Make Nice, a novel

It's 1960, and Frank Sinatra is at the height of his power and influence in Hollywood. Bobby Blaine, a peripheral member of the Rat Pack, chafes under the singer's egomania and bullying. He tries to land roles without Sinatra's help and encounters only failure, until he is asked to do one last favor: pick up Marilyn Monroe in Reno, where she is having a nervous breakdown trying to finish "The Misfits," and deliver her into the clutches of Sinatra's Mafia pals at the Cal-Neva Lodge.

How They Scored, a novel

How They Scored is a book about how straight men talk and think about sex. The novel was written for a small San Francisco press, but was cancelled, so it is now available:

• on lulu.com as a book for $16.98 or as a download for $4
• on Amazon.com as a book or Kindle edition.

Dear Prudence, a novel

I am now querying agents for my novel Dear Prudence, about an American girl who goes to Bangalore to open up a customer service call center.

Lesbian Camp Girls

This is pure pornography, but also an homage to the cheap and nasty paperback porn of the late 1970s. Now available from Lulu.com as a book ($11.99) or a PDF download ($1.50). It must be said: Adults only!

Why write erotica?

I've written in other places -- including the afterword to my book "Too Beautiful" -- about how I moved from writing self-conscious "erotica" that imitated Anais Nin to writing transgressive stories set in a post-modern world of desire and alienation, how I went through various stages on the way from using euphemisms to calling things by their own names, and how liberating the process was. But I've never really addressed the question of why a person would want to write so extensively about sex.

Perhaps the biggest reason I wrote so much about sex for the last fifteen or twenty years has to do with motivation. I've generally been a very undisciplined, and mostly untutored, writer. I didn't get a degree in creative writing, never attended a writing program at a university, and have been to only one writers' conference. Aside from a close friend who generously took it upon herself to encourage me -- journalist Sara Miles -- I've had little exposure to real writers and had nobody demanding I do anything. For a long time I wrote in my journal and made fitful starts at stories, and wondered if I was a real writer or just a dilettante.

The one thing I found I could write, and finish, was stories about sex. No doubt the arousing power of sex was one of the things that made it possible for me to actually work on and finish stories. And then writing many such stories over time permitted me to improve my craft as a writer. Working within a genre allows a writer to forget about some things in order to polish others. With sex writing, you can basically assume the characters you introduce in the beginning are going to wind up doing it; you play within that sandbox. Eventually you become expert enough to play with the conventions of the genre so that, for example, you don't have to have the characters wind up in bed together. You can have them start out in bed, then fall apart, as I did in "Trick" (published in "How I Adore You"). Or you can have them aspire to do something sexual but frustrate that desire, as in "Amateur" (published in "Too Beautiful"). It's still writing about sex.

So the genre allowed me to expand my skills as a writer. It's not lucrative, though -- not the way I do it. I suppose I could churn out stuff for Penthouse Forum and make money; somebody does it. But it's just not what I'm trying to do with writing.

I don't want to create an impression that sex writing is just a way for me to polish my skills, though. I do it because it's fun and arousing and surprising. In the last few years, though, I have been doing stuff that isn't about sex, including several short stories and a novel.