What BDSM Means To Me - Lexi Blake

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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You are singing that song now aren’t you? My evil plan has worked. Mwahahahahahaha! Now back to the regularly scheduled blog about pen names. You had no idea what I was going to talk about from the title did you? I hope not because I like to keep you guessing.

So moving on to the topic of pen names.

I understand the reason authors use pen names. I always feel like they should have a cape or secret powers to go with that name. I guess they do really. They do have the power to take me away to another time or place. Now there is a multitude of reasons they have pen names but the one I hear the most is that they want to keep their public life separate from their private life. They are smart to do that because there are some people who shall remain nameless (Luna) that are stalkers.  I, however, am a dedicated follower (yes, I totally stole that Luna).

Why keep their private life separate, you ask? For a variety of reasons. Let’s face it. If you read or write erotic fiction, you are somewhat thought of as perverted. I wear that badge proudly but for someone with a judgmental family, it is harder. They have to keep it a secret because of their children as well. Either so the kids won’t know because they are too young or they don’t want them to be ostracized at school.

They, also, use pen names to try out different genres. At first, I had no idea what they were talking about. But as I talked to more and more authors, I learned lots of new stuff about them. Most authors work really hard on creating a name for themselves and, if they try a new genre, sometimes it doesn’t necessarily fail but it is not the raging success that their first pen name reached. They are usually still proud of the work, but they don’t want that name to tarnish the successful one. 

Another reason I have heard is that if the genres are different then chances are the readers are as well. I have no idea what that is about because, even though I am not a huge fan of some genres, I know that if one of my favorite authors is writing a book in a different  genre then I want to at least try it. I have yet to find a book by one of my favorites that I didn’t like because of the genre. But anyway, let’s get back to the reason they use a different name for each genre. It is so that the readers are not confused by the books and can easily find the genre they want to read.

Another reason authors use multiple pen names is because they are writing for different publishers. This is probably the most popular reason. Publishers are picky about their authors. Sometimes they own an author’s pen name and, for that reason, the author cannot use that name for a different publisher.  Why do authors use different publishers? Sometimes it is because their contracts say they can only submit a certain number of books a year but the author can write more than that number. So why just submit to one publisher? I almost went off track right there when I put the word submit because all the sudden I heard a whip in the back ground. All right, I did go off the rails, but I am back on them now.  Authors need to make a living, too. If a publisher limits the number of books they can submit then that is cutting into the living of the author. I understand this is one of the biggest reasons that authors use the pen name. I don’t blame them for this one because, if an author is selling, why would you want to limit the number of books they produce? Sorry, another blog topic for another time.

The only drawback I can see for an author using a pen name is all the extra work it must create for them to do promo and whatnot for more than one name. I am sure, if they have to keep the names secret, it must also be quite the hardship because most authors are yappy or the ones I have met (and you know who you are—Mia and several others). For readers, it is a little different. Sometimes when authors use different pen names, if I don’t talk to them a lot, then I have no idea that my book collections are incomplete. I tend to collect authors and not series or genres. So I want every book they have ever written.  

So do you like pen names or do they annoy you?

Sinfully Sarcastic,

Shmuttmeister