My name is Mas, and sometimes I write smut on the internet. What I write is intended to be many-layered – liberational, emotional, thoughtful, political and, oh gosh, gee whiz blush, what many writers and readers are oddly reticent to admit: arousing.

I’ve been writing for a long time, with other kinds of publications in another name. I have a deep-seated appreciation of the power of words. I write about all kinds of things, but sex? Sex is important to me. And so is communication.

I’ll let you into one of my secrets early on: communication is, in fact, my biggest kink. If you read my stories, you’ll find people negotiating and going to therapy amid all the kinky stuff. To me, that may be far more of a transgressive act. There are so many things stopping characters from becoming self-aware. Stopping us.

Speaking truths can be more terrifying than stripping in public, especially if we know what we’re supposed to say and the words fighting their way up from deep down are something different entirely.

I’ll let you into another secret: I added a line back there about how I wanted to make my readers feel and then deleted it, because there’s this weirdness going on at the smutty end of fiction writing – we can say the sometimes unsayable in our stories, but we don’t so easily talk about what we’re doing, or why.

My deleted line went like this: I wan’t to get my reader’s hand sliding inside their clothes… I am curious as to why it was so hard for me to admit this. The central deceit in all this seems to be that our words cannot impact people, we cannot say, as readers, that we were impacted.

But I know words have power. I want my reader to be moved by them, not only getting off to them, although I do put a lot of thought and care into making some of my stories arousing, but moved to tears or anger or deep thought. I also want to make my reader feel safe with me, to trust I’ll take care of them for the duration of the story, even if I take them to complicated places.

Words have power, and I take to heart the truism with power comes responsibility.