Intro
Hi, everyone and welcome to the #RomanceClass Podcast. #RomanceClass is a community of Filipino authors of romance in English, the readers of the books, and fellow creatives who help us make the stories we love. This is our podcast’s fifth season and we will continue to talk about romance themes, tropes, media, with authors, readers, and fellow creatives. This season we will be exploring topics that influence what we consume and what we create, as Filipinos. On every platform, Filipinos are a huge segment of romance media on the consumer and creator side, but who thinks of us and what we need as creators and the audience? Tayo-tayo rin lang, friends. The #RomanceClass Podcast is produced by Tania Arpa and Mina V. Esguerra.
Before we start we would like to remind everyone to subscribe to our channel on YouTube. Head over to kilig.pub/youtube, hit the subscribe button, and also click on the bell to be notified when a new video is coming up. My name is Mina V. Esguerra, my pronouns are she/her, and I’m hosting the episode today.
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.
Host
Panel
Got questions? Ask them on the live chat during the stream or tweet @romanceclassbks .
Watch the full video
This episode was recorded and streamed live on 28 May 2022 over YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. If you’d like to watch the entire stream, check out the video below. If you prefer to listen to the edited audio, you can do so on Spotify or your favorite podcatcher.
