Sometimes when I’m telling people about my first book, 101 Kinky Things Even You Can Do (which is coming out in October and which you can preorder now!), they ask, “Did you pitch that idea, or did the publisher ask you to write a book along those lines?” The truth is, it’s kind of neither. Or maybe both.
The commissioning editor at Laurence King Publishing asked if I’d like to have a phone meeting about possibly writing a sex book for them. I didn’t really know what kinds of ideas she would go for, in part because she didn’t really know; LKP had never published a sex book before. I prepared a few ideas before our call, and hoped for the best.
When I told her the ideas I had, none of them were quite right, but as she told me about the kinds of projects she’d worked on for LKP, these words jumped into my brain: “101 unusual kinks & fetishes.” I spoke them aloud almost as if they had been foisted on me from some superconscious entity beyond our human realm of comprehension, and the editor said, “YES! Something like that!”
Several back-and-forths later, the idea had been transformed into something more basic (and more marketable): 101 kinky things even you can do. (The “you” there is implied to be a beginner to kink, or perhaps a curious vanilla person – although it’s also intentionally open-ended.) I signed the contract, and just like that, I’d started working on an introductory kink book – something I’d never set out to do, or even imagined I would ever do.