Hello once again to the wide world of writing.
I've done this before, but so much has changed. I started writing romance and erotica just after the turn of the century. The world was in a different place at the time and certainly my world was very different indeed.
I was in a place in life where I would have been called "successful," but I didn't feel successful. I was in my thirties, married and with two young children. I had a good job, with a respectful title and a "place in the community." I had graduated college. I was a little league coach. I wore a suit to work and didn't have to scrub my body in order to be presentable afterward. While I certainly wasn't wealthy, I was financially stable and in no danger of finding myself living on the streets. I was living a form of the American Dream.
However, I felt, at best, unsatisfied. There was nothing in my life that really drove me to exceed any limitations. I had lived a life, up to that point, that had included many moments where I overcame odds to achieve something... and at that time, I felt like I was no longer achieving anything, except the growing of my waistline.
There were good things in my life, but I didn't feel there was anything exciting that came from me. All the excitement came from outside and beyond my control. I wanted to change that and I didn't know how.
This was what led me to try writing. I had written before, but never fiction. I had been an editor for my high school paper, I had written blogs about my favorite sports teams...was even doing so at the time. I was getting some minor recognition for that, and even a little income. The blogs gave me an excuse to feel like I was slightly more than the average guy that talked sports with his buddies at work or called in to vent his opinion on sports radio. But even in that realm I felt like I was external to the action. I wasn't playing the games, I was just reacting to them.
I wanted something that was more than a reaction. I wanted to create. I don't remember exactly what made me decide to try creating erotic fiction. I know that I was reading it at the time. I had often read erotic writing, whether it was something as mundane as Penthouse Forum or something more exotic, like Lady Chatterly's Lover or The Story of O. I had always enjoyed it.
I've always had a healthy interest in sex. Perhaps even more than healthy. I had, in my youth, made efforts to push the boundaries of my own experiences. I had been somewhat successful in doing so, if my conversations with others were any indication of what was a "normal" amount of sexual experience. Certainly some of my friends viewed me as having had unusual experiences. They thought me a bit wild and I somewhat reveled in that. But just as I felt that I had quit having experiences where I overcame odds, I also felt that my sexual adventures, if they could truly be called that, were behind me. My wife and I shared a fairly healthy sex life, I believed. But there was nothing really exciting about it, nor was it as big a part of our life as I wanted it to be.
Part of how I dealt with that last fact was in a fairly typical way for a middle-aged American male. I became interested in other people's sex lives. But porn movies have to be watched somewhere, and I had kids and a wife who clearly did not approve of that form of entertainment. Because of my blog writing and the fact that I was a bit more of a night owl than anyone else in the family, I often found myself still on the computer after the rest of the family had gone upstairs to bed. This led to me discovering the world of internet erotic fiction, specifically a website called Literotica. I became a fan. The stories did as much for me as movies did, and sometimes I could even wake up the wife when I eventually went upstairs and she would respond in a willing, if not enthusiastic, manner.
In addition to the pages of stories, there was a bulletin board style section where people talked to each other. I soon discovered that many of the people writing the stories participated in these forums. The evidence that these were just normal people and didn't seem that different than me struck a chord.
A few weeks later, I published my first naughty story on Literotica. It was pretty much a retelling of my losing my virginity. I changed the names and a couple of the circumstances, but most of it was a true recount of my own first time. I got comments and votes and people seemed to like it. So then I made something up, still with some real events in it, but the real mixed in with pure invention. That one also got votes and comments, but even more positive. That led to my new hobby. I also joined in the conversations in the forums.
Then came the event that really changed things for me. I wrote a story based largely on a night that happened when I was in college. It was kind of easy to write becuase it starred a couple of the most colorful people I knew in college. There was a sex situation and a sex scene, but the real key to what made the story enjoyable wasn't the action but the personalities. And it did really, really well. Eventually, it won a "story of the year" award in it's category. ("Wingman" is still on Literotica and continues to garner positive votes and comments to this day, more than twenty years later. The story has been viewed more than two hundred thousand times.)
What snowballed from there was a situation where I eventually became a published author. Able to share my fantasies and creations with a public that actually paid good money that they had worked for and earned to be entertained by me.
