Meet Elle Kennedy, author of One Night of Sin.
A RITA-award-nominated, best-selling author, Elle Kennedy grew up in the suburbs of Toronto, Ontario, and holds a BA in English from York University. From an early age, she knew she wanted to be a writer and actively began pursuing that dream when she was a teenager. She loves strong heroines and sexy alpha heroes, and just enough heat and danger to keep things interesting!Elle loves to hear from her readers. Visit her website www.ellekennedy.com or sign up for her newsletter to receive updates about upcoming books and exclusive excerpts.
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An Afternoon in the Bookstore
The other day I was at my local bookstore (yes, I still go to bookstores! If that makes me a dinosaur, then call me brontosaurus. Because that’s my favorite dinosaur). Anyway, I was looking for a good driving map of Ireland for an upcoming trip, and I got to talking with a woman in the map section. We were chatting for a bit about my trip, and then it came out that I’m a writer. This is how the conversation progressed.
Her: That’s cool! What kind of books do you write?
Me: Romance.
Her: Like Danielle Steel and Nora Roberts?
Me: Kind of, but my books tend to be dirtier. I write romantic suspense and erotic contemporary.
Her: Oh, so porn then.
Me: (blushing) Not at all. There’s more than just sex in my books. They actually have a story.
Her: (smug) Porn has a story.
Sigh. Fine. I’ll give her that. I guess pornography does try to include some kind of story. Sometimes, anyway.
But where are the character arcs? Does the pizza guy go through an emotional transformation from the point when he delivers the pizza to the orgasm he has with the woman who ordered the pizza?
And where’s the conflict? Does the woman have commitment issues and that’s why she only sleeps with pizza guys? Is the owner of the pizza company trying to keep them apart?
And emotion, darn it. Are they emotionally connecting during the sex when he’s taking her from behind? Do they look into each other’s eyes at all and think, wow, this is someone I can spend the rest of my life with.
So I brought up all these points to the lady at the bookstore, and we ended up having a really long, interesting discussion about romance novels. She finally realized that if you take the sex out of a romance, there’s still a deep, emotional story in there. If you take the sex out of porn, you get really bad dialogue and a story that makes no sense.
In the end, I even convinced her to branch out of the non-fiction and thrillers that she only reads, and she bought a few romance novels from a few different genres to get a feel of which ones she might like. I call that a success.
Even bigger success? She emailed me a week later to tell me that she loved 2 of the 3 books I’d recommended, the contemporary and the paranormal, both very sexy. The one she didn’t like was the erotic contemporary LOL But hey, I still call that a win for the romance side!
I guess the point of this post is to emphasize that romance novels are more than just sex. They can be sexy or humorous or suspenseful or dark, but the emotional content is always there, and they can be just as fulfilling as other genres. Or at least, that’s what I firmly believe =)
Sometimes it’s good to be bad…
When it comes to sex, good girl Skyler Thompson always plays it safe, choosing stable and sedate over wild and thrilling. She doesn’t do one-night-stands, but one look at sinfully sexy Gage Holt and she’s willing to reconsider. He makes her want to be bad for once in her life, and she’s prepared to take what she wants.
Danger follows former MMA fighter Gage Holt like a shadow. Despite his successes as part owner of Sin, an exclusive nightclub in Boston, Gage can’t risk getting involved with a woman, especially one as sweet as Skyler. Still, he can’t resist a taste—and it’s so damn good he has to see her again.
As addicted as he is to her, Gage knows there’s no future for him and Skyler—not with his past lurking in the dark corners of an MMA cage. But Skyler’s tougher than she looks, and she’s ready to fight for her man.
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