Body and Mind

I realized recently that I'm one of those people who live more in the mind than in the body.

That's neither good nor bad. It's just who I am. When I was a kid, I spent most of my leisure time reading - exploring new worlds in my imagination. As a teenager, I concocted lavish scenarios involving my latest crush and wrote poetry dripping with adolescent desire. In college and grad school, I had lovers - maybe more than many women - but looking back, it's not the physical pleasure I recall. No, it's the emotional and intellectual connections I shared with those special men that fills me with nostalgia and gratitude.

I was always drawn to men with a rich fantasy life. My grad school lover once "picked me up" in a bar, pretending on the spur of the moment that we'd never met. I immediately fell in with the role. That was one of the most intensely erotic experiences of our three year relationship.

And of course I've written many times about my history with the man who initiated me into Dominance and submission. He poured his kinky fantasies into my mind for months before we actually got together.

Those days with him marked me forever. They're directly responsible for my erotic writing. Yet I don't remember much of the physical pleasure - or the pain, for that matter - at all. It's the mental part that got me hot then, and still does. It felt as though we were reading each other's minds, and that total communication completely blew out my sexual circuits.

Did I orgasm when we were together? Honestly, I don't know. I do remember, even then, not caring. (He probably did care; that is the sort of guy he is.) For me, the connection was the point, not the climax. He could fuck me forever, as far as I was concerned, or do anything else he wanted. Pleasing him pleased me. It was, strange as this might seem to more physically inclined individuals, enough.

I still live in my mind, sexually in and in other ways, too. Someone could fondle my breasts or manipulate my clit with no effects whatever, if I weren't in a sexy frame of mind. I can't come, even with a vibrator, without an erotic fantasy to push me over the edge.

My writing shows this, I suspect. I spend far less time than some authors on the physical details of an encounter. My prose is (sadly perhaps) less focused on the senses than that of some of my colleagues. Try as I might to do things differently, my heroes and heroines have some tendency to be like me in this regard. The situation, the setting, the emotions - the sense of transgression or liberation - the feeling of communion with one's lover - these are what arouse my characters.

My tag line is "Imagination is the ultimate aphrodisiac". Actually, for me, it may be the only aphrodisiac.