Author: Exhibit A

I love getting comments here – or on Twitter, or via email – from other sex bloggers and erotica writers. There’s something really nice about being part of a community where people take the time to engage with each other’s work, and I’m often really impressed by the thought and effort that clearly goes into the feedback they give.

However, what I find even more satisfying in some ways are the messages I get from readers who sit outside all of that. Who follow me on Twitter under their real names, or from respectable – even corporate – accounts. In most cases it’s not just that they don’t blog, they don’t express their sexuality online at all – not publicly, at least. Instead they pop up in my inbox, or slide into my DMs, with thoughts, questions, observations…and fantasies.

I love getting messages like that because I’m endlessly fascinated by what turns people on, and by how they choose to express that. When someone sends me a long, detailed email about a really filthy fantasy they’ve had, it almost doesn’t matter what that fantasy involves – the sharing itself is sexy. It’s a gift, I guess. Plus I’m really nosy.

Anyway, I was thinking about that today and I had an idea. Well actually, to start with, I was thinking about this post from August 2014, and the follow-up from September last year. I’d just decided that I should chuck another bunch of my own fantasies into a blog post when the whole thing came together in my head and I decided that there might be a better way.

My fantasies are great. They turn me on, they’re a reliable source of fucking brilliant orgasms, and they’re constantly shifting, developing, and evolving in really interesting ways. But they’re not what I want right now. I want your fantasies.

Maybe you have a blog. Maybe you don’t. Maybe you write about your sex life on a daily basis and maybe you’ve never written about it at all. Maybe I know you – online or in real life – and maybe you’re one of the silent lurkers who click on my blog every now and then but never leave a footprint. Whichever group you fall into – and whether you write under your own name, a pen name, or completely anonymously – I want to know what turns you on.

Or more to the point, what scenario turns you on. Describe it as if we were in bed and you were telling me a story. It could be utter filth – the kind of thing that makes you blush just to think about, and which you might never want to do in ‘real life’ – but that’s not a requirement. Fantasies come in all shapes and forms, and sometimes all we need to get us off is the memory of the last really good sex we had – or the prospect of the next decent shag. Your brain will work differently to my brain, and that’s just fine. It’s more than fine, in fact – it’s fucking wonderful.

Pick something that gets you unspeakably horny and write it down. Try to keep it under 250 words (this is not a hard and fast limit!), and when you’re done, stick it in an email – you’ll find my address on the ‘About’ page. Let me know whether you’re happy for me to publish it – and if so, under what name (if any) – and when I get enough submissions I’ll turn them into a blog post. If I get too many, I’ll turn them into a book!

There’s no deadline on this. Like most of my projects it’s just an idea I had, which may lead nowhere very interesting. But the thought of all your hot, sticky fantasies filling my inbox made me so happy that I had to at least put it out there – I’m genuinely excited to see what sort of response I get.

Something weird happened to me last Wednesday and I’m going to try to write about it, even if I’m not yet sure I’ll be able to find the right words to describe it.

I was life-modelling in an achingly hipster studio/warehouse in Hackney Wick. With the exception of a hen party two weekends ago (which I’ll cover in a future blog post), it was the first time I’d done anything like that for about 10 years – and it was only when I got on the Overground half an hour before the class was due to start that I decided I definitely wasn’t going to chicken out.

Building yourself up to do something scary is often a lot worse than actually taking the plunge and doing it, so once I’d arrived and taken off my clothes I started to feel pretty calm about things; not exactly in my comfort zone, but certainly not so far outside it that I couldn’t relax a bit and enjoy myself.

I don’t like my teeth. I’ve never liked my teeth. The front ones are too big at the top and too small at the bottom. They crowd my mouth and overlap in unattractive ways. They’re just a bit of a mess.

It’s my own fault too. In my early teens the orthodontist gave me a heavy-duty set of dental braces and told me to wear them every night. I knew that it was a precursor to having a daytime set and – scared of being bullied at school – stubbornly refused to play ball. I ‘lost’ the braces somewhere in my room. I skipped orthodontic appointments.

Perhaps assuming I’d come round to the idea further down the line, my parents shrugged their shoulders and left me to it. They’re not instinctively authoritarian anyway, and by that point I think they’d realised that when it comes to stuff like that I really am the proverbial horse, digging its heels in on the edge of the water.