Shakespearotica: Meet Orlando

As promised, I'm back with an excerpt from my new story As We Like It, which is in Shakespearotica: Queering the Bard from Storm Moon Press.

In this scene, Celia and Ross are watching the wrestling when they first see Orlando. If you now the story of As You Like It, you'll know that there is indeed a wrestling scene shortly before Rosalind is banished from the dukedom. Like the original, my Celia and Ros(s)alind will meet Orlando again. The story is told from Celia's point of view.

We sneak beneath the stands to watch the fights from the shadows. The bouts are held outside the palace walls, one of the few places where village dweller and noble can be found together, although even here the nobles stick to their private boxes. The sand is warm, though it has been in the shade under the arena’s seats all day.

The fights are not a sport for ladies. My father is watching above us, but the noble wives will be sipping tea inside the palace. We have a very different view of the action than the men get from their boxes. We lie on our bellies, our eyes level with the bottom of the electrified steel cage that surrounds the fighters. A bout is just finishing. The loser is slumped against the wire, conscious, but too broken and dazed to pull his back away from the electric current. An attendant pushes him off it with his booted foot and hauls him away.

“I give you Charles, Duke Frederick’s undisputed champion.” The umpire lifts the victor’s hand high. “Three brothers he has overthrown already tonight. One, I hear, is unlikely to live to see another day. Who else will dare to meet his challenge?”

Silence.

I’m half afraid Ross will leap to his feet. But though he is stronger and taller than me, he is still slight-figured and only of average height at most for a man. He is a boy next to Charles. I think he likes to watch the wrestlers and dream of having a body like theirs, all hard, glistening muscle. Taking repeated blows and falls and getting back up for more. I try to understand his yearning for a different shell to house his spirit. But it’s hard enough to imagine how he must feel lying on his front with his ribs meeting the sand through a thin layer of flesh where once he had breasts.

A voice breaks the silence. “I will face this Charles.”

The umpire opens the gate to allow the new fighter into the cage, and we see him rise into view opposite us. He is removing his shirt as he climbs the steps into the ring. The crowd murmurs, sizing up his physique. He flings the garment into their midst and steps into full view. Charles is a monster beside him. The image is enhanced by his growling as he tries to frighten his opponent. He is twice the width of the newcomer, a foot taller, older, battle scarred.

“And what is your name, young man?” The umpire asks, emphasizing the “young”.

“Orlando, sir.” He is soft-spoken, yet his voice carries.

Orlando pulls off scuffed boots and drops them outside the gate, and then unbuckles coarse cotton trousers. I thought Ross’s clothes were scruffy, but Orlando’s are so torn and full of holes,  it is barely less modest when they are gone. His plain grey briefs are mean in comparison to Charles’s silver satin shorts, covered in sponsorship logos. Charles laughs and the crowd joins in. Orlando merely waits, unmoved by taunts.

“Best of three falls,” the umpire shouts. “You know the rules: there are no rules.” The crowd knows his lines by heart, but they roar, nonetheless. The umpire leaves the ring, barring and padlocking the gate behind him. His only real task is to count down each fall to see if a combatant can get up in time to fight on or lose the round.

Shakespearotica: Queering the Bard, edited by Salome Wilde, is available from Storm Moon Press, Amazon and Amazon UK.

News round-up

You wait weeks for something good to blog about, then everything comes along at once. It's like the 53C along Derby Road. 

News on the More Smut for Chocoholics front. We've extended our deadline to December 15th. That's so all the folks doing NaNoWriMo will still have time to submit. What better way to wind down from a month of epic writing than with a nice little, light-hearted bit of smut? All the details are at the Smutters website.

In other news, I have a new story out. 'Twenty-four Surprises' is my contribution to the ebook Winter Warmers from House of Erotica. Ten stories with a festive feel. The call asked us to think about the warm glow of a fire, mulled wine, the colour red etc. So obviously I wrote a spanking story. No brainer. It's the tale of a couple's first foray into spanking 'proper' and centres around the treats in the advent calendars they've made for each other. I'll be back to tell you more about that one soon.

Winter Warmers is out now at All Romance, Amazon, Amazon UK and other online retailersl

But I promise you some Shakespearotica titillation in my next post. I might introduce you to the wonderful Orlando. I think I have a crush on my own character. It's because he's a bit scruffy. Like Han Solo.  

Out now! Shakespearotica

I've got a new story out in this fabulously wicked collection - Shakespearotica: Queering the Bard, edited by Salome Wilde and published by Storm Moon Press.

The blurb starts like this: 'Frolicking in gender play and sexual diversity, the nine authors collected in this volume offer a dazzling array of queer erotica and romance. Stories range from comic to tragic and from historical to fantastic, taking up textual hints overt and subtle as they engage with the power of lust and love.'

I absolutely love Shakespeare. I reckon if he was around today, he'd be making my kind of movies. So this call for submissions was irresistible. But I did have misgivings. I've written gay stories before, but I was worried I wouldn't be up to writing something gloriously queer. I didn't want to inadvertently write something insensitive, or worse, offensive, because of my own naivety. But thanks to the wonderful work of editor Salome Wilde, who does know what the hell she's talking about, I believe I have avoided any faux pas. 

Shakespeare's plays, particularly his comedies, are of course wonderfully suited to a bit of gender-bending. You've got many a boy playing the role of a girl who dresses up as a boy. I wrote a sci-fi take on As You Like It. Mostly so I could do the wrestling scene as a electrified-cage fight. My tale follows what starts off as a lesbian relationship between Celia and Rosalind at a point where Rosalind, or Ross, has started making the physical transition into a man. And then I throw the fluid sexuality of Orlando into the mix, a character I came to love. He helps Ross to accept himself as he is, and consequently to accept sexual pleasure from his body as it is at that point rather than seeing it as somehow incomplete. The power play and themes of dominance and submission are much more subtle in this story than in many of my more overtly kinky tales (that's a kind of reverse content warning!)

As the story developed, I was thinking of the desert planet Arrakis in Dune, and that 'wretched hive of scum and villainy' Mos Eisley in Star Wars, while Salome thought my Orlando reminiscent of Captain Jack Harkness in Doctor Who and Torchwood. It was far from an easy story to write and I nearly gave up, but it's turned out to be one I'm particularly proud of. Oh, and it's hot, of course.

Shakespearotica: Queering the Bard is currently available from the Storm Moon Press website. I'll add more links as they go live. And I'll bring you an excerpt soon.