Let's Talk About Sex, Part II

Okay, so it's a day late. But hopefully not a dollar short.

Your responses to the first post on this subject made me want to write a second. However, now that I'm actually writing it, I'm not exactly sure what it was I wanted to say. I feel a bit like a car that has a funny noise right up until you get it into the mechanic's shop, at which point, it stops making it!

However, one of the questions I asked was about the differences between the "genres": romance versus erotica, erotic romance, and romantica. Alice seemed to think there wasn't a difference between the last three. I have no idea, since I've never read anything that fell into any of those three categories! But I have read that one of the distinctions between romance and the other three is supposed to be in how graphic the language is. The more "dirty" words, the more "erotic" seems to be the theory.

The problem I have with that definition is that it seems to me that mainstream romances these days pretty well include all the dirty words, although perhaps at a slightly less frantic pace! In newer historicals, at any rate, c*cks and clitori abound. And frankly, I prefer that to the "manhoods" and "members" and "hoods of Venus" I remember from the romances I read two decades ago.

Another question I had was about whether or not the degree of explicit sex we're seeing now in romances and the related genres will ever ramp back down in popularity. Lacey asked whether there were ever that many sweet, traditional romances. Well, aside from referring to Jane Austen, I do recall the first romances I read were contemporary Harlequins and the hero and heroine never did more than kiss until they were married, and even then, the references were pretty oblique. I got bored of those pretty quickly, but it does seem to me that those kind of stories wouldn't be publishable now except, perhaps, as inspirationals or by very small market presses and e-publishers. I could be wrong about that, though.

Lainey has it right when she says romance is all about emotion. though. I couldn't agree with that more. I do feel, however, that a well done love scene demonstrates and amplifies emotion in ways other types of interactions between the hero and heroine can't. And if it's really well done, a love scene can even heighten, rather than relieve, sexual tension. Which is probably why I like them!

And as of yesterday, I finished writing "the Big One" in Living In Sin. I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out, too. Is it explicit? Oh yeah. Is it emotional? Damn, I hope so. Does it up the ante between the characters? Definitely, but in ways the reader might not completely understand until she gets to the next chapter.