Writer By Accident—Erotic Romance Author By Surprise

I didn't start out to be a writer. My writing career was literally a by-product of a hoped for career as a nature and travel photographer. Even though I worked full time in Los Angeles in the television industry as a production manager, my passion was photography. My dream was to visit marvelous and interesting places, take stunning photographs, have them published, and even sold in galleries. I had a couple of minor successes with my photos appearing in magazines, but nothing of consequence. I came to realize that I had a better chance of marketing my photos if I wrote magazine articles to accompany them. That led to a few more publication acceptances.

Somewhere along the way I discovered, to my surprise, that I really enjoyed the writing process. And that's when my emphasis switched from photography to writing.

I didn't want to write the sweet, traditional romance where a chaste kiss was the answer to pent up sexual tension and desire. There is definitely a place for the sweet romance within the genre and it has lots of followers, but it wasn't right for me.

My first published romance was from Silhouette's Desire line, the most sensual line they published at that time. After having five books released from Silhouette Desire, I had my first romantic suspense published by Harlequin's Intrigue line.

I've always loved mysteries and romantic suspense seemed like a natural combination to me. Whether it's romance where the two main characters become involved with a mystery or a mystery where they become involved romantically, having the romance and mystery together ups the ante for those characters. There is more at stake for them than merely solving the crime or unraveling the puzzle. They now have an emotional investment with each other and the need to protect that growing love. It adds new elements to the story and complications that wouldn't otherwise be there.

My fifth Silhouette Desire was in the final stages of editing when I was told to add another love scene to the book. What? At this stage of the production process I'm supposed to add a love scene in a manner that doesn't make it read like something just stuck in there? As it happened, I had the perfect place to add it. In fact, that was what I had wanted to do when originally writing the book because it was a natural progression of the story. That editorial directive told me they were increasing the heat level for the line.

Even though the sensual content had been increased, I eventually became frustrated with the imposed need to use euphemisms in love scenes and polite terminology that seemed to me to be out of place for the contemporary times and not realistic to the circumstances, whether the situation was a love scene involving sex between two consenting adults or a verbal clash between two angry gang members on the tough city streets. Although hell and damn were acceptable words, they certainly weren't realistic dialogue. That's not what you hear street gangs saying, or the bad guys in a mystery. Not even what you'd hear the good guy cops saying when interrogating a bad guy. Their terminology and dialogue would be much more realistic.

And that brings us to 2005 when I discovered the eBook publishing world while attending the RWA national conference in Reno, Nevada. ePublishers pushed the envelope and didn't impose unrealistic restrictions on their authors yet they still retained the elements that made a story a romance.

Graphically writing the realism of sex is usually referred to as erotic. To some, the word erotic has an unsavory connotation like something you'd purchase under the counter in a plain brown wrapper at an adult book store. But the reality is that erotic romance has two characters working through the obstacles of a relationship, whether it's the internal conflict of emotional baggage from the past or external conflict of what's going on around them, to achieve the ultimate goal of love and happiness. The same process the writer puts the characters through in the sweet and traditional romances. Erotic romance can be part of any romance sub genre such as paranormal, fantasy, historical, etc. They all have the one ultimate goal of love and happiness.

How do things stand now in the romance industry? It appears that traditional print publishers have taken a cue from the realism of eBooks and have accepted that there is a large segment of readers who want their romance books to include erotic elements. They now have erotic romance lines offering up much of the same type of reality that ePublishers provided from the beginning.

And that's how I got from taking nature photographs to writing erotic romance. I still do photography and not all my romance writing is erotic romance. In fact, a have a romantic suspense scheduled for release in January…DÉJÀ VU from The Wild Rose Press, a NON-erotic romantic suspense that caters to my love of mysteries.

And the beat goes on…