Bodice Ripper to Erotic Romance

Welcome to Erotic Week!

Oh, so many years ago, I started writing stories for the sole reason that I'd become bored with only half the story. I wrote about struggles and finding love, but I opened the bedroom door. I never considered it erotic, the word never entered my mind. I considered intimacy part of a relationship between a man and a woman. Normal stuff, you know. Even your preacher does it - proof is in the kids they have. ;)

I saw nothing wrong with showing the complete relationship, though my mother sure did. Or so she let on. I recall one day, my sister found one of the stories and took it to her. I was read the riot act, however, she returned the story to me. Maybe secretly she was saying, 'go girl', but because of the time she couldn't publically condone it.

Oh, some of my work might be toned down in comparison to what most write, but still for the fact I opened the bedroom door and brought the reader into the mix of lover-talk and details makes me one of them. I learned this back in 2006/2007 when I met some erotic authors.

I really had mixed emotions about it due to the stigma anything 'erotic' had though I've never been a prude - prudish at times, never a prude. Most people have trouble separating erotic from pornography. I live in a backword world where anything to do with sex is frowned upon outside of your personal relationship with your SO. Sure women read bodice rippers, but they didn't do it in public. My own mother read them. I leaned this one day when she'd forgotten to hide it before coming to the school bring me home due to an illness. One other time, I was sitting at her dressing table getting ready for a school dance and she'd had one stuck in one of the drawers. She snatched it from me so fast it left me with curiosity. What she didn't know was that my grandmother, her mother, allowed me to read whatever I wanted when she I spent weekends. I read the books she read, I read True Magazine - boy I loved that magazine. And later, while I babysat for a former neighbor, I was allowed to read her books. She had stacks of bodice rippers. So, maybe I was predisposed to write erotic romance.

Oh, the covers were much different then they are today - tame and respectable in comparison. At the time, revealing cleavage caused respectable to women to gasp, but when much of the breast was left in full view, surely they were a slut; even a slit up the skirt revealing thigh and hip was unacceptable. Or it all was in the backwards world I was raised in. Nowadays, nothing is really taboo.

Erotic Romance has a come a long, long way since I started writing it back in the late 70's. Even my own writing of it changed over the last four years. We've become more graphic, more detail oriented, more free with the number of scenes. It's clear the market was ready for changes from bodice rippers to erotica, but I think for some there is a fine line between erotic romance and pornography. I'm afraid that rift will always be.

For my own books, it's all about the characters and what works for their relationship. So you'll find none of my books or their covers are on the same level of heat though I do think of them all with high senusal undertones.

Darius Markum, a man Cheri London meets online, agrees to help her conceive a child she wants. Darius sets out to win Cheri's wary heart, but before they can meet, she's injured and a rescuer named Allen comes to her aid. After a night of passion, Cheri returns home without meeting Darius. Or did she? [contemporary]

ISBN 1-60601-040-9 Purchase at: Bookstrand, Kobo, Ebooks.com, All Romance Ebooks, Barnes & Noble, Amazon Kindle.
        

                                                                             

Despite company policy, Cole and Lana are desperate to get their hands on one another, but when she believes he was fired over the one indiscretion, she has to have one night with him before he leaves town. Then she learns the truth. [contemporary]

 

ISBN 1-60601-050-6 Purchase at: Bookstrand, Kobo, Ebooks.com, All Romance Ebooks, Barnes & Noble, Amazon Kindle.

Elan Takoda convinces Cassandra Jones that one night, living the vision they’d both had would rid them of the erotic realism of dreams. But does it? [contemporary paranormal]

 

ISBN 978-1-6098-2300-9 Purchase at: eXcessica, All Romance Ebooks, Amazon, Smashwords, Kobo, Sony, Barnes & Noble, Bookstrand. Also available for download from Apple.

 

Banished from her home, Lillian Basford picked herself up and set out to start a new life. When Samuel Wadkins came along and gave her a real-life taste of what her dreams with him had teased her with, she became torn between her life as it was and what it’d now become. [spicy historical fairy tale]

ISBN: 978-1-4524-3636-4 Purchase at: Smashwords, Kobo, Sony, and Barnes & Noble

 

Thanks for stopping by.

Bekki

http://bekkilynn.net/