When I wrote my first spicy romance novel, I stripped away things like religion and conventional propriety to create primal, raw characters driven by the instinct of their masculine and feminine archetypes. I wanted a world where people were unmasked, where they reveled in unrestrained animal magnetism, where they were gloriously whole and true to their character and nature in all things.
I wrote a dominant and submissive relationship because that was my genre, but also because that was my idealized image of connection and relationship. The man was a leader, teacher, protector, and the female was feminine, submissive, willing breeder and nurturing care giver.
I wrote kinky, raw, detailed sex that scorched the pages and created a fated mate bond that connected the characters on the most elemental, united level I could fantasize into existence.
Not once do my characters declare or rhapsodized their undying love and devotion. They don’t say it. They live it. He is her gravity, and she is his moon and stars, and they are united.
Words are so powerful. I used to have a pinned post on my X feed that said, “Words are my super power, I can turn things on with them, and I can turn things off.”
But some words, like love, have lost their power, and the only way to give it meaning is to strip it of all preconceived notions and turn it into an action.
“I love you,” means nothing if it doesn’t come with action. And so my characters never say it. They live it out.
It’s just a little smut book, to some. Just some stupid lady porn. But to me, that novel was an expression of what a loving, connected relationship between a heterosexual man and a heterosexual woman could look like. Unashamed in their desires, accepted by their culture and community, raw, passionate and liquid with want.
And some of my readers get it. Some of them understood. Some of them found comfort, found understanding, found respite in the fantasy I wove for them.
And me? I wanted to live out that fantasy.
But somewhere along the line my wonderful intentions crumbled, and I turned the words into the porn I’d been accused of writing.
I turned my love as action into a song of pure carnality.
I don’t want to be that person. Just because I can, doesn’t mean I should.
I need to find my way back, my way home. I need to find the path to that place where I was writing to an audience begging to be noticed, to an audience with a dead bed, to an audience that had never been embraced with a love so strong that you could feel the other persons need as it flowed out of them and into you. A place where submission was a willing act of love, not some grand performance of pomp and circumstance. Where the submissive was a treasure, not a toy.
The path is dark. Twisted. Criss crossed with rabbit trails that confuse me.
But I have no other choice.