Kids and Pets and erotic romance - can they work together?
One thing I've noticed is that kids don't show up a lot when it comes to erotic romance - apparently single mothers are great for sweet romance (oh, the juicy angst!), but not so much for the sexy stuff. Pets - not the shapeshifting ones - tend to be a little sparse as well, although they show up more often than kids.
Now there is a whole genre of 'baby drama' when it comes to category romance - whether it the secret baby, the abandoned baby, or the one-last-shag-before-I-kick-you-to-the-curb-what-do-you-mean-you're-pregnant baby - but it doesn't seem to translate over into its erotic romance cousin. I wonder why not?
Is the 'hot sex because we are trying for a baby' too close to home? Along with the trying to have an active sex life while avoiding being walked in on by the kids? (oh, I have such an embarrassing story about that - Anne)
Tell us what you think - and if you've got any great recommends for sexy erotic romance reads where the hero/heroine have kids or very charismatic pets, do tell!
10 comments:
I don't mind pets, but I loathe -- l-o-a-t-h-e -- children in an erotic romance. Especially in m/m romance. That whole we're-dying-to-have-a-baby scenario? I don't know what guys these writers know, but they aren't any guys I know.
And, for the record, I like kids. Just not in romance novels.
Many new writers are taught not to include pets and small children into their Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy stories. Supposedly, the inclusion of pets and small children in adult fiction detracts from the story and especially the Romance. However, if you’re writing Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy, you would have pets and small children because you’re writing about their world and their reality.
I disagree. In my opinion, including pets and children as secondary characters makes the story more realistic and believable. They flesh out the background of the world-building. After all, pets and children are a natural and normal part of our lives, aren’t they?
Robert A. Heinlein incorporated pets and children in his Young Adult Science Fiction. Classic examples are PODKAYNE OF MARS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podkayne_of_Mars
and THE STAR BEAST http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star_Beast
In David Drake’s Honor Harrington series, http://web.telia.com/~u54504162/honor/index.htm
Honor is one of the few people adopted by a Sphinxian treecat an intelligent indigenous species. This occurred when she was a child, a rarity among treecat adoptions. She has dubbed her 'cat Nimitz. After conducting considerable research on them, she has eventually become one of the foremost experts on treecats.
Andre Norton’s http://www.andre-norton.org/books/date.html
Beast Master series of books takes the relationship of humans and their pets to a higher level of an equal partnership and blending of physical and psychic abilities. In her Moon of Three Rings, the aliens have a “circus and pet show” where the animals are equal partners in their presentation of their acts.
In the Liaden Universe books by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller, http://www.korval.com/liad.htm
cats are honored pets within many of the Liaden households. In I DARE, http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0441010857/blookangarue/107-2494529-45437/blookangarue
the cat plays a major role in bringing down the villain of that tale.
For the second book in my Sidhe trilogy, DOWN CAME A BLACKBIRD, http://www.atlanticbridge.net/publishing/blackbird.htm
Indio’s eight-year old daughter Socorro stows away on the mining expedition spaceship with her pet kitten, Licorice. The miners on the spaceship voted to hide their presence on the ship from the scientists and captain because they didn’t want to have to cancel their mission in order to return her and Licorice to the space station.
Readers and book reviewers have written to me to express how much they enjoyed the different scenes with the kitten. Especially, the chapter where Kevin has created a cat spacesuit and has to put it on the struggling kitten. Needless to say, blood is shed in this chapter and none of it belongs to the cat. LOL.
In THE HUNTRESS, http://www.king-cart.com/cgi-bin/cart.cgi?store=linda018&cart_id=2724621.20752&product_name=The+Huntress&return_page=&user-id=&password=&exchange=&exact_match=exact
my award winning Erotic SF novel, the alien hero Rulagh is an exo-biologist working for the Interstellar Humane Society. He’s on Earth to handle the animal control problem of the chupacabras, the feral descendants of alien pets left behind by UFO tourists eighty years ago. In addition to killing off wild chupacabras, Rulagh and Sonia wind up adopting two orphaned chupacabra pups.
Heart on His Sleeve, an erotic short story we did has a child in it. I think interaction with children can allow the reader to see another dynamic of the characters.
In today's world single parent families are a huge factor. And they deserve stories to relate to, i think you will see it occurring in erotic books more and more.
And btw three monogmous male homosexual couples in my neighborhood wanted and have adopted children.
