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I don't meet a lot of other smut writers. It's not the kind of hobby that holds lunch meetings or conferences - in ten years I've only met two other writers. So when I got an email from a fellow writer who mentioned he'd be in my town for a few weeks, lunch with him sounded like an interesting idea.
He wasn't a total stranger - we both posted on many of the same writers' websites, and we'd had a long-running discussion on one particular board about why people pick particular story topics. His stories were mostly male/male scenes with some mind control subplots; mine tended toward dominance/submission, short sex-oriented vignettes, and romantic hetero or lesbian encounters, although I'd written one-off stories in a half dozen different fetish areas as well.
I might still have turned him down, but I just loved his pen name, "Feygin". Anyone who uses Charles Dickens for porn is someone I want to meet.
We got together at Applebee's, about as vanilla a meeting place as one could ask for, and outside the group of places where people I knew were likely to show up. Not that I'd have any problems explaining lunch with an acquaintance, but sometimes careful is good.
Somewhere between salad and the third beer, we finished complaining about our respective jobs and started talking about how we wound up in them. I had written computer technical manuals before getting into programming; he had spent a year issuing press releases for a low-budget wrestling circuit then managed activities at a church community center.
We were both readers, of course. He read a lot of biographies while my comfort subject was science fiction. We talked about which websites were currently paying for stories, and played mutual flattery quoting from scenes in each others' stories. The only thing writers enjoy as much as getting paid is knowing someone else really likes their work.
That was when he brought back his question from one of the website forums about why I didn't write stories with male/male scenes.
What do you say to a question like that? In the first place, I had actually written one such scene, though the action was implied rather than explicit. In the second place, it seemed a little like asking a romance author why she didn't write murder mysteries. I was trying to think of a polite way to suggest that our lunch was over, when he said "I think I know, actually."
There's not a writer around who can sit still when someone else says they know why he or she writes. I sat back in my chair and waved a hand, asking him to go ahead and enlighten me.
^^^^^^^^
"You see," he began, "there are just a handful of reasons why someone with as many stories as you have written would skip that area. First, maybe you don't find anything about men erotic. But I read your one masturbation story, and even without hinting at what his fantasies are you nailed the whole physical sensuality of the experience." He chuckled. "Granted, that's kind of like the cliche of writing what you know, but it still has to be done well."
"Second, maybe you don't like gays. I've actually spoken with some erotica writers who are violent homophobes, so I know it's possible - though some of those guys write the hottest male/male rape stories." He shook his head. "It doesn't fit though. Anyone who can write a story about a man molesting his cancer-ridden aunt where the sex is gripping and the guy comes off as a sympathetic figure - well, that person wouldn't let mere dislike keep him from writing a story."
He took a long hit from his beer. I appreciated the compliment - I was justifiably proud of that story - but waited for the other shoe to drop.
"Third, you could be one of those guys who's afraid if he writes about homosexual activity people will think he must be gay himself. But hell - you've written half a dozen stories about that transsexual plumber, and nobody in the critique boards has ever suggested you were writing from experience."
"So that leaves number four. You don't think you're up to it."
My beer bottle hit the table, but he waved off my spluttered response and continued.
"Of course, I'm not saying you *can't* do it. I'm just saying you don't think you can do it believably. There's nothing wrong with that. I don't write about accountants - come to think about it, I don't think anyone writes erotica about accountants, but that's beside the point."
Somewhere in that comment was at best a left-handed compliment. The pleasant buzz from the beer vanished, and it took me a few moments to get my reactions enough under control to interrupt the flow of his lecture.
"There's a hole in your logic," I said. "At least one. For example, a good writer can pick up what he or she needs from other sources and doesn't have to rely only on first-person experience. Think about science fiction stories as an example. Or Pam the Preop Plumber, for that matter. I read Plumbing for Dummies and spent twelve sweaty hours in a peep show booth listening to the noises from next door and watching videos before I wrote the first of those."
