I started reading romance again
after a long period again a couple of years back. I was a housewife and had
been since after the birth of my second baby. Ten years had past and I had read
some off and on, but I hadn’t been the kind of reader I’d been in college. The
truth was I allowed a lot of the people around to influence my reading tastes
and I almost never talked about what I liked to read. I secretly wrote three
romance novels over the course of those ten years, but if you had asked me back
then, I would have told you I was a playwright and then I wrote a couple of
comic books and then maybe if I got to know you very very well, I would mention
the romances.
Don’t take it the wrong way. I also
wouldn’t have talked about the fact that I watched every episode of Farscape,
Star Trek and Buffy. I was educated in a gifted and talented program. They
would have accepted the sci-fi, but not the romance. So I grew up pretending
that I only read the classics.
Seriously, when I read Dickens or
Austen, I wonder about how much better the books would be some hard core love
scenes. But I never told anyone I thought that.
Flash forward to after my third
child. I was thirty seven and I needed something different. I started reading
again. I read Maya Banks’ Sweet Series, and a book called Master of the
Mountain by Cherise Sinclair and they talked about BDSM. Now, BDSM is about
sex, right?
No. What I discovered was that BDSM
was about choice. BDSM was about acceptance.
Every reader is going to find
something different in a book. Anyone who has ever written a book and lovingly
put it all together and presented it to the world and then made the horrible
mistake of going out to Goodreads to check the progress of their baby has
discovered this truth. Readers find their own truth in your book. You can put
your heart into a story, but a reader doesn’t really care about what you meant
to say. They care about what a book says to them. You could read these books
and say Lexi, you’re crazy they mean something else. But those books gave me a
glimpse of something inside me and that was the need to choose to be who I am
and not who I thought I should be.
I began to research and found this
whole weird world of people who just accepted themselves. I’m not saying that
they’re aren’t douche bags in the lifestyle. Oh, no, they are totally there,
but there are also people who I grew to love and respect and to learn from. My
husband held my hand on this journey, each of finding an strength in
questioning everything we knew before. In taking sex seriously for maybe the
first time in what had been a fifteen year marriage. Not love. We had that
down, but sex. I had to come to the conclusion that sex was important. He was
really glad I figured that out by the way. Sex in a loving marriage is important
and sacred and should be fun and we should laugh and try new things and I
realized that my needs were important, too.
I hope I’m not giving you way too
much information, but I think it’s important to explain why I write BDSM
romance, why I believe so many people read them. Sure the sex scenes are hot,
but at the heart of it is a woman’s journey.
Somewhere in all this research and
in becoming fascinated with a lifestyle that seemed so foreign from the outset
I learned a few things. It made me think
about the word discipline in a different light.
It was my father’s favorite word.
Like really. He was a former drill sergeant. He loved discipline and I thought
it was kind of awful.
Discipline in BDSM for most people
means spanking and whips and floggers, but I saw something different. In a
really great BDSM novel, the whips and chains are backdrops like a ranch is to
a cowboy book. The heart of a truly great BDSM novel is real discipline and
discipline is the act of getting what you want. Discipline is the act of
figuring out the things you need in life and then not allowing life to dissuade
you from the seeking of those goals.
A great BDSM heroine for me is a
woman who learns to accept herself, her body, her sexuality, her desires not
just for sex, but for life itself.
A great BDSM hero stands by that
woman, giving her the support she needs as she finds herself, challenging her
to be more than she thought she could be.
I don’t hesitate to tell people
what I read anymore. And I watch a whole lot of Doctor Who, too. I write
romance and I love my job. I’m proud of what I do in a way I wouldn’t have been
at twenty. As my now friend Cherise Sinclair would say, This is who I am and
I’m finally comfortable saying that.
Lexi
You can find more about Lexi and her books at
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Awesome blog Lexi !! I am glad someone was able to put down what I found in not just BDSM books but all romance books. They have taught me to be who I am and stop pretending to be someone else.
ReplyDeleteSuper blog. I think you put into words just how many people feel about BDSM, love and relationships. I always say that one of the most important things in a relationship is total honesty. Thanks for sharing you awesome talent with us.
ReplyDeleteThat was a great post! So well said that you gave me the words to explain how I feel. Its great to find a place of acceptance since so many people can make you feel bad because of what you read or your lifestyle and in essence who you are as a person so that you feel you need to hide parts of yourself. I too have found that it taught me to be myself not just in BDSM books but also in reading romance books.
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