Today I would like to welcome Author
Juniper Bell to the blog. Juniper is currently on tour promoting the release of her book
Go Deep. So if everyone would please welcome Juniper.
Thank for you having me on the blog, I’m very excited to be here! As a writer of erotic romance, I’m often asked how my friends and family feel about my chosen profession. It’s a good question, even though if I worked as a dentist, I’d probably never face it. I used to say, Oh, they think it’s great. It’s my lifelong dream, after all, and they’re happy for me.
But the truth is, I had to ease them into the idea. My first completed book was a romance, hold the erotica – something I felt my parents could read without cringing. But I included a few sex scenes, because, well, I like them. To me they seemed tame compared to what I’m used to reading. But to my family, I might as well have posed naked in Playboy. They loved the story, but didn’t see why I had to put in the steamy parts.
That’s when I realized I wasn’t writing for my family. They don’t read romance—they never understood why I love it so much. So why should I worry about pleasing them? If I’d really wanted to please them, I should have become a Medieval art history professor or a globetrotting foreign correspondent. No form of romance writing was ever going to fill the bill.
I never tried to get that first book published, and now I know why. I wrote it for my family, so they could read something of mine before I went off into the truly forbidden realm of erotic romance. Once I started down that road, they’d never be able to read me again (without risk of heart attack!)
That experience taught me that I should either quit writing romance or go all the way—write what I want, what fascinates me, what excites me. Obviously, I chose the second route, because once I discovered how fun writing erotica is, no way was I turning back. I never told my family, but my favorite scenes in that first book were the ones they hated.
So why do I love writing erotic romance? I get to follow my characters into their most intimate moments. I get to know them at their most naked, their most exposed, their most vulnerable. My latest release, GO DEEP, is a good example. A husband and wife both long to take their sexual relationship deeper, but not sure how to break through the barriers—what could be more intimate than that?
What else…I get to bring fantasies to life without harming my real life relationship. I get to speak plainly, without dancing around in a vague world of euphemisms. I get to tell stories that involve one of the most basic, primal, essential urges in the universe. I get to connect with readers who feel the way I do—that explicitly erotic stories can be beautiful, emotional, intense, and very freeing. I like reading them, and I like writing them even more.
My family has made their peace with my profession. They don’t read my books, but they don’t criticize either. I’m completely fine with that. It’s our own version of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” I don’t tell them about my latest M/F/M with BDSM, they don’t ask.
Luckily, I have a husband who thinks my career is the best thing ever invented.
