Before Zane was a star ... a veteran journalist and published author admits he told his former cyberpal that she would never make it as a writer. Now he just marvels at how wrong he was.

Zane is someone that I struck up a conversation with in an Internet chat room about a decade ago. I had just published my memoir, Waking From the Dream: My Life in the Black Middle Class (Anchor, 1994). Zane saw my book on Amazon.com and asked me for advice about publishing her own work. She told me she wanted to be a children's author, but was having no success with getting New York publishers interested in her fanciful fiction. "Do you know someone, an agent or editor, that could help me?" Zane asked.

There's no greater feeling for a neophyte author than having an unpublished writer look up to you as a mentor. I couldn't resist taking this cyberpal under my literary wing.

Of course, nothing is more humbling than realizing that hundreds of thousands of book titles are published every year and that most of them are destined for the remainders bin. My book was one of them; I think about 1,500 copies were sold, and members of my family bought 750 of them.

But I was the published author, not Zane. So I felt qualified to dispense advice. I asked Zane to e-mail me some of her stuff, which she did. To my horror and amazement, the short stories weren't kiddie fare at all tar from it: they were the most sexually graphic stories I'd ever read. Of course, I'm no prude. I'd devoured my share of Penthouse Forum magazines back when I was a sexually curious teenager. But Zane's work put that pulp fiction to shame and made my eyes bleed.

Zane said writing sex stories would get attention. Her plan was to market her stories over the Internet; a couple of dollars would buy a single story, and a collection of her work would cost about $10. She said people already were sending her money. I didn't believe her. Could people really be so foolish as to pay an unknown and unproven writer with a zany pseudonym for the sort of stuff that you could see in the XXX-rated sites for free, if you knew where to look?

But Zane was on a mission, and she attacked her work with lusty gusto. She spent hours writing. I would see her name on my Internet buddy list at all hours, suggesting she was online doing her thing. Ever so often she would send me a story of two, including gross and graphic stuff about a sorority of black women who had sex as an initiation rite. She sent me one about cheating wives and avenging lovers. She described in detail what these women did, wanted to do and had done to themselves. She called it erotica. I called it pornography.

"Zane," I said in our last online conversation, "I don't think any publisher in New York would touch your work with a ten-foot pole. It's too graphic and explicit. I can't introduce you to the people I know because I'd be too embarrassed."

She wasn't happy with my brutal honesty. "You're too pessimistic," she wrote. "And your energy is negative. I don't have time for that because I'm too busy trying to be successful. Thank you for nothing."

Years later, I was browsing the "new books" section at my neighborhood Borders. I couldn't believe it when I saw it, but it was true: The Sex Chronicles: Shattering the Myth by Zane was a hardcover book on a mainstream bookstore's shelf.

Since then, Zane has self-published many novels and several anthologies of short stories, and she has been picked up by Simon & Schuster's Atria Books.

"Our goal is simple," she writes on her Web site for her publishing house, Strebor Books "to make sure that extraordinary voices are heard and brought to life through the pages of our publications."

There ale two morals to this story: first, follow your passion wherever it might take you. And, second, don't take advice from a failed author.

Sam Fulwood III is a columnist at The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, Ohio. This piece originally ran on his Web log at Clevelant.com and is reprinted by permission. His latest book is Full of It: Strong Words and Fresh Thinking for Cleveland (Gray & Co.).

Kalyn Johnson is a lawyer practicing in New York City and coauthor of The BAP Handbook: The Official Guide to the Black American Princess (Broadway Books, June 2001).

For more information about Zane and Strebor Books International, log on to http://www.streborbooks.com or www.SimonSays.com. You can e-mail Zane at [e-mail]; or write: P.O. Box 1370, Bowie, Maryland 20718.