Tiffany Reisz has just lured me over the edge of a cliff and is letting me hang. If I didn't love her I'd hate her. When I ask her how she could do this to me, she responds: “I'm a sadist. It's what I do.”
Fortunately I’m a glutton for punishment. Having already devoured The Siren and The Angel, the first and second books in Reisz’s Original Sinners gothic romance series, I’ve just reached the suspenseful end of the third installment, The Prince. The fourth climactic novel of the tetralogy, The Mistress, won’t hit bookstores until August 2013, and the anticipation is sweet torture.
The Original Sinners is set in the underground world of the 8th Circle, an illegal S&M club where anything goes as long as the members stick to the strict codes of the culture. Thanks to the staggering popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey, BDSM has been dragged out of the proverbial dungeon and into the glare of the mainstream. However, fans of Reisz laud her work for being more accurate in its portrayal of the scene, and far superior in terms of plot and prose.
Like Reisz, the central character in the Original Sinners series, Nora Sutherlin, is a writer of erotica with a penchant for pajamas in the living room and power play in the bedroom. But while Reisz’s leading man is brunette
SG blogger Andrew Shaffer, Nora’s is an enigmatic tall, blonde and handsome Catholic priest called Søren who’s blessed with some seriously sadistic predilections. Other characters that jump off the page and stay with you long after you’ve put the book down include Zach (Nora’s cautiously curious editor), Wesley (her virginal houseboy), Kingsley (her complicated confidant), Griffin (a playboy with a heart and a Rolex both made of gold), and Michael –– a bisexual young man whose journey from tortured teen to self realized submissive is the subject of the second Original Sinners book, The Angel.
Though laced with lashings of romance, Reisz’s fiction also exposes and explores the more extreme and contentious aspects of carnality. The underlying message is one of acceptance without judgment, which might seem at odds with the author’s stated strong Catholic faith. However religion, like human sexuality, is full of contradictions and nuance. We caught up with Reisz, ironically on a Sunday just after mass, to talk about sex, love, original sin, writing, romance and erotica – though we never did find out why there are no good synonyms for thrust [a pet peeve of Nora’s].
Nicole Powers: I’m channeling Nora. I’m still in my PJs.
Tiffany Reisz: At six in the evening?
NP: Yeah.
TR: I’m very proud of you, and so is Nora.
NP: I’ve got my Hello Kitty ones on.
TR: Oh, she would love it. I approve whole-heartedly.
NP: I have to ask, how much of Nora is you?
TR: Her quirks are me and her sense of humor is me…Although I endow her quirks with different meanings than mine. I have Sock Monkey and Penguin pajamas because my mom gets them for me every Christmas, she has them because Wesley wouldn’t let her run around the house in her underwear and she sarcastically buys the goofiest, most childish, full body coverage pajamas she can find just to be a smart ass. That’s why she wears them, for a different reason. I think they’re comfortable and cute, that’s why I wear them. I’m not sarcastic about them like she is. A lot of her quirks are mine, although they mean something different coming from her. I gave her my sense of humor. When I started writing
The Siren, I was in a very conservative seminary and I felt like I couldn’t really be myself so I really gave her my personality since I didn’t get to use it.
NP: You were in a seminary when you started writing
The Siren?
TR: Yes. I was at the Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky. It is a conservative United Methodist seminary. I wasn’t training to be a minister or a pastor. I wasn’t going for my MDiv, as they call it, Masters of Divinity. I was there for my masters in theology and biblical studies. I wanted to teach. If you are woman in the seminary system, they love it. They’re so desperate for women college professors and seminary professors that they’ll just hand out scholarships and that sort of thing. But I was miserable there so I left after about four semesters.
NP: So I guess there’s a little bit of Søren in you too.
TR: Oh, absolutely. I think he and I have more in common than Nora and I have. I completely understand his theology and the way he reconciles being religious and also kinky. As a writer, I get to play mind games on people with my books and it’s the most incredible rush. I understand why he enjoys the mind games he plays on his partners so well. Really, I feel closer to Søren than I do Nora.
