Publish and Be Damned

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

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)

February 27th, 2010 | Dirtyboy | Discussion Topics, First Bite | 2 Comments »