Archives: anthology

Happy Valentine’s Day! Please submit to me!

No, I’m not talking to my partner (who doesn’t need to be asked to submit to me <3) but rather to the talented erotic writers of the world: the New Smut Project is compiling our third anthology, and seeking breathtaking flash fiction!

Stories can be in any genre or setting–contemporary, historical, other worlds, time travel…  Whether your characters find satisfaction through BDSM, fetish, or vanilla encounters, in long-term romances or one-night stands, it’s all good. This is an erotic collection, so submissions should be arousing. But how explicitly you want to portray the sex, and what counts as sex, is entirely up to you – be as blunt or as oblique, straightforward or experimental, as you like.

No limits on the gender or number of participants. We DO want to see stories that are inclusive, sex-positive, feminist, and that offer positive portrayals of LGBTQA+, kinky, and poly characters. We want to publish stories by #OwnVoices authors and about characters from around the world, from diverse racial and class backgrounds, of diverse body types, abilities, and ages. All characters must be of legal age and express their consent. Safer sex practices are awesome. Details of realistic sexuality, from arousal nonconcordance to stubbing your toe as you (try to) pad sensuously across the bedroom, will be received with delight.

I’m serious about the arousal nonconcordance, friends. I read Come As You Are and cannot shut up about it. If you submit a story about arousal nonconcordance and I publish it (and believe me, I will try to) I am going to find Emily Nagoski’s (virtual) address and hammer on her (virtual) door to tell her about it.

I’ll also be especially excited to publish #OwnVoices stories celebrating trans women, trans men, and nonbinary people; stories exploring non-penetrative sex (for any reason: vaginismus, personal preference, trauma history, a spirit of experimentation); and stories in historical settings from around the world (we’ve received some great speculative fiction and contemporary so far, and even some time travel, but I think there’s definitely room for some good historical treatments). Ultimately, anything that knocks my socks off will be embraced, and frankly what I’m going to fall in love with next is probably something I haven’t even thought of.

The other thing that sets stories about at this length is their voice and narrative style. Particularly, writing that doesn’t sound like anyone else’s. Metaphors are regions of great risk as well as great reward. Prose poetry welcome; rhyming poetry will have a harder time.

My fangirling above is in the singular first person, but Erato is also co-edited by Alex Freeman and Guenivere Chase. I don’t think they disagree with my preferences but they certainly have their own as well :D.

The full submission guidelines are here on our Tumblr blog.

I’ve also made posts on Twitter  (where unfortunately you can’t edit Tweets to correct typos…) and Facebook. You’d be sweet to share them.

Erato’s deadline can be tracked and submission response times reported at Duotrope and Literarium.

And Erato has a Goodreads page— it’s not too early to add to your “To Read” shelf!

Further updates will be sent out through the New Smut Project’s newsletter.

I’m still experimenting with potential cover art, but here are some options to set the mood…including someone very special to me on the far left <3. Hey, it’s Valentine’s Day eve, I’m allowed to be sappy!

This week is your last chance to get NSP anthologies directly through Sellfy

Since the release of our first 2 anthologies in 2015, NSP has sold ebooks on Sellfy, a platform offering digital publishers one of the best royalty rates on the market–ensuring our authors are as well-paid as possible from each book sale.

Unfortunately, Sellfy is changing its terms of service, and as of February 1, 2020, it will no longer have a free plan option available. The Sellfy paid plans are not practical for a micro-publisher of our size, and so Heart, Body, Soul and Between the Shores will no longer be available through Sellfy after January 31, 2020.

However, they’re still available now, and will be until the end of January! You can CLICK HERE to view the NSP store for a read that will bring some heat to your winter (or, for our fans in the southern hemisphere, make your summer even hotter…in a good way ;D). <3

As a clarification: This is very much not the end of NSP! We’ll no longer be selling our anthologies through the Sellfy platform, but our books remain available through Amazon, iBooks, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords.

Also, the editors of the New Smut Project have always intended to release more anthologies, and, not to jinx anything, but an alignment of time and other resources may produce some exciting announcements for readers and writers of engaging literary erotica in 2020! (Hint: flash fiction.)