NP: What is your spiritual background?
TR: My dad, his entire family, him and his ten brothers and sisters are all Catholic. I have some great aunts who are nuns, actually here in Kentucky. My grandfather’s brother was a priest. He died a few years ago. That’s one side of the family. My mom’s side of the family was an offshoot of Mormonism. So the compromise with my parents was that I would be nothing. My mother was divorced when my parents married. When my dad married her he wasn’t allowed to take communion at the Catholic Church anymore, so he stopped going to church once he got married. We didn’t really go to church very much growing up, except to my mother’s church when we visited my mother’s parents, they were the only ones I ever went to church with. I found their church kind of weird and not appealing to me. The Mormon Church, even this particular offshoot of it, had very odd ideas that even as a 6 or 7-year old I thought were weird and couldn’t agree with. So I grew up really nothing. I was fascinated by the Catholic Church but I didn’t really want to join it. I became Christian in college because of a boyfriend – a very typical Tiffany thing.
NP: What did you study in college?
TR: I went to Centre College in Danville, Kentucky which was a very good liberal arts school. I was an English major and worshipped fiction. I worshipped the novel. That was my god for a while. Then, because of a boyfriend, I started going to church and became really more into it than he did at one point. I wanted to be a college professor…I did think about being a fiction writer, but I didn’t think I was good enough for it. I had this unreasonable idea that I think some college students have…You read these classics of literature and you think that writers are gods. You’re trained as an English major to worship writers as gods and you yourself realize how human you are and un-godlike. I couldn’t imagine that I would ever be as good as Jane Austin or Robert Penn Warren or any of my heroes. I thought I could write a children’s book or something like that someday, but I could never compete with these people. I would teach about them, but I wouldn’t try to compete with them. I thought I would be doomed to failure.
After I got out of college I decided that instead of teaching English literature, I’d rather teach theology. I’d gotten fascinated with theology and ended up at the Seminary. Wilmore, Kentucky is very close to Danville, Kentucky where I’d gone to college…I had some pretty open-minded, interesting, liberal professors but I didn’t have any friends at the school. This was a graduate school, so we were all adults. We weren’t 18 and 19-year olds. We were in our mid-‘20s to some students who were in their 50s. If we were single, we weren’t allowed to have sex, not even with another consenting adult. We could get kicked out of school for engaging in “sexual immorality” as it was called. And we couldn’t drink. I was just feeling very repressed and so I started to write erotica as this quiet rebellion.
NP: What was your level of belief at this point? Because, if you’re writing erotica while you’re at a seminary there’s got to be huge amounts of internal conflict going on, and the amount of conflict speaks to your level of belief, what you’re believing in, and where you see the line between sin and the sinner.
TR: I consider myself a devout Catholic. I was at 8:15 Mass this morning. When I say the Apostles’ Creed I believe it. What I don’t believe is the extra garbage that gets piled on top of the Bible. Jesus said nothing about homosexuality, he said nothing about kink…People like to put words in his mouth. Jesus talked 90% of the time about not being a hypocrite and about taking care of poor people. Whether you’re kinky or vanilla you can take care of poor people and you shouldn’t be a hypocrite. He didn’t say anything about being gay was a sin or that two consenting adults having sex was a sin. He just constantly told people that they should look to their own sins and not worry about other people. So I focus on Christ and his teachings much more so than all this extraneous stuff that a 2,000-year old church has dumped on us, just trying to keep law and order. I understand that. They don’t want to anarchy. And there’s a lot to be said for not being promiscuous and taking care of yourself and treating your body as a temple. But it does not correspond with reality for me, a lot of church teaching, and it doesn’t correspond with the Bible either if you sit down and read just what the Bible says.
NP: So you’re not really worrying about how much sperm you’re wasting.
