Let's Talk about Sex, Baby.

We've never actually discussed sex here. And what erotic sex in romance is and isn't. Sex in romance in general and I mean we aren't going to discuss any books that close the door. We're talking romance novels with actual sex scenes. These books fall in four categories. Yes I said four.

Sensual romance. Sensual romance is sweet and sexy sex, body parts touch, fluids mingle. It's usually short and vanilla. No toys, nothing too adventurous and the language is toned way down. He entered her. Is just about what you're going to get. And I have not one thing against this. I've written sensual romance. I read sensual romance. Sometimes I get tired of erotic and need something light. Or even without sex in it all together. Sensual is usually just that, a nice build up to a hot but not too hot sex scene that fits the plot.

Erotic romance differs from sensual in that the sex goes farther. It's much more graphic, the language is different, the scenes longer. The build up to sex is excruciating. Slow foreplay followed by all out hot and sweaty. Or just hot and sweaty. Cock, Pussy. Fuck. these words get used a lot by the writer, or not. You can be an incredible erotic romance writer and never once use any of the more graphic terms. I've read so many that walked that line between sensual and erotic that I'd just go ahead and push them over into erotic. BDSM without the word cock once. Yeah. I've read that. I like a really good sensual/erotic BDSM book much more than a full out graphic one. Erotic romance is more than just oooh fuck me harder. It involves all of the senses. Sight, scent, feel, smell, touch, and that mental connection of two (or three) people so caught up in each other that the world really could explode and they wouldn't know it. The sex in this type of romance is part and parcel to the plot. And that is what sets erotic romance apart from erotica, erotic romance has a full romantic plot that includes the sex, the sex is part of the story but not the whole story.

Erotica. Erotica is sex. Romantic sex but still sex. It's nothing but sex. Stripper comes to a bachelorette party (or as the Brits and Aussies call it a Hen party which I think is just awesome by the way) stripper and bride hook up for a night of hot kinky sex but that's all it is. There is no happy ever after or what have you. Now I've seen those that don't want to take that leap and add that A at the end of the word, throw in the happy ending, such as the stripper turned out to be the groom and it was for kicks and kinks. Avoiding the cheating taboo and giving it an HEA. I've read some very good erotica. Books so good I pulled them out for....ehem. Okey dokey then moving on. And I've read erotica so bad that its laughable or worse it crosses the line into porn.

Porn. Yes literary porn. Disguised as erotica. It's there. In certain books it's dangerous BDSM written by people who have no understanding of that lifestyle. Tie me up, beat me up, fuck me up books. Or erotica that is nothing but cum dripping from every surface for no other reason than because well, the writer just wanted to write sex scene after sex scene. And yes I've read these too. I used to find little gems hidden in a box of books dating back to the sixties, written by men for men. Pulp fiction at it's oh my god pulpiest. Modern attempts to break into the erotica ranks that goes too far. Some decent if that's what you're looking for. Most of it is really is just like watching a really bad porno with a fat guy and some eighteen year old over sexed bimbo with fake tits, you know real world stuff.

So this is me and my take on sex in the romance world. I like to think that I'm pretty good at setting the scene in both the straight and gay themed books I write. I write with the eye to seduce the character. One seducing the other yet falling under the thrall of the seductee. I've read reviews that include phrases about wet panties. And from guys....lalalalalala. Okay thank you for letting me know and you're welcome. But eep ;-) So I think I'm at least on the right track if not down right good at it. Yes I know the condom issues and the dirty talk that some of you want to hang me for. I know.

Recently I read this article http://www.lambdaliterary.org/features/06/20/book-lovers-whats-it-all-about-alfie/ . It's about the M/M romance genre versus the gay romance genre to which I didn't know there was a difference or that conflict existed. I did however know that until last year straight women who write m/m or even gay romance weren't allowed to enter the Lamba awards. My take on that was hmmm and I moved on. There are other contests out there after all. Anyway, what struck me in this article is this paragraph near the end:

"Jerry Wheeler says, “In order to be true to our identities as gay men, graphic sex should be part and parcel of romance because—let’s face it boys—it’s the natural and logical outcome of gay romance. Love and companionship are part of the deal, but when you really come down to it, it’s all about fucking from the get-go. That’s a generalization, of course, but I think it’s true in more instances than not. And unless gay romance embraces that and celebrates it, there’s an essential component missing.”  Wheeler says, “In a way, it’s literary assimilation—a sacrifice of an essential part of our lives in favor of a wider societal acceptance—and it’s disingenuous.”  Wheeler adds, “And if you’ve ever visited any of the m/m forums, the authors who write this stuff agonize over having to write gay male sex scenes—which totally invalidates their work to me.”

