I work full-time as a copywriter, which pulls in enough to pay the bills.

But my thirties are rapidly approaching, and I wanted to build a nest egg for myself. For security, and also so I can take some time off in the next year to focus 100% of my time on my first novel.

But technically, it won’t be my first published work. I’ve been writing erotic novelettes and publishing them as e-books on Amazon for the past few months. And I’ve been pulling in impressive figures doing so. I finally have a savings account that isn’t totally shameful.

A note on “shameful”: It’s worth mentioning that I know there isn’t any shame in doing this type of work. For me, though, I had a clear vision for myself in the best case scenario for my career. I would be writing high-caliber fantasy and science fiction, get lucky with a publisher, and have my name plastered across the cover of my first successful book. It may not have made a lot of money, but it would be finished. It would be public. I would be an official published author.

That didn’t happen. Or at least, it hasn’t happened yet. The predecessors to my yet-to-be-finished first novel are a series of erotic novelettes in digital form, written in rapid succession in the span of a month, published under a pen name in the Kindle store.

The bright side of this is that my work got some recognition, a handful of good reviews, and a steady stream of readers and buyers. Suddenly I wasn’t scraping by. The dark side of this is that I can’t exactly celebrate it — a name that doesn’t belong to me is attached to the novelettes and there stands a looming fear of potential publishers of my non-erotic work finding my smut and designating me as a smut-writer, someone that won’t fit their brand.

Even if that fear is baseless and unlikely to actually manifest, when it comes down to it, I don’t see myself as an erotic author. But it is technically what I am, and it’s made me a substantially better writer because of it.

Writing erotica seems easy from the get-go, but it kind of isn’t. Have you ever sat down and read bad erotica? It’s so bad. Even if you have one goal in mind when you sit down with some smut, you’ll be lucky to even get a little bit aroused reading some of the garbage that’s online. It’s poorly written, a grammatical mess, a cringe-worthy and laugh-worthy pile of “throbbing members” that even the horniest can’t get through.

When I decided to get into this genre, I refused to allow myself to write bad smut. And when I sat down to write a fantasy erotic novelette about a young AFAB person who fucks and eventually falls in love with a succubus that they accidentally summoned (good luck finding the one I wrote, there’s a lot of content in this specific genre online) I felt like there was a certain responsibility I had to the subject matter as well. Even if nobody read it. I wasn’t going to write gay erotica that settled on harmful or stereotypical tropes, so I honed in on my skills. I wasn’t going to be sloppy with this, politically or grammatically. So I practiced, and wrote, and read other works.

The fierce dedication to not be a shitty queer erotica writer pushed me when I felt stagnant in my abilities as a writer in literally every other area. Writing erotica made me a better writer simply because I refused to put out more offensive and poorly-written work into a genre that was already suffering. So I educated myself on tropes, read good work, and applied what I learned to my own writing. And I made money doing it, which is pretty neat.