About Wade Beauchamp
Wade Beauchamp is from Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
Over 30 of his short stories have been published in various journals and anthologies by such editors as Ryan North, Violet Blue, Lori Perkins, and Cecilia Tan. His work has twice been selected for inclusion in Susie Bright’s Best American Erotica series (2005 and 2007). It Rhymes With Luck, a collection of his most popular shorts, was published in 2010. His debut novel, Scream If You Wanna Go Faster, was a 2013 Kindle Book Review Best Indie Book Awards Finalist.
A very brief memoir
(or an extremely lengthy author bio)
I was 14 years old when I discovered sex in its written form. By then I had already seen it on television, in the four-color pages of comic books, and heard it on cassette tape. Before I found it in prose, I had been continuously exposed to sex in an ever-escalating cavalcade across various other media throughout my formative years, disproportionately shaping not only my future proclivities but also my creative output:
- 1976: Julie Newmar and Yvonne Craig in sparkling skintight Lurex as Catwoman and Batgirl, respectively, BIFF!ing and ZOW!ing their way through afternoon reruns of 1966’s Batman TV series.
- 1977: Lynda Carter in Wonder Woman’s star-spangled trunks and nude pantyhose.
- 1979: Daisy Duke in Daisy Dukes and nude pantyhose.
- 1980: Solid Gold (“Filling up my life with music!”) and the Solid Gold Dancers—Darcel Wynne, in particular—interpretively writhing in metallic Lycra leotards to 30-second snippets of that week’s Top 10.
- 1981: Clash of the Titans and Judi Bowker’s Andromeda, emerging from the bath into the waiting robes offered by her handmaidens, the first time I had ever seen a grown woman naked. The first and last time my grandmother would take me to the movies.
- 1982: Discovering my mother’s hardcover copy of Marilyn by Norman Mailer, a 1973 biography of Ms. Monroe featuring photography by Milton H. Greene, most memorably a set of artsy black & whites of Marilyn posing in nothing more than a pair of fishnet tights, launching my ongoing fascination with fishnets, backseams, and Marilyn herself. It was also the first time I ever masturbated to anything other than my imagination.
- 1982: Heavy Metal magazine, unwittingly displayed with the all-ages comic books at the Hop-In and featuring Druuna, artist Paolo Serpieri’s most famous creation, fucking her way through a post-apocalyptic hellscape right next to Spidey and G.I. Joe on the spinner rack.
- 1983: the belated arrival in my home of MTV along with Duran Duran’s “Girls on Film” and its Godley & Creme-directed video, heavily censored in its original run and with the momentous distinction of being the first time I ever saw a thong, specifically a black one-piece thong bathing suit, sparking a lifelong obsession that has yet to subside (further fueled in 1986 by Linda Kozlowski in Crocodile Dundee, in 1991 by Gabrielle Anwar in the video for Tom Petty’s “Into The Great Wide Open”, all in black one-piece thong bathing suits.)
- 1983: Return of the Jedi and, of course, Carrie Fisher’s Princess Leia in the slave girl outfit.
- 1983: the video game Dragon’s Lair and the Don Bluth-designed Princess Daphne, with her black one-piece thong bathing suit and that cool sheer veil (the only reason to pump quarters into that game).
- 1984: the big one, discovering, like a prepubescent Ponce de León, my dad’s run of Playboys, hidden in my grandmother’s attic and spanning roughly 1977 through 1982 and featuring on its covers everyone from Raquel Welch to Dolly Parton to Bernadette Peters. And in its pages, a plethora of tan lines, untrimmed pubic hair, as well as the monthly Playboy Advisor, with its reader Q’s and editorial A’s about everything from lubes to hi-fis, forming an image in my mind of what adult life was going to look like and advancing my sex education far more than even Arny Freytag’s photography did. It is difficult to exaggerate the impact Playboy had on me at that age. (Difficult, but not impossible. I am a writer, after all…)
- 1985: the subsequent discovery of my grandfather’s stash of much sleazier and more anatomical “girly magazines”, as he called them. Unlike with my dad’s Playboys, my grandfather didn’t really care if my little brother and I looked at them or not. They were hidden only from my Clash of the Titans grandmother, hence their location in the deepest recess of his workshop, a place that attracts kids and repels spouses with equal and opposite magnetic force. He had everything from Oui to Cheri to Hustler. Larry Flint’s rag didn’t have the seismic impact on my life that Hugh Hefner’s did, but it did have Beaver Hunt. It also featured coverage of the annual AVN Awards, the Oscars of porn. Before I had ever seen my first frame of a skin flick, I knew who Ginger Lynn, Vanessa del Rio, and Hyapatia Lee were, which would serve me well in…
- 1986, when my mom installed a satellite dish in the yard, and I promptly gained access to American Exxxtasy, an adult film channel where I saw all the AVN winners in staticky action.
This is not to say I had unfettered access to pornography 24 hours a day at age 14. I did not. Porn was still a rare and wonderous thing. It was the mid-1980s after all. No internet. And I was too young to drive, much less purchase adult magazines or videotapes. Still, by the time I was in 9th Grade, I was well-versed in all things pornographic. Or at least I thought I was.
That changed one summer afternoon when I was exploring the attic at my grandmother’s house, the same fertile ground where I had happened across my dad’s stash of Playboys just a couple of years earlier. On the same bookshelf that was home to my grandma’s 1960s Compton’s Encyclopedias, a color-coordinated collection of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, and my dad’s high school yearbooks was a small section of my aunt’s paperbacks I had never properly spelunked. Most of them—Nancy Drew, Anne of Green Gables, A Wrinkle in Time—were known quantities. (A Wrinkle in Time, with its tesseracts and interdimensional travel, held particular fascination for me, even though I never read it diligently enough to finish it.) There was an afore-unnoticed novel on the bookshelf, however, that would alter the course of my life, and I can’t even remember its title.
