Guest Post by Rose Raven (Author of The Pirate’s Lover, The Pirate’s Captive, The Pirate’s Choices, The Colonel’s Captive, and The Gambler’s Debt)

“I tend to write on a whim, rather than in a focused way… so a lot of this is just whim-orientated bits of nothing that turn into a story. I like to think I write well, but in the end, that’s down to a person’s preference… some may love what I write, others will probably hate it, and there’s likely to be a lot of in-betweens. I know I tend to feel the same about other people’s books. But I also think that if you can’t absolutely love what you are writing, you shouldn’t be writing at all. It just leads to frustration and heartbreak.

I tend to write a lot of erotica because I like everything erotic. My first few fics were more personal (ha, you won’t find that published anywhere!) but then I started writing for real, and I like to experiment with how I write. There’s a lot of romance that could almost be erotica, and I like that.

One of the reasons why I actually chose Gold Orchid Publishing actually has to do with the way I write… a lot of erotica publishers get upset about the so-called purple prose and there’s a lot of people who stick their nose up in the air at the way something is written, so terminology, to be horribly scientific, instead of looking at the content.

I like to think of erotica as something luxuriating, and to me, it gets frigidly cold if people either apply too many slang terms or go really specific and biological. To me, erotica is about sex, and sex is about love and sensation and emotion.

You can’t get that with going too slangy, or too clinical and biological. It just loses the feel of it.

So I’m actually quite glad that I can try myself in so many different ways and not worry about anything but is the publisher going to like the story in general. It’s refreshing. I totally get why people went all clinical – it’s a natural balance to the obsessive prudishness – but you can actually get too far out the other way with things. I expect that some people like that kind of stuff, and some don’t. Literature is like food – I like my soft cheese and one of my friends totally hates the stuff. So it’s all about different tastes, and giving people the option to have them, and to try something new.

I get inspired by anything from my actual personal life experiences to random fantasies, to be fair. I don’t always see myself as the main character in the story… it’s more like observing, but not always… but I definitely tend to be attracted to “dark men” and “bad boys” and they tend to form a background for my male characters. So yeah, somewhere out there, there are real people walking around unsuspecting of my having written a story in which they feature… ”