TR: Exactly. [laughs] And this comes up in book four in my series. Somebody asks Søren if he feels conflicted about being a priest and having a sexual partner. He talks about the vows of celibacy in the Catholic Church, and he points this out: a married woman who’s faithful to her husband but uses birth control is considered unchaste because of the birth control –– no matter how devoted she is to her husband. And he says, because he’s part of the Jesuit order, that Jesuits just have to overlook those sorts of glaring absurdities because that’s what they are. Especially if you know how birth control works and know that you’re not committing a little abortion every month, you’re preventing a pregnancy. The Catholic Church is huge and there are lots of different aspects to it. You have the almost evangelical types who get along more with fundamentalist Christians. Then you have Jesuits on the other end of the spectrum, who are incredibly liberal and have given the Vatican lots of headaches for their liberal views that they’re quite public about. It’s a big church and there’s room for all of us under that umbrella. I was just telling somebody last night because we were talking about being kinky and going to church and how some people are like, ‘Well I can’t go to church because there’s no one like me there.’ I’m like, ‘But the church is just people. When I’m there, there’s somebody like me there and somebody like you there.’
NP: But it’s hard for someone who’s kinky to know that there’s someone like them there because that’s one of the things that you’re taught to keep quiet about because of the preachings on sins of the flesh and all that kind of nonsense.
TR: I know, exactly, it’s just heartbreaking. There’s a website,
ChristianNymphos.com, it’s a support group for married Christian women who are kinky and want to have really good sex with their spouses. They’re pro kink and they’re pro experimenting and that sort of thing. So they are out there but they all post under fake names and that sort of thing because they want to keep their private lives private. I think the internet makes it easier to find these people. I’ve certainly found these people after getting my books published and getting emails from people saying, ‘I’m kinky and I felt weird being in church but now that I’ve read your books, I’ve started going, I’ve started praying more, and I was glad that you show people who are sexually active but still love God.’ It’s been really nice to get those sorts of emails. So I know there’s lots of us out there.
NP: How did you make the leap from writing at the seminary to getting your books published? I guess, when the books came out, that also resulted in you coming out as an open kinkster.
TR: I’ve always talked about it. When I started my Twitter account, it was before I even had a book deal. I was just talking to the ether, talking to friends and strangers, and had no filter or anything like that. I’ve always let it be known that I was kinky. But when the books started coming out ––
Seven Day Loan was the first thing that was published in December of 2010 and it has S&M in it –– I did a few blog posts about my kink credibility. I write about this because I have done it and you can trust what I’m writing is accurate. Or at least I’ve researched it personally, I’m not making this stuff up. I do feel that there’s some judgment for people who write things who don’t participate in them. A lot of women who write male/male romances get criticized because they can’t possibly begin to imagine what two men being in love and having sex would be like. Well that’s ridiculous; I couldn’t write a police procedural then because I’m not a cop. Agatha Christie never murdered anyone as far as I know, but she wrote tons of murder mysteries. So I think that’s really an absurd thing, but I certainly felt the need to say, look I am kinky, I respect these people, I’m going to show a more realistic side…I know these people. I know dominatrixes. I know they really do hurt people and hurt them badly, and that’s okay because it’s what the person wants and what they’re paying for. We need to get over our ridiculous overblown shock that god forbid some people are legitimately into this and they’re sane. And it was frustrating reading erotica that was very tame to me, that didn’t show S&M the way I had experienced it. So I wanted to write something more realistic. But yeah, I came out because of the books.
NP: Had you already left the seminary when the first book came out?
TR: Yeah. I left seminary I think in 2004, 2005…And it was 2010 when we sold
Siren.
NP: Wow, that’s six years later.
TR: Right. I dropped out of school. I lived in a friend’s closet. I had no money. I worked for minimum wage at a bookstore. The first couple of books,
Siren and
Angel, were handwritten because my computer died on me. Then I got a new computer and typed it all up. So, yeah, it was a few years. What happened was, I sold
Seven Day Loan, which I wrote as a little prequel story to
The Siren. Once that sold, which shocked the hell out of me, I realized that people would pay money for my stuff. Then I started looking for an agent, got a book deal with MIRA Books at Harlequin, but that was years after I started writing and researching this.
