January 4, 2008 | One Night Stand
If you’re a writer (and especially, for some reason, if you’re a writer of sexy romance), everyone always asks you if you base your stories on your real life. The answer, of course, is always No.
However, real life can often give you ideas for your story, which you then develop into fiction. For example I got the idea for my current wip by watching the awesome old 60s Adam West/Burt Ward Batman show on TV. I thought, “My next book is going to be about Batman.” Of course it isn’t (as Batman is property of DC comics) but that was how my heroine became a comic book artist, and the rest has come from that.
I can trace where One Night Stand came from quite easily. I wrote a joking email to my Harlequin editor at that time, where I wrote a sex scene from the point of view of someone who had the flu or something, and every erotic description could also be interpreted as being nauseating. Then, a bit later, I was pregnant and I had morning sickness and I was actually trying to write a sex scene, and every time I thought about sex and all it entailed I wanted to puke.
So I thought, “Hey, that would be a good scene: an erotica writer who can’t write sex because she’s got morning sickness.”
So I had my character: a pregnant erotica writer. What I usually do next in this situation is ask: Why is this a problem?
Ewwww! No! Get off, I’m gonna hurl!!
Well, of course, she didn’t know who the father of her baby was because she’d conceived during a one night stand.
I’d done a book where the heroine gets pregnant off a one night stand–Married in a Rush. In that book, the heroine is the sort of person who would have one night stands, and because this was a Harlequin/Mills & Boon novel and I wanted to use the great hook of a marriage of convenience, the heroine gets married to the father of her baby.
I wanted to do this one differently. I wanted my heroine not to be the sort of person who would ever have a one night stand, even though she’s an erotica writer. And I wanted her not to know the father, and not necessarily to fall in love with him. I wanted the story to be about her search for the father and, though she doesn’t know it, her search for her own happiness and self-knowledge.
And I also wanted her to have sex with someone who looked like George Michael. Just because.
Ehle says:
I’m sorry, Julie. I was so thrown by the George Michael comment at the end, I totally forgot there were plastic naked people in the middle.
I think it’s every little girl’s dream to eventually have sex with someone who looks like George Michael. I know it certainly was mine.
These behind the scenes tidbits are ultra-shiny. They’re kind of like watching Celebrity Rehab, but without all the guilt from having just watched people with addictions vomit and laughed about it.
Julie says:
Ehle, as always, you say it better than I ever could.
Though there was actually some vomiting involved.
sammyjo says:
that so funny, the vomiting bit lol i cant wait to read this book when it arrives from waterstones yeahy.