In retrospect, and after many an exhaustive Google search, I’ve come to believe it was one of the hundreds of erotica paperbacks published in the late 1960s and 1970s by Liverpool Library Press, purveyors of such titles as Weekend with the Boss, All in the Family, and Rent’s Due. Its pages were brittle and moth-wing-powdered with mummy dust. The sweet scent of ink and decaying wood pulp cellulose rose from its fanned chapters. I can picture the trade dress: an olive-green border framing black text and a monochromatic, almost quaint—if memory serves—illustration in the same shade of green. Like the book’s title and the author’s name, the subject of the drawing is lost to the sands of time. But if the other entries in the Liverpool Library Press catalog I have since seen online are any indication, it was stark linework depicting an eager and comely young lass being attended to by a cadre of enthusiastic suitors. All parties would be in various stages of undress and their positioning would leave little to the imagination, yet the entire milieu would pull up just shy of pornographic.
If the title, author, and cover art escape me, the premise of the novel does not: A young woman inherits her recently deceased aunt’s condominium in Miami. Our heroine relocates to the Sunshine State, where she quickly discovers that her dearly departed aunt, whom she is named after, in addition to bearing a striking resemblance to, was the ringleader of a group of swingers and the condo was ground zero for their sexy shenanigans. The niece’s new neighbors promptly appoint the doppelgänger their replacement hostess and life in South Florida gets back to normal, which means swapping spouses, threesomes, foursomes, and more-somes. (Author’s note: if any reader knows the book I’m describing, please reach out and let me know. I would love to track down a copy.)
I would be lying if I said I read the book cover to cover. Or in sequential order. I did not. Once I had ascended to my grandma’s attic under the guise of staving off summertime boredom, I would pluck my aunt’s smutty novel off the shelf to skim its pages for keywords I knew meant action. Any of the three C’s were all indicators of fruit-bearing pages and I trained my eyes to pick those words out of the crowd. With each excursion upstairs, I would dog-ear another half-dozen passages. Before school started back in the fall I had read about mistaken-identity blowjobs, incestuous exhibitionists, and geometrically-dubious double penetrations.
It is not my favorite book. That would be a ridiculous statement to make about a trashy 1960’s novel I can’t even remember the title of. I did not even read the whole thing. But when I hear other authors talk about the books that inspired them to become writers, and they wax rhapsodic about Neil Gaiman or Stephen King or Tolkien, I realize that musty, yellowed paperback in the attic was my Hobbit.
Like a garage band gaining their footing by covering their favorite songs, my first instinct after reading the fuckpad-condo paperback was to imitate it. (Well, my second instinct…) Instead of practicing the opening riff of “Smoke on the Water”, I transcribed my favorite passages of the novel into a spiral-bound notebook. Thanks to my disjointed, scattershot reading, I never quite pieced together the entire plot, assuming there was one. But I learned a lot.
While the movies on American Exxxtasy would show me how things were done, the book, crucially, told me why. If ever so slightly, the writing tried to get into the heads of the characters in a way porno movies simply did not. Always careful not to get bogged down in the psychology of it all (something more than one editor would later warn me about), my anonymous Liverpool Library Press scribe used narration and dialog to illuminate, for example, the thrill and ephemeral frenzy a husband felt as he watched his wife transform herself into someone he had never met before.
Or maybe that wasn’t really there on those pages and I’m falsely ascribing it, all these years later. I honestly can’t remember, but I do know that the book opened a window to the motivations of those Miamian mavens of mischief in a way the porno flicks never bothered to.
Onto the college-ruled lines of my notebook I would copy scenes, accidentally getting a feel for pacing, structure, learning how to write a sentence, then a paragraph. And then I would copy them again, this time changing names, altering physical characteristics to better suit my own fascinations. Specifically, the blonde niece became a dark-haired dead ringer for Barbara Carrera from the March ’82 Playboy and Lone Wolf McQuade.
At first—and because I lacked the skill to do otherwise—the only difference between the original and cover versions would be the characters’ appearance. After a while, the sentences would begin to change, still using the original structure as my template but swapping out the occasional verb or noun. As my confidence grew, so did my desire to write something closer to what I wanted to read, no longer content with what Liverpool Library Press offered me. Still using the condo in Miami as my base of operations, I began personalizing entire scenes. Like a car customizer who, with a shaved door handle here and a Frenched headlight there, transformed a 2-door sedan into a hot rod, I was soon rejiggering whole paragraphs, rewriting them to reflect my own propensities more accurately (or what I expected my propensities to be once I was old enough to have sex with someone other than myself). The Sunshine State swingers might find themselves, say, in the swimming pool with the condominium complex’s maintenance man, the middle-aged widower from 2B, and the new blonde arrival, engaged in a moonlit threesome while the property manager surreptitiously spectated through the venetian blinds on the office. My adaptation, then, would feature a proxy of myself (with a muscle car and much cooler hair) with an utterly unattainable-in-real-life West Forsyth Titanide, under the lights at midfield on the football field. It was like erotic Clue. And it was fun.
Until suddenly, it wasn’t.
I think the main issue my dad had with my story was not that his 14-year-old son would write something like that, it was that anyone would write something like that. Playboy magazine, launched just one year after my dad was born, was fine. In fact, I’m pretty sure he didn’t hide his stash too well, hoping I would stumble across it when the time was right and help ensure my heterosexuality. I had been known to play Wonder Woman, after all. But there were things you simply did not talk about. There was a line you did not cross, and I had blown past it at twice the speed limit. A centerfold of the Playmate of the Month was tasteful, if not art. What I was dabbling in was filth.
