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 root 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 remember 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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