Essentially that last sentence is what caught me the other day and that I'm still thinking about it tonight as I write this means that it hit something that has bothered me for a while now.

Okay without getting into the politics in this genre and sticking strictly to the topic of sex in romance, I'm going to try and see if I can put into words what bothers me most about that sentence with totally inducing mass rage.... A few years ago a young woman, and I do mean young, as in early twenties with aspirations of being a romance writer but without a rudder so to speak decided that she was going to write up a quick erotic story to submit to Kensington for that contest thing they used to do, send in a partial to be read and critiqued yadayada....anyway, I'd just sold my first erotic romance. Coming off of writing sensual romance. She asked my advice on how to go about it, and before I could answer she said you know I'm just going to sit down tonight and write a sex scene and cut and paste it in when ever I need it so that's not a problem thanks. After I picked my jaw up off the floor I told her you can't just cut and paste in sex, you have to work up to it....she'd already tuned me out, and I haven't seen her since, so I wonder how that turned out for her. Anyway, this goes along with what I've read on facebook time and time again. The dreaded sex scene. I hate writing sex scenes someone want to come write this for me. I suck at sex scenes. I don't like writing sex. This sex scene is dragging me down, let's go play words with friends or whatever.

For the record I love writing sex scenes. I build my books around sex scenes. Usually the very first fully formed scene I have in my head is the first sex scene. I don't know anything else about these two people but I know that they are going to have some hot and heavy first time sex in a.....truck, bed, tub, tree. And then I build the story from there. I write erotic romance. I think if I hated the actual erotic part of the romance I wouldn't be able to do the story justice. I can't write a generic sex scene and just plop it in to a story. And I can spot those that do it.

I'm no expert on sex. I've had it. Many times. For going on 24 years. I'm still pretty vanilla in my personal tastes. I'm not going to preach on the evils of sloppy uninteresting sex scenes. I'm not going to preach at all. I'm just going to say that if I buy a book that is listed as an erotic romance and I get one cookie cutter he stuck it in and pulled it out sex scene I'm not a happy person. I don't care what genre I'm reading.

To the guy in the quote all I can say is, well, yeah I know, it's about sex, I've spoken with so many men and tried to do my best to be as realistic as I can, but it comes down to what the confines of the romance genre. The HEA, the monogamous finding Mr. Right story. I think that I've tried to take that step toward real life but I stay with the safe I'm writing for women route. And that's the best I can do. After all it's all just fantasy. But try to write the best fantasy that you can. And really, I mean that, make it real. When you as a writer feel what you're writing then so does your reader. And if the best you can come up with is he pushed it in and pulled it out until they both came shouting each others name...then you need to find a new partner. If you as a writer don't come away from your sex scene with a bit of moisture in the tricot lining then I hate to tell you this, you're doing it wrong.

Mercy

Let It Go cowboy book announcement

I am proud to announce that Liquid Silver Books has offered to publish Let It Go.

Yes I said LSB.

Wicked Game and Double Coverage are with LSB. I love their covers and their staff of editors are absolutely wonderful. I say this because after the last two or three days dealing with me the new Managing Editor there needs a medal or sainthood or something. We won't discuss what I put that poor woman through. It was just me being me but...and she still sent me a contract :-)

Okay and before anyone get's bent, we're talking mid-September ish. Even if I self pubbed it and started work tomorrow to get it done it would still be mid-August before I could get it out. So late summer early fall and coincidentally that's exactly when the book is set. So yes, quality editing, quality cover, and Mercy quality angst cowboy style coming in less than four months.

Now if I can only finish this cop/teacher book and find it a home.

