5 Plot Lines Erotic Novels Desperately Need to Adopt

5 Allergy Plot Twists

A staple of any romance novel is that the plot should contain a significant obstacle before the heroine and her man can end up together. Your couple can't just fall into bed together on page 3. Rather, they should be forced to overcome a bunch of troubles that allow the reader to become emotionally invested in their future boning. So if you're writing a romance novel about a billionaire businessman courting an average Jane, you'll throw in some crippling insecurity about Jane's poor background. If it's historical romance, the obstacle can be class issues or arranged marriages.

This need for a cock-blocking plot twist is probably one reason why mythical-creature romance is currently so popular. Once you've read stories in which the obstacle to a couple's happiness involves one of them being the Loch Ness Monster, "I can't marry you because I'm a workaholic" just doesn't cut it. But despite all this, the romance genre has yet to explore one of the most obvious and devastating potential obstacles to supernatural romance: allergies.

Think about it: Humans are commonly allergic to the hair, saliva, or dander of other mammals, and there's no reason these allergies wouldn't also be set off by mystical creatures or shapeshifting humans. Shapeshifters spend a lot of time in the forest, so they'd be covered in pollen half the year as well. Allergy-heartache could even apply to vampires: If you're an immortal creature that doesn't breathe or poop or sweat, you don't have to change your clothes very often, so you'd probably get dusty as hell. "Boy meets girl, girl breaks out in hives" is a romance plot that writes itself. And yet, as an allergy sufferer myself, I can tell you that we're an unrepresented market in any book genre, let alone erotica.

A Sample

Karoline and the wereleopard, William, lay on the forest floor, basking in the afterglow of their passionate, scratchy lovemaking. The relationship had experienced rough patches, like when William had badly scratched up Karoline's Chevy Impala after mistaking it for an actual impala. But now, things were finally starting to work out. As her mind drifted to thoughts of wedding dresses, Karoline sneezed.

"What's wrong, my love?" growled William.

But Karoline could not answer: She was still sneezing violently. Snot rained out of her nose. She had never experienced this much snot. With each sneeze, it shot out of her nostrils like the long tentacles of an Elder God. "Oh god," she yelled through the sneezes. "Just kill me. For the love of god somebody please kill me."

Confused, William began to groom himself.

4 Expanded Werecreatures

"Shifter romance," books about women falling in love with supernatural transforming creatures, have remained oddly constrained despite their massive new popularity. No matter how deeply you plumb the depths of Amazon or Goodreads, you'll find that the male love interests in these novels almost always transform into the same things: a wolf, a mythical creature, some kind of large cat, or perhaps a bear.

Some erotica writers might argue that these kinds of limits are necessary, because other animals just aren't as sexy. This is a ridiculous argument, because come on, people, no animals are sexy. If you find wild animals arousing, there are some perfectly good corners of the Internet for you, but you should probably not be writing mainstream fiction. The trick to writing shifter-porn is to keep your manimal love interest just human enough so that you don't give off that "banned from the zoo" vibe. Once you've taken this into consideration, there is no reason not to expand the werecreature genre to the whole animal kingdom. Think about all the unique plots and conflicts you could get if you decided to write outside the box and have your male lead mystically transform into, say, a salmon.

The secrets, the tormented passion. The erotic midnight swimming sessions. The hero's conflict with the local fishing industry. Consider that male salmon occasionally grow canine teeth before mating, and then deposit their seed in a glorious splooge-cloud above the female's recently laid eggs. How can that not make a great climactic love scene?

A Sample

Krystal sat in the rowing boat, pondering the dark secrets of her new lover. Why was Caleb so shady about his past? So insistent on getting her near large bodies of fresh water? Why was it that whenever they tried to organize a date night, Caleb would be mysteriously attacked by a bear?

Suddenly, a piercing cry echoed from the sky above. Caleb screamed in mortal terror.

"Oh no!" he cried as the shadow rushed toward them. "It's a bald eagle!"

(Note: Bald eagles are a protected species, so they make for great functionally immortal antagonists in salmon romance. Werebald-eagles can also be included.)

3 Boomer Romance

Baby boomers, members of the generation born between 1946 and 1964, have for years been too busy having jobs to read much romance. Now that they're starting to retire, though, it's a great time for authors to cash in on the ebook-purchasing frenzy that is sure to follow.

Note that I'm not talking about writing books for normal, well-adjusted older people who just want to read romance featuring others in their age group: That kind of book already exists. I'm talking about books aimed at the type of boomers who are desperately hanging on to the idea that their generation was the most important thing to ever happen to Western civilization, and who manifest this resentment about their lost youth by endlessly complaining about those lazy, narcissistic youngsters who were gauche enough to not even be born when Woodstock happened.

These types of boomers complain about millennials so much that they seem to be really into complaining about millennials, if you get what I'm saying. And yet no one has cashed in on this obvious need. Why not combine these masturbatory generational complaints with subject matter that you can actually masturbate too?

