I've been putting the wraps on Blood Betrayed the past few days, but in my spare moments I stop over at FB, particularly the erotic authors and bloggers group I belong to, for some writing inspiration. The pics rarely fail to deliver that inspiration, and I can't thank those authors and bloggers enough for the eye candy. Delicious! (Now I wish I hadn't taken down the adult warning on the blog.)
When I write in my other genre as my other pen name, I don't really have to write graphic sex scenes. True, they occasionally come up, but it's not a requirement. If it fits, I write it, but in my romance stories, it's expected since I don't write the sweet stuff. (My mind's too dirty to write the sweet stuff. ;) My books are erotic romance, so there must be sex and the steamier the better it seems, if the comments readers make are any indication.
In my current release, Blood Avenged, there's a scene where I walked a very fine line with Vasilije and Sasa. He's learned of something she's done and has come to kill her. He's a vampire, and unlike other sweeter, twinkly vampires, Vasilije will kill. The fact that he has feelings for Sasa is immaterial. She's crossed him. But she affects him in a way that no other woman has for centuries, so his desire to exact his revenge is met by another desire.
The scene is gritty--and one I was worried wouldn't work for some readers. And it's a long scene, taking up an entire chapter from his point of view and then moving into her point of view for an entire chapter. I generally don't use up that much space with foreplay and the act of sex, but this was different. In many ways, those two chapters show Vasilije more clearly than any others in the book.
I bring this up because while I love those two chapters for their emotion and dark grittiness, I wasn't sure readers would, and it was only on the repeated advice of my editor that I didn't touch those pages and left them as I originally intended. A few reviewers have commented that they didn't like the scene (but in truth, they didn't like Vasilije, overall. I think that says more about their taste in men than the book itself, though.), but in a recent review, the reviewer mentioned the scene as one of her favorites. She seemed to misunderstand other parts of the book, but I was pleased she saw the scene for what it was.
Sex can be a difficult thing to write sometimes, especially if your characters aren't working with you or you're working against them and their natures. The sex scenes in Blood Avenged weren't difficult because I knew exactly what kind of characters Vasilije and Sasa were and I wasn't afraid to let them be who they are. I knew there was a chance that readers wouldn't want them to act like they did, but that was a chance as an author I needed to take to make the story what I wanted it to be.
