Cringe

I was asked last night by a reader how long I've been a writer. I think a better question is how long I've been an author.

I started writing ridiculous kid stories back in 2nd Grade – you know, the kind where the protagonist wakes up and it was all a dream? I wrote short stories for school all the way through but I think I wasn't truly a writer until I started publishing work online in the late 90s – mostly Fantasy and Sci-Fi. One story was a cliche piece of shit that was basically a rip-off of the Aliens movie, beat for beat, as part of the hype leading up to the release of StarCraft.

My grandma thought it was great though.

When I was 16, I wrote my first full-length novel. It was 110 pages of extremely contrived cringe. I was really proud of it back in the day, though. I used the school printer to crank out 3 copies and passed one of them around my group of friends. They were mostly kind with their comments. Probably didn't want to hurt my feelings. It was this half-formed, adolescent hodgepodge of Dragonlance, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and Lone Wolf. Band of archetypal characters, including a bad-ass princess, roguish bounty hunter, and "chosen one" protagonist who was also a dragon. The villain was this mustache-twirling Sauron wannabe, complete with a cartoonish kobold minion. The story was a mess. Even the title was lame.

My grandma thought it was amazing.

Yeah, I might give that work a lot of hate, but I think that's when I first became an actual author, at least in spirit. I chased that dream for a long time, yearning to have my work published in print. I did a lot of text-based RPGs in the intervening years before I started posting works from a new genre I'd gotten into – horror. I had a large following for my work, and that's when my writing matured and developed a great deal. I can re-read my writing from this period and be critical but still enjoy it. Around that time, I decided on a whim to write and publish Breeding the Help on Literotica, with no expectations whatsoever.

Part of my "real" work requires professional copywriting – which has been a career-long thing – so I'm constantly writing and publishing in a different field. I'm passionate about that work, but I'm equally passionate about my creative writing. I'm grateful to be continuing that in a meaningful way here with you.

Grandma would probably be mortified about my erotica, but who knows? She might think it was awesome too.

I'm still working on Chapter 4 of Breeding the Help every night. I'm hoping to get into a groove this weekend. There's a lot that's going to happen in the finale of this story.

-D