...If women -- and I know it's not limited to sugar babies, and I also know it's not limited to women -- are willing to overlook reality in the pursuit of "power," that's sad. And it makes us all losers.

“True crime is in the toilet.” That’s what I was told in 1997 when I signed my first true crime book contract. The speaker didn’t mean that true crime was swirling in the toilet bowl with … well … excrement. She meant it wasn’t selling, though certainly many people believe the genre is bathroom bowl worthy. Despite that toilet statement, my first true crime book hit the New York Times best-seller list. And since then

One thing I discovered through researching, writing, and publishing Secret Sex Lives: A Year on the Fringes of American Sexuality is that people look at me through colored lenses when I tell them I research and write about sex. I have yet to figure out if those lenses are rose-colored or black. I do know they looked black on the day a former student insisted that I go up to his hotel room to talk with him about his w

I clicked play and was barely into the video when I was hooked … on both the book trailer, which is like a short film, and the novel.

Sometimes getting lost can be good for writers, such as when we get lost in our work. And in our stories. Then again, getting lost in one’s story can be good or bad depending on what kind of lost. There’s the good kind of lost where our creative minds are living in the world we’re writing about. That’s bliss. There’s the kind of lost when we lose our direction in our story. That’s hell. And then there’s the ki

I didn’t pay much attention to the four teenaged boys standing in front of me at Wendy’s until one of them started talking about someone who had been wearing a Miley Cyrus t-shirt and how he’d walked up to that person and said, “That’s so gay.” At that, I paid attention. At that, I presumed the person wearing the t-shirt was male. At that, I wanted to speak up and say something to the teenager, but I didn’t know what

It can be easier to write about mother-daughter dynamics in a novel than it is to write about one’s own mother-daughter dynamics in a memoir … or … in a book about sex. For that matter, I think it’s easier to write about sex and religion in a novel than it is in nonfiction. In a novel, one can always say that those thoughts, feelings, actions are those of the character, not the author – the character just took the au

Kate Douglas has been writing erotic romance for the Aphrodisia imprint of Kensington Publishing since 2006. So when Publishing Perspectives asked me to do a story on the erotica market and how it’s changed post-Fifty Shades of Grey, Kate was one of the first authors I contacted. My November 2012 email interview with her was so informative that I decided to post it here in its entirety, though divided in two parts. I

I asked a friend the other day to pray that I’d find the “right” book to write next. “I want you to write a book with purpose,” she said. I flinched. Every book I’ve written has had purpose, I think. Certainly Wasted and Breaking Point did. Wasted, the story of the murder of Regina Hartwell, allowed me to go into high schools and talk about drug and alcohol abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, and physical abuse. St