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.
3-19-23
Taking the Leap into Erotica
2011 was an enlightening year. E.L. James released Fifty Shades of Grey, a novel featuring explicit erotic scenes including BDSM practices. It was a phenomenal success, the trilogy of books selling over 150 million copies in five years.
But, my erotic writing (not the works, but the act itself) was looked down upon. Relatives did not want to know that I was writing ‘that kind’ of book. Serious writers who had enjoyed James’ novel shrank from admitting they knew me. One sanctimonious mainstream critic said, “I suppose there are some people who would like this.” Ouch.
The email and comments I received were completely contradictory to that opinion. Readers reaffirmed how wonderful my writing was, how they cared about the characters, and how they wanted more stories from me. I just had to not tell anyone I was writing it. But in many ways, it was the same thing I’d been writing for thirty years!
Lesson learned: I have come to believe that people change as they get older and men and women change differently. Tastes change. Desires change. Social conventions change. I read the first full-length novel I’d written to my then fiancé, nearly forty years ago at a chapter a night. She loved it. She asked me each evening to read the chapter again. Perhaps she was just using my voice to put her to sleep, but she still said she loved the story, an occult fantasy that included some sexually charged pagan rituals. Even my mother, a minister, read the story and enjoyed it.
I didn’t get around to cleaning up the story and publishing it until twenty-five years later. At that time, my wife considered it vulgar and obscene. She definitely didn’t want our family name associated with such a thing. I published it under my erotica pseudonym and The Props Master 1: Ritual Reality proved to be a 4-star novel, both in eBook sales and as a serial. A review said:
Delightfully Different
Devon has created a good world for a modern paranormal story. This story takes place in both America and England. It is about an old Wiccan circle and the power struggle within it. The young man is the props master for his college’s theater program. He has a triangle with an English professor, a fellow theater student, and a late-night coffee house waitress. As tensions and rivalries build, the scene changes to England where things get more sinister. Enjoy this change of pace novel.
But the difference between it being a romantic adventure and it being erotica was measured in years, not in content. The Props Master 1: Ritual Reality by Devon Layne placed third in the 2013 Clitorides Awards for Best Erotic Fantasy, judged primarily by older men and not by older women.
My male readers had changed in a different way than my wife. They largely yearned for that day gone by when they were youthful and vigorous and sexually potent. They weren’t thankful that it was finally past. This was true, even of people I thought of as physically liberated.
I caught a conversation in a nudist park between a man and a woman in their sixties or seventies-both single, either widowed or divorced. I didn’t detect any attempt to start a relationship between them. The man had just started dating a woman he was besotted with. But he suggested that the woman he was talking to needed to get back into a relationship with a good man. He was obviously enthused about his own new relationship. Her response was, “I did my time. I don’t need to do that again!”
I don’t present those as universal truths, but as representative of what I found in my readership during my first year or two of writing erotica. Men liked erotica. Women liked erotica. But they didn’t like the same erotica. I’ll go into that in a future installment.
I guessed I was writing men’s erotica.
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
