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Today’s another fun question…for me anyway.

16. Do you write romantic relationships? How do you do with those, and how “far” are you willing to go in your writing? 😉

Hell yes I write romantic relationships.  Have you not been “listening” to me wax on about it during the previous fifteen days?  Gah!

Romance is at the heart of all of my novels.  I enjoy writing the first meet and building the tension.  Beyond that, my boundaries are set by the sub-genre and targeted market.  I am always willing to spice up or tone down as necessary to comply.  For example, I entered my 2009 NaNoWriMo novel into the Mills & Boon New Voices contest in the “warm and cosy” category.  That category ranges from virginal to the naughtier bits occurring behind closed doors, so to speak.  My novel was not originally written that chastely but neither was it drenched in steamy sex.  I knew I either needed to add more heat to enter it in the Contemporary or Passion categories or tone it down for Warm and Cosy.  I chose the latter because 90% of the story was about the tension between the two characters’ personalities, not between their legs.

I read romance/erotica that ranges from Victorian to pornographic though I probably lean more toward romance than erotica.  Biology without emotion gets boring really fast.  It’s like when I ask my husband what a certain porno movie was about (according his “sources”), he always lifts an eyebrow and in a “duh” tone of voice says “f*cking”, only he supplies the missing “u”.

“I” never want to write anything so quickly summarized.  That’s why I have an alter ego who writes that kind of smut for me.  She doesn’t write very much because she’s not very good (yet) but she has her own website with a few salacious bits posted (mostly excerpts she stole from my novels that I cut because they were too graphic or gratuitous).  Nothing worth sending anyone over to peek at, trust me on this.  She keeps saying she’s going to write an entire novella or novel but she has yet to make good on that promise.  Nevertheless, I feed her my more prurient ideas as she’s failed to come up with much on her own.  It’s really quite embarrassing.

However, she has her limits too.  Hers is all M/F (though she says she’s not averse to throwing in an extra M or two), no BDSM, no fetishes, no dub-con, no beastiality, no incest, no juveniles, none of what the mainstream erotica publishers say “no” to.  She also says “no” to cowboys, sheiks, politicians and pirates….not that there’s anything wrong with those…