Blogging in Shadows

Writing: cause and effects

I use my real name when I write smut. I never want to hide a big chunk of myself away (small chunks are fine, but writing is a huge part of my life) so I am happy to have my full name used at the top of my stories. But as time passes, and my pay-the-bills job has becomes more treacherous, I find myself starting to have mixed feelings about things. I imagine a prospective employer typing my name into a search engine, and looking at what I do, what I love to write about.

I’m not ashamed, but I do try to be practical about things. This is hard when I know that as a black bisexual woman with a disability, I’ll already have prejudices and phobias stacked up against me before I even walk in the door for a job interview. I’d love to walk through said door feeling reasonably relaxed; that I won’t be a box-ticking exercise in equal opportunities, and that I’ll be hired because I’m a good worker who can demonstrate her skills in fifteen minutes of talking to strangers. I have never felt this way, especially when most interview panels consists of three people who are all white, usually all male. I’ve been prepared to lose out on jobs and promotions for the entirety of my working life. My writing erotic fiction is just one more thing to add to the list.

I cannot stop writing smut, and I don’t want to either. Writing is one of the things that increase the quality of my life. Writing is the reason why I’ve made most of the friends I currently have. Writing smut is activism that doesn’t make me gag.

This isn’t the end of it. A disabled woman wrote a review of one of my stories a few years ago. She said that she’d never seen someone like herself in an erotic story. She said that she started crying, because at long last she could identify with someone else who was going through the same thing she did. Another woman wrote me an email saying that one of my novellas gave her hope that she could accept all the different parts of herself. Hope through smut. I would never have thought anyone would have felt this way. Anyone but me that is. And this is the thing that I love. Writing, reading, and engaging with my readers gives me hope too. Hope doesn’t pay the bills, but it feels real good. It’s something positive to hold on to.