage series.