As a writer, I’m an amateur, an infant.  Oh I think I’ve written some things that many might fight interesting and I have stories swirling around in my head that really need to come out.  Erotica, at least my form of erotica, has been about learning how to write.  How to set the scene and create the mood.  Whether I’m a skilled lover in real life matters not.  What matters is that the story I write arouses the reader: mind and, uh hum, body. I have written a number of novellas and a novel or two; not a single one published.  They’re just there, waiting.  They’re waiting to be rediscovered by me.  To edit them.  To bring them to life for interested readers.  But I hesitate not knowing that this genre is the right one for me.  It probably doesn’t matter as I’ve heard it said, from one writer to another, “just write!”

I have story ideas in my head of books that I think could be good. But haven’t breathed enough life into them for them to live!  They’re just there begging for me to begin their lives and to let them reach out to others and allow real people to live, even for a moment, within its covers.  Genre? Who knows? One story is based on real events early in one of my careers, years ago.  It’s a story that needs told but I don’t seem to be able to write it.  Another is a fascinating concept of alternate universes that is almost to phantasmal even for my mind.  Yet another is a story of a dying man that I truly believe could be my best work.  Yet his story stays in my mind, dying its own painful death without the story being read by anyone but the narrator in my mind.

The fact is that these stories don’t belong to me!  Sure they’re in my mind and I, one day I suppose, will be the one to breathe life into them and set them free on the literary world, for what that will be worth.  But the stories, in fact, belong to others and I therefore must find a way to make them live.  I once heard it said, by a writer, that as soon as the words are written they no longer belong to me; they belong to the reader.  I love this!  It’s true.  Even as I complete this lament of mine your thoughts have taken ownership of these words; you’ve found a place in your own mind and heart for them.  In a strange way the reader and the writer are in a perfect romance where each must compromise while giving each other the time required to build their relationship. Whether the relationship is long-term or short-term, that connection remains and the words stay with each of them, belonging to neither.