From Mainstream to Erotic

I have a confession to make: I love sex! Okay, so I’m willing to bet my confession isn’t that big of a deal. I imagine the majority of the population of the world loves sex - if they didn’t we humans wouldn’t be here right now. But for the last seven years I’ve been writing my romances for the mainstream market, meaning that though my novels had steamy, even explicit love scenes, I never went overboard on the sexual language. So you can imagaine my surprise when my editor at Samhain suggested I change my steamy love scenes to erotic. Erotic? What’s erotic? (I kinda felt like Ralphie in the movie A Christmas Story when Santa suggests he’d like to have a football for Christmas. "A football? What’s a football? . . . Wake up stupid!") So now I was suddenly in a panic. I don’t know why, since I’d read tons of erotica, had been reviewing it for Historical Romance Club for the last couple of years. I knew exactly the kind of terms they use. But I was in a delema. I had to revise my entire manuscript, which included rewriting my love scenes, transforming them into erotic. My editor said I could go either way, but knowing that erotica was selling like hot cakes and had even taken the big NY Publishers by storm, I knew it was the direction I wanted to go. But what to do?

I have always felt that the love scene in a romance is the culmination of love between the hero and heroine. Making them explicit would just be plain fun. But now I had to decide what discriptive words to use. I was already using c**k (as in rooster), but I had always shied away from p***y (cat), instead using other discriptive words that merely beat around the bush (no pun intended LOL). However there are certain words I would never use, just because they aren’t sensual or romantic enough for me like c**t and d**k, etc. So after turning to my fellow writers at my HHRW chapter, and getting many great suggestions (thank you Ladies!), I was ready to convert from steamy to erotic. It was actually an odd experience changing the language, like I was loosing my innocence in a way (which I haven’t had in years) and yet at the same time it was very liberating. I do have one rule though: Whenever a love scene is in the heroine’s POV, I make sure her thoughts are more innoccent, especially if she’s a virgin and it takes place in the 1100s, as opposed to the hero: an older man with experience who seems to be horny as hell. *grin*.

So now I’m fully in the erotic frame of mind, ready to edit my past stories and write future ones for the erotic romance genre. Will I ever return to sweet, steamy mainstream? Only time will tell.