For those of you who may be new to Lisa Marie Rice or are devoted readers, here is an exclusive interview for all of you! Get to know a little more about the talented woman who writes erotic romantic suspense and some insight into the main characters Sam Reston and Nicole Pearce from her recent novel Into The Crossfire.

Getting Warmed Up

Jane: Of all the genres out there to write about, what drives you to write about erotic romantic suspense?

Lisa Marie Rice: In erotica, the point of the novel, its core mission, is sex. A depiction of sex. Many erotica books are beautifully written, evocative, wonderful studies in the psychology of sex, often lush journeys into a rich inner world. That’s their core mission—to evoke sex.

The core mission of a romance is to bring a man and a woman together, show their burgeoning love, how they overcome the obstacles. Romantic suspense is the love story where the hero and heroine also have to overcome danger. Erotic romantic suspense is the same, only there’s a more complete description of the physical bond.

I simply cannot imagine a more exciting genre to write. Falling in love is the quintessential human act and without love everything falls apart. It is the sine qua non of being human. I’m lucky in that publishing now accepts the full description of what happens between two people falling in love, something that wouldn’t have been possible in the romance community twenty years ago. So you can follow what’s happening in their bodies and not just their hearts and minds. Also, I get to layer danger over the excitement of the love affair. It’s a very dangerous world out there. The hero and heroine have to prevail over tremendous odds.

It’s a very hopeful genre, too. I love it.

Jane: Some people do not understand the value words have to us. As opposed to romance on a screen, what kind of power does erotic romance have through words for you?

Lisa Marie Rice: There’s not too much romance on a screen. Erotic romance wouldn’t really work too well in cinema because an erotic romance novel takes you deep into the heart of the couple, shows the emotional bonds as they are forming, while also showing in detail the physical relationship. This is the gift of novels, it is not the gift of cinema. Cinema’s strengths lie elsewhere.

Jane: How does writing erotic romance keep you young?

Lisa Marie Rice: When I write, I write in what is technically known as ‘deep third’—i.e., from the point of view of the character. I go so deeply inside the character’s head, it is if the scene were written by the character him or herself. Using the words they’d choose, feeling their emotions as they would. It’s a wonderful process for a writer putting herself in someone else’s head (almost as wonderful as reading a good novel and being in a characters’ head). I’m not young anymore but I can easily put myself back into the head of someone young. Someone facing life and love and danger boldly, with courage. Because it takes a lot of courage to fall in love. A writer leads two entirely separate lives. One as a sedate professional with all the bourgeois accoutrements, sitting alone in a study typing away. The other is the Wild Woman inside, living life to the full, falling madly in love, facing deathly danger. Over and over again. It’s great.

Jane: What do you love most about writing an erotic romance scene and the freedom you have when it comes to the language you can use?

Lisa Marie Rice: I shouldn’t say this, but oh man, I have the best time writing my books. I have a lot of fun with the men. My men are tough and they are not politically correct, in any way. They don’t dance around things, trying to be polite. They are also quite profane in their head when describing anything to do with sex.

Falling in love completely blindsides them. They stutter, they lose their cool, they don’t have any kind of grasp of what is happening to them because it is new, intense and at first not even welcome. It upsets their equilibrium. And there is always a moment when they realize, inside their heads, that they are no longer having sex. They are making love.

But boy do I have fun with their language and do I have fun watching them stumble and fall.

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