Join us for a Kinky Chat with
Golden Flogger Award Nominee
Emily Tilton
Why did you begin writing BDSM novels?
I wanted to write the kind of BDSM I really wanted to read—I think that’s a common impulse for authors in a lot of genres. The difference for me and BDSM was perhaps that I also felt so embarrassed buying erotica that I decided it would just be better all around if I wrote my own material to enjoy, shall we say, one-handed. I suppose it was a little like the way chopping firewood warms you twice. At any rate, I’m now in my forties, and I wrote my first BDSM fiction in my teens. It took me thirty years, and the fortunate arrival of the anonymizing internet, to give me the courage to publish.
Where did you get your information on this lifestyle?
Reading, reading, reading. It began with fiction, of course, but I spent such a long time thinking something was wrong with me that I did very extensive research both into BDSM journalism and into the available social science literature on the subject. It’s served me very well in writing my more realistic contemporary books like Geoffrey’s Rules and Old-Fashioned Values, but it’s also given me a very strong notion of the difference between what’s truly hot in BDSM fiction and what’s realistic. These days I’ve become much more comfortable with the idea that BDSM fiction should be fantasy, with enough admixture of realism to keep the hotness going.
What does being nominated for the Golden Flogger Award mean to you?
‘m really, really pleased that BDSM Writers Con has taken this step. I think it’s an incredibly important development in writers and readers connecting over these parts of their lives that, I think we all know, feel at times like the very most important parts—the parts without which we simply can’t lead meaningful lives, strange as it might seem to the vanilla world. And, of course, I’m terribly honored that Subjugated has been nominated!
Do you conduct any advocacy work in this lifestyle or is it strictly fiction base for you? If so, what?
It probably sounds facile, but I really do like to think of my fiction as a kind of advocacy. Too many of us spend too long thinking we’re irredeemable because we can’t stop fantasizing about things that seem to us ethically unacceptable. I try in my fiction to make sure that even if a heroine, say, gets punished for masturbating, it’s in a framework that makes clear that her needs are absolutely natural and beneficial both to her and to her play-partners.
Where would you like to see the BDSM genre head? How will it get there?
I’m hopeful that the mainstreaming of erotica will continue to the point where politicians no longer feel comfortable scoring points off “perverts” like us. I think we can get there by writing better and better books that attract more and more favorable attention from mainstream critics.
Emily Tilton, whose books have hit number one on Amazon in four different erotica categories, wishes she could live out her fantasies of submission the way her characters do.
Emily’s erotica is a narrative version of her nearly lifelong quest to reconcile her submissive erotic orientation with her ethics. She writes erotica, not erotic romance: her books are about sex, because writing about sex helps her understand that fundamental part of her life better. She hopes maybe it does the same for her readers.
Over the many years since Emily became aware of her sometimes unbearable craving for ravishment, spanking, and above all anal domination, she has tried to come to terms with that craving in more ways than she can count. The first of the ways was by reading, voraciously, every piece of BDSM erotica she could find.