Snippets

Here's a test for whether you truly are writing erotic fiction: Scroll to any page on your manuscript. Your cursor should be close to a hot, explicit sentence. Do this six times in a row, and find an erotic line within an inch or two of where you stop every time.  If you can't, think about turning up the steam.

I try to arrange stories so the sex drives the plot. This doesn't always work. Sometimes I have to let other action take over for a page or two in order to get the story where it needs to go. When I finish a passage of that kind, I go back through it and find ways to add sexual references. Brief flashes of recollection do the trick, and are often realistic. If you have good sex in the morning, do you find the memory of it invading your thoughts in the afternoon? These short, hot flashbacks add another dimension to what the character is doing in the scene. Or sometimes I pump up the eroticism by adding sexy touches, looks, or postures. It helps to keep people naked as much as possible, and remind the reader of the nudity by references to their gorgeous bodies.

When one of my stories is published, I add pages for it to my web site, valerieherme.com. There's a page with the book cover, a brief description, and a purchase link to the eXtasy Books site, another page with the first chapter to read for free, and another page called Snippets. The snippets are five or six hot quotes from the story. I pick them from the first six places where I stop while scrolling rapidly through the story. So far, I've never failed to find a hot line.