Writing
The Asimov Incident: How a Dirty Old Man Killed My Desire to Write Porn
A chance encounter from the past can have a lasting effect on your future attitude
Published in
6 min readJun 9, 2021
I don’t write erotica. I’ve never even tried. I’d like to because let’s face it, there’s a lot of money in it, and I could use some more of that. There are several reasons why I don’t write sexually explicit material. Some of them are the usual suspects:
- I wasn’t brought up that way.
- It would embarrass my family.
- I’d have to use a pseudonym, and my ego demands that, if I write something, I want everyone to know that it was me who wrote it.
There are a lot of people who enjoy writing and reading porn. I neither congratulate nor condemn them. I know this, though: they are not my tribe.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about why. It goes a bit deeper than the reasons I gave above. I believe that, more than anything else, a chance encounter with a famous author at a relatively young age informed my choice of subject matter as a writer. Let me explain.
