Some of Them Want to be Used by You - Reflections on Format and Feeling

I first realised erotic literature was a thing on a school trip. I realise that's the kind of statement that can carry potentially catastrophic connotations, so let me quickly clarify: I was in my mid teens, it was summer term, and I discovered it on my own. I'd been on a school trip to France. 

On the way back, the ferry ran late, disembarking took forever, and so somewhere, around 2am, we pulled off the motorway into a services, presumably so the by then grumpy staff running the whole thing could call someone's landline to explain we were still en route. Everyone was exhausted, it was weirdly, viciously cold for the time of year, and everything in the services turned out to be shut except for the toilets and the shop.

(In my memory, it was a WH Smiths, but I honestly don't know if that's what it was, or a projection based on the fact every motorway services these days has a WH Smiths.)

Regardless of what the shop actually was, it sold books, and magazines, and snacks. I was too tired to be hungry, too broke to buy a magazine, and too cold to go back and get on the coach before everyone else was done. So I drifted over to the books and started reading titles. I wasn't rich enough to buy a book either, but I like books. 

And as it happened, I started reading at the top of the bookcase, which was where the pornography was. I knew that the top shelves were where dirty magazines lived, obviously - but somehow until that point it had never occurred to me that anyone would ever want to read a dirty book. And the fact they were being sold in a motorway services was genuinely a puzzle to me. 

Today, of course, I can see that pornographic books were probably an essential item for any lorry drivers realising that their long-distance run lacked so much fun they needed more than a Yorkie bar to perk themselves up - but back then unable to solve the mystery of 'why', I was left staring at the 'what' of the titles and covers of the books themselves. And I was hooked.

Partly, I was hooked because I knew very well that I was not supposed to be looking at that kind of thing, and partly because - while the dirty magazines had their covers discreetly, er, covered - nobody had done the same for the books. Probably the magazines were more risqué, or had far more suggestive covers than the books, but even so... I don't think I'd even known nurses' uniforms came in latex before that point.

Of course, thrilling though it was, I didn't dare look for long - this wasn't some kind of "And in that moment, I knew my destiny was to write books in which submissives get edged until they don't know which way is up" moment. But I definitely felt that the summer night was toasty warm as I scurried back to the coach and laid claim to a seat over the wheels. 

And there, probably, the story would've ended; I can't have been the only secretly (god I hope it was secretly!) horny teenager who spotted books like that in a services and then tried to imagine the plot from the titles in privacy later.

 

But the story doesn't quite end there, because later that summer I went on some sort of giant holiday or reunion or something - a big wedding anniversary for a family friend, or possibly a wedding itself, I can't remember. It was deathly dull for me, and it happened in a huge old farmhouse that had been turned into a holiday let. It was huge - but it was cramped for the number of guests that got invited along, and there was nobody much my age. As a result, I explored a lot.

If this had happened half a century earlier, I'd probably have ended up falling through the back of a wardrobe into a fantasy land full of cold, dominant witches and astonishingly clumsy allegory, but I had no such luck: I had to make do with the massively overgrown garden and the old, faintly tumbledown outbuildings. One was a stable block with an old loft. There was no ladder up any more, but it was just about possible to scramble up from in one of the stalls, by standing on a sort of iron basket on the wall, and pulling myself up through an old hatch into the loft.

It wasn't the snowy domain of a woman who ties people down to stone tables, but it was still better than playing scrabble or having arguments, so scramble up I did - and found it was someone's den, or at least had been: there was litter and toy guns and some lego and a battered old radio... and a box. In the box I found a number of copies of Page 3 of the Sun - and a little cache of dirty books. They were quite small, the paper was cheap and rough, multiple corners of the pages had been folded down. And... I stole them. 

I feel bad about that now. because getting those books probably needed a lot more work than going to a motorway services: neither the titles nor the cover photos were anything like as modest as the ones I'd seen on that freezing cold night stop and I probably completely ruined someone's day when they came back to look for them. 

