What’s wrong with love & sex?

This is my pat response now, since my first book, Coming Undone, came out last month, when my mother says things like, what am I going to tell people after they read your books and they say, oh, she’s writing some very sexy things in these books?

Tell them love & sex are two of the most natural things in the world, I reiterate.

I can’t tell them that. I’ll tell them that you’re thinking about writing historicals soon, my mother says.

My husband emailed the Amazon link for the book to his grandmother the other day – she looked at it while they were on the phone together and he said there was dead silence for a few seconds. And then she said something like, well, I don’t know if this is really my kind of story, but I’ll definitely buy it to support Stephanie.

My daughter’s speech therapist and her husband both asked me, at different times, if they were ever going to be able to look at me the same way again after reading my book.

I told them, it’s not an autobiography.

The thing is, I tend to forget that I write hot. That’s just how I write – it was always that way, from the earliest romances I wrote, and it was there back when I was writing short stories back in college. Sex was always a fundamental part of my story-telling. So much so, that I don’t even notice it anymore.

I do plot (and I use that term really loosely) through the sex scenes in my book. I don’t consciously think, this sex scene is going to reveal this about said heroine and hero, but that’s exactly what happens. Those scenes are my roadmap, because that’s where the heart of the emotion lies. It’s the times where the biggest reveals happen – that moment of, will they or won’t they, tension that let’s you know these characters are going to do far more that just get naked…they’re going to make a discovery. Sex and love are so entwined in my mind when I’m writing my books – any books, from the Blazes to the Sydney Croft Eroticas to the single title Romantic Suspenses that I’d feel wrong not having that added emotional density the complications of a sexual relationship bring to the table.

I’ve heard the argument that once you let characters have sex, a lot of the tension is gone and the story is on an inevitable, downward slide – and the author must wrap things up quickly. And I definitely don’t agree – not if it’s done right. Sex is messy and complicated, like love – like life. Sex ramps the tension to another level.

Sex doesn’t always have to lead to love in real life, but in my books, it always will.

Now stop looking at me like that. And, for a chance to win a copy of Coming Undone, tell me what you’d say to my mother’s question!