Today, my good friend and critique partner Roxy Harte asked me point-blank, “Who is Xandra and what does she want to write?”

My first thought was, “Well, that’s a big Duh.”  Followed by, “I write…” and then some silence.  Thick silence.  Silence that had been placed on a strict diet of lard, turkey gravy, and cheetos until it was so thick it needed a triple bypass to even exist.

I realized that making a declaration like that was something that shouldn’t be done lightly.  Uniformly, the advice from more experienced writers, industry professionals, and writing career how-to books has been solidly in the “pick a lane and stay in it” camp.  There are reasons ranging from the marketing-oriented to reader expectation which combine to make a great case for finding a tone and (sub)genre to call your own.  Not to mention playing to your strengths.

But here’s where I came up short.  Alien Communion pretty much wrote itself to a certain extent.  I had so much fun creating the Alcaini and sexually liberating my heroine that the rest just sort of fell into place.  I just finished a draft of a really scorching hot M/M that did the same–I just took dictation from the characters.   And I’m letting my big, sprawling space opera WIP take a breather while I work on something that’s distinctly paranormal in nature.  Not to mention the urban fantasy I have in the archives, or the six romantic comedies I wrote several years back.  Granted, not all of these stories were birthed fully formed from a crack in my head, but they all are representative of me.  Of what makes me a writer.  How do I limit myself to just one aspect of that?

So late on a Saturday night when most people are partying their little bunz off, I’m sitting in bed, blogging and thinking (of course, if I wasn’t blogging and thinking, I’d still be in bed–I have kids and therefore no social life).  I should probably pick a lane, and stay in it…at least long enough to get to the next exit.

So I was sitting outside yesterday in my asbestos two-piece, trying to get a little sun on my tummy, since everyone knows that tan fat is more attractive than fishbelly white fat. Well, I was cooking some hotdogs on the sidewalk, listening to the sizzle, and in the 2.4 seconds it took to cook each side before I had to turn, I thought about heat.

What makes a story hot?

I’ve been asking myself that almost since I started writing (bearing in mind that I started writing when I was old enough to pick up a pencil, but didn’t start thinking about heat and sexual tension until I started writing romance with a career in it in mind).  I haven’t been able to articulate a definitive answer, and in digging through my older stories and my current works in progress, I  wonder if I’m any closer to an answer than I was ten years ago.  It seems the correct answer is, like a lot that centers around sex–I’ll know it when I see it.

There seems to be a fluid standard when it comes to heat.  At least for me.  I know, for example, that what turns me on is not always what is hot.  And something that is hot doesn’t always turn me on.  Yes, I know it makes sense in my head.  It’s got everything to do with different senses of heat.  To give you a f’rex - one of the hottest scenes I’ve ever seen in a movie wasn’t in Body Heat, or 9 1/2 Weeks, or even the GBS in Basic Instinct, or anything in Boogie Nights.  No.  It was Linda Hamilton and Michael Biehn in Terminator.  Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese had been on the run , she was just coming to understand how important she was to the future.  The sexiest moment isn’t filled with the usual pr0n-fare.  The shot is simple.  Two hands, intertwined, on bedsheets.  That image, more than naked, sweaty bodies, or cries of, “Oh, hell yeah, baby!” projected the sensuality of the moment.  I totally bought both the reason they climbed into the sack and the potential for happily-for-now they could have.

And yet, in other movies or books, the whole “holding-hands” thing doesn’t fly.  Even to the point of–if I don’t follow them into the bedroom and know exactly what they’re up to, I feel cheated.  It’s harder to buy the HEA (or the HFN).

The best theory as to why this is that I can come up with is that the sex is part of the relationship.  I know, news from the land of Duh there, huh?  You’d think it would be obvious–and easy.  Because who hasn’t, at some point in their lives, let or wanted to let pure physical lust make their relationship decisions, eh?  And just like the rainbow that is human sexuality, each relationship places its own weight and emphasis on sex.  Some relationships–some characters–have to have their sex lives expressed for me to understand their relationship.  If you are a writer, and you’ve gotten used to the average level of heat you find yourself putting in your stories, have you ever been struck when a character or set of characters in a particular work in progress knock you out of that zone?  It’s surprising to find yourself writing something erotica-level when you formerly wrote light romantic comedies that shut the bedroom door.  Equally surprising is to find yourself comfortably immersed in writing scenes of such frank boldness that they make dockside whores lower their eyes and blush, only to wind up with a sudden broken nose when your characters, in no uncertain terms, slam the bedroom door in your face and against your will.

