Twice in the past twelve months I’ve found myself taken aback by the death of a Hollywood actor.
First was the death of Gene Hackman, and then earlier this month, the passing of Robert Duvall. Both were generation-defining actors who played some of the most memorable Hollywood roles in the last fifty years.
They were also the kind of resilient actors who brought a hushed, understated presence to their roles. While masculinity is under attack in certain quarters for its toxicity, these men portrayed a quieter, sturdier kind of masculinity worth emulating.
Former Associated Press Hollywood correspondent Bob Thomas, who died in 2014, was the primary writer of this obituary.
In other words, the writer of Duvall’s obituary died twelve years before Duvall’s obituary was published.
I’ve long been fascinated with the writing process behind obituaries. It’s a journalistic art form clouded by a professional secrecy uncharacteristic of journalism and its desire for transparency. (“Democracy dies in darkness.”)
Obituaries for the powerful and famous are written years in advance of the person’s passing. These obits are not complete, however. A pending obituary remains open and subject to further edits if some new and significant chapter of the person’s life blooms.
Papers and wire services will prepare and sit on hundreds, even thousands, of unfinished obituaries, each a miniature biography-in-development of a full and public life. Newspapers and wire services jealousy guard this corpus of material, not even acknowledging they’re preparing an obit for any particular person. Only death seals an obituary shut, like nailing a coffin closed.
All this prep work is due to journalism’s tight deadlines, since an obituary is expected to be published within hours, not weeks, of the subject’s death. These realities shroud the whole process with a morbid pragmatism that borders on the absurd.
This is what led me to write my short story “The Obituarist,” published by North American Review and collected in my book A Concordance of One’s Life. The story regards a professional obituary writer who, faced with his own mortality, contributes an interview to be used for his own obit.
From the story:
My editors and my fellow obituarists have a little list, The Nearly Departed we call it, celebrities and politicians and artists and authors whom we agree are not long for this world. The unlucky are crossed off the list the same day their obit hits the back pages of the Times. The unluckier are those added when that slot opens. There is no announcement, no press release of their addition. My subjects are not informed privately.
A few years after NAR published “The Obituarist,” I wrote a post for their blog explaining my inspiration for the story, as well as the peculiarities of the obituary writing process.
One peculiarity is when the obituary’s subject outlives the writer, such as what happened to Bob Thomas and Robert Duvall. Back in 2014, I learned that a similar situation happened when Mickey Rooney passed away. I’m certain there’s many other examples to be found.
Sometimes the paper prints the obituary while the subject is still alive. This famously happened to Mark Twain (“The report of my death was an exaggeration”), but also to Axl Rose, Abe Vigoda, Alfred Nobel, and more. One of my favorites is the note Rudyard Kipling sent to the paper which printed his obituary: “I’ve just read that I am dead. Don’t forget to delete me from your list of subscribers.”
Another peculiarity is much rarer than the prior two, that is, when the subject is permitted to read his obituary before his death. In at least one case, a paper acquiesced to publishing an obit knowing that the subject was not dead: Huckster and showman P. T. Barnum convinced a New York newspaper to print his, just so he could read it before passing away a few days later.
So, while I mourn the death of Robert Duvall, I also tip my hat to AP writer Bob Thomas, who passes into infamy in a manner unique to the career of an obituary writer.
Jack Nicholson as J. J. Gittes in 1974’s Chinatown.
I’m not saying anything new when I say Chinatown is one of the greatest movies of all time. Producer Robert Evans captured lightning in a bottle when he put the 1974 film together, gathering a once-a-decade cast and an auteur director around a script familiar in Hollywood’s tones and tropes, and yet unlike anything preceding it.
There’s a tragic timelessness to Robert Towne’s script, a movie nostalgic for a bygone Los Angeles and the wonderful movies it used to make. There’s an audaciousness to the script as well. Making a feature film about the California water wars sounds like a dead-weight clunker, a story laden with all the dramatic zeal of a C-SPAN documentary. Towne’s brilliant insight was to frame the drama as a 1930s private eye noir, and then add a horrific backstory of sexual abuse that the Hollywood of the 1930s could not have even hinted at.
Two drafts of the script are available at the Internet Archive, and it’s fascinating to compare them. The earlier version liberally layers on the film noir device of the detective wearily adding voice-overs. The detective is also more romantic toward the female lead, and less cynical overall. These were all dropped by the final version. Writers Guild of America rates the script as third on their list of all-time greats, behind Casablanca and The Godfather. That said, I bet if you plied a roomful of seasoned Hollywood screenwriters with free drinks, most would glumly admit they wished they’d written Chinatown, more so than the other two films.
