The edits of the first erotic story for the Pleasure project are done, thanks to my editor Steph. It was fun to write, but I got held back by the cover issue–I usually have a clear view of how the final book should look like (sometimes even before the actual book is written), but this time my brain gave me a massive creative ‘fuck you, I’m frying in here!’. So I spent the last few days on stock image websites to get something, something, that would make my mind go yes! this one!
But nope.
Nada.
I had to google women’s erotica covers, and peek at the wonderful yet now discontinued Erotica Cover Watch blog, and read reviews of books in the women’s erotica genre while exploring cover lists like this one on Goodreads (the only thing I learned besides the standard [reader expectations?] for erotic romance being body parts, was that many people sometimes were lured into reading the book by its cover [occasionally coupled with delicious title.])
Now, erotic romance isn’t exactly my primary goal here — it’s more than that. It is an addition to a bigger work, not a completely separate book entity, which could be both trouble and a successful experiment.
While the first story is mostly an explicit sensuous scene (which serves as kind of a prologue to Falaha’s Journey Into Pleasure short series), the second one (I’m currently 2222 words into it) is more of a romance with additional worldbuilding, because these episodes take place in a big detailed science fiction universe and are set somewhere after Episode #83 and before the Epilogue of the Falaha’s Journey trilogy, hence Pleasure series is actually Book 3.5, and in the end the second story might not end up in a(n overly) steamy encounter — we’re talking about people’s relationships, not blind porn. The second episode is about courtship and is particularly hard to write due to circumstances of characters involved. Well, not that they can’t hit it in the later episodes of this work and they probably will. It’s good to have all sides of relationship dynamics besides bedroom play in the romance-themed story.
The good thing about Episode #2? I already have the cover idea for this one…
I even have cover ideas for the Rjg, with the story still in such a puny state.
So if I will not find the suitable image for the first story, I’ll have to go with the photo that I have in reserve.
Tsk.