Okay. I’ll be the first to admit that I am not an erotic
writer. My face burns up just thinking about it. It took me a long time to even
decide to write sex scenes into my novels. To be honest I’m more about the
romance within a novel than the sex, but sometimes the characters making love
helps to emphasize the romance. For me the characters dictate the story and in
my last five novels they told me that they wanted to get it on.
I’ve been talking about my initial drafts of A PerfectCaress. Once I lightened the story, and actually put in a conflict, my very
patient editor at the time told me that some of the scenes were more kinky than
romantic. Now this shocked me because I’m one of the least kinky people you will
ever meet.
It turned out that I may not be kinky, but Lanelle’s best
friend Toshia was. Let me tell you a little bit about Toshia – she’s one of the
funniest characters I have ever written in my life. The woman had no filter and
I loved that about her. I had actually based her and her job on one of the
women I used to work with years ago. This woman was honest, funny, sexually
aware, and didn’t give a rat’s ass about what anyone thought about her because
it didn’t matter. Even to this day I think about her and laugh.
In drafts one and two of A Perfect Caress, Toshia throws and
anniversary party and tricks Lanelle into inviting Dante to the party. Toshia
has a Candy Shop at the party (we’re
not talking Twizzlers and gummy bears here- aka sales of sex toys) and things get a bit kinky in the
scene- at least verbally.
In the third draft I toned down Toshia’s wild ways and
remove the Candy Shop – a scene that I found both hilarious and embarrassing
for Lanelle. Toshia is still funny and a bit unfiltered in the published
version of A Perfect Caress, but she isn’t as scandalous as she used to be.
Can kinkiness be romantic?
