I’ve never really been a reader of erotica until after I started writing it.  I’ve read the Beauty series and a few others, but for me, I’ve always been caught in the paranormal world.  Authors like Sherrilyn Kenyon and Lynsay Sands have always caught my attention.   I love the Dark Hunter series and Lynsay Sands’ Vampire series.  The way these two capture their heroes and give their heroines so much spunk and guts is amazing.

I started writing Erotica after talking with a friend online.  He sent me a page of fiction and then asked me to write the next part.  We went on and on like that for a while but when we finished the story, I was caught.  I had a little accident and wasn’t allowed to work for a while, so to fill in the time and keep myself from eating my way out of my clothes, I started writing myself.

I never tried to get anything published until after I started writing stories and putting them up on a free site.  Some of my readers couldn’t believe that I wasn’t getting paid for what I did so I took that first step.  I don’t think anyone was as surprised as I was when the publisher offered for the manuscript.  Now, I’ve been published 29 times and I have nine more novels coming out so far this year.

But it never would have started if it hadn’t been for my friend and his story.

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Oh my.  Does my memory reach back that far?  The first piece of erotica I ever read was this small, well-thumbed paperback novel from my high school library.  I haven’t a clue what the title was, but I do remember that it was chock full of sex!  It wasn’t even romantic, really…just about a man and woman fucking until both of them were sore.  It was notorious among the girls and I think we all read it at some point or another.  It was like a rite of passage in my small little town.  Shortly after that was a novel called Black Tie Only by Julia Fenton.  It was a rather interesting fictional accounting of three school mates of Princess Di and one that I can’t believe made it through my mother’s filtering of my reading material!  Full of drugs and sex and lust it was definitely not my normal reading material.

After that I had sporadic exposure to erotica, some in the form of Penthouse Variations, some in the form of erotica anthologies my first girlfriend owned such as Getting Wet.  I think one of the most pivotal, though, was one called Dark Love.  It explored erotica from a horror perspective and revealed the depth and span of the erotica genre.

How did you start writing it?

I wrote my first erotic piece when I was still a virgin and clueless to so much!  I was thirteen and wrote a story of a girl’s loss of her virginity to her boyfriend.  I shared the story willingly with friends until my stepmother found it.  Her response was a mixed message, telling me that it was very well written but then flipping out over what I was writing about.  I didn’t write about sex for a long time after that, glossing over that with clichés of “losing themselves to passion” and whatnot for quite some time.

I never really stopped writing about the guts, so to speak, though, and crafted story after story of desire and lust and wanting set against various backgrounds and genres.  I dipped my toes into the fan fiction world with tales of Xena and Gabrielle, often with a third lover(sometimes male, sometimes female).  I found the Internet and found my comfort zone, spilling my writing out into the ether, sometimes for feedback, but mostly just to share, to get the stories out of my head.  The greater portion of those have been lost through notebooks misplaced during moves and computer crashes and so forth.

About a year ago I began writing erotica in earnest.  Through self examination I found that no matter what I wrote I was always tiptoeing around the sex.  When I stopped and wondered at that, I realized it was because I didn’t feel it was “acceptable” to write about it.  Around the same time I stumbled upon Remittance Girl’s blog and a few others and my muse was set free to write!  So, here I am, digging into the soft pulp of my imagination and spilling it forth for all to see.

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After that, I read every book in my library’s “classics” section. Including every woman’s favourite “erotic” novel Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. What can I say about Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet that has not already been said a thousand times? They are the sexiest couple in all of English literature and they never so much as kiss in the entire book. From this I learned about the importance of lust in erotica.

Ten years later, I read a sequel to Pride and Prejudice written by a woman named Linda Berdoll. It was called Mr Darcy Takes a Wife and it was my first real erotic book. If the original novel lacked sex, this one more than made up for it because Berdoll had Darcy and Lizzy screwing in almost every chapter and in almost every position (by vanilla standards). Although I would have made many editorial changes to the book, it took up permanent residence on my night table and was quickly dog-eared to tatters.

