A billionaire
dinosaur forced a strapping young man with oiled pectorals to become gay, and
as a side effect I have decided to become a best-selling author of adverb-laden
erotica.
I love it when the
page beckons, but it doesn’t happen often enough to make me a millionaire. My
hope is that this has more to do with commitment than talent, and that the more
I sit myself down in front of the writing machine, the more material (and
therefore money) I will produce. The trouble is, however, that I write about
things that strike me, topics that mean something, and moments that should
matter as much to the world as they do to me, but don’t.
I must be as out
of touch as my children sometimes think I am. Not only do I like corduroys and listen to singer songwriters that can write and sing and play music without auto-tuning, I can't tell you whether a yellow circle emoticon with
closed eyes and tears denotes laughing or crying. But worse than all of that, I am also clueless about what
matters to the world, and what people living in it want to read. The human condition has in
fact, nothing to do with family struggles, personal insecurities, falling in
love, winning or losing at life, and toilet paper. No, it’s all about shallow, musky,
animalistic rutting...and that’s what sells books.
Hunter Fox learned
this while still at UCLA, and has self-published more than fifty novels based
on the concept of dinosaurs, unicorns, and just about every character you might find in Tolkien, turning men gay. His titles read like something out of Mad Magazine in
the eighties, if Mad Magazine in the eighties had been as dirty as every boy
that read it had wanted it to be, and if every boy that read it had wanted to be turned gay by mythical creatures. There’s
even a saber-toothed tiger (not mythical) thrown onto the title pile for good measure, while
my favorite title includes an alien hound, whatever that might be.
I checked the
Amazon rankings for Mr. Fox’s books, and while the Amazon ranking system is not a
clear indicator of sales and income, there is no doubt that this guy is making
money at this. Sure, the titles are funny and bizarre, and if you belonged to a fraternity (shudder) or were homophobic (shudder) you might give one to a buddy
as a “joke” gift, but does anyone read these books all the way through, and without laughing?
No, I can’t go out tonight, guys, I just
downloaded “Dark Pegasus Made Me Gay” to my Kindle, and I can’t wait to snuggle
up in front of the fire with a cup of cocoa and get started on it!
And lest anyone that is straight think that their attraction to the opposite sex affords them a lofty look down
their nose at the smut preferred by some LGBT readers, I’ll mention Fifty Shades of Grey, Twilight, anything written by Danielle Steel, and the complete Harlequin Romance collection. All of them relative smut when it comes down to it, all
of them laden with adverbs and descriptors that can’t be read without imagining
heavy breathing and the popping of bodice buttons, all of them selling millions
of copies. And those are just a few of the mainstream mentionables; many
authors have made small fortunes by churning out series of formulaic filth that no one
has heard of, or at least will admit to hearing of.
A bad day of
writing at home beats a good day inside the corporate grist mill, and while I
would be happy just making a comfortable, anonymous living by writing, I can admit that a part of me
would not reject a sellout opportunity to become an international sensation, churning entire forests
into pulp and putting endangered owls into owl retirement homes. I sometimes
wonder, however, can that happen writing short stories about moments that
matter? Should I sex up the telling of my
best friend and me boiling our own urine on his mother’s kitchen stove to make
gunpowder, just to land on the bestseller list and extricate myself from
corporate America for good? Maybe some sexually frustrated neighbor
girls stopped by to borrow the very pot we pissed into, and maybe the oven glove that I used to pull the pot of the stove caught fire, and the girls ripped off their shirts in order to smother the
flames and save my life, and in doing so they ignited the lusty pressure keg of passion
trembling within a sinewy, pale-skinned, virginal teenage boy.
It could have happened that way. No wait, it did happen that way, I swear...
Elizabeth and I
joke about me becoming an erotica writer all the time. We imagine book titles, all of them weighted with
innuendo and vice, taboo titles that suggest sensual struggles between wealth
and poverty, daring and innocence, pleasure and pain. These titles lead to a discussion of racy cover photos, glossy images of men with naked, oiled,
capable chests taking tragic women with bulging breasts and desperate eyes into
their arms for lessons in lust while holding uncomfortable,
even physically impossible poses sure to bring about deep vein thrombosis.
And I know what I'm talking about; I used to spend hours hiding in my aunt's basement thumbing through her romance novel collection, drinking in lusty covers, wondering at racy titles, and reading about heated embraces and throbbing passions. All of it made me feel funny inside, but I didn't completely understand why.
Well I understand now, and I think it's time to cash in on that realization.
And I know what I'm talking about; I used to spend hours hiding in my aunt's basement thumbing through her romance novel collection, drinking in lusty covers, wondering at racy titles, and reading about heated embraces and throbbing passions. All of it made me feel funny inside, but I didn't completely understand why.
Well I understand now, and I think it's time to cash in on that realization.
Of course, in order to write erotica, I will need to choose an appropriate pseudonym, something like Dick Foxhunter or Richard Stonewood. Being a
righteous family man that has never once let a lustful thought linger, and has
worked for years to earn an untarnished reputation for knightly valor and
virtuous gallantry, I would not want to risk the public knowing that I earn my stacks writing such filthy books.
Especially those members of the public that are my friends and family, more specifically the ones who would secretly not only read my dirty books, but also dog-ear their favorite pages.
