This episode is called Writing Heat Level 3 or writing on-page sex, When You’re Filipino. On the panel and contributing to this episode are romanceclass authors, who are Filipino romance authors, who have written and/or edited sex scenes in romance books.
Yes, Filipino authors write romance novels with sex scenes. It’s not just our community that does this, but there are published Tagalog romance novels and erotic fiction imprints that have been doing this for years. If you expand your definition of Filipino romance to serial fiction and fan fiction, there would be even more. But there’s a persistent misconception among readers, writers, and the academe that we don’t write sex and you can tell right away who actually isn’t reading romance when you hear them say that. We write it, it’s in published work, but the publishers don’t talk about it or market it because even if they’re willingly making money from it, they’re not always ready to defend it.
What we end up with is knowledge about sex scenes in romance that pretty much stays within writing communities and is difficult to then react to and learn from. And also difficult to find what’s excellent if this is the kind of thing you want to read.
In RomanceClass we as a community decided that a romance book was going to have certain elements, but sex would not be a required element. We have a heat level scale that ranges from 0 which means no sex on or off the page, to 4 which is erotic romance, and only one author has written. We’ve found it helpful as authors and readers to determine where in the scale our book is, and marketing and selling it accordingly.
Today we will be talking to authors who write Heat level 3, ask them about how they feel about writing it, and how readers have responded to their work.