(This post first appeared on Substack: Writing Magick with Maggie Sunseri. Click to subscribe.)
Maggie Update
If you do not care about the intimate details of my life and want to get straight to the topic at hand (um, rude, but whatever), or if you’re coming here from a future post: Scroll on down to the main event. But I’ve decided to include life updates at the start of most of my posts—because I’m a Leo, and I love talking about myself. (Don’t cringe. Astrology is fun. Grow up.)
This week I made my very first TikTok! I thought my Gen Z membership would make the platform an automatic walk in the park, but I was wrong. Very wrong. I spent twelve hours on what was supposed to be a much-needed day off trying to figure out how to make a 38 second video. And, lest I get sued to hell and back, I had to use all stock footage. I managed the task though, and I’m honestly pretty impressed with my first attempt. It’s just a little book teaser that you can view here. I also had a dream that it went viral, which was pretty hurtful of my subconscious considering it currently has 40 views. Just like everything else I’m slowly building for my indie author career, I’m in the stage of endless hours and energy spent with little payoff. And you know what? That’s okay! This is a long-game and I cherish every single subscriber or follower I get right now. This post, for example, will be sent to six of you, and I’m not kidding when I say that makes me indescribably happy. That’s six more people than I had a week ago, after all.
The Discovered, Book 1 in The Lost Witches of Aradia series officially has a cover and a blurb, and it’s being sent to typo checkers this week and advance readers next week. As I was typing this, my amazingly talented cover artist sent me the mock-up for Book 2’s cover. It is BREATHTAKING. I cannot wait to show it off. Everything really is coming together, and it’s super exciting but also a little… horrifying. Because my story is about to be in people’s hands. My words will be read. My voice heard. My soul perceived.
Kinky witch sex included.
Have my parents read my books?
Yes, they have. My mom has read the first three in the series in their entirety, while my dad has read all three nearly in their entirety, because for him I put in all caps DANGER ZONE START followed by DANGER ZONE END to mark each sex scene, and he skips them. My mom says that she has to pretend the steamy scenes were written by someone else, because they’re “very hot,” but she would obviously prefer to remain ignorant of my personal knowledge of sex. Understandable. (Quick shoutout: I am extremely grateful for my parents’ support, especially as my editors. They made these books the best versions that they could possibly be. And they didn’t charge me for it, either.)
Going through your mom’s edits of your sex scenes… is embarrassing. I don’t care who you are; that shit would make anyone cringe. But after five million rounds of edits I honestly forgot why it was a problem in the first place. Just when I thought I’d passed that hurdle and I was shame-free, I started hearing from adult, family friends online and at local grocery stores that they just couldn’t wait to read my books. These gestures were so sweet and supportive, and I’m grateful for them all. However… that does mean that these adults from my hometown who knew me as a child might be reading some kinky witch sex scenes. That I wrote!
Coming to terms
I consider myself to be a very sex-positive person. Like I said in my first post, the plans that got ruined by Covid included an anthropological field study on alternative sexual practices. I was fully prepared to interview kinksters in foreign countries about their experiences with relationships, sex, consent, and stigma. I find the freaky and strange parts of the psyche endlessly fascinating, and in my perfect world, sex would be treated as a normal and celebrated part of the human experience. Almost all of us have sex, and it’s my firm belief that stigma and taboo are at the root of most sex-related issues and problems in our society. American culture in particular is horrific when it comes to sexualizing nudity, objectifying femininity, and taking all manner of archaic, unscientific stances on sexuality.
My books are by no means erotica. (Not that there’s anything wrong with erotica books or their readers, of course.) But they do contain sex, and that sex very often explores themes of power-exchange and Dominant/submissive dynamics. Think: more graphic than YA books like Twilight, but far less explicit than Fifty Shades.
As one of my most admired writers Alan Moore once wrote, “I’d prefer to include sex scenes alongside the adventure scenes and everyday-life scenes, as if they were all part of the same thing. Which of course they are. Sex is not discrete from the rest of our existence.” Like Alan, I especially resent the idea that sex somehow reduces the seriousness of a piece of work. This idea is especially rampant in discussion of the romance genre, and it often gets served with a hefty dose of sexism.
My books have sex. Kinky sex and queer sex, too. They also weave a deeply spiritual story of hope in the face of darkness and cruelty, and faith amid even the deepest abysses of loss and grief. They’re built in a rich, multidimensional universe, with complex characters that teach just as much as they entertain. They’ve certainly taught me, at least.
But when a family friend sees me at Kroger and tells me that the whole family just can’t wait to read my books, I’m still going to blanche in horror and think about those sex scenes. Because we don’t live in a sex-positive utopian society, and I still have unresolved shame just like most people do. I’ve been thinking about all the other creatives that I admire, and I often wonder how they grapple with family and friends seeing their most vulnerable sides. Or even my favorite female comedians like Nikki Glaser who do very raunchy, sexually explicit sets about themselves. At least I have characters to hide behind!
Every artist or media personality that talks about sex has a grandma. That’s a fact. And I find that fact very comforting.
I’m proud of and excited about all sides of my story. After all, it’s the most risky, the most intimate, and the most strange parts of stories that end up being the selling points. Playing it safe doesn’t sell. At the end of the day, we’re all just a bunch of weird little freaks who want to see our own deepest shames, desires, mistakes, dreams, and ideals reflected back to us. And if my own willingness to be vulnerable and open with the world about sex is what it takes to write my most powerful stories, then I will gladly bare it all. If only to make one person feel seen and understood.
Or just to write a really hot sex scene.
(This post first appeared on Substack: Writing Magick with Maggie Sunseri. Click to subscribe, like, or leave a comment.)
