I, erotica writer

Illustration from The Erotic Review for "At the White Stands Motel, 1956"
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 it published in an erotica magazine still tickles me to this day.

It begins in a creative writing class. The instructor offered us a list of writing prompts. We were to select one and write a story 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 cheap lodgings 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 to be “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. (All of this was 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.”

A Concordance of One's Life by Jim Nelson

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 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 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
La Palmas de Gran Canaria. (Photo by the author.)

That’s how, six months after staring down bankruptcy and unemployment, I found myself on an 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 on 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 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 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, had a couple of drinks at a beach bar, 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 Christmas card

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.

“At the White Sands Motel, 1956” is collected with nine other short stories in A Concordance of One’s Life.

Video

The Concordance Depiction

While Googling for my own work—yes, I do that sort of thing—I discovered the video “The Concordance Depiction” by Michelle David.

Originally posted in September 2017, “Depiction” is a 1m04s silent video reaction to my short story “A Concordance of One’s Life”.

Her summary:

This video is about the short story by Jim Nelson called “a concordance of one’s life”. I try to depict the brain of the mentally unstable narrator.

“A Concordance of One’s Life” has inspired other art as well. It was the subject of a San Francisco art show and adapted to a musical by Thu Tran.

Reading one’s own obituary: P. T. Barnum

P. T. Barnum

I’ve written in the past about the profession of obituary writing. My interest is rather simple: I wrote a story years ago about an obituarist (kindly published by North American Review) and I’ve remain interested in the vocation since. It strikes me as a unique field of work to compress a person of note’s life down to six or seven informative paragraphs without simply being encyclopedic.

More interesting to me is that most obituaries are written while the subject is still alive. If newspapers are going to stay in the business of publishing timely work, they have to be. Who wants to read the obituary of a one-hit wonder or has-been star six weeks after their death? The magic of the obituary is to be at once timely and timeless.

One danger in the obituary business is premature publication. It turns out there’s a history of notables who had the pleasure of reading their own obituaries, from Axl Rose to Abe Vigoda to Alfred Nobel. I won’t bother quoting Twain about exaggerated reports, but Rudyard Kipling may have topped it with his letter to an editor: “I’ve just read that I am dead. Don’t forget to delete me from your list of subscribers.”

Mindful of current events in the United States, I found myself reading over Wikipedia’s entry on P. T. Barnum. The man’s life was surprisingly varied. While he’s most famous as a huckster and a showman, I didn’t know one of his first ventures was publishing a crusading newspaper (which might explain his later skill of manipulating the press) or that he didn’t get into the circus business until age sixty, when his greatest exploits and promotions were well behind him.

And then there’s this tidbit about his life and death, as told in the New York Times:

In ill health in 1891, he persuaded a New York newspaper, The Evening Sun, to publish his obituary while he was still alive so he could read it; he died days later at the age of 81.

In my short story, the obituarist remarks that writing one’s own death notice stands outside the bounds of professional decorum. But to bless one’s obituary be published while on death’s door, all for the pleasure of reading it before you pass—P. T. Barnum was quite a man.

Quote

Margalit Fox & Bruce Weber, NY Times obituarists, on NPR’s Fresh Air

In the comments for a previous post on Ann Wroe, obituary writer for The Economist, Peter Marinov helpfully pointed me to a recent NPR interview with two New York Times obituarists, Margalit Fox and Bruce Weber.

Margalit Fox wrote an eye-opening Times essay in 2014 on the art and craft of writing obituaries, so I’m familiar with her name and work. The recent NPR interview coincided with the release of a documentary on Fox and Weber, Obit: Life on Deadline, which I certainly look forward to seeing.

Obit: Life on Deadline, a film by Vanessa Gould

My own interest in all of this comes from a short story I published years back in the North American Review called “The Obituarist”. Researching and writing that story led to my own interest in this underappreciated field of journalism.

Like Ann Wroe’s thoughts on the profession, Fox and Weber share fascinating insights on this odd but rewarding career path. There’s a goldmine of wisdom in the interview, but it’s this observation that stood out for me:

And I think the other great attraction is we are the most purely narrative genre in any daily paper. If you think about how an obit is structured, we are taxed with taking our subjects from cradle to grave, and that gives obits a built-in narrative arc, the arc of how someone lived his or her life. And who doesn’t want to start the day reading a really good story?

