This week we are joined by erotic romance author: Amy Valenti. Amy attained ‘crazy cat lady’ status at four years old, but took a little longer to get to the ‘published author’ stage, which was her other goal in life. Now in her late twenties, she tries to minimize the number of cats she puts into her erotic romance stories, but more than one has slipped into a character’s home while her back’s been turned. After all, the ultimate test of a man’s worth is what his new partner’s pets think of him…
Cats aside, Amy enjoys writing about intelligent female characters who know themselves and their desires. She’s been fascinated by sex, relationship and power-play dynamics for many years, and experiments with different sub-genres under the overarching category of BDSM, concentrating on Domination and submission romance in particular.
We decided to ask Amy few probing questions and below are her answers.
1. When did you first realize you wanted to be a writer?
I started writing terrible stories and poems as soon as I was confident with a pen – so about five or six years old, maybe. Thankfully, I stopped writing poems soon after the first set, and with practice the awful stories got slowly and successively less cringe-worthy. It took me until my late teens to start writing the smutty stuff, though!
2: What do you like to do when you’re not writing?
I play computer games – anything from old-school Tetris to Bioshock and Tomb Raider. The puzzle games give my mind a break from turning over plot ideas, and the violent ones are good for working out aggression.
I also read a lot of books. I used to read a lot more crime, young adult, urban fantasy and horror, but these days it’s almost all erotic romance – it’s like a drug! Ten years ago, if you told me I’d soon be obsessed with reading romance books, I would have laughed at you.
3: Do you have any suggestions/tips for aspiring writers and authors you’d like to share?
Read a lot, write a lot, do things that inspire you. If you really want it badly enough, you’ll find the time to sit down and write. Plan if it feels right for you, but don’t force it if it doesn’t work for you. You should know your ending in advance, though.
Don’t overanalyse what you’ve put on the page, just get it down. I use writeordie.com to make sure I stay focused on the next words rather than the ones before. When you’ve got the whole thing down, you can start to worry about editing then. It took me forever to start finishing projects, because I would edit too soon and end up hating every word and second-guessing myself. Don’t do that.
4. What book do you wish you could have written?
From a financial perspective? Fifty Shades of Grey. I’d love to earn that kind of money!
From an author fangirl standpoint, I’d have to say the Kushiel series by Jacqueline Carey (book 1 is Kushiel’s Dart). They’re fantasy books with religion, mythology and geography inspired by this world, and the main character is a courtesan chosen by one of the gods to feel intense pleasure with intense pain. It’s got a lot of political intrigue and twists and turns, and some very sexy parts, too.
5. Just as your books inspire authors, what authors have