I’ve been writing for most of my adult life. I make my living from writing but not in the creative field. Unfortunately, I’m not at liberty to describe the sort of writing I do as, being an erotic fiction or erotic memoir writer, I need to keep that as a separate part of my life. What I will say is that I write for businesses and you are extremely unlikely to have read anything else I’ve written. I did write a little at school but not about sexual experiences.

I started by telling stories about my experiences. If you read my free download about how I lost my virginity, you will understand how that was a unique experience. There can be very few people in the world who had an experience like that, so I thought it worth telling. There have been a few other experiences, but eventually you realise that these first-person accounts will run out, so you have to think of something else. Also, I wonder if a lot of male readers (and my stories are mostly for men) don’t want to read erotic stories told by a man, therefore I’ve started to write from a third-person perspective. Stories in the third person give much more scope, but I can still draw on experiences I’ve had but fictionalise them a lot more.

The first erotic story was from a time when I got involved with a scene where they had a sort of magazine, nothing too official, just a few photocopied A4 sheets folded into A5. In the end, I didn’t pursue the group as they were too far away to make it worth travelling, but I contributed a fantasy story based on a woman I knew. The woman who ran the magazine said it was a great story and ran it across two issues. I still have it somewhere so I may publish it again, with the names changed to protect the guilty.

I’m thinking of starting a new series about a housewife. Having knocked around the fetish and swinging scene for years, I know how the people involved are always very ordinary people. People understand that they only live one life and there can come a time when they wonder if they should experiment sexually. I’ve met plenty of women who have decided to take that leap into an exciting new sexual experience. There is no point in telling stories of the men on the scene, as my memoirs cover that already. But I’m planning to tell the story of a woman who, having grown-up children, in a happy marriage, seeks some excitement with the involvement of her husband and joins the fetish scene. If it goes to plan, there should be a series of stories as she awakens to the possibilities. Of course, as she and her husband explore, they would maintain their respectability so the reader would never know if this is the sort of thing their neighbours and colleagues are getting up to. I’ve met couples like that and they really do live double lives.

I come up with ideas based on things that have happened to me or based on things that happen in everyday life.

If I have a genuine personal experience, that is a complete story, I’ll tell it as it happened. Inevitably I have to remember any conversations that took place as the writing is often some time after it happened. Then I have to make a judgement whether to embellish the story. If it needs something extra, I might experiment with the outcome of spice it up a bit, but if it’s strong enough I’ll leave it as it happened. My aim is to leave the reader wondering, thinking, ‘No, that couldn’t possibly have happened, could it?’ But with the story that I tell in my free sample, about my virginity, I know that the most unlikely things can happen, so don’t be tempted to believe everything in made up. These stories might be in the first-person if they are written from my perspective, or third person if I want to tell the story from someone else’s point of view, particularly if I want to tell a woman’s story.

The other process is that I meet someone in everyday life, usually a pretty girl, and I walk away with a scenario that might have developed. Sometimes these stories can come from something I’ve heard about or a story that someone tells. The nurse story is an example if that. Someone claimed that a medical examination happened a bit like that, not with that outcome of course, and I developed the idea from there. I didn’t believe the story that I was told for a minute, as it could absolutely never happen, but it was the beginning of the idea for me.

In terms of erotic stories, I used to read a lot of them in magazines when I was younger. I found that I preferred those that seemed like they had a seed of truth to them. There was a column called It Happened To Me, which might have given me the idea to write down my experiences.

I’m not a fan of the type of covers I see on Smashwords and they rarely relate to the sort of stories I want to tell. Instead, I find a picture of someone that could be one of the female characters in my story and I make a silhouette of that figure. I hope that leaving the details of the image to the imagination will allow the reader to project their own vision onto that image. I think the simple black on white image stands out amongst the other covers.

Smashwords is a place where erotic fiction seems to be accepted and there are many erotic fiction authors writing here. I think Smashwords was one of the first places to venture into this area and others have followed. Whatever your moral standpoint, erotic fiction is just entertainment and, so long as it’s marketed appropriately, there is no reason not to publish erotic stories. Smashwords gave me a place to compartmentalise my writing away from anything else I might decide to do.

These days ebooks can be read on any device. I had a Kindle, but it’s been dormant for so many years I don’t think the battery works any more. I do know people who have had Kindles of the same generation as mine that are still going though. Today I just use the Kindle app on whatever device I am using.

I’m not sure it’s possible to market erotic fiction. The recommendation for mainstream fiction is to develop a mailing list and send newsletters to readers. I know some erotic fiction authors have websites, but I’ve not yet found any that send newsletters. Smashwords has an email update feature. I might use that if I find readers are interested. Otherwise I’m relying on word of mouth. Of course reviews make a big difference, especially where other marketing opportunities are not available, so I encourage readers to write a review if they have enjoyed one of my stories.