Confessions of an Aspiring Pornographer follows a man from Brooklyn in the 1970s who aspires to make his mark in the publishing industry. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

Two disparate directions come to mind that somehow merge to inspire the story contained in Confessions.

First is my life partner, my wife, desiring to know more about my past in the publishing industry of the 1960s & ’70s. She had heard tidbits and wanted to know more. Flesh it out, so to speak. We were in Florida caring for her mom, who I loved, and one ordinary work morning, Ellen said to me: “I’m going to tell you once: “I want a book from you titled: Confessions of an Aspiring Pornographer. ” It was scary. I had no alternative than to do as she wished. Love was at the root of it, for her and her mother. So I went ahead and wrote the book. It’s dedicated to her.

The second direction is the frightening truth of street life in Lower Manhattan in the middle of the night, where the Aspiring Pornographer finds himself at the beginning of his life free of the conventions of home, marriage, children, mortgage, and insurance. He is homeless, broke, and a fledgling writer. These are the conditions in which he must make himself into a published writer. But then, slowly, he gets lucky. A few angels find him a place with a roof. He finds a job in a paperback publishing company with a talented copy editor who is willing to teach him. The material Wally works on is soft-core pornography. One job is for a priest who wants and pays for a book about women with gargantuan breasts. Wally Gregory is on his way.

Wally is an inspiring writer who will take fame in whatever form he can get. What were some driving ideals behind your character’s development?

If keeping a roof over his head and one square meal a day are ideals, then those are Wally Gregory’s ideals. At the same time, he came up with a background and education in what was called “Literature.”
He was educated in an Ivy League college with a major in the literatures of French, Russian, and Italian. On his job, however, a practical, learning enterprise for him, he gladly will write books to order under assumed names. One is Memoirs of a Whore by Anonymous. At the same time, Wally begins to write for himself in the middle of the night, before going to work.

What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?

The high-wire act between the themes of Aspirations and Realizations. Realizations, most often racy, appear in Italics. Also explored are different forms of love. The love between Wally and his Ma, for example. She is a Mute, they communicate through sign language and their hearts, which was fun and a challenge to write. Overall, the love I felt in my heart throughout the writing transformed into a desire, in the end, to make things turn out in a positive, uplifting way. I.E., Wally’s Ma gets her greeting card business, and Father returns home.

What is the next book that you are working on, and when can your fans expect it to be out?

Volume Two of Aspirations of an Aspiring Pornographer. Early stages. A year or two. It’s still fun. Thanks for asking,

Thank you, everyone. God speed.

Author Links: GoodReads | Website | Amazon

Call him Wally. Walter Michael Gregory is a literary rogue peddling his prose and amours around 1970s Manhattan. He talks like Frank Sinatra sings, he writes truly, he is a lover par excellence, and he will charm you with his bawdy confessions.

Raised in Brooklyn by mobsters and his doting mother, Wally recounts his idyllic childhood and how he came to be such an amorous soul. Now stepping into life as a young man about town, he establishes himself in the Greenwich Village literary scene and sets out to find work, any work, in the publishing industry. What he finds is the heady rush of hobknobbing with the greats and the tough truths of working for a living. Forced to live off his literary wits, Wally finds interesting work as a copy editor, encyclopedia writer, and literary pornographer. If he can dodge lovers, hunger, meteors, and a lurking bengal tiger of his own imagining, he might realize his dream–cashing in with his prose and feeling like a writer.

From his boyhood in Brooklyn to the pastimes and pitfalls of a bachelor’s life, join Wally on this jaunt through his consciousness and a bygone big city, big book era.