So, you might’ve read some of my stories or listened to one of my podcasts and wondered, ‘Who is this guy?’. Well here I am to tell you.
So I’m a gay erotic author based in Melbourne, Australia. I’ve lived here all my life. While I’ve done some overseas travel, Europe and two trips to the USA, I wouldn’t say I’m well-travelled. Yet. I’m only in my late-30s so, now we’re over this pandemic, there’s plenty of opportunity for travel on the horizon, and travel over the horizon.
Liam Williams is my pen-name. While I’m proud of the work I’ve created so far, and aim to create down the track, it’s generally something that wouldn’t be too well accepted by certain people in my spheres. I still have a ‘day job’ at this stage and a family and so don’t want any issues coming up because of that. A few of my close friends and a couple of family members know and I’m looking forward to the day when I become a rich best-selling author (that happens in erotic fiction right?) and have to come up with an excuse as to where all this extra money is coming from. That is a long way off as I continue to build what was a hobby into a business.
I’ve always been a creative person. In high school I studied music and visual arts. My grades would suggest I didn’t enjoy my literary subjects as much. In fact, my final year literature teacher did suggest that, to my mother, in a parent-teacher conference. But the grades were more an indication of my less-than-studious approach to my schooling, not a lack of enjoyment. Through the latter years of high school my best friend and I wrote sketches, inspired by the likes of Monty Python. They had a similar absurdity but I’m not sure of their appeal as comedy. We found them funny at the time anyway. We even wrote and produced our own school play thanks to a very encouraging Vice-Principal at the time. I watched parts of that play recently and while it’s immature and utterly absurd, there are hints of some writing chops there. I think. Hints of some acting chops too. But they were quickly quashed by the tactics of the ‘drama boys’ at my school. Yes, I’ll admit it, I felt intimidated by the ‘drama kids’.
When moving on to university, I briefly toyed with the idea of studying creative writing as part of a course that combined all of the creative arts I had enjoyed so far, music, visual arts and writing. That lack of a studious attitude meant the entry requirements were well beyond me but it was fun to think about. I ended up choosing more of a ‘career’ course and did enjoy that career for a number of years. I’ve had a couple of career changes since, including running my own business. That took up a lot of my time but I managed to enjoy writing as a way of breaking away from the grind of small business ownership, a form of escapism many avid readers would be familiar with.
But I’ve skipped ahead. I always loved words, their use and their power. I was a voracious reader as a kid. Thanks to Mum for that trait. That has carried through. I still love reading now. I enjoy the escapism of reading fiction. The idea of being transported somewhere else. I’ve always read with an analytical slant, fascinated by the choice of words or the structure of a sentence. Impressed by how a good writer can make a decision or a change that creates an emotion or sets a scene.
As a young reader, I would devour R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps books. This led me to more horror fiction. The first sex scene I remember reading was in one of Stine’s Fear Street novels. It was just a blow job but I remember it being the first time I’d noticed anything sexual in books before. It might have happened but I don’t recall it. After that, I got into Stephen King of course. But then my uncle introduced me to Richard Laymon. His book Funland, which I read in my late teens, features the second sex scene I remember reading. This one stood out for me. It was more detailed and more graphic than others I had probably read. But that wasn’t what started me onto writing my own erotic fiction.
My university degree and the job that followed meant that all of my energy in composing with words was spent on essays and then work documents. I didn’t really think of writing anything creative for at least 5 years after the radio serial I wrote just after graduating high school. But I was exercising and using the dirty part of my creative mind. In online chatrooms, I discovered cybersex chat and roleplaying chat. Doing this I was creating characters and situations and describing actions. This is probably where my dirty imagination took hold, grew and developed.
Alongside this I discovered Literotica. Probably from searching up ‘gay stories’ on Google. The more I read, the more I enjoyed. But the more I found good stories the more I found stories that weren’t so good. Then the point came where I said to myself, ‘I reckon I can do this’. So I did. I wrote a couple of short stories that may still be floating around that website somewhere, under an old account. I didn’t even have my penname then. That was almost a decade ago now.
There’s been a fair journey between that first story, Jack’s First Blowjob, and now. Jack’s experience was, interestingly, with a female. But I’ve pretty much stuck to M/M content since.
The slowdown that came with Covid in 2020 gave me a lot more free time. I wrote a couple of new stories and reworked some of the old ones. I spent a bit of time planning and refining my ideas and my writing skills. This led me to launch the podcast. The growth in that audience is what gave me the drive to think that I could actually make something out of this writing thing.
Thanks for joining me on the journey. Thanks for reading the blog and reading my stories. Signing up for my newsletter is the best way to keep up to date with what’s coming in my writing world. If you’d like to learn more about the Proud Bators Podcast, check out the Bator Blog on the site.