Once More, with Feeling: Why I write Smart Smut with Heart

On sexting, catharsis and manifesting - turn yourself on first

Angélique Boissière on Instagram_ “Selfportrait”

Something a little different from me today - more of a behind the scenes post on the how and the why of my Substack. I would love your thoughts on if you’d like more of this more personal insight

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I didn’t set out to write smut. If anything I had ( and still have) my sights set on literary prizes and writing studios in loft conversions funded by said literary prizes. I also happen to work in an industry adjacent to traditional publishing and so I have a little insight to the world behind the curtain, the machinations of the beast that drives the book charts and the cultural tastes from generation to generation, and I built a lot of my dreams around that. The truth is I have been a writer for as long as I can remember, I just lacked courage and audacity to do anything concrete about it.

Plus erotica was the embarrassing low brow cousin to the darker literary giants. We forget Anais Nin wrote it to pay her bills, and all her ‘low brow’ writing now sits on Penguin Modern Classics. Everything is relative and timing is everything.

I wanted to write books for people who felt they didn’t fit in. For people who felt their darkness was probably unpalatable at best and perhaps dangerous at worst. I wanted to explore what happens when people change, and what the price of that is. What it takes to find your voice and use it. What then? Or more importantly, what might happen if we don’t? Substack had just become a thing, and I used it to write personal essays and relive my early Tumblr and Wordpress blogging days. The short essay is an exercise in being concise and relatable, and it felt like the perfect way to kick off again. Plus it didn’t require the stamina of a novel.

But it was boring. God. So boring.

I happened, at the time, to also be falling in love with a man who pushed every single one of my boundaries - coupled with the fact we were limited to seeing each other just twice a week a truly delicious torture, the context demanded some creativity. Unsurprisingly, we spent the other five days apart writing the most unhinged filth to each other, and it turns out for all my hand wringing angst and deep philosophical soul searching - I had become quite good at cutting to the core of desire using my words.

TLDR - I could make him hard, and come, spectacularly well without so much as a shaking phone snap or a voice-note (although I did add those in too for good measure). It became very common for me to pick up my phone in the evening to see the text

Baby I need your words

So I got better at using them. Then I started writing longer pieces for him.

And here we are.

What has been so illuminating and surprising here on this Substack, writing as Katie Valentine, is the feedback I get on my posts. Yes, the sex is hot. Yes, I can find a way to talk about the action in a way that doesn’t feel too cringey or clunky, but its the character and the story lines which seem to be resonating the most. Because its the story that matters.

A few DMs via Instagram (shared with permission)

Writing more smut with heart happens to satisfy both my need to write good stories, and not bore myself to death in the process. When I say heart I also mean the darker side of love, it’s less comfortable cousins. Jealousy, rage. Heartbreak of course. Control, desire. Manipulation. The heart is not innocent.

Writing smut also keeps me sharp for my other literary work. Writing good sex is not as easy as it can look. Especially when I am obsessed with getting to the core of the ‘why’ of it. What makes the sex hot? Why does that kink make me want to run a mile, but something only ever so slightly different makes me cream my pants? What have I yet to explore that I might want to get down on the page and what do I need to exorcise? Smut can be hugely healing and cathartic too - it offers us a playground, a container, an arena to play out situations that both arouse and terrify us, safely.

WhatsApp Smut

WhatsApp as an edging tool is almost unsurpassed. The way a red notification from the right contact can make squirm in even the most inappropriate of settings is criminal. My theory is if you can do this well, really get into your partner’s head and under their skin with an appropriately timed word, then you’re probably going to be an excellent fuck. Its about timing, and listening, and paying attention.

We’ve all been there when the text escalates too quickly, or is just too coy. It either brings on the ick factor or the other person gets bored (arguably worse). And its always a gamble. That risk is what makes it fun. That’s the edge play.

That’s not to say it doesn’t take practice. There are certain words I can write down and they feel fine, but if they’re used live while someone is whispering in my ear while thrusting into me.. hard no. Sex is trial and error, play it out.

I also absolutely steal ideas from reading other people’s smut to up my sexting game. Feel free to do the same from mine

Cathartic Smut

As part of a now shelved work in progress, I had chartered some of my pivotal, formative sexual experiences as a way to try and map out where I was repeating harmful behavior (both to myself and others). The moments I said yes went I meant no, or the transgressions that blew up friendships, how I had a habit in my twenties of using sex as a pain killer. What each episode felt like. How the walls started to close in at 5am in cabs on the way home, waiting for the pharmacy to open to get the morning after pill, the close calls and the heat of shame. All that stuff.

I wrote it all down in long, very unreadable, word vomit - and it felt amazing. Then I turned them into something else. I wove just enough fiction through them to protect identities and pulled the story telling through a third person narrator, and suddenly I could gift myself the distance I needed to offer myself compassion, and grace. Transformative

Manifesting Smut

The most fun you can have with a keyboard. My post A Birthday Treat is a live example of this. My partner set me a task to write out one of my fantasies for him, as part of our dynamic, and also to ease the distance is being apart for Christmas, it helped keep me distracted (and horny) and he got the gift of a completely personalized story that we may or may not have turned into a reality.

The power of being able to write down your needs, wants and desires cannot be underestimated. Finding the words to say and having the courage to make them tangible both in your mind and on paper is pure alchemy. This is how we create lives that are juicy and delicious and worth savoring. The joy being you get to decide what happens next, there is no expectation. Sometimes the writing of it alone is enough to ignite a fire, between people or just within yourself.

Turn yourself on first!

Literary Smut

And if I am completely at a loss I turn to the ones who have been before, here is a non exhaustive list of three very hot reads, in no particular order

Little Birds - Anais Nin

The OG, the master. Also her letters to Henry Miller are sensational and if youre stuck on the sexting bit - start with them.

When you return I am going to give you one literary fuck fest—that means fucking and talking and talking and fucking—and a bottle of Anjou in between—or a Vermouth Cassis. Anaïs, I am going to open your very groins. God forgive me if this letter is ever opened by mistake. I can’t help it. I want you. I love you. You’re food and drink to me—the whole bloody machinery, as it were. Lying on top of you is one thing, but getting close to you is another. I feel close to you, one with you, you’re mine whether it is acknowledged or not

The Story of O - Pauline Reage

The original BDSM novel, written by the author at the age of 47 which goes to show midlife is just when a lot of women really begin

“What her lover wanted from her was very simple: that she be constantly and immediately accessible. It was not enough for him to know that she was: she was to be so without the slightest obstacle intervening, and her bearing and clothing both were to bespeak, as it were, the symbol of that availability to experienced eyes.”

Acts of Service - Lillian Fishman

I read this in a frenzy on a plane on the way to fuck a married man half way across the world, so it was both the perfect companion and also a foreshadowing on how limerence is not bliss.

As incisive as it is exhilarating, this novel asks us to face our ideas about desire and power: what sex means to us, the forces that shape it, and how we find--or lose--ourselves in intimacy. At once juicy and intellectually challenging, sacred and profane, it might be the most thought-provoking book you read all year.