NP: The Siren is based around an author, Nora, and she’s writing a book within the book. Because of that you’re able to discuss the nature of erotica [
Romance is sex plus love. Erotica is sex plus fear.] and how it’s not really considered to be very legitimate in certain literary circles.
TR: Exactly. That was a lot of fun to have this editor character that the writer was educating. In a way I’ve done that with my own editor because she’s not kinky and she’s fascinated by the world that I presented to her in my books…Anytime human kind discovers a new technology or a new form of media, we immediately try to figure out how to make it sexy. The very first thing we ever put on film was naked women walking around. Those were the original movies. The first writings and first books were pornographic. From the beginning, the first things we published were the Bible and porn. The very first movies were Bible stories and porn. They go hand in hand. This is human nature from the beginning of time. Erotica has been around since the beginning of time. The Old Testament is incredibly erotic. When people are shocked that there is a mix of God, religion, violence, and sex in my books, I just tell them that obviously they have not read the Old Testament. It’s not talked about, but that’s exactly what’s been going on for thousands of years. So, yeah, in
Sirens it was fun to do the meta narrative, the story within a story and to allow for all these conversations between Nora and Zach about kink and erotica and what it means and what it is. I’m not even sure that I agree with everything that Nora says but it was fun to write.
NP: One of the other questions you explore through the course of the books is if as a kinkster you can make a relationship work long term with someone that’s vanilla. Is the sexuality too incompatible? Can someone sacrifice their own sexuality and be truly happy? And, if you love someone, should you even want them to make that sacrifice? What are your beliefs on that?
TR: People can come to different conclusions and they do whatever works for them, as they should…When my boyfriend and I got together, the very first thing I told him was that I do not expect monogamy from him and that I only requested that he be careful and if any relationship on the side would get in the way of our relationship that we needed to talk about it. He said giving him permission to cheat ruined all of the fun of it, so he’s been annoyingly faithful since day one. I was like, I promise this is not reverse psychology, you really can if you want to. I don’t expect 100% monogamy because I think that’s unrealistic for a relationship of two people who want to be together for the rest of their lives. That’s asking an awful lot of someone.
I was talking to a friend of mine who’s in a polyandrous relationship, he has a wife and a girlfriend and he’s exhausted by it, but he knows he could never do traditional monogamy. He said that he’s the type of person who could be in love with more than one person, whereas he sees me as somebody who could only ever be in love with one person but could have other partners to have sex with. In my case, I don’t have sex with other people, but I do S&M with other people because Andrew is no sadist. Which is fine by me because he’s very open minded and lets me play with others when I need to get a good flogging –– he’s happy to let somebody else take over that.
NP: So he’s your Wesley?
TR: He’s really more my Zach in that he and I have this great partnership because of our books. We’re both writers. The main area that we bonded over was our ambition and our writer dreams. He’s one of my best beta readers and editors. But he’s much, much kinkier than Wesley. But there’s different kinds of kink. Andrew’s not into the S&M part, although he did get me a riding crop and he’s threatened me with it a few times. I’d say he was more Zach, more curious and open minded, but not vanilla the way Wesley is. Wesley is so cute.
NP: I was browsing your website and one of the things I love is the Team Søren, Team Kingsley, Team Wesley, and Team Zach
shirts. I guess when you meet your fans they all must have an opinion about who Nora should end up with.
TR: They do, they really do. They’re very passionate about it. People who are Team Wesley cannot begin to understand why Nora would want to be with Søren, and people who are Team Søren just loathe Wesley. Then, because of
The Prince, I have people who want Nora and Wesley to end up together just to get rid of Nora so Søren and Kingsley can be together. My readers are passionate.
NP: Which is the bestselling shirt?
TR: Søren is.
NP: Yeah, I’m Team Søren.
TR: I can’t say who I am for Nora, because that would ruin the ending of book four, but I will say for me, I am Team Søren. He’s my favorite character. Søren is the number one best seller, Kingsley is second, and then I think it’s a tie between Griffin and Zach. Wesley does not sell well.
NP: No one likes the nice guy.