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Ann Wroe on the art of writing an obituary

Death, Matt Batchelor (CC BY 2.0)

From The Economist comes an interview with Ann Wroe, one of their in-house obituarists. I’ve documented my interest in the profession here (multiple times) and elsewhere, and even wrote a short story about the career choice.

Wroe on the craft:

I look through the obituaries of the New York Times and the Telegraph. I’ll spot someone who looks really interesting and I’ll hear a bell going off in my head. I do it for the story, and not whether the person is famous. I love it when someone’s had a quirky career that we wouldn’t be dealing with in any other part of the paper, such as a woodcarver or a whale hunter or a firefighter.

On the career itself:

It’s odd because people think it’s a rather gloomy job, but it’s very seldom a sad job. Usually, the people you’re dealing with have lived for ages and have done really interesting things. … An obit is really a celebration of a life. It’s really a joyful thing most of the time. That’s why I love the job.

I believe a great exercise for any student of writing would be to select someone currently alive, famous or not, and write their life story in under 1,000 words. Do that five, ten, twenty times, each time a different person. The exercise will change how you approaching writing stories, from microfiction to saga-length novels.

Externalizing inspiration

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Last time I wrote about keeping a writing notebook. Let’s say you started one, or have been keeping a notebook for some time. What do you do with it? Once you’ve filled a notebook with all these ideas, how do you transfer that inspiration to a short story or novel?

From an essay I wrote for North American Review regarding a short story of mine, I discussed how I used a writing notebook:

On occasion I revisit my writing notebooks for inspiration…Many of my stories evolve from my own (sometimes misplaced) attempts to wire two or three bits of disparate inspiration together and see if sparks fly.

The inspiration for the story they published (“The Obituarist”) came from three lines scribbled into my notebook years ago:

“The Obituarist – Dying, old age, writes obits for living ppl. Also writes fiction—short stories?—and has come to realize that man is reliant on conflict, tension, etc. because all our stories rely on them, and they are not stories otherwise. Speaking to a young person writing his obit. (Or he writes book reviews.)”

That was it. I had a title alright, and some idea of a character and his situation, but nothing further. As I explained for NAR, about a year after writing this in my notebook I began working on the story itself, which is now collected in A Concordance of One’s Life.

This is the true value of a free-form writing notebook. For some people, a writing notebook is to prevent forgetting something. For others, a notebook is a journal, a way to talk to one’s self, a method of getting down pent-up emotions, ideas, or even a fleeting notion that may or may not be useful later.

I keep a writing notebook to externalize my thoughts. Externalizing inspiration, no matter how crazy or random the inspiration may seem, is itself an act of creation. Writing an idea in a notebook is as important as sitting down before the computer and formally typing the story. Those erratic sentences I scribbled about the obituarist were not subsidiary or tangential to writing the story. Those words were the genesis. The story started with me scratching those erratic lines into my notebook, not a year later when I typed the opening sentence in my word processor.

By committing some scattered notions to the page, I’m getting them out of my skull—where they’re fluid, malleable, and insubstantial—and forcing them into the physical world, where they take shape and harden into form. It’s important to judge my ideas objectively in the bald daylight to determine if they’re worth expanding upon.

Plenty of my inspirations go no further than the notebook. That’s not a bad thing. Most do not age well. When I return to my notebook, I often blanch upon reading these old inspirations. I will hurry to turn the page—a sure indication I made the best decision not to pursue them.

Wiring sources of inspiration together

A Concordance of One's Life by Jim Nelson

In my NAR essay, I wrote that “The Obituarist” grew from a single idea. More often I find success in combining ideas, “to wire two or three bits of disparate inspiration together and see if sparks fly.”

I hold a pet theory that true inspiration is rarely, if ever, a single atomic idea. Inspiration is more often multiple ideas coalescing into one. These balls of inspiration accrete mass over time until a tipping point is reached, and the creator feels the urgent need to get the accumulation down on the page in the form of a story. (Or on the canvas, or modeled in clay, and so on.)

