I'm Coming Out About My Mucky XXX Past
It's not what you think it is, or maybe it is.
Ok, so the time has come for me to fess up about my mucky past, something I have kept hidden in the closet for far too long. Be warned, Wendy the Whip will be long any time now. But before she makes an appearance I have to tell you.....
Many many years ago I was working as a freelance copywriter when one day a friend of mine put me in touch with somebody who was looking for a scriptwriter.
What the guy wanted was some scripts for a Swedish 0898 sex line he was running. The money on offer was so tempting It was an offer I couldn't refuse. All I had to do was write a script that took me about fifteen minutes to do (over fertile imagination and all that.).
For this I was paid sixty British pounds. At four scripts an hour I could make 240 pounds. That was far more than I could ever make writing a newspaper ad or a radio or tv commercial. The devil pays good wages, as they say.
Of course, as a happily married father of three I had my mis-givings. But that amount of money was just too much to resist. I could well use that money for the benefit of my family. The next thing I did was speak to a writer friend who was a storyline editor for a famous tv soap. He reassured me that no self respecting writer could possibly turn the offer down. After all, he reasoned, Playboy had some some really great writers in its heyday. That was it, I was sold.
The next day I made a start and to be honest it was just a case of using my imagination and my own sexual fantasies to set about writing titillating scripts. It really was easy money.
The next thing was the government of that time introduced a law stating that the caller had to be warned about the content (which in fact, due to other laws was actually quite inoffensive). This new law merely played into the hands of the people operating the business. They told me to write a warning and make it last between two and five minutes, which resulted in the caller spending even more money on what was quite an expensive line.
All I had to ensure was that I peppered the warning with titillating comments about how a suitably masked, leather-clad, Wendy the Whip would be along anytime now to give the caller a damn good seeing too. I imagine many a caller never got to last the waiting time due to the expense and /or being overcome with my titillating warning.
Those who stayed the course were regaled with something like...
"Right, you grovelling little runt, you may well be the Leader of your country, or, a High Court Judge, but I am going to slap you with Betsy, my trusty leather horsewhip, right in the gonads." SFX Slap, thwack, followed by OW!!! "Take that you worthless little turd, that'll teach not to screw the people."
Eventually the company asked me to write some homosexual scripts and suddenly I had a problem. It wasn't because I was homophobic or anything, it was just that I could not imagine, no matter how hard I tried, what it was that might turn on a gay man or woman. However, I tried as best I could to come up with some sort of story-line. But then the company started to make the thing quite complicated.
What they wanted was for me to write the first part and then give the caller to choose between four different directions the story could go. All the caller had to do was press 1,2,3 or 4. And then at the end of each of those four parts were another four choices.
As you can imagine, having to come up with sixteen possible routes the story could take, it was becoming more trouble than it was worth. I did a couple as an experiment and it was a nightmare. What was more, I wasn't going to be paid any extra for all of the extra work involved. It was at that point I decided to call it a day.
As for the actual writing process, hell yeah at the beginning I had some mental fun fantasising and getting it all written down. However, in very little time I became bored even with that. There's only so much of a good thing anybody can take.
Eventually my writing career broke down completely due to a devastating recession and that was it. But I had learned one very important lesson from that experience, if you want to be a high earning professional writer you can't always be too choosey about what you write.
