It’s been a busy week around here as of late. I have nearly caught up on ALL of my back log and am putting the finishing touches on the special gift package to one special blog hop winner. My hubby and I are both on the mend with his last round of tests showing NO CANCER!! Now it’s my turn for the round robin of testing. With changing up our health plans at work, I have to break in a new doctor. I’m both nervous and excited about it. I’ll get a new outlook from this doctor and hopefully together we can come up with a plan to get my health at 100%. I promised my husband that I would take care of me now.
Of course, having sent my alter egos Lia and Stephanie on “vacation” for the last week has helped me focus on me and my projects but nothing can stop The Vixen! That part of my personality will not stop working and continues to fight the good fight when it comes to defending erotica and erotic romance. Why is it that so many want to “clean up” this genre? It’s separated from mainstream fiction and romance for a reason. Both showcase very explicit and detailed sex scenes. If a novel or short story doesn’t have this sort of detail, then it belongs in the mainstream categories.
The news media has made it an “in” thing to call something erotica or erotic romance. I wish for once, they would do some actual fact checking before they start with the labels. Because of their erroneous descriptions, readers who don’t like the explicit materials have flocked to Amazon and other ebook outlets in order to get themselves some “erotica like that Fifty Shades.” Unfortunately, when they read what really makes up a good erotic romance, they are often appalled and call it “porn” or “blatant smut.”
It doesn’t help matters when editors, authors and even some publishers try to redefine what makes up an erotic romance. No wonder readers are confused! Quite a few discussions have been going on around the Internet via blogs, Twitter and Facebook about this and a few of my fellow authors and myself have been personally attacked and our work more or less belittled.
Well…I’m not going to sit back and keep quiet about it. I’m going to keep defending my chosen genres until there is no longer any debate about it. I’ve started it off with my Sinfully Sassy Sundays with The Vixen spot on Four Seduced Muses. Having the descriptions of body fluids in a sex scene be called “icky” by an editor was just too much for me. Click on the link and see what I had to say. It’s a bit tongue in cheek, but at the heart of it, I’m ticked off that I have to take up this fight in the first place.
You can’t have it both ways. You don’t allow explicit detailed sex scenes in mainstream romances, then you can’t call the mainstream stuff erotica or erotic romances. Taking our genre name away won’t make us leave. We are here to stay!
Behind Closed Doors 