My Filthy Hobby

Some notes toward a new project

This is the first part of a little memoir-like project that I’m working on, tentatively titled “My Filthy Hobby”; obviously it’s a parallel project to The Eroticist’s Notebook, but also a little different, too. This first entry is going out to all subscribers, but future entries will be a paid-subscriber exclusive, at least until it’s time to compile them all into something that I can publish widely. I’m planning for a weekly or so release, depending on how other writing projects are going.

Note that you can earn a temporary paid subscription by referring friends to sign up for free subscriptions — if you have 3 friends with dirty minds (surely you do!), you can get one month free when they sign up; find the details here! Not only will you get all of the “My Filthy Hobby” releases, you’ll also get access to all of my publications and bonus stories.

Also, a quick note to current paid subscribers: don’t forget to visit the link to subscriber stories so you can grab my latest pre-publication release, “A Dip in the Lake,” and the bonus story, “Cait’s First Gangbang” — I have big plans for the characters in both of these stories that I’m really excited about!

My Filthy Hobby - Introduction

You may have read my short stories before and not even known it, if you're the sort of person who read small press literary and speculative fiction magazines in the first decade of the 21st century. The kind of magazine that paid in contributor copies, got displayed in indie bookstores, and often put out only three or four ambitious, beautiful, ground-breaking issues before disappearing forever. You might even have reflected on your time reading these magazines, and thought about a particular story of mine, and mused, "I wonder whatever became of [name redacted]? I never saw anything by her after 2013."

Which means you probably never read any of my short stories.

For a few years, I was publishing a story every month or so in some lit mag or webzine or other, stories that I was proud to have written. They were poetic, elegiac, and thoughtful; toward the end of my run I had taken a turn toward the sort of new weird and slipstream stories that were popular at the time, and my stories took a darker turn (I remember one in particular, which was eventually picked up by a horror podcast, that was rejected several times for being too dark; I'm especially proud of that one). I was committed to the short story as my form — I had no interest in publishing a novel. My heroes were Raymond Carver and Katherine Mansfield, Kate Chopin and Andre Dubus, writers who were best known for their shorter works, capable of carving a perfect little jewel out of a brief observation, conjuring whole worlds in a handful of pages. I certainly didn't have any illusions of making a living at it — I had a good day job, so I could afford to spend a few hours every week on the craft of writing stories. But I did think that I could become one of those names that would entice a certain kind of reader to pick up a journal or anthology because they recognized me as a writer who delivered something special.

And then, abruptly, I stopped.

It wasn't writer's block, exactly; I had a ton of ideas, and I could fill notebooks with sketches and plots and snappy dialogue. But when it came time to pull the little pieces together, and make some sort of coherent thing out of the words, I just couldn't do it. Nothing gelled. The sentence I thought would be a great opener suddenly seemed to fit later in the story, or fit some other story altogether; characters wandered lazily in and out without committing to the plot; I would write the same scene over and over again, almost identically, and never find my way out of it. I felt like every story I wrote should somehow be better than the last, and when it wasn't, I gave up in despair. I found other things to occupy my mind and my time, though stories still sometimes percolated up to trouble me. "Go away," I'd say to those ideas, "I'm not help to you."

But that's not what this story is about.

This story is about how I unexpectedly got my writing groove back by dipping a toe into the world of ebook erotica. It's about some of the interesting people I had the good fortune to bump into, and about some things I discovered about myself in the process of finding my smutty voice. It's also about the inspirations for some of my stories — once I started writing them, my brain started to generate filthy scenarios everywhere I looked, which could be a problem, I suppose, but has its charms.

This story is not, however, a guide to how you, too, can turn a profit in the lucrative world of online smut. For one thing, I haven't turned a profit yet myself — this is still a hobby for me, one that pays for some of its own expenses but certainly not all of them. For another, I am certainly not qualified to write that guide. There are others who are better qualified and have written good guides, and I'll point you to them along the way; and there are people who are even more qualified, but are too busy writing dirty stories to do much more than toss cryptic crumbs and lots of encouragement at the newcomers.

If you're a new writer of erotica yourself, then accept this as encouragement for you to keep at it — if it's your thing, if you're doing it as much for fun as for money, then you're on the right track. If you're an experience writer of erotica, then please accept my apologies for everything I get wrong. And if you're a reader of erotica, I hope you'll find this little memoir a handy roadmap not only to my stories, but to all of the other stories just waiting to make you feel all tingly.