Archives: new release

New story free to read online in Erozine Issue #7

I fully intended to write this post on Friday when the story went live, but I was caught up in a few things…still aiming to finish several projects my COVID bout derailed, and the end-of-year-rush, and also my NaNo novel.

Oh yeah, I kinda did NaNo this year. Only it lasted longer than the month of November and way more than 50,000 words. Turns out the plot bunny bit hard and despite…everything…I managed to get 200,000+ words written from mid-September to today. In fact I have the final scene of the epilogue to finish today or tomorrow, and then of course a lot of editing.

Certainly, that swallowed time I could have spent on other projects — and I do intend to get more responses out on Erato II submissions in the coming weeks — but when it comes down to it, if a year from now, December 2024, you ask me if I’d rather have done a variety of things or if I’d rather have completed the novel, I know what my answer will be.

More importantly for today, though: I have a ~3,000-word story free to read at the Erozine! My story, for this issue’s theme of “Post-Nut Clarity,” is “Aftplay.” A pun, of course.

Once her breath returned, she said, “It hit me I’ve never slept with a guy who liked sex before.”

His hand moved up to her stomach, following the pulse of her afterglow. “Okay, you’ve got to unpack that for me.”

Grinning, she skirted her fingertips over his hip. She loved to unpack things, and he knew that.

“Oh, they liked orgasming—at least they complained when they felt like they hadn’t done it recently enough. But they wanted to get there as soon as possible.”

He opened his legs wider so she could reach between them, stroking the inside of his thigh. “Mmm.” Maybe a response to her touch, but also encouragement to keep talking. 

“They treated every other step in the process like an impediment. The idea of exploring, drawing things out, continuing them—absolutely no interest.”

His next sound seemed interested as she circled his cock, contentedly flaccid and bare—he’d stripped the condom off fast, then, in the moments before she took his hand to get herself off. He was efficient. Competent (competence was hot). But he didn’t rush the stuff that mattered. 

-“Aftplayin EroZine

[Content warning for a brief mention of sex by deception, along the lines of the legends about King Arthur’s conception, if you’re familiar with that. To skip, stop at the line ““There are stories…legends, even…about a woman having sex in the dark…” and resume at “The distress left his face like darkness at sunrise.”]

While I’m trying to keep up on publication news, I’m also excited to announce I’ll have a Tweet-length* poem at https://twitter.com/olicketysplit next Tuesday, Dec 19!

*Still a meaningful phrase in our hearts.

New poem out in Strange Horizons

…and when you wander the orchards,
your robe’s light, long sleeves swimming
with your motion, the trees bear fruit
and flower on the same branch—both delicious (of course

I’ve tasted the petals too; if anything I have only become
more curious, knowing now how much more there is
to learn). Or you can roll up those sleeves to do
some gentle garden work, meditative and

invigorating. We do not, of course, need a harvest to eat—hunger
is a memory, starvation a silly rumor—nor blossoms
to add more beauty. You know I never cared much
for flowers, but all beauty is meaningful here, and everything is

beautiful, and everything beautiful
can be trusted.

-excerpt, “From Summerland

This piece started in my car, as I was driving somewhere on a pleasant spring day and reflecting on how my ideal “heavenly” weather is exactly that–late spring, with lots of sun but not too much warmth. Summer used to be lovely, I guess, before the climate change, but it’s also muggy. If not outright dangerous thanks to fires and heat advisory. And then I have friends who are wild for autumn and even winter, which I find rather depressing.

But! This is not a poem about weather. It’s actually about death. Or after-death. “Summerland” is the name often given to the afterlife in Spiritualism, the religion based in mediumship that sprang up in the 1800s and is still going today. I’m certainly not the first bereaved person to get extremely interested in Spiritualism — in my case I’m not planning to convert (not sure they even do formal ‘conversions’) but it’s often moving to read about. Its paradise is an engaging mixture of the mundane and the spiritual, blissful but flexible, much more so than the constant-singing-praises-to-God-above-the-glassy-sea of the Christianity I grew up with.

