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I wouldn't really call us 'erotica', because we're actually rather blatantly porny, and the focus of our narratives isn't actually on an erotic atmosphere or idea.  We tell stories that happen to have sex in them, explicit sex.  The goal is to be like a mainstream adventure story that doesn't fade to black when things get steamy - that's pretty much our formula right there. 

One thing we don't really do - despite what you might expect - is romance.  Not that there is not romance in our stories, there is some.  But romance is not the main focus of what we do.  More than one person has suggested that the romance community might be a good place to spread the word about our stuff.  It might, but I feel like that would be dishonest in several ways.

I will be the first to admit that my knowledge of the romance genre is limited by not, you know, actually reading romances.  People who know me are fully cognizant of the fact that a story without monsters, swordfights, superpowers, or explosions is unlikely to attract my attention.  I am a sucker for a good love story, and there are several so-called "chick flicks" that I am not too proud to admit I enjoyed, but a story where the entire focus is on romance just seems thin to me.  Like short story fodder rather than something bigger.

So I am not the market for romance, and neither is Naamah, frankly.  Ergo, we don't really have the impulses or instincts to write it.  I think we write cool stories and that people would like them if they gave them a chance, but I really doubt that someone who likes romance as a genre preferentially is going to find what they are looking for here.

In a true romance, the focus is on the relationship.  We are presented with two characters and led to sympathize with them both.  (Assuming this is not the kind of romance where the man is an idealized hunkadore and the woman is a blank cipher for the reader to project herself onto al la Twilight - that kind of shit is just sad.)  But the characters meet and usually don't like each other at first, then come around to being passionately In Love, whereupon Obstacles are put in their way that they have to Overcome in order to Be Together.  They struggle, they overcome, kiss, roll credits.  Snore.

My first problem with this is that it is usually heteronormative, monogamous by design, and sexist.  When the characters are 'meant for each other' they are not allowed to have sex with anyone else in the story, so they have to be monogamous even before the inevitable wedding which tops off so many of these simplistic fantasies.  As a writer who favors interesting sex, I deplore this idea.  Two loving adults having mutually fulfilling consensual sex with each other - who the hell wants to see that?  This is porn, I want to write about things I can't do at home, thanks.  This model of sexuality not only A: chains sex to love in a way I find tiresome and juvenile, and B: excludes gay/bisexual people, transgendered people, and fucking forget about polyamory.  Romance teaches people to search for "The One" when the very idea is preposterous - there is no such fucking thing.

My second problem is that, as a person who has been married for sixteen-plus years, I find the 'happily ever after' ideal utterly laughable.  Anybody who has been married a long time can tell you that whatever obstacles you went through to get together are a joke compared to what you will endure as a married person.  In the real world, the wedding is when the work starts, kids.  I'm not ranking on marriage, and I'm not saying my marriage is miserable - I'm very happily married, and right now that doesn't take much work to maintain, but it took a lot of work to get to that point, I can tell you.  The thing that turns me off romances is that at the end I always say to myself "I give them six months, tops."

Romance also divides people into arbitrary categories.  It divides love and feelings into well-defined types that are actually rather hard to identify in real life.  We are taught that 'friendship' and 'love' are two immutably different things, and that we will 'know' when we feel them, when this is not really true.  "Romance" does not depict the messy, uncertain, fumbling relationships so many of us have.  We don't know how people feel about us, we don't know how we feel, and we grope and falter through life trying to split people into 'friends' and 'lovers' as if there had to be a divide.

The romantic ideal chains men to a seeking, aggressive role and women to a passive one.  It holds out a two-person, monogamous, hetero marriage as an ideal and by omission derides any alternative.  It ties sex to love and teaches that love is a kind of mystical, intoxicating force - like ghost tequila - that is supposed to magically elide past all problems if you have enough of it.  It holds up a standard that dooms adherents to disappointment, as no real relationship is ever like that.  Romance fades, and when it does you are left with the person you chose.  If you chose well, then you have a relationship that can become the deepest, most fulfilling friendship you will ever have, but 'love' is not really the measure of that.  'Romance', as it is portrayed, is a false idol that will not bring happiness.

So yeah, that's why I don't write romances.