Well, first of all I feel a little disingenuous saying that I write because it’s been a long time since I was regularly writing and sharing anything meaningful but that should hopefully - no WILL - be changing in the near future.
I am first and foremost a reader. I love to read and have devoured books at a slightly alarming rate ever since I could do so without help. After cutting my teeth on the famous five and Biggles (yes really) I quickly found my way to more advanced novels. I had finished the Dune series before I was 12 which is probably why Sci-Fi will always be a go to genre for me. I’ve read my way through reams of horror, fantasy, Science-Fiction, thrillers and more, discovering some weird and wonderful stories along the way. There are some amazing authors out there in every genre and they tell such compelling stories and give us an infinite number of worlds to explore at our own pace. I also know that there are some stories in my head that I would love to read but can’t find anywhere because nobody has written them for me. Those are the ones I hope to add to the infinite pool of fiction.
My lifelong ambition was and still is to become a “proper” author. To me that means being published physically and having books that sit on real shelves in actual shops. Although I have self published a short collection of flash fiction (there's a link on here somewhere), I’m still a long way from achieving that and the only person stopping it from happening is me, but I digress.
The main reason I write is to explore the untapped corners of my mind, to push myself and see what happens. I like to take a little bit of reality, usually something I know or have experienced and then play the “what-if” game with it. Stretch the truth, tease it out a little and develop the story into something that could have happened. Sometimes the end result is very close to my memory of reality, other times it is far from it and buried somewhere deep in fantasy. I’ve mostly been writing erotic flash fiction, or at least that is all I’ve shared. Why? Well aside from the fact that it’s huge fun to write, erotica is actually very hard to write well so it is a great proving ground to experiment and discover both what works and whether I can actually write it. It’s also fun. Lots of fun. Where else can you take your wildest fantasies and present them to the world without being judged? After all, nobody else knows how much or little of any given story is real. That's part of the joy of fiction. I’ve written short stories in several different disciplines but the one I keep coming back to is erotica. I really enjoy the challenge of finding words to convey the images and sensation in my imagination to somebody else’s head.
From everything I’ve read in the genre I don’t believe that it works particularly well in anything over a novella length, I get bored reading anything (erotic) longer than that and have found very few novels that I’ve actually enjoyed. The few I have enjoyed all had great stories and the sex was almost incidental so maybe that’s the key to making it work.
For the immediate future I intend to resume writing flash fiction again. I want to shake off the cobwebs and hone my skills. If I can add a little humour along the way then I will. Sex shouldn’t be taken too seriously and there’s nothing wrong with making it lighthearted - I tried this in a Christmas story I wrote a few years back and was pleased with the results so expect another one this year.
I’m not quite in a place to explore a full novel yet, I have a few ideas for plots and they will appear at some point but I need to get back into the habit of writing before I attempt them. I also need to read a few more novels to prepare myself, well, that and to enjoy escaping to some more new worlds.
