As cliche as it may sound, I've been writing as long as I can remember. Pretty much since I learned to. As a kid, it was a way of bringing the people in my mind, my imaginary friends, in to reality. As a teenager, it was an escape. I could create my own worlds, worlds that I usually preferred over the real one. Over the years, my stories became more and more romance based. Historical fiction became a favorite of mine to read, and that naturally bled over in to my own work. In time, romance turned to erotica, though looking back it was all fairly tame. Then I discovered BDSM, and a whole new world of literary possibilities opened up to me. Writing became a way to explore new ideas, new fetishes, new fantasies, whether they were based on my personal feelings or research and input from others.
When I started in on my first piece of BDSM erotica, I had no intention of publishing. It was an outlet for frustrations, an escape from a painful break-up and a better remedy for bordem than anything on TV during my waking hours. I worked largely third shift at the time and late night TV when you don't have cable is usually pretty awful. Occasionally I would let someone I trusted read everything I had up to that point, just to see what they thought and to get ideas. Eventually, I began putting it up a chapter or two at a time, amusingly enough on a blog. Needless to say, that was all I ever put on it. Then, one day, someone asked if I had ever considered publishing the piece when it was finished. I laughed it off. I'd never even thought about giving it a concrete ending, figured I would just keep writing it until I lost interest or it came to a natural conclusion. But the seed of the idea had been planted, and as I kept working on it the idea of being published grew. So I caved in and starting doing some research.
As is probably the case for many burgeoning authors, I quickly became discouraged. The traditional publishers had requirements I couldn't meet. I turned to ebook publishers, but most required a romantic sub-plot, something my piece didn't have at all at the time. With it already fairly long, I had no desire to go back and attempt to work one in. Aside from being time consuming, it would have seemed forced. I gave up and went back to simply writing for myself, and the friends who had come to look forward to getting the next chapter. It was several years before I began contemplating publication again.
By then I had discovered FetLife, joined a handful of writing groups and even shared pieces of my story. Again, someone mentioned having it published. That's when I realized that I finally found the right forum to get input from other writers on which publishers were good to work with, and would take something like what I had written. After years of thinking about it, I found a publisher that would take my work and shortly my first book was released. With that, what had started as something just for me became the start of a published series.
Now a new series is beginning, practically writing itself. I can hardly wait to see where it takes me!
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