Winger – Hotwife meets Swinger fiction

Many years back, I remember working with a beta reader who accused me of writing “winger” stories rather than hotwife stories. At the time, it was meant to be a disparagement. I wasn’t staying in my lane. I wasn’t hitting the beats that a “true” hotwife author hit. As many long-time readers know, I write these stories for myself first, exploring my own fantasies and turn-ons, so I never took the criticisms to heart and changed my ways.

Now, though, as I put out Bull’s Eye and its significantly more genre-bending/challenging story arc, it occurs to me that maybe the “winger” label is worth exploring a bit more—that maybe I’m not alone in enjoying the hybrid. So I put together a quick article here.

What is winger fiction?

Not a great name (but hey, I didn’t exactly pick it), but essentially it’s the intersection of “hotwife” fiction and “swinger” fiction. The way I’ve been writing it, at its heart, the action is driven by a husband’s desire to watch his wife with other men (aka “hotwife”) but along the way, he’s not a mere bystander in the action.

There may be another couple involved in the scene that he gets to play with. There may be a hot friend. Hell, the book may actually be mostly a group sex/swinger book with serious wife-watching elements. The key, though, is that it’s not your typical wife-sleeps-with-other-men-the-end story.

Some examples?

I’ve got a few of my own, of course. More than a few, actually, and I probably missed some on that list. The quintessential ones are probably books like All In or Cool With Her. At their heart, these are swinger stories, where couples get together and wild things happen. Ben Boswell’s Summer Swing is another good example of these approach (and I highly recommended read). Max Sebastian’s Anarchy of the Heart (coincidentally the book that turned me onto his work) is another example.

But the winger-themes do thread through many of my other books. Ben and I wrote the Parallel Lines books, which are explicitly about the husband and wife taking on different lovers. Book three of Training to Love It hits on aspects of a more open lifestyle, and Max Callahan, from the Forbidden series, was never a full-on hotwife husband.

Why do I like “winger” stories?

My fantasies tend to fall on the “hotwife” end of the hotwife-cuckold spectrum. I’m drawn less to the humiliation and the power games, and more towards the shared experience that can come from a husband watching his wife do naughty things. There’s room in there for more than just the one-sided fun.

Also, I think that when the husband gets in on the action, it’s easier to write a more balanced relationship. I realize that this is the deep fear of a woman when her husband admits to having a hotwife fantasy—”you just want me to sleep with other men so you can sleep with other women”—but I don’t think that winger stories are quite so transactional. The husband still desires, above all else, to watch his wife. But if things get crazy, he can get crazy, too.

So that’s “winger” fiction. Terrible name, but it does have a place. How about you all? Read any good books that would fit this hybrid genre? Let me know in the comments below!

I won’t burn the bitch

There’s a subset of the subgenre of naughty wife erotica that would like to see the wife punished for her misadventures. This variant is typically called “burn the bitch,” or BTB (not to be confused with the corporate lingo), usually features a cheating wife, and is almost always not my thing.

This’ll be short, but I felt like it needed to be addressed because these story lines are so tangential to the ones that I am drawn to, and I’ve gotten a few readers asking (or suggesting) I explore a BTB. Simply put, I won’t. To me, a happy ending is pretty damn important, both from a romantic perspective, but also from a literary one. I write about couples (and wives) who explore a naughty side of themselves that they didn’t know they had. The goal is always to strengthen their relationship by understanding themselves better. To write a story that ends in revenge runs contrary to what I’m trying to do as an author.

Let me be clear about a few things. Opinions are opinions, and I’m not judging those people who enjoy this kind of literature. Our desires are crazy and inexplicable things, and sexuality is even more enigmatic. Also, real life is messier than fiction. People cheat. People get hurt. People hurt their loved ones. And a lot of times, marriages end in divorce (or worse). I strive to write stories full of characters that (hopefully) feel real, and they go through their ups and downs, and things may even get dark, but in the end, I’m writing their destinies, and I feel like writing one that ends in tragedy would be a waste of time for me.

Again, this is only my opinion, and it’s one of many. But hopefully this’ll help set your expectations about my books.

Don’t expect applause

Some solid advice for creatives in all fields (even erotica) from Seth Godin:

If your work is filled with the hope and longing for applause, it’s no longer your work–the dependence on approval has corrupted it, turned it into a process where you are striving for ever more approval.

Who decides if your work is good? When you are at your best, you do. If the work doesn’t deliver on its purpose, if the pot you made leaks or the hammer you forged breaks, then you should learn to make a better one. But we don’t blame the nail for breaking the hammer or the water for leaking from the pot. They are part of the system, just as the market embracing your product is part of marketing.

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Juggling act of a writer

When writing a story, I find that I often feel like a juggler: characters, plots, twists, intricacies, I have to keep track of them all as they rise and fall. This is my process. It’s not the best process in the world, but it works for me, most of the time. It lets me stay organic while still dealing with outlines. It lets me write in a non-linear fashion if need be while still keeping things consistent.

Thing is, I can’t write like that with multiple stories going on at once, which is where I am currently. And even more to the point, I can’t write like a juggler when I feel like so much of my life is being juggled. My wife and I are moving out to the burbs (yup, the kid is just about a year, so the timeline fits, right?), my job has gotten remained crazy. Things keep going wrong in the place we’re selling. Oh yeah, and it’s the holidays.

In order for the juggling act to be successful, you need to be focused. A lot of details are being kept in your head and as soon as something comes in to distract it, something is bound to fall. I feel like stories are falling around me all the time. I’ve got this really great angel story for the holidays, I’ve got my voyeur story for Ellora’s erotica for men line, I’ve got a nice collaborative story ready for editing from a new author-friend, and then a handful of near completed works that I want to get to. And they’re all lying around me in a sad clutter.

Well, it’s time to start picking things up again. Hopefully by the new year, things will have calmed down more and you’ll see new things from me!