Margaret L. Carter, Revisited
is the heroine of DARK CHANGELING (which was written before SHADOW, although published after). Naturally, the fact that she has a vampire for a partner isn't mentioned in SHADOW, but readers of both books have the "inside knowledge" that her experience with vampires makes her more open to believing in werewolves.
Some of your writing is for Ellora's Cave, which sells erotica. Did you find it hard to write erotica? Do you set out to write erotica, or is it a case of writing the way you feel, and then sometimes toning it down for other markets?
I stumbled into writing for Ellora's Cave by a fortunate accident. For a long time I'd been thinking I ought to write about a female vampire protagonist, since all my vampire central characters up to then had been male. The females played only supporting roles. I conceived the idea of writing about Gillian, from CHILD OF TWILIGHT, as an adult. It seemed natural to explore her reactions when she reaches sexual maturity and goes into heat for the first time. After associating with human beings so much, on account of her mixed ancestry, she would of course be open to falling in love with a human male, unlike most female vampires, who regard reproductive sex as an unimportant distraction that occurs once every few years at most. A plot that focuses on the main character's going into heat has to contain a lot of sex. Aside from a few short stories, this was the first extended erotic work I'd written. The sexual focus grew inevitably out of the plot premise. Having written it, I had to find a market for a sexually explicit novella and novella markets are rare. I tried the best-known erotic romance short fiction market, the "Secrets" anthology series from Red Sage. They rejected it. On one of my e-mail lists I saw a mention of Ellora's Cave, so I tried them next. This novella is one of many examples of works I probably would never have got published without the Internet. The online community has made my career! As for erotic romance in general, it all depends on the stories. Some plots lend themselves naturally to in-depth exploration of the characters' sexual relationship, while others don't. Tacking extra sex scenes onto a story of the second type doesn't work well. Exploring the relationships between characters fascinates me, which is why I
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