I ended up lending that book to a friend who returned it with a copy of her own favourite erotic book called Women on Top by Nancy Friday. This book honestly changed my life and triggered a string of events that ultimately led to the creation of Republica Press. It wasn’t the book as a whole that influenced me, just the introduction of the book that Nancy wrote where she outlined the importance of masturbation and sexual fantasies in the life of women. It was like she wrote this introduction just for me. I took her words to heart and set about dismantling the chains of repression and guilt that had anchored me down for so long. After the chains were off, it didn’t take long for me to become the open-minded and sexually liberated publisher of erotica that you all know today.

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My first exposure to erotic writing was at boarding school in England. Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence was probably the only book in the school library with any smuttiness in it at all. By today’s standards, that really doesn’t rate very high on the hot pepper scale, but thinking back, I guess that’s where I read my first reasonably explicit description of sex.

My next encounter was with De Sade. Although this does get classified as erotica, I have to say that I didn’t find it at all erotic. Socially and politically interesting, but not exactly the sort of thing that makes my legs tremble. Although I still admire his ability to use the word ‘fuck’ as a noun, an adjective, and an adverb. I had a similar reaction to Anne Rice’s ‘Beauty‘ series. I admired the universe she built, but I really didn’t find it very erotic.

It turned out that, for me, it wasn’t the explicitness of a book that made it erotic for me, it was the ability of the writer to express an intensity of desire – not necessarily its satisfaction.

This might explain why I have found Anais Nin still ranks as one of the most erotic writers I’ve ever read. It isn’t her descriptive sex that turns me on; it’s her ability to use prose to bring alive the desire that her characters feel.  And, ironically, The English Patient, by Michael Ondaatje ranks just as high.

“Her life with others no longer interests him. He wants only her stalking beauty, her theatre of expressions. He wants the minute secret reflection between them, the depth of field minimal, their foreignness intimate like two pages of a closed book.”

(from The English Patient)

And some people might say that The English Patient is more of a romance novel. But to me, the main character’s desire is not for romantic love, it’s for a kind of gnawing, feral consummation. Lust. It took me a long time to get through that book – I spent half the time I had it in my hands masturbating.

People often rate lust below love on the scale of worthy emotions. Perhaps I don’t. I find it very easy to love people and extremely hard to lust for them.  Of course, I acknowledge that this is not how most people feel. But then I’m a freak, and my stories reflect that.

How did you start writing it?

When I started writing erotica myself, about nine years ago now, I didn’t want to write stories about sex. I wanted to write about desire, sometimes fulfilled, sometimes confused, and sometimes completely unsatisfied. That’s why I get irked when people call what I write pornography. Pornography promises its readers sexual satisfaction. I don’t think this is erotica’s job. Erotica should make you yearn, not necessarily make you come.

In life, people often don’t get what they desire. Of if they get it, they discover that what they wanted wasn’t really what they needed. Or they get what they lust after and it turns out not to be very good for them.

In Gaijin, for instance, it’s not really clear whether Shindo desires Jennifer, or just want to possess what she represents to him. Not being a terribly analytical fellow, he finds this frustrating:

“He scrambled to his knees and straddled her, his face a portrait rage. “You don’t go until I let you.”

“Then let me, please.”

Hunching over her, he grabbed her chin and sneered into her face. “Why are you so cold?”

Jennifer stared back, both fear and defiance locking her jaw.

He grabbed a handful of snow and threw it in her face. “Why?” he yelled, scooping up an armful of the white powder and dropping it on her. “Why are you so cold?”

He let her chin go and used both hands to pull the surrounding snow over her. She closed her eyes and lay motionless, pinned beneath him, as he piled more and more of it on top of her, screaming the same question over and over again. The cold stole up from beneath her and sank down onto her, the warmth of her body melting the icy bed where she lay.

Then he stopped, enraged and panting, like someone who’d run a marathon. He moved, and she heard his voice close to her ear. “Why are you so cold?” he said, quietly. She felt him push his face into the snow that covered hers, nuzzling through it until he reached her cheek. He pressed his lips to her skin. Cold hands drew up the sides of her body, covering her breasts, squeezing them hard, careless of the still raw piercings.

“Why, gaijin?” he whispered.”

(from Gaijin)

Shindo likes the idea of ‘owning’ something foreign, but when he gets it, he is puzzled by her very foreignness. Certainly, he has sex with her, but he’s not truly comfortable with what he’s gotten.

