I was desperate to get out of Facebook as they transferred me to the night shift, away from my friends, and took me off White Power, which meant removing all my reasons for staying — and none of this because I was a squeaky wheel, even! Just because that’s how bad they were at this!
I got ghostwriting in my head from a friend and former freelancer, and did a little digging. Turned out you could even get ghostwriting gigs doing fiction, which really get me going: After 15 years at TWoP I write about 2000 words an hour and edit as I go, which means anything that’s a numbers game, I can weaponize. And fiction? What a great way to write without risking anything of myself; without being the face of anything.
The first person I contacted was here in Austin, and wrote sci-fi—seemed like a cool fit. But his entire catalog got nuked the same week we started talking, due to various internecine Amazon seller bullshit that is a fascinating rabbithole on its own.
The second contact was a shadowy group of what I believed to be middle-aged women working out of the East Coast who wouldn’t tell me what I’d be writing or who I would be writing for — just that it was “niche” and I might not be okay with it. I knew from my own adventures in self-publishing what Amazon would and would not allow, and surmised there was nothing on my no-no list that wasn’t on theirs. Could I be writing porn?
They asked me if I knew what shifter mpreg was. I answered that, based on my knowledge of the internet, I’d guess it was about gay werewolves fucking each other and getting each other’s male bodies pregnant.
They said “You nailed it.” I said, “I think I can do this.”
I quit Facebook immediately, before I’d even locked it down, and bought audiobooks of several bestsellers. The sci-fi guy, I knew who he was so it was easy to get ahold of his work. I fell asleep in the afternoon once and woke up in my living room in darkness, with a disembodied voice describing sex with an alien bug queen.
“Tell me you’re mine,” the Queen hissed, a claw raking across her breast.
They still wouldn’t tell me which werewolf author I’d be, though, so I bought a handful. And in the greatest summer of my life, I played Fallout 3 and listened to werewolf porn all day, for weeks.
My favorites were the Navy Seal series by Noah Harris and the Mercy Hills Pack series by Ann-Katrin Byrde, and I hoped I would be one or the other of them. I joined both their mailing lists, looking forward to the day when I would get an email to myself, from myself, about a book I didn’t know I’d written.
When I told them my idea for my first book, they told me I had revolutionized the genre. I wrote it, under the working title Lunar Heat, and they hated it. We rewrote, but I could tell it was going to be bumpier than I’d expected, putting myself into this new shape. So much of me wanted the words to flow free, the way I’d trained at first TWoP and then with my fiction serials.
But I did get an email about it, from myself to myself, and celebrated that day more than I had in months or maybe years. And that’s how I learned who I was: Noah Harris, a then 28-year-old bisexual boy living in Brooklyn who enjoys bicycles.
The second one was working-titled Instructions for Planting the Second-Chance Garden, and included a bevy of children named Poppy, Huckleberry, Rosemary, and Bodhi, which my friend Will says is how you would be able to tell that I wrote it. I maintain that it’s a very good book, and I’m not making money off any of this anymore. But I stand by that one, it’s a beautiful story and also contains my greatest creation, a commune leader named Goodboy Miller, whom I based on Bowe Bergdahl.
After that we moved me to “outlines,” which means making up stories and series, and so for a while I was the actual Francine Pascal. I created at least five series and fifteen more standalone books, which were then ghostwritten by people more skilled at the particular requirements of that job, which I never did get a handle on.
The thing about mpreg is that it’s just about the most conservative genre there is, because it’s overlaying basic gender roles onto an all-male framework. There are the wolves that can get pregnant and the wolves that can do the impregnating, and the concern is about babies and daddies and ending up alone. Our biggest audience was army wives.
And here’s a thing you may not know about me: As far as I’m concerned, that’s my perfect fit. If I’m going to be writing eighth-grade level romance with spicy bits, it might as well be the kind of stories I’d read if I were reading them, and my whole relationship with men was for a long time based around my desire to have kids. I had walked backwards into my perfect job, to be honest.
Which is why, when the wolves came to my door again, it was a particularly ugly irony. Once again I had created a living wage out of literally nothing, and this time I was doing it without risking myself at all — or even spending the time on writing the actual stuff! Purely the creative impulse, that Knight-of-Wands Aries/Pisces-cusp project-starting spark is my birthright. Finishing projects is hard for everybody, I think, maybe less at this point for me than most. But it’s not natural.
They kept me on as long as they could, for a precarious business with high profits and a lot of moving parts, but ultimately my contract with the werewolves ended. A very sad day, but not an opportunity that I particularly grieved — at this point it was all the frustration and disappointment of failing once again, as a kind of writer, crossed with the violence of letting someone, anyone, down.
…I don’t have much to add to this story except that I own paperback copies of most of these books now so I can look at the covers and remember when I was in charge of werewolf sex.