Archives: new release

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.

Escape to Pleasure

Even though it’s been a winter with eerily little snow, it’s still winter. It’s gray, it’s cold, the kind slices like a knife. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather be anywhere but where I am.

Since, because of travesties like “work” and other “adult responsibilities,” I can’t pack up a suitcase and follow the sun, instead I’m staying curled on my couch under a wonderful fluffy blanket and reading a lot.

If you’re in a similar bind, there’s one way to enjoy the better aspects of both options–to temporarily escape somewhere less gray, and to really warm your winter up. Escape to Pleasure; Lesbian Travel Erotica from Bold Strokes Books is now widely available at many ebook and paperback retailers. 

Have you ever fantasized about dipping into sensual waters? Tasting exotic fruit? Watching forbidden pleasures? Ever dreamed about the erotic games lesbians  play when they’re far away from home?

When life becomes mundane, the best way to shake things up is by getting away from it all. On vacation, anything is possible and fantasies really can come true. Edgy, wild, and wanton encounters promise satisfaction for those ready to play while away.  Join these award-winning authors as they explore the sensual side of erotic lesbian travel.

My story, “Like Flash Flood,” appears alongside 18 other tales of far travels, intriguing experiences, breathtaking scenery, and other other things that take your breath away…

Find Escape to Pleasure at:

Bold Strokes Books website
Amazon
Barnes and Noble
Kobo
Smashwords
Goodreads

Cliterature’s 50th Issue

For their 50th issue of poetry, short fiction, and essays addressing the intersection of women’s sexuality, Cliterature has released the double-sized “Anthology“.

It includes my piece, “Manifesto,” best described as a fictional essay–written in a voice that is not quite my own. Actually, the voice belongs to the heroine of my NaNo novel. But her manifesto certainly draws a lot on my own reading and thinking.

What I’m trying to do with the parable above (besides explain why I couldn’t see you on Saturday) is make the point that I hate appearing soft, sweet, harmless. But it’s not that I hate softness, sweetness, harmlessness themselves.

Because you’re soft. Sweet. And I’d trust you with my life.

You’re, if you’ll excuse my saying so, pretty fucking cute. And I like it.

For that matter, especially when it comes to you, I don’t hate being harmless. Maybe I do want to be defanged. I want to do things to you that could hurt, without you being hurt. (Please believe me that I never want you to be hurt.) Is that benign, compassionate, or simply unrealistic? Careless, even?

I’d like to write a little more about the things I want to do to you.

I’m writing this while I’m supposed to be writing something else, because I’ll always be supposed to be writing something else. For the rest of my life.

That’s exhausting to think about, somehow less exhausting to write down. Feels better to have it contained on the page. Although writing is also exhausting, and it’s exhausting to think about how much is left to be written—which, according to this writer Cixous I’ve been reading in my downtime (by which I mean reading when I should be doing something else), is almost everything.

About sex, specifically. And this manifesto of mine is about sex, specifically. But you already knew that.

You can read the full story HERE.

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.

 

Valentine’s Day Review: Best Women’s Erotica of the Year, Vol 3

(Note: I received a free ebook of Best Women’s Erotica of the Year, Vol 3 for my honest review.)

The third volume of Best Women’s Erotica of the Year combines significant variety with several recurring themes that keep the book feeling cohesive. The ones that struck me included growing older, the use of paint (or body paint and makeup!) as well as photography and other art, negotiating desires, and storytelling–plus books as physical objects, stress on the physicality part. There was also a great diversity in characters, with a range of ages, ethnicities, backgrounds, jobs, body types, and sexualities, as well as a number of strong stories touching on trauma, gender identity and presentation, and/or kink. One thing I did notice in reading the author biographies is that every contributor had an impressive bio–which is not at all a complaint! But I had the feeling that this volume of Best Women’s Erotica didn’t introduce me to as many newcomers (though a number of writers were new to me) compared to more established or experienced writers. And on the third hand, it’s worth emphasizing the quality of writing in this anthology–there isn’t a single story that didn’t have some line or image that caught my attention, even when not all of them appealed to my kinks or taste in style. Plus there were several that opened my eyes and mind, and I’ll be looking up more of these writers’ work.

I want to talk about the pieces that especially stood out to me.

Stories I Liked:

The Birthday Gift by Apigail Barnette: For her husband’s 52nd birthday, Sophie treats him to a gift in their home theater that features body-friendly paint in interesting places–and appropriately in the bi pride colors!

