What's the most interesting research you've done for your erotica?

Janine Ashbless, author of Red Grow the Roses and contributor to Shameful Thrills, Exposure and The Visitor

I’m not telling you!! Let’s just say . . . it involved more than one other person :-)

Chrissie Bentley, contributor to The Visitor, Confessions, Submission, My Secret Life, Sex & The Stranger, At Your Mercy, Shameful Thrills, Exposure, Improper Conduct and Girls Girls Girls

Two come to mind. Utterly unerotically, one was about a 1920s English soccer team (for a chapter in my novel Below Blue London). It even won me a mention in an English soccer magazine! The other, which involved lots of hands-on research, was for a story about erotic photography. More than one story, in fact!

Rachel Kramer Bussel, contributor to Exposure, At Your Mercy, Shameful Thrills and Girl for Hire

I love doing erotica research, especially when it's not about sex per se, but something more unusual, whether it's looking up how to eat fire or how to box. I write a lot about food and restaurants, so I love browsing menus and seeing how I can incorporate them into my stories, but then take it to a whole new level, like with my story "I'll Have What She's Having" in  Exposure, about a woman whose job is to eat in a sexy, seductive manner in a restaurant window and draw customers in (that one was also somewhat inspired by When Harry Met Sally's infamous line). I'd estimate that at most 10% of my erotica research is about sex toys or sex acts; the large bulk of it is other details, that often lead me in new directions. Working on my upcoming petite novel Room Service, which is about hotels, has given me a reason to indulge in reading hotel blogs and looking at all sorts of hotel amenities (which has also added to my hotels-I-want-to-visit list!).

Kyoko Church, At Her Feet (March 2013), contributor to Submission and My Secret Life

There's a scene in At Her Feet where Mistress and her sub go to a strip club. I've only ever been to a strip club once and it was over a decade ago. So I spent a bit of time talking to male friends about their experiences in clubs and I talked to a former stripper as well. I want to make every scene as authentic as possible. I considered going to a strip club too, you know, all in the name of research and development. I still might. I'm just that dedicated.

Rose de Fer, author of Lust Ever After

I really enjoyed reading about Victorian cures for "hysteria" and some of the kooky (and scary!) gadgets they used to treat it. I love the thought of all those "afflicted" ladies going to doctors for pelvic massage and "hysterical paroxysm" because to give themselves relief would be immoral. It wasn't considered an appropriate job even for a husband to perform. There's just so much kinky potential in the idea of medicalising the female orgasm. I worked some of it into my petite novel Lust Ever After but I expect it's a subject I'll return to again. And again...

Megan Hart, contributor to My Secret Life

Every bit of research I do is interesting if it teaches me something! 

Sommer Marsden, contributor to Boys Next Door (September 2012) At Your Mercy, Exposure and Across My Knee

I try not to do too much research or work in too many things I don’t know a lot about naturally. I’m a show off with knowledge, so I’d end up wanting to brandish my research muscles. However, I do write a lot of shifters and typing in things like mating habits of wolves and/or same sex attraction in animals and seeing the results is always a good way to wile away an afternoon!

Charlotte Stein, author of Make Me and Power Play

I don't think I've ever done any interesting research. It's all mostly just looking into the inner workings of a publishing house, for things like book settings!

Kristina Wright, author of Seduce Me Tonight

Oddly enough, the most interesting research for Seduce Me Tonight involved rereading my own stories about a dozen times, picking out details and characters to use in other stories. I decided when I was about a third of the way through writing the manuscript that I wanted the stories to be loosely linked-- so all of the stories are set in the same general geographic location (Northern Virginia) and characters and places overlap from story to story. Of course, since I had twenty stories to write, there was no way to keep them all straight in my head, so I found myself rereading the early stories and pulling details from them to layer into the later stories. For instance, a secondary character in "Their Lover" gets his own story in "Joe for Breakfast" and a college, coffee shop and bar all are seen more than once. It was a lot of fun weaving the details together so that each story stands alone but has some link to other stories.