Blogging with Elizabeth Cage

Elizabeth Cage asked me to be a part of her “Sexy Stories: fiction that turns me on” series. Here’s a snippet from the article:

The Ties That Bind by Vanessa DuriesI’ve always been a great believer in the virtues of popular fiction.

I began my writing career in the science fiction & fantasy field before making a diversion later in life into the world of crime and thrillers. However, my own efforts in these wonderful genres tended to attract mixed reviews and barely average sales due to the fact that it was always self-evident to me that even if I was working in genre, this was no reason not to have believable characters constructed out of flesh and blood rather than cardboard. So, my characters always felt real to me, and in order to make them even more real and credible they shared many of my own tastes, obsessions, quirks, whatever, and as a result sex often reared its pesky head in my writing, which didn’t help in making me overly popular to genre readers.

This explains how I eventually came to erotic fiction.

As an editor with a long career in traditional book publishing, I have always subscribed to Sturgeon’s law that states that ‘90% of everything is crap, which leaves 10% of quality’. A simple piece of maths that applies to all literature, whether it be deemed literary/mainstream or be within recognisable genres such as those evoked earlier.

Read the rest of the article here.