Demon Purse by Sommer Marsden: This one also features paint, specifically full-body makeup, plus some high-heeled boots, hairspray, black denim, and green contact lenses with elliptical irises… Of course, I especially love this one for its femdom overtones, but it gives further meaning to the words “scary hot” and even redeems the deliberately cheesy reference of the title.

The Follow-Through by Kris Adams: Another great piece featuring mature characters, humorous and sexy without flinching from their foibles and imperfections. Janelle is determined to seduce a new widower at her retirement community and Edward offers his assistance in making the eligible man jealous. Cringeworthy as Edward can be, Janelle is drawn in as he reveals his hidden depths (plus a prescription for the blue pills, and a little sciatica from time to time–meanwhile, Janelle is literally swooning in his arms).

Romance and Drag by Lyla Sage: The title says it all. This story is packed with imagery and ideas and so much to love–a bisexual couple, a handsome woman in a suit, a gorgeous man in makeup, swinging, kink, role-switching…

Falling by Charlie Powell: One of those stories I recognized earlier for its treatment of disability and kink. The heroine of this story has hemiplegia, which means her left leg is about half an inch shorter, and she arrives at her first date with Kit in tights ripped from a fall on the way there. The shredded leggings offer an opening for them to discover they’re compatibly kinky through adorable flirtation which blossoms into an intense, romantic encounter.

Overexposed by Brandy Fox: A photographer, Shannon, unexpectedly meets her late brother’s best friend. They had grown close to in the wake of her brother’s death, then drifted apart, and Joey’s now homeless but has built a community in Seattle. They finally have the chance to consummate their sexual tension in a story that handles painful, messy subjects with compassion and passion.

A Stolen Story by Leandra Vane: A librarian, feeling betrayed by a true crime writer who interviewed her about a historic local murder, receives comfort and confrontation from the ghosts of the maligned couple–sexy and philosophical, this one uses an erotic connection to explore the nature of truth, history, fiction, and the ownership thereof, a great example of literary erotica in which sex provides a lens through which to engage with big questions.

Red Satin Ribbons by Tamsin Flowers: Leah’s friend at work, Tom, asks her to help him give his wife the birthday gift she’s always wanted–a threesome. Thus Leah winds up in a box and in elaborate shibari bondage with the titular ribbons. What especially won me over about this one was the wife, Shona, and her utterly charming mixture of politeness and erotic enthusiasm–her opening words to Leah are “Honey, you’re beautiful. What’s your name?” And I don’t know what it is about me or about that line but my knees went weak.

Infused Leather by Dr. J: Angie and Harold, a barista and a shoeshiner at an airport, connect based on their interest in leather and kink, and as they grow in intimacy they also find ways to take control to recover from trauma. The dialogue–negotiation, support, and navigation of desires and boundaries–makes for convincing and hot chemistry in this piece, which handles heavy topics in a way that feels not only respectful but really cathartic.

Stories I LOVED: 

Body Shots by Thien-Kim Lam: This story opens with gorgeous imagery, then builds up in a delightful slow reveal of a progressively kinkier setup. Not only were the story and characters great, I especially enjoyed the structure of this one: an in media res close-up opening that pans back and makes use of brief flashbacks (if they can even be called that, they’re so unobtrusive) to tell the story of how Kit and Tre got here while keeping the heat high.

Bibliophile by Dee Blake: We all love books, but Sophie…really loves books. And after reading about her, you might also, because her fetish is honestly a bit contagious. While looking up sexy retellings of the classics (mm, yes!) she encounters a fellow book lover. He’s also a writer, and shares some of his work–the excerpts themselves are wonderful, a bit primal compared to the more cerebral bibliophia, giving us and Sophie the best of both worlds.

Guyliner and Garters by B.B. Sanchez: Every geek’s sweetest dream, this costume-themed story had me at “He is totally Cinna from The Hunger Games” (the gold eyeliner is such a good look), had me again with the heroine’s inner narration (“Okay, finally remembered breathing was not a lifestyle choice”), had me a superfluous number of times with the side reference to a Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy couples cosplay at this Halloween party, then treated me to an erotic encounter in a library and the beautiful chemistry between the main couple (Ciara and John-George, starring for the evening as Agent Carter and Cinna, respectively). It proves you can never have too much or too many good things.

