Was that in the job description?

Jenna McCormick for Writers Gone Wild
So I spent most of Monday morning looking at porn. Now, before you call me a big pervert (which I am but is totally beside the point) you should know I was trundling through the tumbler archives for various adult blogs because I'm trying to track down the source of a photo. Not just any photo, but THE perfect photo for Zan and Gia from my upcoming futuristic erotic romance No Mercy. It's racy but no more so than the cover of No Limits, all the really naughty bits are covered. On a porn scale, this is definitely softcore with a fuzzy romantic edge.



Ah, I see I've got your interest. Wanna see? Doya doya doya? Sure you do, pervert. ;-)

Le freakin' sigh, they are perfect. The mood, the passion.... I want to live in this photo the same way I lived in that book while writing it. And I would definitely like to show it to the cover artist over at Kensington to see if maybe something similar can be done for the book cover. This photo is definitely worth my 80,000 words on the space pirate and his lady love.

Hence, the headfirst dive into porn central. I'm waiting for a response from the latest tumbler poster, hoping like hell she can tell me who owns the photo because I need permission from the copyright holder to use the photo and that's only if the Kensington design team agrees. But it's worth it to me to spend my morning looking for a way to make this possible, even if it means I'm up to my eyeballs in T&A.

Let me just say, after all this research I have some new positions to try and describe for upcoming works. Porn does not equal erotic romance. Porn is about body parts where erotic romance is about intense emotion demonstrated in a physical way. Though I've often used it to inspire erotic romance. Without the emotion, it's all tab A and slot B or C or...yeah, you get my drift. Waste not, want not, especially when it comes to my writing time. 

So what's the strangest thing you've ever done/been asked to do for your job?