"It left me wanting more"

I've had what I believe is my first proper review, for my ebook Miranda's Tempest, published earlier this year by House of Erotica. I'm not counting the two that show up on Amazon for Xcite anthologies I'm in. One of them says "it's just a collection of pornographic short stories" as if that's a bad thing (Cherry Ripe: 5 historical erotic romance stories). The other admits the stories are sexy, but the reader is glad they got the book as a freebie (Miss Pemberton's Drawers: 6 erotic short stories)! 

Anyway, John D of the blog John D Stories is posting a series of reviews of books by authors he's interacted with online. And that's the thing about being a writer or reviewer in the age of social networking - you can't hide from each other! But fortunately, in this case, that hasn't stopped John giving an honest appraisal of the book, with good points and bad. I'd much rather have that than have my ego massaged, when it really comes down to it. No really. Honest. I think. 

But, since I'm only human, I'm going to share some of the good things he said... and leave it up to you to go and read the rest of it over at his place. Incidentally, you'll also find reviews of Banging Rebecca by Alison Tyler and Xcite collections A Victorian Seasonal Spanking, featuring a tale by Victoria Blisse, and Deliberate Display, featuring one by Lucy Felthouse. 

Here's my favourite bit of the review of Miranda's Tempest; it's about the final story of the trio in the book, Penelope's Odyssey, which takes Homer's The Odyssey as its starting point but looks at it from his wife, Penelope's, perspective: 

The story lends itself perfectly to an erotic tale, and Tilly Hunter has, in my opinion, saved her best story until last. The text ebbs and flows effortlessly, drawing in a fantastic little story that moves at pace, with a great sex scene of female domination. It left me wanting more, which is no bad thing.

So there you go. I should warn you that if you visit John's blog you might get distracted by his own fiction, and the stories and pictures of his real-life antics...

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.  

Editor's notes: No cheating. Or even swindling, duping, tricking or general chicanery.

This is the last in my Editor's notes series for now, in which I share some of the things I often find myself telling authors when I report back to them on how I've edited their work. It's not about the basics of how to tell a story or that you need to check your spelling, but about the less obvious things that can subtly affect the reader's experience. If you want to catch up on previous posts, and there are six including this one, I've now given them all the tag 'Editor's notes', so if you click on that at the bottom, you'll find all the posts. I hope they've been of some help. It's made me think about why I like editing other people's work. I seem to have a knack for it, for being able to work with other authors' distinctive voices without imposing my own and to help them to strengthen their writing with quite a sharp focus on each word and sentence. And when I read something that's a good story but is just a little bit clunky, it makes me want to do something about it.

Anyway, today I'm pleading with you to avoid cheating, and suggesting you might want to throw your thesaurus on the bonfire. Unless you use an online one or you might end up with some toxic smoke and nothing to write on. 

No cheating

You're writing away and your characters are getting hot and steamy and you suddenly realise they're at it but you never mentioned them taking any clothes off. Or they've finished and got up to make a cup of tea, but you forgot to untie them or they're drinking said cuppa, but one of them's still got a ball gag in. Oops. So you slip in the past action at that point of the story: Lee got up to make a cup of tea. Leanne had untied him shortly after her own climax. Or, Sarah suddenly said "fluffy bunnies". It was her safeword and Martha knew that because they'd discussed it earlier. Or, Terence sucked Tony's cock into his mouth. He'd pulled off Tony's trousers and underwear while they were still in the hall. 

It makes me, as the reader, feel cheated. I think this is particularly relevant to erotica. You might get away with it in general scenes of conversation or everyday life. And it's part of the plot in a 'twist in the tail' story, but there you will have conventions that let you know a surprise is coming even if you can't guess what it is. But when the reader is immersed in the action of an erotic scene, they don't want to realise there are things going on between the characters that they haven't been told at the time. They want to feel right there, either identifying with one of the characters or voyeuristically looking on at every little detail as it occurs. So if you realise you need to add in this kind of information, you really need to go back and weave it in at the point it actually happens. And 'weaving' it in is a skill in itself. It means not simply inserting a sentence, but making sure that sentence fits with the rising heat level, the tone at that point and the patterns of language and metaphor you've been building up. 

Burn your thesaurus

I'm all for varying your language to avoid repetition, but this doesn't mean looking up a series of synonyms and going through the list one by one and it doesn't mean replacing perfectly good, ordinary words with more 'literary' ones. 

