I am so fried. Today is Erotic World Book Day and I want to write about how much erotica kicks ass, but all I’m capable of doing is watching House of Cards and mainlining Diet Coke. I just moved to Brooklyn and I’m still sleeping on an air mattress. I have no furniture other than my roommate’s admittedly glorious leather armchair. A week from today I leave for Vancouver to do social media on site at TED2015, and this blog will probably go on hiatus for most of March after my recap of the Bachelor season finale in a few days. My mind is literally everywhere but erotica.
But Erotic World Book Day comes but once a year, so fuck it.
The first erotic story I ever wrote was actually Harry Potter fan fiction in which Hermione Granger went to the Room of Requirement for some stress relief and found a handsome Head Boy waiting for her whom she did not recognize. I was thirteen years old, and I did a pretty classic fade to black before I had to write any actual sex. I’d yet to have my first kiss—all I knew about sex came from reading other fan fics. I misspelled fervently, included way too many adverbs as I was wont to do, and used the phrase “prominent cock.” I had no idea what erotica was, I had never seen a penis in real life, and I was terrified someone would find this short story. I never published it online, convinced it would scandalize my loyal readers who devoured my Draco/Hermione romance, updated weekly. This story was about Tom Riddle, aka a young Lord Voldemort, and it was about needing to fuck.
It took me a while to dig the story up, buried as it was in my documents folder as if someone would comb through my endless chapters of other stories to hunt it down. Adorably, although the story never saw the light of the Internet, I included author notes anyway (perhaps I had intended to share it and lost my nerve, I can’t remember). Thirteen-year-old Ella wrote, “And if either of my parents or my more narrow-minded friends are reading this, don’t panic. Honestly, I had my reasons for writing this. They include boredom and the need for smut practice.”
In retrospect, my future as an erotica author seems kind of predictable. Little me had a point: I truly would need the practice. But I still remember that excitement, that thrill as I wrote something that seemed so dirty and transgressive, something that made me dirty and transgressive for creating it. I still feel that way years later when I put together a particularly filthy and surprising set of words. It’s a rush of adrenaline and arousal, shame and pride. It’s a high that I love so much.
So here’s to erotica: well written or terrible, soft-core or kinky as fuck. May we sex up our Kindles and buy beautiful paperbacks, exchange sexts with our partners and tweet all of the smutty puns we can think of. Long live the genre, and read it with pride.
In the interest of the lolz, here’s the beginning of little Ella’s Tom Riddle/Hermione Granger fan fic, aptly entitled “Rush.” I didn’t edit it whatsoever, so enjoy all those tense switches, extra commas, misspellings and horribly written kisses. I encourage my friends to record dramatic readings. Happy Erotic World Book Day, everyone.
He wasn’t sure why she was here. He had just been passing a blank section of the wall, thinking about nothing in particular, when a door suddenly formed out of no where that had certainly not been there before. He had opened it, feeling it was his obligation as Head Boy to look into mysterious doors that popped up, and also to satisfy his own untamable curiosity. Without an ounce of worry, he peered in, met only with black. So, sighing impatiently, he opened the door wider and stepped in, pulling out his wand and lighting it. The circle of light it produced didn’t land on anything until he pointed it directly in front of him, when it highlighted a face, shocked and fearful. He frowned as he looked over the teenage girl standing hardly a foot away from him, wondering why her uniform wool skirt seemed shorter than the girls in his year wore. She seemed hardly a day younger than him, and his eyebrows rose at the sight of a Head Girl badge glittering just above her left breast. Then he spotted the red and gold patch, displaying a lion: the Gryffindor patch.
This year’s Head Girl was in Ravenclaw.
However, as he considered whom on earth this stranger was, a look of understanding spread across her face. Before he could register what had happened, she was right in front of him, pressing completely against him. He bumped into the door behind him, stunned, as she bent her head up to kiss him, fierce and passionate. He didn’t know what to do or say, and before he could push her off of him, she was gripping his shoulders and pulling him down to her level. Hunching over, his eyes widened at her forwardness as he felt her tongue pressing against his lips. Astonished, he gasped, and she took that as a queue to slip her tongue into his mouth, caressing the sides.
This was any guy’s dream, he realized as her hands moved from his shoulders to his bicep, which she clutched tightly before gliding further down to his waist. Lestrange or Rosier would have leered and tackled this girl if they were in his shoes. Luckily for whoever she was, she had him instead, slightly more evil, but certainly more respectful. He hesitated for a moment, unsure of what he should do, but she frowned and growled against his lips, before pulling away and whispering harshly, “Is this the best the room can do? Kiss me!”
Still incredibly confused, he complied, knowing that for some reason a girl who apparently was not from his time had arrived, asking her to kiss her. And such things didn’t just happen in a school of magic. As corny as it sounded, at Hogwarts, things happened for a reason.
Ella Dawson 