If you don’t like to read about sex, and people having sex, or people thinking about sex, or people talking about sex or talking about having sex or thinking about having sex or wishing they were having sex…
If you are not in the mood to read about sex…
Please don’t read my books. Because most of them, right now, feature a lot of sex. Some of them are better than others. Some have more sex than others.
But I’m going to let you in on a teensy weensy little secret…
It’s in there ON PURPOSE.
I didn’t just toss in the sex because I wanted to jump on someone’s bandwagon or as part of a trend. I’ve been writing about sex and with sexual content for years. I happen to like it, or else I wouldn’t do it. I happen to think that all my published work is the best I could produce at the time I wrote it. (Again. Some is better than others, and I have my opinion as to which is which. If I didn’t grow as an author I wouldn’t be very good.) But all of it was written on purpose. None of it was just tossed in to suit some fantasy market “need.”
I have written the books I wanted to write, the way I wanted to write them. I happen to believe that Dirty and Broken could have been written as non-erotic books. Then they would not have been “erotic novels.” They would have been something else. But guess what? I didn’t write them as something else; I wrote them as erotic novels.
ON PURPOSE.
Why? Because I felt it suited the book and the characters and it gave them motivation and depth and they had reasons for doing what they did and wanting what they wanted. I wrote about the sex because I felt it was necessary to tell the story the way *I* wanted to write it. Yes, I said it. I wrote the books the way *I* wanted them to be written.
And I happen to be very damned proud of them both. As I am about the others that are coming after them.
Sexuality is a very deep well from which to dip a drink. It can slake a lot of thirsts. Most of us do it. Most of us think about it. And you can choose to disagree with me, but most of us use sex for more than just satisfying our need for pleasure, or have at one time or another used sex for something beyond the need to scratch an itch.
Here’s the thing.
I also write books without so much sex. And I wrote them that way on purpose, too. Because guess what? They’re not erotic novels.
So if you don’t like erotic, and you don’t want to read erotic, then find something you do want to read, okay? Life’s too short to waste your time reading (on purpose) books you don’t like.
If a book’s got naked people on the cover and the words “EROTIC” anywhere on the cover, that’s a pretty good indication it might have a lot of sexual content in it. Whether you find it erotic and sexy is a matter of taste, to be sure, but you surely won’t be able to claim you didn’t know what you were going to find inside the pages. Just put it down, and walk away. There are other books to read in the world, some of them will even be mine. And they won’t all be labelled erotic.
–M
PS. And yes, by the way, if I write sex I do hope it turns people on, the same way I hope a scary scene would frighten them or a sad one make them cry. I have no trouble admitting I want to tantalize all the senses.
Oh. And PPS — I won’t apologize for liking to write erotic fiction.
August 30th, 2007 at 9:17 pm · Link
Hi Megan.
I loved this post. I’d had a similar conversation with someone recently. The gist of it was she’d said “That could have been such a good book without the sex.” *groan*
I think, in some stories the sex is a completely necessary piece of the puzzle. The characters sexual journey makes/made them who they are. It influences their decisions, quirks, and their very future. Without seeing that part of themselves they’d be two dimensional and the story would suffer.
Elle, from your book Dirty was like that. Her sexuality was part and parcel of who she was. Sure, her tale probably would have been a good story without the sex, but it wouldn’t have been true to her.
I’m looking forward to more of your work, I think you have a story tellers soul.
August 31st, 2007 at 7:12 am · Link
Maybe that book could have been a good book without sex, but it wouldn’t have been THE SAME BOOK.
And I do not actually argue that some books DO have too much sex in them. It’s inappropriate. It’s just tossed in there willy nilly. SOME books, yes. Absolutely. And if someone feels my book had too much sex and not enough of something else, that’s their opinion and that’s fine.
However.
If you pick up a book that’s clearly labelled as erotic fiction, you should expect that it’s got a lot of sex in it.
You might not find it sexy. I’ve read some like that. You might find the sex poorly written, or boring, or not a turn on. That can happen too.
But if you pick up a book of EROTIC fiction, and you wonder *why* it has so much sex in it, that’s just lame.
And if you pick up one of MY books that are called erotic fiction and you insinuate that I wrote it as erotic merely to fit a trend or tossed in sex because I didn’t know what I was doing, I’m going to take offense.
You don’t have to like my book. But don’t assume that because something didn’t work for you that I didn’t intend for it to be exactly the way it was. You don’t have to like what I chose to do. You can think I didn’t succeed with my choice of content or point of view or subject matter: you are welcome to think that my skill as a writer or plotter didn’t meet your expectations.
But do not assume that my books are anything other than what I intended them to be.
M
August 31st, 2007 at 10:17 am · Link
Insinuating that a writer “wrote to fit a trend” or “just tossed sex in” is very arrogant on the part of the assumer. I won’t even comment on the assholic nature of a person like that.
To pick up an EROTIC novel and complain about the sex is just plain stupid. What else would one expect? And why would one pick up EROTICA if they didn’t want to read graphic sex in the first place?
To say erotica has too much sex in it is like saying “That action movie would have been great if no cars blew up.” or “That murder mystery would have been just perfect without a murder.”
The list goes on and on… a sci-fi without aliens, a high fantasy without a sword, a slasher film without blood, a documentary without facts, a comedy without a joke, a sitcom without a laugh track… point made ?
I think I’m kinda sick because I find it all oddly hilarious, not that someone was so blind and nasty as to suggest you wrote such rich, vivid tales simply to fit a line, but that they can’t see the forest for the trees.