Bob walked up to the house, wondering what awaited him inside. It wasn't the sort of house he expected a Domme to live in. It was, in fact, the smallest house on the street, a street full of large, detached Victorian houses. 

To avoid the repetition of 'house(s)', you could get out your thesaurus and do this:

Bob walked up to the house, wondering what awaited him inside. It wasn't the sort of dwelling he expected a Domme to live in. It was, in fact, the smallest building on the street, a street full of large, detached Victorian villas. 

Or you could write this:

Bob walked up to the house, wondering what awaited him inside. It wasn't the sort of place he expected a Domme to live in. It was small, much smaller than the Victorian villas that dominated the street.

I hope you think the second alternative is better. You won't find 'place' as a synonym of 'house' in the thesaurus, but it's an appropriate word in this context. I used villa in the first rewriting simply to replace the word house. But by refettling the whole sentence (and that's a technical term) you can get rid of the need for yet another synonym altogether and let the word 'villa' which has connotations of size and grandeur, stand in for some of the adjectives. It also means I've given that sentence a stronger verb, as well as 'was' it now has 'dominated'.

These are the sorts of details you can't write rules for. And each writer would come up with a different solution to a problem like that repetition. That's why fiction is so bloody marvellous, because no two writers think the same way or have the same voice. My solutions are one way of doing it, and I usually make a suggestion to clients, but I leave it to them whether to accept my suggestion or come up with their own edit. 

And yes, I have already used "fluffy bunnies" as a safeword in one of my stories. So don't even think about stealing it! My editing services site can be found at www.tillyhunter.co.uk.

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.

Dwarf hotness

I bring you this aside to tell you that I finally got round to watching The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. Being a proper LotR geek, I never expect much from these cinematographic distractions, which can in no way measure up to the force of Tolkien's words combined with my imagination. Then the dwarves appeared. Including this one, Kili, played by Aidan Turner. Now I understand.

Editor's notes: I exclaimed that she retorted

Still here? I'm going to do a round-up of lots of little bugbears this time, as this is my penultimate Editor's notes post for now. 

Just say it

Some writing advice will tell you to avoid the word 'said'. And I spend a lot of editing time replacing words such as 'ejaculated', 'confessed', 'admitted', 'retorted', 'exclaimed', 'laughed', 'giggled' and 'interjected' with 'said'. I'm with Alison Tyler, who wrote on the How to Write Erotic Fiction blog, "'said' can go a long way". And she's put together more than 50 erotica anthologies. Also, you don't always need a speech identifier at all if it's obvious who's speaking, or the action immediately before or after their words make it clear: "I'm going to eat you all up." He pressed his teeth to my neck. 

Basically, you’re lying

Characters lie down a lot in erotica. And in erotica written in the past, they lay down a lot too. I once wrote a story in which a fairytale prince is found lying on a rock. He’s lain there for a hundred years or more. It’s not the bed of heather where his lover laid him down. But it’s amazing how often people think the present tense of the verb is ‘to lay’. It’s not; it’s ‘to lie’. Perhaps one day, when enough people have got it wrong for long enough, this will change. But not yet.

That’s enough

Some advisers would have you lose the word ‘that’ altogether. ‘I think that we should take our clothes off’ doesn’t need it. Nor does ‘I could tell that he was getting sleepy’. But ‘I was well aware that I was pushing my luck’ is borderline, in my mind. And ‘I felt that to stay there would be stupid’ almost certainly needs it. My rule? Purely pragmatic. Get rid if it still makes sense and sounds ok without it. And that’s that.

Adding and subtracting

Get rid of all your adverbs. That's what some 'writing rules' advise. The thinking is that (that? I think it’s needed there) if you’ve picked good strong, specific verbs you shouldn’t need to modify them. So instead of writing ‘she walked slowly’, you could put ‘she ambled’. Instead of 'he laughed childishly', you could put 'he sniggered'. My rule? Most of the weaker ones can go – slowly, gradually, softly, gently – along with most instances of the overused ones – suddenly, instantly, shockingly. Use them sparingly. Use them with intent instead of lazily slipping them in. Like that.

Next time is going to be my last Editor's notes post for now, and I'll be talking about cheating and burning thesauruses (thesauri?).