I think the challenge for erotica is to interrogate erotic desire. Not necessarily satisfy it. Too often I’ve found erotica to be a predictable and formulaic sequence of events that lead to two people having sex and at least one of them orgasming.  I started writing it because I wanted to read something different.

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What was the first piece of erotic fiction you ever read?

Honestly, I can’t remember exactly. I’d been sneaking peeks at my dad’s hidden magazines since pre-adolescence. In retrospect, I think they weren’t so much hidden as simply stored out of causal view – until I was caught once, and then they were hidden – though not well enough to keep me away. I think the first actual “story” I read was the text accompaniment to a Penthouse photo-series of a wayward astronaut encountering two beautiful alien women with feathers instead of hair. I also remember finding the stash of erotic books in his office library, which included the Story of O, Delta of Venus, and a book the title of which escapes me now, which had a series of short erotic fiction pieces written “for women”, which I returned to over and over, and eventually stole outright in my teen years, but lost in a move. It may have been Nancy Friday.

I never came to ease with purchasing or owning erotica as a young man, and not because of any particular imposed repression. It was habit from the sneaking younger days, and thus didn’t amass much of a collection of my own until much, much later and the advent of the net and digital erotic text. It is very likely that my earliest, furtive encounters with porn and erotica formed some of my prime writing style. Usually, as an adolescent, I would skip over the plot and non-sex scenes, such as they might be, in any book or story I found to get to the squishy bits. At 13, I didn’t care why they were fucking, I just wanted to see what they were doing and how they were doing it. So a lot of my early erotic reading was largely context free, with blank settings and physical attributes like hair and proportions supplied mostly by my imagination. It is only as I mature as a writer, lagging somewhat behind maturation as a reader, that those things have become increasingly important, and sometimes essential.

How did you start writing it?

My first few true erotic stories were written to a girlfriend in college during a summer apart in the late 80’s. I think over that time and subsequent separations I wrote a half dozen or more scenes or stories featuring us in different roles. After that relationship ended, I wrote a story here and there, pen to paper, continuing to explore sexual themes on my own, progressively opening to the darker, edgier side of things. None of those hand-written stories survive.

In the late 90’s I was reading erotica on late-usenet, and early-net sites, and finding few things that I wanted to read out there that were written the way I wanted to read them, so around 1998 I began writing erotica on the computer, and some months later, uploading it to places like alt.sex.stories. and eventually several free story sites. I continued writing mainly because I discovered I liked doing it, and getting the thoughts, fantasies, and scenarios in words. It’s was at first only personally cathartic, analytic, and occasionally revelatory. I didn’t realize the power of feedback and the exchange with the reader until it happened through e-mails from readers, and that began to change my approach to writing, if slowly. Now, today, in this medium, I find the interaction with the reader an essential part, not necessarily of writing, but of having written. It’s the reason Will Crimson and I started our blog, and the reason I’ve become more interested in this community of both readers and writers.

Writing has always been a hobby. Full time work and family carved long gaps over the last decade plus, and even more recently, as my interest and activity increased since fall of last year, the available time to write is rarely regular or long. I don’t see myself stopping any time soon though – I enjoy it too much, and think I have stories to tell, parts of myself still to explore, and people I want to write with and for. I think I’ve learned more about writing (both erotica and general) in the last four months than in the previous ten years, and I want to see where that takes me.

Monocle | Raziel

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I can’t say it made a great impression on me, although perhaps it did since I can still remember the experience of reading it, if not the exact words. It didn’t send me running for more of same. At the time I was probably more interested in reading science fiction and fantasy, and why I read RtS I don’t know. I was a big reader, though, and it was probably just there and I needed something to read and so I read it.

You know, I just remembered — the first erotic stuff I wrote was in college, and it was a joke with a friend. I think it was a bit of a dare to make him blush. He was gay and rather flamboyant and I think he made it a point of pride not to be too terribly shocked by anything. For someone with very little sexual experience, going simply by imagination and what I might have read in books was kind of a kick.

The plot involved a small-town girl going to a big city and falling in with…well, not the wrong crowd, but certainly not the crowd she envisioned. There was straight sex, lesbian sex, group sex and even a bit of bondage, if I recall. The most memorable line, in a scene between two women was: Oops, you moved.

