Malcolm Gladwell was dancing to “Kung Fu Fighting” the night that my life changed forever. Perhaps yours would have, too, although Gladwell is a minor footnote in the chance encounter that led to my life as a genre writer.

It was 1991 and Gladwell was the host, along with my old friend Jacob Weisberg, of a ’70s party in Washington, D.C. I gravitated toward the one woman who looked as if she had actually had a driver’s license in the ’70s. We made the usual party chit-chat. When I said I was a reporter, the woman brightened: “Have you ever thought about writing erotica?”

I felt like Sister Carrie on the train to Chicago. But the query was legitimate. The woman was Michele Slung—former editor of the Washington Post Book World and a bestselling writer. Her latest project was an erotica anthology, Slow Hand, and she was looking for submissions. Use a pseudonym, she advised; think of it as a mask. In her experience, women sometimes needed the “mask of genre” to attempt writing fiction at all.

“It pays $1,500 and the deadline is July 1,” she added. Money and a deadline? Those were terms this cheerful newspaper hack understood. I stole a friend of a friend’s funny anecdote about a ménage a trois. Michele accepted it and, two years later, commissioned another story for the sequel, Fever. She also encouraged me to write a novel, promising to give me a ruthlessly honest opinion if I did.

Two erotic short stories had used up all my shades of gray. And despite amazing mentors—Meredith Steinbach at Northwestern University, Sandra Cisneros in a long-running Texas workshop—I had already stalled out on several autobiographical novels for, well, lack of autobiography. However, I loved crime novels and it occurred to me that writing one would force me to overcome my plot issues. It might even teach me how to plot.
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