Coming soon major changes to the blog. And a website. And stuff. I'm shifting focus to stuff. Stuff for GRL and stuff for give aways and stuff for promotion.

Lots of stuff coming up.

Mercy

The wheel is turning but the hamster is dead

Yesterday I did a little plea for help and I got a pretty good bit of feedback. Y'all threw a lot of great ideas out that I hadn't even thought about.

First Christy Dukes. You're hired.

Kendall I sent you a message on Face Book.

Karen you are one of several stalk...er fans and new friends from Australia. I think there are a lot of m/m romance fans down under...and that takes on a whole new meaning doesn't it?

I am first going to settle Let It Go once and for all. I can't talk about it right now because it's tentative. But I'll announce something official on that this week. I contacted one publisher. We are not exactly negotiating a contract but working out some minor details before we contract (if we contract) so that what happened with Complicated doesn't happen again. As soon as I have that settled I'm going to make some changes.

Specifically, blogging.

I ran out of things to say months ago. Keeping this fresh and interesting is a full time job. Kendall McKenna whether she knew it or not gave me an idea.

I am searching for a website provider for a more professional look. One that I can have a store and a news page and let someone who knows what they're doing load pics and things. If you know of a good provider who is also cheap...inexpensive please let me know. But I'm not going to shut down this blog. It's established with a pretty big site count. I'm going to change it up. A lot.

I spent all day either emailing back and forth with a managing editor or looking at promo sites that I was pointed to.

I'm sort of excited. I haven't been in a long time.

Would you believe that Double Coverage came out January 24, 2011 and in the last year and almost a half I'm ready to finally go pro.

Me either.

I think the hamster got a shot of adrenalin.

And Christy Mercy's Crew??? I'm not creative either. We'll think of something.

Mercy

Oh and I have another birthday today, Alaina is 17. At least she has asked what I'm getting her nine million times tonight. Her friends are coming over on Saturday and we get to have more cake today...the idea of more cake isn't really appealing right now. Cake overload from Friday, still coming down off that.

That moment when

you feel as if you are just spinning your wheels and not slinging any mud.

If I were slinging mud at least that would be something productive right?
You would think that since I have seven books out -nine if you count the two Emjai books- that I would know something about promoting myself and my books.
You'd be wrong.
How in the hell did you get to be a quasi-popular (which is what y'all keep telling me--I'm going with that here) author in both the straight and M/M categories of erotic romance and not know how to promote?
Uh, hello, I don't know.

I've never been much into hopping around looking for places to talk about myself. I don't know how to talk about myself. Uh, hey, y'all I have a book out. Is about the extent of what I can do. And then it'll take me forever to figure out how to ask to do a guest spot on a blog. I don't even know how to ask the people I've hosted for a return favor.

I am going to do something here and crawl on my knees....Like I haven't done that before.

I need promotional help.

I keep hearing about Street Teams. I want a Street Team. I need volunteers for a Mercy Street Team. And someone to tell me what I need this team to do for me. I'm supposed to have things like book marks and post cards and stuff made up to send out to teams to distribute for me. At conferences or conventions or Pride events. Problem is I don't have anything printed...yet.

I'm thinking about biting the bullet and getting a real website. Me and Blogger aren't getting along. It keeps cutting text from my posts. I don't know why. And I'd like to move on from the blog format to a more professional look. Maybe add a page for book related merchandise. I don't know if I can even do that using my covers. I'll have to see. Coffee mugs or T-shirts. I'd love to do T-shirts. I hate tote bags. Does anyone use give away tote bags?

Ideas, suggestions, volunteers? Advice.

I know I'm pitiful.

Help!

Mercy

and yes I do say y'all

I know I'm going to catch hell for this but....

I've shelved the sequels to In From The Cold indefinitely. This is not to say that they won't eventually happen. It could still work out that I write book three. Right now I'm not even on track to touch book three. So what does this have to do with book two? I don't want to put out a book that ends with more doubts than a HEA. I'd rather leave Cold as a stand alone or wait until I have book three finished before I publish book two. No I haven't been turned down by publishers for the series. I never submitted them to new publishers. I could still submit or self publish later if I get to that point.

