Sunday, February 11, 2018

February Newsletter

So, like I said last month, I'm looking to start a newsletter. If that's something that sounds interesting to you, send me an email with NEWSLETTER in the subject line saying you'd like to sign up to sonnidesoto@gmail.com and, when I have enough names to make a good go of it, I'll start sending one out every month.


Until then, to give you an idea of what that would be like, here's this month's.

When I started this journey in publishing six years ago, my dad had died, I'd ended my first serious BDSM relationship, and I honestly didn't know what to do with myself. I needed a distraction, a goal, a purpose, badly. 

I've always loved writing, since I was in the second grade and my teacher saw something in me and encouraged my need to spin stories. Being a published writer has always been a dream I held within me. Something I always wanted to be. Someday. 

It took me losing so much to realize that nothing is guaranteed to you. Everything ends. Everything carries risk. If I wanted something, I was never going to get it by sitting around and waiting for someday to come. 

So I took The Taming School, that was my way of understanding my early steps into kink, and took a chance that someday could by any day and have never regretted it since.

My dream my not be exactly how I always imagined it in my head--filled with money and acclaim--but it's amazing and I am so grateful.

In this video, I talk a bit about what it was like to write the novel, what I learned and what I am still learning.



In this next video, I read an excerpt from The Taming School. One of the things I love most about kink is its ability to change how we see and interact with our world. How it can, through sheer will of its partners, change the rules. I'm a firm believer that, with enough imagination, communication, negotiation, and consent, anything is possible in kink.



This next video tackles a topic that I've been thinking about a lot, especially during this time of year that puts so much emphasis on fairytale kinds of love rather than the kinds of love I and those I know actually experience. So often, the romantic tropes we find in fiction sound good in theory and work well within carefully created and controlled worlds, but when tested in the uncontrolled, often chaotic real world... 

And, while I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with those kinds of tropes, I think it's always worth thinking about them, questioning them, and testing them, within fiction and without. 


So here's basically what a newsletter from me would look like: some behind-the-scenes information, a featured excerpt, and an update on what's going on. And, remember, if you'd like to be a part of a monthly newsletter like this, email me at sonnidesoto@gmail.com with NEWSLETTER in the subject header. 


And remember that you can get my very first novel, The Taming School: