Published: Miranda's Tempest

Oh jeepers. It's here. My first book. Okay, so it's an ebook. But still. That's my name. On the cover. (Okay, so it's my pseudonym, but you get the idea.)

Well. 

I'm a little excited. And suddenly a little scared too.

Anyway, it's three short stories, totalling around 14,000 words. And they are kinky reworkings of Shakespeare's The Tempest, Grimms' Hansel and Gretel and Homer's The Odyssey. 

Here's the blurb: Miranda loves to submit to her forbidden lover, Caliban, but she wields a power of her own and together she and Caliban turn the bedraggled prince Ferdinand into their plaything. Young lovers Hansel and Gretel are lured to the witch's house, where Hansel finds himself chained and caged ready to be used in the coven's midsummer ritual, but Gretel takes on the witch at her own game. Penelope has survived the long years of her husband Odysseus' travels with the help of her 12 beloved handmaidens, but one of the 108 suitors who vie for her hand in marriage proves his true devotion.

I will probably tell you more about the stories when I've calmed down a bit. But for now, I'll just give you the Amazon links.

For UK peeps, here.
And for .com folks, here.

Writing tips: A link-a-thon

I've read some really thought-provoking and useful tips recently on writing erotica, on writing in general and on getting it published so I thought I'd pull the links together in one place. Some of them are about the writing itself, some about the tweaking and polishing, others touch on what editors might be looking for. Some of it's the obvious stuff but I found some insights and new perspectives that I know I'll be learning from.

Aside from tips for honing the craft of writing itself, the things that come up time and again are to familiarise yourself with the genre, to make sure you read submission guidelines thoroughly and do exactly what they stipulate and to edit and proofread your work to a high standard rather than seeing your first draft as complete. But you knew that. Didn't you?

Take a look over at the How to Write Erotic Fiction blog from Ashley Lister. He has a book of that title coming out soon, but on the blog you can read thoughts from twelve-and-counting authors and editors in a 'five tips' format. You've got the great Alison Tyler talking about the importance of opening and closing lines, and her preference for the word 'said' instead of a lot of giggling, chortling, whispering, moaning and groaning. You have the likes of Sacchi Green, Tenille Brown and Sommer Marsden warning you to make sure your characters' sexual exploits are physically possible and that no extra limbs (ahem) creep in.

Over at the Sex is Social online magazine, I found this post by seasoned anthology editor Rachel Kramer Bussel about the things she's looking for in submissions. She stresses how important it is to make your piece stand out among the hundreds of others by drawing on your unique experiences and knowledge from any area of your life. She also lets us in on the fact that she gets sent far more stories about submissive women than dominant ones and she'd also like more variety in age and race. 

At The Self-Publishing Revolution blog, Selena Kitt gives some down-to-earth advice that cuts through the hype of the erotica 'gold-rush' as she describes it. However many people are jumping on the bandwagon, it still comes down to writing a good story, making it hot and writing what you love rather than what you hope is going to be the next Fifty Shades. 

On the deliciouslydeviant blog, Velvet Tripp has this to say about overdoing such hackneyed plots: 'Boring! Sorry, but I lose interest very quickly if the plot is too obvious.' She gives an example of how you can take the theme of an anthology and make it different, among other good tips. Velvet also links to some pithy general writing tips from Neil Gaiman and Kurt Vonnegut. 

I give my own five quick writing tips here, including my favourite: 'Call a cock a cock.' And here are five things I like in the erotica I read and which I strive for in my writing. 

Now that you've got all that straight, remember that when it comes to the actual craft of writing, all rules are made to be broken. Whatever one writer tells you, another will contradict. But as Neil Gaiman's tips remind us, the most important thing above all is to get your fingers on the keyboard and do it.

If you have your own tips, or have spotted any of interest around the web, feel free to share your links in the comments. And if you fancy a more in-depth read, you've got How to Write Hot Sex, edited by Shoshanna Evers, which I reviewed here, and M Christian's How to Write and Sell Erotica, which I'm currently reading.

Picture above from the Virtual Typewriter Museum.

Review: Cute Boy Gets Squeezed by D.L. King

A big thank you to Alison Tyler, who's let me take part in the blog tour for her new anthology The Big Book of Bondage. Check out her blog, Trollop with a Laptop, for links to all the other reviews. I'm talking about D.L. King's story, one of 25 in this new offering from Cleis Press. So without further ado:

The real star of this story is not endearingly submissive Cute Boy or his kooky-but-caring play pal Evangeline; it’s a piece of equipment. The vac bed, to be precise – latex sheets out of which the air is sucked leaving the sub cocooned so tightly they can’t even twitch but with every contour of their body on display. I’d hazard a guess that most bedroom kinksters don’t have one and have probably never encountered one for real (go on, hop over to Google Images, I'll wait). And that’s what makes this story so irresistible. It’s the stuff of fantasy for most, rendered real in tantalising detail. The description of Cute Boy’s experience in the vac bed gains weight from the sparseness of description elsewhere; what the characters look like is largely left to the reader’s imagination.

The story has an easy, conversational style from the first-person viewpoint of Cute Boy. That’s in keeping with the casual nature of the relationship involved. There’s no romance and little emotional interaction here. But set against that is the intensity of Cute Boy’s physical need and his experience with this piece of equipment. Eve is no stereotypical Domme either; she’s more of a facilitator for his pleasure. She sounds more than a little bonkers and for Cute Boy there’s a thrill in the anticipation, the uncertainty, over what she’s going to come up with while knowing that, fundamentally, she’s not dangerous. Although there’s no seduction involved, she does constantly reassure him in her light-hearted way that everything is going to be ‘fun’.

It’s common for BDSM stories to try to untangle the psychology of submission or look for some reason for it in a person’s past experience. But that assumes a narrative viewpoint from outside of the world of kink, a place where justification and rationale might be demanded. Right at the start of the story, King openly dismisses this when Cute Boy begins to explain his kink and trails off with the words ‘yada yada yada’. But the whole story is, in a wonderfully subtle way, an exposition of a physical and psychological need that, in this case, seems to be completely natural. There are several moments when Cute Boy (who also goes by the name Pete!) has reservations – when Eve points out his ‘nice cock’ to her housemate, when there is the suggestion that said housemate is going to take photos of him, when she introduces the butt plug. But his expressions of unease are overwhelmed by his need. And when he sees the vac bed, his deep desire to feel its embrace shuts off the noise in his head and renders him hopelessly, sweetly, compliant. Add in a couple of toys and it leads to an orgasm the likes of which he’s never had before.

Cute Boy Gets Squeezed appears to be a simple, casual tale, but beneath its easy style lies an intensity of experience and a depth of knowledge about the nature of submission and restraint that is anything but.

Thoughts: On the Erotica Explosion

So, it's now acceptable, cool even, to be seen reading erotica. Copies of the most popular series of books are changing hands at the school gates, in the office, at knitting clubs. We're all suddenly so liberated. It's like some kind of sexual revolution for those of us who don't remember the Summer of Love.

More and more people are turning their hand to writing smut - from established authors packing in more sexual detail to complete newbies giving it a go and confronting their first dilemma of which words to choose to describe our naughty bits. I've ramped up my own efforts in the past year as the number of opportunities for getting published has grown. 

But there's a downside. The big boys of the publishing industry are muscling in, launching erotic imprints, resurrecting old classics. Anne Rice's Sleeping Beauty trilogy has been re-released by a subsidiary of Penguin Group, for example. And this puts the well-established, but smaller-scale, players at risk.

I hope the smut lovers behind Every Night Erotica and Oysters and Chocolate are moving on to exciting new things and I wish them every success. Every Night Erotica used to publish a story a night (Really, clue's in the title.) They published my story Cooped Up, a lovely allotment tale of a chicken coop and some nettles on September 30th 2012. On October 7th, they published their last story. 

I was pleased to have my story Pleasing the Nymph of Woodwell accepted at Oysters and Chocolate and published in December. I got a rather sweet comment for it: 'That was probably THE most erotic outdoor story I have ever read! I hated to leave them! I hope there's more to this... or I'll have to come up with my own ending. My wife may be in for a real treat!' I sincerely hope his wife got her treat. I'd just received my payment from O&C when I saw Kay Jaybee's blog post about them closing down. I'm not mentioning the word 'jinx'. Oh bugger, I just did. 

Sites like these are invaluable for encouraging and nurturing newbies to writing as well as providing a far more instant hit for established authors than the traditional publishing process. But now the field has narrowed and I can only hope that new avenues will open up in their place that aren't dominated by commercial interest, churning out the same formulaic stories with little regard for literary quality or the full range of erotic potential.

I thought of all those formulaic stories when I read this blog post entitled How to Be Submissive for Love. I was horrified beyond the ability to form a reasoned response at some of its assertions and its muddying of the difference between female subservience and sexual submissiveness. I was also reminded of the description by Myna Wallin of the stereotypical erotic romance formula in online mag The Acrobat, shared by the Sex in Words blog: 'Rich and worldly handsome man with a brutish manner seduces innocent young woman and sweeps her off her feet in spite of her protestations - and much to her delight.'

I can only hope that the new erotica revolution will lead more readers to try out the many, many stories out there that smash that formula to pieces.

