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Originally Posted by Mr. Dalliard
I question whether the kind of person who reads "erotic fiction" is all that choosy anyway.
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I read a great deal of erotic fiction. I'm not alone in that, and we are just as picky about style and quality in this genre as readers of any other genre.
I don't read it if the grammar is incomprehensible, the punctuation is lacking, the storylines are tangled, there is *no* storyline (if I want plotless erotica, there are movie clips for that), or the plot is a cliché that bores me (clichés I enjoy are fine, and I'm much more likely to read if the author can convey the fact that it's got those in the blurb).
Authors who can't describe sex creatively get a pass. Authors who describe sex as being gross or ugly or innately violent get a pass. Authors who think sex is a substitute for story get a pass.
Just as science fiction can be mostly "about" some new gadget or technological advance or alien race, but needs characters and a setting to convey that interest to the reader, erotic fiction can be "about" an act of sex--but the framework still has to be compelling. "Here there be sex" is not worth reading on its own.
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That said, if you want people to be bothered to read what you write, your prose should, at the very least, give the impression that you could be bothered to write it.
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This, I do agree with. If it's going to be read by strangers, rather than serving as "I find these images interesting so I wrote them down to think about later," it needs to follow the basic grammatical rules that apply to all other kinds of writing.