When we live an experience the memories are created in our synaptic highways and chemical depots of our brain. Similar experiences, a chance image, an unexpected smell brings up to the forefront what we once did.

Is reading so different?

When we immerse ourselves in books, the words echo in our brains, our muscles react, and our senses come on-line as we escape into what the writer has provided us. Memories are created for later retrieval just as if we were once of the characters.

So is it really that surprising that books can lead to love-making or war? In the act of reading, our brains become imprinted and the book is digested into us. We are in fact experiencing the book when we recall it to mind later.

Read your dialog out loud. Do you hit snags that sound awkward? Do you grimace at the prescribed word order or word choice? Change it then. Perfect grammar is for term papers and essays. In the fiction novel you need to create a believable world for the reader to enter into, and nothing stops a reader from suspending disbelief more than fine tuned dialog that comes out of a ‘How To Write’ manual.

First, I spent my hormonally challenged youth being female and surrounded by other females. I know what women, what I wanted, in romance. Like so many others, I immersed myself in romance novels hoping to catch a glimpse of true love and my heart’s delight. But then I transitioned, and came into another view of romance and love. As a man, my context changed and I got an inside glimpse of what men desire. This dual experience provides me a larger context for writing romance from a dualistic point of view.

Second, I know from running on estrogen to running on testosterone how much chemicals affect how we perceive and relate to the people around us. I have a rare honor of knowing how women and men talk both internally to themselves and externally amidst others.

Together, this makes writing romance novels more exciting. My female and male characters take different points of my own history to make them feel like living, breathing people one could meet on the street. I never want the reader to feel the female lead is unrealistic or for that matter that the male lead is false feeling. I use my own extensive experience living life as both genders to put flesh and blood into my characters.

Third, as I experimented with gender and gender presentation, my own hang ups and feelings of shame or guilt about sex and sexual needs exploded. I use this personal knowledge of guilt, desire, and need to move the characters in the novels through their own travails of BDSM as it plays out in romance.

No matter what, a writer will only succeed if experience backs up characters to make them feel real. My own unusual past has helped my writing in casting both genders as leads and in exploring how society inhibits sexual expression in love.