Who I am

I’m an erotic romance writer.  Being a writer used to mean typewriters and paper and a year or more to write a book. As recently as the 90s I made most of my submissions on paper. And not so long ago, being a romance writer meant you spoke about sex in terms of manhoods and womanhoods, or seed and loins.  Writing and romance stories have changed. Those of us who write erotic romance are still defining who we are and what we write, a task further complicated by the fact books are undergoing an evolution and so is the job description.

This quote sums that up in a number of ways, not all of them immediately obvious:

Life was so simple in the ’90s, when all we had was an e-mail address. I keep track of a blog, a Twitter feed, avatars, jobs, a boyfriend, a secret post office box in Boise that nobody – and I mean nobody – knows about. We all have to make and manage dozens of ourselves. And clearly, the easiest way to do it is by paring ourselves to the bone.

User-Created Users » PixelVixen707

I’m asking myself how she managed the ’90s with one email address. But she’s right, we aren’t who we used to be. I go to log in at a site or to check email and I have to stop, hands poised over the keyboard and say, “Who am I here?” I have 3 phone numbers for the different roles in my life, more email accounts than I want to think about, and avatars, and twitter feeds, and blogs. I can’t decide if that makes me too divided or if it makes me whole.

I’m not who I was in the ’90s.  Books aren’t what they were in the ’90s, but I can’t help thinking books aren’t all they could be. Technology and new media have handed us the power to make books something more, to add new dimensions, in the same way it allows us to add dimensions to our lives.

While I figure out who I am in this virtuality that is my writing life, I’ll explore what an erotic romance can be and what a book can become.

And just to get things started, PixelVixen707 is a game review blogger, and if you peruse her site I’m sure you will agree she is an excellent writer and game reviewer. You really have to read a couple of her posts to get the full impact of this next bit: she isn’t real. She’s a character in a story that is being written to sell another story. She is so good at what she does that real game bloggers link to her and comment at her site. She was good enough at the game to fool gamers. Have a look at her site and see if you can find the clues that reveal she isn’t real.

While this isn’t an erotic romance, as far as I know romance books don’t exist in this dimension. Yet. It does involve her relationship with her boyfriend, so I’m considering it close enough to qualify for discussion about what this type of story means for romance writers.

I’m ready for the adventure. Are you?