So on my drive, I considered who decided Summerland was summery and whether its inhabitants might have other opinions. At my destination, I pulled out the notepad I keep in my car and started writing, considering other details of what this life after life is like, and how it might be described — if it can be. A common complaint mediums delivered from their communicants was just how tricky it was to put these things in words that living people use (a difficulty enhanced by the fact that dead people, as attested to by mediums and by a number of near-death experiencers, don’t speak but rather make use of telepathy). And that also adds a sort of edge to this poem — the uncertainty of communication — because even as I indulge in thoughts of how nice Summerland might be, I can’t yet trust everything beautiful. I’m wary of wish fulfillment when it comes to something as important as death and eternity. I kept writing through that wariness, and the final stanzas came as a sort of answer. Maybe. What do you think?

If nothing else it gets back to one of the themes I’ve written about again and again, which is longing. The basis of eroticism and grief and quite a bit of religion.

Several of the ideas behind the depiction of Summerland in this poem come from a short book by professor and philosopher of religion Stafford Betty, The Afterlife Unveiled. The reference to cigars and sex is about a communication Sir Oliver Lodge believed he received from his son Raymond (who died in World War One), which I first encountered in Colin Wilson’s Afterlife: An Investigation.

Midsummer Updates

I always go into something of a lull in late June and early July. Maybe it’s the heat (although here near the Great Lakes we’ve been much luckier than a lot of people temperature-wise). Maybe it’s the grief-iversary at the end of June. Or my birthday earlier in that month putting me in the cheerier version of a “I deserve to slack off a bit” mood.

The idea of lounging in the air conditioning and reading is just so seductive, you know?

And writing, too! I’ve done a bit of that — when I feel like June was a sunny void, a humid ghost of a month that left no trace, I remind myself I did finish three stories during it.

Plus some of what I’ve been reading are the submissions to Erato II — exciting stuff!

Anyway, here are some quick updates of interest to my fellow readers and writers:

This July, Smashwords is holding its annual Summer/Winter site-wide sale. You’ll find fantastic ebooks discounted 25%, 50%, even 75% or free. This includes a number of my titles.

It also includes the anthologies from the New Smut Project – most are 25% off, but Erato is half-off in honor of our open submissions call for the sequel.

If you don’t have a Smashwords account or would rather buy the book more directly, you can get 50% off the Erato ebook at our Gumroad store by using coupon code “EratoIISubmissions“. Plus remember, with discount code “newsmutprojectfan“ you’ll always get $1.00 off our paperbacks purchased through Gumroad, including Erato.

Do you have a flash fiction, prose poem, short-short story, or <1,500-word excerpt from a longer story you’d like to submit to Erato II? We’re open until August 31st (and can negotiate extensions where necessary – life happens). In the anthology guidelines, I get pretty detailed about the kinds of stories we get excited about, and those we’re more lukewarm about (“sex robots,” longtime readers will recite at this point, even as fans of NSP’s books will fondly remember the stories about robots who have sex – yes, those are different kinds of stories!).

I’ve had a poem published! It’s short and, to no one’s surprise, both sensual and haunting. “Three Years After” appears in Tiny Wren Lit’s first anthology of “tiny poems” (10 lines or shorter), All Poems Are Ghosts.

In somewhat sadder news, I learned this week that SinCyr Publishing is closing its doors. They were a landmark in the erotica press landscape for their creative anthologies (I had a story in a volume of Rule 34) and interest in building a consent culture.

SinCyr’s books are now out of print, though you can get paperback copies secondhand through some online stores. I’ll be looking into ways to reprint the stories I’ve published with them, including “Route 34” from Rule 34, “The Solution” from Dancing With Myself (this one’s actually expanding into a book-length work), and “Silver Bracelets” from the femdom anthology Getting It.

So that’s what my July looks like. Hope yours is going well, readers! Keep cool…except when you can be hot in a fun way.

Some 18th-century bondage in the Seattle Erotic Art Festival Literary Art Anthology

I’m psyched to announce that for the second time I’ll be in the annual Literary Art Anthology from SEAF, the Seattle Erotic Art Festival.

If you’re able to get to Seattle, you can get the anthology – and see the art! – at 301 Mercer Street, April 21 – 23. There’s a whole schedule of performances and readings.

In the Festival Store, you can also check out Erato and Cunning Linguists, both for sale there – along with my late beloved John Theriac’s short collection Kinky, Queer Love and my flash omnibus Soft, Sharp, and Tender.

