Growing Pleasures

Sweet Savage Flame is expanding our focus to include historical and contemporary romance novels from the 1970s to the 2000s, beyond old-school historical romances.

Growing Pleasures at Sweet Savage Flame

That title doesn’t sound right, does it? But it is a pleasure to describe the changes coming to his site. The more I think about it, “Growing Pleasures” has tumescent connotations. The phrase pulses off the pages.

Well, that’s appropriate for a blog specializing in vintage smut!

The History of Historical and Contemporary Romance

I’ve been looking into authors, publishers, and cover artists and have found a lot of commonalities among both historical and “contemporary” romance written from 1970–to 2000. Names, books, and covers kept popping up that seemed relevant. I had wanted to keep this blog as a place for old-school historical romances.

Now I see how shortsighted that was. There is a strong connection between the evolution of the category and the historical romance sub-genres.

That particular time in history needs to be fully told to be remembered accurately.

20th Century Romances

It will take a bit of change, but I will be adding category romance authors, covers, and publishing information. I will only focus on romances that overlap the post-Flame and the Flower era to the end of the twentieth century.

So, while that means vintage romance, that won’t include comics, nurse romances, older Harlequin Romances, or Gothics written pre-1970s. If I do Gothics at all, to be honest, I’m not a big reader of them.

Hopefully, this change will spark some lively conversations, as I’d love to hear your thoughts. Happy reading!