Silence.
Scuffling.
"But I thought you wrote, you know, other stuff." I could hear the mad blushing over Skype.
I 'spect they had me pegged as writing...what? The twenty-first-century version of Little House on the Prairie? And more importantly, why? Because I'm a mid-thirties soccer mom who couldn't balance on fetish footwear to save her life and doesn't wear her pasties out in public? Because I bake a mean pumpkin cake and coo over kittens and don't make a habit of hanging up nudie artwork in my living room?
My guess is that most erotica writers don't wear their club leathers down to the Wal-Mart. Probably most don't even own spreader bars, just some inspirational pics on their hard drives to get them by. I further guess that my very shocked friends have passed by an erotica writer or two in the aforementioned Wal-Mart and never once knew it.
See, we look like normal people. Hell, we are normal people. Just, as I'm finding out, normal people with really fun jobs.
--
Cross-posted at vivienjackson.com
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3 comments:
Your post made me laugh. I get this all the time, too. In fact at a recent writer get-together, I mentioned that I had an erotica story just released under my pen name. I told them that my publisher had given it the steamiest rating of "Sextreme." One of the women says, "You'd never know it to look at her or talk to her that she writes such things, would you? I mean, she looks so...normal." Ha ha. I take that as a compliment.
The silence is deafening!
For the longest time, I wouldn't tell family and friends my pen name. But I do now. And I once I do, I almost never hear another word from anybody! I say almost. I've gotten compliments from some surprising individiduals -- friends in their 80s! Yes, 80s. Maybe I should market my books at senior citizen centers. LOL.
Good piece, Vivien. It's something I think we all deal with.
I write two very different genres, one of them being my own work, under this penname, in the espionage and counter-terrorism thriller genre. The other, under my other penname of James Morgan, is a collaborative romance erotica, and it gets very graphic. I've gotten some of the same... long silences!
Good post, Vivien!
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