Dungeon Crawl - a little light spanking

Ready for a little light spanking? For the Dungeon Crawl this week I'm bringing you an excerpt from my story Twenty-four Surprises. It's a festive-themed story, which I guess is a little odd when Easter's coming up, but I hope you'll forgive that because it does have some lovely domestic discipline in it. It's from Winter Warmers, published by House of Erotica. Now, if you'd care to assume the postion:

He shows me the paddle. Black. Check. Leather. Check. Smaller than I’d imagined. He pushes it to my face, down by the sofa cushions. “Kiss it, Sam. You have to kiss the implement of correction, don’t you. You remember?”

I may have said that, yes. I purse my lips and give it a smacker, my face flushing red. My ass feels like it’s glowing already, sticking up there like a beacon. Tom brushes a hand over it and dips a finger under. “My, how wet you are darling. It just shows what a depraved creature you are.”

One track of my mind is thinking that his Victorian gentleman act is just ridiculous, while another is imagining grand drawing rooms and crowds of sombrely clad men clustered around tethered, bent-over females with their acres of skirts and petticoats pushed up over their heads. Tom rubs the paddle over each cheek, drawing out the anticipation so much I wiggle my hips and invite him to get on with it.

“All in good time, Sam. You need to reflect on your misdemeanours first, have them pictured in your mind when the paddle lands. Otherwise, how will you learn? You must learn that your perverse, unladylike fantasies will be met only with punishment, not rewarded with fulfilment.”

What misdemeanours? Who cares? Maybe I didn’t do the breakfast dishes this morning when it was my turn. Maybe I don’t iron his socks. Maybe I haven’t adequately scrubbed the step or blacked the grate. Whatever that means.

“Are you ready to accept your punishment?”

“Yes.”

“Are you truly penitent?”

“Yes.”

“You will count the blows.”

“Yes.”

Thwack.

It’s definitely harsher than the satin paddle. Heavier, stingier, louder. “One.”

“You may now rearrange your attire and carry on with your duties.”

Huh?

“Huh?”

“You heard me. Put your knickers back on and help me make the dinner.”

“What? Is that it? That can’t be it."

If that single little spank has left you unsatisfied, be assured there's much more to come in the story. But if you're desperate for more right away, crawl on over to the other blogs taking part this week...

An InLinkz Link-up

Small but perfectly formed

I thought I'd share some inspiration today. I'm currently writing a story in which Britain's Smallest House features. It's in Conwy in North Wales and is truly tiny, with a floor area of 10ft by 6ft. It's the red house in the picture. Yes, the tiny red house between the stone turret and the white cottages. Below, is the view of the ground floor from the door.




I'm a sucker for little cottages and cabins, and if you share my fascination there's plenty more to ogle at cabinporn.com and tinyhouseblog.com.

Dungeon Crawl!

Hello and welcome to my little corner of the Dungeon Crawl blog hop!

I'm bringing you an excerpt from my story 'The Guerilla's Plaything' in the anthology Snatched, out now from Storm Moon Press, Amazon and Amazon UK.

Our main character Thomas has been kidnapped while on holiday in the Amazon rainforest, but finds that his harsh treatment at the hands of the slightly bonkers Alvaro reminds him a little too vividly of his BDSM relationship with his partner John:

Alvaro told me to lie down on the groundsheet while he brandished a bundle of the jute rope. “Turn over,” he said. I didn’t question or argue. I rolled onto my front and let him pull my wrists to the small of my back where he bound them, securely but carefully so that nothing pressed on the vulnerable insides of my wrists to cut off my circulation. My throat tightened. I could feel every particle of the gritty sand that lay on the groundsheet against my cheek.

Alvaro bound my ankles in the same way, wrapping the rope carefully so it wasn’t overlapping. I realized I had semi-consciously pressed my toes into the ground to raise my lower legs and make it easier for him. Then he tied my wrists and ankles together, pulling my feet up. Not as tight as John would have done it when he wanted me in the strictest of hogties. Just enough to stop me straightening my legs or being able to struggle to my feet.

“You are so predictable,” Alvaro said, kneeling at my side and leaning toward my face. “A bit of rope, and you are panting. I wouldn’t be surprised if your cock starts to dribble a little bit.” He grabbed a handful of my hair and yanked my head off the ground, stretching my throat out and making my mouth fall open wider. With the other hand, he took hold of my jaw firmly and turned my face toward him. I struggled to swallow. My rigid cock was trapped beneath me, throbbing against the open zipper. Alvaro leaned down, opened his mouth and pressed his lips to mine, flicking his tongue inside. His stubble rasped against the one-day growth on my chin. As he pulled away, I strained to reach his mouth again, but he kept his grasp tight around my jaw.

He whispered close to my face, “I let you into a secret. I am planning on escaping this camp myself tonight. Once a person has joined the Movement, they are never allowed to leave. But I have to get out. I will take you with me.”

This threw me. Was it another cruel trick? “Why would you do that?” I asked.

“Because I like you,” he said. “Your reaction to being kidnapped and bound has amused me greatly. It brings me great joy to see an attractive man who loves to be tied and teased. Your partner is a very lucky man. I want to make sure you get back to him in one piece.”

An InLinkz Link-up

Erotica meets thriller

Ok, ok, I'm here, don't panic. And yes, I'm going to tell you about my story The Guerilla's Plaything in the new collection, Snatched, from Storm Moon Press. 

