Dale H West Menu

© 2004 Dale H. West. All rights reserved.

The Collector
(on Why I Write Erotica)

Her question glared at me from the screen.

“So why do you write erotica?”

In our e-mail exchange, she asked me if I was aroused by writing erotica and I hadn’t thought twice when replying after her words a simple “No.”

And today, she brought me a copy of Nin’s Delta of Venus. Now I have words as to why I write erotica. I write erotica for The Collector.

The Collector has changed. While once he paid Nin and her cohorts a dollar a page for his own personal arousal and fantasy, today he is the voracious seeker of erotica known as the Internet. Where there is at once a great hunger for consuming page upon digital page of contrived impossibilities, there is also a desire on the part of writers to appease that appetite with words of sex and human passion - a desire to feed the monster with sweets and junk food that whet his appetite yet leave him still craving more and more. Obesity at the fingers of Internet writers is the result and we find ourselves in demand because we have supported and fed this beast.

We love the beast, the monster which sends us praise so it might be fed more. And we know that we never really give of ourselves, save a bit of sweat - a small amount of excretion we were bound to unburden ourselves from had we not seen its thirst.

There are times we resent the beast. It often fails to pay us our price of admission known as praise. Maybe because it has become fat and lazy from the smorgasbord of relish and pomp. When he tires of one author, or exhausts another’s work, he can always find more or sate his desires with something other than the written word.

I prefer to write a poetic prose - paragraph and verse which speaks to the very soul of sexuality. But The Collector keeps telling me to “Cut the poetry.” He does not understand the vulnerability with which I write such words nor the fulfillment he would attain if he would only take a moment longer to chew and digest my words. He might Fletcherize rather than sucking sex through a straw and slurping at the dregs in the bottom too thin even for his insatiable vacuum. I wonder if The Collector has the teeth and the stomach for a real meal of erotica, not the pulp I write to entertain and dump the waste from my core.

It seems almost a crime that the words I write which are usually written off as crap, are much more directed at the core of sexual spirituality and represent an artistic erotica. What The Collector loves is merely our excrement, our half truths, if that, of a way sex is not and never will be. But we write it because he buys it as truth - as the form which arouses his minimalist senses to the peaks of their desire.

I’m sure there are many writers out there who love to prostitute their writing. I have a perversion to write in a manner I know will arouse the lowest common denominator of Internet erotica consumers. But I also love to make love to the reader who will take the time for the foreplay of character composition, the challenge of sticking with a plot beyond 2000 words and the sensuality of description.

I need The Collector as much as the next writer of erotica. I need the opportunity to write and receive praise frequently enough to maintain my real love - the veiled secrets, the alluded trysts of poetic prose which invites the reader to create their own sex through my story.

© 2004 Dale H. West. All rights reserved.