Pam Rosenthal GuestBlog: Who'd Object to More Hot & Happy Sex?
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From Michelle: So delighted to be welcoming back Pam Rosenthal to round out Erotic Romance Week. Pam's "Almost a Gentleman" (Brava) is one of my top 5 favorite novels, and Pam simply is one of the best writers of erotic romance. Her books are enormously sexy, yes. But it's the way she ties us to the relationships between her hero and heroine that makes us roo
t for their happily ever after, and revel in their powerful sexual exploration and expression right along with them. Please offer Pam your warmest T.G.I.F. buongiorno...
From Pam:
"But do you think, David, that we shall ever make love in a way that is not quite so . . . combative?"
"I think that we shall make love in every conceivable way in the lifetime we'll spend together. Now go to sleep. I don't want you dozing through your first view of my countryside."
It's a passage from "Almost a Gentleman," my first published erotic romance (2003), just reissued this week in mass-market paperback, with a sexy new cover and a svelte new price.
I can still remem
ber how much I enjoyed writing that passage. The lovemaking a few pages before had indeed been "combative," as well as (dare I say?) hot:
Each of them dared the other to go further - with eyes wide and shining, bodies taut, and senses ready to be astonished, they coaxed each other into new positions, each with its profound or novel sensations, its possibilities for new and daring intimacies to be stolen or granted. He nibbled her ears, stroked her eyelids...
You'll have to buy the book to get beyond earlobes and eyelids. But what I love about erotic romance is how it challenges an author to develop both the emotional and physical sides of an encounter, to make all facets of a scene reflect, enrich, and complicate each other. Emotional and physical; mind and body: you can't have one without the other - and why would you want to, in fiction any more than in life?
It's great to write hot explicit sex, but it's also great to probe the characters' responses to it. It gave me enormous pleasure to show Phoebe's surprise (and also a hint of her anxiety), in contrast to David's buoyant self-confidence (or was it overconfidence? I
wanted the reader to wonder). As affectionate as their little goodnight exchange was, I hoped the reader would understand that this couple wasn't "home" yet. I hoped she'd want to follow them on their journey - not just into David's countryside - but toward reconciliation and discovery.
And who'd object to some more hot and happy sex along the way? (Which scenes are - at least for me - their own reward to write.)
What a challenge, a privilege - and what fun - it is to write in so rich a subgenre.
And so my question to you readers is: Do you think that erotic romance has changed and/or developed since 2003 when I wrote Almost a Gentleman? And if so, what do you think of the direction in which it's gone?
Pam Rosenthal blogs about erotic writing at The Spiced Tea Party and historical romance at History Hoydens. Pam writes erotica under the pen name, Molly Weatherfield.
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comments
Whoever wrote that song should be hung over a pool of sharks by his thumbs or better yet forced to live in my shoes for a week. :o\
I'm sorry I missed last week. A lively erotic talk would've gotten me out of this holiday funk I'm in.
After reading all the posts this week, I'm REALLY hoping for that Amazon/B&N/BAM gift card. The wonderful authors and awesome discussions have convinced me that I've got alot of catching up to do.
I'VE BEEN A GOOD GIRL, SANTA. HONEST. :oD
When Kensington first bought the mss, I'd had Phoebe (before she met David), not just sleeping with the boy prostitute Billy, but with Billy and his colleagues, Jamie and Jo. But Kate Duffy, my editor said it had to be just one boy prostitute. So Billy it was.
Anyway, in this current w.i.p. I'm writing, I'd had a hell of a time with one of my subplots (this one takes place a few years later). And it seems that the way I solved it was to let Jamie back in (or a more grownup version). And he grew up these past few years to be both hot and the solution to my plot.
I'm for bed! Ciao, Bellas. And grazie mille, Pam!
The thing I love about Pam's books (and indeed about Pam herself) is how smart they are. The characters, the situations, the dialogue. She writes very deeply, IMO.
And cyclops8, I've got a question for you. When you started reading erotic romance, did you go for the historicals or contemporaries. And why?
I think erotic romance/erotica has matured a lot in the last few years. We've seen it go from ePub/small press (with the scandalous *gasp* "you write s*x" reaction) to mainstream acceptability.
I know there are a lot of people who still think erotic romance/erotica is not romantic, but I think they're missing out on some damn fine romance. On top of that it's allowed women who read the subgenre to become more accepting of themselves and helping them come to grips with their own sexuality by indulging in fantasies without embarrassment.
