There is a pleasing irony to my career as an erotic writer. When you think “adult literature expert” I doubt you picture 23-year-old me working from my parents’ shed in my pajamas, using Pornhub as source material and with only a handful of orgasms notched on my bedpost. But so it was during the summer of lockdown, when writing erotica became my main stream of income and was putting me through a creative writing master’s at Cambridge (which I was doing to write serious poetry, not smut).
It was an acquaintance from high school who had recommended the gig after she had completed a piece for an erotic library. But, she told me, she only had one story in her (a threesome with a CEO and his analyst — she was an accountant), and thought I may have more. This in itself was mystifying — where we grew up, the luxury of a shower head between your legs and intimate knowledge of the clitoris was essentially a trade secret. But I applied to the site anyway and was commissioned immediately — $211 for “1,000 words focused on her pleasure, a hidden kink and an intense (and orgasm-filled) experience”.
