Okay so I lied.
I reviewed the story so far and am allocating some time to it this weekend now that I'm catching up. Writing two books can be challenging, but now that I'm not a) travelling b) looking for a home c) trying to find my way around the nation's capitol and d) getting used to being in this new place and getting to know an entire new set of friends/acquaintances/colleagues, I should have some actual - brain space!
Question for you readers: one thing I have struggled to define for myself"in these stories, now that I have gone all the way as it were, into explicit erotica, is "level of explicitness." Which is part of the reason I paused where I did with this story.
What I find for myself, writing, is that even if I am writing something completely original and different every time, when it comes to sex (unlike plot), there does come a moment in the story where there's only so much to write, and I solved that issue in the Tourmaline books by relegating much of the bedroom action to offstage, unless there was a reason for it. I'm still puzzling it through, because - let's be honest, it is not fair to an audience for gay erotica to be censoring the sex that is on-screen, and I think for anyone who has read the first Greenlea County series, I don't censor it. And I don't want to be perceived as censoring it. However, it does make it less interesting for me, as a writer, to write the same or similar things, which is why I don't write the same stories with different characters with different names: I write different stories, in different time periods, with different people in radically different circumstances. I have to do this, because I have a low tolerance for repetition and if anyone ever writes to me and tells me they can't tell the difference between a main character in one story and the main character of another one, then I'll know I've got a problem and should not have written one of those two stories.
So if anyone has any thoughts about explicitness, I have had a lot of feedback prior to the finalization and publication of the book which was original entitled "Taking Chances"and with regard to this new book, I would definitely like to hear your thoughts on the level of explicitness in this book.