Availability Update: NSP Anthologies on Sellfy

Since the release of our first two anthologies in 2015, the New Smut Project has sold ebooks on Sellfy, a platform that offers digital publishers one of the best royalty rates on the market–ensuring our authors are as well-paid as possible from each book sale.

Unfortunately, Sellfy is changing its terms of service, and as of February 1, 2020, it will no longer have a free plan option available. The Sellfy paid plans are not practical for a small publisher of our size, and so Heart, Body, Soul and Between the Shores will no longer be available through Sellfy after January 31, 2020.

However, they are still available there now, and will be until the end of January! You can CLICK HERE to view the NSP store for a read that will bring some heat to the beginning of your winter. <3

Dirty Thirty

I’ve been somewhat absent of late, haven’t I?

Conditions described in my previous personal update prevail. Pervertedly. Passionately.

It feels so natural and so wonderful at once.

While a lady doesn’t tie up and tell–actually, my boytoy/girlfriend wouldn’t mind me bragging, but the real challenge would be wanting to talk and talk and talk about it once I got started; maybe someday–in the writing world (and I AM still writing), I have some updates to share!

Coming soon: “The Passion of Her Sleep,” a Poe-inspired F/F romance, in MYSTIQUE, an  anthology of cosmic, uncanny, and macabre erotic romance short stories.
Preorder on the Aurelia Leo website.

And while I’m sharing new releases: can’t believe I missed my sci-fi pegging fic, “Not Quite an Antidote,” in Rose Caraway’s The Sexy Librarian’s Dirty Thirty, Volume 3. Now available in ebook and paperback. From what I recall from my years of working in a library, Dewey Decimal 808.8 includes anthologies, rhetorical analysis, writing advice, etc. The Sexy Librarian also classifies “Not Quite an Antidote” as being about Venom, Boundaries, and Intoxicating Desire. All true, and have I mentioned the pegging?

Love and Love and Love…

Happy belated Valentine’s Day, whoever you spent it with. Including and especially to those who spent it alone, as I did–not the worst of company! And not just because it means there’s no need to share the pile of chocolate assortments I got on discount the 15th of February. ;D

Without digging too much into personal drama, let’s just say I spent Valentine’s Day alone partially by choice, because being alone is better than being in poor company, or company that can’t accept you as you are. And as I’ve had reason to reckon with that, I found some comfort in thinking about my story in Rachel Kramer Bussel’s recently released anthology, Erotic Teasers. 

“I mean, it feels personal. I’m not sure if it is. Which is weird, right? Not that I don’t enjoy your company,” she added. “I like hanging out with guys. But women, too…”

Roland nodded. “Would you like to get a drink?”

“Sure.” Marisol smiled, but five minutes later she was frowning into her beer. “It’s just a guessing game, I guess.” A grimace at the echo. “But how did I get to be twenty-seven without knowing if I’m lesbian or straight?”

“There are other options,” Roland said.

She looked at him across the table. “Yeah. And it’s even more of a guessing game how people will react if you bring that up.”

“Well.” He tipped his glass toward her. “My boyfriend, my girlfriend, and I all fall on the continuum.”

Her eyes widened. Then her mouth did, showing teeth in a grin. “You have both?”

“They have me.” Maybe it was the beer, maybe it was the brightness of her smile and what it did to his heart jumping in his chest, but Roland decided to go all in. He pushed back his shirt sleeves and raised his wrists to show her.

As I mentioned in my blog post about my story in Best Lesbian Erotica, this story received a plot point, and some fuel, from certain signs held up at events in my generally pleasant Midwestern town. But it’s not just written out of defiance. I already had the idea of this poly group of two dominants, their submissive boyfriend, and the woman who joins them, and I was already excited about writing it, because it’s the kind of romantic fantasy that warms my heart (and not just my heart, I’ll admit, if we’re going to get personal).

More about the story, including another tease of an excerpt, is available HERE.

Meanwhile, I do have “set up an OKCupid” profile on my to-do list, so maybe a year from now I won’t have chosen to be single… but whatever you may be, so long as you’re being true to yourself, I’m happy for you and those you love in all the ways you love each other. And if you haven’t yet found your truth, I wish you luck. It’s worth finding.

The Seattle Erotic Art Festival is this weekend!