Monica
I seem to be buying a lot of Christmas presents for myself in the form of books at the moment, and forgetting to buy the gifts I'm supposed to be buying for other people! LOL
And don't forget Brava, Stacy, in your list of erotic romance pioneers. But I think you're right about the big impact of both Red Sage and EC.
And yes, I do plead guilty to being "intellectual." It seems to me that many women have a romance story at the core of their imaginations, and that it doesn't matter how "intellectual" they are or aren't (my romantic sensibilities probably made it easier, rather than harder, for me to get a handle on authors like Proust, Joyce, Flaubert, Colette, Doris Lessing). And I don't know why that isn't simpler for commentators (both pro and anti romance) to accept.
As for when I started reading erotic romance (or at least what I would have defined as erotic romance at that time), back in the 80's and 90's as a teen, I read books by authors like Bertrice Small and Susan Johnson and even one by Thea Devine. At that time, and that age, I didn't find anything wrong with it, but knew it wasn't what you'd normally read in most romance novels.
From my perspective as a buyer of romances, I think the erotica/erotic romance really started to, ahem, explode, with Red Sage Publishing's Secrets anthologies and also when Ellora's Cave started to write sexually explicit material and really gave ebooks a shot in the arm. As it has evolved, I agree that the choices offered to readers now is extremely varied and more and more mainstream. Readers aren't hesitant to buy these books in the store.
I think you may have hit the nail on the head there, Michelle, because that certainly seems to be what they're putting out as erotica in the US, whereas it's really unconventional erotic romance, with erotica as a different beast entirely, especially in the UK.
I think the main way things have changed since 2003 and earlier is in the convergence of women's erotica and erotic romance. Until quite recently I didn't read very much romance, now as the books get hotter, I'm more tempted by their content.
Love the new cover for Almost a Gentleman, Pam. The old one put me off for a long time as it's rather garish and wallpaper like. I'm glad I took a gamble on it regardless. It was a really enjoyable read.
The Spiced Tea Party
That looks like a very fascinating blog post, but I'll need time to read it in depth in order to do it justice. I'm ashamed to say I'm not a great theoriser on the dynamics, craft, history and politics of erotic writing. I'm pretty much a seat of the pants, hope for the best, 'if it feels right, it probably is right' storyteller! :) I do actually own a copy of 'The Other Victorians', as I once considered writing an erotic novel set in the Victorian era, but I never got around to actually starting that project, and have only ever very lightly skimmed the Marcus book.
One of these days, I'll read it properly though. Promise. :)
Portia, I have to read your stuff. I've heard wonderful things about it. And Monday, when I hand in my draft to my editor, I'll be a free woman. (Of course, I have to read Atonement, so I can see the movie, but after that, I'm yours...
And I'm fascinated by what you have to say about the axes the market creates to chart various sorts of erotic fiction. "Female" vs "male" oriented; sex stories vs love stories; US vs Britain. I'm also blogging about this stuff at The Spiced Tea Party today (http://thespicedteapartyblogspot.com). Once again, once I hand in my draft, maybe I can straighten out what I think.
cyclops8 and bellegjw -- it's still funny for me to think of myself in the mainstream (perhaps because I'm also an old, reconstructed hippie). When Almost a Gentleman first came out, there were people who were shocked, that my heroine had had sex for pleasure before meeting my hero. So I think a lot has changed.
Like mis-labeling and different perceptions of what 'erotica' and 'erotic romance' are. I think 'erotica' means something slightly different in the US to what it does in the 'UK'. And, to the muddy the pond even more 'erotica' is a term that can cover books for women and books for men. 'Erotica for women' is quite different to erotica written for men, and certainly when we talk about 'erotica' here, we're almost always thinking of the sort written for women, aren't we?
Maybe in the US 'erotica for women' and 'erotic romance' are quite close together. Whereas in the UK, there's very little indeed in the way of a publishing concept of 'erotic romance', so books that have fallen into that category in the past have been labelled 'erotica' and grouped with books that actually *are* 'women's erotica'. Black Lace is now categorised as 'erotic romance' although it's not so long ago that *it* was labelled 'erotica by women for women'. And the only other erotic romance imprint I can think of in the UK is the epublisher Totat-E-Bound [for which I also write!] Other publishers may exist, and major houses may publish individual titles of what we understand as erotic romance, but they don't label them as such and there are no 'lines'.
Ack, I'm rambling on and on again, and yet still not quite coming to any concrete conclusions... it's the story of my life! LOL