So because of this, I republished Cold on ARe and Amazon, just as it was before. Nothing has changed. Cover, story, it's all still there. I've dropped the price to 99 cents permanently. If you haven't had the chance to read it, well, now is the time. IFTC was the second m/m I wrote nearly two years ago, I hope you enjoy it. And uh, yeah, it's not a happy sweet romance, I did bad things to a good man in that book. Proceed at own risk. You were warned!

Click on the cover to the right of the page to find buy links from your preferred retailer.

Mercy

I have no idea what to say today

I spent the weekend writing pretty much nonstop. I haven't done that in a long time. I think I ended up with around five thousand words over the two days. Months of writer's block nearly destroyed me. I averaged about five thousand a day before I let myself be dragged down. Five thousand is a good round number. That's a fifty thousand word book in roughly ten days. I can't do that many words in ten consecutive days. My fingertips tend to swell up when I go on writing benders. Maybe I hit the keys to hard, I don't know. Maybe its the Fibromyalgia, though that's never really bothered my hands. Who knows. I consider thirty days to be a good comfortable time period to write a fifty thousand word.....okay who am I kidding. I wrote Wicked Game, all sixty-two thousand words of it in thirty days. I was a basket case after that. I forgot to eat. I considered bathing and basic hygiene to be detrimental to my plans of world domination. And Wicked Game has proven to be my master piece if you crazy readers are any indication. One I can't live up to by the way. I forgot what my kids looked like that month. And in December I crashed. Seriously, I slept for an entire week once I decided I was finished. I hated that book so much I refused to look at it until March. I sold it in April or was it May. I can't remember. This was too long ago. Nearly two years since that fateful NaNoWriMo.

So this weekend I got into this cop meets history teacher story I've been fiddling with for a few weeks. I even titled it. Crazy From The Heat. It's the story of an undercover narcotics detective trying to keep the zombie making drugs out of the local high school and the history teacher who finds himself smack dab in the middle of the investigation and central to Paul's every waking and sleeping whim. I thought about calling it Hot for Teacher. But i sort of don't want another banned book on my hands. Even if Paul is thirty and not the seventeen year old jailbait that he's posing as. And yes the teacher, Grey, does know before they get involved. Lesson learned. Only push some hot button topics. Leave the rest alone.

Okay so now that we're all caught up, I'm going to go soak my fingers in something like Icy Hot and get some sleep. Tomorrow we're taking the kids down to Gulf Shores for the day. If it doesn't rain. If it rains then we'll just do some outlet shopping or something. Talk to you Wednesday.

Mercy

When I say farm

I've talked a great deal about growing up on a farm. My fun adventures with my grandmother's chickens and hinted at the great okra escapade to end all escapades. Honestly, the okra escapade isn't much to talk about. It's more of a horrific chore assigned by a crazy woman as a way of controlling a willful child. Mercy was a willful child, gasp/ Yes, yes I was. I wasn't a bad kid. I've never been a bad person. I just seriously don't like to be commanded to do things. Command me to do anything and you'll see something. I was this way at three. I used to sneak out of my house when my mother napped in the afternoon to play outside with the boys next door. I remember that very clearly. I put on long pants and socks on my hands, Keds on my feet without socks because I'm from Florida and we don't wear socks if we don't have to dammit. Anyway, I was maybe four at the time and she was probably pregnant with my brother. I didn't want to take a nap so she closed me in my room. I wasn't having that so I schemed to break out. Wearing the above described I crawled on hands and knees down the tiled hall all the way to the back door where I flipped the locks and carefully let myself out into the yard. We won't discuss the whooping I got for that. It was deserved. I was an incredibly willful little shit but on top of that I was devious. They didn't know how to handle me so they broke me. All of them.

