Writing Naked: A Novella
I’d often told myself that I wanted to be truthful in writing erotica but I didn’t want simply to do autobiography (which is perhaps not always truthful)
In “Writing Naked: Letters To Myself” I was trying for a warts and all portrayal of second generation Irish immigrant in England who is happily married but much less than happy with himself – OK so there are strong similarities but none of the details tally – it simply made it easier for me to imagine this man.
There are three stories (Letters) in the sequence “Happy Birthday Kieran O’Connor”, “Innocence and Experience” and “Kissing Kathy Doyle“.
For me, the hardest thing was to avoid adding things that would make the main character nicer or to provide more romance. It’s not that this is a story without love – far from it – but it is the story of a man trying to be brutally honest with himself.
The story won the Rauxa Prize for Erotic Literature in 2005.
Moonlight And Shadows: A Novella
“Moonlight And Shadows” is a story about a man who has braided together love, lust, guilt and anger into a noose around his own neck.
I wanted to understand how a man arrives at the point where he hits the woman he loves and what happens to his sense of self afterwards.
American Holidays : A Novella
“American Holidays” is a set of interlocking stories, each on of which is set in an American Holiday: Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Halloween and Thanksgiving.
Each character gets a story of their own, told from a first person point of view.
One of the challenges I faced in this series is that I am not American. I’ve spent a lot of time in the US but it’s not the same as being native to the culture. I hope that what I’ve written seems authentic. I’m sure there are as many Americas as there are people who’ve been there. This one is mine
The first story in the series, “Memorial Day” was originally published on ERWA and became may first story in a print anthology.
Shortly afterwars, Sussanah Indigo of Clean Sheets, accepted a proposal from me to run a the (at that time, unwritten) American Holiday series on Clean Sheets, with each story being run on the day of holiday.
The whole thing was then selected by Maxim Jakubowski to be in Best New Erotica 4
Mike Kimera's Erotic Fiction 