The script is booby-trapped with one reversal after another. In the first act, a wealthy Mrs. Evelyn Mulwray hires detective J. J. Gittes to snoop on her husband’s illicit activities. Once the job is finished, Gittes is confronted by another wealthy woman, the real Mrs. Mulwray, who threatens to sue Gittes for defamation of character. These rug-pulls and sleights-of-hand continue throughout the movie, all to slow down Gittes as he hacks his way through a thicket of lies and secrets.
Screenwriter Robert Towne. (Photo by Sarah Morris.)
The sharpest observations I’ve encountered about the script come from Syd Field, a Hollywood writer best known for his books on the screenwriting process itself. (I’ve written about Syd Field several times before.) In his book Screenplay, Field thoroughly mines Chinatown for examples of strong storytelling. Here he makes his admiration plain:
A far as I’m concerned, Chinatown is the best American screenplay written during the 1970s. Not that it’s better than Godfather I or Apocalypse Now or All the President’s Men or Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but as a reading experience the story, visual dynamics, backdrop, backstory, subtext of “Chinatown” are woven together to create a solid dramatic unity of a story told with pictures. … What makes it so good is that it works on all levels—story, structure, characterization, visuals—yet everything we need to know is setup within the first ten pages.
But it’s in Field’s Screenwriter’s Workbook where he uncovers what I believe is the most original observation on Chinatown, and what may be the movie’s greatest secret. Field is explaining his concept of the “midpoint,” the scene in a movie that cleaves the second act down the middle, and creates connective tissue between the two halves of the film. As I wrote back in 2015, Field’s midpoint is “the moment when you’ve laid all your cards out for the reader, the moment when the reader now recognizes what’s really at stake for your main character.”
Syd Field
Field recognized Chinatown‘s midpoint wasn’t literally on page 64 of the 128-page script, but rather on page 54. It’s the scene where Gittes visits the Los Angeles water company to get more information on the murder of the department chief, Hollis Mulwray. As he studies the photos on the waiting room wall, Gittes deduces that Hollis’ wife Evelyn is the daughter of Noah Cross, the retired founder of the Los Angeles water company. That is, the three people central to the murder he’s investigating are closely-related family members.
Before this scene, we think we’re watching a Los Angeles murder mystery set against the backdrop of 1930s water politics. Gittes discovery of the true relationship of the three central characters transforms Chinatown into a drama of a grossly dysfunctional family.
If you watch carefully, you’ll see that the film makes a decided change in direction and tone after the midpoint. The questions of water rights dissolve into the background. The film’s remaining revelations almost all regard the Cross-Mulwray family’s dynamics. There’s a reason the movie’s second-most famous line is “She’s my sister and my daughter!”
This is Chinatown‘s big secret, the ace up its sleeve—the film sets us up to expect one kind of story, but by the end, we’re watching something very different. Like the question of who killed Sam Spade’s partner in The Maltese Falcon, the mystery of who killed Hollis Mulwray is neither important nor surprising. Water and money are simply a means to a tragic and rapacious end.
There’s a software industry maxim: “Always be shipping.” That means, if you’re not writing software, you’re not shipping software.
The same thinking applies for writing novels, short stories, self-help guides, biographies, and so on. If you’re not writing (or editing, or proofing), you’re not moving closer to getting your work published.
The following advice will sound familiar to anyone who’s read a book or taken a class on how to write a novel:
“Write an hour everyday.”
The idea behind this bit of sage counsel is that, by writing a little bit everyday, you will eventually reach your goal of writing a novel (or a short story, or a movie script). Another way I’ve seen this phrased is, “If a novel manuscript is 350 pages long, that means if you write a page everyday, you’ll have your novel finished in under a year.”
I’m not a fan of these hard-and-fast rules of writing. For one, they’re often difficult to stick to. Like a strict diet or physical exercise regimen, missing a day or two usually leaves behind a sizable amount of guilt. Guilt may get you back to the keyboard and typing, but it’s a horrible emotion to overcome when you should be focused on your characters and their challenges.
Let me offer a slight twist. Instead of “write an hour everyday” or “write a page a day,” find a regular writing schedule and stick to it. In other words, come up with a schedule right for you.
Once a week
I don’t write everyday. I tried it on a number of occasions. It was not productive.
