I’ve started this weekly blog about my life as an erotica author. Why and how did I get started? How is it going? What have I learned? These posts are suitable for general audiences, but probably not of interest to anyone under 50. Feel free to contact me with questions or for information about my 50+ erotica books. For the past twelve years, I have been on an incredible journey and there is much more to that story. I’ll post here each week with another short chapter of my life as an author of erotica. Might even give tips regarding how to get involved. I encourage you to join my Patreon community.
3/12/2023
Reviewing My Life in Erotica
I’ve been reading Rachel Kramer Bussel’s new book, How to Write Erotica. I figured that after ten years and fifty-some books, I should maybe check to see if I was doing it right. Turns out, I’ve been doing okay, but still had plenty to learn.
For example: I appreciated her simple definition of ‘erotica.’ She called it simply, ‘writing that is intended to arouse.’ That is a sufficiently broad enough definition to cover a wide range of descriptive literature that includes sex as a core component. Note, I say component, not totality. There is a lot of writing that, as Regina Kammer described it, “… is merely describing physical acts of sex and the choreography of body parts performing sex.”
One of my readers, reviewing my first major work of erotica, expressed it in these words:
Not the typical “insert tab A into slot B” nor the bizarre “masturbatory fantasy played out with wooden models.”
I believe sex is a component, but not all there is to it.
I wrote my first piece of erotica—at least that I considered erotic—back almost thirty years ago. I shocked myself. I was trying to be a serious literary writer. This piece had sprung from the dark recesses of my mind as a motivation for someone in my work-in-progress being blackmailed. I read it over and then put a password lock on it. I hid it, because “I don’t write stuff like that.” But I didn’t delete it.
Then in 2011, I wrote my fourth mainstream book that would be published as a literary mystery, and the ending of it was so devastating to me personally that I cried as I wrote it. I’m a pretty emotional person. I’d written a dozen other books that I would ‘get back to someday,’ but this one would be released in just a few months as a prequel to another of my early works. The detective solves the case but loses the girl. What could be worse?
News that I got later that evening was even more devastating. I won’t go into details, but I began to slip into a dark chasm of self-induced depression and anger.
Suffice it to say that I needed to write something with a happy ending. What better to write for a happy ending than romance, and the steamier the plot, the happier the ending.
I surprised myself by remembering the password to the locked file from some twenty years before. Using that story as a stepping off point, I wrote my first short erotic novel, called The Art and Science of Love. But I didn’t know what to do with it. I certainly couldn’t publish it under my real name, or even through my company. People would know.
So, I adopted the short moniker, ‘aroslav,’ at StoriesOnline.net, an adult story site, and released the story there, not expecting all that much. It was a raw first draft and I released it a chapter at a time over six weeks. I was overwhelmed with the response from the story site. Praise that I had never heard from the readers of my ‘serious fiction.’ Over 10,000 downloads in the six weeks it took to post the story. Email pleading for me to please write more. My depression eased a little and I decided being an author of erotica wasn't so bad.
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
