Debra Hyde Blog



What A Difference A Year Makes!
2009.12.01 21:44:31
A year ago today, I watched Ravenous Romance roll-out to the public.  It was quite a splash, with its sophisticated look of a website, its authors' blog, and its many sub-genre offerings. And I got to be part of the action!

A decade previous to this date, I embarked on writing short erotic fiction. Dozens of my stories appeared in major anthologies from Cleis Press, Alyson Books, the now-defunct Venus Book Club, Berkley Heat, and more.  I celebrated every by-line and cherished every opportunity. But something was missing. I was one of those authors that the larger mainstream publishing world overlooked. I was an early blogger and diarist about sex and my sex life, yet no book deal came my way. I had a couple of novels in the can yet securing an agent was a multi-year exercise in futility. I watched the romance market embrace a certain level of eroticism in their publishing lines... but it did not speak to me in a way that was authentic to my experience or even paralleled the intensity of erotic writing I had done. Let me tell you, I felt left out in the cold.

Until Lori Perkins blew me away by inviting me to submit Ravenous Romance. She remembered my writing and publishing creds -- something every writer prays for -- and just when I questioned whether to continue on, she gave me the very outlet I needed to journey on. I had a whole new reason to celebrate and cherish opportunity.  Since then, Lori and her partners have brought two of my novels into e-print. They've asked for several more, including one that is shaping up to be an opus of a lifetime. And, most soulful to me, they've allowed me to write from the erotic edge. Not once have they asked me to softball my erotic portrayals.

Today, all of us Ravenous Romance authors are celebrating our good fortune. We're ecstatic.  And our publisher is celebrating, too, by offering all full-length ebooks to the reading public for a mere .99 cents.  What a way to celebrate!

Happy anniversary, Ravenous Romance!

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Weaving Erotic Wonders: The Naughty Campaign
2009.09.15 22:01:24
Or: naughty stuff, free for the asking!

Over the summer, my college-aged, production-savvy daughter helped me assemble an exciting DVD/CD promotional package, specifically geared to the erotic romance/erotica reader. It's a DVD/CD package that has book trailers, author commentaries, and book excerpts of all my novels.

My novels are exceptionally kinky and probably not for the faint-of-heart.  But if you're an adventurous, open-minded reader and game for interesting twists of erotic extremes, then you might enjoy my work.

If you'd like one of these babies, simply email me at debrawriting at cox dot net, provide your snail mail address, and I'll send you a DVD/CD combo at no cost to you.  (Adults only, please.)

Note:  If you'd like to see a photo of the "naughty package," please visit debrahyde.com. I seem to be unable to upload the image here.

I absolutely promise to regard your snail mail address as sacrosanct. I will not share it and if I have future offerings, I will contact you first via email.

I hope you'll check out this freebie of mine.  We had such fun putting it together and I'd like to pass our enthusiasm to you!

Tags: freebie promotion erotic erotica ki

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Book Trailer!
2009.05.11 21:34:06

Hope you don't mind, but excited me *has* to tell you that I put together a book trailer for my newest novel, Training Desire!  Thanks to better software, it has special effects and a voice over!  And thanks to that same better software, I'm still in the grips of its learning curve so you audio/visual tech types will easily spot that I need to learn more about, well, audio/visual fine tuning.

I'm also pleased to share word with you that erotic author Louisa Burton , known for her Hidden Grotto books, kindly hailed my book for evoking

"a world of sacred sensuality and dark intrigue that’s sure to appeal to those with a taste for erotic fantasy."

Louisa's books are wonderful reads and I'm grateful to earn her nod.

Enjoy the video and, if it leaves you so inclined, check out Training Desire!



Tags: fantastica | wicked pleasures | Debra Hyde

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Training Desires!
2009.03.27 20:30:34
Yes! Ravenous Romance has released my newest novel, Training Desires!  It's a fantasy-based erotic romance that, over four books, will take us from rangthiath Mira's innocent pleasure-giving beginnings and plunge us into an internecine conflict that will rip her from all she knows.

Think Jacqueline Cary (Kushiel's Dart) meets George R.R. Martin (Song of Fire and Ice series) meets Anne Rice (Beauty series).

Mira's world is an omni-sexual landscape where pleasure is ordained by the great goddess, Rangtha, and the people of her kith house cater to her worshipers in every way imaginable -- without prejudice towards orientation or taste.