The notebook with that story is long since gone. I wrote other things at long intervals after graduating college, nearly all in the science-fiction/fantasy genre. What I write tends to reflect what I’m reading at the time, and that was my genre of choice. Well, that and Robert Ludlum, but for some reason I don’t do spy stories.

Moving on, in June of 2007, my family relocated to Pennsylvania and I was working from home. Shortly after the move, I became pregnant, and because of the tanking economy and my previous pregnancy history, job searching went into cold storage. Trying to cut costs and save space, I searched online for free reading material and added romance into the string and found Literotica.

I was intrigued.

At first I wasn’t quite sure what to think and kept it to myself, including clearing my browser cache when necessary. Eventually, I decided that was a bit silly, especially after I discovered that many stories were stories with sex in them, as opposed to simply sex stories, and that they were on a par with what one would find in the romance section. Better than many of those, in fact.

I read enough stories, in print and online, that I thought: I can do that. So I did. I started a few just to see what would happen. Writing the sex was the most difficult part; I felt like quite the voyeur. “Soft” is too hard a word for my initial attempts at sex scenes, but I kept at it. Practice makes perfect, after all.

Wait — the most difficult part, I must correct myself, was finishing a story. I’d started some here and there in the past for my own enjoyment, but nothing was ever completed, for various reasons. After I proved I could finish something, then the sex scenes were the hardest part.

The difference between the sex scene in my first finished and posted story, Make a Wish, and those that followed are, I think, pretty clear. I also think, and hope, they got better. Readers say they like them, so I guess that’s the best gauge.

It quickly became clear to me that I like to write — and read — romantic stories (stories with weres are really just furry romances). I can’t help it; I like the principals meeting and overcoming obstacles and having a happy ending (although a happy ending isn’t as important as the right ending). I’ve certainly branched out and read stories in different genres, but I’m not comfortable writing in those categories, so I don’t. There are others who do enjoy writing that, and so I’ll leave it to them, because everyone will be better off.

My ideas come from a few places, some I remember and some I don’t. Songs, for example. I find that reading new stories is often a source of ideas. I’ll read a story and wonder “What if X had said no in that scene instead of yes?” and then something will coalesce in my head and I’ll try to get it down. Sometimes it flows easily, other times I have to stop and let it simmer, and still other times I sit and write something just to keep it moving.

In no way did I think I’d do any kind of writing in any kind of serious way — it’s not what I studied, not what I did at work. I certainly didn’t think I’d write anything novel length or have anything published. But it’s fun, and that’s a big plus. I hope I can keep it up, because it really is a great release. *ahem*

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I did the typical teenage thing and spent a morning riffling through my parents’ stuff when I uncovered a Penthouse magazine. Maybe my stepfather bought it because of the controversial cover story as it was the infamous Vanessa Williams issue.  Regardless, it became fodder for my adolescent mind.

I won’t lie. The pictures caught my attention first but it didn’t take long for me to find the Penthouse Forum.  I couldn’t recall any of the letters on a dare… except one.   Of course it was written from the male perspective.  The young fellow who authored this particular missive related the tale of his girlfriend and her love of anal sex.   To share her love of this act, she talked him into experiencing a series of dildos up his rump. From small and slender to big and beefy, he experienced an awakening in his bowels that turned him on and intrigued the heck out of me. I’d never heard of such a thing and it set my mind ablaze with possibilities.

It would be at least a decade before I started to write my own smut.  By no small coincidence, these first forays were epistolary exercises.  Still a virgin, I wasn’t writing torrid tales to Penthouse Forum. Rather, I slowly opened myself to a series of Dominas to whom I wrote in hopes of popping my submissive cherry. They wanted lurid details and I struggled to provide them. At first it was difficult facing my own desires, admitting the things that haunted the dark corners of my mind.  That’s what started the ball rolling.  I found that once I started, I didn’t want to stop.

I started writing dirty stories whenever I could.  I threw nearly everything away when fits of guilt overcame me. It took years of therapy before I could really admit to what I am and what I enjoy; before I accepted the fantasies (and the realities) as part of me.   I continued to pen the occasional story when requested — often to let a Domina know what kind of things I had in mind. Over the years I had quite a few that I would send out when asked.  And, due to the convenience of the interwebs, I started up a blog–Prurient Interests–where I posted these stories and began writing more.

