The Motorcycle Club series connects authors and erotic novellas

The authors of The Motorcycle Club series — best buds Ella Goode, Kati Wilde and Ruby Dixon — join HEA to introduce us to their MC series, which is made up of interconnected erotic novellas. Each book features an MC located in a small town that's adjacent to the other MC's small towns, so they all inhabit the same world.

Q: How would you describe the motorcycle clubs in your series?

Ella: In Her Secret Pleasure, Pippa jokes that the Death Lords MC is not so different than a college fraternity.

"Let's see. You've got an administrative hierarchy, secret road signs that you share when you pass each other on the highway, initiation periods, loyalty tests, and you wear clothes that have your insignia on it." She nods toward my cut. "You're pretty much a fraternity. Oh, and you have drunken hook-ups in your boys-only clubhouse."

Judge, the club president, replies that he wouldn't know as he didn't go to college, but he explains that the club was formed by his grandfather and a few disaffected Vietnam vets who found the world changed when they returned from war and couldn't fit in at their old haunts and with their old friends. Their love of motorcycles and the lure of the freedom of the road drew them together. The legacy handed down is full of tradition, but the core concept remains the same — a place for men of like minds to gather together and find support and communion within the brotherhood.

Q: Why did you decide to create this series around motorcycle clubs?

Ruby: It's the brotherhood-on-the-fringe vibe that really works for me. You can have your guys that have had a bit too much of life thrown at them. You can have your white knight in tarnished armor. You can have your dangerous heroes that are only good to one thing — their woman. There's just so much that fringe groups are allowed to do because they're not constrained by rules — in romance or in their lives. I made my club work in pairs because I wanted to push the boundaries a bit more. Is it a little out there? Sure. Is it unheard of? Nope. I've known people that swing, and people that share. It happens, and it happens more in fringe groups.

But it's more than just sharing a girl for my Butchers MC — it's about always having someone that completely has your back at all times. It started when the presidents of the club, Gem and Dom, were in the military together. Dom saved Gem's life, and when they formed the club, they always wanted a brother looking out for another brother. It seemed natural for me to bring the ménage into this, and to play with the different aspects of that. I get to add heroines who are excited about the ménage aspects, or heroines (as in the upcoming Double Trouble) who aren't so excited about it. I get to see how having that constant partner affects the heroes, too. It just gives me a different frame to play off of, relationship-wise, than I normally do.

Q: What is your favorite part of writing these stories?

Kati: I love building the relationships between the guys, and the military is a strong influence on the heroes in my series, as well. Maybe not always overtly (although one of my heroines, Jenny, explicitly draws that comparison between the sense of brotherhood in the military and a similar brotherhood in the clubs), but I love that these heroes have a deep-seated code that they always follow. That code might cross a few lines, legally, but the backbone of it is the freedom that these men are embracing as they live their lives in the way they want to live them.

But that freedom comes with a lot of rules — and I think that's where a lot of the fascination with the clubs and these men stems from. With my club, the Hellfire Riders, so much of the conflict lies in pushing up against those rules. In the first novella, my hero, Saxon, has to negotiate some distinct territory lines in order to finally get his hands on the woman he's wanted for years. And in the second novella, his presidency is threatened when the Riders' bylaws demand more from him (and Jenny) than he's willing to give.

As a writer, I just love that this series is pushing my own boundaries. Because these guys can play outside of society's rules, I get to push myself further, too — and I get to see Ella and Ruby do the same. It's been so much fun working on these novellas — not just my own, but seeing theirs develop, too.

Q: How is it like working with other authors on the project?

Ruby: I love writing it with these guys because we get to bounce ideas off of each other. I love that we can share pages and get each other pumped for releases, and run ideas for heroes and heroines past one another. We can tell someone if something isn't working, and bolster each other when we have doubts. It's like our own little club, minus motorcycles.

That was ... probably really nerdy of me.

Q: How interconnected are the novellas?

Ruby: The community in the books stands alone, just like the novellas, but we definitely Easter-egg the crap out of each other. I like that we're building this world populated with independent biker clubs who know about each other and can interact at a later date. Right now we're setting the groundwork, but I'd love to have the Butchers meet up with a club daughter from the Death Lords or Hellfire Riders.

Kati: I think the common thread we're getting from all three of us is that the series is all about pushing boundaries. Which is really fun to see. :)

Writing short (but not too short) is one of the aspects of the series that I really love — because I think we all know what it's like to want a book that will give us a strong, satisfactory romance but not having a lot of time to sit down for a full-length novel. So when we got together, that was one of our primary goals: to create romances that women could read in a single sitting before they get on with their busy lives.

Hence our tag line: When you want all of the heat and the emotion but don't have all of the time.

Find out more about the authors and their MCs on Facebook and Kati's website, katiwilde.com.