A Sample

"I'm so glad I kicked Jake out," Moira said to Pedro, the handsome, well-endowed gardener she had hired with the money she was no longer spending on her worthless, millennial, social-media-using son. "If I could work my way through college in the '70s with income from my summer job, so can he."

"Haven't tuition costs gone up a little since then?" asked Pedro. "And minimum wage rates haven't-"

Moira grew angry and fired Pedro. Just then the doorbell rang. On the doorstep stood The Beatles!!

"The Beatles! Aren't half of you dead?" Moira asked.

"We are not the Beatles," said the one who looked like Paul McCartney. "For legal reasons, we are vampires who look exactly like The Beatles and whose mystical powers allow us to live eternally in 1967."

Moira and the Vampire Beatles sat on the renovated patio and smoked pot and congratulated themselves for ending capitalism and the Vietnam War. The Vampire Beatles listened to Moira as she told them about her worthless son who was now in Afghanistan or one of those worthless millennial places.

"What a loser," said Vampire John Lennon. They all threw back their heads and laughed and then had sex.

2 Realistic Military Romance

Along with billionaires, sheiks, and doctors, male soldiers are a popular target for today's romance novel. But did you know that several studies have shown that, of all the romance genres about categories of people that actually exist, military romance is the most unrealistic?

You probably didn't know that, because I made it up. But a quick glance at the leading military romance titles will uncover a cesspool of un-verisimilitude. Most glaringly, the majority of these books focus solely on the challenges the couple in a military romance must overcome in order to fall in love and get together. Anyone who has had even the slightest brush with life in the military knows that this is like a feature-length movie focusing entirely on everyone building the mecha-suit that humanity needs to fight the giant alien monster, and then ending the film right before the monster actually comes on screen.

Think about all the other obstacles these novels could be portraying. The feisty, college-educated heroine following her love to a military base in the middle of nowhere, and discovering that the only local jobs available are babysitting for $3 an hour. The long, boning-free deployments and awkward nude Skype sessions where his roommate walks in. The subplot where they fight because he never listens to her, only for it to turn out that gunfire has given him 60 percent hearing loss at age 23. The part where their steroid-addicted neighbor on base starts screaming death threats at them because he thinks they looked at his dog funny. I'm willing to bet not a single one of these issues has even been explored in military romance, let alone eroticized for profit.

A Sample

Emma's thighs trembled as Cody, her new Navy SEAL husband, pulled off his shirt, his well-defined muscles glinting in the candlelight as he stepped forward to consummate the romantic encounter they'd been planning for months. Suddenly, Cody's cellphone rang.

"Whoops!" Cody said. "I have to go somewhere. Can't tell you where. Sorry!"

"When will you be back?"

"I don't know. August, maybe? See you!!"

Emma went looking for a vibrator on Amazon but realized that with Cody's E-3 salary, she could afford only an inferior product that had electrocuted the wives of several Amazon reviewers. She spent the rest of the night crying alone into her husband's pillow.

1 Sex With Abstract Concepts

Back in this article, I wrote about a new romance genre involving the Grim Reaper, i.e., the personification of the abstract concept of death. Since then, apart from a few new reaper-themed romance novels, the wider genre of Abstract Concept Romance has somehow failed to take off.

But abstract concepts are a strange thing to eroticize, you say! Except that there is a long tradition of doing just that. For centuries, artists have been creating allegorical art and sculptures that characterize concepts like Philosophy and Justice as almost-always-female figures who aren't wearing many clothes. This is partly because these nouns are feminine in a lot of languages that have grammatical gender, and partly because it's a way of allowing people to feel smart and cultured while looking at boobs. Look at this 16th-century "allegory of happiness":

Most paranormal romance novels are aimed at heterosexual women, so the abstract concepts will need to be male. But that's no problem at all. English nouns lost their grammatical gender centuries ago, so there is no reason your abstract concept of Philosophy can't have a dick, or that your heroine can't be seduced by the virile personification of Liberty. There are literally thousands of abstract nouns in the English language, and we could be boning all of them.

A Sample

Sandra's insides tingled as she felt herself swept up into the embrace of Poverty. His skinny arms and ragged clothing did not detract from his harsh, masculine beauty. Yes, since she started seeing him she had lost her job, her apartment's roof had caved in, and she was pretty sure her downstairs neighbors were cooking meth. But their love could overcome all that ... couldn't it?

She kissed him passionately. "Poverty," she whispered, "I want you inside me."

Soon after, Sandra felt a part of him inside her. One of his teeth had fallen out. Discreetly trying to spit it out of her mouth, she felt his stubble graze her skin as his low voice rumbled sexily in her ear: "Do you have 20 bucks you could lend me?"

So there you go. Writers, feel free to use all these ideas at no cost. You don't even need to credit me when you make your first ebook million two months from now.

C. Coville has a Twitter here and a Tumblr here.

For more information that'll make your genitals feel funny, check out The Sex Ed Lessons You Wish They'd Taught You and 14 Realities of Romantic Relationships in Chart Form.