I’ve just published a new book on Amazon. It’s called Pathway to Depravity, and it’s a book that I always assumed I’d never publish. And yet, here I am announcing it. So, what’s going on? It isn’t one of the books I said I had lined up as future projects, so why this unexpected, unscheduled release? There’s a backstory that explains why, and I guess I’d better tell it.
It helps if I start by saying that Pathway to Depravity is based on something I wrote years ago, long before I published anything else I currently have available on Amazon (like, long before: the origins of this story are about 11 years old). And it also helps if I say that before I was an erotica writer, I discovered I could write erotic stories because like lots of people, I’d spent years sexting and exchanging sexy emails with various sexual partners (and prospective sexual partners) and realized I was pretty good at it. Usually, erotic emails are in a first and second person hybrid: I kiss you, you kiss me back, and so on, which is great when you’re in the heat of the moment but almost unreadable in anything over a few hundred words long. It was when I started taking email exchanges written that way and translating them into third person stories that I began taking the first steps toward being a ‘proper’ erotica writer. Pathway to Depravity wasn’t the very first thing I wrote this way, but it was the first story that was long enough to have a character arc and a well-developed narrative that extended over multiple scenes.
The reason I’ve never published it on Amazon is because the person I was exchanging emails with wanted me to write some pretty extreme scenarios, several of which would have seen the story blocked if I’d submitted the original version to Amazon. I’ve had a file with the story edited into third person knocking around for over a decade, and every so often I’ve looked at it and thought, how could I make this acceptable to Amazon? Most of the time, I’ve read through the story and decided it wasn’t possible. Just after Christmas though, I started breaking it down and thinking, well, that scene is good, what if I turned it into a short stand-alone story. And what about that scene? And so on.
In the end, I started at the beginning and took it one scene at a time, asking if I could keep it, or if I removed certain elements could it be kept, or if I changed the setting slightly, could it be kept, etc. Then I began to put it back together, editing it as I went, using the scenes I liked but sometimes switching where they fit into the story, sometimes changing the opening or closing paragraphs to change the context, sometime silently removing a few words that rendered a scene problematic while leaving everything around them (and of course, I was quietly updating the grammer and writing style too). My aim was to keep all the hotness (and boy, there’s a lot of hotness!), to tighten the narrative, and to make it just the right side of extreme, so that Amazon would accept it. I think I’ve kept around two thirds of the original and added a fair bit of new text to link it together better. There’s one scene I wanted to use but couldn’t fit into the new narrative – I guess I’ll think of a way of making it available somehow at a later date.
And now it’s out! My oldest full-length story is now my newest book! It’s still a fairly extreme story, and it’s possibly not for everyone, but I’m really pleased that it’s finally seeing the light of day: it was way too hot to keep buried on my hard drive forever. Trust me though, when it says depravity in the title, it means it!
If all this has piqued your curiosity, you can find it here, and as usual, it’s available in KindleUnlimited.
Philip Mitchell Stein 
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