He told me as much on our ride home after he picked me up from a failed tryout for the West Forsyth baseball team (yet another red flag, no doubt). He very briefly touched on the dubious manner in which he found the story: He had noticed the pages in the kitchen trash can, recognized my handwriting, assumed it was an abandoned homework assignment. Had I shredded the paper into confetti and flushed it down the toilet, or taken a lighter to it in the driveway, or simply used the wastebasket in my own bedroom to dispose of my aborted effort, Dad would have never found it and therefore been unable to take exception to my nascent literary endeavors. But I did not, and he did.
He explained to me, in no uncertain terms, that what I was writing was depraved. To his credit, he was not mad at me, just very worried about his son. I desperately countered that the words were not mine, that I had simply copied from a book I had found that belonged to Aunt Judy, a craven and cowardly defense, I realized even then. He dismissed the notion out of hand that his saintly sister would ever own such a book, a claim I would have made myself had I not seen her name written inside the front cover.
Back at home we sat in my room under the watchful eyes of David Lee Roth and Christie Brinkley and talked some more. I tearfully pleaded that there was nothing wrong with me, which, as I had calculated it would, further distanced him from any anger he might have felt and coerced him into assuring me that I was normal, even if what I was doing was, at least in his eyes, not. Maybe if I redirected that pent-up energy toward batting practice, he gently suggested…
My dad came of age in a world where the sexiest thing he saw in mainstream media was Mary Ann’s belly button on Gilligan’s Island or a seemingly nude Dolores Erickson, strategically obscured by cotton batting and Barbasol on the cover of Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass’s Whipped Cream & Other Delights. For my generation, sex was everywhere. On television, at the movies, on the newsstands. It was there in the Sixties, of course. It had always been there. But you had to dig a lot deeper for it back then.
As we sat on the foot of my bed and my dad tried to wrap his head around why I would write what I wrote, I was reminded of how he was unable to grasp why I was not dazzled by John Wayne westerns when I had Star Wars, or why the Statler Brothers didn’t do it for me when I lived in a world with KISS. For as long as I could remember, I could see tits and ass whenever I wanted. We had HBO at home. We had MTV! I needed something more.
I went back to writing the very next day, now with much stricter privacy protocols in place. Almost 40 years later I still cringe at the memory of that father-son talk. But I am not ashamed of what I wrote. Yes, I used a nom de plume for years, primarily because I’m a III and my name is not mine alone; it belongs to my dad and his dad, as well. I would eventually drop the pen name and write under my real one, and if I am embarrassed of anything it’s not owning that earlier in my career. But when it began, it was not a career, it was a hobby. Eventually I would see my name, pseudo and real both, on bookshelves at Barnes & Noble and on amazon.com. At 14, though, the idea of being a published author was not the dream. It had not even dawned on me that people got paid to write dirty stories. But they did. Not many, and not much. But I would find out soon that they did.
By the time I reached adulthood, I had sworn off using other writers’ stories as templates for my own. It was as much a decision made of necessity as it was one of artistic integrity. My grandmother’s house had changed hands, with its contents auctioned at an estate sale. Even if I had not long ago mined it barren, my aunt’s paperback with its Miami condo denizens was no longer available to me. I can only wonder who ended up with my beloved Liverpool Library Press novel when they won the lot of Nancy Drew and Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. Regardless, I was now dedicated to writing wholly original material.
I had graduated from Forsyth Tech and had my first fulltime job. I had my own one-bedroom apartment where I could throw anything I wanted in the trash with impunity. Most crucially, though, I had a girlfriend. And having a girlfriend meant I had an audience. With a new mission to arouse someone other than myself, I went in search of inspiration.
The late Nineties were a strange time for bookstores. The big chains—Borders, Barnes & Noble—had not yet come to my town but the smaller mall-based ones like B. Dalton and Waldenbooks, had already run off the local independents. So it was at Waldenbooks in Hanes Mall, as I aimlessly wandered the aisles, that I made arguably the most fortuitous discovery of my writing career since that afternoon in my grandma’s attic: there was an Erotica section. An entire section. And, after a few quick glances over my shoulder, I realized these weren’t books like my aunt’s. These were good.
Just flipping through those books and skimming a page here or there made it instantly clear this was real writing. Serious writing. If my Liverpool Library Press book was a VHS copy of one of the harshly lit pornos on the satellite dish, the books in the Erotica section at Waldenbooks were like one of those sepia-toned Michael Ninn adult movies that looked like a George Michael music video. While the plots, such as they were, were still vehicles to deliver sex scenes, they were a little deeper than inheriting your aunt’s condominium and physically resembling her to the point of mistaken identity.
No, let me rephrase that. The plots in ‘90s erotica weren’t deeper than ‘70s smut. In fact, maybe the plots weren’t as deep. But they were more real. They had less artifice. They didn’t seem embarrassed about what they were. Much like ‘90s filmed pornography as compared to its predecessors from the two decades prior, modern written erotica at the time didn’t feel the need to perform narrative contortionist’s acts to justify the sex. There were no pizza delivery boys wondering who ordered the extra-large sausage, no doctors being paged to diagnose mystery maladies that can only be cured by a good fucking. We were all adults here in the Erotica section. We could be honest about why we were here.
I perused Little Birds and Delta of Venus and The Story of O. There were even names I recognized, like Anaïs Nin and M. Christian. Even Anne Rice was here, writing as A. N. Roquelaure, with her BDSM Sleeping Beauty novels. The majority of the books in the section, though, were short story compilations and anthologies, which suited my reading style (and, I imagined, the reading styles of most erotica fans, for the same reasons the adult film industry had shifted by then from features to vignette-style compilations). Most had a unifying theme of some sort: threesomes, bondage, lesbian, etc.
