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"I always had good taste in literature, Puppy."
"You always had weird taste in everything, Owl."
June 4 question:
What were some books that impacted you as a child or young adult?
I was a precocious reader. I learned to read Dr. Seuss at the age of four. By the time I was six, I was delving into the twisted mind of Edgar Allan Poe. Scarier still, I understood what Poe was talking about, even with the flowery Victorian prose. I loved it then, and I love it to this day.
That explains the emergence of C. L. Hart, author of dark Lovecraftian (and Poe-esque, and Kingly) fantasy and horror.
On the flip side, C. L. Hart also writes sweet romance. Hard though it may be to believe in these days of cronely curmudgeonry, I used to have a romantic bone somewhere in my body. I still enjoy reading and writing romance, but in real life, I find the idea more fantastical than anything Poe or Lovecraft ever penned.
Now, how do I explain the emergence of Lil DeVille, the Queen of Cheeky Smut?
Well...
We didn't have none of that Internet thingy when I was twelve years old in 1977. We did, however, have libraries. The library in the college town where my family lived was always busy, so, unless the title was something completely blatant like Sixty-Nine Spicy Sex Stories, the librarians were too busy to consider the appropriateness of the book for an impressionable young mind.
Oddly enough, I wasn't particularly aroused by the over-the-top steaming hot subject matter, but it was fun to read. The fact that I wasn't supposed to read it made it even more of a kick. It also added a new twist to the fan fiction I wrote.
If any of you ever find said fan fiction, I'll have to kill you. It was very cringy self-insert stuff written by a lonely teenage girl who didn't entirely have a grasp on what she was writing about, but she had a lot of fun writing it.
I wrote three types of fan fiction: buddy stories, sweet romantic stories, and Tsar Bomba-level melt your pants and your eyeballs stories.
Those are still the kinds of stories I write. The steamy ones are no longer as cringeworthy. At least I hope they aren't! I strive for over-the-top levels of heat, but I also incorporate realistic considerations.
I hope you enjoyed this post. As I always say, if men don't find me either attractive or handy, they should at least find me mildly amusing in a warped sort of way.
Ornery Owl Has Spoken
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