My first written efforts were, I thought, brave and classy, florid though somewhat sexless. I could never get Billy Jo and her uncle Stubby to go the distance or even to get close. Once, I managed to finesse Wayne and Harlan into the shower together, but the brothers thought it too sterile a setting for real, hometown lovin'. I simply could not abandon the intellectual model. Instead of shedding the trappings of real foreplay -- wit, humor, condescension, flattery -- I fleshed out my characters' inner lives and refused to acknowledge that "issues" make pornography die on the page. Consequently, I could never get my people into bed the way a good porn writer should. None of my efforts made it onto the site.

My editor was patient at first, but soon he urged me to put out or get out. I was frustrated. My other writing began to suffer. I swore to stop writing incest porn just as soon as I ran out of intrafamilial combinations.

And then I gave it one more shot. The story was called "Can I Get You Anything?" It was about a paraplegic aunt and her misunderstood (albeit overage) nephew. The story, replete with catheters, bedpans and an IV drip, went roughly like this: Boy meets geriatric aunt; aunt hurts; boy succors; aunt has colossal orgasms that celebrate her disability and renew her faith in life's many pleasures. It was the vilest thing I'd ever written.

The editor read the story, asked if there was anything I needed to talk about, and then told me that what I'd written was unpublishable. It was "over the top," "insensitive toward the disabled," "disgusting." On a Web site featuring nipple clips and metal gourds, what I'd written was unpublishable. Hard to believe, but I'd sunk lower than the lowest of the low. I was a woman whose sexual dementia rivaled Anne Rice's. I was a woman who "took too many risks," this according to other editors who read and rejected the work.

By the end of that summer, I was dejected. I'd written several more stories, none of which got published. I'd done my "isn't this ironic" bit, but I still came out feeling like a loser pornographer without any published clips. Suddenly, the flip posturing of wanting to be both a great mind and a beastly dolt seemed tired. Suddenly, real-life erotica, with all its complications, seemed more desirable than its bland facsimile.

Come Labor Day, I was amped to rediscover the joys of adulterated sex and chichi literary pretensions. Thankfully, pretensions come easy.

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