Auto-Erotic Fantasy vs. Public Erotica

The difference is one of degree. When I was writing the Laura story just for myself (roughly the first 170 chapters or so) I had several motives: Passing the time at work. Possessing sexually certain women I saw there (e.g., Yvette) whom I couldn’t have but wanted. Doing the same to women I saw in various magazine spreads (e.g., female body builders like Brandi). Exploring impulses toward bondage and mild sexual sadism that I knew I had but was reluctant to broach as a possibility with current sexual partners for fear of what they might think of me. Indulging my deepest yearnings for romantic love coupled with steamy sexual interaction.

One thing is true of fiction. It is better than life. (And worse, I suppose.) All the boring dreck of everyday existence can be winnowed out and the rest concentrated and focused intensely in fiction, so that the way we react to it is acutely more real in some ways than ‘real’ life itself. This is why people who can still read still read it.

I frequently get asked if the people in Laura’s Story are based on real people, but that is almost beside the point. Yes, many of them are based on real people, but they have been so reified and re-imagined into their fictional life that whatever resemblance they have to their physical existence, apart from certain traits that might remind one of it, is purely notional. They are ‘better’ than they are in real life even, because all the annoying or boring parts of their natures have been subtracted, leaving only the enchanting part.

And so when I began to ‘publish’ the story in the real world and attract readers to it, I had to change my approach somewhat, and also go back and edit some of the earlier chapters to make them seem less like masturbatory fantasies, which they were, and more like fully realized scenes from real life, where certain things are possible and certain things aren’t. For a woman to have six orgasms in one session is not impossible, or even unusual, but sixteen is stretching it. For a man to have a gargantuan erect cock is an honorable tradition in a certain brand of erotica, but in real life pretty rare (I would surmise).

It might almost have been better for me if I had started over at that point, since some of the earlier stuff, especially the BDSM between Laura and Karen, or the frequent double penetrations, surely drives some readers away prematurely. (Of course, others love it, and beg for more, but we’re not talking about them.) As it happens, I simply modulated the tone a bit as I moved forward, leaving behind the rough stuff mostly, concentrating on the love angle, and getting so entangled there that I also had to extricate Laura from those complications too, as much as possible.

The simple fact is that Laura herself began to turn into a real person, which changed the auto-erotic content of the piece subtly. After all, for auto-eroticism to work, the main character has to be like you, or at least like you see yourself. That’s how you inhabit your fantasies. But when she begins to grow into a figure that may have some resemblance to you but really has a life of her own, you have to get your thrills in other ways, the ways potential readers are going to get them, through identifying with her, but not through being her.

When I started getting emails telling me how Laura should change, or how she should handle particular relationships, or what sexual practices she should avoid or adopt, or how her colon was going to be ruined for life if she kept taking it up the rear, I began to see that I had succeeded more than I had thought in creating this character. People feel for her. They give her advice. They commiserate with her. They scold her. I can tell you it’s a lot of fun to receive those emails, but it is the farthest thing from what I ever expected. And it certainly takes us miles away from a private little sex fantasy. For so many people, Laura is real, and not a simple erotic fantasy.

How It All Started [continued]

In 1992 I was working for a large corporation (huge is more like it) with thousands of employees. I worked at the headquarters, a huge building with robot mail trains running through the immensely long corridors and vast parking lots on the periphery. Naturally, since so many people were concentrated in the same place, there was an abundance of gorgeous women working there, a candy shop for one obsessed by the beauty of women, especially black women, like me. I used to park my car each morning at 7 a.m. right across from an enchanting black woman who arrived at the same time each day and parked hers opposite mine. (A nice sociological study could probably be cooked up by examining why people choose particular parts of a large parking lot to park their cars in. One good example: Me. "I park here because Yvette parks here, and I love to look at her.") She had long, flowing black hair, and dark skin and turned out to be an accountant with two children, a husband who also worked for the company though in another location, and a total lack of interest in anything more than a trivial 'office' friendship with me.

Her name was Yvette. If you have read much of Laura's Story you can see where this was leading. I couldn't have this real Yvette, of course; not in the way I wanted to have her. But lots of corporate cog-in-the-wheel jobs leave you with time on your hands and are also occasionally so boring or repetitive that you need some other stimulation to keep you from going into the bathroom and opening your veins. And so, I began noodling away in my cubicle on the Laura story. I began with Karen because I had seen pictures of her in a 'man's magazine' and couldn't get the image of her incredible naked breasts out of my mind. Actually, I had no thought of Yvette at this time, and now I realize that I was skirting the issue in my subconscious by focusing on other sexual targets, fantasy girls from magazines (both Karen and Rina).

How It All Started

I began writing Laura's Story in 1992. It's hard to believe it was that long ago, but when you look at the 300+ chapters you realize it took some time to accumulate the total. Someone once told me it's the longest-running and largest serial fiction on the web, which may be true. I wouldn't know. I don't read much long stuff on the web, and no erotica at all. My theory is that I began writing it simply because I couldn't find anything else, written by anybody else, that would flesh out my own fantasies the way I wanted them fleshed out; which, of course, may be true of all fiction and all fiction writers. In any case, nobody was writing any interracial lesbian erotica that I could find or enjoy, so I began writing my own.



I wrote somewhere close to half of it purely for my own enjoyment. Maybe even more than half, since when I look back now it seems that somewhere in the one-hundred-seventies is where I began to put it up on the web, and realized that there was an audience for it in addition to myself. (There are some consequences of this, which I will get into later, some day, in this blog.) This happened by accident. Or at least not deliberately. I did post one chapter (can't remember which one at this late date) on the alt.sex.stories.moderated (ASSM) newsgroup, just as a lark. One reader of the chapter emailed me and in our subsequent conversation I let him know that there was a lot more where that first one came from.


He encouraged me to put the rest of it up online. The rest is history. Now it has a small but devoted worldwide readership, and new readers joining from time to time. There appears to be an average of about 30-35 readers returning per day, which I take to be a core group of interested readers, and of course many other 'first-timers,' among whom some obviously become return readers too. This amounts to several hundreds, perhaps even several thousands, over the fifteen or so years of its existence. I take some comfort from the fact that though I have several professional writers as friends, people who have published books and magazine pieces widely, I doubt if many of them have had as many readers as the Laura story has had and continues to have. It may be 'just erotica' but lots of readers just love it, to my great pleasure and astonishment.