As for the ’23 festival anthology itself, it includes over 30 writers and poets, including not only yours truly but Erato alumnus Micah BlackLight (full disclosure – I invited him to submit to Erato because the story of his I read in the 2018 SEAF anthology, “Surface, Locked, or Buried” is probably the best BDSM science fiction I’ve ever read), poets like Lyssandra Norton, Bill Wolak, and ZenKOAL, and others I’m sure I’m going to become a fan of once I read my contributor’s copy!

My story, “Le Nouvel Abelard,” is a kinky historical piece inspired by two philosophers: first, Peter Abelard, most famous for his castration, really did write about monk bondage and oral fingering in Eden as examples in his ethical ponderings. Then the title and setting evolved as a tribute to Rosseau, who was pretty kinky in his own right. Here’s a sample of what that philosophical inspiration looks like in practice:

Her hands trailed farther, over his breeches, up to the join where they felt so especially, excruciatingly, blissfully tight. She followed the shape and size, appearing thoughtful once again. This expression was one Julien had become used to seeing, but never in a thousand years could he have dared think of her wearing it while regarding his cock.

“I’m afraid,” she said then, “I can’t make all the use of this that I might desire.”

His unbound tongue bounded on—“I recall much Peter Abelard had to say about consent that fails to be rational, desires so far from reality as to—”

He hadn’t been entirely sure how he would complete the sentence, so it relieved him when her hand sealed across his mouth.

“Thank you,” she said with impish politeness. “But I fear I have no mind for such learning now. Your words and wisdom would be wasted on me.”

As her fingers trailed away, stroking his cheek, he asked, “What more would you learn today?”

“I think I have a way to silence you.”

Her hand returned, and his lips parted for it. She stroked with her fingers the way she had with her tongue. If Julien recalled correctly, one of Abelard’s philosophical predecessors, disdaining pleasure, had argued that in Eden, before the Fall, erotic congress had been no more exciting than the putting of a finger into a mouth.

And now Julien agreed, but not in the way that no-doubt celibate man of learning intended.

It was difficult to imagine anything else their bodies might do together could be sweeter than this.

To be soft, to be yielding, to be filled with her—to see the delight in her eyes, hear her breathing roughen—to taste the salt on her skin.

Her other hand went to his shoulder and pressed down. He yielded to this, too, until she had him lying on his back, tied hands resting over his head. She straddled him and pulled at what seemed like endless lengths of silk, baring her legs. Not as pale as her powdered face, nor as silken as her stockings—there was even a bruise midway up one thigh suggesting she had stumbled, inattentive, against some piece of furniture. So scholarship in his schoolroom had not completely tamed the impulses that sent her galloping in high spirits about the estate.

As if Julien needed further proof of it.

Poetry

I’ve talked about it in my newsletter and on social media, but I’m not sure I’ve yet broken the news here on this blog that my longstanding interest in reading poetry has, over the past year or so, turned into an interest in writing poetry.

It’s not completely out of nowhere – in 2018 I wrote a poem that appeared in the “Birth Control” issue from the much-missed Cliterature feminist journal. And “By Steam and By Sail,” in Litro, is a prose poem (I was challenging Carole Maso, particularly her Aureole, when I wrote it – indeed the bit of French slang that inspired the whole piece came from the first part of the book, “The Women Wash Lentils”).

Still, it surprised me as much as anyone. The kickoff was when I had some concepts I wanted to write out as stories, but couldn’t quite make work as a thousand+ words of prose. I started writing in lines and stanzas instead, and playing with sounds, and….

Fast forward to this winter, when I received my first acceptance! “Three Years After,” a six-line poem about intimacy and loss, will appear in Tiny Wren Lit’s anthology All Poems Are Ghosts.

Tiny Wren makes beautiful little chapbooks and I look forward to sharing this one with you when it’s published!

Maybe it’s no surprise that quite a few of my poems are about grief – but it’s also no surprise, I’m sure, that a ton of them are about sex. I entered a sheaf of especially queer sex poems (or especially sexy queer poems?) into the 2022 Penrose Prize for Excellence in Poetry from LGBTQIA+ Writers and I’m delighted to share that they made it onto the longlist!

You can see the full list and read the 3 winning poems on the Death Rattle/Oroboro Lit Journal site.

I’ll be looking for final homes for my Penrose entries this year – I really cannot wait to share them with you!