After a lot of experimentation, I found my best work came when I wrote once a week. I’ve written a number of novels over the past ten-plus years, all while maintaining a weekly, not daily, schedule.
With that one allotted day, though, I spend eight hours writing. That’s writing with minimal interruptions for eight hours straight, like an office worker in a cubicle. And note that I do not require a certain number of pages or words be written in those eight hours. I do my best. That’s all I can ask of myself.
Over the course of my writing day, I’ll pause for lunch. I eat at my computer and go over what I’ve produced so far that morning. Usually I write at cafes, although during the pandemic, I learned how to write at home without interruptions.
The people in my life know that one day a week is off-limits. If something comes up that interrupts my schedule, I make arrangements to write on a different day. It takes a lot to pry that one day from my grip.
Plus, the way I write, I’m usually just starting to cook when I reach my first hour writing. “Write one hour a day?” Juices start flowing at the end of the first hour, and words are still coming at a fast and steady pace. Why stop right when things are going well? I’d rather bank those seven hours a week into a single day, and add another hour on top of them for good measure.
I’ve encountered some skepticism from other budding writers about my routine. Like most writing lore, “write an hour everyday” has become ingrained as one rule among dozens for becoming a successful writer—a kind of mantric or devotional routine that guarantees results. Your novel was rejected? Well, did you skip a day while you were writing it? Also, did you open your book with weather?
“Write an hour a day,” is sound advice in spirit, but not in practice. Better advice is to find a productive writing routine, and stick to it.
A second job
This is the important part: It’s not a wasted day. As I’ve told my family, writing is my second job. It’s not a great-paying job, but it is a job.
Time to write doesn’t magically appear. People in your life will always find some other priority for you. They’ll tell you that you can write later. You have to be firm on this point.
You don’t have to spend a full day a week writing to produce a novel. If you can set aside a few hours twice a week—say, two dedicated evenings—you’ll be surprised how much writing you can get done. But you will want to stick to your schedule for it to work.
One writer I admire is comic book legend Peter Bagge. Apparently, Bagge is infamous in the comics industry for his work ethic. Every morning he rises, dresses in business-casual clothes, and go to his home office to produce comics. He’s not working from home. His office just happens to be in his home. He puts in a full day, five days a week.
I don’t have the success to write everyday and make a living wage off my work. Still, I made a commitment to myself that I would treat the one day a week I had free as a work day, just like Bagge does. I rise, eat breakfast, head to the computer, and write, just as if I was heading to the office.
Silence your phone. Close the door to the room. Put on a pair of headphones. Turn off your computer’s Wi-Fi to avoid the temptation to surf social media.
If you’re not writing, you’re not producing. Make the time to write.
Last year I wrote about dysfunctional narratives, a type of story that Charles Baxter first identified in the 1990s and which now seems overly prevalent today. He quoted a description of them by poet Marilynne Robinson, who also identified this type of narrative. She called it a “mean little myth”:
One is born and in passage through childhood suffers some grave harm. Subsequent good fortune is meaningless because of the injury, while subsequent misfortune is highly significant as the consequence of this injury. The work of one’s life is to discover and name the harm one has suffered.
In my post, I wrote about a “Cambrian explosion” of dysfunctional narratives in our culture since the 1990s, this sense that we’re being overwhelmed by them. They’re in our magazines and books, in our cinema, in our newspapers, and on social media. “Reading begins to be understood as a form of personal therapy or political action,” Baxter wrote, and his observation seems as acute today as it did back then.
Last year I offered a few explanations for what energized this explosion. Recently I thought of another reason to add to the list. It’s a concept repeated endlessly in creative writing classes and how-to guides on writing fiction, namely, character-driven fiction versus plot-driven fiction. Respectable authors are supposed to write character-driven fiction and to eschew plot-driven fiction, which is largely associated with genre fiction.
When I first heard this edict of character versus plot, I accepted it as sage wisdom, and sought to follow it closely. Over the years, I kept hearing it from instructors and successful writers, especially writers of so-called literary fiction. I heard it so much, I began to question it. What exactly is character? What is plot?
I began to pose these questions to my peers. Their response usually sounded like this:
“‘Character’ is all the things that make a character unique. ‘Plot’ is the stuff that happens in a story.” A character-driven story is supposedly rich with humanizing details, while a plot-driven piece is a fluffy story where “a lot of stuff happens.”
Aristotle is not the final word on literary analysis, but his opinions on how a story succeeds or fails is far more nuanced than what many of my peers and instructors in creative writing programs could offer.
