I’ve been writing erotica for over twenty years. I have some stories on my hard drive that date from the early 1991 or so. I may have written some pieces before then, but frankly I can’t remember and I don’t think I did.

For almost that entire time, it was just for me. Just a way to play out my various fantasies. There is something about the act of actually writing out a fantasy that makes it richer, livelier for me. Not that I write out all of them, of course. Some are just what they are: a scene, a thought, a passing attraction. But those that seem to have at least a small semblance of story arc were always most interesting to me, and those I was most likely to commit to “paper.”

I has also been reading erotica for even longer, back to the days when I would avidly pore through Penthouse Letters, hoping to find one that would fit my particular interests. It was always hit or miss.

Anyway, the internet is, of course, not just a source for visual porn, but also written porn. Indeed, back in the day I am pretty sure I got more enjoyment from the postings on alt.sex.stories than I did from fighting my way through the process of assembling images and later videos from the alt.binaries newsgroups.

But while I was both producing my own erotica and consuming that of others, I never made a real effort to publish any of it. Part of it was that much of what I wrote at first wasn’t very good. It was badly plotted, with poor, or non-existent, characterizations. A few hot scenes perhaps, but very little that might be called clever or interesting beyond simply a concise description of sex.

Part of it, though, was also that I was, for lack of a better word, ashamed of my hobby. I guess I still am, hence the cloak of anonymity, frail though it might be, behind which I hide. But I’ve also gotten to the point where, in the end, if my identity were exposed, I could live with it.

Ultimately, my decision to publish was that I began to realize that what I was writing was actually pretty good, entertaining at the very least. And I didn’t want it to just disappear one day in a hard drive crash or because of an accident to me. I’ve spent a lot of hours writing stories, and in a weird way, I like the idea of them living on electronically in perpetuity.

So about three years about, in December 2010, I created an account on Literotica.com. I publish there under the name misterstan. I don’t recall why I decided on that name. I think I was writing a story at the time with a character named “Stan,” or something.

The stories up there are a mix of old and new, and some old ones that had lain half-completed for years before I decided to revisit them. They are a mix of good and bad. The older ones tend to be weaker in various ways, in my opinion, although interestingly the user comments don’t always track my own judgments. I’ll talk more about that later when I link and discuss individual stories.

Anyway, Ben Boswell is a new stage in my writing. Thanks to the encouragement of Kenny Wright, a brilliant author who writes in some of the same genres as I do, I have decided to try my hand at some longer-form fiction. I have my first novel/novella coming out shortly, and will promote it when it is closer to publication.

Welcome everyone, and I hope you enjoy this blog and forthcoming works of Ben Boswell.