From April 27th-29th, in a year when artistic erotic expression is more important than ever, a curated selection of some of the finest erotic art the world has to offer will grace the floors of the Seattle Center Exhibition Hall.

During regular festival hours, visitors are invited to view the art and daily entertainments, from poetry readings to pantomime to acrobatic displays. The Festival art is intended to engage, titillate, make you think and start converations. There is also the Festival Store, where you can often find prints by the artists featured in the festival as well as other unique items and annual Seattle Erotic Art Festival merchandise. In the evenings, the vibe changes from a gallery to sexy art party. The Late Night Festival is a sexy, fun time with DJs, performers, bartenders at the ready, and a fantastically energetic crowds (Ages: 18+ during gallery hours, 21+ during evening hours).

For those of us who can’t make it to Seattle, photos and news from the event are available on the Festival’s website and Facebook— and the Literary Anthology is available, both online and in the Festival store, if you can make it to Seattle and want to take memories home with you.

The end of the world didn’t change much at first.

The Seattle Erotic Art Festival Literary Art Anthology 2018 includes my novella, The Summer After–the story of a self-described nearsighted, awkward, introvert, bisexual spinster and the nameless man who takes shelter with her at a rural house, with a thriving garden and a lot of reading material, after the end of the world.

For the past months I had been hiding. As if all the disasters would resolve themselves while I wasn’t looking. The cities rebuilt, the climate stabilized, the utilities and the law restored and better than ever. Now I’d begun preparing for the hard times to last. The time of tribulation was upon us. Tribulation, a word my parents taught me. I was almost an ungrateful enough daughter to hope they were experiencing this one to the fullest. There hadn’t been any word of a Rapture.

In between the plants and pages, there’s also some pretty intense sexual tension.

For so long my sex life had been very self-contained. Some would say nonexistent. For it to suddenly blow open—to explode open, to burst and cataract through not only my life but his and sweep us both away, ending up who knows where—it was too scary a thought to face alone.

“Look,” I said—probably out of the blue, at least from his perspective. But he took out his earbud, and I took out mine. “We don’t have to…do anything. The expectation that just because we’re a man and a woman together, alone, and we get along pretty well, so obviously we have to enjoy sex with each other… It’s pretty, well, heteronormative actually.”

Not that I wouldn’t enjoy sex with him. And—my filters had improved enough that I didn’t say these parts aloud—I’d enjoy it just as much if he were a woman.

…He faced me straight-on now. “But do you want to?”

It’s also about revelations, though not the Book of, necessarily. About what keeps mattering and what parts of the past get left in the past; about the choices people make and security and vulnerability and creativity when the story isn’t quite over.

You can read more about The Summer After and the SEA Literary Art Anthology here.

“What You Want” in Pure Slush’s LUST

To celebrate 7 years of publishing, Pure Slush is releasing a 7-volume series about the 7 deadly sins.  Lust is the first, with poetry and flash fiction by 70 different writers from around the world. 

My piece, “What You Want,” is about sadism, both the sexy and the scary parts.

It gets to the point where you can’t even sit in the same room with him, because sooner or later your body and mind snap tight, contracting with what you want, an internal orbit around unspeakable things…

It’s one thing to say he’s so handsome you could punch him, but what do you really want?

Because it can’t be that.

Last night, when he took your ringing phone off the coffee table and handed it to you, his bent, broad shoulders and long, lean back and something about the points of his knees through his slim jeans made you want to make him crawl.

 

Dancing With Myself Release: “The Solution”

Today is the release date for Dancing With Myself, an anthology of self-love erotica. What a beautiful phrase–“self-love.” In all it senses. Interestingly, one might argue that the protagonist of my piece in this anthology, “The Solution,” doesn’t have a lot of reason to love herself.

“The Solution” is a story that’s been on my mind for a while. Even with this, it’s still not fully purged; I suspect it’s one of those beasties that might turn into a novel one day. I starting writing it when I was reflecting on how several of my favorite erotic novels–everything from Megan Hart’s Tear You Apart to  Kate Chopin’s The Awakening–center around adultery.

What’s up with that?

I’ve got theories: not the lies, but the secrecy certainly touches on something in me, and I’ve always been personally a bit skeptical of monogamy. It’s definitely something more fun to read and write about than to do, but there is that fascination that always surrounds people behaving badly.