Aristotle defines character as a set of human traits imitated in the text. Traits could be run-of-the-mill personality markers, such as a character who is studious or arrogant, or complex and contradictory, like Hamlet’s brooding and questioning nature. Before modern times, playwrights often used traits associated with the four humors to define characters in a play.
The four humors
For Aristotle, plot is the series of decisions a character makes that propels the story forward. These decisions generally take two forms: The character speaks, or the character acts. In line with the saying “actions speak louder than words,” Aristotle holds that a character’s actions are more significant, and more revealing, than the words they mouth.
When one of the salesmen in Glengarry Glen Ross announces he’s going close a big sale that night, and then crosses the street to have a cocktail, his actions reveal the hollowness of his words. Both decisions (speaking and acting) are also plot. Plot proves what character traits merely suggest.1
In other words, plot is not “stuff that happens.” (Note the passive voice, as though plot elements are forced upon the characters.) Rather, plot is a sequence of decisions made—and readers are very interested in a character’s decisions.
To be fair, inaction by a character is a kind of decision. Certainly there’s room for stories about characters who ponder a great deal and do little about it. In successful fiction, though, the final effect of inaction is almost always ironic. (Two good examples are Richard Ford’s “Rock Springs” and Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.”) The problem is when inaction in literary fiction is treated as sublime.
The inaccurate, watered-down definition of plot-driven fiction—”A story where a lot of stuff happens”—has led to contemporary American literature’s fascination with flabby, low-energy narratives. I’ve met authors proud that the characters in their stories don’t do anything—never get off the couch, never pick up the phone, never make a decision of any consequence. Literary fiction has come to regard passivity as a virtue and action as a vice. A writer crafting a character who takes matters into their own hands risks having their work classified as genre fiction.
For decades now, creative writing programs have been pushing an aesthetic emphasizing character traits over character decisions. It’s frustrating to watch, year after year, the primacy of character-driven fiction getting pushed on young writers, with too many of them accepting the mantra without further consideration.
And this is why I think the Cambrian explosion of dysfunctional narratives is tied to this obsession with character-driven fiction. Passivity and inactivity are keystones of Baxter’s dysfunctional narratives. In his essay, he notes the trend toward “me” stories (“the protagonists…are central characters to whom things happen”) over “I” stories (“the protagonist makes certain decisions and takes some responsibility for them”).
This is why I’m wary of character-driven writers who do not permit their protagonists to make mistakes, instead strategically devising stories where they make no mistakes, and are therefore blameless. No wonder plot—that is, decision-making—is being eschewed, when this is the kind of story being upheld and praised.
Aristotle’s Poetics are obviously far more complicated than my three-paragraph summary, but the gist described here holds. ↩︎
From a novel-writing perspective, 2018 and 2019 was a creative interregnum. After publishing Hagar’s Mother in late 2017, I found myself juggling energy between two books. One was the third installment of the Bridge Daughter series, the other a futuristic detective novel where society has essentially become a giant social media simulation. While working on the former, 2018 fizzled away with a fearful lack of progress. As 2019 marched on, a slow panic developed inside me. Would I burn off a second year with nothing to show for it?
I learned a hard lesson: Writer’s block is real. Before this, I’d read articles by well-known writers who either denied it existed, or called it a semi-phony condition covering for laziness. The cure for supposed writer’s block, they explained, was to turn off your Internet, silence your phone, and write.
The early chapters of the Bridge Daughter sequel emerged in fits and spurts. Like a teenager learning how to drive a stick shift, I couldn’t find second gear and launch the story forward. Eventually I admitted that I’d hit something like writer’s block. I recalled what the Coen Brothers did when they were blocked developing Miller’s Crossing: They wrote a movie about writer’s block, Barton Fink.
While I didn’t go that meta, I used the problem to pivot to my science-fiction detective novel. Encouragingly, I was far more productive. It was also a much longer story. As a tightly-wound mystery, it was vital the chronologies of the different characters matched up, as story events were occurring in the background that the detective only learned about later. This required a fair amount of revision to clean up and synchronize.
The pivot did unblock me, and in a big way. During a stay in Tokyo at the end of 2019, I finished the remainder of the third Bridge Daughter book over a six-week sprint. Unlike the grind of the detective novel, Stranger Son spilled forth all at once. It and In My Memory Locked were published in 2020.