The books that intrigued me the most, though, were the Best American Erotica series, edited by Susie Bright. I did not know her name yet but her back cover biography said she was a consultant on the Wachowski’s feature film directorial debut, Bound, with Jennifer Tilly and Gina Gershon. My girlfriend and I had rented that movie just a few months prior. And the BAE books just looked important. The cover design was elegant and sexy and clearly professionally designed. And while I was unclear on how the stories were deemed America’s Best, it still felt like a pedigree worthy of respect. It said so right there on the cover that they were the best, and there was a volume for every year. It was like the Grammys of naughty stories
I picked out an edition with the highest concentration of author names I recognized—1997—and made my way to the cashier. I will confess to feeling a slight twinge of self-consciousness buying a book with a provocative portrait of a semi-nude woman along with an equally provocative Georgia O’Keeffe-esque flower, its stamen and pistil lewdly exposed, and the word Erotica emblazoned across the images. But it was clearly art, and whatever embarrassment I felt was nothing like buying dirty magazines at the Hop-In. This was literature, after all.
The writers and their stories were all excellent. I especially enjoyed a story called “A” by Alice Joanou, about a naughty wife; “Bob & Carol & Ted (But Not Alice)” by M. Christian, about a very naughty wife; and my favorite, “The Dress” written by Michael Hemmingson, about an extremely naughty wife.
But my key takeaway from BAE ‘97 was this: How did these authors got their work published in the first place? Not necessarily how they had been chosen for the Best American Erotica series, I figured that was up to Susie Bright. I meant how did these writers get their work out there to begin with.
In the back of the book was a list of where each selection was originally published, usually in other anthologies, some of which I had leafed through myself at Waldenbooks. But how did they get in those? Not that it really mattered, these were real, published authors, and I was just a guy trying to write a story to turn on my girlfriend.
I wrote a story called “New Rays From an Ancient Moon”, a riff on a Joe Satriani song title. With no personal computer (it was the Nineties still and the PC had yet to join the microwave and DVD player as necessities for the home) I spent the next few days at work surreptitiously transcribing my handwritten story into Microsoft Word. I worked directly from a 3.5” floppy disk to keep the file off my hard drive (a lesson I learned the hard way, naturally). The day I finished, I stayed late and sent the story to the LaserJet we all shared in the Drafting Department, triple checking to make sure all the pages had come through, that I had retrieved them all, and that I had collected my floppy disk from my computer. I scoured the area for evidence of my malfeasance with the forensic zeal of a crime scene investigator. (The infamous headline from The Onion about "Erotic-Horror Screenplay Discovered On Office Printer" still strikes terror in my heart.)
Satisfied, if a little paranoid, I brought the story home in a manilla folder. I refused to proofread it because a) I had no idea how to edit my own writing at that point, and b) I didn’t want to risk correcting it and having to reprint it at work. Later that evening, I gave my girlfriend the story and sat patiently next to her while she read. Just as some songwriters can only reveal their innermost feelings through their lyrics, my dirty stories let me confess my kinks to my girlfriend without the embarrassment of blurting them out. If they were laughed at or derided as disgusting, I could plausibly deny that they were simply the urges of my character, not his creator. As it was, though, the story performed its intended function as propaganda admirably and immediately.
The thought didn’t occur to me until weeks later when I found myself in Waldenbooks again, but if my writing was good enough for home use, maybe it was good enough to get me into one of those books in the Erotica section. Dare to dream, right?
I went back to my copy of Best American Erotica 1997, which had since been joined in the growing erotica section of my own bookshelf by The Mammoth Book of Erotica, edited by Maxim Jakubowksi, Violet Blue’s Sweet Life, and The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica, also by Maxim. I flipped to the credits in the back and wrote down all the journals, anthologies, and websites that had originally published the stories Susie Bright had chosen as that year’s best. With a list of potential destinations for “New Rays”, I set about compiling contact information for each, who to reach out to, how to do it, whether they preferred email or snail mail, what they were looking for, what were there submissions guidelines, whether to send the entire story or just a synopsis or simply a cover letter to begin with. Some of that information was easy to find, readily available on the publisher’s website or elsewhere on the internet at writing forums and message boards. Some of the information was not easy to find. Some of the publishers had since gone defunct—I would learn that was often the case in the evanescent world of small, independent publishing—and were duly scratched off my list. Yet others were not accepting submissions at that time, or only accepting submissions for their upcoming bondage anthology or their voyeurism anthology or their spanking story contest. Or they were only looking for novel-length manuscripts. Sometimes they didn’t bother telling you what they were looking for.
Eventually I had a short list of publishers who were open to submissions, liked short stories, and willing to read something from an unpublished, un-agented author.
That was the easy part.
Next came writing the cover letter. If you’re an aspiring writer, you’ve no doubt heard this a hundred times (and it’s also the only piece of writing advice I’ll give here because it’s the only thing I know is true): Your pitch is every bit as important as your manuscript. 100%. A great cover letter has never sold a bad manuscript, but a bad cover letter has kept some great stories from getting read. If your query letter doesn’t compel an editor to want to read your story, you might as well have never written it. With that knowledge, and precisely zero writing credits to my name, I set about crafting the introductory inquiry that would convince a probably tired, maybe jaded, certainly overworked editor to take the time to read a story by an unknown rookie writer. In those same three paragraphs I had to introduce myself, explain why I was contacting them, be charming yet humble, be maybe even a little clever, and, most of all, be professional. And do it with no spelling or grammatical errors. All while convincing them this was the exact story they had been waiting to read.
