Lee Goldberg writes:
I was extraordinarily lucky. I sold my first novel when I was 18... then again, calling what I wrote a "novel" is pretentious. What I wrote were a series of "men's action adventure" paperbacks called .357 Vigilante, under the pseudonym "Ian Ludlow," so I would be on the shelf next to Robert Ludlum.
In the first draft of my first book, .357 Vigilante, my hero was impotent, unable to get it up because of all the violence in his life. When I turned the manuscript in to my editor, he was shocked. "The hero can't be impotent," he cried. "This is a men's action adventure novel. Not only does he have sex, he has GREAT sex!"
So I rewrote the sex scenes. I made them utterly ridiculous. They defied logic. They defied gravity. All the hero had to do was glance at a woman and she'd collapse into multiple orgasms. A few days after I turned the manuscript in, I got a call from my editor.
"I read the sex scenes," he said.
I figured what he was going to say next was that the book was rejected and my contract for two more was canceled. I was wrong.
"Not only were they hot," he said, " they were real."
I was relieved...and deeply depressed. If those scenes were real, than my love life was pathetic. Or, at least, more pathetic than I already thought it was.
Lee Goldberg is a prolific novelist and screenwriter. He is the author of the Diagnosis Murder novels, the latest of which is The Waking Nightmare.
