Solace Ames: Power-Exchange Romance That Treats Kink as Character

Solace Ames is an American erotic-fiction writer. She has also published as Violetta Vane. She writes power-exchange romance, polyamory, and desire across cultures, and she puts BDSM inside how the characters live rather than using it as wallpaper. Adult readers who want consent, cultural identity, and desire on the same page have a clear contemporary name in her Carina Press-era books.

She describes herself as self-taught. In 2013 her short story Tomorrow’s Much Too Long placed third in Hyphen magazine’s first Erotic Writing Contest. That same year she and Heloise Belleau published The Dom Project. 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, came out in 2014 and drew a Publishers Weekly notice that treated it as a nuanced look at polyamory and BDSM. A husband, after a serious car accident, can no longer give his wife the full sex life they used to share, so he hires a rent boy as a “gift” for her. Disability, paid intimacy, negotiated power exchange, and kink stay in the same room. The Companion Contract (2015) was also well reviewed. It follows a porn actress who wants another job and another place in her life. Sex work is the start of the romance, not a “fallen woman” label.

Safer sex in her novels is ordinary erotic logistics: condoms, STI screening, and how multiple partners actually get arranged. She has said multicultural stories are not real to her unless she understands where the characters come from. Culture, in that argument, is not a prop for fetishizing an “exotic” Dom or sub. It has to sit in who the person is. That stance also pushes back on men who treat Asian women as sex objects, which is part of her own history as well as the fiction.

Her father was a Japanese citizen. Her mother was raised in the United States. She has called them anarcho-hippies, and the two of them did not share the same expectations about raising her. Growing up, she often felt fetishized by men. In her early twenties she worked in a strip club for the money, and she has said she does not talk about it much afterward because of the stigma. She is married and has children.

Books

In order: 2013, with Heloise Belleau, The Dom Project, Carina Press, ISBN 9781426897672. 2014, her first solo novel, The Submission Gift, Carina Press, ISBN 9781426898280. 2015, The Companion Contract, Carina Press, ISBN 9781426899522. All three were published in Don Mills, Ontario.