The One-Drink Book Club is an informal, (almost) weekly series in which fellow author Emma Lee Jayne joins me and our other creative friends to talk about the life, business, and art of writing and making books … for the duration of one Friday-afternoon drink.

Here’s what we talked about in this episode:

* Bill opened up with a salvo of questions about erotica for Punjabi widows. No, seriously. That’s what he asked.

* This led to discussions of topics like: How many sex scenes go into romance/erotica books, and how spicy should they be? Why and when does it vary from book to book?

* But the larger discussion was about what people want out of those kinds of books and therefore what you, as the author, should provide.

* The whole “Punjabi widows” discussion, though, got us wondering about where the line is between “inclusiveness and diversity” versus “cultural appropriation.” Should we write more diverse cultures as a positive thing … or is it negative because in this example we don’t know crap about those cultures, and would resort to cliches?

* I spent a bit of time explaining all the ways that my new online store at johnnybtruantbooks.com has been eating my face this week. I’ve had to learn so many new things, but it’s such exciting work. I talked a bit about all the bells and whistles I’m building into my thought process as I build to attract TRUE FANS instead of just “traffic” like I did in the past.

* We closed by talking about fictional worlds in which the subjects of those fictions do or do not exist. Example: zombie worlds where nobody knows what a zombie is. I’ve played with this idea in some of my books, reversing the psychology: for instance, in Dead City, pop-culture zombies exist before real zombies start popping up … and because the idea of “zombies” exists in the zeitgeist, it creates a sort of “fake zombie” thing too, like psychosomatic illness.

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