“My Dad, the Pornographer”, 2015-02-05 (; similar):
[Excerpt from memoir/investigation of SF author Andrew Jefferson Offutt V by his son, charged posthumously with sorting through an enormous horde of writing, notes, art, novels, and everything pornographic, as Andrew Offutt was more prolific as an author of SF/fantasy & regular pornography than mere SF. Initially a side-gig to make money, it became his passion and secret life, and he saw himself as elevating pornographic fiction, a task to which he brought all his organizational skills in order to publish one novel per month across his many pseudonyms.
How? He kept extensive notes, cross-classified by every fetish & sexual act & plot device & physical description, then developed a draft outline; used items from the notes would be struck out so as to avoid the artistic sin of repetition. The outline would be filled out in 20–40 page hand-writing stints, and the completed novel edited while transcribed on a typewriter, for his wife to make a final edited copy. At his fastest, he could write a book in 3 days.
This was only the visible part of an even more intense and secretive fantasy life, where he made 120 books (4000 pages) of comics using a collage technique, taking art from countless magazines/catalogues, and lightly redrawing or editing. The comics were an outlet for his bondage and sadism fetishes, and he credited them (his son disagrees) as a safety valve stopping him from becoming a serial killer.]
The commercial popularity of American erotic novels peaked during the 1970s, coinciding with my father’s most prolific and energetic period. Dad combined porn with all manner of genre fiction. He wrote pirate porn, ghost porn, science-fiction porn, vampire porn, historical porn, time-travel porn, secret-agent porn, thriller porn, zombie porn and Atlantis porn. An unpublished Old West novel opens with sex in a barn, featuring a gunslinger called Quiet Smith, without doubt Dad’s greatest character name. By the end of the decade, Dad claimed to have single-handedly raised the quality of American pornography. He believed future scholars would refer to him as the “king of 20th-century written pornography.” He considered himself the “class operator in the field.”
…Dad’s writing process was simple—he’d get an idea, brainstorm a few notes, then write the first chapter. Next he’d develop an outline from one to 10 pages. He followed the outline carefully, relying on it to dictate the narrative. He composed his first drafts longhand, wearing rubber thimbles on finger and thumb. Writing with a felt-tip pen, he produced 20 to 40 pages in a sitting. Upon completion of a full draft, he transcribed the material to his typewriter, revising as he went. Most writers get more words per page as they go from longhand to a typed manuscript, but not Dad. His handwriting was small, and he used ampersands and abbreviations. His first drafts were often the same length as the final ones. Manuscripts of science fiction and fantasy received multiple revisions, but he had to work much faster on porn. After a longhand first chapter, he typed the rest swiftly, made editorial changes and passed that draft to my mother. She retyped it for final submission. At times, Mom would be typing the beginning of the book while Dad was still writing the end. His goal was a minimum of a book a month. To achieve that, he refined his methods further, inventing a way that enabled him to maintain a supply of raw material with a minimum of effort. He created batches in advance—phrases, sentences, descriptions and entire scenes on hundreds of pages organized in three-ring binders. Tabbed index dividers separated the sections into topics. 80% of the notebooks described sexual aspects of women. The longest section focused on their bosoms. Another binder listed descriptions of individual actions, separated by labeling tabs that included: Mouth. Tongue. Face. Legs. Kiss. The heading of Orgasm had subdivisions of Before, During and After. The thickest notebook was designed strictly for BDSM novels with a list of 150 synonyms for “pain.” Sections included Spanking, Whipping, Degradation, Predegradation, Distress, Screams, Restraints and Tortures. These were further subdivided into specific categories followed by brief descriptions of each. Dad was like Henry Ford applying principles of assembly-line production with pre-made parts. The methodical technique proved highly efficient. Surrounded by his tabulated notebooks, he could quickly find the appropriate section and transcribe lines directly into his manuscript. Afterward, he blacked them out to prevent plagiarizing himself. Ford hired a team of workers to manufacture a Model-T in hours. Working alone, Dad could write a book in three days.