If you’ve been around one of my blogs for any time, you’ve heard The Parable of the Snails. New blog, so I’m rehashing it again.

1986. Mizzou. Creative Writing class. Instructor: Dick Francis, but not that Dick Francis.  Squirrelly and animated little English dude. He surprised the class with his claim to make a practice out of not reading while he was writing.

“Why?” asked the class in a cinematic, monotone unison that only actually happened in my imagination.

Professor Francis launched into The Parable of the Snails.

“The French will eat bloody anything. Most disgusting: Snails. Bloody snails. They buy the live snails at market and they bring them home and put them in a terrarium on their windowsill. For a week, they keep them in the terrarium and they don’t feed them anything but a few drops of wine.”

He leaned back in his chair as if he had made his point.

“What does that have to do with not reading while you’re writing?” asked the snotty brunette who thought me publishing a poem in Plowshares was equivalent to her writing stories for her high school newspaper.

“Why do the French stop feeding the snails a week before they eat them?” answered Professor Francis.

We shrugged.

“Because they don’t want to eat snail shite!” he shouted! “Whatever you feed the snail is the shite that’s going to be in the snail when it comes time to cook them. Whatever you read is the shit that’s going to come out of you when you write. You need a cleansing period or you’ll always be spewing out other people’s shite!”

And that is the Parable of the Snails.

God knows that I was reading Franzen as I was writing the first draft of Selfie. The amount of character backstory I had to later strip out was ridiculous. I keep coming back to the Parable of the Snails because I’m the worst for channeling the style of the writer I’m reading into the whatever I’m writing. It’s not a conscious effort, but I know I do it.

The Parable of the Snails has been on my mind once more. Entangled Publishing is opening an imprint for out-and-out porn. Not romance. “Physical Relationships.”  85% sex, 15% story.  alt.sex.stories-kind of porn.

“I can do that,” I think. “I can even do that from a female character’s perspective. I can do that.”

Then I read the free pages of the example story Entangled holds up as the example of the kind of writing they are looking for.

“Hmmmm,” I think. “This reads way more romantic than pornographic.”

Maybe I should finally break down and read Fifty Shades of Gray. Figure out what women think makes a long bubble bath worthwhile.  Or maybe I shouldn’t.  I hate tropes. I don’t want to write the story that has been written a hundred times before.

My Beautiful Wife and I tried to brainstorm out fresh pair if characters: a plucky, horny heroine and an alpha male badboy character that has not been done-to-death. No cops. No firefighters. No billionaire hedge fund managers.

Man, it’s tough. Laying fresh tracks through a familiar landscape of romance/erotica is tough. And why bother when all you are doing is annoying a readership who just wants the familiar? Hell, Fifty is Twilight fanfiction. A trope of a trope.

I was supposed to have learned my lesson about chasing publishing trends from writing an epic vampire book when I don’t give a shit about vampires. But this Entangled thing…  I can knock out 40 thousand words in three weeks. I did sharpen my erotica skills with Serpent. I honed my female POV chops with Selfie. It’s almost taunting me. It’s like an extended writing prompt.

What do I have to lose? I can always post it to asstr.org if Entangled doesn’t want it.