As I continue to write as M. O'Keefe, I find myself following darker story lines. Plots I might have flinched away from I now rush toward. Using sex as a tool to tell women's stories is endlessly fascinating.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Most people like a little sex in their novels.
I think sex is a very minor part of most romance novels.
Sometimes the books most restrained about sex, even deeply scandalized by it, can whisper to us with the greatest hidden force. I am a huge admirer of the recently deceased, always underranked Evan S. Connell.
There are some novelists who can get away with writing about sex - Philip Roth, Ian McEwan - but they are rare.
Everyone seems agreed that writing about sex is perilous, partly because it threatens to swamp highly individualised characters in a generic, featureless activity (much like coffee-cup dialogue, during which everyone sounds the same), and partly because it feels... tacky.
Writers and readers are still trying to work out unresolved problems between men and women, and that is why millions of women around the world are hooked on romantic fiction. So am I.
I think there are many more stories still to be told about women.
Stories about the ongoing dramas in our lives as we age are not being told because women find it difficult to be honest about what's going on - about, for example, our heightened sexuality as we age or about living in a society that only values youth.
Traditionally in crime fiction, women exist as a bedroom convenience or to screw up in order that the plot may progress. I wanted no part of that.
I'm a very girlie girl, but I often find the heroes of my books trying to take over the story. In truth, I enjoy writing the male point of view more than any other.