EDIT: Oh. Dammit. I had this blog ready for last week and told myself I’d publish it on Friday, then on Friday I had a busy work day then honestly didn’t remember it until today. Damn I’m good at this.

When you read a pron story, odds are you barely ever think of the author. In a way, these blogs are almost a betrayal to the kind of stuff I do. The nice thing about writing online erotica if you care about the stories is that the anonymity is twofold – on one level, no one knows that my real name is Nick Sherman and I’m actually a 90-year-old retired astrophysics professor living in the middle of Des Moines. Sure, if you believe me you’ll know I’m a 22-year-old Canadian who hates university, but can you trust me? No one knows who I am until I decide, or not, to out myself. But there’s level 2 – even if people know me, people don’t really care all that much about my thoughts or my status. I barely update my Twitter, ever. I can’t imagine my bio on any smut website gets more than 10 clicks a month. Two digits of people read these very blogs. That’s kind of nice.

In that anonymity, we forget that erotica writers are people, living among us, sharing their individual stories and probably a bunch of fucked-up stuff in them. Do you really think any high school would have me on board as a teacher after learning my flagship story was about minors, as young as 13, getting it on, including a scene where one of those minors has sex with her geography teacher? If that doesn’t put the nail in the coffin we could look at my other two existing stories, one including a guy having sex with a sleeping girl without her consent, and another being basically the tale of a stalker being validated because she happened to like him before he even went after her. Yeesh. Maybe I should get myself checked or something.

But does anyone view the stories purely like that? Nope. They view the humanity of those stories, and other stories. The most shallow cardboard stories of high schoolers getting it on or families inbreeding as if that’s anywhere near normal outside of certain pockets in the Deep South and Scandinavia, those stories are projections. We get to fill in the gaps in our mind. I can’t have been the only one that had a crush in high school on a girl of a certain name, like Jenny, then went home and looked up any and all stories of girls named Jenny afterschool. Bonus points if they got her ‘correct’ eyes and hair color, as if the story was about an alternate timeline where she was sluttier, slutty enough to maybe even consider me. Was it creepy? In retrospect, a little. That said, if that was my awkward take on sex, perhaps it was best that I never asked a girl out formally until my later grades so I didn’t embarrass myself or make any girls genuinely uncomfortable.

People like the earlier version of me I just described write porn stories. Anyone could, and that’s something that makes their open secret a bit more powerful. There is a chance if you frequent sex story sites that you’ve read a story someone you know wrote. The universality of porn, despite my complaints about its difficulty to use as a stepping stone to make a living, makes it an interesting sharing of our experiences. Every twist and turn, every sex scene, every character, they’re born out of the imagination of a regular person. That’s who we are at the end of the day. Bashful Scribe is just a name. I’m a regular guy typing on a tablet who takes way too long to write stuff. That’s why I’m always so grateful to see comments and emails and all that, to see the wonderful people who also have their own aspirations and potential characters and stories. Smut isn’t for everybody, but barring those that don’t, everybody writes smut. I’ll talk to you all *edit* later this week.