Too Many Damn Spies Out There!

Warning: Early morning musings about craft below. Written without the benefit of coffee (still brewing). No intentions of attack on any genre intended, no matter how in-between the spaces you're trying to read.

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There used to be too many damn virgins out there in romance-land ;-). Now I find there are too many vampires who need a lifemate, poor things....

Things I keep hearing in the writers' market front:

1) HOT is hot, hot, hot. Write HOTTER. Hotter, hotter, hotter sells.

If you keep up with such things, you're seeing that many established publishers (including my old pub, Avon) are starting new erotic lines because of the success of erotica e-publishers. Many erotica e-authors have signed on with publishers for mass market books. Erotica for women is a legitimate romance genre now. Think Emma Holly, Mary Janice Davidson, Jaid Black, Angela Knight--all wonderful authors who rev up the HOT factor, although, of the four, only Emma is still writing "true" erotica that includes menage trois and more than a little bit of BDSM.

Hey, even the Harlequin Presents is coming out with Harlequin Uncut!

Question to readers: Do you read women's erotica? Would you like even hotter lines? Is it still going to remain a "niche" market genre, like, say, African American romance?

I don't read much women's erotica. I've tried them--some were great reads and some were obviously just knitted-together-sex scenes--but don't still don't really set out to buy them like the way I do with other genres.

Is it because most of them are e-pubbed and not on bookshelves, so I couldn't pull them out and put them in my shopping cart? No, I order the bulk of my books online.

Take Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake and Merry Gentry series, for example. I loved the former before it changed from erotic-horror to erotica-horror. There IS a difference. Erotic-horror is about the forbidden fantasy, and in this case, that of sleeping with a vampire or a werewolve. Erotica-horror is what the Anita Blake books have become after the tenth or eleventh book, the one when Anita became...umm...uber-slut. LOL. Sorry, but I HAD to use that word for my once tough-as-nails Anita.

I found myself still loving LKH's writing but just simply turned off by the content. I couldn't handle all the sex! Everything and everyone is offered as some sort of sexual delight in the newer books and I knew I was in trouble when I skipped fifty pages of ONE gooooshy sex scene to get to read what happened next ;-P.

Does this photo link below bother you? Because it is explicit, I thought about photoshopping it and posting it here but it would lose its impact if I draw a little leaf over the obvious big part ;-). There is a certain eroticism in this picture. Would love to hear your thoughts. WARNING! DO NOT OPEN AT WORK! :

WARNING!!! EXPLICIT EROTIC PIC

2) Paranormal is HOT. Write about any hybrids of vampire, werewolf, alternate-world with beings, and you've got interested editors (and readers).

Now, I LOVE paranormals. I LOVE alternate-world/reality settings (from the scifi Dune series to the sexy Dara Joy Matrix series to the LKH horror settings to J.D. Robb's futuristic In Death series). Most of my buys are of this genre. There's something about the combination of knights and uber-epics set in space that gets my imagination juices flowing.

But let's face it, everywhere you turn, there's another vampire/werewolve hybrid romance book out. No end in sight either because I've just been hooked on the J.R. Ward urban hiphop vampire series.

I'm getting a little bit tired of them, though. Just an itsy-bit. There are too many of them to choose from. Are you feeling as overwhelmed as I am? I have reading buddies who are totally at a loss about what to read because they don't like vampires/werewolves stuff and read a lot of Regency historicals and the latter is a dying genre (or dead...not sure...since I think the last line just closed). They tell me they aren't happy with so many of these paranormal books in the market. I guess you can call it envy in a way because they aren't getting more of what they love to read.

Like anything, too much of it could be a bad thing. I remember when I first started reading romantic suspense written by our women authors, I thought they were the best thing since M&Ms, but boy, after glomming on them for months (and the genre became UBERHOT), was I tired of another "serial killer coming after the heroine" story.

Of course, I hear the calls of TOO MANY DAMN SEAL/operative stories out there too. Is there such a thing? Horrors! ;-)

My dream (and this is for Reese Witherfork): a SEAL vampire (boy would HELL WEEK be a problem)...okay, maybe a SEAL werewolf, heh...in an alternate reality urban fantasy...with...with zombies. A punk female zombie-slayer as a partner! Yeah, that would work.

What do you read most? What are you tired of?

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