TR: I know, poor thing. Wesley is actually based on a friend of mine, so I get upset when people are mean to him because I know him in real life in a way. His personality and certain aspects of him are based on a very good friend of mine who is genuinely the kindest person alive.
NP: Can I get an introduction?
TR: His name is Josh. Come to Kentucky, I’ll introduce you. He’s in seminary right now, he’s in the same seminary that I used to go to. He’s spent months living in Haiti and Honduras doing missionary work because he wanted to be a doctor like my Wesley. He’s very devout. He was an old virgin, the same way Wesley was, not one of those guys who was sleeping around at 15 or 16. I get upset with people who are mean to Wesley because I know him in real life and I know what a good person he is…The thing is, somebody who wants to be a doctor or has done medical missionary work and has gone to third world countries and seen children missing legs or with horrible rashes or other illnesses, has a lot of trouble accepting that pain and suffering could be a good thing or could be erotic. They just see pain and illness as evils. Which is completely understandable. Even Søren says in book four that he would worry about someone who was blasé about the thought of harming another person or hurting another person. So I get Wesley. I get that he just doesn’t want anybody in pain because he sees it as an evil.
NP: Writing can be very therapeutic. As you’ve been writing these books, have you discovered things about yourself and your own sexuality?
TR: I have. I didn’t realize that I had a sadistic side until the books started coming out and I realized how much I was messing with people’s heads and how much I enjoyed that. I had this bond with Søren because of the theology and the philosophy and his love of the church, we shared that, but it wasn’t until I got to do mind games on people and got to be a sadist and use people that I realized how much I enjoyed that. I have a great deal of sympathy and understanding for sadists now, and I think I could do it. I really think I could be an actual sadist, and inflict physical pain on someone who was willing. If I knew they were 100% into it and that’s what they wanted, that wouldn’t bother me at all.
NP: You really do fuck with people’s heads. In the first book you make people hate Søren and then in the second book you make people fall in love with him.
TR: Right, right. And he’s still the same person, you just see him through different eyes. By the end of book three, you’ll discover that I completely lied to you about what happened at the end of
Siren…I do wonderful mindfucks that make me so happy. And little ones too. In
The Angel, Nora gets this note from Søren at the beginning of the book that she’s not allowed to open until the very end, and then you realize that Søren’s been in on the joke the entire time. It’s just fun to do that sort of thing. That’s something that really is an aspect of being a dominant, being a sadist, messing with people’s minds.
NP: When did this part of your personality come out? Were you fucking with kids’ heads in the playground at school?
TR: I don’t think I was. I really don’t. I think I thought I was just a pure submissive when I was reading
The Sleeping Beauty Trilogy by Ann Rice when I was a teenager and discovered those. I really couldn’t go back to romance novels after reading
The Sleeping Beauty Trilogy. The thought of getting tied up and beaten and passed around sexually, that didn’t bother me at all, even as a 16-year old virgin. It didn’t seem weird or gross or anything. I was like, ‘Sure, sign me up, I love it.’ Since that didn’t bother me, and I thought it was sexy, I thought that’s what I was. I thought I was probably just a sexual submissive and if some guy wanted to do all that to me, I was all for it. I didn’t get to start doing that stuff until I was in my mid-20s, but even as a teenager I remember giving the books to my sister and my sister being horrified. That’s when I first realized there’s different types of people in the world. There are people who are horrified by this and people who instinctively get it, and I’m of the instinctively get it side.
NP: If you were going to be an armchair psychiatrist, what was the difference between you and your sister? What formed your different sexual preferences? Was it nature or nurture?