Mari
For me, I keep my kids and my work so separate, it feels funny to put kids in my work. My own little wierdness. Not saying I'll never do it but there would need to be a compelling reason.
Robin Schone's The Lady's Tutor did have teenagers in it. That's the only other book besides Heart on his Sleeve I can think of offhand that deals with kids. Ingram's Charm has a semichild but he's a different race and also a bear...
I like to see pets in a stories. *G*
Haha! I like what Josh said.
I've really had to give this serious consideration for a couple of plot lines of mine. Ultimately, I think the plot has to dictate. Like any other part of the story if it doesn't belong in the plot then don't include it. If there are going to be children then there has to be true commitment there. I especially made it quite clear in my comet books that while the Swithin lead a different way of life, they take having and rearing children very seriously as a culture. A little bit of my own moral values sneaking in? Perhaps. I do feel you don't need to have a traditional family to give a child everything it needs but a child truly does need to be wanted. Where children are concerned, I guess I'm old-fashioned at heart and I believe that a child should be created out of love between two people or accepted (eg: adopted) with the same principles.
I think stories need diversity and I personally don't want to write all my books along the same theme, so I will include children or pets if the situation calls for it. I won't include or exclude them just because other people think I should. Incidentally, I think if there's a scene that includes a family gathering or description of a culture, while it may not require the main characters to have children, to exclude the existence of children entirely would just make the story unreal.
There is one other point (Josh *g*), there are plenty of women out there who don't want children nowadays. You can google 'childfree' -- a term they adopted because they hated the term childless, which implied women who had decided not to have children were missing something. Like life, I think stories are about choice and diversity.
And btw three monogmous male homosexual couples in my neighborhood wanted and have adopted children.
That's real life. There's a big difference between real life and romantic fantasy.
I'm not saying men -- straight or gay -- don't want children.
But the way guys approach having kids is different. These M/M We're Having a Baby! books feel very fake to me. Embarrassingly so. I see this goofy girlish yearning over babies and changing diapers and blah, blah, blah. It's a feminine perspective on having children pasted onto a pseudo-male psyche.
There is one other point (Josh *g*), there are plenty of women out there who don't want children nowadays. You can google 'childfree' -- a term they adopted because they hated the term childless, which implied women who had decided not to have children were missing something. Like life, I think stories are about choice and diversity.
Sharon, I'm not by any means saying all women share longing for babies. Or that no men do.
What I'm really saying, I guess -- at the risk of insulting a few fellow writers -- is I've yet to read a believable M/M Oooh Let's Have a Baby! scenario.
That book may be out there -- but I've yet to find it. And I've read plenty of 'em.
I'm also not talking SF or Fantasy novels -- or YA novels, for that matter. I'm strictly talking contemporary M/M romance.
But of course it's important to remember that these books are written primarily for (and by) women, so this may be a wildly popular feminine fantasy: the idea of two buff, sexy guys oohing and cooing over their baby.
I'm talking about what I personally enjoy/read. And babies do not enter into it -- despite the fact that in RL I adore my nieces and nephews.
See, I could see the old 'inheriting a baby cause the parents died' scenario in a MM book - but not from the 'cooo, a baby! I never thought I'd have one' side, but the 'omg, I'm a guy, and my partners a guy - wtf am I supposed to do with this thing? all the while holding the baby out at arms length" thing. Where having a child introduced changes the MM dynamic entirely as they try come to grips with it all.
Otherwise I think I'd agree with you Josh (lol, says me the very straight woman), I've read some MM stories that seem to have no relevance to any male I've ever encountered, they have very female sensibilities that just don't seem real.
I like pets in any story. Lends realism for me - probably because I've always been a pet person, and pets have always been quite individual personalities in my life.
Kids - they are a yes and no for me. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't (one MM story comes to mind that totally quicked me off that authors particular series). I do like reading about 'real' people, and real people come with baggage named 'children'.
LOL. Anne, that sounds brilliant. You should write it. Mind you, I can also see that applying to some straight couples I know. I also know couples that would have had children but for whatever reason couldn't, and now they're used to their life a certain way, so they'd feel in a similar position. The 'sudden arrival' twist has a lot of potential.
And yes, I do see Josh's point. Also, not who women who adore children share the same feminine sensibilities that you refer to. The point is every one is different and a writer needs to remember that. I also think a writer has to decide if he or she is writing a gay story that everyone can enjoy or purely for the female market. It can also depend on what a writer wants to achieve and what style of book they favour reading personally. I think what every writer needs to do is avoid creating the same character time and again.
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