bonus: an interview with laurelin paige

As a bonus--exclusively for my subscribers--I have an interview here I did back in 2013 right before Fixed on You released, back when I was a fledgling romance writer. It's not linked anywhere else on my website--it's just for you!

(Would you also like to read a bonus deleted scene from Fixed on You?)

I’m a girl who bloomed early, so to say. I was into hearts and flowers and sex from the minute I discovered what it was. My Barbie dolls only got dressed so they could undress each other and have sex.

Such precocious antics were frowned on in the conservative religious town I grew up in. I learned to feel “dirty” about my sexual thoughts. So despite my natural tendency to be a sexual being, I stifled my impulses and tried to fit into the culture of my upbringing.

I didn’t lose my virginity until I was twenty with a guy I picked up at a party. It wasn’t how I’d wanted it to happen, but after so many years of stifling my sexual identity, I lost control. And I felt dirty because that’s how I was taught to feel.

This was how my sexual experiences went after that: get turned on, have sex, feel guilty. I hated myself for anything sexual I did.

Even after I was married, I wasn’t comfortable with sex. It deeply affected my relationship with my husband. Our sex life was, um, not good.

Until I started reading romance novels.

No joke. Reading and then writing romance changed how I felt about sex. It changed how I felt about me. My confidence soared.  And it one thousand percent changed my relationship with my husband for the better.

I think about my experience and the similar stories I’ve heard from other women when I write. I feel a responsibility to betray sexual relationships as honestly and naturally as possible, and in detail, even. Because I know that the books I write have the power to change people.  Hopefully I’m giving back to others what was given to me—confidence and pride in, not only my sexual self, but in myself in general.