TR: I don’t know. That’s a great question, but I really don’t know. I was just reading an article yesterday where a bunch of dominatrixes were interviewed about male submissives because of
Fifty Shades…They were talking about their clients and how they got into it, and they said it’s just so random. One dominatrix was talking about a client who would hide in cupboards as young as 2 and 3 years old, and as an adult he still loves cage play. He loves being restrained, full body, and put in a box or put in a cage. There were seeds of that as young as 2 and 3. Nobody did this to him abusively, he just enjoyed it even as a small child and still enjoys it as an adult. I know a professional submissive who as young as 11 or 12 was tying herself to her own bed and masturbating. She just loved being tied up that much. No one had ever tied her up before, she wasn’t sexually abused, it was just this thing that she liked, and as an adult she still likes it. So I have no idea where it comes from. It might just be just a sexual orientation, just like being gay or straight, it’s just on that spectrum, the very broad spectrum of sexuality. For me, I like the complexity of BDSM and the role play. You use much more than your body, you use your whole imagination. You’re not just playing with someone else’s body, you’re also playing with their mind. I like the whole aspect of S&M, that you’re getting to the entire person, and not just one part of them.
NP: There’s a definite synergy with being a writer and being into S&M, because a lot of it is about creating stories, scenarios and characters.
TR: Exactly. You’re playing a role, very much. Even when you’re playing the role, sometimes that’s the real you. You get to play the role of the real you, if you’re a female dominant or a submissive or something. When you get into the bedroom during the scene, that’s when I think you’re the most you. Yeah, there’s a lot that goes on with the imagination, it’s really impressed me. My old dominant, I put some of him into Søren, he was really creative with the stuff he came up with. The scenes and the mindfucks and just even the complicated knots that he would tie and the creative ways he would tie me up –– it took a lot of brain power. It wasn’t just lay there, spread your legs, we’re going to have sex now. A lot of thought went into it. It was thoughtful sex.
NP: One of the rules that Nora has is that she can’t write about her sex life with Søren — well, she can write about it, but she can’t publish it. Do you have any rules in your life whereby what goes on in the bedroom with your partner stays out of the books?
TR: I think Andrew wished that I had more rules. He’s like, ‘You have no filter Tiffany.’ I’m working on that. I am.
NP: Please don’t work on that.
TR: [laughs] I really don’t have any rules. My personal rules just have to do with what’s true to my character. That’s all I care about. I get accused of writing stuff that’s shocking –– that’s very insulting to me. I could have Wesley slap Nora, that would be incredibly shocking but it wouldn’t be true to who he is as a character. He would never do that in a million years, unless she was like choking to death, then he might hit her on the back, but that’s it. There’s a lot of things that I could do in my books that would be incredibly shocking. Kingsley could shoot Søren in the head, something like that, that would be shocking, that’s not going to happen. I don’t write this stuff to shock people, it’s all about what’s true to my characters. That is my one and only rule…
Other than that, I really don’t have any rules. My books are fiction. Yes, I’m kinky and I do put my experiences with S&M into the book. Like the first S&M scene in
The Siren, where Nora’s kneeling blindfolded on a bed and Søren comes into the room and doesn’t speak to her for about 10 minutes, that’s based on personal experience. I’ve had scenes like that, but the books themselves are all fiction. The plots are fictional. When Nora writes about Søren, she’s doing it to exercise the memories of her past and try to get them out of her. I don’t think she would’ve ever publish them anyway, because they are so personal. Søren just doesn’t want her exploiting what is so sacred to him by publishing them. I don’t have a similar situation as she does. My ex-doms would be thrilled if I wrote about them, so it’s a very different situation between her and me. So, no, I don’t really have any personal rules, just ones for my characters.
NP: I have to say the way that you opened the story up from book one to book two was genius. The backstory that you created for Søren was incredible. Did you have an idea of that backstory when you were writing about him in book one?
TR: Yes. I knew a lot about him because I spent so many years working on
The Siren. Once I finished the first draft of
Siren, I started writing the first draft of
Angel and then went back and started working on
Siren again. I knew from
Angel stuff about him that I went back and hinted about in
The Siren. Like his awful father and his very young discovery of what he was and the complicated family dynamic. Usually I work backwards. I will put something in a book and then I will figure out why it’s there or how it came to be. So you had Søren and Kingsley’s relationship. You know in book one Søren threatens to kill Kingsley over Nora. You don’t see it on screen but you do hear them joking about it…So obviously Kingsley and Søren have a relationship, separate from Nora. So where did that come from? I started to work backwards and I realized that they went to school together when they were teenagers and that realization led to
The Prince and a lot that happens in that book. I knew I wanted Søren in Catholic school and neither one of them had Catholic parents. There are not a lot of English Catholics, they’re usually Church of England…We have a Danish mother, an American WASP foster mother or step mother, and a British father, so how did he become Catholic? He must’ve converted in Catholic school. Well, he would’ve gone to Catholic school very young. Why would he have gone to Catholic school very young? He must’ve got kicked out of his British boarding school. Why did he get kicked out of his British boarding school? I asked myself these questions and then build a backstory as I answer them.
