A not so brief history…

Writing is more than my passion,
it’s an obsession.
The stories crowd into my head.
I write them down so I can get some peace.

According to my mother, I was writing stories — or rather, drawing stories, before I began Kindergarten. Any pencil, pen or crayon that I could get my grubby little hands on and any piece of paper with with the smallest amount of blank space became a place for me to draw my little picture-stories about mermaids with long beautiful tails, witches who could fly and wild horses.

To this day my mother likes to gleefully recite, the tale of how I cried over losing a particularly good mermaid picture that I had drawn on the back of the phone bill. The lady who took the bill had thought it was wonderful too, but she couldn’t give it back. The copier had yet to be invented at that time.

I published my first story while I was still in High School.

On a whim, I wrote a nice little horror story about a ghost dog and revenge against his murderer, and entered it in a regional contest. It was quite lurid and more than a little gory.

As a competitor, I had several strikes against me. The main one being that the competition was Regional: there were entries from every public and private school in the Tri-State area. To make matters worse, I was only a C average sophomore competing against against straight A seniors.

Note: I asked my English teacher to give me an after-school crash course on punctuation, paragraphing, and writing dialogue. Once I showed her the draft and told her it was for a story contest, she surprisingly did.

I took the Grand Prize, and was published in a magazine.

I was thrilled, and my mother was stunned. So were my teachers.

It was 1980, and I was 16.

It was a very heady experience seeing my name in print. It had been my first try; my first finished, printed story and I had won first place.

I immediately wanted to see my name in print again. I already had a new idea, and thought my first story could use improvement.

Then I discovered that winning had disqualified me from ever entering the contest again. I was crushed. For once, I wished for second place.

I started writing that new story anyway — and discovered the horrors of the manual typewriter. After struggling with the fact that I had to RETYPE Every Single Page to correct one mistake, I gave up and went back to writing in notebooks with an erasable pen that had just been invented.

My career as an author started
because of the Computer.

I began writing seriously in 2000 when I got my grubby little paws on my own personal computer; a battered laptop that barely supported windows 95 and Word 98.

The sheer joy of not having to retype whole pages because of one mistake cannot be underestimated. Nor can the pleasure of moving whole paragraphs around as needed.

Also, with the internet; the world’s largest public library, research on any subject my heart desired was only a browser query away.

The Information age is truly a writer’s paradise.

Like most authors, I started writing simply because I couldn’t find the stories I wanted to read.

I began to submit short erotic fantasy and erotic supernatural stories to Literotica.Com where I had access to volunteer editors.

Strangely enough, my stories were well received. Even better, people wanted me to write more. Fan mail is a wonderful thing!

I discovered the paying market of eBooks when Extasy Books asked me to submit my stories to them. That’s when I discovered that what I was writing was Women’s Adult Pulp Fiction – more commonly known as: Erotic Romance.

The rest is pretty much history.

Morgan Hawke