erotic-a

some people who know me might say that i am about as qualified to write erotica as i am to record a song with nine inch nails, or orchestrate the launch of a space shuttle from NASA's headquarters.

i disagree.

if my MFA has given me nothing else, it has enhanced my ability to turn a phrase. and though my single life ultimately bowed down at the altar of marriage, it did leave me with a few choice memories which, all along, i knew would one day find their way into fiction. moments in time, unexpected lovers, lines of dialogue that were so good the first time around, they deserved an encore.

some of them made their way into a 5000-word erotic short story i penned last week. a friend issued the challenge and i figured, hell, it was worth a shot. amazingly, the words flowed like midori at a bachelorette party. within a few short hours i had put the finishing touches on the ravishing tale of two strangers who screwed their way around south africa. i dipped my toe into the language of taboo and emerged energized and, honestly, impressed with my ability to craft a sexy and engaging story. it had moments--a sentence here and there--that were lyrical and surprising. mainly though, it was 17 double-spaced pages of earth-shattering fucking. penthouse forum for the gen-x backpacker set.

now, i'm moving onward and upward in the world of "romantic fiction," trading graphic sexual language for the flirtations and euphemisms of the harlequin romance tradition. i've outlined a 60,000-word novel and hope to deliver it by the end of the summer. i find myself thinking of my characters all the time, excited to watch their lives unfold. this kind of writing is like candy, like reading jane austen or david sedaris. it's delightful.

i have had one mildly troubling realization. i do believe i can get past the stigma of romance writing by telling myself it's an almost meta act of hipster subterfuge. however, if i do pursue this as a money making venture--dare i say a career--i will be feeding a machine that delivers to women of all ages false expectations of love and romance. even in my short story, my characters engaged in sex with a frequency and...creativity...that few mortals could attain. but should it ever see the light of day, i can imagine a reader thinking, "hey, my boyfriend/husband/lover has never done THAT." and then denigrating into sad feelings of inadequacy or unattractiveness. little will she know that the woman behind the pen name is a size-16 nebraskan who rarely shaves her legs and has never approximated in her own life some of the acts she perpetrates upon her characters. it's fiction, baby. but it's also fantasy, it's what we want on some level, right? or these books wouldn't sell.

so that's my plan. torrid grocery store romance writing with an MFA flair. stay tuned.