Natty Soltesz, friend of the blog and author of Backwoods, already told us about his obsession with all things Point Horror, now let’s find out a little more about his book, his thoughts on self-publishing and the surprising things you may find stashed away in small towns.
For those not already familiar with your book, can you give a little background on Backwoods and your own writing process for the book?
Soltesz: Sure. It’s an erotica book made up of a bunch of short stories about a fictional rural town called Groom, Pennsylvania. The stories all stand on their own but overlap in places. I was inspired by books like Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, books that are less novels than they are short-story cycles, all the stories united by a shared place and feeling. One of the benefits to writing each chapter as a stand-alone thing was that I could submit each story as I finished them to different anthologies or magazines and kind of worry about the book as whole when I was done.
Your rural Pennsylvania setting is loosely based on our hometown, Blairsville. How did growing up gay in small town America affect you personally and how much did you draw upon real-life experiences in writing this novel?
Soltesz: Well growing up gay in a small town kind of sucks, obviously. I think I’ve always felt sexually repressed by a number of different factors, but the fact that I was gay and living in a rural area definitely contributed to that repression. Erotica has always been a way to sort of claim my stake on my sexuality, you know, when there are so many forces out that that want to claim that it’s wrong or should be hidden. I drew on a lot of real-life stuff for this book, places in Blairsville and people I knew growing up. I guess it’s my way of saying ‘I was here.’ ‘I was here and I had a boner,’ haha.
The initial inspiration for the book came from another small town, though, in West Virginia. I was trick-or-treating with some friends and we stopped at a house where two gay guys lived, and it made me really wonder about their experience, how they fit into the town, who hated them, who showed up on their doorstep at 3am…that kinda thing.
Speaking of small towns and the small details that add up to larger stories, you once told me an interesting fact about a community porn stash in Blairsville that has always struck me as being particularly evocative of small town life.
Something in the rail yard…
Soltesz: Yeah, the first porn magazine I ever saw was in the railroad yard across the alley from my house. This fellow paperboy, a kid a few years younger than me, asked me if I’d ever seen a Playboy. There was a stack of them in the middle of a field under a pile of tar paper. He showed it to me then I showed it to some other boys. I think a lot of boys growing up in small towns had similar experiences with ‘woods porn.’ Geez, it’s nostalgic now, isn’t it? The days before the internet…
After your novel was accepted for publication, you used KickStarter to raise money to add illustrations to your book. Tell me a little about that process.
Soltesz: It was fantastic. I was blown away by the process. The idea of including illustrations had always been a dream and I never thought it would happen with my first book. But my publisher was into it so I just had to come up with the money. So I tried Kickstarter, and I put a lot of work into my campaign but it was fun work. I made my goal within four days of posting my project and I just could not believe it. Total paradigm shift, like this utopian 90s vision of the internet becoming reality, in the way that artists really do have these incredible options that they didn’t have before. Not that a lot of doors and venues for writers haven’t closed, recently, too – which is kind of the point. Now that you can do it yourself, who needs the publishing industry?
Self-publishing, huh? Backwoods was published by a small independent press, but you also have two other books that you self-published through Amazon Str8 but Curious and 428 College St. Given your experiences with both, what advice would you have for an aspiring author trying to break into publishing.
Soltesz: Give your stuff away. That’s how I started out, and it’s what I always come back to. I don’t know if it works for everybody was well as it has worked out for me – in some ways I feel lucky to write erotica, which seems to be have a more robust market than other genres. I guess the other side to giving your stuff away is giving it to the right people, finding people who would be interested in what you’re doing, and giving it to them. That’s how you build an audience, and if you nurture that audience they’ll do good things for you in return.
Self publishing is where it’s at – the money, the freedom, everything. I don’t know. Editing is important, distribution too I guess. I don’t really know what’s going to happen with ‘Backwoods’ because it just came out, so I’ll be watching intently and taking notes.
How do you feel about the writing community in Pittsburgh?
Soltesz: I think it’s pretty fantastic, there’s always shit going on. I always feel like I sit a little outside of things, because sex makes people uncomfortable – hell, it makes me uncomfortable. I’ve always had writer friends in Pittsburgh who’ve been supportive of what I do, and recently I’ve gotten to know some great people, like the Cyberpunk Apocalypse guys and people in the zine and comic scene, who make me feel really welcome and are doing awesome things.
Speaking of Cyberpunk Apocalypse I heard it through the grapevine that you gave an excellent reading at their recent event. How did that go?
Soltesz: Each month the Cyberpunk Apocalypse do a “Cool Off” where people bring in what they’ve been working on for the month and the group votes on whose project is the coolest. This was the year-end cool off, so it was the coolest thing you’ve done this year. I’ve been to two other cool offs and I never win – and this one was huge, with all these people who did these amazing things, like a robot fire extinguisher and a built-from-scratch single-string electric guitar. So I didn’t think I would win and I actually felt really uncomfortable reading the pornier parts of my porn. But I won! And I got this really cool trophy that’s a sword with a wolf head on the handle.
Speaking of the pornier parts, now that you’ve written a gay erotic novel (or as I’ve seen you refer to it on Facebook, a “big gay porn book”), how are you going to tell your grandma?
Soltesz: I relate to Grandma on a need-to-know basis, and this is definitely not on the agenda. My parents are proud. My mom asked for a copy for Christmas. I wouldn’t be surprised if she told my grandma about it, just for the shock value.
So what’s your next project?
Soltesz: I’ve got like a million things on the back burner. I’m going to put out another ebook of my old material here in the next month or so that’s going to be intergenerational erotica, I’ll call it Daddy/Boy. Then I seem to be working on a novel-length continuation/sequel of an old story that people really seem to like, but I don’t want to jinx that by talking about it too much. Also me and a couple of gay erotica writer friends are putting together book as an experiment in self publishing, so that should be interesting.
And finally, when I told you that I couldn’t remember the exact moment we met in the sixth grade, you mentioned that you did remember my hair. I remember that hair too. Go ahead, tell the world about it.
Soltesz: Well, Laurie, I remember meeting you in sixth grade when there was this whole batch of new people to meet and everybody looked a little strange and alien. I can’t remember what we bonded over initially but I do remember thinking of you as a friend from the start, and I definitely remember your hair, which was this kind of amazing mushroom-type cut. It sort of defied gravity.
And yes, I figured I’d give you all a thrill by showing you my hair in the sixth grade, although I imagine that Natty is actually talking about phase 2 of this hair-do as it grew out and I started trying to emulate the awesome big bangs that all the cool 8th graders rocked. What can I say? It was 1990!
