All my literate life, I have wanted, no, needed to write. It started with obssesive journaling, and led to making most of my personal decisions based on whether or not there might be an intersting story involved.

I was once a tour guide telling ghost stories (I also conducted purely historical tours) for 9 years, I only worked for tour operators who let me write my own 'scripts', these were basically retellings based on many older versions. I took them and twisted some of them not changing the crucial actions but rather interpreting the motivations, making the tourists empathize with the characters before they met their inevitable sad ends that turned them into ghosts...people really liked my tours. I loved it when people would cry, shed a tear for the dead. I don't do that job anymore.

It seems I can write a fairly wicked short story. I have a million ideas as I have been deliberately collecting inspiration here in my beloved New Orleans and other locations for many years. I have little murder stories, Voodoo stories, bar stories, travel adventure stories, disaster stories and love stories. I am a whore for the details.

I have also been bartending for over a decade, on and off. I am very approachable, and a good listener; people tell me their stories. I have plenty of my own, but I am continually studying, observing people and making up a story, seeing them as characters even if we don't meet or speak.

This is not how the erotica started. I have always liked sex. A lot. A few years back I had a lover who was a professional writer and a bit of a sadist. He adored my writing and to entertain him I would send him tons of short stories. I found his attention very inspiring, especially when it came to writing out sexy scenes.

Alas, our fairytale, happily ever after, was not to be.

This may sound like a copout, but it seems the quality of my erotic writing is related to whether or not I have a very sexy, sadistic man in my life. Thank goodness this is not a factor with my non-erotic attempts at writing.

I have not had much schooling; but I have decent intuition. Somehow I stumbled on this site; I didn't know I would find such a cool writing class. I liked the assignments in level one, taking a bit of suggestion and running with it was fairly easy for me. All it took was a sentence and I could easily get going. Level two was harder, the 'write whatever you want' assignments, well, I wanted to write something juicy, not just get through the assignment.

Outlines are something I feel I need but have not been able to grasp and use, but I want to. I have plenty of short stories and scenes and I want to be able to make them into a longer work. It helps when a character or two are really strong for the story to take it's own form around them. The writing just flows. If it isn't (I got all blocked up for a while in level two) I make myself write anyway.

How do I put a story together? I take everything I know, I sit down. and it flows. If it is an assignment, I just make myself do it, over and over, badly, until something better flows.

I have three abandoned, completely different attempts at my last assignment in level two which I think were just crap. Finally I decided to write something that might not have been very erotic but had been knawing at me...it is like the stories are using me sometimes to achieve existence. It turned out that I got some nice compliments on the last one and I was certain no one would like it.

Wow, I am really glad to be in this level; seems like I got here when things are getting pretty exciting. When I saw how many pages this thread was I got worried. I am happy it was mostly Mad Lews helping Tessa write.

Sadly, I could not read any of cariad's posts as the dark color of the back ground made it impossible. I really want to read her posts.

Thanks,
Beswitchingly