Why a Pornography Writer

I knew when I started my novel Hell on Earth that becoming a newspaper writer was going to be Rasmoth’s punishment but I didn’t know what sin would send him to Hell (Earth).

I was going back to Rochester in 1975 for Christmas break with two ex-CSULB students. We were three complete strangers whose only involvement with each other was driving a non-stop, cross-country marathon from about 4:30 Friday afternoon when they picked me up after my last class until 6:00 Sunday evening when we arrived in Bristol, Virginia. You can learn a lot about someone in a 50-hour car ride. Most of it you forget because you never see them again but some of it sticks.

The girl, whose car we would be riding in, was quitting school and returning home to Connecticut. She was having some problems with her fiancé or was hoping to become engaged or wanted to break the engagement off. It was something like that and I only remember that she wasn’t very happy about going home.

The guy, on the other hand, was very relaxed. He had graduated the previous year with a teaching credential much like the one I was working toward and was teaching composition at a local junior college. He also had another job that provided him with a little bit of extra spending money.

He wrote pornography inspired by pictures a publisher would give him. He told me that when he finished a story he would shuffle the pictures and come up with another different story.

The thought of a composition instruction writing pornography on the side had never crossed my mind, and he could have even been making it all up, but once I knew that the job existed, or that at least one person was doing it, I knew that I had found my condemnation-to-Hell sin for Rasmoth.