The Accidental Menage

Have to say I hadn't given much thought to writing a menage until recently although I like reading them. Menage, for those of us who have a very....um, tame lifestyle, it's pure wicked fantasy and there's not a thing wrong with that. But honestly? That's how I look at menage. I don't think it's the norm although I'd be interested in seeing statistics on how many people live that lifestyle or just indulge on occasion.

As a writer of erotic romance, I have to say I've always been kind of vanilla, I guess. One woman, one man...very hot, but there you go, VANILLA. That's okay. BDSM, menage, f/f, or m/m isn't for everyone. Thing is I find I'm branching out these days. Maybe my comfort level as a writer is expanding and that's a good thing because, as writers, we want to grow and try doing new things.

Well, finally, I moved to the next level, crossed over to the dark side, and I've written my first menage and currently I'm working on another. And it all happened by accident! Not long ago, I was seriously stalled on a work-in-progress. This wasn't brain surgery. It was an erotic romance. But for some reason, my mind just froze. I talked with a friend about the whole stalling-out thing and she suggested an exercise that seemed a little different so I decided to give it a try. She told me to write something completely "different" from what I'd done before. Didn't have to be long or anything...just different. She suggested writing a story about a love affair between a were-rabbit and a were-tiger. Okay, rolled my eyes and laughed over that one, but she had a point. I got it.

So just to give myself a break from the stubborn work-in-progress, I gave it a try. I had the flash of an idea for a paranormal and jumped in with both feet. I've NEVER had so much fun writing a story. This was another genre I hadn't tried and yes, it definitely took me to another level in my writing. The story flew and before long, due to the paranormal element, I was injecting menage into the plot. It was an accident, but it worked. I finished the shifter story in about four days, incorporating what I've been calling a MENAGE plus ONE. Guess I could've called it a foursome but that just sounded too much like a bunch of guys planning a golf date.

Now I've never been much of a fan of "stranger sex". You know...hot woman walks into a bar and spots a couple of equally hot guys. She stops and points...you and you. Come with me. We're gonna have wild monkey sex. Uh-uh. I don't find that appealing in anyway but I've found that injecting a bit of paranormal into the mix frees the writer up to deal with any morality qualms nicely. You have a world to create and diffent standards crafted exclusively by the writer. You can get away with just about anything.

For what it's worth, I sold the paranormal with the menage plus one to Ellora's Cave and now I'm onto another. It was so fun that I just had to do it again. Sometimes it takes a gentle nudge to try something different and some accidents can be good things.