And if I didn't already prostitute my writing enough ...

It’s a common theme I know, but once again I have come across the issue of balancing my rapacious need for money and capitalist bourgeois-ness (take that Karl Marx – I worked hard for my Jimmy Choos, and I shall have them!) and holding aloft the Nobel Prize for Literature. Because in my head Karl Marx actually gives a shit about high-heeled shoes. And in my head, it is indeed a little gold Oscar statue that I hold aloft, perhaps whilst wearing said Jimmy Choos.

Nah, fuck it. I’ll buy a new pair!

But I digress. (And, incidentally, have just cottoned onto the fact that one gets over a million dollars to win this thing, so this blog quandary has just become moot. But I will press on!)

Yesterday I received an email from a previously unknown (to me) magazine that I rather carelessly sent a story into some months ago. I say carelessly, for I have never read or clapped eyes on this magazine – it is in America, actually – I just happened to google romance magazines for a romance story I’d written (writing prostitution sin #2) and the rest is history. Sort of.

The response started off quite nicely: we think your writing has merit (it was crap, actually – but on purpose, so I guess that’s still quite skilful on my part!) and you have great flair for romance writing (kill me now – I have never even read something from the pulpy romance genre, though a friend of mine used to force me to listen to the sexy bits when she read them out) but we do feel that, before we agree to publish your story, it needs the addition of sex.

Um. Ok.

Please re-write your story to include 1000-1200 words of explicit (but not pornographic) examples of titillation and sex, and we would be happy to publish your story should it meet our stated criteria. With thanks …

Don’t get me wrong – I can write sex. The rest of this story is so blindingly clichéd, the addition of a bit of “titillation” hardly seems problematic at all. But does this start me down a new garden path of ill repute in the field of writing?

If I sell my first Mills and Boon in six months, I’m going to kill myself!

… She writes as his eyes sweep over her crimson, throbbing …

Nah. Sorry folks. Can’t do it!