Which means there's plenty of het, m/m, and f/f couplings.  And that's before Mira loses here virginity.  Imagine the possibilities in future editions!  Wonders await us all.

Born into the pleasure world of Kith House, Rangtha in the fading city of Nameda, Mira is poised to enter the ranks of the revered pleasure-giver. Her only goal is to serve her goddess, Rangtha, by giving her virginity to a worthy recipient.

Yet she's an innocent, unaware of the strife that surrounds her. Rival mentors pit themselves one against the other. Rapacious citizens exuberantly bid for hers virginity. And shadowy factions -- for good or for ill -- see Mira as the symbol of the future.

Rarely has one so innocent had to stand up to dangers so blatant. But rarely has Nameda seen the likes of Mira, a celebrant determined to fulfill her goal according to the ways of her goddess.

Spinning Mira's world into existence has been one of the most exhuberant writing experiences of my life and I hope you'll indulge yourself in Training Desires.  Heck, make it a Ravenous Romance bestseller, please?  That way, I can continue to sping her world, and other equally exciting realms, into existence.

Because we all deserve pleasure.

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Schools of Thought
2009.02.25 23:11:49
When I was a much younger woman, I wanted to become a classical musician.  Through high school and into college, I immersed myself in music and musical performance.  I spent a year in a music conservatory, under a strict pedagogy of performance, theory, and history.

One thing I learned during those years that not only did the arts  have their historical eras, but that different schools of thought existed within those time periods.  What the German opera composers produced during the Romantic era was distinctly different from what the Italians created.  What Cubists created in the early 20th century was distinctly different from the Surrealists's works.  The literary movements of naturalim and realism perceived and portrayed their world from markedly different platforms.

Yet all managed to co-exist, inform one another, and, ultimately, create a shared universe.

Something similar happened within erotic romance.  And I think we're seeing a wonderful convergence of origins here at Ravenous Romance.

Some of us arrived here from the sex-positive world of women's smut.  Others have their perceptive origins with the romance genre itself, before or during its accelerated sub-genre explosion.  Some of us found ourselves initially informed by the likes of Susie Bright and Betty Dodson, others by Sex and the City and Bridget Jones's Diary.  Some of us fell in love with slash fiction while others had their roots in writing LGBT erotica.

Yet here we all are, different schools of thought channeling our talents into erotic romances for Ravenous Romance.

Erotic Romance, as a sub-genre, is a relatively young creature.  Its characteristics are reasonably well-defined, yet some of the heated discussions I've seen surrounding it suggest that it's anything but a static sub-genre.  In all likelihood, it will continue to develop and refine itself.

But good stews come from time spent in the pot, though, don't they?  And what I'm really excited about here at Ravenous Romance isn't just where us author have been, but where we will take erotic romance now that we're here.  I'm excited about the various ways we might inform one another and inspire one another and, ultimately, how our collective works might influence erotic romance as a sub-genre.

I have no idea how our various perceptions, backgrounds and aspirations will play out here, but I have no desire to predict an outcome.  Instead, I want to live it.

Because we're all in the same pot, we're bubbling away, and a great stew's underway.  And I hope readers everywhere will discover Ravenous Romance and take a hearty taste.

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And Then There's the Sex
2009.02.03 06:59:47

Long ago, in my early days as a sexually aware young woman, I made a key sexual discovery:  That sexual arousal felt wonderful.  Up until then, my mother had guided the sexual messages I received, messages born of her generation's fears, fears that centered on loss and failure.  The loss of one's virginity and, hence, one's reputation.  The failure to prevent pregancy and, hence, one's reputation.  The loss of future possibilities because, hell, you ruined your chances by having sex.

No lie:  My mother once told me "whatever you, don't."

Hers was a generation that entered adulthood in the early 1950s.  She would become a high graduate, a before-marriage working girl, a wife and a mother in the span of five years.  (That she managed to put motherhood off until the age of 23 was almost scandalous to her Midwestern relatives.)  She would be a young parent during a decade of extreme social conformity.  And the sexual messages that saw her into adulthood would try to invade mine.

Except when I realized how good sexual arousal felt, I couldn't believe a just and caring God would give mankind something so wonderful and make it a sin.  And I refused to believe that, in an era where family planning information and birth were easy to come by, sex would automatically lead to ruination.  I decided pretty early that one could be a responsible hedonist.

I decided my mother's pat phrase was bullshit.

The reason I share this with you isn't to make some lofty claim about throwing off the shackles of sexual repression or that I knew more and better than my well-meaning mother.  It's to illustrate what was, essentially, my first embrace of the sex positive.