NP: The Prince is the most recent book and you’ve got a fourth one that you’re working on at the moment?
TR: I turned in book four to my editor yesterday. It’s done.
The Mistress is book four and it’s the last of the first quartet that takes place in our present time. Book five through eight will be prequels starting with book 5,
The Priest, which deals with Nora’s early relationship with Søren. Her age 15 through age 20. It’s going to be very interesting to write a love story between a 15-year old girl and a 29-year old priest, but if anyone can do it, it’s me.
NP: I would have to agree with that.
TR: It will actually surprise people by how sweet it is. People are at this point are used to jaded, cynical, somewhat violent but romantic erotic stories from me, but she’s only 15, 16, 17-years old and Søren is very careful of her. It’s actually a very sweet romance if you can get over the fact of the age difference and that he’s a Catholic priest. By this point, book five, I think my readers are going to be over it.
NP: I’m reassured that you’re continuing on from the first quartet and planning another series. I’ve got very attached to The Original Sinners’ characters. They’re all so fascinating. They’re people that I want to keep in my life. I’m going to be very sorry when The Original Sinners series is over.
TR: Oh, thank you so much. I’m pretty addicted to them too. I don’t know if I could ever let them go completely.
NP: Please don’t.
TR: I might take a break and write some other stuff, but at the very least, I’ll keep writing short stories about them or novellas. Because they haunt me, they won’t leave me alone. When you have Søren standing over your shoulder, how do you ignore him?
NP: I noticed that you have some short stories for fans on your website that they can download for free.
TR: Yes. There’s almost a full book length of short stories on my website, probably about
three or four hundred pages of freebies. Because, like I said, they will not leave me alone, my characters. I have to keep writing about them. In my downtime I’m like, ‘Oh, I have free time, I can write a story. I don’t have to write something for my publisher right now, I can write something for
the blog.’ So, yeah, I can’t let them go. I love them too much. They’re so sexy.
NP: I’m completely hooked.
TR: Yes! I gotcha!
NP: You got me. And you’ve got a lot of other people out there including the New York ladies of Divalysscious Moms that introduced
Fifty Shades of Grey to the world. How did that come about?
TR: I’m not entirely sure. Either my publicist or the Harlequin publicist sent Liz [Stern] of the
DivaMoms a copy of
The Siren…It just so happened that she read it and she loved it. And her mom read it and her mom loved it, which I thought was so cute. Her mom is a bigger fan even than Liz is. She just fell in love with the books. They invited me to come talk to them, so I got to go twice, which was a lot of fun. They’re great ladies, and what’s fun is that they’re all in Manhattan and that’s where a lot of S&M is. I’m like, ‘It’s right under your nose ladies, I swear. Just get on
FetLife and I’ll take you to some parties.
NP: A lot of people begrudge the mainstream-ization of S&M, especially in the wake of
Fifty Shades of Grey. Where do you stand on that?
TR: The more people who are into S&M mean more people I get to play with, so I’m all for it. I don’t think it really needs to be some big shocking secret. It makes it more fun writing, because S&M is very shocking. You can have this fun dynamic of this whole group of people who live by this code and this way of life and it’s so foreign to vanilla people. It’s just a blast to write. If it became mainstream, it wouldn’t be as shocking and it wouldn’t be as fun to write, but that’s me the writer talking. Tiffany the real person, who wants to see all of her kinky friends be accepted and wants to see myself be accepted, and I want gay teenagers to stop killing themselves because people bully them, I want all of that to stop. I want people to get over it and just accept that there’s thousands of right ways to have sex. There’s not just one right way to have sex or to be sexual. We need to be open-minded and let people live their lives and be open and not make them feel bad because they want something a little different than we do.
