Why Does Katie Need a Mask?
I was taken to a Lesbian Club the first time when I was 19 and felt embarrassed seeing female nudity and females kissing in public. I have no idea why. I had seen naked girls at school a million times, and even been kissed by one or two.

A few days later, I passed a costume shop in Soho, descended the staircase and saw a mask on the wall which fit to my face as if it had been made for me. The second time I went to the club, I wore the mask and felt more at ease. I was me, perhaps more me, but hidden.

That was ten years ago. I was discovering myself then. I suppose I still am, and borrowed these emotions for an early scene in Katie in Love. Katie and Tom meet on New Years Eve. She takes him home – it's just too sad to sleep alone on this night of nights. After they kiss and pull at each other's clothes, Katie slips into her bedroom and slips into a mask.

It adds an erotic frisson to the scene and allows Katie and Tom to get to know those aspects of each other  – more psychological than physical – that normally take forever. Katie in Love is a romance with its setbacks and surprises, but love affairs in fiction need the willingness to experiment that we find in the big wide world, making erotic romance what I would simply call contemporary romance.

A girl in a mask is alluring, even when dressed. Why is she in a mask? What is she hiding? A mask is sexy and it is the potential for sex that draws out the tension. A couple climbing the stairs, dropping their clothes as they go, holds our attention far more than that same couple banging away on the bedsheets. It is flirtation, the scent of sex, the promise of sex, that grips the reader.

Describing a sex scene requires restraint  and nuance – he lifts her shirt over her head and reaches for the clasp at the back of her bra. She smiles because he can’t find it. Their eyes meet and he looks down as she unhooks the clasp between the cups and her breasts are revealed. Now they kiss and her busy fingers start pulling the shirt from his pants.

Words in a sex scene detract. If there is a need for dialogue, almost anything a writer can think of will have been thought of before and will be cliché: I’ve wanted you so long; I never knew it would be like this; Wow, you’re amazing! Sex is cool. If characters have to speak, what they say has to be cool. Better still, don't tell the reader how they feel. Show it through action.  

BLURB

Katie Boyd has nothing in common with Tom Bridge, the volunteer doctor she meets at a party – except in bed she finds a passion to match her own. Tom is intense, puzzling, a man who cares about others and compels Katie to question her own life drifting through the hip clubs and London party scene.

When Tom returns to his post in a Sri Lanka orphanage, Katie isn’t sure if their passion was lit by its brevity, or if love, unexpected and not entirely wanted, has edged its way into her life. Should she go back to being who she always was? Or follow Tom into the unknown?

Katie in Love is a compelling erotic-romance that will grip readers as they follow Katie’s journey to an ending they may have expected – but not in the way they expected it.

Brilliantly written and coolly self-aware, Chloe Thurlow was described by KM Dylan on Amazon as “…the Anaïs Nin of our times.” With Katie in Love  – her sixth novel – Thurlow reveals a writer at the height of her powers.

BUY LINKS

Link for Amazon downloads - http://bookgoodies.com/a/B00S1SMMIG

Link for Amazon books -  http://bookgoodies.com/a/1503014908

AUTHOR BIO

Chloe Thurlow lives in London, suffers insomnia, writes at night, likes Spanish cava and falls over when she drinks too much. The author of five earlier novels she pretentiously calls the Girl Quintet (girl is in all the titles) – Girl Trade has been translated into two other languages and a production company has generously suggested she gives them a FREE film option.

Website: http://www.chloethurlow.com/

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