The First Bite of the Fruit – Monocle
Hello all. Monocle here, and very excited about this blog and the company I find myself in.
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
M!!! Ironic. My first foray into writing had to do with some prurient magazines, too!
There are so many vectors, it seems. The ‘Letters’ and ‘Variations’ type mags were also around for me. Those little bite-size porny pieces were also formative to the way I started writing – for good or ill.