(Also, keep an eye on The Whorticulturalist, who accepted an early and very sexy narrative poem from me last summer.)

In the meantime, I’m continuing to share excerpts of poetry I’ve loved reading on my Tumblr, and also on the Tumblr of the New Smut Project – speaking of which, if you have erotic prose poetry or flash fiction seeking a home, NSP opens to submissions for Erato II, our second anthology of short-short pieces, on April 2nd! Full guidelines are here.

“For Myself” in Delicate Friend’s BODYLOVE issue and other updates

I’m delighted to announce my flash piece about self love on a sunny day, “For Myself,” has been reprinted in Delicate Friend, a quarterly literary magazine about eroticism and other forms of desire.

Clicking the cover below will take you to the full issue.

I’m very grateful to the editors at Delicate Friend, not only for including this story but also for remaining willing to work with me after their acceptance email landed in my spam folder, where it languished for the better part of a week before I did my irregular checking-if-anything-good-got-accidentaly-caught-by-the-filter check. If anyone needs a vivid reminder to check their spam folders more often – there you go.

If you haven’t had the chance to check out two February anthology releases, my femdom monster erotica piece “Her Lure and Jesses” is out in Beastly Tales and an expanded version of my BDSM science fiction romance “What He Brought Home” is out in Union.

Outside of writing (including irregular email checking, composing newsletter announcements, and failing to post on this blog on actual anthology release dates) life has been busy, mostly in a good way. Guinevere Chase and I are polishing the guidelines for Erato II so I’ll hopefully be sharing those soon!

Until next time – happy reading.

New Flash story in “Marriage”

My flash piece, “Mine,” appears in Pure Slush Books / Bequem Publishing’s Marriage anthology. The latest in their Lifespan series, Marriage collects poetry and prose on all aspects of marriage and long-term cohabitation, including what my story tackles – sex and infidelity.

My legs wrapped around him, so passionately it threatened to roll us to the other side of the
bed. To his side, with its single thick ergonomic pillow. He pushed down with his hips, returning
my passion, but also pinning me in place.

-“Mine”

“Mine” is a prequel of sorts to my story “The Solution” in the Dancing with Myself anthology – which, by the way, may be going out of print soon, though it’s still available on Amazon, iBooks, and Kobo. It’s a sizzling collection of self-love erotica I’d hate for you to miss!

“The one who smelled of vanilla. Whose scent, rising from his skin as he curled around my body in bed, had started all of this.” – The Solution

I’ve also been working on other interlinked stories that take place between “Mine” and “The Solution,” exploring betrayal, freedom, possessiveness, honesty, and desire.

You can read other excerpts from the Marriage anthology at Pure Slush’s blog post, “A Taste of Marriage.”

It’s available in Kindle format and as an epub and paperback through Lulu.com. (It’s not available as paperback through Amazon because the retail price would be prohibitive, and as the editor put it in an email, “Jeff Bezos is rich enough.” I won’t argue with that!)

Those Linguists sure are Cunning

And Cunning Linguists is up for preorder!

The New Smut Project’s 4th anthology contains 30 tales of language, literature, and lechery and comes out May 18. It’s now available for preorder on Gumroad–do check the product descriptions for both the paperback and ebook editions, as they include discount codes to use with your preorder!–and elsewhere.

(I’ll be updating in a few days once the paperback pre-order through IngramSpark becomes widely available!)

Curious about the contents? See our ToC announcement on our blog, and check out the author interviews we’re posting each day this month. So far we’ve had romance books with the hottest sex scenes recommended by D.J. Hodge, opinions from jem zero and Melissa Snowdon sexy word choice–and more to come!

“Come” not “cum”

“By Steam or By Sail”: a prose poem

My prose poem about being bisexual and in lust (with people of all genders and with words, particularly boat metaphors), and a bit of kink if you want to read into my cable metaphors, is up at Litro Magazine as their Friday Flash!

You are strung with cables humming in high winds, singing like the veins. You are laid with circuits of nerves in electric wires, sophisticated and swift. You make a sail with your broad back, a canvas of your bending, billowing body.

Hello to the steam of your breath. Thank you, when you guide me home with your hair like smoke. Welcome, when you find your way as I stoke the furnace within you.

