Thanks for letting me guest blog today, Delilah! I’m Jenna Ives, and I write contemporary erotic romance novellas. I love novellas, because with so much technology at hand these days (texting, tweeting, e-readers, smart phones, video game players, etc) it seems everyone is developing a shorter attention span. And novellas are the perfect way to satisfy a romance reader’s appetite for stories without having to make a long-term time commitment!
Since novellas are by definition short, I’ll share my secret for writing erotic novellas with you: as the story opens, I immediately put my characters into a situation where they either have to have sex for a particular reason (there are many fun ways to do this, and author Leigh Court is my personal favorite for coming up with creative situations) or else create an event where your characters are forced to stay together for a certain plot reason. Voila! Instant tension! And in an erotic romance, that means the sexual sparks fly!
My new novella, Snow White And Her Seven Lovers, was inspired by both Kristen Stewart’s upcoming movie “Snow White And The Huntsman” as well as Julia Roberts’ spring release of “Mirror, Mirror.” It looks like 2012 is definitely the year of Snow White!
Here’s the blurb for my erotic version of this classic fairy tale, which I’ve written in first-person from our heroine’s point of view:
What’s a girl to do when she wakes up poisoned in the ER and finds that she’s lost her memory, her family, and very nearly her life?
That was me. Three months ago. With no identity, no money, and nowhere to go on the day I was discharged from the hospital, I gratefully accepted my gorgeous ER doctor’s offer to move in with him and his equally gorgeous six friends – the ones who’d found me unconscious in an apple orchard. My plan was to stay only until my memory returned, and I could figure out who I was and if someone really had tried to kill me.
Together with Doc, these were an amazingly diverse bunch of guys, but there was something about each of them that attracted me powerfully enough to want to explore it. The policeman with his clever handcuffs. The cunningly linguistic librarian. The disciplinarian teacher. The virgin computer whiz who loved to play sex games. The engineer who created shotgun orgasms. The wildly imaginative baker.
Becoming intimate with these seven men completed me in ways I suspected discovering my name never would. That is, until the fateful day a man showed up claiming to be my fiancé…
Oooh… conflict and lots of steamy love scenes! A real page-turner. But by far, my most favorite part of writing this story was coming up with jobs that realistically lent themselves to the characters – Doc is the obvious one (he’s the ER doctor who saves our heroine’s life) but if you read this story, I’d love to hear from you about my choices for the six friends’ occupations J Grumpy? Dopey? Sleepy? Sneezy? Happy? Bashful? Are the real-life jobs I’ve chosen for these characters believable?
Snow White And Her Seven Lovers is available through amazon.com, bn.com, Smashwords.com, or at my website, www.jennaives.com.
So…. which fairy tale is your favorite?? And how could we spice it up a little?
