Adam Sawyer always felt weird about his interest in romantic and sexy literature as a teen. Now it’s his job and he loves it.
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I discovered this American dude James Victore — a designer and artist — who’s got this great saying:
‘the things that make you weird as a kid will make you great tomorrow’.
When we’re kids some of us have quirky talents and eccentric passions that parents and teachers are quick to knock out of us. But when we grow up, it’s these little quirks that make us ‘us’.
And James’ quote really hit home with me.
When I was a teenager I was really interested in sex (okay, nothing odd there I hear you say. Every teenage boy is interested in sex).
But when a kid in class lent me my first porn magazine, I realised something. I wasn’t interested in looking at pictures of naked women. I was interested in something else: the WORDS on the page.
I loved reading those stories of sexual encounters, I can even remember some of those lines of text, those turns of phrase, all these years later.
Sex-by-words became such a currency for me that as a young teenager I even started capturing my fantasies on paper. With my Bic biro I’d write short stories in old school exercise books. A story about a sexual encounter with a young mother who lived across the street, another about a young woman who worked Saturdays in the greengrocers. I loved to write these stories, but also I loved to read them back to myself. And what’s more, they aroused me more than the stories in the magazines because these felt like REAL-LIFE.
But as a fourteen year old kid, I guess that was a bit weird right? Sitting in my bedroom writing sexy stories?
And now, as an adult many years later, I rekindled that ‘weird’ past-time. In my early 20s I started writing stories of sexual encounters for girlfriends, emailing them stories written in the third person of what we’d got up to in bed at the weekend. My girlfriends said they liked reading these stories, they said I was good at capturing the emotion of those intimate moments.
A few years ago, one ex said I should write stories for other people to read. So when the British women’s magazine ‘Scarlet’ launched, I became a contributor to its ‘Cliterature’ pages, writing erotic short stories, often based on my own sexual experiences (because the saying goes, ‘write what you know’).
>My stories are pretty straight, they don’t include any strange fetishes or tales of S&M. They’re just real-life tales of sex between two consenting adults.
This week I’ve just published a book of short stories called ‘Nine: real-life erotic stories for women’.
I’ve said it’s for women, but it’s for anyone really — all the women I’ve shown it to say it’s not the kind of thing that a bloke would like. One fellow erotic writer says it’s unusual for a man to write erotica for women like that; she joked that I was a bit weird.
So yes, maybe I was a weird teenager. But I like to agree with Mr. Victore on this — the things that make you weird as a kid will make you great tomorrow. So from my teenage bedroom scribbling stories to twenty years later, with my first book on Kindle, it’s the same Adam.
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Originally appeared at Medium.com
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Photo: FLickr/David Goehring