For an example of wiring disparate bits of inspiration together, I point to another story in the collection, “A Concordance of One’s Life.” The elements from my notebook contributing to the story include:

  1. Man writes a concordance of his own memoirs (but why?)
  2. Adult feels cheated about something that happened when he was young
  3. Small town becomes a literary tourist attraction (a la Hemingway’s house in Key West)
  4. A man with a name no one can pronounce

When I began writing “Concordance”, the early drafts only involved points 1 and 2. I thought pairing them answered that first question (“but why?”). I was wrong; the early drafts of the story went nowhere. I’d noted the second two bits of inspiration in my notebook before starting the first draft but failed to make a connection. I thought they were for a separate story, if I used them at all.

In a later draft, I added the third inspiration and sparks began to fire. The quiet mountain town as a tourist attraction added a quirky backdrop to my drafts, odd scenes of faceless people going from location to location with their well-worn concordances in hand. Still, the story was shiftless and moody and failed to progress.

The final bit of inspiration came from waking one Saturday morning and, hazy-headed, realizing the cheated man was not the concordance’s author. Rather, the narrator was a friend or an acquaintance who went unmentioned in the concordance (even though everyone else in town is described within it).

I’d given up on the story several times over a span of nearly two years. Patience and focus on the story’s needs led to plenty of sparks that Saturday morning. The draft I wrote became more-or-less what was published by Watchword later that year.

(Somewhere in this is a moral about not giving up on stories, but I must confess it’s sometimes good to cut anchor and move on. Some stories simply cannot be salvaged.)

The fourth point on inspiration—”man with a name no one can pronounce”—found its way into the story during the Saturday morning writing session. It was a last-minute addition. I’d been thinking about the man with the unpronounceable name as the basis for another story, but it had no feet. At the computer Saturday morning, I included it as a gag, a side bit of detail. As the story came to fruition, I realized it was one of the most salient aspects of “A Concordance of One’s Life.”

Gallery

The denouement did not happen here: Watchword’s Whole Story, “A Concordance of One’s Life”

On May 4th and 5th, 2007, Watchword Press held the second of their literary art shows “Whole Story”. Watchword’s goal was to join visual and performance artists with writers and create a unique collaborative event.

In this case, artists were invited to read and react to my story “A Concordance of One’s Life” (collected in my eponymous book). If some of the images make little sense, it helps to read the story first. (You can get a free copy by signing up for my mailing list.)

Photos

Pins handed out for everyone to proudly wear.

Pins handed out for everyone to proudly wear.

Fortune cookies made from pages of an index.

Fortune cookies made from pages of an index.

The family from Golden Dragon, live and in person.

The family from Golden Dragon, live and in person.

Some astounding works by George Pfau (left) and Alexandra Pratt (not pictured). That nameless guy on the right's just blocking good art.

Some astounding works by George Pfau (left) and Alexandra Pratt (not pictured). That nameless guy on the right’s just blocking good art.

A Concordance of One's Life: The Gold Anniversary Edition. Andrew Touhy jumps in the pool with his own humorous take on the story.

A Concordance of One’s Life: The Gold Anniversary Edition. Andrew Touhy jumps in the pool with his own humorous take on the story.

A panoramic view of the entire gallery. In the full view, I'm the one standing in the center wearing a hat and a tie and a blank look of disbelief.  Courtesy Jesse Clark Studios.

A panoramic view of the entire gallery. In the full view, I’m the one standing in the center wearing a hat and a tie and a blank look of disbelief. Courtesy Jesse Clark Studios.

The limp skeletal remains of Ken James and the Fellow Travelers Performance Group.

The limp skeletal remains of Ken James and the Fellow Travelers Performance Group.

"... and soon they're fucking their brains out like spring rabbits!"

“… and soon they’re fucking their brains out like spring rabbits!”

Arthur Lyman Buford: Person of the Year. Courtesy Carolyn Boyd.

Arthur Lyman Buford: Person of the Year.
Courtesy Carolyn Boyd.

Thu Tran sings Dylanesque odes to Arthur Lyman Buford & Company.  Thu would later adapt "A Concordance of One's Life" to a musical.

Thu Tran sings Dylanesque odes to Arthur Lyman Buford & Company. Thu would later adapt “A Concordance of One’s Life” to a musical.

Organizer Laurie Doyle imagines Chi-Tung's desk at home.

Organizer Laurie Doyle imagines Chi-Tung’s desk at home.

The silk-screened poster Watchword used to advertise the event.

The silk-screened poster Watchword used to advertise the event.