Vapour dissipates into the atmosphere, not before it curls our hair and glistens on our skin. Hot enough to scald…

Cables gone salty with ocean breeze, with sweat, hold sails taut against the bodies of air that push into them. Seemingly so thin, so strained, but holding. Knots grow tighter as they dry. Perhaps it’s dangerous. Perhaps we shouldn’t let them ever get dry. Let’s not.

https://www.litromagazine.com/usa/2022/02/by-sail-and-by-steam/

The title comes from French slang for bisexual, “à voile et à vapeu,” or “to work by steam or by sail.” I first discovered that charming phrase when I read Carole Maso’s Aureole, a sort of collection of erotic prose poetry (perhaps? It’s a real genre-buster. The subtitle is “An Erotic Sequence” if that clarifies). I was inspired to try my own hand at the craft Maso makes look so effortless…so breathlessly effortless.

It was not effortless, but it left me a bit breathless and steamed up, for what it’s worth.

You can read the full piece here.

Cunning Linguists’s Table of Contents and Pre-Orders Up!

I’m thrilled to at last share the list of authors and stories I’ve been editing for the New Smut Project’s fourth anthology, Cunning Linguists.

Language. Literature. Lechery.

Thirty authors, including Rachel Kramer Bussel, Sonni de Soto, Kristan X, and Good Sex Award honorees D. Fostalove and jem zero, share clever, sensual stories of the many ways we communicate about and around our desires. From erotic epistolary tales to queer retellings of classics, this collection bursts with memorable and hot new reading material.

  1. One Tongue – A.C. Quill
  2. Dido Burns – Taylor Verdon
  3. Blue Rising – Max Turner 
  4. Head to Toe – Camille Devine
  5. I Ought to Be Thy Adam – Seb Palumbus
  6. Barako – Rachel Woe
  7. Draft – T.C. Mill
  8. Astronautical Intimacy – Tiana Talaria
  9. Sky-High at Aquarius – jem zero 
  10. The Meaning of Anything – Kristan X 
  11. Muse – Sprocket J. Rydyr 
  12. On the Line – Sonni de Soto
  13. Noi Leggiavamo Per Diletto – Alex Freeman
  14. We’re Not Tentacle Porn – Koji A. Dae
  15. Spark to the Tinder – Cathy Bryant
  16. Written – Ollie Fox
  17. Frontiers – Moxie Marcus
  18. Cave Suckers – Elizabeth A. Allen
  19. Under the Table – Rachel Kramer Bussel
  20. Planet Rolling Over – Peach Berman
  21. Moonlight and Madness – A. Zimmerman
  22. First Time – Alex Yan 
  23. Inkmanship – Melissa Snowdon
  24. Welcome to EvolWorld – Louise Kane
  25. Spell Ling B – D. Fostalove
  26. Unsexed, Sexy – Danny McLaren
  27. The Feeling’s Mutual – D.J. Hodge
  28. The Training of the Tongue – Evadare Volney
  29. More Than Words – Lillian James
  30. Phantom Centre – T.J. Cooke 

Heated banter simmers until the sexual tension boils over. An academic aches with curiosity about the mysterious woman behind the letters she translates–and the mysterious woman working alongside her. Lovers seek a common language after the fall of Babel. Without a physical body, a spaceship’s AI makes love to her captain with words. A domme and her sub negotiate kink titles that reflect all they are to each other. After saving his nonbinary partner, Victor Frankenstein celebrates both erotically and electrically.

Diverse characters find pleasure in body writing, music, virtual realities, fanfiction, first-time phone sex, the queer truth behind local folklore, and reading aloud despite a boyfriend’s best attempts at distraction. Stories ranging from the lighthearted to the bittersweet explore what happens when someone finds just the right thing to say in bed—or says the wrong one—or speaks eloquently without using any words at all.

Preorder links:

A paperback issue will also be available – subscribe to our newsletter to receive an email when it is.

(Update: Gumroad, our platform for direct sales, is phasing out the pre-order option. The ebook version just squeaked in while it was still supported. A paperback order page is up, but with the caveat it’s not an ‘official’ pre-order in the system. This means, unlike when you order the ebook, for paperback your card will be charged when you place the order rather than on the release date in May. I’m also looking into options for more official pre-orders, though Gumroad is still one of the best I’ve seen for coupon codes — and both paperback and ebook pre-orders on Gumroad include a coupon code in their product descriptions, so be sure to take advantage of those!)

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