Lex Valentine: My Road to Writing BDSM

Giveaway Alert!  Lea Griffith is still running her release day giveaway, Eden Bradley has her Dangerously Bound contest, you can still win a prize from Shelley Munro from yesterday, Stacey Kennedy wants to know about your panties for a prize, Holley Trent has an O For Two and Joey W. Hill is running a contest from yesterday still. Don’t miss these!

Today we have HEA writing author, Lex Valentine, taking us down the rabbit hole of how she began writing kink…

I wrote my first BDSM novel in 2009. It was part of my Tales of the Darkworld series. Ride the Lightning did well in a number contests including the Lories and the Passionate Plume and sales soared. At the time, I’d only just begun to research the lifestyle, but I knew some people in it who helped me along the way. Ride the Lightning turned out to be a stepping stone for me with my M/M books although it’s M/F. Taking the BDSM element I’d enjoyed so much in RTL and employing it in my M/M writing created a monster of sorts as I realized M/M and BDSM go together like chocolate and peanut butter!

On Christmas Eve 2012, I released Broken Bonds, book 1 of the Souls in Bondage series. This novella was not your typical Christmas story. It has its sappy moments but most of the moments are dark and heart wrenching and the reader almost feels as if this is a book without a happy ending. However, those who know me also know that I don’t do anything but happy endings. So the big bad Dom is redeemed in the end and our hero the submissive has a happy Christmas after all. The broken bonds begin to mend.

That book sold so many copies so quickly that I was shocked. It was not a happy Christmas story but readers ate it up! My plans for the series continued on and I wrote Bitter Bonds, book 2 of Souls in Bondage. This book wasn’t nearly as heart wrenching as the first one and the Dom isn’t mean, he’s just stubborn. Mostly, he keeps telling the submissive he doesn’t want a submissive. The Dom resists and the sub yearns…through most of the novella. The couple from Broken Bonds and their friends and family appear in Bitter Bonds. The friends, of course, are from the gay BDSM community. (It’s how I introduce more couples for more stories in the series!)

Bitter Bonds sold even better than Broken Bonds so I put out Broken Bonds in audiobook. I wondered if I’d happened to hit on something that readers really wanted. The M/M light BDSM novella. Long enough to give you characters that you can be vested in, short enough that it doesn’t take all day and all night to read it, hot sex of both the vanilla and the BDSM kind and nothing so hardcore that a newbie to BDSM stories would wince or freak out. Oh, yeah. And the HEA. Lots of sweet, sexy HEA between two luscious men.

I tend to focus on bondage in my books because, well, I’m kind of a control freak so putting a man into bondage makes me drool just a little. 😉  I like my main characters to have their emotions be a little out of control because really, Love is like that for everyone. And for readers, it humanizes the characters on the page. It makes them love them because they can often empathize. Haven in Broken Bonds is so lost with no hope of a happy ending and readers adore him even though he’s no cute little twink. Love has brought to him the lowest rung on Life’s ladder and readers just want to hug him and take him home! I think it’s that element of how Love just brings you to your knees that makes them feel so moved by Haven.

So mixing light BDSM with M/M romances seems to be the place I should be. I’m comfortable there now and readers seem to enjoy what I create in that genre. Fellow EC author VJ Summers (who is half of the team of Sierra Summers who write M/F and M/M/F BDSM books) and I came up with a project that we just launched in April. It’s the Shadows & Kink series, a dystopian, M/M BDSM romance set in the middle of a hunt for terrorists with two unlikely and fairly broken heroes who are forced to be partners.

For book 1, Partners, we introduce our heroes and ride the sexual tension wave. We ended it with some very light BDSM, although there is a more hardcore scene from Ian’s (the submissive) past shown in a flashback. Book 2, Masks, which we are working on currently, has more involved BDSM as we take the characters to the next level in their relationship. Bringing up the level of BDSM as we involve these two heroes more deeply with one another is a bit of a tightrope but I think we’ll do fine and we hope readers will enjoy the deeper level of Dominance and submission they will find in Masks.

As for my Souls in Bondage series, I have a short out now called Subs For Lunch in which three of the subs from the series find some provocative T-shirts and use them to get just what they need from their Dominants. It’s just to tide readers over while I write Binding Heaven, the third Souls in Bondage book. And you might even get some steampunk M/M BDSM out of me as I’m working on a project with my pal, Jaime Samms, for our editor at Jupiter Gardens Press.

So one book led to more research, more ideas and more books in this genre. The fact that readers enjoy them only makes me want to write more. Every time I get an email from a reader who says they want to hug Haven from Broken Bonds, the more I want to write more in that world. The more I hear readers say they adore Ian from Partners, the more I want to write Travis loving on his submissive. Even though it’s not a lifestyle I live with my husband, it’s a lifestyle that lives and thrives in the very active part of my brain ruled by my writing muse and hopefully, it will be there for many years and books to come!

PS: For the next three weeks, keep an eye on my Facebook page for news on how you can get a copy of Broken Bonds, Bitter Bonds and Subs For Lunch for FREE!

Lex Valentine

http://lexvalentine.com

http://facebook.com/lexvalentineauthor

http://twitter.com/lexvalentine

a Rafflecopter giveaway