I had a choice?

I write BDSM erotic romance.

That’s my genre, but I never actually picked it.

When I started writing, I thought I would be a fantasy writer. A while later, I worked out while I like writing about fantasy worlds, what I really love writing about are relationship between characters who exist in those worlds, everything else is secondary to that. So I somehow morphed into a romance writer.

Sometimes it was a fantasy or paranormal romance, sometimes historical romance, sometimes straight forward contemporary. Whatever the details, even if I didn’t start out intending to write a romance, two of the characters would soon make their intentions clear. The books turned into romances whether I wanted them to or not.

Looking back, I was also a BDSM writer from the start - although I didn’t necessarily put that label on them. In fact, I was writing them well before I knew that label existed – well before I was old enough to know the label existed, lol!

I’ve always written relationship based on a mutual enjoyment of dominance and submission – not one character forcing their will on their relationship because they are bigger or stronger, but each character finding their own kind of happiness in their own way.

There weren’t a lot of whips and chains in these first books (they came later, when I was older) but reading those old stories back – it was always dominance and submission all the way for me. I’ve never actually written a proper vanilla romance in my life. Probably a good thing since vanilla psychology confuses the hell out of me!

I become an erotic writer after all that - around the same time I became a writer of male/male stories. Still not sure if that was a coincidence or not. Maybe it’s just a case of they both happened when I stopped trying to write what I thought I should write and wrote down the complete uncensored stories in my head.

Sometimes the characters who fall in love inside my head are both the same gender, sometimes there’s one of each and sometimes there are more than two characters to play with. That doesn’t really make any difference to me. I’ve never thought of male/male as a separate genre because gender or orientation really couldn’t present less of a blip on my radar.

So I don’t really think of myself as a male/male writer. Perhaps an erotic romance writer whose male characters often end up with other guys? If I’m going to be entirely honest, I’ve never thought of myself as an erotic writer either. What’s erotic is incredibly subjective. Explicit might be more accurate, although no one seems to label anything that way.

And that’s it really. I’d love to tell you that it was a flash of inspiration. That I got up one morning and decided I wanted to be a BDSM erotic romance writer when I grow up. But the truth is, I didn’t pick a genre or even a label. In the same way I don’t pick the stories that are going to turn up inside my head.

Ending up in the genre I currently occupy was a process – sometimes a quick one, sometimes a not so quick one. I got her more by luck than judgement and more by instinct than either. I wrote the stories that come naturally to me and BDSM erotic romance is the genre label the world puts on them.

I might not have picked my destination. But I’m very pleased to be in my current genre.

I’m happy here.

I write BDSM erotic romance.

Kim Dare.
Kink, love and a happy ending. Do you Dare?