Guest: Grace R. Duncan

Today my guest is Grace R. Duncan. Comment to be entered into a drawing for a bag of swag and a signed copy of Choices. Good luck!

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Hayley B. James is a big fan of this cover 

I am fairly new to professional writing.  Choices is my first published novel, my first truly professional endeavor.  I’ve self-pubbed one story before but that was it.  The rest of my writing started out as fanfiction, which I’d been doing for some four years before Choices was published.

In all that time, I have been writing adult-oriented fiction.  I like sex, I like to write it and in all the stories I’ve written, only one has prompted someone to tell me that I had too much sex in there.  And I have gotten some really nasty reviews over my fanfiction.  I write BDSM – quite a bit – and I’m not ashamed of that.  Because many of my stories are BDSM-centric, they also involve a lot of sex. 

So, imagine my surprise when the first negative comments to come back on Choices was talking about there being too much sex.  Tacked on to that involved comments about it being the same sex over and over and I have to say that I was really surprised.  I had gone to great lengths to keep the sex scenes fresh. 

My content editor and I went over them many times, did a lot of cutting, moving and refining and both of us were quite happy with what came out. 

But that whole thing led me to start wondering – how do you keep sex fresh when writing erotica? I mean, let’s be real, erotica comes with certain expectations, like a lot of sex.  Most also expect a decent variety of it.

I was talking to a friend of mine tonight and he agreed, when you’re talking about vanilla sex, there are only so many ways to write it.  Location, position, things like that, but unless one of the guys is holding a Kama Sutra, it’s not going to be all that varied. 

As a writer of BDSM, that helps.  When you bring kink into the picture, things open up.  I can’t begin to imagine that Choices would have been nearly as erotic if it wasn’t BDSM-focused.   But BDSM gives a lot of options, and I enjoyed using many of them.  Bondage, denial, pain, Domination and submission – many of these things allowed me to keep the sex scenes fresh and different. 

It’s not easy, even when there are relatively few sex scenes in a book, to make them different.  As I pointed out above, there are really only so many ways to HAVE vanilla sex, much less write it.  Choices will not be, by far, my last novel.  I have some 20 different stories running around in my head.  Some of those will be erotica, some of them won’t.  A few of them may not even have sex in them (I know, this is shocking to me, too, believe me!). 

But I think that, perhaps because it’s not easy, I look forward to the challenge, I look for ways to make it different, both in and out of kink.  Here’s to hoping I manage it.

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Thank you again to Hayley for hosting me! I am very appreciative of the opportunity.  Do be sure to leave a comment for a chance to win a bag of swag!  I’ll be drawing the name on Monday, April 15^th, along with the winner of the signed paperback copy of Choices!

Thank you for stopping by and reading!

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Born and raised a gypsy in the late eleventh century, Teman values freedom over everything. He and his best friend, Jasim, are thieves for hire—until one night they're caught and their precious freedom is revoked. Given the choice between the dungeons or palace pleasure slavery, they become slaves, but Teman vows to escape someday.

Bathasar doesn’t want the throne. He supports his brother instead, which suits their sadistic father, Mukesh. When Teman, the handsome slave Bathasar has secretly been watching, saves his life, Bathasar requests a slave for the first time. Before long, Bathasar and Teman fall in love. But all is not well. One day Mukesh brutalizes Teman before the court, angering the empress of a neighboring nation. To appease her, he then offers her Jasim as a gift, and Teman decides to stay with Bathasar for now—despite the abuse he may suffer.

The peace doesn’t last. Mukesh plans to invade Jasim's new country, and Bathasar must find a way to stop the destruction. But if he succeeds, he'll ascend to the throne and have the power to grant Teman his liberty. Then Teman will surely leave him. What other choice could a gypsy make?

Buy link: http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/store/product_info.php?products_id=3611