Loving Your First

You remember your first? First kiss? First boyfriend who breached the portals? First story?

Now, I have to wince a little here, because I just went back and read my first story, and I wish I could crawl under a blanket and hide. Good God! It’s still there on the internet for the world to see. With my name on it! I wrote this story in 2004, sent it in to an erotic story contest, where it won an honorable mention. I was so clueless, I didn’t know how to cut and paste. So I wrote the story, then typed the entire thing into the submission box on the website. They sent me a check for 25 bucks, which I still have not cashed.

The story was called The Olivetti, and was an erotic typewriter story. That was the contest theme, typewriters, sponsored by Desdmona. She had a writer’s workshop for those of us John Gardner was talking about in his famous introduction to The Art of Fiction when he said –‘every writing teacher has the unfortunate experience of finding he is teaching a pornographer.’ Some people just have dirty minds.

I decided to go ahead and write this story and send it in, my first publication effort, because I had an actual typewriter story to build my little porno on. I set the story in the library at ODU, Old Dominion University, where I attended both undergrad and graduate school. I had many adventures in the library, some involving typewriters, but never one like I wrote about in this story, naturally.

It was published in 2004. So it looks like I’ve been writing for 9 years. It seems to me like it has been longer, but maybe it’s just been a long 9 years. I went from writing shorties, like The Olivetti, to other silly pornographic short stories, lured by cash and publication. I wrote a screamingly funny story about menopause and sex with a goat, which even then I decided was the pinnacle and the end of my porn career. I mean, really. Enough was enough. I wanted to write about love, not sex, and I was starting to take it seriously. What I mean by taking it seriously was not myself, but the stories and the readers. I felt like I wanted to go for quality, and I wanted to say something that had meaning, say something about what it meant to love someone.

So now I have a new first. The General and the Horse-Lord, out on April 5 from Dreamspinner, is my first novel. I’ve written a few that were close, but this one is around 62,000 words, making it the first story to breach that barrier. It seems different to me from the shorter stories, in that it is an exploration of the characters. A short story is about something- Sockeye Love, for instance, is about learning to let go and try again. Flamingo says that love comes at all ages, and when we least expect it. This new novel, though, is not described so easily. It’s complicated! Sex, but no sex with goats. It is not pornography, and I can say that having written more than my fair share! It is, however, a great big beautiful romance, and I am very happy to share it with the world. With my name on the cover. And no typewriters anywhere to be seen.