For Those of You Who Want Clean Romances, Here Are Some Authors You Might Enjoy
I’m going to send you to a couple of romance authors I personally know who write clean romances. These are fine Christian romance authors who are super sweet people.
Historical western romances:
Check out Janet Syas Nitsick.
I actually do have one historical romance that is clean. It’s Romancing Adrienne, and it can be found on this page. (It’s Book 4 in the series.) Just link to the retailer you’re interested in.
For contemporary romances:
Check out Catherine Lynn.
Check out Kristy K. James.
Check out Dorothy Paula.
I do have one clean contemporary romance that I wrote in an anthology under the pen name Barbara Joan Russell. It can be found on this page. Look for the book titled Bride by Design. Click the link to where you want to buy it.
For historical or contemporary:
Kristen Osbourne has some clean historicals and contemporary romances. Read the descriptions to make sure they’re clean.
Also, It’s my understanding that Catherine Lynn and Kristy K. James are looking into writing some historicals. (I just checked, and Kristy does have a historical already out.)
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That all said…
I am going to keep putting sex into my romances. I don’t write clean romances because there are SO MANY already out there. There’s more supply than there is demand. You can go to any retailer right now and find a ton of them. You’ll never run out of clean romances to read. Seriously, you won’t.
However, there are very few romances available where the author has made this promise about every single book: the hero and heroine do not have sex with each other until after marriage. I can find an author who does this setup for a few books, but then they have other books where the hero and heroine have sex before marriage. So I never know what I’m getting when I pick up that author’s book.
But I do make that promise about my books, and I am going to keep true to that promise. The only two other authors I know of who are doing this are Rose Gordon and Carolyn Davidson. I am helping to fill a void that exists in the romance market. This is the beauty of self-publishing. I get to write books that very few others are doing.
And some people have told me they’re glad I write sex within marriage. Believe me, no one was more surprised than I was when I found out I wasn’t the only romance reader who got frustrated in searching for an author who kept sex within marriage for every single book they wrote. I thought I was the only romance reader alive who wanted the hero and heroine to wait until marriage to have sex. The reason I started writing romances was because I couldn’t find the kind of romances I was looking for.
I also wanted more virgin heroes. Man, I can’t tell you how tired I was of finding so many sexually experienced heroes in romances. Like magic, he falls in love with the heroine and changes his ways. Never mind the other women he had gone through in the past. It’s like those women never mattered. And that always bothered me. That’s why if I do have a hero who isn’t a virgin AND isn’t a widower or was forced into a divorce, I make sure to show that the hero’s past sexual pursuits weren’t fun. I give him guilt. He has to realize he used those women for his own selfish pleasure. It was never love. It was lust. I don’t see how any man can use women and feel good about himself in the long run, at least not if he has a conscience.
I’m going to keep putting sex into my books, and I will keep describing the act. In a good marriage, the act of lovemaking brings the couple closer together. That’s all I do in my books when I include sex scenes. I’m showing how they grow closer together. I have a lot of respect for the sex act. I find it beautiful and pure. And that’s how I see it when I write about it.
I understand not everyone will agree with me. And that’s why I listed the authors above. Please, if you’re looking for clean romances, check them out. If you want clean romances, I’m not the author for you. If you pick up another one of my books, you’ll be disappointed, and I want to save you that disappointment.
From now on, if someone asks me about writing clean romances, I’ll just point them to the authors I mentioned above.