That was 2006.  The blog has had its rich and fallow periods as my life has had its ups and downs.  The most difficult part of being a Smut Peddler, for me, is taking it seriously.  I often feel like my writing is barely Penthouse Forum quality and facing up to that deficiency is difficult.   But, with enough practice and enough feedback, I think that each story ends up better than the last.  I hope my readers agree.

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I think my first exposure to erotic fiction would have been in furtively bought girlie mags in my late teens, when I was still way too geeky and clumsy to be dating. This was long before the days of the internet, when to see a naked girl you either needed to have a regular girlfriend, or you reached up guiltily to the top shelf at the newsagents.

This, as any guy will tell you, was always something of a trial to go through. I had this system of my own in which I would only ever buy such obviously shocking magazines in a part of town I never normally visited, and in a newsagents I had never been to before. I would also never use the same newsagent’s twice (heaven forbid that they’d think that I enjoyed masturbating, my goodness no!). I’d always buy a newspaper too, all the better to conceal the magazine as I rapidly made my escape. Clearly, I was in serious need of a girlfriend at the time…

I pretty quickly discovered, however, that I enjoyed the written material far more than the photographs (we’re talking such softcore fare as Penthouse, Mayfair etc), and I especially enjoyed the longer reader’s letters, frequently a source of my masturbatory fantasies in those early days. For those too young to have an idea what I’m talking about, these would tend to be allegedly real experiences enjoyed by the readers, in which they’d boast about particularly extravagant and fabulous sex they’d recently enjoyed, about which they couldn’t wait to share with the world. How many of these were real and how many written by the editorial teams I have no idea, but I enjoyed that sneaky glimpse of something a little dirty going on under the surface of respectable society, and it gave me a real enthusiasm for good sex that never left me.

I found that I liked reading about other people’s sex lives, and my later discovery of Nancy Friday’s ‘My Secret Garden’ (and her subsequent future volumes) increased my love of reading about real sex, of glimpsing intimate correspondence. These days, such things are ten a penny in sex blogs on the internet, but back then, this was all a real revelation to me, and her books rarely left my bedside.

The first erotic book I recall buying, having made the revelatory discovery that I preferred words to pictures, would have been Delta of Venus by Anais Nin, which I read and reread until the pages were almost falling out. The sex seemed very hot to me, and I really enjoyed the decadence, the repeating characters and the general tone of the book. I think my Sophie stories owe a lot to that first discovery, attempting to capture that same verisimilitude, to build an authentic world of decadence for my characters to inhabit.

How did you start writing it?

Back in the dark old days before email, I maintained a letter writing relationship with a platonic girlfriend. We’d known each other for years, there’d always been a certain amount of sexual attraction for both of us, but we’d never both been single at the same time to take advantage of this. Mutual flirtation took place on a constant basis, but it was very subtle, and I was in a serious relationship which I had no desire to mess with.

When she moved away to London we continued our letters, mostly full of news and gossip, but as time went on we also began to tease each other with mildly sexual flirtation, just for the fun of it. This soon developed into writing delightfully smutty sexual fantasies for each other, in which we’d both appear. I can’t remember now if I was the first to begin this, but we both indulged in it with delight, both safe in the knowledge that we’d almost certainly never get around to doing anything about it, enjoying the fantasies for the sake of it.

I found I really enjoyed it, and the fantasies I wrote for her became longer and more detailed. This was partly because I enjoyed writing them, but mostly in the knowledge that what I wrote would bring her to orgasm, and would encourage her to write increasingly smuttier fantasies for me to enjoy. Something about that notion really appealed to me, and it’s what still drives my erotica to this day. I write with the specific intention that my words will make my readers come, and in the knowledge that many will tell me about it in delightful detail. It’s the same relationship I had back in those early days, but spread across a broader canvas.

When I finally discovered the slowly growing phenomenon of sex blogs on the internet, and little enclaves of people writing their own stories for the pleasure of others, it occured to me that I had a number of stories I considered to be pretty hot, that only one person had ever read. Stumbling across a small community of erotica writers (now long gone) called IndecentBlogging, I began writing up those fantasies and putting them out there, assuming that at least someone else might enjoy them. And of course, I never stopped.

Writing erotica remains an exquisite, semi-voyeuristic pleasure for me, which absolutely dates back to those long letters, years ago.

Roger Steiner (Dirtyboy)

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