The other writing outlet I used over 2019 to break my writer’s block was this blog. It’s no surprise my focus that year would be on the writing process itself. I blogged about keeping a writing notebook on your phone, story revision, story structure, and even on (bad) cover letters. Basically, any problem I faced while writing, I at least attempted to compose a post about it. (Most were never published, trapped forever in my blog software’s Drafts folder.)
So desperate to write anything to keep the blood flowing, I even wrote about writing in cafes. It couldn’t have been more flagrant: Sitting in a cafe, desperate to jump-start the creative engine, I started writing about what I saw around me. What began as a lark grew into a lengthy diatribe on the different cafes I’d written in over two-and-a-half decades, and the varieties of cafe patrons and owners I’ve had to put up with.
The cafe I wrote that post in was near-perfect for my writing habit. Plenty of seating, open late, electrical outlets, free Wi-Fi, good drinks, good food, reasonable prices, a cozy college student vibe—and a mere one block from my apartment. That’s why at the end of the post I didn’t reveal its name. I feared it would be discovered and ruined.
Well, not long after posting, the cafe changed owners. One by one, the wonderful perks disappeared, prices crept upwards, and hours were reduced. By the end of 2019, I was on the hunt for a new cafe.
A few months later, my preference for writing in public spaces would become a very distant problem.
Illustration from Erotic Review for “At the White Sands Motel, 1956”
I once wrote erotica by accident. Writing and getting the story published is a wild tale.
If you know of anything of my output—my novels, my interactive fiction—that might surprise you. You’ve probably never read anything by me that remotely involves the sex act: No kinky sex, no ho-hum sex, not even missionary style. Generally, I shy away from that kind of thing. Getting a story published in an erotica magazine still tickles me to this day.
The story-behind-the-story begins in a creative writing class. The instructor offered us a list of writing prompts. We were to select one and write an opening.
The first speed bump in this tale is that these prompts were communicated to us orally. The prompt I selected regarded a teenage lifeguard named Hamke. Years later, I learned I had misheard the details. The prompt did not include the name “Hamke” or anything about a lifeguard. How I managed to screw up so much remains a mystery lost to the shroud of time.
In any event, the name and occupation stuck. I assumed it was a German name, as I’d never heard of it before. (Apparently, I’m not alone.) While I enjoy swimming, I’ve never known a lifeguard nor worked as one. Why this prompt caught my interest, I do not know. Over the following week I roughed out a first draft about a teenage Hamke standing guard over a motel pool in Nevada. In need of a title, I jammed one onto the front page of the manuscript: “Living It Up at the White Sands Motel.” (I believe it was a riff on the quip about a cheap lodging being a “low-rent Shangri-la.”)
Around this time, I dated a woman also enrolled in the creative writing program. She was experimenting with poetry about the body. She read many of my stories, which is generous—even when you’re dating a writer, that’s no guarantee they’ll actually read your output. She called my work cerebral, and noted that my characters seemed “detached” from their physical nature. She challenged me to write a story where the main character’s physicality is centered.
Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean “write about sex” or “write about someone with a smokin’ bod.” It could mean the main character is physically challenged, or has suffered some grievous physical damage they’re recovering from. It could mean some aspect of their body defines them in a material way (which is something I had in mind as I wrote my Bridge Daughter series of books.)
In this case, I went for the obvious: Hamke would have sex. More than that, he would lose his virginity.
I poked and prodded at the manuscript—draft after draft—trying to tune all the off-key notes. In workshops, peer writers would scratch their heads trying to figure out what to make of this strange story. There was a lifeguard with a flat-top and a weird name, an empty motel in the desert, and an older couple from New Jersey who invites him to their air-conditioned room for an afternoon romp. By this time I’d renamed it (still flailing for a proper title) “At the White Sands Motel, 1956.”
I submitted to the usual literary magazines, searching high and low for a place to land it. The rejection slips came back a bit more quickly than the other stories I’d sent out. Perhaps the complaints I heard in in the workshops (“‘Hamke?’ Is that Jewish?”) was now confounding editors. The sex was not graphic, but it was on the page and not merely alluded to. The wife was acidic and domineering, and her husband frustratingly passive. Wide-eyed Hamke, who was simply “along for the ride” (so to speak), was not a character to stand up and cheer for.
Enter London-based writer Saskia Vogel. By chance, she came into the bar I tended while working through graduate school. She was working on a study of kink; I despaired over a short story about a lifeguard losing his virginity. We swapped email addresses and kept in touch after she returned to England.
