Yes, I call myself a writer. I also call myself lots of other names, less charitable names I should add, and especially today when my muse has not bothered to turn up at the appointed hour. Deadlines, you know. Deadlines.
[FYI, my muse is female and she’s a taciturn bitch with a range of moods swings that would put a Jackie Collins novel to shame. Just sayin’…]
How did you get into writing?
Well, actually… Writing (with a capital ‘W’) found me.
I began writing short stories when I was twelve. Not sure why but… I just started and that was it. Off I went.
Back then, I read a lot and, consequently, I wrote a lot. I read everything I could get my hands on. Everything. Genre didn't bother me. I read most of Jane Austen's works back to back with Robert Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke, Charles Dickens side by side with Clive Barker and Stephen King. Messers King and Barker are my touchstones, by the way. I don't want to debate their politics or their lifestyle but I admire their writing enormously.
I got into writing erotica very early on after stumbling across a Jilly Cooper book, (Riders, I think) in a second hand bookstore in Newcastle (Robinson's, now long gone). And whilst said tome was utter trash, it was also fun and highly arousing, and that's what got me writing smut. Even though I wasn't even remotely old enough to contribute, I had an erotica blog on a kink site with over three thousand readers. How did I know what to write about? I didn’t. I just let my imagination run riot. I let my loins do the talking, and talk they did.
With hindsight, most of those early works are utter crap. Actually, they’re worse than crap. The English is poor. The spelling is atrocious. The dialogue is worse. The scenarios, in particular, are unbelievable, plainly the work of an inexperienced mind struggling with the need to create art coupled with the need to please one’s inner desires.
On the other hand, the side effect of writing so much smut was that my grades in English Language and English Literature went through the roof, and I was nominated for a fair number of prizes, some of which I won. Small cash prizes of maybe ten or twenty pounds certainly made my parents take notice. Maybe I had talent after all, they would muse.
I decided not to go into writing as a career following the advice of, you guessed it, a careers counsellor though how they fuck he would know anything about a career in writing is a mystery. He was the ultimate in lazy inarticulate Hippy drop-outs. Alas, I, and my parents, listened to his sage words of advice and so I went up to University to read computer science. I graduated with a Masters and then spent twenty years working in the Banking sector, providing network support and programming. I was still writing, still reading albeit in my spare time but work took over to the point that… Yeah, you know what happened next.
A lengthy spell battling with total burnout was the result. And a small collection of failed relationships, too. Those years were truly awful and I quit the IT sector auspiciously to help my husband get his business off the ground but, in reality, I quit because I'd had enough. I either found something else or fell into oblivion. Alas, that didn't go to plan because COVID struck and Alex's work dried up. Luckily, we both had substantial nest eggs to keep us going so…
By chance, I bumped into a friend from my University days on-line. Thalia (her middle name) had moved out to LA to make commercials fifteen years before and she'd been reasonably successful.
Back in the day, Thalia and I had made some low budget adult films together. Don’t get your hopes up. These films were little more than Art House Whimsies designed to attract the attention of the real movers and shakers. They're certainly not porn and they're certainly not masterpieces but, as a tactic, they worked because Thalia was soon nominated for a couple of prizes on the European Art House scene. And whilst those films have hardly ever been shown, they are still out there. [Even I don't have a copy] If you fancy a bit of rather pretentious (and rather tame) lesbian erotica then… have a look. They're not Tarantino or Ridley Scott but then they're not meant to be.
Thalia was, at the time, working on a couple of small scale films. She was unhappy with the dialogue, which she felt sounded stale and clunky. And it did. I offered to have a look and quickly added a couple of ideas of my own. Thalia liked those changes and… I got the gig. I became the script editor on a fairly low key made-for-TV sci-fi/fantasy movie. Other work followed and I soon built up a name for quality work, turned around quickly. With that sort of reputation buzzing around, the work started flooding in to the point where it’s genuinely a struggle to keep up with the demands on my time, especially so at the moment because I'm eight months pregnant and about to drop.
Around the time I rekindled by friendship with Thalia, my relationship with FetLife, the kinkster's website, crumbled. My kink diary, which I'd kept up for around five years, drew fewer and fewer readers, which was a shame because some of the writing was (I felt) good. Many of the encounters detailed therein, vanilla and otherwise, were interesting. They were solid. They were grounded in the reality of trying to enjoy a kink lifestyle in the midst of a global pandemic.
In the wake of almost complete indifference, I moved most of my longer format stories over to YouPorn and then Literotica, where they currently enjoy a significantly larger audience. Last time I counted, something like a quarter of a million people had read my stories. Yeah, that made me smile.
Eventually, when I could take no more of the petty infighting and the vitriol, I deleted all of my writings and quit FetLife, this time permanently. I don't regret that move because I returned to tumblr, where my photographs and writing are gaining the kind of traction that makes me smile all over.
Novels? I’ve written four. Some day I’ll publish. I’ve also been invited to publish my erotica on Amazon Kindle. One day, I’ll get around to that, too.
Want to be a writer? Want some advice?
Get writing. Write about anything. Write about everything. Read as much as you can. Write as much as you can. Find your favourite author and learn to write in their style. Find your meter and find your pace. Pay careful attention to situation. Make it real. Live those situations if you possibly can. Yeah, I know. You can’t actually walk the streets in the guise of a Berserker or a Barbarian (well, you can. Just try renting a small flat in Pennywell, Sunderland) and neither can you fight epic space battles in a custom built faster-than-light spaceship but you can… use your imagination instead. Imagination is all.
It is hard work. The deadlines are crazy. The egos are impossible. Some days, like today, the muse takes his/her/their time to appear and, if that’s the case, then write something else (just like I did right now) until the muse shows up because show up they will and probably when you least expect it. Like in the shower, the car or cruising around Tesco looking for a toilet because there's a small person pressing on your bladder twenty-four seven.
Want more help? Drop me a line. But first, seek out a copy of Stephen King’s “On Writing”. You’ll find everything you’ll ever need to be a writer within those pages. Like him or not, King’s story is amazing. His advice to budding writers is invaluable.
So, what are you waiting for?