NP: That’s definitely one of the underlying themes of
The Angel. The compassion that you express for Michael, and the sense of freedom that you give him when he understands that he’s not alone and that he can be himself, that’s very profound and must be very inspirational for some of your readers.
TR: What’s been really interesting is the mail I’ve gotten from people. I’ve gotten a few emails from people saying, ‘I am Michael. I even still have the scars on my wrists.’ I know one person is getting tattoos to cover her suicide attempt scars the way Michael did. It’s been great to have these people write me and tell me how much they relate to him and how much better they felt about their sexuality after watching him go through his journey of self-acceptance. Because, for me, I’m just so out. I’m so out. Are you kinky? Yes, I am. Don’t you think that’s wrong? No, I don’t…Once you’re just out and you don’t apologize for it, people will stop asking you to apologize for it. When you’re embarrassed and ashamed, people sense that, they feed on that. They realize that you think that you’re doing something wrong and so they can tell themselves you
are doing something wrong. If you are unapologetic about it, unrepentant, and say, ‘Yes I am kinky’ or ‘Yes I am gay. Why is my personal life something that you have a problem with? You obviously have the problem.’ You turn the tables on them and then they have to look at themselves.
NP: With shame, you have to give someone the power to make you feel shame and guilt. You are giving them the power and you have the choice to take it back.
TR: Exactly. And what people don’t understand about S&M is that it’s incredibly empowering. Even when you’re submitting it’s incredibly empowering because you are doing exactly what you want to do with the person you want to do it with in the way you want to do it. That is the true definition of power, getting to do what you want.
NP: Another thing that you talk about in the book is how it could be argued that submissives are the ones that ultimately have the most power because they’re choosing to submit and they can stop at any time.
TR: Right, they really can. I think there’s misunderstanding when we say the submissive has the power –– because the dominant definitely has the power, trust me. But the submissive does have the power, they do. It’s not that the dominant doesn’t and the submissive does, they both do. Like I said recently on Twitter, in the BDSM context, sadism is not something one person does to another person, it is something they do with another person. Like when I had scenes with my ex who was a 6’4” blond sadist –– if that sounds familiar at all –– we talked about it beforehand: What I would enjoy. What he would like to do to me. What I would let him do. What we would both want to explore when it came to pain and sadism. It was something we did with each other. Even though I was the one walking away with the bruises, it was very much a joint effort on our part…We were Team Sexy.
NP: Well, I’d like to thank you for seriously upping the ante with regards to what we can expect from erotica and romance novels. Because, even though they’re set in the S&M world, they are romance novels.
TR: They are. They’re very gothic, and gothic books traditionally are a fusion of romance and horror. They’re very gothic in that respect. But yeah, the romance is definitely there and the horror is there. Especially coming in books three and four, there’s horror elements to it or suspense thriller elements through them.
The Siren was called an erotic thriller by a lot of people, but the heart of it is love. Because Søren, I based him on God, and God’s ultimate attribute is that he is all loving. Love is at the heart of the books. A different kind of love than some people are used to seeing but still very much love.
NP: It’s interesting that you say that you base Søren on God, because we’re told God is love, but he’s also very cruel.
TR: Right.
NP: I guess God would have to be into S&M –– it’s the only thing that makes sense.
TR: Exactly. Yes. I love the Old Testament, and the God of the Old Testament wiped out whole cities and was quite sadistic in a way, but for the greater good. So I based Søren on the God of the Old Testament, if he where a modern priest, what his personality would be like. It’s very intense, but incredibly loving, playful at times, but don’t fuck with him. You get to see his development throughout the book and see the more loving aspects of him, but still always very powerful and a little bit scary. But that’s all part of his charm.
For more on The Original Sinners visit tiffanyreisz.com/. 
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