Sounds like I love my work, huh? Actually, I don't think about it. It's a lot less unsavory than some occupations I can think of--like being a school teacher. What I mean is that even though I write it, I don't consider myself a pornographer. It's just something I do to get by. My identity is not wrapped up with it, and I hope I'll stop before that happens.

Originally, I got into this when I was kneeling in my booth at Show World, blowing some guy, and suddenly, I thought, "Goddammit. I never want to see another hairy thigh as long as I live." I realized that with a mind like mine, I could be on the other side of this business. So I sat down to write the next Candy. You know, that book by Terry Southern.

Actually, I'm just kidding. The truth is so mundane. I was broke, and a friend knew some unsavory characters that ran a "porn factory." This place was amazing. They had about a dozen writers. It really was like a factory and most of the people couldn't keep up the pace. It's hard to keep a story going for a hundred and eighty-eight pages. And it's even harder when you have to meet a deadline week after week. Most people have one or two stories in them and then they don't know what else to say. Little do they realize that they don't really have to say anything. At that place, you had to get your book out every single week. No rewriting at all. For this, you got four hundred dollars, under the table.

So I'd sit down at my station and type straight through until it was time to go home. I did gay and straight. The first time I did a gay book I said, "I'm straight, how'm I gonna do this?" I was advised to "Change the cunts to assholes" (laughs). And it worked. I got real fast at typing, too, typing almost as fast as I could think. I'd be sitting there, moving characters around from one romp to the next, and I'd hear someone shout out, "They're in a jeep in the desert, what should I do now, I'm stuck?" and someone else would say, "Have them make it with a prairie dog." This went on all day. But you never stopped typing.

The secret to these books is that instead of worrying about plot, or about saying anything, you learn to type and re-type certain sets of words--with little variations here and there. I mean, you really do learn to say nothing at all. You just use the first thing that comes to mind, unless it's--well, like fucking a prairie dog. You wouldn't actually use that because inter-species sex is frowned upon.

Anyway, the guys who ran that place are dead now. But I met some really interesting people. I met Craig Esposito there who did book covers. He's a legend, known for his illustrations of gay erotica. Currently he does a two page comic strip called "Jocko" for Blueboy magazine and another called "Slider," about a time-traveler, for some other title. His stuff stands out because it is not reliably dim-witted like most of the genre. He's been in the biz for decades and has seen it all, yet is curiously untainted. Craig is extremely well-educated and gentle, a really and truly sweet guy. He loves his cats better than most people he knows, yet he spends his waking hours drawing people fucking and sucking. I also met the great Smoky Mimms. You've heard of him? He was a prolific stroke book writer who with his words fertilized enough women to populate a small country. He was retired by the time I worked there, but they were still quoting him. Then of course, there was also the guy who worked next to me, who would periodically bend over in his cubicle and stick mescaline up his butt. Helped his productivity.

After that place shut down, I briefly wrote letters for a Canadian publisher. You know, those digests full of letters that people supposedly write in? I had to give it up because of all the restrictions which slowed me down and were a pain in the ass. "No cum on the face" was one. A cum scene on the face can take up half a page. That's another half a page with no thought, just description. Also, the pay was terrible, really like nothing. It was like five dollars a letter or something.

The last book outfit I worked for did all kinds of titles. Gay, straight, S&M, "bitch books" (dominant women), "little darlings" (sweet young things), pretty much everything. These books are sold at specialty shops, bus stations, train stations. Transient locales.

These days, I work at home. All porno book writing is all done on computer at home now. You send in the discs to some unfortunate who typesets it at his home and forwards it to the main guys. I get all my jobs from word of mouth. The stuff I'm doing is usually ongoing--you know, a series of books for one outfit--and one job can last off and on sometimes for years. When you're writing a series, say twenty hooker-housewife titles, the individual subjects for each title are picked nearly at random. I mean I get the specs for the series and it literally is like: fifteen titles with healthy, happy, horny hooker-housewives. And that's it. So the rest is up to me and a lot of what I do depends on my mood. Say I'm writing in the winter, well I probably want to dwell on warm weather--so they're at a beach house then. That leaves many options open: sex on boats, sex on beaches, changing rooms, ice cream stands, whatever. If I get bored at the beach I'll have them fly or drive to the city, it just depends on my mood.

The market is incredibly stagnant. Aside from fetish material which has gotten more intense, almost hostile, things have not changed since I began working in this industry two decades ago. At least not that I've noticed. Videos have come to supersede books, but not as much as people thought. For some odd reason, people still like to visualize their stuff in their own minds and in their own time.

The subjects are still the same: the men are handsome and well hung and the women are busty and long-limbed. They are either blond or brunette or the occasional redhead. No one cares about men's hair color. They don't have personalities. They may have hobbies or occupations that relate to the action. For instance, a lot of the men are photographers because then they can pose their subjects as like foreplay--maybe a little light bondage--and then have a ten page sex scene. Or they work in offices, because there's like a natural power factor there. A shmuck that works in an office can abuse his secretaries (in a wholesome way of course) and then have orgies with all the other workers. It's a formula structure.

There are some rules, like for example, in porno land, death NEVER happens. Everyone is good looking and healthy. (That was disappointing for me to learn, because I so love tales of illness and devastation.) I manage to slip in gruesome little things that no one notices. But, you know, I guess it wouldn't be fun to pull your wanker to images of pustulence. Another rule is no kiddie porn. All the publishers are terrified of that. They still manage to get arrested periodically--only the boss who is on good terms with the cops avoids going downtown. But that's just part of doing business. It never affects production.

The pay sucks. It always has. It's a myth that porno pays well. Lately I get around $250 a book, which is something like 50,000 words. But you really spit them out, so whatever money you make is on volume. Also, for the last year I've been doing magazine work--"erotic" fiction, video reviews--which I only need to watch a minute of--and even a sex advice column. The last makes me snicker as I'm the last one to give advice on the matter. People who write porno can be as ignorant and repressed as the next idiot (laughs).

In everything I do, payment is slow. Some magazine publishers have been known to only pay those writers and illustrators that they know personally. Others get screwed. This is one way to keep production costs down. I'm one of the ones that does get paid, though. Sometimes it takes a while, but I get paid. I've been doing it so long, my bosses know me and they know I'm reliable.

I tell myself this job doesn't affect my personal life. And to a large extent it doesn't. I stay safely in the formulas and usually listen to my walkman and most days I hardly notice what I'm doing. I've been married for about fifteen years and I'm very happy with that. But I know that doesn't really explain why I do it. I mean, I know it's a gross, sleazy business. I guess I just don't like to leave home that often. And I make decent money and it doesn't really bother me. It hasn't changed my attitudes to sex any more than is to be expected. At first maybe I got off on my own fantasies a bit, but pretty quickly it got to be just churning out the "he throbbed, she quivered" stuff. And it's just stayed that way, year after year. So how does it affect me? I don't know. Does a sanitation engineer balk at taking out his own garbage?

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