The earlier posts this month focusing on romance have been quite interesting, and one thing that I have been getting from them, and the comments, is that there is room for any kind of romance novel you want to write, or read, from sweet to sexy. Many moons ago when I had a top NY agent, Denise Marcil, I had just completed my first mystery, Doubletake, which I wrote with a coauthor, Margaret Sutton. Denise worked hard to market the book, but this was the late 70s when romance was trumping all other genres and mysteries were a hard sell. So Denise suggested I try my hand at writing a romance. She suggested some titles to read in a new contemporary line that Harlequin was launching that featured modern women who were strong and spunky and had interesting jobs. The editors were also looking for smart, sassy dialogue and lots of humor. I could do that. What I couldn't do was meet the guidelines that called for intimacy by a certain page and a requisite number of sex scenes. No...

Or not. Where do you stand on the topic of literary sex scenes? Some readers avoid it like a dread disease while others run towards it with wild abandon. Most readers are somewhere in the great in-between, a pinch of spice at the appropriate time makes for a well-rounded story, but it’s not the whole story. I engaged in a very long internal debate about adding sex scenes to my novel, The Last Prospector . There were some strict mandates I needed to follow, self-imposed mandates all. But I set out to write a story that would satisfy me as a reader, so one of those mandates was every word, every scene had to propel the story. For the most part, sex in books is just scenery, it rarely moves the story forward and this was a problem. Erotic fiction is everywhere lately, courtesy of Fifty Shades of Grey .  (I haven’t read 50SOG and don’t intend to. It’s not a judgment of sex or kinky sex, I’m just plain old not interested). Since publishing isn’t afraid to ride a trend t...