Going All the Way

Some years ago, a writer friend of mine – a fun blonde with surfer-mom waves in her hair and a smile that made everyone in the room feel like it was for them and them alone – was having a hell of a year. In a good way. She’s a Romance author who’d been writing in just about every Romance sub-genre, including erotica. This was back when “Fifty Shades of Grey” was all the rage, and my friend’s fairly obscure BDSM series suddenly took off like a rocket. Once readers discovered her work, they didn’t stop there. Within a couple of months, nearly all of her romances, regardless of genre, became bestsellers.

It’s such an inspiring story, isn’t it? My heart still goes pitter-pat, like I’m reading one of her romances, when I think about it.

This woman had put her heart and soul into her romances, only making a meh living until gold struck. Yet even during her barely making it years, giving up on her vision was a non-starter. She felt like she was making a difference in her readers’ lives. They told her so – often writing her long letters revealing not only how much joy she gave them, but how much hope. Many thanked her for relieving their loneliness.

When she wrote about people and fetishes that were so far from her own tastes and experiences, she did it with empathy, imagination, and authenticity. She infused her stories with meaning, and her readers picked up on that. It was why, in a crowded Romance market, they kept coming back to her novels. And why, given the right market forces, her books were able to find a broader audience.

All of us storytellers hope for that moment to converge on us. For our cult followings to become massive fandoms, our personal and literary obsessions to ring a bell – maybe bang a gong – that resonates far and wide.

It’s why many of us shy away from writing outside of our usual scope, even when we’re bored and restless, or engage in frenetic jumps from genre to genre in the hopes of hitting a cultural movement. Walking that line is hard, and we writers are always stalking our online groups, going to conferences, and consulting with each other to make sure we’re making wise choices.

“You should write Romance,” my “overnight success” friend told me one day. I’d been telling her how, despite being a thriller writer, my essays about love had always elicited such strong reactions from readers – even the guys. They were and remain my most popular posts, by far.

“You’re made for it,” she said. “And don’t shy away from the dirty stuff. Readers love it when we leave the bedroom door wide open.”

I had no doubt she was right. And I wasn’t just shooting the breeze with her about blogging that day, I was seeking her guidance. I’d been having this niggling feeling that I needed to take a left turn with my writing, challenge myself, do something new. This was back when I was first starting to assemble some ideas around writing a lovers-centered series and I wasn’t sure how far to go in such a venture, if you know what I mean. I had always been the kind of writer who orchestrated the big wind-up, then let the lights dim and handed the heavy breathing over to the reader’s imagination. Granted, until that point, I’d never written a novel that put a pair of lovers as front and center – my stories had revolved mostly around the cloak and dagger antics of Cold War characters and leaned heavily into noir territory.

But sex was in vogue – and not just in the world of Romance. Explicit scenes were creeping their way into Historical Fiction, Sci-fi, Thrillers, and even Young Adult novels – particularly the Coming-of-Age sort that tackled issues of sexual awakening and other rites of passage head-on.

I was hungry to try something fresh and out there. I was open to pushing boundaries.

Still, despite the fact that it seemed like almost every writer I knew was mixing at least a little Oo-La-La into their stories, and getting rewarded for it, I remained hesitant.

It wasn’t because I didn’t like hot love scenes. When done well, they’re magnificent. When done poorly, they’re hilarious, but all the handwringing wasn’t for fear of ending up with a lot of cringey sex in my books. Truth be told, I’d written erotica before – poems, mostly, a handful of scripts, and one short story that I ultimately decided not to publish. Regardless, I knew I could make a go of it.

My reluctance came from the same place as my friend’s enthusiasm. For me, it was a matter of heart and authenticity. Erotica was an occasional hobby, like a few, raucous summer games of beach volleyball. Composing a risqué story was fun and exciting, but it didn’t fit organically into what I had to say as a fiction writer.

My Cold War thrillers, as well as the lovers-centered epic that would become a Historical Fantasy series called BREATH, came from a place within me that I don’t fully understand. Those stories pour out of me – sometimes like a firehouse and other times like a sputter – and I don’t always know where they’re going or what spirit will lead them there.

But I do know that every time I try to write more “to market,” as they say in my profession (this means writing to trends and/or strictly adhering to genre rules), I tend to go off the rails anyway. BREATH is a great example. What began as an intentional Romance series morphed into a Paranormal Romance, a Romantic Suspense, and ultimately into what the story was meant to be all along…Historical Fantasy.

Heavy on history, heavy on heart, and heavy on the otherworldly…just like my Cold War thrillers. I shouldn’t have been surprised.

“Leaving the bedroom door wide open,” as my friend encouraged me to do, felt intuitively wrong as I approached my love scenes. Like a distraction rather than an enrichment.

As I catalogued all of the themes that my own muse has been feeding me over the years – life and death, wars and plunders, curses and prophecies, destiny – I realized how my love stories, the ones that are sideshows and the ones that run front and center, are woven into a pretty intricate tapestry with a very particular aesthetic. Adding sex, even into a highly sensual love scene, would be a bit like inserting a motorcycle chase into a Hans Christian Andersen story. And I love motorcycle chases, don’t get me wrong.

No matter what the new conventional wisdom dictated, or what my wonderful and supportive friends advised, I felt there just wasn’t any room for more by the time it came time to blow out the candles, unzip the dress.

I hoped the importance of a kiss would be enough. The thrill of a touch, a glance, a word, a dream.

Respectfully, I chose to keep the bedroom door closed and leave that part of the love story to the reader’s imagination. Because in the end, I was making a difference in my readers’ lives. They told me so, writing beautiful letters, telling me heartfelt stories. I didn’t want to tinker with that relationship, serve them up something they could get somewhere else and didn’t want or need from me.

But who knows…maybe the muse will change her mind one day?Here’s a short, recent sample of the Cold War noir I’m working on (alongside a new novel in the above-mentioned Historical Fantasy series): Bombay, India, 1959 A single bead of sweat trickled down Rodki Semyonov’s face, pooling at first in the saw-toothed scar on his cheek, then spilling over, carving a silvery path through the grime and soot that clung to his skin. The chill of the stone slab beneath him was welcome, even if it did little to cool him down. The Bombay heat was relentless, even this deep underground. He blinked up at the dripping ceiling, the sound echoing like a funeral dirge through the dimly lit chamber he found himself in. A place so abandoned that even the smells of mold and rust seemed faraway. But maybe that was more to do with Zoya, a woman who had always managed to fill any territory – whether friendly or hostile – that she intruded upon. She didn’t merely inhabit a room, she possessed it.

“Rodki,” she said. Velvet and tinny all at once, it was a voice that had haunted his dreams for two long years.

Zoya leaned over him, blotting his face with a cold, damp towel, letting her fiery hair brush his temples. “You’re a long way from Mother Russia.”

NO IDEA WHERE TO TAKE THIS YET. Likely, it’ll end in passion or death. Maybe both