Then came the hard part: working up the courage to actually send it. If you’ve never done this, you might be thinking, “What’s the worst that can happen? They say ‘no’?” No. That’s merely the beginning of the worst thing that could happen. They could all say no. In addition to “no” they could take the time to tell you exactly why they were saying no, not in a constructive manner (which is still hard enough to hear) but in a “don’t quit your day job,” “we don’t like their sound, guitar groups are on the way out," Decca Records-rejecting-the-Beatles kind of way. And those "nos" could shatter that little crystal of self-confidence you mustered in order to send them your stuff in the first place, making you question not only your talent but whether your hard work was a complete waste of time. Maybe they were right, you should just quit. It did more than just sting.
But, had the Beatles listened to that Decca exec there would be no Beatles, right? So, with clerical assistance from my patient girlfriend (by now my fiancé) I mailed and emailed my queries to every publisher on the list. And then… I waited.
Weeks passed with no responses, which, at first, I took as good news. No one had said no yet. Maybe they were considering it! Then, when the weeks became months, I started to come to terms with the idea that I possibly wasn’t going to hear back from any of them at all. Don’t call us, we’ll call you…
It wasn’t until well past the point when I stopped getting butterflies every time I checked the mail, snail or e, that I got my first reply. It was a letter. I immediately recognized the return address on the enveloped as one of the publishers I had decided to get my hopes especially high for based mainly on their classy cover art and production values. My heartrate instantly spiked.
I opened the letter in the driveway, took a deep breath, and read the first sentence which, with very little variance, I would soon learned opened almost every rejection letter:
Thank you for your interest in [insert name of publisher here]. However…
However… Unfortunately… Regretfully… Those were the keywords I learned to look for. And whatever other entries I could find in the thesaurus for nope.
It hurt. Of course it hurt. They let me down as easily as they could, praising my writing, asking me to resubmit again when I had another story, gently explaining that the publishing world was wildly subjective and just because my piece wasn’t a good fit for them didn’t mean it wouldn’t be perfect for a different publisher. They encouraged me to not give up and wished me luck. But it still hurt.
The second rejection hurt just as bad. As did the third. And every one I received from that inaugural round of queries. Furthermore, there wasn’t any real closure on that first sortie, no moment when the final "no thanks" showed up in my inbox or mailbox and I could finally stop hoping and get on with my life. There were, inevitably, a few replies I never received. There were a handful of editors who were too busy or so unmoved by my writing (or, more likely, simply had a policy of replying only if they were interested) that they didn’t even bother saying no. And with each week that went by without being able to cross them out on my list, my inherent optimism dictated that I consider them a “maybe”. I’ve probably still got that list, 25 years later, in a folder somewhere, with half a dozen publishers not officially ruled out.
Once the wounds of rejection had sufficiently scabbed over, I did something that felt almost as brave as submitting my story in the first place: I read the replies. I don’t mean I fearfully skimmed them for the keywords and catchphrases that would rip off the Band-Aid and let me know I could stop reading. No, this time I would actually see what they had to say and take their (hopefully) constructive criticism to heart before going back to the drawing board.
There was only one problem: there was no advice, constructive or otherwise. Not counting “Don’t give up” or “Keep writing!”, I could find no real insight at all, usually only a form letter that sometimes referred to me and my story by name, sometimes simply Dear Author. I suppose that was easier to take than insults to my writing, but if I was hoping for some guidance of some sort—“The characters were one-dimensional,” maybe? “The sex was too graphic,” “The sex wasn't graphic enough”—I wouldn’t find it in my stack of rejection letters.
Instead I turned to my stack of erotica anthologies to try to divine their secrets and learn what the stories in them had that mine did not. And I quickly realized that I hadn’t read any of the stories in those books. At best I had read the good parts of maybe half of them. But I had lacked the discipline and intellectual curiosity to actually read any one story all the way through. BAE ’97, Sweet Life, and both Mammoths each had dozens of dog-eared pages and highlighted passages, but they only place-marked the action. I had not been interested in the characters, their motivations, the settings, the mood, none of it. I had only cared about the juicy bits and in doing so I had done the stories and their authors (and myself) a grave disservice.
I set about righting that wrong and discovered that the action I had been so focused on was immeasurably and simultaneously heightened and deepened by getting to know the people involved. Learning why they were doing what they were doing, and what they felt, before and after doing them. What were the consequences? The rewards? What were they willing to risk? What would they promise? What promises would they break? Asking those questions made the good parts so much better. Just like in real life. Go figure.
By now I was married to my best friend and, as such, my love life was decidedly risk-free, which was a blessing and a curse. The stories in Best American Erotica were not about happily married couples who had vanilla sex after putting their kids to bed. BAE was the antidote to that. My wife and I had our kinks and fantasies, to be sure, and that fueled my writing, and vice versa. But I did start to discern a pattern in the stories in those books, a subtext that was missing from my own real-world experiences: they all had an element of risk. They all had some sense of emotional danger that elevated them. Whether the characters were swinging, swapping, having sex in public or with multiple partners, the stories were all very exciting but, crucially, they had stakes.
The highest stakes for my wife and me were trying to find time for each other between work and family to get it on at all, much less in an elevator or the back of a chauffeured limousine. But I was a writer of fiction, wasn’t I? At least I wanted to be. And despite Sam Clemens’ apocryphal advice to write what you know, I was going to have to make it up.
Unlike “Ancient Moon”, my next attempt wouldn’t be simply a boy-fucks-girl story. The Best American Erotica stories didn’t jump right into the action, they had setups and plots and things in them other than just the sex. I needed to introduce another factor beyond just describing the act. So, for inspiration, I turned to the only things that excited me as much as sex: rock & roll and cars.