Oh no.  Oh no.  Oh no they di’in’t.

Oh yes they did.

So why?  And is that where the line between erotica and erotic romance lives?  Or the other line between spicy romance and erotic romance?  Yes, I’m asking you.

I’ve been asking myself genre-defining questions by the bucketload lately, in an attempt to better understand the stories I want to write and their place in the grander scheme of things, and one question that keeps popping up in my mind is one about Worldbuilding.

I’m not afraid to say that I lovelovelove worldbuilding. I love developing cultures, and spinning out the worldviews that become the lenses through which the characters experience the events of the story. I love threading through the evolution of the strange-to-us becoming the commonplace to the characters. I love exotic situations where the expected is turned on its head. I love making myself, as the author, shift my own worldview to adopt that of the character’s. I’ve always been a fan of the “walk a mile in another’s moccasins” philosophy, and it holds twice the meaning for a character in a world of my own making–I learn not only about the character, but about the world itself.

And the wackier the world, the better. I write futuristics, and I find the thought of a future world that’s pretty much the same as ours, only with more batteries, depressing (even if it is more probable than the ones I come up with). One of the reasons I first started reading SF back when I was a youngling was that the worlds were so exotic. So different and strange, and hella more exciting than living in Mundania, USA. But the books I liked weren’t what appealed to my romance-reading friends. Now I admit, back then we were just as interested in scouring the Johanna Lindseys and Janet Daileys and Penelope Neris (and loads of others) for the smutty parts as we were reading them for their story value (but we did read them eventually. After we’d dog-eared all the love scenes). We read the stories and we all liked the stories of handsome warriors and headstrong women with traitorous bodies betraying them (yes, it was the 80’s and yes, we were teenage girls).

At the same time we were googly over Raistlin Majere. and we all wanted golden Pern dragons of our own to ride. But while most of the other girls in our little gaggle wanted the dragons and the wizards to come here, some of us wanted to go there, wherever “there” happened to be. I spent hours imagining down to the last detail of what it would be like to wake up every morning and go feed a dragon, read a magic spell book, or clump along the corridors of an alien habitat composed entirely of sentient jelly that only responded to commands given in song.

What appeals to you in an SF story - the weirdness of it? The differences between the SF world and the contemporary world? Or the keys of commonality? The similarities?

In surfing some erotica-writing sites, and re-reading my copy of Susie Bright’s “How To Write a Dirty Story,” I keep coming across the idea that one of the purposes of writing and reading erotica is to stretch your boundaries. Erotica that is described as “edgy” or “pushes the envelope” seems to be the thing to strive for. When I really think about this, I’m puzzled and conflicted. Mostly because reading erotica stories that push the envelope often leave me wanting to send the thing back to the post office.

I realize that everybody’s boundaries are different, and I’m certainly no vanguard when it comes to adventurous sexual themes. But I find myself wondering at a piece of my writing and remembering how much passion I put into it and then realizing when I look at it that, well, it ain’t that new. But I read it, and if I’ve done it properly, when I read it again, I still feel the same heart coming through the writing.

Romance as a genre is partly predicated on the fact that there are certain conventions–reader expectations, so to speak, that need to be present in order to make the story more enjoyable. It creates a conundrum, then, when I look at what I’ve written and it doesn’t seem unsettling. It didn’t make me nervous, or challenge my sense of boundaries…but it made me feel content that those characters were in a better place from where they started out. I put the piece down and I’m happy that the characters have grown into something better, or happier.

But when I read some of that boundary-pushing erotica, I finish the piece without that happy, contented feeling about the characters. Like Story of O. I finished the piece wanting to rewrite the last half of the book to show O discovering mutant superpowers, kicking the boyfriend in the jaw, and burning the Chateau to the ground. And then finding a nice, respectful man who would worship her to settle down with. Or at least, stop being a damn dishrag. Oh, sure, later on, I thought, “Wow, what an amazing commentary on the psychology of submission, and how interesting it is that a person can feel fulfilled by allowing their self-determination to be subsumed by someone else’s desires. And wow, I think I used ’subsumed’ right but I’m not totally sure. Oh, look–shiny!”

So the question that begs for an answer is this–how do the expectations of romance intersect with the deliberate absence of expectations in erotica? What kind of balance does an author strive for between the emotionally comfortable and the thought-provoking squick?