Yes, I write smut.

But first, some backstory

To whoever is reading, welcome. I’ve thought a lot about how to do this. Should a welcome message just be short and sweet, to the point? “I write erotica, hope you enjoy it.” Boom, done. “Wow, you’re just like millions of other people!” Well yes, but no. Hear me out. A majority of erotica writing is bad. Like, real bad. Bad enough that at some point when I was desperately scrolling through stories one night, the idea struck me to try it myself, because why not? I know what I’m looking for, I know my interests. Nothing’s stopping me, right?

Writing has always been in my life, longer than I realized or gave it credit for. Creating worlds and characters and scenes is something I’ve always done, even if it was never the primary focus. Some of my earliest memories go back to first grade, creating 2-3 page stories about a heroic prince rescuing the damsel in distress from various (usually) giant-sized creatures. I was still a child, so the small scope of antagonists included ants (heh), spiders, insects, and one outlier. Dragons. I was obsessed with dragons, and not long after, fantasy.

Despite writing so much when I was younger, it never felt like a hobby or something to do for fun. English wasn’t even a subject I liked. Instead I was more into drawing… anything. Fantasy creatures, people, landscapes, abstract art. I even made character sheets with backstories and personalities. Something also pulled me toward architecture, and for a long time that’s what I thought my career would be. Designing and creating these amazing, unique places that people could visit and interact with. That was the plan for 10 years, right up until graduating high school, when the harsh reality of college quickly made it clear that I would not be designing anything close to that for a very long time.

There was a point in one of my architecture classes where we were instructed to take off our shoe, put it on the table, and sketch it. A week later, it was an apple. Then a juicebox. A month in, I dropped out. They were trying to teach perspective, I know, but it felt more rudimentary than the art classes I’d taken in high school. I couldn’t do it. A job in interior design came not long after, and that’s where I stayed for many years, before moving into a drafting position for cabinetry and woodworking companies.

In a way, those jobs scratched the itch for making things the same way architecture was supposed to. They at least kept me occupied enough to the point where I wasn’t thinking about my own projects. It was always busy with new clients, new houses, interesting floorplans and layouts. Looking at a 3D rendering of a room I designed and then seeing it become tangible was really, really satisfying. At first. But over time it became the same flavor, carrying the same kind of slow constriction that seems to happen with a lot of creative jobs.

So the childhood memories of writing and drawing came back again. I bought a tablet and tossed around the idea of starting a webcomic set in a fantasy world I’d designed for fun, but it wasn’t as easy as it used to be. It had probably been 7 or 8 years since actually sitting down to draw anything, and it was incredibly frustrating to have a clear image in my head that I could no longer accurately transfer onto paper. Online courses and tutorials for anatomy helped, things started to click back into place, and it was genuinely exciting… but the realization came quickly again that this wasn’t something I wanted to wake up and force myself to do. The idea of trying to draw on a schedule, even if it was just for fun, was already robbing part of it before I’d even started.

Shortly after, I ended up back on an old tumblr I had curated with music and art. A lot of it was gone, links were broken, but there was still some poetry and general writing which was nice to look back on. Going down a rabbit hole of writing tags also reminded me how raunchy tumblr can get. There’s always been a lot of smut, and some of it definitely turned me on, but a lot of it just… wasn’t great. There’s this lack of buildup and tension in so much erotica, it goes by too quickly, maybe that mirrors how a lot of people experience sex in real life? The act gets described, but not the in-between. The slow push and pull up until release. The subtle details like the way someone’s hand would feel on your thigh as they’re fucking you, pulling your skin taut as their nails dug in. Or the way the pace of their breath would increase against the back of your neck as they pushed into you. How the tiny hairs on your neck would stand on end, the tingle traveling through your spine as you got closer and closer to the edge. Stuff like that.

Looping back around to the beginning of this ramble, this is when I decided to give it a shot. Why not? I made a new account, and posted a short 2k word story with cnc and somno kinks. It blew up, way more than expected. A few longer stories followed when time allowed, and those were generally well received too. With expectations for new content starting to form, it never felt difficult, even while working full time. (Though I didn’t register the value of that back then.) Sadly, for personal reasons, I had to deactivate the account shortly after, and that was all the writing I did for a while.

A few months later, a post from r/eroticauthors caught my eye on the main page. It was a dataporn post about someone writing romance novels encouraging others to do the same. “You can publish things that easily?” I couldn’t believe it. So I dove into learning all about how it worked and everything that came with it. What was allowed on amazon and smashwords and all the other platforms hosting erotica. Not entirely sure why I chose this particular trope, but a story about a college student and his professor started forming in my spare time and just… kept going. Before I knew it (well, not before I knew it, there was a lot of off and on writing) it became a seventy thousand word story. Whoa. Major life changes happened along the way, moving across the country, switching jobs, dealing with loss. But I did it. I wrote a full-length novel, more than I had written in my life. And most importantly, it felt good to make, not once did it feel forced. I actually looked forward to the times I could sit down and write.

Now, this isn’t a romance story. It’s almost exclusively erotica, and 90% of it is detailed, steamy, and filled with tension. I’ve split it up into 5 parts that I plan to release every week or so as time allows while I edit, format, make covers etc. (As accessible as publishing is, there’s a lot of other things that tie into that too.) BUT I’m really excited to finally move on to exploring other stories as well, whatever I find hot. That’s usually a lot of power dynamics and tension. Dominant characters that take what they want, and others that leave their partners begging for more. Taboo temptations, minds that were made to be bent. Creatures you’ve never imagined, doing things you definitely have. I’ve got a lot of icks with some more popular kinks too though, so I’ll likely post a masterlist somewhere so everyone knows what to expect.

For the first story, the trope just sort of popped into my head as a scenario that I’d enjoy writing, and I stuck with it, but future content will lean a bit more toward fantasy stories than contemporary real-world settings. Real world stories I write will likely be one-offs or multipart isolated storylines, but for fantasy I’d like to go more in depth. There’s something exciting about building a new world for characters, even if they don’t all directly interact. Having things tie in somehow or connect on some level would be neat, there’s just so many opportunities there to play around with. Off the top of my head I’m thinking of shop keepers or members of a guild or adventurer groups that would be recurring characters. Different character POVs might be something I experiment with, I’m not sure… There’s an entire universe in my head that I’d love to eventually create but… I’m getting a bit ahead of myself.

Occasional rambling posts like this will probably show up too, if anyone is interested. Thoughts on the publishing process and the steps involved, brainstorming ideas, difficulties along the way. Being fairly introverted and closed off, it feels good to freely post things like this into the ether, even knowing most people will only be here for the stories. There’s also something rewarding about sharing what I’ve learned. When it comes to absorbing new information, my approach is a bit obsessive. I comb through everything I can find, grabbing every single bit of information and gobbling it up, even when it’s not necessarily relevant. Then I refine it all down, take whatever I’m focused on and create a schedule or plan to improve, and go from there. If that would help other people, then I’d be happy to share.

Maybe this all sounds a bit over the top for someone who wrote a bunch of sex scenes, but there’s also just an aspect of myself I’m trying to overcome by putting myself out there. I’m confident in my writing and I enjoy doing it, so if you enjoy consuming it, that’s great. Anyway, stopping here for now. Another warm welcome if you’ve made it this far. Thanks for reading. ♥