Rock seemed almost cliché—sex was the whole point of rock & roll already—so I went with cars. Sex was the point of a lot of cars, but not all of them. And the sexy cars weren’t as obvious about it as, say, “Rocket Queen” or “Panama” (which was about a car while also being a metaphor for sex…). I remembered another book I had perused on that trip to Waldenbooks, a collection of fine art photos of antique car hood ornaments from the Classic, Art Deco, and Jet Age of automotive design. It had been filled with beautiful photography of historic vehicles from marques like Bugatti, Packard, and Pierce-Arrow, with silver sculptures of flying mermaids and winged goddesses, bravely pointing the way into promising futures, designed by men with names like Avard Fairbanks and Casimer Cislo. But the one that had caught my eye was the chrome goddess on the Rolls-Royce.
The text told me it was 1934 Phantom II and that the sculpture was called The Spirit of Ecstasy. The lithe figure on the car’s hood was one Eleanor Thornton, and that she was sculpted by a man named Charles Robinson Sykes. I dutifully researched Eleanor as I brainstormed the premise for my story.
Utterly convinced of the quality of my girl-fucks-hood-ornament story, I titled it “Charles Sykes’ Spirit of Ecstasy” and once again compiled a list of publishers open to submissions, polished my query letter, and sent it out. If my first dispatch for “New Rays From an Ancient Moon” was like holding a match to a bottle rocket at arm’s length and then running for cover once the fuse started to spark, this round of queries was sent forth into the wild with the enthusiasm of the Wicked Witch of the West releasing her flying monkeys. This time I knew not to wait by the mailbox or refresh Outlook every couple of minutes. I was prepared for the weeks and months it would take to hear back from the editors. I was prepared for half of them to not bother replying at all. What I was not prepared for, despite my best efforts, was the first rejection.
I thought I was ready for it this time, I really did. Over the past 25 years I have learned, time and time again, that I will never, ever be ready for it. I have received, by my best estimate as of this writing, over 600 rejection letters. Conservatively. Seriously. In that same time I have gotten around 40 "yeses". That’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 "nos" to every "yes". A batting average of .043. Not exactly Hall of Fame material. Honestly, I’d bet the ratio is a lot worse than that. And that’s not counting the queries that went ignored or unanswered. That’s over 600 Thank you for your interest, unfortunately... And the 600th stung just as much as the first one.
So, when Round 2 of my nascent writing career began with a rash of “no thanks”, it was every bit the gut-punch that Round 1 had been. Maybe more so because I had allowed myself to believe I had improved. First time, sure, it was a longshot. I knew that going in. This time, I should have gotten better. And I had, I knew that, even at the time. But I hadn’t gotten better enough. It was a bitter pill to swallow.
Then I got an email from Peacock Blue, a website that published erotic short stories. Although beginning like all the others, with its Dear Wade, Thank you for the opportunity to read your story… it didn’t, on initial skim, have any of the balloon-bursting words I had trained my eyes to snag on. There was no However…, no Regretfully…, No You seem to have completely ignored our word-count limit.
Still trepidatious, I knew I would have to actually read the entire email to be sure. Steeling myself, I began.
Dear Wade,
Thank for the opportunity to read your story, ‘Charles Sykes’ Spirit of Ecstasy’.
So far, so good. I continued.
I believe it would be a perfect fit for Peacock Blue. If it’s still available, I would love to feature it on our website.
I stared at the monitor. I read the email again. Then I calmly stood up from my desk to go tell my wife.
My second yes came just four months after the first one. I had written a story called “In the Back of Raquel” about some exhibitionist mischief in the backseat of a speeding ‘67 Fastback years before I had one of my own. As with “Charles Sykes,” “Raquel’s” eventual yes was preceded by two dozen nos. Like that opening salvo of rejections, I took every last one to heart. But, as before, that singular yes was a salve for the sting.
Dear Wade,
Thank you for submitting your short story, ‘In the Back of Raquel' for consideration for Taboo: Forbidden Fantasies for Couples. I really enjoyed the story and would love to include it in the collection. It has a moodiness and tenseness to it that gives it a style that sets it apart from the usual erotica.
Thanks again and I look forward to hearing from you!
Violet Blue, Cleis Press
And this time it was a real print book, not a website. It would be the first time I would see my work in an honest to god, hold it in your hands paper and ink book. And Violet Blue was one of the true luminaries of the erotica world. She was a well-known writer, journalist, and sex educator. She’d been on Oprah! She was also the editor of the popular Sweet Life erotica anthology series. I had the first volume, Sweet Life: Erotic Fantasies for Couples on my shelf at home, and had actually read some of it. And Cleis Press, if the number of books at Borders with their name on the spine was any indication, was the most prolific publisher of erotica in the business. This was a big deal for me.
The official blurb that would be on the back cover of the book sounded like a mission statement for why I was writing in the first place:
Here are twenty-two superbly written erotic stories featuring couples who want it so bad they can taste it - and they do, making their most taboo erotic fantasies come true. What is your deepest, darkest, sweetest, most stunningly wicked fantasy? The couples whose naughtiest fantasies play out within these pages are committed to each other without question. They push the limits of sex, lust, and the imagination as far as they can to please each other. Taboo delivers enough heat to inspire you to try out your own fantasies at home, in the office, or ...?
I had found out about Taboo through www.erotica-readers.com, the website of the Erotica Readers & Writers Association. ERWA had been online since 1996 but it wasn’t until after I started taking the whole writing thing more seriously that I discovered them. Their site featured erotic fiction, publishing advice, and a user forum, but the thing that mattered most to me was their postings of calls for submissions. There was a full section on ERWA of publishers, editors, and websites looking for manuscripts to consider, listed in chronological order by submission deadline and sortable by category (Erotica Anthologies, Magazines & Journals, Websites, etc.).
This was a goldmine. Instead of having to track down publishers who might be interested in reading something and then having to sift through their website for usually-byzantine instructions on how to contact them, here it was all laid out. Here were people who wanted to read your story. They told you what they wanted to see, what word-count range they were interested in, what subject matter, how to format your Word document, what font and point size they preferred, and what they paid if they accepted your story, (which was usually next to nothing, but at that point in my career I would have paid them).