The okra thing was a teenage rite of passage. As soon as I was old enough to handle a knife and tall enough to reach the high stalks I was sent into the field to cut okra. Back in the old days this stuff was considered a poison. It's an ugly plant with an ugly fruit. And it's noxious, odious, and any other word for just plain foul. You can't pick it, the stalks are tough you have to cut it with a knife. I'm very good with a knife, I can peel a potato paper thin without breaking the peel faster than anyone with a potato peeler. But anyway, okra once you cut it oozes this nasty stinging slime. I don't like to wear gloves especially when I'm wielding a knife. So there you have it. Fun summers spent on my grandmother's farm doing character building chores that they couldn't pay anyone else to do all because I was a willful child and needed to be kept in my place while that evil bitch sat in her air conditioned kitchen and laughed at me. Not one of my cousins ever did that chore. Not a single one. Just me. The one brave enough to stand up to her. I hate fucking okra to this day.

Now when I say I grew up on this farm I don't mean I lived there. My parents owned seven acres of mostly pasture land not far from my grandmother. We kept between four and seven heads of cattle (cows for you city peeps) on our little plot of land. We also boarded other people's horses. Once we boarded a huge litter of piglets, and wasn't that just fun and games all over the place. I have no problem eating bacon because of those little bastards. Don't laugh, there was that one time in a friggin hurricane that the neighbors donkey got loose and ended up in our yard. Yeah we had to chase that ass down and pen him up until the storm let up. Soaking wet with wind whipping around like, well, it was a hurricane, doing that herding dance that farm kids learn to do. Arms out forming a wall while some big damn animal comes barreling at you and you don't have any shoes on because you were too stupid to go grab some. The goats that we had one year, yeah I hated those fuckers worse than anything. The nanny and the kids were fine, it was that asshole billy that I wanted to see run over. Mean, stinky with horns and did I mention mean. Electric fences are wonderful things let me tell you that right now. He couldn't get through it to get to me and when he'd forget it was there, well, that was always a good day. An even better day was the day my cousin was told not to touch the fence so what did he do? That's right he whipped it out and took a piss right on the electric fence. He never did that again. He was lucky he was able to have kids but he never did that again. But as much as I hated that goat, the meat stayed in our freezer for years. I wouldn't eat it. I don't know what my parents were thinking when they decided that was a good idea. We never ate the animals we raised personally. We sold those and ate anonymous animals from my grandmother's herds. The goats weren't anonymous. I knew them. I might have hated him but I never wanted to eat him.

Now about my grandmother's farm. She is still alive and she still has that damned thing. She's holding it over her surviving children's heads as an inheritance. And it's not a small thing. She is a corporate farmer she owns several hundred acres of land. She farms soybeans, cotton, peanuts and feed corn. Runs about a thousand head of beef cattle and various other farm animalia. One of my uncles owns race horses and has had one in one of the big derbys. He didn't do so well but it was there. One of my favorite things to do when left to my own devices was to rile the turkeys up by sitting on the big gas tank and yelling gobble gobble gobble at the top of my lungs until they all started gobbling back. This isn't a small quaint little tv farm like on Green Acres or Little House on the Prairie. This is a big damn farm with millions of dollars worth of equipment and out buildings. Silos filled with grain. And when I talk about my fond memories of gathering eggs for my grandmother we're not talking a small little coop with a couple or five roosting hens and a cock (rooster). We're talking two houses about the size of a one bedroom cottage each and a quarter acre chicken wired run. She kept about seventy-five hens in each house and I usually gathered about a hundred eggs at a time. I only did this once a week. Those hens laid every day. She sold the eggs the family didn't eat at market down in Panama City. I never was allowed in the other house with the rare chickens, she didn't let the kids mess with them. She was used to dealing with men, farm hands, buyers, whatever. She was an evil abusive woman but I will say this, she worked in a male dominated field and she's outlived most of her competitors. That much I'll give her. That and whether she meant to or not I do have some fond memories of those days, the headless chicken incident isn't one of them but there are a few.

Now about that contest for a print copy of Behind Iron Lace.

Friday. And Friday only. One comment per person. Nothing special, just our regular hot man Friday and one person is going to get a signed copy of BIL. Easy Peasy. What? I could make you go cut okra for it. That shit stings like a bitch. Worse than salt and lemon juice in a cut. And don't rub your eyes because you will be blind for life.....er...nope no torture. I don't do torture. Much.

Mercy

Remember print give away on Friday. Tell your friends.

M