Here's the blurb for the anthology, which is a collection of three m/m stories of an erotica-meets-thriller flavour (44,500 words total):

Any hunter will tell you part of the satisfaction is in the chase as well as the triumphant capture of their prey. In Snatched, the focus is on the eroticism of the power play between men and their male captors. Sometimes romance ensues, sometimes just a good amount of steamy sex, but in all cases, the effects of one character being in utter control of the man he has captured takes center stage. The appeal is in the erotic dominance and the way the captive would try to escape if he could, whether he truly wants to deep down or not.

And here's a little intro to my story:

Thomas is determined not to let the fights with his boyfriend, John, ruin his vacation in the tropical rain forests of Ecuador. But when he steps off the trail, he steps into danger as he is taken captive by guerrilla freedom fighters. Held against his will, he nonetheless finds himself developing an attraction to the man who both arouses and repels him. And as his captivity weighs on him, Thomas finds that being The Guerrilla's Plaything is not the worst fate he can envision...

Available now from Storm Moon Press, Amazon and Amazon UK.

Coming soon...

I may not be writing much at the moment, but because of the publishing time lag, I do still have things to shout about. Hurrah! Here's a sweet little cover for the forthcoming Storm Moon Press anthology, Snatched, a gay (male) collection of what you might call longer shorts. My story, The Guerilla's Plaything is, in fact, the longest story I've produced, at more than 13,000 words. I shall tell you more soon...

Creativity, life and gold stars

I have often wondered in four decades of writing how it is that time and again my stories seem to gather themselves, write themselves almost (the best ones really seem to), cover the empty pages almost effortlessly - once I get going, that is. Each one is, I believe, the result of forces of a creative fusion, a fusion that simply can't happen unless certain elements are in place, a fusion I don't properly understand, but can only guess at.

Michael Morpurgo (author of War Horse) writes this in Singing for Mrs Pettigrew: A Storymaker's Journey, a kind of autobiographical account of where his stories come from, interspersed with a few actual short stories. He goes on to discuss the elements that create that fusion - the life he has lived and the memories that has given him, the books he has read, the research he does. But, he goes on:

I must wait for the moment before I begin, until the story is ripe. This process can take five minutes (unlikely) or five years. All I know is that you can't hurry it. The story will be written when the moment is right.

When I was training as a journalist, I remember one fellow student being soundly ridiculed by a tutor (it was his favoured teaching style) for suggesting she had writer's block. And sure, if you have deadlines and a living to earn, you can't afford such luxuries as creative procrastination. But news journalism (in the British style at least) is more about getting down to basics than nurturing creative flair. When I am writing, I often wonder about that magical process that sometimes happens in which the words flow and your work manages a coherence of mood and metaphor and style which continues for page after page. But for a fiction writer, the need to actually produce brings a great conflict.

Some set themselves daily word counts to meet, others take part in the month-long slog of NaNoWriMo to produce a first-draft, some may have annual targets of how many short stories, novellas, novels they will turn out. And then there's that balance sheet you fill in to keep the tax man happy, showing what you've 'achieved' in hard numbers. And we've all seen and possibly given (I have) that most basic of writing tips: If you want to be a writer, you have to actually pick up a pen, or place your fingers on the keyboard, and write.

But what happens when you're juggling your writing with another job, relationships, family, the needs of your health etc? Guilt is what, if you're given to such things. Even if you're not, there's likely to be a nagging feeling as the days and weeks go by that you've lost your mojo as a writer. What happens when your brain gets taken up with some other big life event, like a major career change or the ill health of a loved one or a house move? You might find that, even when you have some time to spare, your head simply isn't in the right place. You might lose that sense that, whatever else you're doing, you are always a writer.

Partly, I'm writing this to make myself feel better while I have one of those big life events going on that means my brain's focus is elsewhere. But I think there's a wider point (I'll get to it eventually amid the ramblings). So, partly, I'm saying that sometimes you have to sit back, forget the targets, do other things, look after yourself and those you love, live a little, store up some memories for future stories. (Is it possible that writer's block means we've used up our store of memories and need to get some more? And despite being a writer of erotica, I don't mean that in the most obvious of ways, necessarily, because there is so much more in the way of knowledge of places, the quirks of human nature, the tidbits of knowledge we pick up and store away that all contribute to a good story, sex-based or otherwise.)

But my other point is about the non-linear relationship between both the writer's effort and talent and the reward gained when it comes to publishing fiction. We all know of books that have made it big when many people deride their quality. And we all know of the books we've loved, but which sell very few despite how good we think they are. And we do also know of the talented authors who, after many years of hard work, could be deemed a success - as well as the fact that not all talented authors who work hard will get there. 

So, my wine-fuelled conclusion? Putting in the hours, the practice, getting the words down, trying out new things, writing, writing, writing is, of course, a Good Thing To Do. Have a gold star. But if your target falls from three thousand words a day to three short stories in a year, you're still a writer, you're still living the life you need to live in order to be able to write in the future - and you've probably got as much chance of making your fortune from those three short stories as the people on three thousand words a day.

Men in leather

No, not like that. Like this:

Smouldering, no?

And how about this cutie?

Or do you prefer him with the wet look?

They are Santiago Cabrera and Luke Pasqualino from the new Musketeers series on BBC1. The formula of the show itself seems to bear striking resemblances to the Robin Hood series the Beeb did a few years ago, but I reckon I'll keep tuning in. There's something about a fringe falling over the eyes...