Interview With Author Pat Powers
Tell us about yourself and how many books you have written.
I’m a writer and former editor. I’ve written a couple dozen full length books and even more novellas. At this point, counting them would be a chore and kind of meaningless. Almost all my stories are erotica of various sub-genres, mostly SF, though four or five non-erotic titles have slipped in there somehow.
In writing, my goal is to write a fun read, something readers will pick up and not be able to put down until the end at which point they say, “What a great ride that was!” I also hope to make millions and become a household name, or at least a household appliance, like everyone else.
What is the name of your latest book and what inspired it?
“Bound for Bebop City” was inspired by the fact that there are people who have a kink for 1950s style domestic lifestyles, in which the men are all powerful and the women are, if not outright submissives, close to it. I don’t fully understand the kink, but I love the Populuxe design sensibility of the 1950s and early rocknroll music. It was a weird time in American history, in which the surface anodyne culture had a lot of revolutionary elements churning beneath it: rocknroll music, feminism, and (not coincidentally) effective new birth control methods under development, and the civil rights moving was bending the arc of history toward justice.
I didn’t get into the political elements, however. What I did do was imagine an alternate Earth where things have developed as they have on our Earth except everyone is into sexual bondage and thinks it’s perfectly normal and natural for people to tie each other up during sex. And for husband and wife to be something like Master and slavegirl, although not exactly.
But of course that wasn’t enough for me. I wanted to THOROUGHLY muck up the 1950s. And I decided to do that by having all teens in Bebop City’s world getting treated with a drug called “euthinertia” or “nersha” which kept recipient’s nervous systems from responding to the hormonal changes occurring during puberty. Their bodies develop sexually, but mentally they remain prepubescent and for all practical purposes, asexual.
The kicker is that once they go off nersha after they turn 18, all those hormones hit like a runaway freight train, all at once, leading to a frenzied orgy of sex as slavegirls go out in search of recently minted Masters to submit to. (The guys are just as horny as the girls, but it’s considered wrong for them to seek out the girls, since they’re so horny they’ll submit to ANYONE who asks. So they have to do the asking. And they are SO horny, they get out on their bikes or whatever and seek out Masters to have sex with.)
I also wanted to portray a society that deal with all this rampant sexuality in a sane and sensible and healthy manner, rather than with some weird thing like locking the kids in their bedrooms for a few months or years until they finally return to something like normalcy.
Mind you, all of this is background for the story, which is a straightforward account of what happens to the main characters, Mincy and Jarral, when their parents take them off nersha. That’s part of the fun, telling a story about a very different, very weird society from the viewpoint of people who view it all as normal. And hopefully, that will be part of the fun of reading it.
Do you have any unusual writing habits?
No. As an erotica author I am perfectly usual. I write by tapping out one weird letter after another. I am a pantser, in that I wear pants while writing. I generally think a lot about the situations and the characters beforehand, but when I start writing I have NO idea what’s going to get written. My subconscious has taken me on some JOURNEYS, man.
What authors, or books have influenced you?
I used to have a book-a-day reading habit when I was young, mostly whatever fantasy and SF I could find in the local library. So you could reasonably say the entirety of both genres.
I also read all the plays and prefaces of George Bernard Shaw, who died at age 94 from complications resulting from a broken leg after a bicycling accident. I hope to follow in his footsteps someday, except for the bicycling accident. I’m not crazy. Also, I’m not a playwright. I mean, why bother? There’s still stuff in “Pygmalion” that resonates to the present day. Like “the undeserving poor” who eat as much as the deserving poor, and drink quite a bit more.
What are you working on now?
My current WIP could be summed up as “Collar World meets The Handmaid’s Tale.” (I’ve been reading “Handmaid’s Tale” recently, I’d avoided it because I thought it was probably a superficial feminist tract in SF form. I was so wrong: Atwood can REALLY write! Handmaid’s Tale is topnotch SF.)
In my story, a world of technologically and socially advanced kinky types that can travel to alternate timelines discovers a timeline where something like the The Republic of Gilead is in power. And if you know anything about the Republic of Gilead, you know that women are dying and being treated horribly there.
The technological advantage of the Collar World is so great that they are never in any danger from Gilead, which is nowhere near having crosstime travel tech (they’re more at World War I level tech). The conflict and tension comes from the Collar Worlders’ determination to rescue the women in alt-Gilead. The faster they rescue the women, the more likely violent means will be necessary. A slower rescue would mean less violence, but would condemn more women in alt-Gilead to death and other horrors. The Collar Worlders, being socially advanced, are also very ethical, and they work hard at the issue.
All this will be background for the derring-do, because of course they’ll figure out a way to do it fast and violently while harming as few innocents as possible. Like my other books in this series, this won’t be erotica, though it will be chock full of fantasy fuel, you betcha.
What is your best method or website when it comes to promoting your books?
So far, Twitter has been pretty good to me, and the algorithms at Amazon and Smashwords have helped, as have my freebie works. I’m hoping Awesome Gang will outdo all the rest as I get started in using promotional sites.
Do you have any advice for new authors?
A flaming asteroid could sail out of outer space and kill you tomorrow. So write today.
What is the best advice you have ever heard?
“Every step on the way to heaven, is heaven.” — St. Catherine of Sienna. Or to put it in Maslovian terms: “Every step on the road to self-actualization, is self-actualization.”
What are you reading now?
The Handmaid’s Tale.
What’s next for you as a writer?
I have yet to win a Pulitzer Prize for Erotica. But you just wait!
If you were going to be stranded on a desert island and allowed to take 3 or 4 books with you what books would you bring?
“Billion Year Spree” by Brian Aldiss. “A Distant Mirror” by Barbara Tuchman. “Little, Big” by John Crowley. Ask me tomorrow and it might well be three different books, but I’m satisfied with this lot today.
Author Websites and Profiles
Pat Powers Author Profile on Smashwords
Pat Powers’s Social Media Links