A warm welcome to author Dephine Dryden joining us today here at Love Bytes to talk about her new release “The Unicorn”. She shares a very interesting guestposts and there is also a giveaway to participate in!

Welcome Delphine 🙂

Hi! I’m Delphine Dryden, touring the internet to talk about my latest book, The Unicorn. It’s a geeky, kinky M/F/F romp, it’s part of Riptide’s “Escape” universe, and it’s a much-expanded version of an earlier story called Roses and Chains. Thanks so much to all the blogs hosting the tour! Be sure to comment on tour posts for a chance to win a $10 Amazon gift certificate and your choice of two books from my backlist.

Kink, Sex, Romance: A Super Hot Venn Diagram

My latest release, The Unicorn, features kinky characters (they’re also polyamorous, and in general I’ve found a lot of overlap between the worlds of polyamory and kink). So of course the three main characters enjoy kink scenes together, with varying amounts of sex involved. But one of the three also does a scene with a partner she isn’t in a relationship with. And the first time she plays with the other two, there’s nothing romantic about it; it’s just kink for her, and they don’t go into it planning to play with her again, much less get into a relationship outside of kink. This is a commonplace feature of real-life kink that a lot of vanilla readers seem to have a tough time wrapping their minds around: you can be in a committed relationship—whether or not it involves kink—and also have kinky play partners that you may never see outside the context of kink scenes.

I think some of the confusion stems from the way BDSM is so often depicted in romance these days: an inexperienced female submissive (she may not even know about kink prior to the story) is mentored by a male dominant, and the HEA is between those two parties. The kink scenes involve her submitting to his demands to please him, in exchange for which he gives her orgasms like she’s never had before—and pretty much every kink scene on the page culminates in sex or at least mutual orgasms. If other partners are introduced, the male top is the one orchestrating it; often the heroine’s willingness to accept these other partners (typically other male dominants) is presented as a test of her commitment to the Dom/sub relationship (sometimes it’s a test of True Love™). The others are almost always not just kink partners, but sex partners. They will disappear before the HEA (unless it’s a series, in which case each of them probably gets his own group-kink book later, with another novice submissive).

And I’m sure that has happened before, and will happen again, in real life. But that scenario makes a lot of assumptions that simply don’t always apply in real-world BDSM. And I think the biggest assumption is that kink always means sex. It’s one of those things that, as a kinkster, I often wish non-kinksters realized.

In the real world, not every kink scene involves sex. A lot of us also enjoy BDSM play for its own sake, no orgasm required. Unlike the usual romance novel fantasy kink club, some public play venues don’t even allow intercourse in the common areas. And not every player wants to have sex in public—but they may still enjoy public beating, binding, consensual torture of all sorts.

Even in private, kink scenes may not be primarily or ultimately sexual in nature. Some submissives may only be in it to please their dominant partner and receive an orgasm as a reward at the end, but for a lot of us, the primary motivator is not providing service to the top—it’s enjoyment of pain itself, or enjoyment of the endorphin rush and subspace, or of being bound, or any number of other things that may or may not have anything to do with sex. And while a lot of tops, doms, sadists, are sexually aroused by causing pain or topping in general—not all of them are. Some of them just really enjoy tying people up, or whipping them, or whatever. And even the ones who are turned on by it (which, yes, is probably the majority of them) don’t necessarily require sex in the course of a scene to be able to enjoy it.

So in the real world, having multiple kink partners doesn’t necessarily mean having multiple sex partners. Sex is part of what you need to negotiate before a scene, and it may be a deal-breaker for some, but it’s not a given. And an orgasm may be something one party needs out of a scene but the other doesn’t. A lot of public scenes in particular do not involve anyone getting off. This doesn’t mean that the parties aren’t getting anything out of it, because getting off is not necessarily the goal of a kink interaction.

But whether or not the kink does involve sex…it’s still the case that a lot of kinksters do scenes with other partners who are not their primary partner (whether or not they identify as polyamorous for non-kink purposes). The primary partner may or may not be involved in scenes with these other partners. The non-primary partner may be a one-shot, or a regular play date, or a full-on secondary romantic partner, or anything in between.

Some kinksters don’t have a primary partner; they either prefer to play with different people, or they just aren’t in a relationship. Some people are in a romantic relationship with a vanilla person, but they have a kink partner to meet needs the vanilla person can’t. Some people are just poly, and don’t limit their kink life to one partner any more than they do their sex life. And sometimes you can be in a long-term, committed, romantic relationship with somebody who also meets your kink needs…but you want to experience another person’s single-tail expertise, or be tied up in a particular way, or explore something that your regular partner isn’t into.

Most romance novels don’t show that facet of real-world kink; most romance readers aren’t used to reading it, and have no idea that kink isn’t confined to that tiny hot pink dot in the middle of the Venn diagram. But I love to write about kink the way actual people I know engage in it—like it’s not just part of our sex life, but also a tremendously engaging, endlessly fascinating hobby.

I hope you enjoy that aspect of The Unicorn, and come back for more kinky installments in the “Escape” series!

About The Unicorn

Delia and Daniel have a picture-perfect life. They like their jobs. They love their house. Everything is coming up roses . . . but in private, they’d rather have the thorns. Their recent forays into kink have brought them closer than ever, but there’s still something missing, and they can’t quite work it out.

Mara knows what she’s missing: a significant other. She tried vanilla, and it was a total bust. But when she and her last girlfriend took things out of the kink club and into the “real” world, they fizzled. Even their friendship is on the rocks now. Mara feels like a lost stray, looking for a forever home.

When the three of them meet up at the brand-new club Escape, their connection is instant. And surprising—none of them were expecting more than a few hot nights. But now they might be ready to bring their kinky threesome into the light of day and build a life together.

Publisher’s note: This title is a heavily revised re-issue of a prior story, Roses and Chains, originally released in 2011.

Buy Links:

Riptide Publishing

Amazon

About Delphine Dryden

Delphine Dryden probably should have gone ahead and become an English professor like she planned. Instead, she took a detour through law school, another detour through the wonderful world of working in special education, and took an extra fifteen years to end up where she belonged: writing kinky romances.

Del’s writing has earned an Award of Excellence and Reviewers’ Choice Award from Romantic Times Book Reviews, an EPIC Award, and a Colorado Romance Writers’ Award of Excellence. When not writing or editing, she can be found binge-watching television shows, playing tabletop games, and tweeting to excess.

 

Connect with Delphine:

Website: www.delphinedryden.com

Twitter: twitter.com/deldryden

Facebook: facebook.com/DelphineDryden

Tumblr: deldryden.tumblr.com/

Pinterest: pinterest.com/deldryden/

Instagram: instagram.com/deldryden/

Newsletter signup: http://eepurl.com/fPq3n

Leave a comment for a chance to win a $10 Amazon gift certificate and your choice of two books from Delphine Dryden’s backlist. Entries close at midnight, Eastern time, on February 27, 2016. Contest is NOT restricted to U.S. Entries. Thanks for following the tour, and don’t forget to leave your contact info!