Shannon Morgan, who writes under the pen name Mia West, discusses her career writing erotic romance novels. She has self-published multiple series since 2014, including stories featuring LGBTQ+ characters and relationships despite being a straight woman herself. Morgan emphasizes balancing audience wants with her own creative interests and discusses her daily writing process, which involves drafting on a treadmill desk for several hours each day. She also notes the importance of planning her publication schedule in advance as a self-published author.

1. The Erotic World of Mia West
The San Antonio Author talks self-publishing, craft, and the time-traveling partnered orgasm
Most days you’ll find Shannon Morgan trotting on her treadmill, furiously drafting her next
book. Morgan (pen name: Mia West) has self-published multiple series’ since entering the Erotic
Romance genre in 2014, including Tell Me When, seven erotic novelettes about a pansexual
time-traveling art thief; Grizzly Rim, a m/m contemporary paranormal series about a community
of shape shifters in Alaska; and Into the Fire, a post-roman collapse m/m romance (“It’s the
series of my heart,” she says).
Morgan’s characters may often be gay men, but she is a straight woman. With a husband. And a
cat. And she’s not alone; in fact, she is part of a growing community of straight women who read
and write m/m romance, a genre that often employs traditional romance conventions to explore
the emotional and sexual arcs of its characters.
Despite her fierce love for her practice, Morgan hesitated to give this interview. “I was a little
reluctant to just be another voice yapping from my standpoint of privilege,” she explains. But,
with a bit of persuasion, she yapped nonetheless.
How would you say you’ve evolved with the genre?
With my first series, the protagonist was a female time traveling art thief and it was part of her
identity but also part of her job that she was pansexual. In order to time travel she has to have a
partnered orgasm, so she has a colleague in the present who does that, but she has to convince
someone in the past to give her another one to get home…
When I finished that series I realized I had set myself a tough road forward, I had people who
liked the history part of that series, and then I had people who liked the contemporary part, I had
people who liked the male/female romance, and I had people who liked everything else. Moving
forward from that I was like okay, how do I satisfy all these people?
How much of your writing is in response to the audience’s wants and how much of it is for
yourself?
I’d be talking out of the side of my mouth if I pretended that making a living wasn’t important to
me. A big reason that I’m continuing the shifter series, the paranormal series, is because it sells.
It’s a huge subcategory in romance and it feels irresponsible not to keep writing that for my
family.
What is the line between Mia West and Shannon Morgan? Is it just a pen name? Or does Mia have
a personality all her own?
Mia is me, I have to say. I have social media platforms for myself as well, and basically I’m a
goofball on all of them. It would possibly behoove me to be more sophisticated as Mia but I’m just
not. I’m an enormous nerd.

2. Let’s talk about the craft behind writing erotic romance? Is there a formula to it? How do you
balance sex and story?
In erotic romance, a lot of times it’s a sexual event that is the turning point that then has emotional
consequences, where in a conventional romance an emotional event might have sexual
consequences. So in my post Roman series every book has quite a bit of sex in it because I’m
actually examining the evolution of their physical relationship as much as their emotional
relationship. And they’re about to hit some road bumps (laughing), my readers don’t know that
yet!
Describe your daily practice.
We go to breakfast and get breakfast tacos, then I come home and I do about an hour of
administrative work. I draft until lunch. I have a treadmill desk, so when I’m doing first drafts I
write on that…Afternoons are for editing, or revisions, or for other peripheral elements of
publishing, like working on the website or working on a book cover. And then I try to end each
day with half an hour where I review what I did that day and manage what I need to do the next
day.
It’s about six days a week that I do that and most of the year… Starting now into next year I’m
slowing down. I’ve started working with a developmental editor who’s going to help me
conclude one of my current series and help me plan two new ones.
It’s good to force myself to slow down and make a plan for all that. I do love planning. That’s a
huge part of my process. If I could sit with a spreadsheet all day and just plan my production
schedule I would. I’m ridiculously nerdy about my production schedule. I love thinking about
coordinating how to juggle three different books in the same four-month period.
That’s a real talent.
I’m the one that has to do that if I’m self publishing. It’s a rabbit hole the same way research is.
Some folks love to research and they’ll research instead of writing, but I’ll let myself plan things
to death instead of writing. It’s like a drug.
Find Mia online at www.miawest.com
Twitter:@authormiawest
Tumblr (NSFW): wordswest
Facebook: @authormiawest
Goodreads: @miawest