Carol (Carol Schmidt Series)

by Cook, Lori

  I am also quite happy to discuss my own preferences with anyone who cares to ask. On a personal level I have no hang-ups about expressing what I like and dislike, and that includes the kind of erotica I enjoy. Catch me on a good day and I might even draw you a diagram. However, I work in the education sector. I have done so for most of my working life (I am forty-one), after studying languages at college. For the last few years I have been freelancing. I enjoy the work and the freedom of being able to decide where and when I work. I have always taught adults (if you can call college students adults).

  I work on and off for a handful of colleges, and the departments I deal with are pretty liberal in general. However, no institution exists without some kind of ‘moral’ atmosphere, and issues here can arise in strange and unpredictable ways. A couple of years ago, for example, there was a bit of a problem in a department of ESL (English as a Second Language) in the same building as my own department. One of its tutors posted some photos of himself and his girlfriend on a popular image sharing site. They were in the ‘adult protected’ section, tagged as containing sexual content, and were in fact quite artistic; just two people naked, absolutely nothing more.

  However, word got out, and someone lodged a complaint with the department, a student who, although not actually in one of his classes, was studying English. The complaint was not very specific, in that clearly no laws had been broken, and the department did not uphold the complaint. Yet when contracts (temporary ones) were up for renewal, he didn’t get one.

  Needless to say, the issue was actually about money. The student who had complained was from a foreign country, and the embassy in question had negotiated a deal to bring dozens of students to the college each year. The student’s complaint was that s/he didn’t want ‘pornographers’ on faculty. As a consequence, a tension arose between the department and the embassy, and veiled threats were apparently made to cancel the embassy’s deal with the college.

  See? It’s not always so easy to live a free and open life. There were several important consequences of this: 1) the guy lost his job; 2) he had to stop posting images of himself, and take down those he had already posted; 3) just to get any further teaching work he had to pretend (aka lie) that none of this had ever happened; 4) he had to live in fear that someone would find out; 5) all faculty in the department, and indeed the entire institution, were warned about ‘activities not appropriate for those working in the educational sector’, which affected non-tenured teachers most obviously, because their contracts could simply not be renewed if any issues were to arise.

  What it really led to, though, was a culture of fear, suspicion and distrust. Faculty started blocking their Twitter and Facebook accounts, and generally looking over their shoulder a lot more. That, ladies and gentlemen, was about a few nude photos. Imagine how my position might change of someone got to know that I’d written Carol? I’ve got at least twenty years left to work, and I don’t need that kind of hassle.

  So, reluctantly, I am Lori Cook.

  There is, however, a further reason for adopting a pseudonym. I write ‘literary’ books as well. I’m not very well known, and I don’t know how many more books or stories in fields other than erotica I’ll be writing hereafter. The fact is, I have loved writing Carol, and foremost in my mind is the sequel.

  Even if I never publish anything else that is ‘literary’ in nature, though, I’d like my existing work to escape the inevitable snobbery that would be generated if I wrote erotica under my own name. Perhaps I should be braver, and stand by everything that I write. That might come. Certainly, I cannot see myself caring much about this kind of thing when I’m easing gently into my golden years. But just for now, it would be nice not to have to suffer the tarnished reputation of a ‘literary’ writer who went over to the ‘other side’; not only genre, but erotica!

  So, Dear Reader,

  I remain yours faithfully,

  Lori Cook