David Woolfall – Female Erotica Writers
Before the Internet, there were books. Before +18 websites there were erotic books. Like almost everyone else, I was very curious to read some and also very curious to meet an erotic writer. I met one guy who was writing for an erotic column for a magazine. He is shy. David Woolfall’s first thought was “Do women write porn?”. He was intrigued about the answer that came immediately and naturally, yes. He wanted to find more, to know more, who are they, who are the women behind the books that sit in the erotica section in book shops? He did a little research, dug into the internet and met the ladies, and then he came across his answers.
“Mostly they would describe themselves as shy, introverted woman with a love of reading and writing. They could be your mother, sister or girlfriend, the woman sitting next to you at church on a Sunday. This is my fascination, why, how, who? makes their living from gay cowboy stories, what type of woman creates a shifter werewolf fantasy, a male on male graphic sex scene? The project is about the real women doing a slightly unusual job.” – David Woolfall
Lucy Felthouse
I’ve always written, ever since I was little. From a very young age I’d be scribbling endless stories in notebooks and telling anyone that would listen that when I grew up I was going to be an author. That creative streak has always been there and I think was helped by the fact that my family encouraged me to read, too. As a child I always—and I quote—”had my nose stuck in a book.” Some things never change, I guess! Writing erotica happened quite by mistake. I did a Creative Writing degree at the University of Derby because I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do as a career (by this point I knew that I couldn’t just sit and write and expect people to throw money at me, unlike my younger self). While I was there one of my fellow students made the suggestion that I should have a go at writing erotica. I laughed it off at first, but then he dared me… so of course I couldn’t say no then! – www.lucyfelthouse.co.uk
K D Grace
I’ve been writing erotica for four years now. At the moment I have two novels out and a trilogy on the way, plus I’ve had a lot of short stories published. I didn’t start out writing erotica, and it was never my plan to write romance either. But I’m a romantic to the core, so it was inevitable, I guess. And since I always enjoyed writing the love scenes and the sex scenes in whatever I was writing at the time, when the erotica market opened up, it seemed like a logical step to take. One day I sent in an erotic short story to Scarlet Magazine, now sadly defunct, and they took it. Then they took another one. Then Black Lace started taking my stories. Not long after that I sold my first novel to Xcite Books. – www.kdgrace.co.uk
Janine Ashbless
I still don’t believe this is real, you know: me, being a writer. Being “Janine Ashbless.” Having my darkest sexual fantasies read by strangers. In my mind’s eye I’m still a shy, introverted, conventional girl with her nose in a book. I’ve been praised to the skies and I’ve been reviled with real vitriol, and both still astonish me. I started writing erotica because there was no one out there producing what I wanted to read – which was, basically, like Angela Carter only a lot dirtier. I’ve been writing it for over a decade now. I’ve six books in print and three more on the way, and I’m amazed and delighted to find that there still seems to be no end to exploring the strange and filthy niches of my imagination. – www.janineashbless.com
Miss Rebecca Bond
Close your eyes. What is the first thing that you see there in the darkness? A family sized bar of Galaxy? Those resplendent pair of Louboutins you window-shopped for last week? A half-empty bottle of shower gel reminding you that you need to buy some more? Sounds dull doesn’t it? But it’s these random everyday images that can lead to the most delicious of experiences for the characters in my world. That is the power of imagination. Imagination. Everybody has one. Mine just so happens to play host to some rather colourful characters who accompany me about my business and liven up my somewhat mundane existence. I’m not special or extraordinary or different – I have a hobby like the millions of other people out there, but, because I like the finer things in life, my hobby enables me to live out the most luxurious fantasies through the characters in my mind. – www.missrebeccabond.co.uk
Victoria Blisse
I’ve always loved words. My mum and my Dad read to me when I was little, I spent many happy hours in my local library and even more lying in bed getting lost in a world of fantasy. Through my teen years I continued to play with poetry and also let my imagination and my hormones go wild by writing short, silly romances featuring myself and my favoured crush of the time. I never really contemplated becoming an author as an actual proper career plan but I always had it at the top of my list of ‘favourite fantasy jobs I’d love’ just above Physio for Manchester United and paid chocolate taster. I met my now husband on the internet in a chat room, way back when chat rooms were cool and meeting via the web was a weird and somewhat
unique thing. We’re up to eleven years of marriage now so we must be doing something right. When people ask me how I started writing erotica I tend to blame him. – www.victoriablisse.co.uk
Lexie Bay
I first started writing when I was in my mid-teens. Back then it was pretty tame stuff, more romance than smut, but every encounter ended the same way, boy meets girl, boy falls for girl, girl jumps into bed with boy. My characters had no social restrictions, they took their pleasure where and when they wanted it. My female characters were all beautiful, curvaceous and wildly sexy, everything I wanted to be, and the guys were based on celebrities I was in love with at the time. I suppose as a shy teenager I was living out my fantasies through my stories. As I got older I used my writing to escape, disappearing into another world populated with gorgeous men who fell crazily and recklessly in love with my heroines, men that wanted these women with such a desperate need that it drove them to distraction. The sex was hot and frequent and much more explicit than before. – www.lexiebay.co.uk
Elizabeth Coldwell
I’ve been writing and editing erotic fiction for nearly twenty-five years now, and a lot’s changed in that time. When I first started working on Forum, most of the books we reviewed were either written by men under female pseudonyms or credited to Anonymous – and given the quality of some of those books, you probably wouldn’t have wanted to own up to being responsible for writing them. What really changed things was the emergence of For Women magazine and the Black Lace imprint in the early Ninetirs, both of which proved women had a healthy appetite for consuming and producing erotic material and, along with Forum, launched the careers of a lot of very well known writers in the genre. – elizabethcoldwell.wordpress.com
Jacqueline Applebee
I am one of the few black writers of erotic fiction in the U.K. I write because I never see people like myself in any kind of romantic or erotic book. I’m black, bisexual, a working-class fat woman with a disability. I’ve had over forty short stories and ten longer titles published in the last five years. My work has appeared in books including Best Women’s Erotica, Diva lesbian magazine and Penthouse. Ninety-nine percent of my work is published in the U.S. I’ve had a lot of acceptance and encouragement there, plus now I can convert dollars to pounds without hesitation! – www.writing-in-shadows.co.uk
More images and other interesting projects on www.davidwoolfall.com. David Woolfall graduated with a first class Hons Degree from The Kent Institute of Art and Design in 1996 and proceeded to assist commercial photographers and work on personal projects. He is an experienced award winning editorial photographer based in London, working for international magazines shooting stories and individual portraits. David is also a keen traveller and some of his travel photographs can be bought on line from Eyestorm.