The "sex positive."  Basically, it's the attitude that sex need not lead to Bad Things.  That it could be a bright and meaningful force.  At the risk of sounding new-age mushy, good sex was good karma.

Sex positivity was a backlash to the dim view previous generations' held towards sex.  Dimestore novels -- what we today call vintage sleeze -- always enticed its readers through titilation and provocative, but your vixen pretty much always ended up ruining her life.  Lesbians looked hot in the cover art but never had a happy ending.  Extreme sex always led to an extreme and violent end.  In fact, the sex negative was employed so publishers could routinely escape the grip of vice-and-suppression watchdogs.  Miserable fates actually gave such novels redeeming value.  The facade of a moral outcome fed into a message generations previous to mine found all too intimidating.

I actually gave up on reading erotic works when I was a young adult because so much of what I came across was bleak.  And came with a death toll.  Candy?  She presumably died in the end.  Story of O?  She chose suicide.  Young Adam?  He killed his pregnant girlfriend, for Pete's Sake.  And that was the literary avant garde.  Can you imagine how it went down in dimestore sleeze?

I wanted work where people didn't die of their excesses, but actually achieved some level of happiness.  Sadly, I didn't really see that until the big box boom brought a Borders to my neck of the woods.  There, I discovered erotic writing that celebrated sexual enjoyment and actually advocated for pleasure.  I hadn't seen such positivity since The Joy of Sex from my early adulthood.  Four novels into it, and I wanted to be part of this sex positive movement.  I wrote my first erotic short story soon after and never looked back.

Next: schools of thought



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The Transition
2009.01.17 00:37:20
Recently, an interviewer asked me about the convergence of erotica and erotic romance and expressed some frustration over the genre-bending.  I won't speak for my interviewer, but I suspect many of us who toiled as authors of erotica and found ourselves ignored and ostracised by most of the publishing community were more than mildly frustrating when erotic romance leap-frogged over us.

When I first saw it occur, I considered taking a romance route with my novels.  I started buying romance in piecemeal fashion, attracted to their plots and the promise of erotic content.  But every time I read a title, I found myself stymied.  I wasn't enjoying what I read.  One novel pitted its protagonists against one another in an emotional wrestling match after every sexual encounter.  They get it on, then get into it.  And it struck me as so passive agressive -- and so lacking in the honest communication -- that I abandoned the novel before its midpoint.

Several of the novels I read alternated its most of chapters between the female and male leads (sometimes with secondary characters commanding a few chapters, sometimes not).  When the approach works well -- like Pam Rosenthall's recent The Edge of Impropriety -- it can make for a riveting read.  But when it didn't, I put the book down.  Sometimes the plot seemed too thin to sustain the story.  Often, the characters didn't earn my loyalty.  And many times the plot revolved around "things unspoken," secrets that pulled protagonists from one another's arms in day-after regret.

For quite some time, the romances I read kept me from authoring erotic romance.

Believe me, I love love as much as the next person.  It's wonderfully euphoric and validating.  But I'm also a pragmatist and I don't pussyfoot around when it comes to relationship issues.  I'm of a mind that you get it out in the open and put it on the table.  And not just for problems, but for compliments and joys as well.  I'm as likely to put "I adore you; I cherish our intimacy" on the table as I am "I have a problem."  The push me/pull you thing I see in some romances just don't cut it for me.  It's a bad relationship habit and if I was single or uncommitted, I wouldn't date anyone who used it as a modus operandi.

Yet I managed to join the erotic romance fold.

Why?  Because I realized that a majority of my erotic short stories already focused on relationships, a key romance element.  Granted, my fictional relationships were already established but they served as the key backdrop for the erotic encounter.  Love, grief, the fear of loss, the balm of intimacy, I explored them all in my characters.  In erotic romance, I simply brought the backdrop into the foreground.

But I remain resistant to characters dragging around a U-Haul's worth of baggage.  I don't want to write a soap opera but a drama.  I'm more of a "when bad things happen to good people" kind of author and I'm more interested in exploring how characters handle unexpected impacts, how they navigate their way through trouble, and, if they're part of an established couple, how they unite and protect the love they've shared.

That's some of what you'll find in my first novel with Ravenous Romance, Blind Seduction, and I hope you'll find it a rewarding read.  But that's not all that captures my imagination when I write.  There's also the sex -- ah, another topic!

Next time.

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