Why I Want to Write

Holy cow! Last time I posted I was unemployed, and now here I am again, unemployed.

I just wrote this. Russ, you will be pleased, because once something is said, it can't be unsaid, right?

Warning! What you are about to read is about sex. Kinky sex. The kind of sexual content that may cause you to see me in a different light. So if you are a relative or are a friend who followed me here from Facebook and have some sort of aversion to things that may be about hard-core kinky sex, you may want to stop reading now. I'm not kidding.

But it is also about writing, and why I want to do it in a way. Do it as in write. I want to write.






I want to write a novel. Not any old novel, a High Fantasy novel with magic and fighting and quests to be followed. And sex. Lots of graphic, BDSM heavy, rapey sex. I even have a heroine, Athren Pendragon, daughter of Arthur Pendragon and Maeve, queen of the Northern Elves.

Athren Northtree (the Pendragon would come later) was created from my imagination in 1984 as a character in an AD&D campaign run by my high school sweetheart, Kenneth. Ken and I would spend hours writing little stories about her and her companions/lovers Chryssa, Dorian and Dyvim Von Storm, her One True Love. Both in and out of gaming time, during classes at school, passing notes back and forth full of sex and longing and orgasms and the side quests that formed her character background. But no real BDSM stuff, not really. I tried, really I did; with my words I tried leading him into situations only to have him back out again and take me down a different path.

Frustrated, I started writing fan fiction about my own character, putting her in a captive situation that involved the enemy they were fighting, The Dark Prince. At the time he was a shadowy figure, never really filled out during the game except as the ultimate evil that must be fought. I gave him a personality of a sort, the kind of evil glamour that makes the bad guys so desirable in movies and bodice rippers. I presented it to Ken as a dream sequence in the game. He read it and liked it, but considered it as just a story that had no bearing on the game. Fair enough, I suppose. I can’t always have things my way. So alongside the actual game, I created an alternate world where my heroine suffered the Perils of Pauline over and over again, purely for my own pleasure.

Ken played along for a time, and we made up stories together, but other campaigns came and other characters were created and found to be more interesting and I moved on. But I never forgot Athren Pendragon. I still have the majority of those notes, even the transcription of the early works written in Ken’s beautiful, flowing script. It always makes me smile to see them and I remember how much fun we had together and how much we both like to fuck like bunnies.

But I digress. A few years later I came across the box of notes about the alternate timeline (In the game the evil mage was defeated and Athren lived happily ever after as the queen of her new land surrounded by her friends and loved ones) and began putting them together into an actual story. Ack! I was a horrible writer then! To this day I can barely read them without being embarrassed for poor 19yo me, but I must say, most of it is better than 90% of the amateur BDSM erotica posted on the internet today. So in the early 90’s I started writing what would have happened to Athren if she had been kidnapped during the final battle instead of victorious over evil.

Once again, this was purely for my own pleasure. I envisioned a cruel, manipulative, sadistic Prince who was madly in love with the beautiful, sexually exciting Athren. I nibbled at it off and on for the next 15 years or so, usually just pulling it out when I wanted to titillate myself with my own cleverness and kinkiness.

In those early days (before the internet!), I was strongly influenced by Anne Rice’s Beauty series, as many people were, as well as random stories and images from porn magazines and what kinky movies I could find. I have been fascinated with abduction, ravishment and rape for nearly as long as I can remember and had quite the imagination, and since that was what turned me on, it is what I wrote about. From time to time I would try to organize the vignettes into some semblance of order, taking out pieces that didn’t work with the almost-narrative, adding new pieces as they occurred to me, until eventually I realized that I was trying to write a book. But it was a book that couldn’t really share with my friends, and certainly not my family! So for over 25 years I continued to write just for myself. I was afraid to share it, afraid of all of the things that writers and artists are afraid of; being judged and found not worthy, sharing too much of my secret desires, and most unfairly, believing that my grown-up friends would be appalled and offended and needed to be protected from my inner thoughts. That last one is particularly egotistical and downright stupid. It is not my place to protect other people’s experiences and perceptions.

So I didn’t share, and I stopped working on it for a long, long time. I’ve written other things than that, other things that I have only shared with a few people as me, and with the internet as a whole under a pseudonym that won’t fool anyone who knows me. But when I get bored and restless and horny, I pull Athren out of her nest of bits and bytes and tweek her a little this way, and tweek her a little that way. No one has read the entirety of the unfinished novel. Well, no one else but one person.

Professor Mike showed up on Fetlife and drew me in with his intelligence and wit. A professor of law, he was used to reading students’ crappy output and helping them become better at expressing themselves, and he asked me to share Athren with him after I told him about my writing. So I did. And he was impressed and had kind, supportive criticism for me. And I am grateful because it prompted me to start to fix the mess of a narrative and decide what I really wanted to do with the characters in the story.

In recent years, erotica in mainstream non-fiction has become commonplace; Diana Gabaldon and George R.R. Martin are some of my most recent influences, not because they write long, detail ridden stories that take volumes to complete, but because they are not afraid to write about anything. Rape and torture, love and lust are all part of their stories. I even have to tip my hat to E.L. James and Fifty Shade of Grey for opening up the world to the concept of a best-seller that is about an abusive BDSM relationship (that apparently pretends it is about love, but since I have never read the trilogy, I cannot comment on the content really).

It is my goal to write and publish without being afraid. It is my goal to allow others to read my thoughts and desires and fears without internalizing their experiences myself. It is my goal to stop obsessing over form and worry about content. It is my goal to unashamedly fall in love with my own words. It is my goal to be a writer, a dream I’ve had for nearly my entire life.

I can do this and Queen Athren Pendragon can help me.