I did not disappear and I’m not dead! I just had a bit of a rough patch this summer. The highly anticipated Final Answer Chapter 4 has now been released, with my sincere apologies on its lateness. The rough patch is over and I’m fully ready to get back to work. Unlike many blogs, spoiler warnings don’t really apply below.

Those who read my blogs often know that while I appreciate all criticism and feedback and never plan to prevent any from popping up, I’m not above disagreeing vocally with criticism that, in my opinion, misses the mark. There have been times readers, who happen to have interpreted a work of mine in a different way or didn’t like it much (as it their right!), would comment something like “why did you never include <this thing>?” And all I can do is sit back at my computer, a puzzled look on my face, and write back, “I did.” My personal favorite, even though I won’t cite it because that feels too mean and that’s not the point of this blog, is when someone asked why I “never included” a certain topic in one of my stories, when it was literally the first sentence of that story. When people write criticism like that and say I never did something or I did something wrong when it’s demonstrably the case I didn’t, oftentimes there’s no stronger reply than a two-word phrase most of us know well.

“You sure?”

I’ve been writing teenage erotica for (good God) a decade now. The genre comes with a lot of difficulties but also a lot of shortcuts. It’s not hard to explain why a character will see their crush every day, a social institution will always beget drama, and hormones are running wild so huge crushes and crazy sexual urges are the order of the day. Plus, a lot of us either look back on high school fondly or wish it could have gone better, and both of those demographics enjoy reading high school stories. For a budding writer, coming-of-age stories are great ways to start writing stories for exactly these reasons.

One of the fascinating things about online writing is that it’s perceived differently depending on the era it’s consumed. I’m not even talking about one’s age, but rather, simply what year it is. Mutual Benefits, a well-received story for its time, has recently gotten a lot of comments on Literotica going, “for those wanting to read this story, let me save you some time, this story is filled with drama and the protagonist is self-loathing.” Both of these comments are, for the record, true, and it’s also true that not a lot of people want that much drama with their story. No harm and no foul in pointing that out alone. That said, a lot of them kind of imply that the story is unrealistic or the drama is unwarranted, and to that, I can only laugh and shrug.

Mutual Benefits was, fun fact, one of the only erotic stories I wrote that was actually based on my own life. There was a real-life answer to Taylor. And let me tell you something: I turned the drama down when writing the story. Those who think that the drama was needless were never in that situation: a nerd that got entangled with one of the most popular girls in the school. Hell, the idea of “popular girl needs a study buddy” is a well-known trope in the high school erotica community, and I had lived experience in my back pocket. Those who think the story had too much drama for their tastes are, no doubt, absolutely correct. Those who think the story was unrealistic or that popular girls would never create that much drama are, frankly, wrong. They’re incorrect. They don’t know what they’re talking about.

Similarly, self-loathing and shy whiny geeks are abundant in high schools, speaking as someone who has recently worked in a high school and a former student myself. For the record, I write primarily based on the latter experience and don’t use examples from what I’ve seen during my time working at high schools as inspirations from my stories, simply because, in my opinion, using the experience of real teens I’ve observed as an adult to write erotica is unethical. Not to mention, the 20s are, based on my own observations, actually quite sexually calm in high school compared to the 10s, and as far as I’m concerned, good for the teens of today. Jumping into sex unprepared can lead to consequences.

At any rate, these tropes exist in high school environments, and even beyond. It’s reasonable to read these stories and cringe at the characters’ decisions and pointless fighting. It’s silly to decry these teenagers’ poor abilities to communicate as “unrealistic” or “not what teenagers are like.” I’ve already gotten one email arguing that Rose’s character doesn’t exist in the real world and… Rose is just aloof. There is literally nothing she’s done that’s beyond the expectations of moody teens. Again I ask: You sure?

I worry that instead of improved expectations of teenagers, this speaks to an evolving lack of media literacy that includes all of us, including myself. It’s more common these days, for example, to get emails or comments noting that Nicole’s character from Being More Social is unrealistic. And, like… that’s so nuts! The character who has a crazy intellect, who always pops up in the protagonist’s life when she’s most needed, who changes and reads books in mere seconds, is unrealistic?? Who knew?!

Unlike a lot of my characters, Nicole being unrealistic is, as any reader should know, kind of part of the point. Nicole is supposed to be unrealistic. Taylor, by contrast, is supposed to be realistic, and I’d need to see some better evidence than “now that I’m in my 30s or 40s, I don’t think teens would behave irrationally” to believe otherwise. Some people may not like the drama, and I’d like to believe that’s why I try to branch out and write other stories. That said, it seems that my stories with more overt drama as the plot, like Being More Social or Mutual Benefits or even Final Answer, always happen to become my more popular stories. People like drama, but I think they don’t like to admit that drama reflects more of their past teenage selves than they’d like to admit. Food for thought. I’ll talk to you all next week.

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