erotica

So I wrote some erotica last night.

This may not come as a surprise to some of you, but it surprised the hell out of me. It's not a genre at which I have any practice. Most of my fiction, so to speak, has been limited to off-the-cuff pieces for my old writing group like the story of the real estate agent trying to sell the house where Hansel & Gretel were killed.

Steamy girl-on-girl action has existed in my real life, but it has never found its way into my fiction. I guess this has roots that can be psychodynamically dissected in several ways. Too sexually repressed or shy as a writer? Or just unwilling to engage in the search of synonyms for genitalia that is demanded by the genre? Hard to say.

Whatever the case, I've written my first piece of erotica. I've also penned my first piece of fiction in several years. (Yes, sad to say everything you read on this here blog is non-fiction.) It felt to my writer's soul like a curtain had been pulled back to reveal a story already complete and waiting to tell itself to me.

I know I have considerably greater ease in writing than do many people. If you ask me my secret, I'll always say the same thing: Write like you talk. But that does not make me any better at inventing believable characters and a complex plot in which to give them life. Rather, my work has tended toward the realistic. I've never known if I was drawn to journalism because I'm a realist or if journalism took an unformed writer and turned her into a realist.

Fiction has proven a foe, mainly because I "lack the imagination." (S2 debates me on this point.) Well, let's say she scores the points in this area of the debate: There certainly is no shortage to my imagination when it comes to sex. Perhaps on this topic, it is more a matter of releasing the being within than it is in developing a complex storyline. And being willing to conjure and *use* all those synonyms for genitalia, of course.

Because what happens in erotica? Well, bodies attract, begin to touch in some way or other (or other or *other* or other), and orgasm results. If there's a little depravity mixed in for good measure, that can add a certain unexpected and salacious quality to it.

Let's be clear, however, that this first piece of mine is far from depraved -- at least, according to my standards. (Can't speak for Pat Robertson. He might say what I've penned *is* the big calamity god told him was coming in 2007.)

I just think I've penned something kind of ... hot. (I've sent it to some fellow writers to evaluate whether that's actually the case.)

It is a work in progress, but what pleases me to no end is that it is a work at all. My imagination rarely sees the light of day. I am surprised at what chose to show up this time around, but I'm not going to question it.

In fact, I may just write some more of it.