Throbbing vs. Thrusting. The Glories of Sexual Tension.

The next time you hear an erotic romance author being described as “hot!,” stop to consider for a minute exactly what that means.  Because these days, there’s a fracture in what readers want, exactly, when they say they want “hot!”  Because hot ain’t what it used to be.

When erotica first hit the market in a big way, readers found it titillating to be hit with the most flagrant and in-your-face sex scenes possible, up-front, as soon as possible.  They wanted details, dammit, and they wanted plenty of ‘em.  Ellora’s Cave’s mantra was — and still is — moresexmoresexmoresex. They even have tee shirts that read: Got sex? We do. (Saul has one.  You should see the looks he gets when he wears it out in public in main street Helena. :) )

Authors, well, rose to the occasion.  They wrote hotter and hotter, more and more.  But there is a point where you can only fit x amount of sex into a story and still manage to tell an actual romance — and Ellora’s Cave authors still tell damn fine stories.  And there’s only x amount of in-your-face detail you can put into a story, and that’s 100% graphic detail, and that’s pretty much what Ellora’s Cave provides.  There’s nowhere else to go.  How else do you up the ante?  Where do you go from there?

Classic erotic romance authors had the answer all along.  Erotic romance readers have always said that their favourites like Lora Leigh, for example, write so damned hot they singe the page, but if you actually sit down and analyse such writers, you’ll notice something very interesting about their sex scenes.

They’re not actually anymore frank or in-your-face, or “hot” than any other author.

The magic ingredient, in fact, is sexual tension.

To continue to use Lora Leigh as my very good example, she has the art of not doing it down to perfection.

Consider Marley’s Choice from the August Brothers series.  That’s a damned big book.  291 pages in paperback, and very many of those pages devoted to smokin’ hot sex scenes that leave the reader trembling.

But do you know how long it takes for Marley and Cade to actual consummate the sex?  Yep, pretty much 70% of the way into the book before they get to “do it” for real.

There’s just so much teasing, foreplay, climaxes, orgasms, trembling, and various other steamy types of sex and touching, that you really don’t notice that Cade doesn’t get to fuck Marley in the traditional sense until that far into the book.  But it sure adds to the tension!

The primitive genetic drive in us all wants that age-old possession to take place, and despite all the teasing and foreplay — which adds nicely to the throbbing, swelling tension in the reader — we want to see the hero take the heroine.  It really is that old fashioned, in the end.  And if the tension is built up well enough, it’s that satisfying, too.

More and more, these days, I find I’m gravitating towards authors who understand the difference between sex and sexual tension, and know how to build the tension until it’s thrumming like a harp.  Joey W. Hill is another author who can build tension within a page or two and keep it going for chapters.  It’s no accident that these authors are some of the better sellers in the Cave.

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