From Fiction to Reality – Getting Kinky For Real by Victoria Blisse

“Just because I write it doesn’t mean I do it in real life.” Is something I hear authors say all the time, in fact I’ve done it too. It seems something particular to the erotic genre that it’s assumed you’ve done all the things you’ve written about. Not so if you’re writing about murders and violence but that is a debate for another day. There’s definitely a whole lot of stuff in my stories I’ve never done. Sex with a vampire, for a start and kissing on a gondola under the bridge of sighs for another and many other things that are purely generated from my imagination.

But what is so bad with doing what you write about anyway?

Personally, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with enjoying sex in any way you want to. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with writing about it either. Sex is a good, positive activity and should be celebrated. However, it’s not quite like that out in the everyday world. Okay, so certain books become ‘the thing’ and for a while people are happy to be seen with an erotic book in their bag but otherwise it’s kind of something a bit dirty that you do in privacy and don’t much talk about. This is an extension of the weird uptightness we have around sex generally. We have such a weird relationship with sex in Britain. In some ways we’re pretty open minded – smutty postcards, Carry On films and innuendoes are all fine but try and be serious about it and all hell breaks loose.

Or it becomes an episode of Jeremy Kyle.

So we hide it away behind closed doors, whisper about it like it’s a big, terrible secret and pretend our sex lives are perfectly normal and average and not at all strange thank you very much. And as an erotica writer I’ve been guilty of this sin. I’ve quickly leapt to say I don’t do the stuff I write about because I was scared it would lose me readers or I might offend someone or maybe it’d get back to my family, my friends or my vicar.

But my life is very different now. My friends are weird, many of them are kinky and they all happily encourage me to be me. My church is welcoming and accepting, no matter what I do I know I will find a welcome there because St Agnes practises what it preaches – love for all, unconditional and all embracing. And my family are brilliant. They might not want to know the details of my sex life but none of them would condemn me for what I do. My world is a far more accepting place than it was only 2 or 3 years ago.

And I’m a different person. I’m more confident, braver than I was and am trying hard to believe in myself. I’ve believed in many things in my life but have struggled to believe in me. Trying to change that has opened me up to trying new things and exploring others that I’ve been curious about for years but been too scared to try. So my journey has brought me to a place where I have experienced pain for pleasure in a real, actual dungeon and I’m not only happy enough to admit it, I’ve written a blog about it.

Finding the Pleasure in Pain at Miss T’s

Now, I’m not saying that you have to have experienced something to write about it, no I believe it’s perfectly possible to write realistic fiction using just the power of imagination. Every author brings a little of themselves to their books though, it is only natural that their experiences shape their fiction. What I am saying is that there’s nothing wrong with living a kinky life inspired by the characters you write and read about.