I wondered if Dom had ever worried about me, all the nights I’d been out late. Maybe he’d been glad to have his space, just as I was glad to have mine on those evenings he claimed to have meetings or buddies waiting for him at some bar. Once I figured out where he’d really been going, I claimed more than space. I took pleasure, I took control. That was what it felt like at the time, at least.

The story centers, then, around that headspace–the thrill of doing what you know is wrong, but feeling justified in it anyway. A place where selfishness isn’t quite the same as self-love. But it’s as much about the other people involved in these brief-lived affairs, some of them one or two-night infidelities:

Dirty, he’d called me when I showed him how to get me off. I’d grabbed his hand and guided it to where mine now was, riding his fingers and rutting against his palm. His wrist had twisted in my grip and he’d panted about my perversity. I’m not sure which part he found so perverse. When I’d gone further, grasping his cock to control how it slid inside me, he’d been able to say nothing at all. Had that been worth violating my marriage vows for? That, and Heather, and Claire and Matt, and Joshua’s lips wrapping around my nipples as his fingers cupped and kneaded my ass, and Scott’s grin as he followed me down the dim corridor…

It’s a story about memory, and having it all at once, and having none of it, and learning how to love yourself once again. After all, you’re the one person you have no choice but to be faithful to.

Dancing With Myself is available on Amazon and Smashwords. More updates will be added to “The Solution’s” story page as they come.

A Big Book Release

2018 is off to a great start in terms of gigantic book releases…

The one I want to point you to today is the Big Book of Submission Vol 2’s paperback release (on Barnes & Noble and Amazon)!

While each story is under 1,200 words, 69 of them add up to quite the package.

Speaking of kinky flash fiction and/or insights into power–weren’t we?–I also have a short but sweet piece up at Bare Back magazine:

I’ve always wanted to feel power. The thing itself, not its effects or trappings. The effects aren’t bad; like hell I’m going to protest getting what I want. But they’re not exactly what I want, if that makes sense. I don’t care so much about the symptoms, but I want the disease.

Power is a disease, as you always bring up at some point in our political-philosophical-spiritual conversations. I nod along to your sermon, which I do agree with. Power is killing the world with deaths of a thousand cuts, exploitation, extraction. But that’s not what I’m talking about when I talk about the power I want.

It’s not in the slinky black PVC dress, though it looks great on the model online, and neither is it in the fishnets barely visible under my thigh-high leather boots. The netting imprints a pattern on my skin for the rest of the night. I love how the boots gleam and hug my calves, but those heels—“Shouldn’t you be the one in a torture device?” I ask.

You’ve marched and signed petitions against torture, the real kind I mean, but our conversations never get lost in that particular labyrinth. It makes so much difference when it’s consensual that it takes an effort to connect the two meanings of the word. Also, you don’t preach half as much when we’re playing—fucking with power.

Your hands rub my aches away. There’s a special energy in that, in your hands moving warm and firm over my heels, my ankles, up to my diamond-stamped thighs. Your touch somehow reaches into my flesh, soothing and exciting at once, and all at my command.

Still, this was just costuming. Turning me into someone else, or at least the imitation of her. It can make me feel freer or more obvious, but it’s not a source of true power. True power I’ll be able to feel in complete nakedness. True power I keep searching for, and you let me mark and bind your flesh into a map.

I’ll have more fresh updates in the next week–the next episode of the Smutty Storytelling podcast, in which Betina Cipher and I discuss erotic genres and ‘sex languages”; and a unique story in the Dancing With Myself anthology of “self-love” erotica!

Book sale alert: Red Velvet and Absinthe

Book alert: the Red Velvet and Absinthe anthology is currently on sale at 10% of its original price (99 cents instead of $9.99)!

This anthology of Gothic erotic fiction is quite possibly the best book of erotica I’ve ever read. I’m not in it, but you might say it’s in me. Every piece is lush and dazzling, with a diversity of orientations, kinks, and dynamics between couples. Some stories lean more toward romance, some toward horror, some toward pure smut. There are classics like vampires and werewolves (reimagined in interesting new ways) and some stranger encounters with enchanted–or haunted–paintings, a hangman, and a dom who might be the Green Fairy herself.