I have a confession.

I don’t know exactly when I started writing erotica. I know when I noticed — one evening, I was reading back through a journal I’d kept for years and realised that, what I’d thought were diary entries had quietly become something else. The observations had turned into scenes. The scenes had acquired characters. The characters had started making decisions I hadn’t planned for them. And I still hadn’t fully understood what I was doing.

I grew up in a family with modest dreams and modest enough means. It wasn’t long into my adult life that I realized “good enough” wasn’t going to be enough for me, especially sexually. I had dreams, desires, cravings and needs that most couldn’t understand. I was called a radical and worse. I learned to shut out the noise and to live true to my heart, chasing my dreams.

Over the years, I’ve lived in a lot of places. Not visiting — living. The kind of living where you learn the unspoken rules of a place, the ones nobody writes down because everyone already knows them. What you can want. Who you’re allowed to be. What kind of desire is acceptable and what kind needs to be folded away and kept private.

Every culture has its version of this. They’re all different. And the longer I spent moving between them, the more one question kept surfacing:

Who decides?

Who decides that desire, between consenting adults who want the same thing, needs to be policed, hidden, or ashamed? Who granted that authority? I’ve looked for the answer in temples and in bars, in conservative drawing rooms and progressive cities, in marriages that lasted forty years and affairs that lasted one night. I haven’t found a convincing answer. What I’ve found instead is this: the rules are always local, always contingent, and always presented as universal truth.

I stopped believing in universal truth a long time ago. I believe in people. In what they actually feel, when they’re honest enough to feel it.

Life has not been gentle with me. I say this not for sympathy — I’ve never been particularly interested in sympathy — but because it’s relevant to what I write and why.

Heartbreak has many shapes. I’ve encountered most of them. The romantic kind, yes — but also the kind that comes from watching something you built fall apart. From discovering that people you trusted had a different understanding of loyalty than you did. From having to start over when starting over was the last thing you had energy for.

None of it killed my voice. Some things tried. They didn’t succeed.

I’ve been called a rebel. A non-conformist. Difficult. Too much. I’ve learned to treat these as compliments, which I suspect is what irritates people most about me.

What I know, from having lived this particular life, is that desire doesn’t disappear when you suppress it. It goes underground and finds other routes. It surfaces in the moments you least expect — in the elevator with the wrong person, at the airport in a snowstorm, in your best friend’s apartment on the worst afternoon of your life. It finds its way out.

My stories start from this knowledge. Not from fantasy — from the absolute certainty that these moments are real, that people live them, that they matter.

The journal came first. Then the diary. Then, one night in a city I’ll let you guess at, something shifted.

I’d been watching two people — two strangers. By the time they went their separate ways and I went mine, I had constructed an imaginary romance between the two. When I wrote about it in my diary, it went where it went. I had to stop and take care of what the writing was doing to me before I could proceed.

I ended up writing an erotic story. Then another. Then ten. Then a hundred. I’ve long since stopped counting.

The hobby became a career the way most things become careers — slowly, and then all at once. My characters started leading me rather than following. I’d sit down with an idea and find, several thousand words later, that the story had gone somewhere I hadn’t planned. I’ve learned to trust that. My characters know things I don’t. They always have.

Here is something I will say plainly, because I’m tired of writers in this genre tiptoeing around it:

I love sex. I love everything about it — the wanting, the negotiation, the moment before, the moment after, the conversation it makes possible between bodies that haven’t yet found words. I find it endlessly interesting, endlessly various, endlessly human.

I write erotica because I believe sex deserves serious attention. Not clinical attention — I’ll leave that to the manuals. Serious attention in the literary sense: the kind that notices the interior life happening alongside the physical one. The kind that gives desire the complexity it actually has.

My characters are not bodies moving through choreography. They are people making decisions — sometimes brave ones, sometimes foolish ones, almost always ones they don’t fully understand until later. The desire in my stories is the desire of real people: messy, contextual, shaped by everything that happened before the story began.

I am sexy and I know it. I say this not as vanity but as fact — and because I think women should be allowed to say it without apology. My characters know it too, and they move through the world accordingly. That confidence is not arrogance. It is simply the decision, made once and kept, to take up the space you’re actually entitled to.

I call my readers my lovers. This is not a branding decision. That’s actually how I see you and hope that you love me too. This life isn’t long enough for all the love I can get and give.

When someone reads one of my stories — really reads it, stays inside it, lets the characters matter — something happens that I take seriously. They’ve let me into a private moment. They’ve trusted me with their imagination. That is an intimacy, and I don’t treat it casually.

What I wish I could do is more than send them a story and wait. I want to know who they are. I want to hear what the story unlocked for them — what memory it surfaced, what longing it named, what version of themselves they found in a character they hadn’t expected. These are the conversations I most want to have.

This is why I write back. This is why Sterling Dates exist. This is why I ask the questions I ask in my newsletter — not to gather data, but because I am genuinely curious about the inner lives of the people who find me.

On lonely nights — and there are lonely nights, I won’t pretend otherwise — I think about my lovers scattered across time zones, reading something I wrote in whatever city I was in when it arrived. That connection is real to me. It’s one of the reasons I keep writing.

I will share pieces of myself with you. The places I’ve been, the things I’ve noticed, the questions I’m still carrying. The photograph from the trip that unlocked a story. The sentence that arrived at 2am and turned into something I hadn’t expected. The honest account of what I was thinking when I wrote the scene you can’t stop thinking about.

In return, I’d welcome the same from you.

Tell me what you were thinking in the moment the story found you. Tell me about a time you wanted something and did it anyway, or a time you didn’t and wished you had. Tell me what you believe about desire — yours specifically, not the general theory. I want the particular, not the abstract.

You don’t have to use your name. Sterling’s Circle keeps its secrets. What happens on the date, stays there — unless you want it shared, and even then, I’ll ask first.

What I can promise is this: I will read it. All of it. I will let it matter to me. And somewhere in my next story, something of yours will find its way in — not as data, not as raw material, but as the thing that stories are actually made of: one person’s truth, translated into something that might find another person’s truth on the other side.

Love me and I will love you more.

That is my promise.

Come find me.