Sex and the Local Library

Last Thursday, I spoke to the Friends of the Woodland Library in Woodland, California. It was really nice to be asked and the lovely woman in charge of publicity managed to get the local papers to run about four different articles about me and my books. It's hard to beat publicity like that, especially with a new book coming out in a couple of weeks.

I asked if there was anything in particular they wanted me to speak about and the answer was that they wanted me to speak about romance. It was Valentine's week, after all, and I was a romance author. Great. Easy peasy, right?

Except nothing about these talks is easy peasy for me. My sister is a professor and I swear she can pull intelligent and witty lectures out of bodily orifices in about ten seconds flat. She often points out to me that she has been teaching at the University level for thirty years now, has put together a lot of lectures from which she can pull information and strcuture and simply has a lot of experience with it. I disagree. I think she hogged all the good lecture genes, leaving me with strangely stunted and mutated little things that can't create a linear speech.

So I set to work toiling over my talk. I kept coming back to sex. Why did there have to be so much sex in romance novels? Why has it gotten more explicit? What does it mean? Does it mean that our books are chick porn? How has the sex changed? What's it like to write those sex scenes?

Which is how I ended up standing in front of the Friends of the Woodland Library including, but not limited to, the incredibly adorable teacher of Life Stories at the senior center and my spin instructor from the gym and my cousin's husband's brother's wife, and giving an impassioned salute to sex in romance novels.

And you know what? I think they liked it. I had about twenty minutes of great questions after I was done and sold a pile of books. I don't think they even noticed the giant zit that had sprouted on my chin that morning.