- I married my husband, and we lived long distance until I quit my job and moved in with him.
- I found out he was cheating but couldn’t leave without an income.
- Writing steamy romance novels allowed me to free myself from the relationship.
Smut saved my life. That sounds like hyperbole, but it isn’t, not really.
I’ve always wanted to be a writer. In college, I surrounded myself with boys who also wanted to write, and I insisted on only writing about “serious” topics that would hold my male colleagues’ attention: war and record stores, hockey and alcoholism — playing at masculinity and refusing to write something as inane as a “love story.” Sold to me on a Disney-shaped platter, love stories were trite at best, pornographic at worst, and certainly not the purview of a serious writer.
Still, I was never alone through everything: writing was my constant companion. And it was writing that helped me get out of a relationship when I needed it.
I moved for my husband
I married my husband in secret at a courthouse in New York City. This elopement wasn’t romantic. At the time, I justified it by telling myself that I needed his military health insurance and that it would be nice to know where he was when he was deployed, but the truth is more complicated than that.
My friends and family would have tried to dissuade me, and I simply didn’t want to hear it: my relationship was a box I could check on a list of accomplishments and then forget about to move on to more interesting things. In this way, I was an active participant in the destruction of a thing I claimed to want, but here’s an even more embarrassing truth: I knew we would divorce when I married him. And I married him anyway.
Most of our marriage was long-distance. I finished grad school and got a job at a theater nonprofit immediately thereafter, and I was content to visit California every few months and call that a marriage. But my husband insisted that I move. It was an ultimatum. So I moved.
I had no job or savings
I spent my meager savings to move from New York to California, leaving my job and support system behind. I was further away from family than I’d ever been, in a city I didn’t know, and as soon as I moved out there, my marriage began to fall spectacularly to pieces.
I was a ghost haunting our 3-bedroom condo; he was gone most of the time, his schedule demanding, and his deployments frequent. I had no friends, no job, nowhere to go, and nothing to do.
His attempts to integrate me into his Navy network were failures. I was an outspoken feminist thrust into a more “traditional” world that was not interested in me, and my husband’s survival depended on his acceptance into that world. It was one of many fissures between us, but it wasn’t the largest.
I also had a feeling he was cheating, and I wanted to get out.
A friend introduced me to the world of romance writing
One of my best friends had been laid off and was looking for freelance work to tide her over, so she answered a Craigslist ad looking for romance writers “comfortable with spice.” So when I messaged her on Gchat and told her that my husband and I had split, that I needed to get out of our condo, and that I had no money, she had a solution.
It wasn’t long before I was writing romance for pay by the word, plus 30% of net royalties. I wrote Motorcycle Club romance, sci-fi erotica, contemporary romance, and paranormal romance. I was drowning in romance.
At its height, indie authors were making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year writing and publishing on Amazon, and my friend and I got on the smut train just before it started to derail.
With an MFA in dramatic writing, I wasn’t sure if I had a novel in me, but I wanted to try. During those months when my husband and I attempted something that looked vaguely marriage-shaped, I quelled my loneliness in the pages of my first book, a fantasy about heartbreak and betrayal that will never see the light of day. But that book’s only job was to exist from start to finish. From there, I springboarded into other projects, projects that would go on to be published under a pseudonym and support me both emotionally and monetarily through my divorce.
I wrote about werewolves and aliens, motorcycle gangs and assassins, bear shifters and panther shifters, hockey players, and cowboys. I was a wellspring of romance; I lived and breathed romance; I fell in love every day with the people on the page, even as my marriage crumbled and dissolved around me.
My pseudonym grew and flourished. I made enough money to pay my rent and then enough to pay my car payment. Then, I didn’t need any money from my ex-husband anymore. Then, I was free.