On my very first visit to ERWA’s site, I had seen Violet Blue’s solicitation for Taboo. She said she was seeking stories 3,000 to 5,000 words in length that featured devoted couples ready to turn their fantasies into reality. She was talking directly to me. She said those fantasies could range from sex in public to BDSM to threesomes. The only rules were no non-consensual sex, no underage, and no bestiality (I would quickly discover these were boilerplate guidelines for almost every call for submission on the site).
I knew I had already written a story that would be perfect for Violet’s new collection. Suddenly the rejections I had already gotten were a blessing.
Looking back now, this was the story that changed things. I didn’t realize it at the time. At the time, I would have said “Charles Sykes” was when things changed. It had been my first published work; it was ground zero. Getting that story published gave me the confidence to keep writing and the knowledge that this was something people actually did. Maybe not for a living but certainly as a hobby. And it definitely Spiced Things Up™️ in my marriage, which was the story’s raison d'être to begin with. But it didn’t change my life.
Neither did getting “In the Back of Raquel” published. But to this day, receiving my comp copies in the mail and immediately flipping to the back to read my author bio back there along with the others—there I was!—is a highlight of my life. Seeing my name, albeit a pseudonym, in the table of contents alongside the names of authors I had heard of and had read made me swell with pride. I had even corresponded with a couple of them by the time the book came out. They treated me like an equal. Like a fellow writer. It was amazing.
A month later would come a moment even more amazing, when I walked to the Erotica section at Barnes & Noble and found a copy of Taboo: Forbidden Fantasies for Couples on the shelf. It was real. I had seen it in the wild. Once again I read my pen name in the contents, read my bio, flipped to “In the Back of Raquel” and scanned the words I had written, words that had sprang forth from my own imagination and were deemed good enough to be part of a real book being sold in a real bookstore. I wanted to stand in there by my book and tell everyone who wandered within earshot that I was in there, my story was in that book, I was a published author, pleased to meet you. But I somehow summoned the willpower and humility to refrain.
Then one day, Susie Bright called me. On the telephone. The Susie Bright. I was speaking on the phone with the person who had choreographed Jennifer Tilly and Gina Gershon’s sex scenes in the Wachowski’s Bound. Susie is on the commentary track of the DVD. She had a cameo in the movie. She was Jesse, the woman that Gershon’s Corky tries to talk to in the bar. I was speaking on the phone with someone who had worked directly with the Wachowskis. Susie Bright liked the Wachowski’s script for Bound and wanted to help them with their movie. Susie Bright liked my story about a woman who fucks a hood ornament and wanted to include “Charles Sykes’ Spirit of Ecstasy” in Best American Erotica 2005. She said I wrote “with verve.”
Even as Susie was explaining to me the timeframe of BAE’s publication cycle and offering some much needed editorial advice (“You start too many sentences with And.”) I was thinking back to that day in Waldenbooks at the mall when I stood in the Erotica section and learned that people wrote and read stories like that. I tallied in my head the names of the authors I had seen in the table of contents of past editions of Best American Erotica. The authors whose ranks I was being invited to join. Pat Califia, David Sedaris, Chuck Palahniuk, JT LeRoy, Poppy Z. Brite, Anne Rice, Jane Smiley. Jane Smiley won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1992 and she was going to be in BAE 2005. I was going to have a story I wrote published alongside a Pulitzer Prize winner.
The Best American Erotica series was published by Touchstone, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. Even my dad had heard of Simon & Schuster. As much as I loved and appreciated Peacock Blue, Scarlet Letters, Oysters and Chocolate, and Ruthie's Club, this felt bigger. I think it paid only something like $50 to make it into Best American Erotica. There were no royalties. I didn’t care.
Later that same year, I got another yes, this time for a story called “If You Love Something, Set It Free." Unlike most publishers and sites I had dealt with, Neil Anthony at Ruthie’s Club did not require author’s to grant exclusive rights to the stories. I was free to answer other calls for submission, which I did for a photography book called My Wife and Her Lovers, by a Russian writer and editor named Inna Zabrodskaya and her husband, photographer Ivan Kay. It was a slickly produced collection of photography documenting Inna and Ivan’s sexually-permissive marriage in which Ivan captured over 200 artful black & white images of Inna having extremely graphic sex with multiple male and female partners. Throughout the album were text pieces from various erotica writers to accompany and add atmosphere to the photographs. “If You Love Something, Set It Free” was right at home among the pictures of a wife experimenting with a variety of partners while her husband captured it all with his camera.
A few months later, “If You Love Something, Set It Free” got accepted for yet a third publication, this time for a print collection called The MILF Anthology: Twenty-One Steamy Stories, to be edited by Cecilia Tan and Lori Perkins from well-established purveyors of erotic fiction, Blue Moon.
Hot on the heels of The MILF Anthology, I heard from Susie Bright again. In her email she said “If You Love Something, Set It Free” was “a terrific, engaging, sexy, troubling, sinister story” and that it had been selected for inclusion in Best American Erotica 2007.
This time my story would share pages with writers such as Alicia Erian, whose debut novel Towelhead was adapted into a movie starring Aaron Eckhart and Toni Collette and directed by Alan Ball of True Blood fame; Daniel Duane, who had written for Esquire, Men’s Journal, New York Times Magazine, Village Voice; Bram Stoker Award nominee Nicholas Kaufmann; Marie Lyn Bernard, who had contributed to Marie Claire, Curve, and Jezebel; Susan DiPlacido, the Moondance Film Festival’s Spirit Award winner; Jessica Cutler, the subject of a Playboy interview and pictorial after her role in a 2004 Capitol Hill sex scandal; Kathryn Harrison, whose essays had appeared in Harper's Magazine, The New Yorker, Vogue, Salon, and Nerve.
