Hey, I just have to tell you about this tattoo. Yes, I said "tattoo." No, I'm not going to be writing this month about "LA Ink" and the erotic connotations of skin art. I simply have to crow about something very cool that happened to me this week: I found out that I had a fan so enamored of my book Bloodchained that she wanted to get a tattoo of the iconic "carylian" symbol featured on its cover. A tattoo!

This is not the sort of reward I expected to see when I set out to be an author. I think most would-be writers hope for more ordinary things like contracts (as if a contract is ever ordinary!). Well, this year I got my first advance check from a publisher, something I assure you I treasured so much I considering framing it rather than cashing it (but nah, I cashed it). First an advance check, now a tattoo. Man, I'm really amazed at the rewards that come to a person in the writing business.

So I just wanted this month to digress from my usual topics and tell you about the sorts of rewards that authors find really amazing.

Last year I experienced a true thrill when a young woman wrote to me that she had created some fan art based on my story "Abigail's Archer." Fan art! It never crossed my mind that I would receive fan art one day. And it was in fact so beautiful that I ended up asking that fan (CC Rogers) to illustrate comics with me. Well, we authors get very excited about the concept of readers imagining the worlds we have created. And when one actually captures her mental picture of a story on paper, that's just incredibly cool.

A couple of weeks ago I received an inquiry from a fan who really loved my story "The Scarlet Shackle." She wanted my permission to write some fan fiction about the characters in this tale. Fan fiction! Can you believe that? That means someone has such a vivid grasp on characters that came out of my head, she can actually write about them herself. Blows my mind, frankly.

My mind was even more seriously blown a couple of years ago when a young man studying for his Masters degree contacted me about a paper he was writing. He planned to compare an early work of romance, "The Birth-Mark" by Nathaniel Hawthorne, with my story "The Dark Prince," and trace the development of the romance genre from one work to the other. The young man's wife is a big fan of mine and recommended the story to him for analysis. I have an English degree myself, so the thought of someone writing a English paper about a work of mine was certainly a dream come true. A college paper! Isn't that crazy?

When each of these things happened to me, they took me completely by surprise. You have to consider how it is for writers: it seems like we create our imaginary worlds, write them down, and send them out into the world like a message in a bottle. We usually have no idea where they end up and what happens when they get there. But once in awhile you stumble upon a surprise like these, real evidence that the things we contrive in our fantasies truly have made their way into the minds of other humans. And vividly so, enough to inspire a blog post, or a work of writing, or a piece of art, or even a tattoo.

I'm sure I can't even guess what the next amazing reward will be that comes my way. But in the meantime, the news of this tattoo has reminded me that every day there is someone somewhere reading one of my stories, imagining my characters, and laughing or crying (or to get back to the usual subject of this column, getting horny, LOL).

Amazing.

Diana Laurence is the author of the Soulful Sex anthologies of erotic romance fiction, and the vampire romance Bloodchained (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.