But I distinctly enhanced my own evenings from then on, smuggling them home and hiding them under a loose shelf that was sort of the base of a built-in cupboard in my room, reading them over and over and rehiding them in a flurry of panic whenever I heard the stairs creak.

One of the books was - I swear - called Bonjour Maitresse, but I have never been able to find another copy: I suspect the publisher failed to fulfil their obligation of legal deposit. I know it was called Bonjour Maitresse though, because it would silently thrill me, like forbidden knowledge, every time I had a French lesson all the next year. Also, it referenced The Eurythmics; the submissive male lead (he was called Hudson, he drove a limo, he was bound in a dungeon with almost unsatisfying speed) flirted with the Domme by playing Sweet Dreams Are Made Of This on the radio because of the line about "some of them want to abuse you", an embarrassing side effect of which was that I personally got really into just that one specific song.

But even if elements of the books were a little clumsy - and to be fair to the authors, who then could shop around or argue?? - still they were thrilling. 

I still didn't think it was my destiny to write books about how delicious orgasm control and denial is, but I did discover I desperately wanted to explore some of the ideas I'd read - and I could hardly spend my life raiding random outbuildings in the hope of acquiring more dirty books that way. 

So, since the only alternative was to make my own entertainment, I began trying to write smutty fanfiction. 

My fanfiction was fun to write - it was even fun to read back, though in retrospect much of it was, at my most charitable, far worse than merely sometimes clumsy - but somehow I found it felt less real; less... exciting than the printed books.

It wasn't just that, having written my own stories, I knew how they ended - I'd reread the books dozens of times by this point! It wasn't even that the books I'd found were more explicit: true, they could be, but I'd also discovered Nancy Friday by then (thank you, charity shops!), and her My Secret Garden and Women on Top drove me wild not from any explicit content but from the fact they gave permission. 

No - the difference that made the books thrilling was that they were more tactile than anything I wrote myself: their paper was a faintly yellow-cream off white, slightly rough to turn the pages, but their covers were glossy. They had adverts for dirty phonelines on the back pages, and the pages whispered when you turned them. 

They weren't just forbidden; they were forbidden and real: someone had written them and printed them and knew exactly what I would be doing as I read them - and I did it anyway. And that only made it more thrilling. 

Today, of course, everything's online. Nobody is concealing their ereader beneath a shelf, and I imagine lorry drivers aren't buying their dirty stories under the full glare of the CCTV in a motorway services either. Frankly, as an author, I'm extremely pleased to be able to have an Amazon page, and a Smashwords page, and to have my books available to buy from any number of other platforms, so that people can access and enjoy my work in whatever way is best for them.

And yet...

 ...For reasons I know come more from romanticism than from hard-nosed commercial practicality, I found myself opening a parcel the other day.

A parcel of paperback proofs:

Now available as Print on Demand

 

Because yes, eBooks are practical - from an authorial standpoint, they are fantastic! - but somehow they are not quite as real. You can still read them, you can still thrill to them, you can still whisper select passages to a partner listening with shaking fingers... 

But you can't feel them in the same way. Their pages cannot whisper to you, you can't hide them under the pillow in the same way. Yes, you can read them in public more safely, but their spines can't crack just a little so they always fall open at the passages which undo you most. So wonderful though they are to read, they are always just a fraction less a part of your private erotic life than a print copy could be. 

I'm proud of my books. I love that I have readers who appreciate them, regardless of the specific medium. 

But I like to share experiences. And yes, maybe I fell into the world of print erotica in a specific way, or at just the right time. Maybe I'm just an old-fashioned romantic to half-believe a woman's orgasm really does feel more on paper than on screen. But I think tactile sensation matters (and goodness knows, that and psychological interiority are core to my writing style!).

If you want to enjoy my writing then please, of course, buy my works as eBooks if that's the right format for you: the words and the scenes and the heat don't change across the medium! 

...But if, in addition to just reading my work you also want the additional private thrill of holding my writing - well. That, I think, wants a paperback. That's what I'm working to make available, as a Print on Demand option. 

And I promise if any of you do end up buying any of my work in hard copy, I won't sneak into your den one summer and steal them.