The picture is of Plymouth Rocks at feathersite.com, much like the three bantams I had before a mink savaged them. If you'd prefer to see a naked man in a chicken coop, google it and you will find one.

Review: Red Grow the Roses by Janine Ashbless

Vampires. Everyone knows the rules. We all own at least one Buffy box set. (No? Just me then. And it’s four actually.) The coffins, pointy teeth, superhuman speed and strength, vulnerability to garlic, crosses, holy water. That whole ‘inviting them in’ thing. We know it all until some new author comes along and chucks half the rules away, picking and choosing what suits their vamp world. I hated the invulnerability of the undead in the Twilight series. I can’t have been the only one homing in on the moment Jane of the Volturi makes Edward suffer, the one and only time he appears to be less than smugly invincible. (What, that was just me being sadistic then?)

Janine Ashbless has taken the vampire myth and made it her own. Yes, they sleep in coffins. Sometimes. But she really gets you to smell the freshly dug earth, hear the worms burrowing beneath you. No, they don’t show up in mirrors. Except when they do. But Ashbless portrays one that inhabits mirrors, and other reflective surfaces, a being so old she is ephemeral and barely exists in the material world any more. Yes, sunlight kills them. Unless they’re young in vampire terms. They have an insatiable blood lust. The blood we all know about, the lust less so even if it’s there in thinly veiled manifestation in every portrayal of punctured flesh.

Well, for these vamps, the lust is as unquenchable as the thirst for blood. And for their lucky human blood donors, their bites engender similar feelings of uber horniness. Don’t act surprised – you read my review of Ashbless’s Named and Shamed didn’t you? You knew there’d be sex. Lots of sex. All kinds of sex. Not to mention violence, particularly in the kinky cage fighting scene. I’d recently re-watched Fight Club when I read Red Grow the Roses and it all chimed quite nicely in my psyche’s own personal erotic thriller. (Repeat after me, the first rule of Fight Club...)

I love the way Ashbless chucks in obscure bits of folklore and mythology; things you think you knew somewhere at the back of your mind in a Jungian collective unconscious kind of way but could never have put into words. Ashbless puts those things into words, beautifully shaped words that are delightfully evocative. But what I’d really like to know is how on earth she knows about the giant pike I used to be scared of when kayaking as a teenager?

She’s a damn fine writer with the sort of style that flows along easily, making you perhaps forget how much skill it takes to produce. Red Grow the Roses is often discomfiting. The vamps treat humans as playthings to be used and discarded. They bicker amongst themselves and the book culminates in all-out nastiness between London’s six undead. But it’s also a book that draws you in and consumes you with the need to keep reading. You’ve been warned.

I bought Red Grow the Roses at Amazon.co.uk, where, at the time of posting this, it was still at the ridiculous price of 20p. Yes, 20p. 

Thoughts: On Reviewing

I've been reading a lot of erotica lately. Lucky me! Some of it I review on here. Some of it I don't. I thought I should explain why.

I feel that it's important to have an idea of what's going on in the erotica genre so I know where my own work fits in. What I know for certain is that I'm never going to write the kind of material that becomes a phenomenon. You know the sort - like *that book* and its sequels which was such big news last year and will be again when it gets made into a film. There are others like it, all alpha males, billionaires, high society, slick city living and big business. I can't write that stuff and I don't want to. It's just not me. I prefer flawed people, slightly farcical situations, unexpected power relations, make-do-and-mend mentality, simple living and the great outdoors. 

I don't review books that I can't be mostly positive about. I will give my opinion of the odd shortcoming in a story I've enjoyed, but I'm not going to write a review slating someone's work just because it's not to my taste or is full of unfortunate errors. I may be a journalist in my other life, but here I'm blogging as a fiction author and I don't see the need to unnecessarily piss anyone in the industry off. And I don't think readers of my blog want that kind of thing either. So my reviews are really personal recommendations. I add edited versions to Amazon because I think it's important to support fellow authors, although I would never accept payment in return for a positive review.

I read the other stuff because I think it's important to be aware of it. And I may be muttering to myself about what a load of twaddle it is and rolling my eyes in exasperation at the cliches and stereotypes but I'm not going to share my scathing remarks, much as I'm tempted to bitch, on occasion.

On the subject of unfortunate errors, I'll be launching my own proofreading and editing business in earnest soon, having tinkered about with it for a while. That's why there's a new link on the menu up there, but the website still needs a tweak and a polish that is proving to be infuriatingly exasperating to a non-techie.

Of course, when I'm reading I always look like the woman pictured in the painting above by Howard Chandler Christy as long as you swap real paper and ink for an ereader.