🍭 Sweet or 🌶 Spicy? Two Romance Writers Debate
Pt. 2
This interview between Daisy Fairchild (Tasting Much Sweeter Than Wine; What The Empress Wants) and Augusta Connor (Whoever Brought Me Here; Catch Me If I Fall) continues on from our January newsletter, which you can read here.
DF: Okay, Augusta, your turn!! Do you like to write spicy romance scenes in your stories or sweeter, low-steam stories?
AC: I’m not sure I have a preference, per se. I’ve done both for Space Fruit Press, and I plan to do both in the future, as well.
DF: Do you like one or the other better when you’re reading?
AC: You know, it’s interesting, I definitely prefer to read spicy content. But I think I’m very aware that not everyone does, and I also have a lot of thoughts and feelings about the sexualization of queer content, in the sense that queer content is often assumed or implied to be somehow more inherently explicit than het content. I also think sometimes we, as the queer community, have leaned so hard into reclaiming our sexuality as good and fun and visible that we forget to reclaim sweetness, too. So, even though I enjoy, and even prefer, explicit content, I feel strongly about writing both.
DF: See, this is why we’re friends. I’m all, “smut’s great!!” and you’re like, “but the socio-political implications…”
AC: Both takes are important!
DF: They are, they are. Okay, what was the first spicy story you ever wrote?
AC: It would have been an early fanfic, I suppose. I didn’t discover fanfic until I was in college and had my own computer and own ethernet connection. Once I did discover it, though, I was all in!
DF: Star Trek?
AC: Laughs What else?
DF: A classic. Blow a kiss to the K/S Archive! Okay, but I already talked about smut, so tell me about writing sweet! Beyond being the change you want to see in the world, why do you write it?
AC: That’s a good question! Being the change is honestly a big piece of it. It’s important to me that the queer community be able to see sweetness and tenderness and all of the sort of romance that we take so for granted in het rom-coms and YA novels and so forth. But also… there’s something almost easier about it? I don’t mean that as an sort of slam on sweet stories, but with spicy stories, if you want to write one that works, you have to do all of the emotional lifting and character building that you would with a sweet story, and then you also have to write the smut. Which is challenging.
DF: Or you can just write pwp* or kink stories.
AC: You can. I’m not good at straight-up erotica. So, I think I find it both satisfying and rewarding to just stick to the story proper, and not have to figure out how to build in exciting spicy scenes along with everything else. I also really think a lot of stories don’t need it. For example, Catch Me If I Fall is a sweet story, and I really considered writing a smutty epilogue because I was worried that no one would want to read a sweet story. But it didn’t feel right! The story ended where it ended, and I didn’t want to compromise that.
DF: Besides, you gotta leave something for your fanfic writers to work with!
AC: Laughs Exactly. Will no one think of the fic writers?
DF: And there you have it! Sweet stories are better for the fic-writing ecosystem. Thank you, Augusta!
AC: Thank you, Daisy!
*pwp – defined as “plot, what plot?” or “porn without plot,” depending on who you ask; a common fandom acronym for smutty stories written for smut’s sake.