To inappropriately invoke Dr. Seuss, some readers like it hot, and some do not. So I consider it part of my responsibility as an author to describe the book in an honest way, with regards to the amount of “heat” or “spice” in a book. The question is how.

There’s a language around spice labeling; you’ve probably run into it as you’ve browsed for books. It’s not standardized, but you can get the general idea from combining this guide by Karin Waldhauser, this reflection by Cindy Ervin Huff, and All About Romance’s sensuality labels. Speaking very generally, “clean” often means no sex at all, “sweet” means at most an allusion to stuff going on behind a closed door, and then you get up to books that are “sensual” or maybe “steamy” or “hot,” which imply various degrees of: there will be sex, and you, the reader, are going to read about it, in various degrees of detail.

But wait! I want to say. “Various degrees of detail” covers a lot of territory! Such as:

• How much sex actually happens over the course of the book?
• What kinds of sex? Do the characters experiment? If so, how much?
• How explicit and detailed are the descriptions during the sex scenes?
• Does either member of the main couple have sex with someone other than their love interest?
• How do the characters react to sex? Is sex no big deal unless or until it’s accompanied by love, or is it consistently intense and not something to be entered into lightly?
• How do the characters talk about sex? What language do they use?
• Are the characters thinking or talking about sex when they’re not actually having it? If so, how? And how detailed a treatment do those scenes get?

You can see how a one-word rating is hard pressed to answer all those questions. So let me take this space to go into a little more detail about how I write. The short answer is, unlike Cindy Ervin Huff, I tend to lean towards the spicy side.

Here’s the problem, though: “spicy” has to cover both quantity and quality: it’s not unreasonable to be told a book is “spicy” or “sexy” and assume there’s a lot of sex in it. But a book may be frank about sex, and detailed in its depictions of sex, without necessarily sending the characters to bed every other chapter. You can’t say that a book with three sex scenes is super fiery erotica. You also can’t call it “sweet” if the characters are using less-than-polite language with each other.

That’s what happens in Sparks Fly. Grant and Allora are attracted to each other at first sight, but it takes a good chunk of words for them to get into bed together. If you’re reading Sparks Fly for the sex you’ll get bored well before you get to that part. But it’s not a “sweet” book, because it requires the reader to go where sweet-romance readers don’t necessarily want to go. If you’ve read it you know there’s a point in the story where they have to talk about sex (Grant’s sexual past, specifically) and the conversation isn’t meant to be sexy at all. If you’re the kind of reader who doesn’t want explicit sexytimes you also probably don’t want explicit consideration of sexytimes.

It’s more or less impossible for a writer to tell stories without injecting some of their own personal values into the stories. I put a pretty high value on clear and frequent communication. The way my characters talk about sex with each other may be a better indicator of how well they work as a couple than how they have the sex itself. (If you compare my two books so far, Anne and Tommy, in Learning to Love You, actually have more on-page sex than Grant and Allora do, but they talk about it less and rely more on nonverbal communication—and one of the challenges for both Anne and Tommy is being able to articulate what they want.) So I’m going to err on the side of spicy bluntness, or blunt spiciness, most of the time.

That having been said, I will go ahead and tell you that the next book (yes, there’s one coming!) is not nearly so spicy. It takes most of the book for the hero and heroine to go to bed together, and it doesn’t happen until after the I-love-yous have been said, and the door does not close but the level of explicitness is lower than that of Sparks Fly and Learning to Love You. It would be easier to market my books if I could guarantee a consistent heat level every single time, but I try to write the story the characters give me, and this particular pair is a lot more shy than are Allora and Grant or Anne and Tommy.

If you ever want detail about the heat level of a particular book, by the way, feel free to ask! I’d like to avoid a reader giving up on a book just because it doesn’t meet their spice expectations; I’d rather get a chance to tell you what you’re getting into.