This week I published The TA and the Tease! It’s a commission piece and if you’ve been to college, the title is a bit of a giveaway: it’s a story about a TA, or Teaching Assistant. Basically one of those junior teachers that teach seminars in college. That much is not a spoiler but, as always, the rest of this blog is.

Every so often I want to write something new, something I haven’t written before, and I am so incredibly happy with this piece, because it does something so incredibly new. Partially thanks to how I’ve been reading erotica since before I should have been, it frustrates me when writers write the exact same story over and over. Way too many erotica writers get formulaic. If they have a fetish, most of their stories will have that fetish. If they think they did something clever, like a wife’s wedding ring sparkling as she gives a handjob to another man, it’ll pop up in story after story until it’s not clever in the slightest; it’s, instead, the twelfth time it’s happened. If they have a character dynamic (like a spunky young girl and an unassuming older man or a Christian and a Muslim or something), they’ll use it over and over while barely bothering to change it.

I can see why so many of you constantly ask for recommendations for legitimately good erotica writers. I’m struggling to find them sometimes too.

As with virtually all erotica writers, I’m guilty of it to a small extent, though I always want to change some things. Adam from Being More Social and Quinn from Mutual Benefits are both shy nerds catapulted into having a sex life by popular girls, but I feel content with how different they were. Adam was shy and nerdy due to his general innocence and lack of experience doing much of anything. He was bullied. As a result, he’s dramatic and pretentious and is a bit of a control freak. Quinn doesn’t know how to talk to people or make friends at the tail end of high school. He’s clumsy, closed-off, and much more content being alone than Adam is. His most dramatic moments come from attacks on his character and attempts to control him, whereas Adam’s are out of a need to control and his over-emotional nature.

Nevertheless, it is a valid criticism to point out my two biggest stories center around awkward nerds. Even the story that came between, The Good the Bad and the Molly, had a protagonist who was fairly awkward in his own right (uh oh, does this say something about me?), even if he carried himself with a more popular swagger. Still, I refuse to “sit still” with my erotica, and I often like to branch out with other stories.

And I’m not necessarily talking about different storylines like Amy’s Fantasy or First Impressions either. I’m talking about stories that dare to do something different; those are the real challenges. I enjoyed writing Only If You Want because it took a pre-established set of events and told it from another character’s perspective, including one event that was recreated, line-by-line. That was fun to do. Exhilarating, even.

But the big ones are stories where I play with the format itself. Panopticon and Breathe are the obvious standouts here – it’s fun to play with storytelling itself. It’s fun to discover how I can even write a story, even a sex story, and still make it work. Odds are, a few of my stories didn’t work for you. Is that bad? Not at all. It’s good. If I never wrote a story that wasn’t your cup of tea, I still have some branching out to do. I like covering a whole range of types of stories, and ways to tell stories, and, yes, fetishes to include in these stories.

The TA and the Tease is my biggest jump yet in telling these stories because it plays with the formatting options this site itself has. Please read the story before reading on so you can be pleasantly surprised by it.

The story is told partially through online group chats, using an app like Instagram or Discord or whatever. As I usually do, I used italics to indicate the text was referencing an online message, and bunched up text without indenting it to indicate multiple messages were sent from the same source. But then I ran into a problem: when pasting the text over, the formatting didn’t work. Website text doesn’t use indents, and there are automatic breaks in between paragraphs. What was I going to do?

This is why I loved the process of making this story so much. My choices weren’t an intentional way to be artsy or something, they were out of necessity. I decided to make the text messages of a particular person correspond to a color, and quickly discovered that I loved it. I already loved writing the group chat scenes because I love writing spunky sarcastic dialogue, so being able to punctuate them like this felt fantastic. I don’t know how great it is for readability, and I hope some readers will help me out here. I won’t lie: if the text color thing sucks, I’ll be a lil’ heartbroken, but I’d rather know about it and fix it than pretend something is good when it’s not.

I’m also slightly concerned for my colorblind readers, and hope it won’t be too bad. I’m aware that colorblindness is a spectrum and tried to pick high-contrasting shades so that the story could still be enjoyed, but the only colorblind friends I have would never accept the erotica-writing side of me, so that’s that on that end, I suppose.

Anyways, the use of color as well as the use of text messages to exposit are only part of the fun of the newest piece, it’s also a fun story and my beta readers responded really positively to it. If you’re reading this, I hope you enjoyed it, and if the commissioner is reading this, I got so much out of this project too, so thank you. I’ll talk to you all next week.

Click on this image to get access to the site’s Discord channel.