An open and honest discourse about smut
A little known fact about me — besides me always putting my left shoe on first, and occasionally forgetting which side of the road to drive on — is that I am, in no uncertain terms, a pretty prolific erotica author. Wait, on second thought, scratch that. Erotica sounds too fancy. Instead, I'll just say I love smut. Like, a whole lot. I'm a smut connoisseur. I'm a rip-roarin' smut enthusiast. I smut therefore I am. Etc, etc.
I've written hundreds of pages of erotica over the years, from the tame to the tawdry, the quick to the dirty, the romantic to the downright nasty. Male/female, male/male, female/female, and any other combination you can think of. And, from what I've been told by the small but enthusiastic readership I've cultivated online, I'm pretty good at it. (The inbox full of colorful, and occasionally TMI, feedback is proof of that, I think.) It's something I do for fun, when I'm bored or taking a break from other, larger projects. It's a hobby, really, for my own amusement. Some of it's been published, most of it hasn't, and that's okay. Still everybody always asks me, as they have for years many now, "Why don't you just write erotica? I bet you'd sell a ton of books."
Standing in the kitchen the other day, my mother (who doesn't read any of that stuff, but was curious nonetheless) asked me the same thing.
My answer, just as it always is, was a shrug and some awkward feet-shuffling. "I don't know," I said. "I don't have any good ideas."
Because, well. I don't actually have any good ideas.
This isn't to say that I don't have ideas. (I have plenty of ideas, don't you worry.) They're just nothing to write home about. These aren't stories I'd feel okay adding to my larger body of work. They're fun, but they're not particularly smart or meaningful. This is a small sample of what I'm talking about, featuring a few characters by the names of Hillel Alves and Elliot Townshend. (Don't worry, it's relatively tame.)
Hillel likes fucking on countertops. Just in the mornings while the coffee's brewing, because he's wittiest after nine o'clock and Elliot doesn't like to say No. The sunlight coming through the kitchen window above the sink warms the smooth ceramic tiles under Elliot's bare legs when he wraps them around Hillel's waist, pulls his hair and sighs. He likes fucking Elliot slowly in the back of his car on the street at night and on top of the duvet with the lights still on. Their clothes only halfway off, tugged open, out of place, when Elliot's twisting on his belly to rub his cheek against the pillow or the upholstery and close his eyes, Yes yes yes.
More often than he likes to admit, Hillel likes fucking against the wall by the bedroom door, when they haven't the mind to make it all the way inside. He likes it, because Elliot likes the way Hillel grips his hips to fuck him and pulls on his hair to kiss him, and what Elliot likes makes Hillel's balls tighten in a start. And if he's too rough or too hard or too this-and-that, Elliot says nothing of it. He never does, and Hillel finds he likes that too.
Elliot likes to let himself be opened up. Pulled apart in pieces of a larger whole, rearranged like doll limbs on carpet or in cotton sheets, pressed to cold shower tile or against the leather of the backseat. All elbows and knobby knees, pink on his cheeks and lips and little swipe of a tongue, skinny, ball-jointed and wet to kiss. He likes sex like it's a missing part of him that he dropped on the sidewalk along the way, and Hillel likes that about Elliot. Pulling it inside of himself and folding it in, letting it fill him, reassemble him, making him into something that's bright and hot and needy. There's something a little beautiful about it.
Nice, right? Could I put a novella out about that? A novel, maybe? Even a short story collection? Probably not. I'm tempted, sure, because I love all my characters. I love the way they are and the things they do, and the way I've wound them up like toy soldiers and sent them off on stupid sexual escapades for my own amusement. (Anybody who follows me on Tumblr is probably well-aware of the hijinks Casey and Joel get up to outside the novel.) I love everything about writing this stuff, and I do enjoy sharing it with people, even in the limited capacity that I still do post it publicly. But erotica, god bless it, just doesn't have the same draw that horror does for me. With horror, I feel like I'm telling a good story that I can proud of. I feel like I'm doing something, exploring topics important to me. With erotica, I'm just having a good time. I don't feel like I'm actually doing anything, and certainly nothing worthy of deeper exploration.
Is enjoyment alone a good enough reason to try to put together a body of work? Should it be shared just because I had a good laugh writing it? Would anybody want to even read it if I did share it? I don't know yet. It doesn't mean I'll stop writing anytime soon, though. Don't worry about that. What, if anything, I end up doing with it still remains to be seen.
