Naughty Message was my first erotic novel published in America. It grew out of the first novel I ever wrote - Naughty Message Part Two - which wasn't published, but lead to Cocktails becoming my first published novel followed by The City of One Night Stands and Hard Drive - all published in England by Nexus. It was published originally by Masquerade - who went out of business and the book went out of print - and now it's being re-released by the wonderful Blue Moon - July 2004 - it is in the stores now.

I wrote my first novel - Naughty Message Part Two while running a nightclub - One Step Beyond. Running a nightclub was a challenge and full of fun moments with many really cool bands, but it did become a bit of a grind - so I passed some of the dull moments by writing. I knew I didn't want to run a nightclub forever, so developing my writing while the club kinda did its thing seemed a nice way to stay sane. I didn't start out to write a pure erotic novel, but more or a romantic comedy with good sex bits in it - something real mainstream along the lines of Nicholson Baker's Vox.

Having said that I really enjoyed erotica - always have enjoyed wanking off to the Good Bits - and like any aspiring author and pervert - I always thought I could do better. I also enjoyed phone sex. In the late eighties phone sex was booming - I enjoyed calling them to see if I could find really good ones that would play off my wild imagination. Most weren't up to the task, but I did find a few who knew how to spin an erotic tale. Now, me being a rocket scientist meant that I couldn't resist linking the two - I'd done a lot of work in game programming and virtual reality/artificial intelligence work. I'd noticed that the best phone sex I had was when the artiste tailored her chat to meet my desires and fantasies. So I wrote a novel about what would happen if a phone sex service created by a rocket scientist/computer scientist used a supercomputer to store all the world's erotica to be able to dish up the best, wildest, most custom designed fantasy on demand. It was called Naughty Message Part Two because someone once left a really sexy, steamy story on my answering machine and it cut the tale off, but luckily the person called back and began the second call with "This is my Naughty Message Part Two." It was the perfect title and became the perfect plot foundation for the story, plus the subject of many a good wank.

Most of the erotica I read was from England - the Nexus imprint - so I sent off Naughty Message Part Two to them. They responded back that it was a bit too complicated, with too much plot and not enough sex, but I could obviously write, and what I did write about sex was good, so if I wanted to write a simpler, more straightforward erotica novel, they'd be very interested. Well, so much for my mainstream ambition. What could I do but start typing, and the closest thing to me was all the fun and games I'd witnessed running a nightclub and hanging around Silicon Valley's bars - so Cocktails was born.

I put Naughty Message Part Two away. When I wanted to break in to the US erotica market I decided I'd edit down Naughty Message Part Two into three books - Naughty Message, Naughty Messages, Inc. and Naughtier Messages. I souped up the sex and submitted Naughty Message to Masquerade where the awesome and amazing soon to become anal advisor Tristan Taormino fished it out of the pile and signed me up - jumpstarting my erotica career here in the US. Unfortunately Masquerade went out of business before they could publish the full trilogy, but now after my Shoe Leather success Blue Moon is re-releasing Naughty Message - and if it does well then the rest will follow.