Monday Magic - Nicole R Murphy

Writing sexually active women

In 2003, when I decided that I was fooling myself if I thought I was anything but a romance author, I started thinking long and hard about the type of romance author I wanted to be.

I love romance – have from the moment as a teenager I discovered the towers of Mills and Boons in my grandmother’s cupboard. Later on, some friends showed me into the single title world and I found folks like Amanda Quick and Joanna Lindsey.

But there was one thing about romance that was starting to bug me – the virgin heroine.

I know that there are women who are virgins for some time – I was one myself. I know there are women who have only slept with the one man and have made quite a happy life for themselves in the doing so.

But as I read book after book with virgin heroine, and at times saw the authors do INCREDIBLE things to maintain the heroine’s virginity until she met the hero, I started to wonder what was this saying about women’s sexuality.

We all know that there are a lot of women, probably the majority nowadays, that have more than one sexual partner. There are some women that never settle down with just one person. There were open relationships, and couples that swung and so on.

Because these women had a different sexuality, did that mean they were incapable of recognising true love? Was that the message all the virgin heroines were sending me?

So when I sat down to write the initial drafts of the books that would become the Dream of Asarlai trilogy, I had just one message I wanted to send – that sexually active women could find happiness with their perfect man too.

To make my point as firmly as I could, the very first sex scene in the first book was not with the hero. My heroine, excited by having achieved an ambition and wanting to celebrate, finds a cute guy at the local nightclub and takes him home.

It doesn’t work out – he’s too selfish to be a good lover. It provided me with a perfect counterpoint to the heroine’s first encounter with the hero – his utter selflessness in wanting her to experience pleasure proves that he’s a much better choice.

In the second book, I’ve got a heroine who’s a single mother. Her son is her first priority, and so she steers clear of dating when he’s around. The moment he goes to stay with his grandparents – she’s over the nearest guy she sees. Luckily for our hero.

In the third book, our heroine actively sets out to seduce the hero – at first for nefarious reasons, but then because she just wants him.

In each of them, the woman is actually more confident, more secure, even more experienced than the man is.

I loved it.

And I’m not done in my quest to show non-virginal women finding true love. I’m writing the sequel trilogy to Dream of Asarlai at the moment and I’m having fun with a girl who is not a virgin but is sexually inexperienced finding herself; with a woman in her 50s who finally gets the raunchy romance she deserves; and with a woman who doesn’t actually believe in love, but doesn’t see anything wrong with dating multiple men :-)

In a world where the word ‘slut’ is still too powerful, I’m pleased that I get to combat it in such a fun way.


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Thanks so much for visiting me today Nicole.  I love this series!  I can recommend it to everyone who loves great characters with a lot of sexy romance. 

Nicole has a copy of her third book in the Dream of Arsalai series - Rogue Gadda to give away!  It's easy to win...

So leave a comment (including your email address) for Nicole and you'll go into the draw to win!  Good luck!

You can find Nicole at http://nicolermurphy.com/