Solace Ames is an American erotic-fiction author known for power-exchange romance, polyamory, and BDSM-aware plots that treat kink as character work rather than wallpaper. She has also published under the pen name Violetta Vane. For readers who want adult literature where consent practices, cultural identity, and desire share the page, Ames is a clear contemporary name on the Carina Press–era erotic-romance shelf.
Career: Contests, Collaborations, and Solo Books
Ames describes herself as a self-taught writer. Her short story Tomorrow’s Much Too Long placed third in Hyphen magazine’s first Erotic Writing Contest in 2013. That same year she co-authored The Dom Project with Heloise Belleau for Carina Press; the lead is a tall, “tattooed Asian bad-boy Dom”—a deliberate push against the blond-billionaire default of mass-market kink romance.
Her first solo novel, The Submission Gift (2014), was reviewed by Publishers Weekly, which called it a “nuanced look at polyamory and BDSM.” A husband hires a rent boy as a “gift” for his wife after a serious car accident leaves him unable to provide the full sex life they once shared. Disability, hired intimacy, and negotiated power exchange stay in the room with the kink.
Her second solo title, The Companion Contract (2015), also drew a favorable Publishers Weekly notice. It follows a woman working as a pornographic actress who wants another career and another place in her life—adult-industry labor as a starting point for romance and reinvention rather than a one-note “fallen woman” trope.
Safe Sex, Multicultural Casting, and Anti-Objectification
Ames consistently builds safer-sex practice into her fiction: condoms, STI screening, and logistics of multiple partners appear as normal parts of erotic life. When she entered romance, she aimed for multicultural stories, arguing that “characters aren’t as real to me if I don’t understand where they come from.” She stresses that multicultural erotica must stay rooted in personhood—not fetishizing someone for racial or cultural difference. That stance matters in a genre that has often treated “exotic” Dom/sub figures as props.
Personal Background
Ames’s father was a Japanese citizen; her mother was raised in the United States. Each parent held different expectations about raising their daughter. Ames has described them as “anarcho-hippies.” Growing up, she felt frequently fetishized by men who treated Asian women as sex objects—a lived context that feeds her fiction’s resistance to that gaze. In her early twenties she worked in a strip club for money and has said she does not “talk about it much after because of the stigma.” She is married and has children.
Selected Bibliography
- Belleau, Heloise; Ames, Solace (2013). The Dom Project. Don Mills, Ontario: Carina Press. ISBN 9781426897672.
- Ames, Solace (2014). The Submission Gift. Don Mills, Ontario: Carina Press. ISBN 9781426898280.
- Ames, Solace (2015). The Companion Contract. Don Mills, Ontario: Carina Press. ISBN 9781426899522.
For bdsmwild readers mapping erotic writers who take power exchange seriously, Ames offers Dom/sub romance with polyamory, disability, porn-work transition, and racial identity on the table—plus an explicit refusal to treat safer sex or cultural background as optional flavor text.
