…and writing, erotica that is, moreso. So sez Chelsea Girl:

I’m accustomed to reading books and finding my girlparts moist. The act of reading, after all, has a kind of inherent eroticism. A generally solitary activity, reading is just you and your quiet hands and the fantasy that the words play out in your mind. It’s just one swift hand below your waistline away from masturbation.

The eighteenth-century birth of the European novel was heralded with all kinds of fear that reading would unreasonably inflame the senses of the young with what one critic has termed ‘one-handed reading.’ And justifiably so — by the middle of the century, John Cleland wrote the first piece of English pornography to help him get out of debtor’s prison.

To get out, and one might suspect, to get off, because let me tell you that writing porn makes a person seriously body-needy.

I’ve been writing a couple of commissioned porny pieces: the first for an American soldier stationed in Iraq narrates a soldier’s wife’s experience of her husband’s return and her waking up from a long sexual nap. The second, for an international poker player, gives the story of a secretary being anally punished for habitual lateness.

Who knew that in a pinch binder clips work as impromptu nipple clamps? Me, that’s who.

I’ve found it incredibly hott-making to get inside these character’s heads and bodies. To inhabit the life of a woman who has by necessity put her sexuality on hold and then to find it smacking it upside her fanny was incendiary. It was hard, literally, a hard little wet knot in my g-string as I sat on my desk chair typing, typing, typing this story of this woman’s learning about what she wanted and how she wanted it.

When I finished, the story a crescendo of simultaneous orgasm and multiple penetration, I felt as if I knew her.

And now, immersed in this office fantasy, the rolling chairs, the drawers of pointy staples and rolls of tape, the shredded gossamer of good-girl pantyhose and the imminent threat of discovery, I find my delicate sensibilities inflamed. (Today, while writing, I had to take a break, discover the painful joy of my nipple clamps and come hard and long with my bullet vibe, groaning louder than I’d expected.)

Ah, the joys of literacy!