Around this time, fellow grad student Lizzy Acker mentioned off-the-cuff she was developing a new San Francisco reading series with the theme “funny / sexy / sad.” The work writers presented had to feature one of those elements.
“You know,” I said, not entirely innocently, “I have a story that’s funny, sexy, and sad.”
It’s true: Hamke’s fumbling and awkward loss of innocence is funny. The wife impatiently orders Hamke across a tour of her body as though teaching him to drive a stick shift. It’s sad, too. As one workshop instructor remarked, the boy is robbed of a positive formative experience.
Lizzy included me in the series’ opening night line-up, and the reading went uproariously well. Maxfield’s House of Caffeine was packed. The audience reacted with every twist and turn of Hamke’s awkward journey. They burst out laughing at all the right moments. Red-faced parents held their hands over their children’s tender ears. People were moved by the ending, and a couple of tears were shed. The applause knocked me off my feet. It was, by every measure, the best reading I ever gave.
How the hell could I not get this story published?
Then, an interregnum. I separated from the girlfriend who challenged me to write about the body. I separated from my appendix, and a few months later, I busted up my right shoulder. I separated from graduate school. (Well, a degree was conferred, how’s that.) Hamke’s story remained a magnet for rejection slips. Meanwhile, medical bills ate through my meager bartender savings.
With no more excuses, I returned to full-time employment. The first year with my new company, the sector we were involved in hosted their annual conference in, of all places, the Canary Islands.
La Palmas de Gran Canaria. (Photo by the author.)
That’s how, six months after staring down bankruptcy and unemployment, I found myself on a semi-tropical island in the Atlantic a mere 500 miles from Marrakesh. I rented a cheap open-air room overlooking the Las Palmas promenade and a pristine sunning beach. After the conference concluded, I stayed for another week to explore the island and write.
During this vacation I received an email from Saskia Vogel in London. She heard from an editor friend that the UK-based Erotic Review was in need of fiction. Didn’t I have a story about a guy having sex for the first time?
In that low-rent Shangri-la, the couch doubling as my bed and the drapes billowing from the breeze coming off the beach, I hustled one more edit pass out of my aging Hamke story. Thankfully I brought my writing notebook computer with me. This was not a time when Wi-Fi was a sure thing in a rented room, especially in an out-of-the-way place like Gran Canaria, but I in this case I was set. I emailed my little story to editor and publisher Jamie Maclean.
Before I did that, though, I used the Wi-Fi to study up on just whom I was submitting to. My search revealed I was not soliciting some amateur outfit. ER had been around since before 1995, and had published numerous erotic books on top of a monthly subscription-based magazine. Their readers spanned the UK and North America. Not only had I never published a work of erotica, I’d never been published by a magazine that survived solely off subscriptions.
With a healthy taste of self-doubt in the back of my mouth, I pressed the Send button. Then I did what I usually do after submitting a piece to a magazine: I got my mind off things. I went downstairs. I walked the promenade. I had a couple of drinks at a beach bar, and got my toes in some sand.
When I returned to the room, I of course checked my email, fully expecting to find nothing. Instead, an acceptance email waited in my inbox. Compared to the usual turnaround times for literary magazines—one sent me a rejection two years after submission—this was lightning fast. Later it dawned on me that my accidental vacation spot had contributed to the quick response: I was in the same time zone as London, where ER was published.
Three months later, a contributor’s copy of Erotic Review and an international money transfer arrived at my apartment in California. My Hamke story was out there.
And that’s how I became a writer of erotica, scribbler of filth and peddler of smut.
Postscript:
My tale might be seen as a reversal of Ray Bradbury’s strategy to seek out unusual places for his work (such as Gourmet publishing his “Dandelion Wine”). I sought out unusual places to publish an erotica story, and eventually found a natural home for it.
Being published in an erotica magazine has become a point of pride for me. I never set out to write erotica, and I’ve never considered pursuing it since. I once read that no one writes erotica under their real name. Well, I did, although when you have as generic a name as “Jim Nelson,” perhaps it doesn’t matter.
Erotic Review is a class act. They continued to stay in touch. I received editorial updates and invites to ER parties (which, sadly, were all in London). They even sent digital Christmas cards, such as the one above.
Recently ER changed hands and is now retooling under a new editorial staff. If you’re interested in supporting the relaunch, visit them at ermagazine.com.
_illustration_Alchemic_approach_to_four_humors_in_relation_to_the_four_elements_and_zodiacal_signs.jpg)
