The Black Dagger Brotherhood_ An Insider's Guide - J. R. Ward [78]
From the get-go, I knew the Brothers were going to be more sexually explicit than my previous contemporary romances. And I was aware that the series was going to take readers in directions that my other books hadn’t (i.e., Rhage’s sex addiction, Z’s sexual dysfunctions, V’s predilections). That being said, I didn’t specifically target the erotic market. The Brothers are just very sexual, and the scenes I see of them with their females are hot. In keeping with rule eight (yes, it’s the Rice Krispies again), I write what I see in my head. Do I sometimes think, OMG, I can’t believe I just typed that? Yes! But the thing is, the sex scenes always advance an emotional imperative, and that’s why, however graphic they become, I don’t feel they are gratuitous.
Take, for example, Rhage being chained down to his bed . . . or when Z services Bella in her needing . . . or Butch and Marissa in the back of the Escalade when she finally feeds from him. All of these scenes are highly erotic, but the dynamic within the relationships changes afterward, either for the worse or the better. I think maybe that’s one difference between romance and strict erotica. With romance, sex affects the emotional bonds of the characters and propels those connections forward. With strict erotica, the sexual act or sexual exploration itself is the focus.
Do I think the market will stay as hot as it is? It wouldn’t surprise me if it did. Predicting is a dangerous sport, but there seems to be a sustained appetite for books with heat in them. I’m quite certain that subgenres will continue to rise and fall in relative popularity, and that some new ones will come along that we can’t begin to guess at. But I think the overall trend of sexuality will probably remain where it is.
And speaking of sexuality . . . now a word on Butch and V.
Where to start.
The first inclination I had that there was going to be a sexual component to their relationship was in Dark Lover, when the two of them spent the day together in Darius’s guest room. There was something so intimate about the pair of them lying in those beds, drunk, talking. And then they moved into the Pit with each other and became inseparable. To be honest, I was clear from the beginning what V felt toward Butch, and I was also aware that Butch was clueless about it—but I sat on the dynamic, keeping it to myself. I wasn’t sure how to handle it. Or how readers would feel about it.
I do that sometimes. I have whole plotlines that happen in the world that I don’t put in the books, and I leave them out for a variety of reasons. Most of the time it has to do with story-focus and book-length issues. For instance, the short story in this compendium about Z and Bella and Nalla has been in my mind for about eighteen months now, but there was nowhere I could put it in any of the books.
Sometimes, though, I leave plotlines out because I’m not sure how to deal with them. As I wrote the first three books, there were all these scenes between Butch and V, both on the page and in my head, and they fascinated me. The whole time, I was like . . . Okay, when’s Butch going to tweak to what’s doing with his roommate, and what’s his reaction going to be to the way V feels about him?
As I kept banging away at the keyboard, the question in my mind was, Do I bring the dynamic out on the page? And if so, when? Eventually I decided to make the leap. The way I saw it, I had already tiptoed into some tricky waters over the course of the first three books, and it went okay—but more important, the story deserved that kind of honesty.
Lover Revealed was the logical choice for it in terms of timing.
When Butch was abducted at