These were rock stars. I was the opening act, at best, I knew. I felt like a poseur hiding amongst real writers. An imposter. I told myself maybe they felt that way too, even though I didn’t really believe it. These people all had Wikipedia pages. I sure as hell did not. But the opening act still shared the same stage as the headliner.
The book would also be translated into Italian by Piccola Biblioteca Oscar and titled Best Erotica 2007: Il meglio della narrativa erotica dell'anno, Arnoldo Mondadori Editore. Apparently “Se ami qualcosa, lasciala andare” is “If You Love Something, Set It Free” in la lingua italiana. I wondered if it had quite the same meaning.
Susie informed me there would also be an audiobook version of BAE 2007, which I was deeply relieved to learn would be recorded with professionals and not by the authors themselves, which would have meant me having to use the same Southern drawl that elicited laughs from my voicemail greeting.
The book’s blurb would read, Erotica’s veterans and up-and-coming new writers join forces to explore how tantalizing crossing the line can be. I wasn’t sure whether I was the former or the latter. I was thrilled, regardless. If possible, I was even prouder of this one than I was BAE 2005. The first time could have been a fluke. Milli Vanilli won a Grammy. Mark Rypien won a Super Bowl. But they never did it again. Getting in there twice felt like confirmation. A validation.
I immediately set my mind to deciding what my next story would be. I knew the high of making into Best American Erotica would soon fade and I would need my next fix. And then Susie Bright called yet again, this time asking me to contribute to a new anthology she was putting together to be titled X: The Erotic Treasury. It was to be a cloth-bound hardcover in a sumptuous slipcase with a big, bold X laser-cut into the box. She intended it to be something akin to her ultimate thesis on dirty stories.
I had an unpublished coming-of-age story I was calling “Rock of Ages” about a teenaged boy’s first discoveries of rock & roll and his older sister’s best friend. At Susie’s suggestion, I recalibrated the setting from the 1980s to the 1960s, exchanging Mötley Crüe for the Everly Brothers, Billy Squier for Buddy Holly, and renaming the story “The Birds, the Bees & the Monkees” after Davy Jones and the boys’ 1968 album. Susie liked it.
In addition to my story, Susie chose 39 others for X, including some written by Carol Queen and Pulitzer Prize-winner Robert Olen Butler. Time Out New York called it “a beautiful hardcover book featuring some of the most outstanding authors of erotica ever” and said it was “brainy and horny all at once.” Once again there would be an audiobook. “The Birds, the Bees & the Monkees” got singled out for praise in more than one review.
It was the most notable published thing I had ever been a part of. And Susie had specifically invited me. But as flattered as I was to be included, I didn’t feel the same high I had when I got into Best American Erotica for some reason.
Not long after X: The Erotic Treasury came out, a publisher called Excessica released a collection of my greatest hits—for lack of a better term—called It Rhymes With Luck. In it were 17 short stories I had written over the previous decade. It did pretty well. It also garnered me what is still my favorite review: “Perhaps it's easiest to think of him as the director/producer of low-budget, sexploitation B-movies. He seems to operate under the delusion he's doing just that. Each is released not on drive-in movie screens or late-night cable television, but rather via the written word.” I couldn’t have written it better myself.
The biggest royalty checks of my career came from Excessica. They still come, over a decade later. They’ve been dwindling for years now into the single digits, but the first few checks were good enough to make me tentatively consider quitting my day job. I had almost made it. Almost.
Then the smut market (ironically enough…) began to dry up. I suppose it was hard (ironically enough…) to convince people to pay for what they could get online for free. I still check out ERWA every now and then just to see what kind of calls for submissions are out there. It’s crumbs compared to the genre’s heyday. But, as with so many things in life, it was a blessing in disguise. The dearth of erotica opportunities forced me to write something else. The result was my first mainstream work, a novel titled Scream If You Wanna Go Faster. There were only two sex scenes in the entire book, one a flashback to a teenager’s loss of innocence, the other a softly lit interlude between two lovers that I wasn’t even uncomfortable letting my dad read. It was the first thing of mine he’d read since finding that adolescent story in the kitchen trashcan. An independent press called Ink Smith published it. It became a 2013 Kindle Book Review Best Indie Book Awards Finalist. Some really nice things were said about it.
Chad Nance with Camel City Dispatch called it, “a travelogue along the backside of the American Century,” and said, “What Beauchamp excels at is the capturing of an atmosphere and, like John Hughes, he understands the sometimes epic and operatic realities of being an American teenager.” I was proud. In what I’m sure is my most-widely review yet, Hemmings Muscle Machines Magazine said, “It's a captivating ride, leading through slices of Americana, the good and the bad, and painting vivid pictures. Beauchamp's voyage is entertaining, and clearly written by someone with a bit of grease under his fingernails.” For one month in 2013, that magazine was on shelves in supermarkets and bookstores across the country.
Over the past decade I’ve gotten two other novels published and found a home for a dozen or so short stories in various anthologies and literary journals. Sometimes they’re sexy, sometimes they’re sad. But they’re always published under my real name. I just finished proofreading my manuscript for my latest novel, titled The Purple Menace and the Tobacco Prince, a fictionalization of a lurid local post-Jazz Age scandal that’s sexy and sad. As I write this, I’m in the middle of the first round of queries and bracing for the rejections.
I had this thought wandering around downtown by myself one night a couple of years ago: There is a non-zero chance that somewhere in the world there is a human being aged somewhere between newborn and 20 years old that exists because one or both of their parents got horny after reading something I wrote. That makes me smile. And makes me want to write.