Making It Feel Right by Annabel Joseph: The first three pages of this one led me on a journey. First off, I’ve often wondered about the gender-flipped version of dominatrices–doms for hire–and whether I’d enjoy a story about them, so this piece’s set-up had my interest. And Daniel certainly had my attention, being gorgeous and at once caring, accommodating, and in control. However, above all I’m about femdom, and I was just starting to feel disappointed that this anthology didn’t have more of it when Myra figures out that even if she hired a dom, what she really wants is to try being in control of him (She has a line–“Maybe I’m not submissive. Maybe those books I’ve been reading just made me think I was submissive”–that’s interesting in this regard, not to draw this review off-topic but I’m also reading Nancy Friday’s Women on Top and reflecting on how dominant women’s fantasies and sexualities develop, so…) The upshot is, once I saw I was reading about a man who is gorgeous,  caring, confidence and accommodating enough to try submission (since submissive guys are the hottest!) AND Myra with her careful uncertainty over what she can do, mixed with the growing certainty of what she wants, I read the rest of the story with a dumb happy grin on my face. Let me know when there’s a novel-length version of this.

You can find Best Women’s Erotica of the Year, Vol 3 at:

Amazon

Goodreads

Barnes and Noble

iBooks

Audible

Facebook

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!

‘Tis the Season for…Kinky Flash Fiction

I didn’t plan it this way, but I have three flash fiction publications this month and they’re all pretty wonderfully perverse. So it’s a great time to work out the end-of-year tension and get your freak on in under 2,000 words.

Today, my short piece “The Depths of You” goes live at the Erotic Review magazine. A little long to be technically flash fiction, it’s a sort of prose poem about why it can be scary to use a strap-on:

Performance anxiety? Sure, some. But I’m good at what I do to you. I know it. I know just the depth, rhythm, angle to take you apart. Then to pull you back together, so you burst again. All the while driving into you towards my own pleasure, my own ascent and plummet into something dark, full, and for each moment, enough.

Somewhere in that helpless satisfaction is the thing that scares me so fucking much.

It’s better, sometimes, when you’re not facing me. When it’s just sensation. Our bodies slide with the same motions, friction traveling along the length of the silicone cock inside you to my clit, and that’s all we share. An encompassing awareness that we only need to feel. Not something to think about or communicate or soften with kisses. I hear your gasps and moans but your breath falls on the pillow; I don’t feel its wet heat lick my face. I don’t look into your eyes and drop into them, those beautiful dark bottomless pits.

But the kinky December fun doesn’t end there! I also have a piece in The Big Book of Submission, Volume 2, edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel and coming out December 19. It’s titled “First Slap”:

“Can I slap you?”

He was struck by how she asked the question. Clearly, but softly, revealing not shyness but a sort of respect for the request’s significance. It was the same way she had suggested their first kiss, resolving his private uncertainty over the nature of a conversation which had grown steadily warmer and more intimate.

Lastly, a longer flash piece with a bondage theme, “Outnumbered,” will be part of New Zealand-based erotic journal Aotearotica, Volume 4.

They’ve been going at it for almost an hour—just the two of them, one on one, but really, she’s got him outnumbered. The cuffs help.

He strains at them suddenly, so hard the bedposts groan. She chuckles. They’ll hold. He’d hold, too, even if in the moment he doesn’t realize it. She slows down, giving him more space to ask for anything he needs. If he isn’t too proud.

Silence. She goes back to what she’s doing, riding out his reaction. Under her he bucks, trembles, struggles. A body in tension and frantic release.

Haunted is now out!

Haunted, Mofo Pubs’ latest volume of literary erotica, is out today–just in time for Halloween! Treat yourself to the eerie, sexy, chilling and thrilling:

A young man feels a peculiar hunger to be loved, one he can’t survive without sating in a series of vivid homoerotic dreams that blur the boundaries of fantasy and fact, desire and love. 

A hesitant dominant struggling with a recent breakup and the loss of her grandmother, finds a mysterious man in her living room with her grandmother’s rosary and an appetite for submission.

Years after a summer romance with a young male model, a woman finds herself driven to search through online porn for photos and videos that might feature him.

A man is tormented by the erotic demands of his soulmate—with whom he shares an intimacy so deep they can literally hear one another’s thoughts. 

A British soldier is haunted by memories of his lost lover and comrade in arms. 

A grieving woman moves into a basement apartment, which she discovers already has a resident.

Last week I wrote about music for making love to ghosts, and if that’s your thing, good news: Mofo editor Parker Marlo has put together her own playlist for this anthology.  Check it out on Spotify.

Read Bodies of Ghosts free:

Mofo Website

Amazon

iBooks

Kobo

Nook

Get all the stories in Haunted:

Mofo Website

Amazon

iBooks

Kobo