Hey. So it turns out I’m a few days late on this one. My bad. This may turn out to be a shorter one, but I haven’t written it yet, so who knows.

One of the side projects I’m working on alongside this stuff is writing and programming for a video game, which sounds like a pipe dream from the outside, but has actually starting to take some kind of tangible form. Writing character dialogue and dialogue alone and a whole story are two different things, although in both cases the worlds are there, and the dialogue has to constantly validate this. The age-restricted content often makes us segregate in our minds the practice of writing sexually and writing non-sexually. Sex story writers can’t be teachers, they know about sex and might corrupt our children, people think. Well, at least, in that order of writer to teacher, sure. People tend to forget that Bill O’Reilly of Fox News fame was a history teacher before the show’s human icon, and his 1998 novel Those Who Trespass contains some very risque scenes.

They’re also so terribly unsexy that they inspired me to believe in myself a little bit more the day I discovered that book.

Granted, the transition isn’t entirely seamless. Because of the demand from online sex story purveyors, sex is practically a necessity in every chapter or piece I create. Which is fine – I picked the game, I play by the game’s rules. But when I’m not Bashful Scribe and go back to being ******************, I have to switch the game that I play. The thing is, the more that I keep writing, the more it seems that I’m switching modes instead of switching games.

I’m going to drop the metaphor here, don’t worry. I think that I’m not really an erotica writer. At times I flat-out skip sex scenes and write them later because I already know what happened (spoiler alert: they bang) and want to get on with the story. As a result, my transition is more seamless. People sometimes call me out for having too little sex in my stories as it is, so ultimately, this transition is going to depend on the person. Interestingly, I’d also say that specifically writing erotica improves my ability to write other things. To me, erotica is about emotions a lot of the time – heightened bliss, unbridled lust, all that jazz. As I’ve covered before, I write a lot of character-first pieces, pieces that focus on the people having sex and not the fact that they’re doing it. One could argue that most pieces are, but usually in free sex stories, the selling point is the sex the characters are having (key word, usually). This is why I’d argue I’m not an erotica writer, but my approach to erotica writing in a character-first format helps me writing for this video game project.

Are you an erotica writer? If so, how do you write? More importantly, what do you write for? Do you go with the emotions? You might be a good poet. The environment? Maybe a filmmaker. I don’t know. I’m pulling this out of my ass. The point I’m trying to make is that the transitions between erotica and non-erotica are small and the benefits to doing both are mutually beneficial. And addressing the point from earlier, people may not want a guy writing about 14-year-olds screwing teaching their kids, but Being More Social has just confirmed how much I find underage sex weird, awkward and kinda gross. I’ll probably still write it because I’m fascinated with how the characters react and to an extent it is somewhat realistic. At least, the emotional reactions are. And at the end of the day, that’s what a lot of writing, erotic or not, is about. I’ll talk to you all later this week.