Fortunately for you, dear reader, my family members never read this particular column of mine, so I can pretty much be candid with you and bar no holds. Because face it, it would be a little weird to read about your mom or daughter as a thirteen-year-old girl writing erotic fiction.

Well, I suppose I was bound to start at that age. I was a fiction writer from the time I could write in cursive, and at thirteen I passed puberty. Hand paper and pen to me, throw hormones in the mix, and what are you going to get? Erotic fiction.

So, I've written before about my first crush of a truly sexual nature, a certain Chris that I knew in junior high. (For the full tale see "Memoirs from Puberty: Chris.") As I wrote in that blog post, "Chris was the first boy to make me feel like sex was not necessarily a bad thing. His was the face and body and voice that maleness wore as it changed my mind about the sex act. What had previously seemed, as it does to all children, as repulsive and bizarre and inexplicable, began to have strange appeal. I felt that with this one person, it was possible such intimacies could be not horrifying, but rather pleasant and exciting. I could do it with Chris, only with him; he alone could make me want to explore such things."

My first piece of erotica, if you could call it that, was about him. I wrote it in my diary. I must have read it five hundred times. It wasn't much of a narrative, but rather more of a prose poem. Just snippets of words that I found mysteriously exciting and vaguely sexual. To demonstrate to you how vaguely, one of these words was "conjugation." Did you even know that word had anything to do with sex? Most people will simply be reminded of Spanish class. But as the online Free Dictionary states, another definition is "the act of pairing a male and female for reproductive purposes." I picked it up in biology. Hot stuff huh? But, the point is, this was the first time I experienced a word fetish, and for lovers of erotica, it's all about word fetishes.

The second piece of erotic fiction I wrote in tiny print in my diary was definitely a step forward (or downward, depending upon your moral point of view). I was probably barely fourteen, and one night when my parents were out, this very good girl tried out the vodka and stayed up late watching "Rosemary's Baby," the 1968 Roman Polanski movie in which Mia Farrow is forced to mate with Satan. (I hope you appreciate that this is a story I've never told anyone before!) I was inspired to compose a rather disjointed and pretty explicit essay, which in retrospect I think was mostly induced by a combination of puberty, alcohol, and the genuine hotness of Mia Farrow.

And so it went. I never shared these works with a living soul, nor did I tell anyone about them. I couldn't begin to tell you if they would have moved anyone other than myself (surely that conjugation one wouldn't have), but then, that didn't matter, did it? They were for me, and I read them over and over and never tired of them.

I kept this hobby up, off and on, throughout my twenties and early thirties. I was married then (to a gay Lutheran pastor, another long story), and I never shared my stories with my husband, but rather hid them in a slot in the side of my sewing basket. I know I wrote one about Rick Springfield (can you blame me?) and one about baseball star Paul Molitor. Some of these pieces were, I'm sure, quite nice…but alas, they are gone now, and even I am not sure where or when.

After I remarried, I came out of the closet as it were. I liked to write hot stuff about people I was crushing on--sometimes real life acquaintances, sometimes celebrities--and I didn't hide it from David. He didn't read the stuff either--no point really--but I was a big believer in full disclosure having already had a marriage where from one side the disclosure didn't even quality as partial. Well, this was the first step I guess. Once the cat-in-heat was out of the bag, as it were, I was almost ready for a whole new chapter in my life as an erotic writer.

I made a friend online, Judy, who was also an excellent writer and who also wrote pornographic stuff for herself. While she was crushing on one particular hockey player, I was crushing on another. So yes, Judy and I shared each other's hockey porn. It was the first time I had ever let another person read my stuff. She really liked it (for the record, I really liked hers too). And I must admit, there was a whole nother thrill to the process when you added the element of turning on another person as well as yourself.

Now, sidebar: All these years, by this time about thirty years worth, I had been writing "real" stuff too. I sold some articles and short fiction, wrote four novels and nearly sold one, published two books myself, etc. Never in my wildest dreams had I imagined my secret hobby of writing erotica would ever intersect with my very real determination to be a multi-published book writer. But all that changed when I finally dared to put an NC-17 rated story out for public consumption, and total strangers began to email me how much they loved it. It was a piece of Star Wars fan fiction starring Obi-Wan Kenobi (aka the incredibly hot Ewan McGregor) called "As Commonplace as Rain," and I posted it on my website. Less than a year later, I ended up reworking it without the lawsuit-worthy Star Wars elements and it was the first erotic romance story I ever sold. I became Diana Laurence, and within two years I was a multi-published book writer.

Well, that was probably a lot more information than you wanted to know, but I think it's kinda fascinating how a person can go from a barely nubile girl huddling under her bedspread writing about sex for her own entertainment, to a woman who has managed to speak about it to a crowd of hundreds at a convention. Life can be downright weird.

Anyway, that's my story. Bet you never think of the word "conjugation" quite the same way again, hey?

Diana Laurence is the author of the Soulful Sex anthologies of erotic romance fiction, and released her last book Bloodchained in September 2007 (www.bloodchained.com). Diana's works are published by Living Beyond Reality Press (www.livingbeyondreality.com.)
Visit her at www.dianalaurence.com or enjoy her blog at www.eroticawithsoul.blogspot.com.