Glimpses of reality

I write erotica. It is fantasy, intended to arouse and amuse. I try to make it feel real, but it is not autobiographical. Sometimes the fantasies are suggested to me – for instance Penny Meets the Neighbors has its origins in a request from a real-life couple (who are swingers) to write a story in which they feature, and which mixes their real and fantasy lives.

That said, every so often, there are glimpses of reality in my my stories – events which I have used, often heavily filtered, from my own life. The most obvious of these is Farmer’s Daughter Threesome. The summer job the male character Mike has, is drawn from my own life. I really did spend a summer working on a farm (but I was 18 not 20), and I did spend part of it painting a large barn. The farmer’s daughter really did spend all summer teasing me (including about the fact I had turned my underwear pink in the wash!). More than that, the events leading up to the ‘sexy’ parts of the story are true – there really was a day when the farmer’s daughter and her friend spent the afternoon sampling her fathers drinks cabinet, and when I came in from work, they did try to pull my pants down to see what color my underwear was.

So the basis of the story, right up to the beginning of the sex, is almost entirely true. In reality though, things get less exciting from that point on. We were all younger than in the story, and I’m sure none of us would have known what to do in a threesome (I was an 18 year old virgin, the girls would have been 15 or 16). And we’ll never know anyway – right at that moment, as they were tugging at my pants, we heard the farmer’s car pull up in the driveway! So the rest of the story is pure fantasy!

Meaningless Masturbation? is heavily based on my time as a student. It channels my sexual frustration of the time more than anything, and there are bits of me in Josh. On a couple of occasions I shared a house with a female student, in similar circumstances to Josh and Ellie in the story. I cannot deny that I was attracted to my housemates, but unlike in the story, nothing ever came of that attraction. One of those housemates (the one Ellie is most strongly based on) had a boyfriend in another town, like Ellie does in the story. The difference (which one day might make a story in its own right!) is that the real-life housemate and her boyfriend were quite seriously into BDSM. They attended fetish clubs and, at his house, hosted BDSM parties. She never told me what she did at these parties (although I did see a couple of photos), but she was quite open about what she saw other people get up to. Sadly, vague suggestions that I should attend a party never came to anything.

The reality in 1, Coverlid Place is different, in that the story was researched following a suggestion. I corresponded for a while with a real-life Jade, who told me that gloryholes and adult cinemas were a fetish of hers she’d like to see in a story, with her as the main character. I knew of the existence of places such as the Club X that features in the story, but they’re not somewhere I’ve ever frequented. Instead, when the opportunity arose, I went there deliberately, with the aim of researching the story. If you strip out all the sex, and compress Jade’s visits into one, you can very clearly ‘see’ me entering and exploring the Club X, starting downstairs with the peepshow booths, and heading upstairs to where the shop area was, and finally into the cinema. Jade’s fumbling exploration, and her reactions, are largely my own. Obviously, the sex is all fantasy! One final point about 1, Coverlid Place. The story is set in a real adult cinema, or at least it was – a few months after my research visit it closed down. It now, apparently, has been converted into a Chinese restaurant. I wonder if any of the diners know exactly what used to happen where they are currently sitting?

I’ll talk about A Bit of Rough in another post. The reality in that story is different again – it is scattered events and characters, rather than something I can point to easily. I’ll focus more on the process of writing it, and how it came to end up as it did. That’s for another time though!

All the best,

Phil