Are erotica authors born, or made? After a lifetime of reading sex-drenched novels, I finally took the plunge two years ago and published one of my own. Now, five steamy (and occasionally raunchy) “Logan Belle” novels later, I’m still thinking about the books that started it all: the juicy, passionate, explicit, heart-stopping novels of my youth that made me hide my books under my bed and set my imagination (and other parts of me) on fire.
As a pre-teen, I devoured any book with even a hint of sex. I think the first “erotic” scene I ever read was in Judy Blume’s Deenie, in which the heroine Deenie was hooking up with her crush Buddy Brader and he tried to feel her up but she was wearing a back brace. A shockingly short time later, I read D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley’s Lover—easy to sneak past the parental censors because of the classic-looking cover. Emboldened and hungry for more, I progressed to Jackie Collins’s Chances. I swapped the jacket cover featuring the photo of the vampy brunette for something innocuous. Well-worth the subterfuge: the sex scenes were scorching hot. Those first “erotic” novels are unforgettable—imprinted in my head like nothing that has followed. I recently asked fellow romance and erotica authors if they remember their first erotic read. The answer was, of course, emphatically “yes!”
Stephanie Draven (It Stings So Sweet): “My first erotic novel was the Story of O, which captivated me with its beautiful prose and strange, seductive, foreign sexuality. Alas, when I reached the end and learned that O was to be abandoned by her lover after having transformed herself into everything he desired, I threw the book across the room and wept. Maybe this is why all my erotic novels have happy endings.”
On Quinnipeague, hearts open under the summer stars and secrets float in the Sweet Salt Air...
My love affair with the novella began when as an undergrad I discovered I much preferred “Bartleby the Scrivener” to Moby Dick and “The Dead” to Ulysses. Part of the attraction of the literary novellas was the length, of course, but as I branched out into novellas in romance fiction, I found other advantages. Not only could I read a complete novella while waiting for soccer practice to end or while my students were doing their department-mandated in-class writing, but I could also try new writers with a minimum investment of time. I reserved a special shelf for keeper anthologies and expanded my auto-buy list with authors I first fell in love with through novellas.
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Philosophically speaking, I’m anti-New Adult fiction. I’m quite fine with Young Adult fiction, and over the years as a PW reviewer have read many a coming-of-age novel, but I’m genuinely annoyed by the notion of a genre of fiction for 18-26 year olds. What’s next? Not-Quite-New-Adult fiction, for the 27-30 set? How about Fiction for 30-Somethings, Unmarried Fiction, Menopausal Fiction, or...better still, Men in Midlife Crisis Fiction? Isn’t it bad enough that just the other week 
Entertainment—whether it's books, music, TV, movies, or art—is a way for people to connect to those around them, escape from those around them, find an emotional touchstone, or simply entertain themselves. And since it's all entertainment, it's natural that the subgenres would blend into each other (it's not an accident that we cover TV and movies at Heroes and Heartbreakers as well as books—romantic fiction is spread across genres!).
Today we've got not one but TWO new covers to show you, the next two books in 
The folks behind 
