Warning, this novel contains explicit sexual content and is not suitable for children under the age of 18.
I’ve wanted to write and publish a novel since I was a young girl. I just never imagined I’d someday have to include that disclaimer along with my book’s description, but when I self-published my first novel, The Fantasy Effect, on April 10 that is exactly what happened.
I didn’t set out to be an author of erotic romance. In fact, my writing career started as a student journalist, covering arts and humanities for my college newspaper. From there I became a sports writer, for a brief time a TV news producer, then back to newspaper where I mostly covered crime and courts. You might be thinking, how does a girl go from writing about crime and sports to hot sex and romance?
I have always enjoyed reading a good romance novel, especially the steamy ones, so it seemed like the logical next step to try writing them. The truth is I’ve been writing erotic stories for a long time but was never brave enough to share them with anyone. I grew up in ultra-conservative Utah, in a conservative family and a small town where everybody knows everybody. I was worried what my friends and family would think. Worried they might see me differently if they read some of the things I had written. I wondered if they would be proud of me or just disappointed in my topic of choice.
Those fears kept me from sharing my writing and my passion for a long time. I thought for sure everyone would hate what I had written. When I finally did share a scene I’d written, one night after a few too many drinks and a friend who wouldn’t leave me alone about it, the feedback surprised me. She loved it! So I shared it with a few more friends and they liked it too. Those few close friends encouraging me is what finally gave me the push I needed to write my first book, one that falls firmly into the erotic romance genre.
For along time I was afraid to admit not only that I write erotica but also that I love writing it. The sex scenes in my book were some of the easiest scenes for me to write. The words would flow, my adrenaline would start pumping and before I knew it I had added a couple thousand words to my manuscript. And when I got edits and feedback from my editor those scenes are the ones that needed the least amount of work.
I’m sure there are plenty of people in my hometown that will look at me differently next time they see me but I don’t really care. I’m not ashamed anymore. I’m not embarrassed by the words I’ve written, I’m proud of them! I could’ve written a tame romance novel, I could’ve written something less explicit for my first published book but that wouldn’t have been what I really wanted. So instead I wrote a hot as hell, erotic romance and I’m proud of it. 
You can check out my book here: Amazon, BN, iBooks, and Kobo
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