This is number fifty-five in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
“I READ YOUR BOOK and I could tell it was about you,” said one of the nice church ladies that Sunday morning. I was shocked. Not that she’d read the book—it was Nathan Everett’s For Blood or Money, not erotica—but rather that she thought I was Dag Hamar!
I was in my fifties and worked at the tech giant, but I had no real experience with computer security, was happily (at the time) married, and was healthy as a horse! My heart problems, which were reminiscent of Dag’s, didn’t manifest until I was seventy! I didn’t consider myself anything like my unlucky computer forensics detective.
But that was not the only time I was accused of writing about myself.
Wrote a Book. Please Help!
Several times, I’ve sat down to write my autobiography—or at least a memoir. Even this blog is supposed to be about “My Life in Erotica.” It seems I always reach a point where I’m thinking, “Oh, I should have…” or “If only she’d…” or “This is boring. I’ll add…” I end up writing Life as I Would Have Lived It.
In writing erotica, we have a commonly used term for it: Wish fulfillment. It’s the foundation of virtually all the “Do Over” stories, of which I’ve written a few. But it’s also fundamental when writing fiction based on actual life events. We write something that is “Just like when I was going steady with Bonnie in high school, except we have sex and don’t break up.”
Other than aroslav’s Wonders of My World series, the closest I’ve come to writing about my own life is my currently running Photo Finish series. The name of the leading male, Nate Hart, is the name I used as a pen name in high school to keep teachers from knowing the poetry I read in speech contests was my own. The little town of Tenbrook, Illinois is about the same size and shape as the little town in Indiana where my mother moved the family so she could begin her career as a Methodist minister. My dad worked at a filling station, in construction, building speaker systems, wiring travel trailers, and about anything else he could do in order to follow Mom to the various places she was assigned.
I have four sisters. It was too complicated to get a fourth sister into the mix in the story, so I consolidated the older three into two. And that, I might think, was the beginning of divergence from my autobiography. I’ve always been a writer—and though I won a photography contest in 4H, I did not pursue it as a career. I had multiple girlfriends, but they were in different cities. I even went so far once as to make carbon copies of a letter I wrote them.
Though there was a fair amount of petting and dry humping, none of my girlfriends slept with me. I was technically a virgin when I married the first time. All of the things that actually made my autobiography interesting were wish fulfillment. They were Life as I Would Have Lived It.
And somewhere, buried among ancient manuscripts that I’ve lost track of and didn’t scan, there is a manuscript I titled Life as I Would Have Lived It, a Pseudo Autobiography. I’m pretty sure that most of what was in that manuscript forty years ago has already been included in my literary and erotic writings.
If one was truly a literary forensic investigator, perhaps one could reconstruct my actual life from the pieces found among the lies in my books!
The average income from books of a professional author in the US in 2023 was less than $5,000. Even when we sell our work, we’re making little from it. Consider that twenty authors in 2023 made well over two billion dollars combined! How do the ‘less than minimum wage’ authors make any money at all? Next week: “Reviews.”