Random point before I begin, for some strange reason on Veteran’s Day (though it’s referred to as Remembrance Day here in Canada) the traffic on my site quadrupled. I mean hey, I guess we all show patriotism in different ways. If anyone reading this has ever enlisted, I just want to say thank you for your service.

A topic I use a lot in my stories and yet for some reason never really brought up is love in erotica. To some it’s an absolute staple. To others, as soon as they see love is a prominent theme in an erotic piece, they roll their eyes and walk away. Love is one of the most silently divisive themes that can exist in erotica. People rarely acknowledge it, but it’s true. So why is this?

I think that love and sex are like entities on a Venn Diagram. They can exist as different entities but they work, in my opinion, at their best when they work together. Even without a romantic connection, an emotional connection is needed for meaningful and ultimately better sex, that’s my opinion. Erotica, in a lot of cases, works the same way, at least in the way I consume it. I like emotion. I like passion. I like when the characters clearly care about each other. Granted, not every relationship needs to be a romantic one, but usually, romantic relationships are the best examples of this passion in erotica.

To me, passion is inherent in erotica. True, I’m in the middle of writing The Good, The Bad and the Molly, where it’s more of a grey area, at least for now, as to whether the passion is a two-way street or a one-way street. Not to mention, I’m also writing more experimental pieces where the love element is increasingly and increasingly absent. I find writing sex scenes challenging where at least potential love isn’t a factor. I’m trying to get better at it, but if there are indeed two camps, I’m definitely pro-love. I like exploring people’s feelings for one another as a catalyst for sex as opposed to “Martha wants to try anal so she enlists the help of five strangers” or whatever. Character-first erotica I guess? I have no clue.

Make no mistake, no one camp is inherently superior to the other. I think perhaps love-centric erotica is easier. It’s sappier, in a lot of ways easier to write (writing a couple in love is a bit easier than writing the nuanced characters of two people who want sex for reasons other than love) and you can be forgiven for describing the bodies of both characters for paragraphs under the guise of them being smitten with one another. I’d like to write more nuanced erotica, and that was definitely the goal with both Amy’s Fantasy and Panopticon, moreso the latter than the former.

That said, Being More Social was by far my most popular story, and even though it pointed and laughed at the idea of teen love, it still had a lot of it in the story. Perhaps love sells better too. I’m not sure. All I know is that I want to diversify a bit in my future pieces, even if those pieces do contain conventional love. I guess we shall see what the future holds. I’ll talk to you all next week.