Jaime Clevenger's Blog
September 25, 2021
One Weekend in Aspen: Navigating the murky waters between erotica and romance
The line between erotica and romance…
One evening in late spring 2020, I was at my desk typing away on my latest manuscript—One Weekend in Aspen—when a question popped into my head: What was the purpose of this story?
Most of the time when I get an idea for a book, I don’t pause to analyze it. I simply jump in and enjoy the wild ride that the characters take me on. Which is why it hadn’t occurred to me to worry about the fact that I was setting a light romance at a sex party until I was about half-way to a finished manuscript. Can a book have a mid-life crisis? As it turns out, yes. Should that happen at a sex party? Well…
Now I could argue that I was writing One Weekend in Aspen simply because my brain needed a vacation and a real one wasn’t happening. What better way to take a break from homeschooling two kids while juggling a day job than to escape each evening to a sex party? Plus, given the craptastic year we all had, giving readers a little fun wasn’t a terrible excuse either. Still, the answer seemed more complex than this. But before I’d tackled my novel’s existential question, another more dire question followed: Could I even pull off a light romance set at a sex party? Two strangers walk into a sex party…Sounds like the opening for an erotica, right? And yet I was pretty sure I was writing a romance.
While plenty of important questions were posed in 2020, this is the one that claimed space in my mind: Where is the line between erotica and romance? I’ll admit I don’t generally like lines. Or rules. Or categories. Heck, I have trouble even picking my pronouns. That said, I can appreciate why lines exist as well as the beauty of folks who can adeptly blur them. But I was still at least ninety percent sure I was writing a romance despite the setting. To convince myself, I decided to dig deeper.
For the rest of the blog, please visit my website:
https://jaimeclevenger.com/blog/
One evening in late spring 2020, I was at my desk typing away on my latest manuscript—One Weekend in Aspen—when a question popped into my head: What was the purpose of this story?
Most of the time when I get an idea for a book, I don’t pause to analyze it. I simply jump in and enjoy the wild ride that the characters take me on. Which is why it hadn’t occurred to me to worry about the fact that I was setting a light romance at a sex party until I was about half-way to a finished manuscript. Can a book have a mid-life crisis? As it turns out, yes. Should that happen at a sex party? Well…
Now I could argue that I was writing One Weekend in Aspen simply because my brain needed a vacation and a real one wasn’t happening. What better way to take a break from homeschooling two kids while juggling a day job than to escape each evening to a sex party? Plus, given the craptastic year we all had, giving readers a little fun wasn’t a terrible excuse either. Still, the answer seemed more complex than this. But before I’d tackled my novel’s existential question, another more dire question followed: Could I even pull off a light romance set at a sex party? Two strangers walk into a sex party…Sounds like the opening for an erotica, right? And yet I was pretty sure I was writing a romance.
While plenty of important questions were posed in 2020, this is the one that claimed space in my mind: Where is the line between erotica and romance? I’ll admit I don’t generally like lines. Or rules. Or categories. Heck, I have trouble even picking my pronouns. That said, I can appreciate why lines exist as well as the beauty of folks who can adeptly blur them. But I was still at least ninety percent sure I was writing a romance despite the setting. To convince myself, I decided to dig deeper.
For the rest of the blog, please visit my website:
https://jaimeclevenger.com/blog/
