Career Alternatives for Attorneys: Erotica Writer/Editor?

onJanuary 15, 2009 at 12:06 PM

In our occasional series on career alternatives for attorneys — i.e., things you can do with a law degree that don’t involve working for a law firm as an associate or contract attorney — we’ve already touched on the writer/author career option. But when we happened upon How I Went From an NYU Law Student to a Smut Writer, we couldn’t help but return to entertaining the idea of book-writing as an alternative career.

Admittedly, Rachel Kramer Bussel never actually became an attorney, as she dropped out of NYU Law before completing her J.D. She recently guest-blogged on Jewcy, a “premier Jewish media and entertainment outlet for progressive free-thinkers.” There, she explained why she traded the Bluebook for blue balls books:

Today I want to share how I went from an NYU Law student to the editor of 24 anthologies ranging from spanking to foot fetishes to exhibitionism to crossdressing. You could say it’s all because of Monica Lewinsky. She was the protagonist of my first published story, called “Monica and Me,” written circa 1999. It was a fantasy about, well, Monica and me, about what would happen if I (or rather, my narrator) met her at a booksigning.

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From Pilot and Above The Law

Thanks to Google Books, you can read an excerpt from Monica and Me. Warning: After she described Monica as “ever-luscious” in the first paragraph, we found it hard to continue reading.

I took something true (my crush on her) and turned it into fiction for a book of celebrity sex fantasies called Starf*cker. That was just as I was leaving law school, uncertain about my future (I never graduated from law school). I went on to work at various administrative jobs, and kept on writing in my spare time. I wrote and submitted and [sic] erotica story every few months, many of them true, about my budding sexual explorations, and found getting published to be a thrill I fast became addicted to.

In addition to writing and editing porn, she teaches writing workshops. Bussel claims that you can eroticize just about anything. She says that two of the exercises in her workshops are “write a story involving a chair, and write a story involving George W. Bush.” The chair seems easy, but putting Bush in a porn story is just wrong. Right?

If you’re thinking about a foray into porn writing yourself, we offer an exercise of our own. Write a story eroticizing a massive doc review, your managing partner, and creative billing codes. Good luck!